On the Bridge

Actually, the bridge was full of agents and officials on both sides. And there was a third party in this historic exchange. Graduate student Frederic Pryor, who went on to become a Professor of Economics at Swarthmore College, was also exchanged for Abel, but at another point in the city. Pryor had been studying in West Germany, and was arrested the summer before when he traveled into East Germany, mistakenly getting mixed up in a case of a woman who had just slipped to the West; he was held without charge for six months.

Pyotr Kapitsa - A leading Russian physicist (1894-1984) who worked at the Cavendish Research Laboratory in Cambridge, England from 1921-1934, when he was persuaded to return to Russia. He continued his work, constantly at odds with authorities, and was arrested in 1946, but kept working, and was not released until Stalin’s death. He went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978.

Major Alexander Orlov, one of the most senior KGB officials ever to defect, headed up the “Cambridge Five” Ring and led Soviet intelligence in Spain during the Civil War there. Summoned back to Moscow in 1938, he feared for his life and fled to the U.S., where he hid, unbeknownst to U.S. officials, until 1953. He never gave up any secrets, playing cat and mouse with American spy agencies until his death in 1973. For more information, read Deadly Illusions, by John Costello.