In February next year it will be exactly half a century since the first sensational ‘spy swap’ took place, in a divided Berlin at the height of the Cold War. In a two-for-one deal, William Fisher, a Soviet mole born to Russian-German parents in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1903, was exchanged for a pair of Americans: Frederic Pryor, a graduate student of economics, and Francis Gary Powers, a first-class pilot who had been shot down over Sverdlovsk in the Urals on May Day, 1960. Less than two years later, Fisher and Powers walked towards each other from opposite ends of the Glienicke Bridge, whereas Pryor – an interesting and unusual person, as this book makes clear – returned to West Berlin via Checkpoint Charlie (the conventional route). In this well-constructed and very readable study, Giles Whittell weaves together the stories and lives of all three protagonists who, in the author’s opinion, might have unwittingly changed the course of world history.

Whittell believes that Khrushchev may well have been planning to propose a fairly genuine détente to Eisenhower at a meeting in Paris in May 1960 (Khrushchev had visited the USA the previous year). He had known from 1956 (after the Twentieth CPSU Congress but before the invasion of Hungary) that American U-2s had occasionally been flying over and photographing parts of the USSR; but the Soviet authorities had kept their protests to a minimum, if only so as not to draw the public’s attention to their inability to shoot down any of these planes. President Eisenhower was none too keen on the U-2 project, but some of his colleagues insisted (wrongly) that there was a huge gap in the number of missiles the two superpowers possessed. It was the job of Powers and his colleagues to uncover as many Soviet inter-continental ballistic missiles as possible. Some conspiracy theorists still think that Powers’s final mission was deliberately postponed in order to give the Soviet military more time to gain intelligence of it and make preparations to shoot the plane down. If that happened, with the loss of only one human being, it would have meant that there was no ‘danger’ of a détente – good news for the military-industrial complexes on both sides. Whether or not one thinks that this scenario is plausible, no one expected Powers to survive if he were shot down. Although he had not been instructed to swallow his poison capsule if he was somehow taken alive, he could have done so, and he was severely criticised after his return to the USA for not having committed suicide and for having said too much to his captors.

In contrast, William Fisher, better known as Colonel Rudolf Abel, managed to hold his peace for over four years after he was picked up by the US authorities; he had lived undetected in America for well over eight years (1948–57). Indeed, he made very few mistakes and would probably have spent a much longer time in the West had he not been betrayed by a grotesquely incompetent and strikingly unprofessional KGB colleague, who defected while passing through Paris on his way back to Moscow from America. Whittell agrees with others who have written about Abel: he probably acquired very little classified information during his extended tour of duty in the USA. If that is true, he appears to be very like most – perhaps all – of the handful of neo-Soviet Russian ‘sleepers’ who were exchanged last year for four Russians, some but not all of whom had been working for the West.

I knew about the planned exchange of Abel for Powers and Pryor before it happened. In the room next to mine sat the only senior officer in Department 6 of our Directorate. He looked after the security of the Soviet ‘illegal’ apparatus and did the paperwork necessary for the release or exchange of our agents who had been arrested in various parts of the world. (Some of the ‘hostile’ counterintelligence agencies were more successful than I had once thought.) After his return to Moscow, I saw Abel quite often. He used to work in an office close to mine that didn’t have a desk or chair, so he had to sit on a sofa. I never saw him smiling. He was totally devoid of charisma, and he seemed to be ill at ease, inhibited and very low-key. I was the ‘cultural organiser’ of the Directorate and sometimes gave him tickets for the theatre, but he never told me whether he had used them. He didn’t strike me as particularly well educated. I knew that one day, on Lubyanka Square, he bumped into Ernst Krenkel, with whom he had served in the Red Army in the late 1920s (Krenkel later became a renowned Polar explorer). Asked what he was doing now, Abel said he was still working in the huge building in front of them. ‘Goodness,’ said Krenkel, ‘even the birds don’t want to land on that building! What on earth are you doing in there?’ ‘I serve there as a museum exhibit,’ said Abel with irony and bitterness. 

In the 1990s I was lecturing at University College in Cork and met a retired KGB Colonel who had worked in Directorate S. Its head in 1971, when Abel was dying of cancer, was General Lazarev, who did not believe that Abel was a genuine Soviet patriot. Could he not have been ‘turned’ by the Americans while in captivity? The general thought that Abel, delirious on his deathbed, might reveal the truth about where his loyalties really lay. Lazarev ordered the KGB station in Tokyo to buy two tiny microphones, which were then worn under their ties by two officers who sat at Abel’s bedside recording every word uttered by the dying man. Many people in Directorate S, including myself, were outraged that such a distinguished and loyal agent as Abel was so distrusted.

Several minor blemishes apart, this is a worthy addition to the numerous earlier books about Powers and Abel. I wonder if the latter’s only daughter might have recorded what she knew and thought about her father?