Who were the three men the American and Soviet superpowers
exchanged at Berlin's Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie in
the first and most legendary prisoner exchange between East and
West? "Bridge of Spies" vividly traces their paths to that exchange
on February 10, 1962, when their fate helped to define the
conflicts and lethal undercurrents of the most dangerous years of
the Cold War.
"Bridge of Spies" is the true story of three extraordinary
characters - William Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, a British born KGB
agent arrested by the FBI in New York City and jailed as a Soviet
superspy for trying to steal America's most precious nuclear
secrets; Gary Powers, the American U-2 pilot who was captured when
his plane was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission over
the closed cities of central Russia; and Frederic Pryor, a young
American graduate student in Berlin mistakenly identified as a spy,
arrested and held without charge by the Stasi, East Germany's
secret police.
By weaving the three strands of this story together for the first
time, Giles Whittell masterfully portrays the intense political
tensions and nuclear brinkmanship that brought the United States
and Soviet Union so close to a hot war in the early 1960s. He
reveals the dramatic lives of men drawn into the nadir of the Cold
War by duty and curiosity, and the tragicomedy of errors that
eventually induced Khrushchev to send missiles to Castro. Two of
his subjects -- the spy and the pilot -- were the original seekers
of weapons of mass destruction. The third, an intellectual, fluent
in German, unencumbered by dependents, and researching a Ph.D.
thesis on the foreign trade system of the Soviet bloc, seemed to
the Stasi precisely the sort of person the CIA should have been
recruiting. He was not. In over his head in the world capital of
spying, he was wrongly charged with espionage and thus came to the
Agency's notice by a more roundabout route. The three men were
rescued against daunting odds by fate and by their families, and
then all but forgotten. Yet they laid bare the pathological
mistrust that fueled the arms race for the next 30 years.
Drawing on new interviews conducted in the United States, Europe
and Russia with key players in the exchange and the events leading
to it, among them Frederic Pryor himself and the man who shot down
Gary Powers, "Bridge of Spies "captures a time when the fate of the
world really did depend on coded messages on microdots and brave
young men in pressure suits. The exchange that frigid day at two of
the most sensitive points along the Iron Curtain represented the
first step back from where the superpowers had stood since the
building of the Berlin Wall the previous summer - on the brink of
World War III.
"From the Hardcover edition."
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
