On February 10, 1962, American spy pilot Francis Gary Bowles was released by the Soviet Union in exchange for Colonel Rudolf Abel, a senior SOVIET KGB spy who had been arrested in the United States five years earlier. The two men were taken to both sides of the Glienicker Bridge, which spans The One Lake connects East and West Berlin.
U-2 reconnaissance aircraft piloted by Francis Gary Powers
While the spies waited, negotiators spoke in the middle of the bridge, where a white line separated East and West. Finally, Bowles and Abel were waved forward and crossed the border into freedom at the same moment, at 8:52 a.m. Berlin time.
Just before they were transferred, Frederic Pryor, an American student who had been detained by East German authorities since August 1961, was released to U.S. authorities at another border checkpoint. In 1957, KGB Lieutenant Colonel Renault Hayhanin walked into the U.S. Embassy in Paris and announced his intention to defect to the West.
Haehanin proved himself to be a poor spy during his five years in the United States and was recalled to the Soviet Union, where he feared he would be disciplined. In exchange for asylum, he promised CIA agents that he could help uncover a major Soviet spy network in the United States and identify its responsible person. The CIA handed Over Haihanin to the FBI for investigation of the allegations.
During the Cold War, Soviet spies worked together in the United States, not giving each other names or addresses, just in case someone was caught or defected like Haehanein. As a result, Hayhanen initially provided little useful information to the FBI. He did, however, remember being taken to a storage room in Brooklyn by his superiors, whom he called "Mark." The FBI traced the storage room and found it rented by an artist and photographer, Emil R. Goldfus, who had a studio in Brooklyn Heights.
Emil Goldfus is Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, an excellent Soviet spy, fluent in at least five languages, and an expert in the technical requirements of espionage.
Rudolf Abel (center) is accompanied by U.S. marshals at Newark Airport on August 8, 1957.
After serving as an intelligence officer during World War II, Abel entered an East German refugee camp in a false capacity, where he successfully applied for the right to immigrate to Canada. In 1948, he crossed the Canadian border into the United States and set out to reorganize the Soviet spy network.
American pilot Francis Gary Bowles, right, attends a public meeting of the Military Commission of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union in Moscow on August 19, 1960.
After learning of Haehonen's defection, Abel fled to Florida, where he remained underground until June, when he felt safe to return to New York. On June 21, 1957, he was arrested at the Latham Hotel in Manhattan. FBI investigators found a hollow pencil used to hide information, a razor brush with microfilm, a codebook and radio transmitting equipment in his studio. He was tried in a federal court in Brooklyn and convicted in October of three counts of espionage and sentenced to 30 years in prison. He was sent to a federal prison in Atlanta, Georgia.
On May 15, 1963, Greville Wynne's wife visited him at the Moscow Supreme Court.
Less than three years later, on May 1, 1960, Francis Gary Bowles took off from Peshawar, Pakistan, under the control of an ultra-sophisticated Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. Bowers, a pilot employed by the CIA, would fly over about 2,000 miles of Soviet territory to the Military Airport in Bodo, Norway, gathering intelligence information on the way.
Steven Spielberg's recent film Bridge of Spies tells the story of the Cold War prisoner exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Around the halfway point of his journey, he was shot down over Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains. He was forced to escape by parachuting at 15,000 feet, but was quickly arrested by Soviet authorities.
On May 5, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced that a U.S. spy plane had been shot down, revealing two days later that Bowers was alive and acknowledging intelligence missions for the CIA. On May 7, the United States acknowledged that the U-2 may have flown over Soviet territory, but denied that it had authorized the mission. On May 16, the leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union, britain, and France held a long-awaited summit in Paris.
The four powers will discuss tensions between the two Germanys and negotiate a new disarmament treaty. However, at the first meeting, in the Company of Dwight M. The summit broke down after President D. Eisenhower refused to apologize to Khrushchev for the U-2 incident.
Khrushchev also canceled Eisenhower's invitation to visit the Soviet Union. In August, Bowers pleaded guilty to espionage charges in Moscow and was sentenced to 10 years in prison — three years in prison and seven in prison. At the end of the 1957 trial, Rudolf Abel escaped the death penalty after his lawyer, James Donovan, persuaded federal judges that Abel might one day be used as a source of intelligence information or as a hostage for dealing with the Soviets.
Captured American agents. After five years in prison, Abel remained silent, but the latter prophecy was fulfilled when he was exchanged for Bowers in Berlin in 1962. Donovan played an important role in the negotiations that led to the exchange.
Upon his return to the United States, Bowers was cleared of any personal responsibility for the U-2 incident by the CIA and the Senate. In 1970, he published a book, Operation Flyby, about the incident, and was killed in a helicopter crash in 1977 while he was a reporter for a Television station in Los Angeles. Abel returned to Moscow, where he was forced to retire by the KGB, which feared that during the five years of his captivity, U.S. authorities had persuaded him to become a double agent. He received a modest pension and published a MEMO approved by the KGB in 1968. He died in 1971.