“Bridge of Spies” (2015)

The real case: Abel

In 1953 a Brooklyn newspaper boy dropped a five-cent coin, which split open to reveal a tiny photograph of numbers. Years later, after Reino Hayhanen defected to the United States, the FBI established that “Mark”, the man running the network, was Colonel Rudolf Abel. He was arrested on 21 June 1957 and sentenced to a long prison term for espionage.⁵

Abel was defended by the New York lawyer James Donovan, formerly a lawyer with the OSS, who opposed the death penalty for his client.⁴

The real case: Powers and the exchange

On 1 May 1960 a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft flown by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union. He was interrogated in Sverdlovsk, taken to the Lubyanka, sentenced to ten years for espionage and held in Vladimir prison.⁴

On 10 February 1962 Powers was exchanged for Abel on the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin, known as the Bridge of Spies. The exchange was negotiated by Donovan together with the CIA lawyer Milan Miskovsky.^4,5

What is accurate

According to Kaiser, the film is based on a true story: Donovan defended Abel in 1957, went to Berlin in 1962 to arrange the exchange, and lost the appeal before the US Supreme Court by a single vote, 5 to 4. The main source for the screenplay was Donovan’s 1964 memoir “Strangers on a Bridge”.³

What was added or changed

Kaiser notes that in the film Donovan meets with almost nothing but hostility, whereas in his memoir he records only occasional critical remarks; according to the book, his family never felt threatened. The scenes of shots fired at Donovan’s house are not in his book.³

Among the film’s inventions Kaiser also lists a senior partner in the law firm who turns against Donovan, and a CIA agent who follows him, pressures him to inform on his client and is later prepared to leave an innocent American in an East German prison – this character does not appear in the book.³

Kaiser points out that the jurors, although they found Abel guilty, later told Donovan they respected his defence. He also considers exaggerated the scene of a schoolgirl crying in a lesson about nuclear attack, and the picture of an intolerant 1950s America; the film leaves out that children at the time were taught, rather, to stay calm.³