Bridge of Spies: what it was really like

Steven Spielberg's film Bridge of Spies is an excellent thriller, largely based on the true events which led to the Abel-Powers exchange on Glienicke Bridge in February 1962. As it is a thriller and not a documentary, there are certain background aspects which are far from accurate, notably the depiction of East Berlin at the time. It was a drab, dull, dark city in total contrast to the thriving metropolis of West Berlin on the other side of the famous Wall, whose construction had begun in the preceding August. Some of the scenery in the film - ruined buildings, horses and carts, etc - would have been more applicable to the weeks and months following the 1945 Soviet occupation of Berlin. Even at the height of the Wall crisis in 1961, the streets were not filled with East German and Soviet troops as shown in the film. And James Donovan did not have his coat stolen by a gang of East German youths (I never saw such a gang!). But these are minor quibbles as depiction of things as they actually were would have made the film far less dramatic.

All that apart, this was a story in which I, as the only Western correspondent in East Berlin at the time, was a virtual non-player. The first I learned of it was during my regular early-morning reading of the Reuter European newswire. As there were no phone communications between East and West Berlin, and the whole thing had taken place in utmost secrecy at the Soviet embassy, there was little that I could do but read the beautiful Annette von Broecker's story with admiration. Shortly after the exchange, a Reuter story dealing with the exchange startled me into life. It quoted Donovan, the American lawyer so excellently depicted by Tom Hanks in the film, as saying the man in the Soviet embassy he had negotiated with was one Ivan Shishkin who, though he described himself as a second secretary, was clearly in a position of authority over the Soviet ambassador.

This amazed me as said Shishkin, whose visiting card described him as Second Secretary Press, had been my one and only contact in the Soviet embassy in the 14 months I had been assigned to East Berlin. I knew him very well, or so I thought. Hardly a week passed by without my calling on him for what were interesting and occasionally newsworthy conversations. But it had not taken me long to realise that Shish, as my wife and I called him, was extremely well informed. When he said "I think", that meant "I know". The extreme example of this was a week or so before the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit in June 1961 when his "thoughts" on what line Khrushchev would take turned out to be an uncannily correct prediction. Our agreement was that, although I could not identify him by name, I could write anything he said as long as it was attributed to a "usually well-informed Soviet source".

Shish was a professed Anglophile (and tried to dress like one), and my wife Mary and I had got to know him quite well socially. Indeed on one occasion when I had to visit Prague for a few days, he invited Mary, a 22-year-old blonde whom he described as an "English rose", to spend the day with him and his wife and daughter in the Soviet compound in the Karlshorst area of East Berlin. She told me on my return that they had spent the day fishing and had had a nice picnic. The only thing he asked of her was a photograph of her father, a Norfolk vicar. After a long and what now seems a fairly ridiculous discussion of the pros and cons of this request, we decided that we could not see any cons - and provided said photograph.

On Christmas Day 1961, when my parents were visiting us, Shish, having dropped a few heavy hints about his interest in things English, joined us for our traditional turkey lunch and was a most amicable guest. By the time of the events on Glienicke Bridge, I should have realised that he was a man of some authority as, during the November 1961 upcoming US-Soviet tank confrontation at the Friedrichstrasse crossing point, I had complained to him that I had not been able to get as close to the border flashpoint as I wished to report the story adequately. His response was to drive me to the border at Friedrichstrasse in an embassy limousine and, while I remained in the car, speak at some length to the allegedly East German border guard officer in charge of operations, who evidently spoke excellent Russian and looked very Russian! When he returned, he told me: "You can come here as often as you want and there will be no restrictions on your movement provided you do not try to cross the border. Be careful."

Much later, when Shishkin was Soviet consul-general in London in 1965 at a time when Mary and I were spending a few months in London between assignments in Peking (now Beijing) and Johannesburg, he was identified, after a dramatic confrontation at Heathrow Airport, by a Ministry of Defence spokesman quoted in The Observer newspaper as Colonel-General Ivan Shishkin, head of counter-intelligence Western Europe KGB.

Annette von Broecker's Cold War spy swap scoop recalled ■