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    Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War
    Unavailable
    Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War
    Unavailable
    Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War
    Audiobook10 hours

    Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

    Written by Giles Whittell

    Narrated by Giles Whittell and Jonathan Keeble

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The dramatic events behind the Oscar-winning film, Bridge of Spies, tracing the paths leading to the first and most legendary prisoner exchange between East and West at Berlin's Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie on February 10, 1962.

    Bridge of Spies is the true story of three extraordinary characters whose fate helped to define the conflicts and lethal undercurrents of the most dangerous years of the Cold War: 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. The three men were rescued against daunting odds, and then all but forgotten. Yet they laid bare the pathological mistrust that fueled the arms race for the next 30 years.

    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 Nikita Khrushchev to send missiles to Fidel Castro.

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 4, 2015
    ISBN9781101922675
    Unavailable
    Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War
    Author

    Giles Whittell

    Giles Whittell is The Times of London’s chief leader writer, and the author of four books previous books, Lambada Country, Extreme Continental, Spitfire Women of World War II, and Bridge of Spies. He lives with his wife and children in South London.

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    Reviews for Bridge of Spies

    4/5

    47 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Excellent true story of the Cold war years. It centres around three figures - Rudolf Abel, real name William Fisher, alleged Soviet master spy who was actually anything but, Francis Gary Powers, a West Virginia boy who was unlucky enough to be flying a U-2 spyplane over the Soviet Union when it was shot down, and Frederic Pryor, a young student who was arrested by the paranoid Stasi for asking too many questions about the East German economy. On 10 February, 1962, Powers and Abel were exchanged at the Glienecke Bridge in Berlin while was Pryor was returned to the West at Checkpoint Charlie. This archetypal trope from so many spy books and movies actually occupies only a fraction of the book, the rest is concerned with the state of superpower relation in the early 60s, the US obsession with the so-called "missile gap", and Russia's paranoia about US overflights. The lives of Abel and Powers and their journeys to the Bridge of Spies are documented brilliantly, particularly Abel's problems with an incompetent Finnish spy who eventually turns him in. Captivating, thrilling read for anyone who loves spy stories.
    • 4/5
      Once again, a patriotic serviceman becomes the pawn in the Hawks' political game of espionage. This is the story of he three men who were exchange at Checkpoint Charlie and at East Germany' Glienicke Bridge. One was the Russian spy the Americans had found, another a doctoral student writing about the economics of East Berlin, and the third a pilot of a spy plane over Russia. The true picture of the tenuous times of the Cold War is given.
    • 3/5
      I wish this had focused more on Donovan, but it was more in depth with the other players in the swap.