Glienicke bridge
The Glienicke bridge is a
bridge in
Berlin which spans the
Havel River to connect the cities of Berlin and
Potsdam. Because the
Soviet Union and the
United States used it three times to exchange captured spies during the
Cold War, the bridge was referred to as the
Bridge of Spies by the media. It is located at .
The first prisoner exchange between the
superpowers took place on February 10, 1962. The U.S. released noted Russian spy Colonel
Rudolf Ivanovich Abel in exchange for pilot
Francis Gary Powers captured by the USSR following the
U-2 Crisis of 1960.
Encyclopedia
The
Glienicke bridge is a
bridge in
Berlin which spans the
Havel River to connect the cities of Berlin and
Potsdam. Because the
Soviet Union and the
United States used it three times to exchange captured spies during the
Cold War, the bridge was referred to as the
Bridge of Spies by the media. It is located at .
The first prisoner exchange between the
superpowers took place on February 10, 1962. The U.S. released noted Russian spy Colonel
Rudolf Ivanovich Abel in exchange for pilot
Francis Gary Powers captured by the USSR following the
U-2 Crisis of 1960. Annette von Broecker claims that a lucky guess resulted in her being the only eyewitness to this exchange.
The second exchange on June 12, 1985 was a hurriedly arranged swap of 23 American agents held in
Eastern Europe for four Soviet agents arrested in the West.
The final exchange was also the most public. On February 11, 1986 the
human rights campaigner and political prisoner
Anatoly Sharansky was exchanged for a Soviet spy Karl Koecher.
The Glienicke bridge as a venue for prisoner exchange has also appeared in fiction, most notably in the 1966
Harry Palmer film,
Funeral in Berlin is a spy novel [i] by Len Deighton [i]....
, starring
Michael Caine, based on the novel of the same name.
External links
References
