It was a cold, cloudy morning in Berlin. Just before 8 o'clock, five blue-grey German-made sedans pulled up at the western end of Glienicker Brücke. the steel-trussed bridge that spans the sleepy Havel River between the U.S. zone and Communist territory. A group of 20 American military men and civilians got out and waited. Five minutes later, other cars approached the bridge from the Communist side. Their occupants emerged and stood talking. Finally, two men detached themselves from the opposing groups and walked across the white stripe, in the center of the bridge, that marks the boundary between West and East. Thus. last week, was effected the exchange of a pair of convicted cold war spies: American Francis Gary Powers, 32, the U-2 pilot who crashed in Russia in 1960 and was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, and Russia's Colonel Rudolf Abel. 59, who had served almost five years of a 30-year sentence for his espionage activities in New York.
The Powers case was a milestone in the cold war. Nikita Khrushchev seized upon the downing of the U-2 pilot to torpedo a
Paris summit meeting and launch a series of crises that continued beyond the Administration of Dwight Eisenhower through the first year of John Kennedy's New Frontier. Only in recent weeks had there seemed to be signs of thaw—and the Powers-Abel exchange was certainly the most dramatic evidence to date of that thaw. There was a further meaning to the exchange. Although the U.S. under Eisenhower had admitted the purpose of Powers' flight over the Soviet Union, Russia had never so much as admitted that Abel existed. The trade of the two men last week was at least a tacit Soviet admission that Abel, like Powers, was a spy. In the exchange, the Communists also released Frederic L. Pryor, a 28-year-old American who was taking a graduate course in economics in West Berlin when he blundered into East Berlin last summer. He was arrested and had been held without charges ever since.
Negative Answer. The negotiations that led to the Powers-Abel transfer began months ago—and the key figure was New York Lawyer James B. Donovan, a man with considerable experience in espionage cases. Donovan, 45, served in World War II as a Navy commander, became legal aide to Major General William ("Wild Bill") Donovan (no kin) in the Office of Strategic Services. After the war, he worked as a top assistant to Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in prosecuting Nazi war criminals at Nürnberg. When Soviet Spymaster Abel was caught, Donovan was his court-appointed attorney. In arguing against the death penalty for Abel, Donovan made a prophetic plea: "It is possible that in the foreseeable future, an American of equivalent rank will be captured by the Soviet Union or an ally. At such time, an exchange of prisoners could be considered to be in the best interest of the United States."