60 years ago, American pilot Francis Gary Powers, who was piloting a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, shot down over the territory of the USSR, was exchanged for Soviet intelligence officer Rudolf Abel. This happened on the Glienicke Bridge, which connected West Berlin and the city of Potsdam in East Germany. Ru tells about the circumstances of this exchange. On February 10, 1962, the famous exchange took place on the Berlin Glienicki Bridge of the Soviet intelligence officer Rudolf Abel for the American pilot of the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft Francis Gary Powers, who was shot down on May 1, 1960 in the Sverdlovsk region and convicted by a Soviet court for a ten-year term. At the same time, at the request of the American side, to which such an exchange seemed insufficiently equivalent, an American economics student Frederick Pryor, who was arrested in the GDR on suspicion of espionage, was also released at the Checkpoint Charlie checkpoint in Berlin.
The exchange took place through the mediation of American lawyer James Donovan and East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel. Donovan undertook to defend in 1957 Rudolf Abel, accused of espionage in America, after a number of other lawyers refused this job. Donovan managed to convince the court not to pass the death sentence on the Soviet intelligence officer. Donovan's main argument was that the evidence used against his client was seized by the FBI in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
The real name of Rudolf Abel was William August Fischer, he was born in England to a family of Russian emigrants in 1903, and in 1920 he moved to Russia with his family and from the late 1920s - early 1930s began working for Soviet intelligence. In World War II, he took part in intelligence operations against the Germans, and after the war he was sent to the United States, where he led an extensive spy network based in New York, and, in particular, was an intermediary in the transfer of intelligence on the Manhattan Project. In 1957, the US Federal Court in New York found Fisher guilty of espionage and sentenced him to thirty years in prison. Of this period, the Soviet intelligence officer managed to serve a little more than four years before he was exchanged.
In 1962, Donovan, along with CIA lawyer Milan Miskovsky, negotiated with Soviet intermediaries to exchange Abel for the captured American pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1960. These negotiations and the dramatic exchange of prisoners on the bridge separating West Berlin from East Germany later formed the basis of Donovan's book Strangers on the Bridge, which was published in 1964 and inspired director Steven Spielberg's film Bridge of Spies (2015) with Tom Hanks as James Donovan.
The second important participant in the spy exchange negotiations, Wolfgang Vogel, worked as a lawyer in the GDR and, on assignment from the East German Stasi Ministry of State Security, established contacts with his counterparts in the West. He acted as an intermediary in a number of human exchanges between East and West, while organizing not only the exchange of captured spies and political prisoners, but also contributed to the development in the GDR of the practice of releasing its own citizens to the West in exchange for money and other valuables. With his mediation, from 1964 to 1989, 215,000 East Germans and 34,000 political prisoners from East German prisons crossed the border. The most important exchanges took place, as a rule, on the Glienik bridge. After the reunification of Germany, Vogel was charged with close ties with the Stasi and blackmailing citizens who wanted to emigrate from the GDR, who were forced to sell their property for next to nothing, but in 1998 the German Supreme Court acquitted Vogel on all charges.
Francis Gary Powers, piloting a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, was shot down while flying over Sverdlovsk on May 1, 1960. Powers managed to survive, but was sentenced by a Soviet court to 10 years in prison for espionage. He had to serve the first years of his imprisonment in the Vladimirsky Central prison in Vladimir, before the exchange he managed to serve a year and a half.
After the secret exchange at the Glienicke Bridge, Powers received a rather chilly reception in the United States. In March 1962, he appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on the Armed Services at a special hearing, but after an inquest, all charges were dropped against him. Powers' son even said that at the end of the day, members of the committee gave his father a standing ovation. However, public opinion and the press were clearly not on the side of Gary Powers. After his return, he was often criticized for staying alive at all and agreeing to answer Russian questions. It is known that after his capture he was interrogated for 107 days, and although he was not tortured, the psychological pressure exerted on him during this period was very serious.“He was not tortured,” Powers’ son, founder and chairman emeritus of the Cold War Museum in Warrenton, Virginia, later said. “But there were bright spotlights, and grueling interrogations, and sleep deprivation, and death threats.”
And since the capture of Powers markedly heightened tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, it was widely believed in America that the pilot cowardly succumbed to the pressure of his captors and revealed all the secrets related to the reconnaissance flight program that he was not supposed to reveal.
Shortly after his release, The New York Times called Powers "a very ordinary man" and, according to journalists, "he was not a superhero, just an ordinary and unsophisticated young man" who easily cooperated with the Russians and gave them valuable testimony. In addition, Powers was accused of not detonating an explosive device that was supposed to lead to the self-destruction of secret aerial photography equipment and the film itself, and also of not committing suicide with a special curare needle given to him. CIA employees.
Powers' daughter, Dee Powers, recalled how her teacher once "told the whole class that her father had to kill himself." “It was very hard for me,” Dee Powers later said. - When I returned home that day, I told my mother: they told me that dad should have committed suicide. And, of course, my mother was very outraged. But that's how they treated it all back then. And it took a long time for that to change."
A different view of this story was that Powers behaved in captivity with dignity, not following the lead of propaganda and not agreeing to voice the statements imposed on him by Soviet politicians, as evidenced by his posthumous awards.
In 1998, the CIA declassified many details of its Cold War U-2 spy plane program, and in 2000 Powers was posthumously awarded the Prisoner of War Medal, the Distinguished Service Cross, and the CIA Director's Medal. And in June 2012, the Chief of Staff of the US Air Force, General Norton Schwartz, handed over the Silver Star to Powers' grandson and granddaughter, which is awarded on behalf of the US President "for courage and bravery shown in battle." It is the United States' third-highest military award and it has been said that Powers was given it for "steadfastly rejecting all attempts to obtain vital information about the defense or allow himself to be used for propaganda purposes."
It was noted that Powers was “continuously interrogated, harassed and subjected to pressure from numerous investigative teams of the Soviet secret police”, but at the same time he managed to “resist all the efforts of Soviet investigators who tried to break his will with the help of persuasion, deceit and death threats”, thereby he displayed "an indomitable spirit, exceptional devotion and heroism".
In any case, Powers was not only acquitted, but also continued his work in military aviation as a tester of the latest types of aircraft, but there is no evidence of his further cooperation with the intelligence agency. Between 1963 and 1970 he worked as a test pilot for Lockheed.
In 1970, Powers published Operation Overflight: A Memoir of the U-2 Incident, co-authored with Kurt Gentry. In 1972, this book was also published in the USSR, but in a small edition and with the stamp "Distributed according to a special list", it was not available for public sale. The book also did not help much: during his lifetime, the pilot heard much more criticism than approval of his behavior in captivity.
In the end, Powers decided to move to California to avoid bullying and took a job as a helicopter pilot for a Los Angeles radio station, monitoring the situation on the roads. On August 1, 1977, the helicopter he was piloting suddenly ran out of fuel - with the appropriate sensors malfunctioning - and the 47-year-old Powers, along with a journalist passenger, crashed to death near a Little League baseball field in Encino, an affluent area in the San Fernando Valley. Los Angeles, where a large number of veterans of various wars live. It is reported that in doing so, he behaved heroically - instead of trying to escape, he preferred to spend the last seconds to take the helicopter away from the playground where the children went in for sports.
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