Bridge of Spies (30 page)

The Bridge of Spies today. (
Courtesy of the author
)

Upon his release, Pryor flew back to the United States with his family, determined to put his “Rip van Winkle” experience behind him. He strode through the airport flanked by police, looking like an investment banker. (
Time & Life Pictures/Getty
)

No one could be exchanged on the Glienicke Bridge until Frederic Pryor was handed over to his parents at Checkpoint Charlie, the legendary crossing point between West Berlin’s American sector and the East. (©
SuperStock, Inc
.)

In 1959 the official Soviet count of Western espionage, “terror,” and propaganda organizations based in West Berlin was forty-eight. The generally accepted Western estimate of the number of Communist agents operating out of East Germany at the same time was sixty thousand.

Berlin was crawling with spies, sometimes literally. They had to crouch low to reach the end of the quarter-mile eavesdropping tunnel built by the British and Americans under the Soviet sector that had been dug up by the Russians when the snow melted in 1956.

Even at the end of the decade there was still no wall, so spies could mingle. They mingled in the bar at the brand-new Hilton and in raincoats at the airports. They mingled in uniform at the Allied military missions in Babelsberg, the international diplomatic enclave surrounded by Soviet-controlled territory on the west bank of the River Havel, and they mingled incognito in the glass-walled cafés along the Ku’damm. They traded stories with the Reuters men (and with Annette von Broecker, the beguiling Reuters editorial assistant) in the restaurants near the news agency’s West Berlin bureau on Savignyplatz, and they traded hard information for hard currency in the CIA’s rented villas in Zehlendorf.

The British hung out of the cockpits of RAF Chipmunks flying low over Soviet bases in the eastern suburbs and took pictures with
handheld Minoltas. The French military attaché worked for the East German secret police or the KGB—no one was sure, or sure if the distinction mattered. The Russians practiced tradecraft in the ruined city center that they refused to rebuild as a way of reminding Germans of the price of Fascism. The Americans refused to recognize East Germany, but their mission to West Berlin was bigger than most of their embassies and bristling with antennae.

Willy Brandt, the West Berlin mayor and future West German chancellor, called his city’s spies “grown-ups playing cowboys and Indians.” As ever, he was being gracious. They were not always grown-ups. Students on both sides of the East German border were frequently offered assistance with their travel expenses in return for running errands and taking “interesting” photographs.

It was into this milieu that Fred Pryor parachuted after escaping from Yale. The graduate of Oberlin College and the Society of Brothers in remotest Paraguay was personable, funny, smart, and self-reliant. He was well traveled and interested in Communism, but everyone who knew him agreed he would have made a lousy spy. The idea was “amusing,” says one Oberlin contemporary who went on to work for the CIA. He was “just too flaky and unreliable.” Then it became more than idea, at which point, another friend remembers, “we all laughed.”

Looking back, Pryor doesn’t find it all that funny. “They knew who I was, the secret police,” he says. “They had a file on me, even before.”

Of course the Stasi knew who Pryor was. He was the American in the red Karmann Ghia, the lanky one at the Free University. He was the Yale PhD student with the deep and unusual interest in East German foreign trade. He was the one who had assiduously polished his German and was now crossing into the Soviet sector every few weeks, against the tide of East Germans flooding out, to interview the country’s top economists and read their theories in the Hochschule für Planökonomie.

And the Stasi? They were the obsessives, the men in gray leather jackets with faces of stone and one informant or full-time agent for every thirty-eight adult East Germans. They were the most overstaffed security force in history, the Ministry for State Security. As the exodus of young professionals from East Berlin to West intensified in the spring and summer of 1961, they were obsessed in particular with the fear of
an economic blockade should new border controls be introduced. To make a blockade hurt, the West would have to understand the country’s foreign trade. And who knew more about that than the young American who liked to breeze through Checkpoint Charlie in his scarlet sports car as if Berlin had never even been partitioned? That he knew nothing and cared less about tradecraft and covert intelligence mattered little to the Stasi. They would have expected Pryor’s interviews to report their contact with him to the authorities, and every one of them did. Even before the wall went up, it was inconceivable that the Stasi would not have a file on him.

*  *  *

The same was probably true of Marvin Makinen, though in the end it was not the Stasi who caught him.

Unlike Pryor, Makinen was one of those students who did get the call, whose personal contrails had singled him out as of interest to one of the forty-eight espionage, propaganda, and terror organizations operating in Berlin, and who was consequently invited—rather than forced—to join the grown-ups in a game of cowboys and Indians. In terms of life choices and intellect, he was not unlike Fred Pryor: a young man with spectacles and a precocious mind, at large in the world, intensely aware of its variety and not intimidated by its borders. But there was less of the innocent abroad about him, and more of the maverick.

Pryor and Makinen were contemporaries at the Free University but didn’t know each other. Makinen was a fourth-year undergraduate exchange student from the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in chemistry but with political science credits still to earn. His dean had told him he would learn more political science in a year in Berlin than in a three-credit course in Philadelphia, and his dean turned out to be right.

In his first spring in Europe, in the break between winter and summer semesters, Makinen visited relatives in Finland. He had planned to ski with them in Lapland, but a distant cousin told him about a new package tour to Leningrad and Moscow, so he took that instead. Back in Berlin his Soviet visa had a certain cachet. In the ritual comparisons of passport stamps as students returned from France, Greece, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia (if they were daring), Makinen’s stood out. People
knew where he had been, including people whose business it was to know. “So I got the call,” he said, “and I accepted.”

He met two men from U.S. Army intelligence in a restaurant near the
Studentendorf
in Dahlem where he was living. They gave him a late-model Pentax, showed him how to use it, and suggested that he take advantage of the new camping routes through western Russia being advertised by Intourist. For the first time, westerners were allowed to take their own cars, and the men from army intelligence said they would lend him one. All he had to do was take a lot of pictures, and if he happened to take any of airports, bridges, military installations, passing tanks … well, that was all to the good.

Makinen left Berlin that summer bound for Prague, Budapest, Kiev, and points east if his traveler’s checks allowed. He would be gone some time.

Norton, Virginia, is a few miles farther from the Appalachian watershed than Pound and altogether more established. The hills stand back from Route 23 as if a town is actually meant to be there. Main Street is straight and broad instead of having to follow every twist of the river, and although the side streets have to climb a little, they still allow the construction of respectable business premises that might suit a cobbler, or a lawyer, or, in hard times, both at the same address.

The late 1950s were hard times in Norton on account of the mechanization of the mines and the job losses that followed. Still, it was home for Carl McAfee, a young lawyer who set up there in private practice at the end of 1958 after a tour of duty in the army.