How the superpowers rescued their agents, and why the German bridge was nicknamed "spy"

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Prisoner of war exchanges are often practiced in international relations with deep historical roots. In the 20th century, open armed confrontations were increasingly replaced by secret intelligence operations. It was then that the tradition of exchanging "failed" agents was born. About the very first and most iconic exchanges of intelligence officers between the secret services of the USSR and the West - in our material.

1. As the son of a Chinese marshal in the Soviet Komsomol went

Exchanges of "spies" in the Soviet Union have been known since the 1930s of the last century. One of the first known cases was the rescue of intelligence officers operating in China by the USSR special services. Then Yakov Bronin was exchanged for Jiang Chingguo. The latter was arrested in Sverdlovsk after the Shanghai arrest of a Soviet agent. In 1933-35. Bronin was the representative of Soviet intelligence on Chinese territory, replacing the legendary Soviet intelligence officer Sorge in this post. The Chinese sentenced Bronin to 15 years in prison, 2 of which he spent in the now famous city of Wuhan. The exchange of the "envoy" of Moscow for Jiang Ching-kuo took place in 1937. Moreover, the latter was the son of Marshal Chiang Kai-shek. Jingguo arrived in the Soviet Union back in 1925.

The heir to the head of the National Chinese Party, the Kuomintang, thoroughly mastered the Russian language, received a quality education, joined the Komsomol and confidently moved up the career ladder. In Sverdlovsk, he worked for Uralmash, at the same time editing the newspaper For Heavy Engineering. Here he got married and managed to become a father twice.

It is worth noting that the further life of both men was quite peaceful. Returning to the Union, Bronin did not become a victim of the "big terror" following the example of many colleagues, but lived a long life in his native Tukums. Jiang Ching-kuo rose to the rank of President of the Republic of China (Taiwan), having been re-elected twice. And his Sverdlovsk wife Faina Vakhreva (married Jiang Fanliang) became a respected first lady in the homeland of a high-ranking spouse.

Role of the "Spy Bridge"

Often military historians call the first international exchange of intelligence officers the incident on February 10, 1962 at the Glinik "spy" bridge between Berlin and Potsdam (the border between the GDR and West Berlin). On that day, representatives of the USSR and the United States handed over to each other the American pilot Powers and the Soviet intelligence officer Abel, respectively.

A Soviet military agent (real name William Genrikhovich Fisher) has been in the United States since 1948, controlling the extent of the possibility of a military conflict with the USSR, creating channels of illegal communication with the Center and obtaining data on the nuclear potential of the Americans. After the betrayal of his comrades-in-arms, he was arrested in 1957. He did not give anti-Soviet testimony in court, and he categorically dismissed attempts to persuade him to cooperate. Fischer was given 30 years in a hard labor prison in Atlanta in a foreign land.

Soviet intelligence fought for Abel from the moment the verdict was passed, building bridges with foreign colleagues and embedding the "necessary" people in the chain. Everything was decided by an international scandal in May 1960, when an American reconnaissance plane was shot down over Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), filming military objects. Pilot Powers escaped by parachuting, but was sentenced to 10 years. The American public offered to make an exchange, recalling the story with Abel. But a professional career intelligence officer could not be compared with a simple pilot, so after negotiations, Abel was exchanged for three Americans. Returning home, Fischer (aka Abel) went on a health-improving vacation, after which he worked for a long time in the central office of foreign intelligence and trained illegal intelligence officers. Pilot Powers was less fortunate: in 1977, he died in a helicopter crash.

Most massive exchange

Gliniki Bridge has once again been noted as a place of exchange between superpowers during the Cold War. Two years after Abel, the legendary Konon the Young was exchanged here for the British Greville Wynn. And in 1985, the largest exchange of intelligence officers in history took place on the same bridge. On June 11, 23 CIA agents who were serving sentences in the prisons of the GDR and Poland were released from here to the West. The Soviet Union, in turn, rescued four "spies" of the Eastern Bloc, including the experienced Polish intelligence officer Marian Zakharski. Negotiations on such a massive exchange have been going on for 8 long years. Moreover, it all started with a proposal to release a person who, as a result, was not among those exchanged.

Dropped from exchange lists

It was about the Soviet human rights activist Sharansky, who did not get into the exchange procedure.

As a result, he was exchanged, but this happened already in February 1986 after many demonstrations around the world, as well as the personal participation of authoritative politicians in Europe and the United States. The reason for the inconsistency of the exchange list in 1985 was that Moscow demanded loud confessions from the Americans. The USSR insisted that the Russian dissident, sentenced in 1978 to 13 years in prison, was engaged in espionage in the interests of the CIA. But American President J. Carter refused to trade the human rights defender for a spy. In the 1970s, Sharansky, while living in Moscow, oversaw the human rights "Helsinki Group" and was one of the Jewish activists who demanded from the Soviet authorities free travel to their Israeli homeland. Sharansky was also accused of organizing meetings with foreign journalists, passing on information about violations of human rights by the Soviet regime to the West.

Natan Sharansky is today a well-known public and statesman of Israel, because he crossed the "spy" bridge to the West. In the company of two more German citizens and a native of Czechoslovakia, he was exchanged for the four Czechoslovak agents Keher, the Soviet intelligence officer Zemlyakov, his Polish colleague Kaczmarek and the GDR agent Scharfenort, who were arrested by the Americans. After repatriation to Israel, Sharansky was greeted with honor by the local Prime Minister Peres and his deputy.

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