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Giles Whittell

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Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War Hardcover – November 9, 2010

by Giles Whittell (Author)

4.1 2,567 ratings

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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.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Broadway Books
Publication date

November 9, 2010
Dimensions

6.36 x 1.13 x 2 inches
ISBN-10

0767931076
ISBN-13

978-0767931076
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Riveting, meticulously researched and beautifully written, Bridge of Spies unlocks one of the most fascinating espionage mysteries of the Cold War" - Ben Macintyre, author of Operation Mincemeat

About the Author

Giles Whittell is the Washington, DC bureau chief for the Times of London. He has been the Times’ correspondent in Moscow and Los Angeles and has written four previous books including two about the break-up of the Soviet empire.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Broadway Books; First Edition (November 9, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0767931076
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0767931076
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.12 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.36 x 1.13 x 2 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #371,975 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #183 in Nuclear Weapons & Warfare History (Books)
- #249 in Espionage True Accounts
- #3,226 in World War II History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.1 2,567 ratings

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Giles Whittell

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Giles Whittell is an English author and journalist. He has worked for The Times of London since 1993, first as US West Coast Correspondent from 1993 to 1999 and later as Moscow Correspondent (1999–2001) and Washington Bureau Chief (2009–2011). He is currently the paper's chief leader writer.

His books include Lambada Country (1992), Extreme Continental (1994), Spitfire Women of World War II (2007) and Bridge of Spies, a New York Times bestselling account of the Cold War spy swap between Rudolf Abel, Gary Powers and Frederic Pryor on Berlin's Glienicke Bridge in 1962. The book was published in the US in 2010 and the United Kingdom in 2011.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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Reader in the rain

A really well done "now it can finally be told" story

Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2016

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This is a very good book and well worth reading even if you saw and enjoyed the Tom Hank's movie. It is different from the movie in many ways because I am pretty sure that the movie is based partially on this book, partially on Jim Donovan's book, and partially on Hollywood's penchant for historical dramatic license. This book is very well researched, very easy to follow and read, and with a surprising amount of humor in it. It is a book that clearly had to wait for the end of the Cold War, reunification of Germany, and half a century to pass before most of the secrets surrounding the Rudolf Abel and the U-2 incidents could be told. I say "most of the secrets" because even a half century on Mr. Whittell could not convince some of the surviving players to open up about the subject at hand. One of the best aspects of the book is that the author vividly gives you the inside story of all of the sides, players, and communities involved in the story without being overly judgmental about any of the protagonists' motivations and yet he does a great job of elucidating those motivations. You get the CIA's story, the East German's story, the KGB's story, and the Soviet military's story, the stories of all three national governments involved and the stories of their respective leaders, all told from their own point of view without prejudice or bias. The reader also gets a nice portrait of post-war American and Soviet societies. If, like me, you lived through the aforementioned post-war period, the entirety of the Cold War, and remember the U-2 Incident, Francis Gary Powers, Rudolf Abel, and the spy swap it is a poignant and chilling book that will probably shake loose some of the most frightening memories of your childhood and adolescence. And it is those frightening and chilling aspects of the tale which makes Mr. Whittell's talent for finding the humor in the stories all the more amazing. Whittell does a wonderful job of weaving so many diverse and seemingly unassociated story lines into a cogent, logical, and well connected whole that goes from a million miles wide to eventually narrowing down down to a pinpoint meeting on a bridge in Berlin. I was transported back to those scary days where they made us watch the "Bert the Turtle" film at school, hide under our desks at school to prepare for a nuclear attack, and warned us little kids to watch for the bright flash of an exploding bomb. I never thought there were "commies hiding under my bed" but we all knew they were out there "...trying to destroy our free country and our way of life." If you are younger than we Boomers then you ought to read the book as a way to gain some insight as to the way your parents and grandparents can be so crazy paranoid at times because "Bridge of Spies" will transport you back to the world in which we Boomers were little kids.

40 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

Not high enough

Reviewed in the United States on April 25, 2023

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I think this is one awesome story. I lived in Simi Valley and worked at Burbank airport when Gary crashed. I listened to his traffic reports on the radio. To read about what altitude the U2 pilots flew at was astounding and what information they compiled about Russia was significant. To find out how many people were involved in the secret operation was very informative. I had heard about Kelly's skunk works while working at Burbank. I gave it 4 stars because it was very interesting about history and would recommend it to anyone who wants to know about things that happened in the cold war.

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DaveF

Important Cold War incident.

Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2015

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This is the story of the three men who were imprisoned as spies and ultimately exchanged between the US and USSR on the Glienicke Bridge ('Bridge of Spies') in then East Germany in 1962. The three men were Francis Gary Powers, pilot of a U-2 spy plane shot down over Russia in 1960, American student Fred Pryor, and Russian spy Rudolph Abel. Its a brief but important chapter of the Cold War, particularly of the Gary Powers shoot-down. The author is poignant about the huge opportunity for peace that was lost as a result of this incident. The back story of the three men and surrounding players is told in this book in somewhat excruciating detail. The actual spy exchange of the book's title takes up very little of the end of the book and is not the main point of the story.
Author Giles Whittell did an incredible research job for this story. He knows and relates the facts and details almost too well. My reason for rating the book as so-so is the quality of the writing and the denseness of the story, which made it hard to keep straight at times. To me, the author writes in the style of Timothy Egan or Eric Larson. Although Whittell is capable, the writing just isn't as good as their's. The book could easily loose 25-30 percent of the words and still convey the same story. I'm glad I read it as I learned a lot about this period of the Cold War, however, if that is not of interest to you; this may not be a book for you.

3 people found this helpful

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KLB

Review of Cold War book

Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2023

Verified Purchase

Very interesting to read about the workings of the cold war. Good to know the story of Gary Powers.

One person found this helpful

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LEE

If you’re looking for a book that follows the movie, you will be disappointed.

Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2018

Verified Purchase

The movie BRIDGE OF SPIES starring Tom Hanks is very different than the book BRIDGE OF SPIES by Giles Whittell. In the movie, the storyline centers around James Donovan (Tom Hanks). In the book, James Donovan is barely mentioned. The movie represents only a very small portion of the book. If you’re looking for a book that follows the movie, you will be disappointed.

If you remembered or are interested in what happened during this time period (the dawn of the Cold War); BRIDGE OF SPIES is an eye-opener. The espionage, the paranoia, the arms race, the military-industrial complex, the external and internal politics of US-USSR relationship, etc. are all covered in this well-researched book.

I found the first 25% of the book to be a little slow, but the last 75% was fascinating. Overall, I enjoyed reading BRIDGE OF SPIES. It was different than what I was expecting, but I learned much more since the book was more complex and detailed than the movie.

7 people found this helpful

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Ellis22

Fascinating insight into the political and military worlds at the time of the exchange

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 9, 2017

Verified Purchase

This factual book is both informative and an excellent read, albeit requiring continuous attention to the plot.
The events depicted took place at a time when, in my pre-teen years the prospect of nuclear war loomed large. The Cold War is history for many readers but the sense of foreboding at the time is a vivid memory in my mind.
This book provides both an analysis of the backgrounds of the three individuals involved in the Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie exchanges in Berlin in 1962 as well as the political and military context in the US and USSR in the years leading up to the event.
There are also fleeting references to the business interests that benefited from the lost opportunities from a detente that might have been possible in the absence of the U2 incident. The author chooses not to promote any conspiracy theory on the part of the military business lobby, rather to conclude on bungled management of the operation for the shooting down of the spy plane over Soviet territory.
The author, Giles Whittell, demonstrates that the U2 programme provided clear evidence of the lack of effective nuclear capability in Russia at the time and, consequently, the lack of any real gap in US capability in the late fifties and early sixties. Yet there were parties interested in promoting the fiction of a missile gap in the US at the time, including John F Kennedy. His analysis supports a case that this misperception was a factor in the missile build-up in both countries over the following 30 years.
Whittell also provides an insight into the individuals involved in the largely ineffectual Russian spying programmes in the US and the successful reconnaissance missions undertaken by the U2 pilots in the limited time that had immunity from the ranges of Russian fighters and missiles. There is also detailed insight into the personalities behind, and the process by which, an exchange of the U2 pilot, Gary Powers, and William Fisher ("Rudolf Abel"), the Russian spy, was engineered.
I haven't seen the film of the same name but will now be interested to see how much it corresponds with the book.

2 people found this helpful

harris

まだ最後まで読み終わっていません

Reviewed in Japan on July 16, 2020

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この本を選んだ理由は、"cold war"時代のスパイの活躍がアナログ的でエキサイティングと思ったことと、ページ数が264ページであったからです。だけど、手に取ると、活字がーー最近読んだ"stay":Katharine Ryan Hide が300ページ以内で、1 chapter/day で一か月あまりで読み切れました。しかし、文字が小さく、おそらく2~3倍時間が必要になると思われる。文体もなかなか読みづらく、専門用語も多く、辞書と首っ引きで頑張って読んでいます。途中で挫折しない程の exciting storyであることを願っています。

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Gary

A Very Good Book

Reviewed in Canada on November 27, 2015

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Very well written account of this historical period during the Cold War.

One person found this helpful

Amazon Kunde

Sehr Gutes Buch!

Reviewed in Germany on May 11, 2016

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Sehr schön geschrieben, guter Kauf. Sehr Empfehlenswert für erfahrene Leser, auch empfohlen auf Englisch zu kaufen da dies die Originalsprache ist.

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Pranav Sinha

Awesome story. Must have if one enjoys spy stories ...

Reviewed in India on March 14, 2015

Verified Purchase

Awesome story. Must have if one enjoys spy stories and/ or tales of the cold war. Also a great peep into what shaped geopolitics in the 1950s and 1960s.

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