Berlin's Bridge of Spies

Hidden gems: ANYONE WHO remembers when cold-war spy movies were all the rage will also remember the inevitable prisoner exchanges, in the dead of night or just before dawn, in the centre of a deserted bridge.

If the films were shot on location, then the bridge was Glienicke Brücke, between Berlin and Potsdam, dubbed the Bridge of Spies by reporters who covered the real-life exchanges at the time.

It had a starring role, for example, in Funeral in Berlin, the 1966 Harry Palmer movie starring Michael Caine and based on the Len Deighton thriller.

The first swap between the US and the Soviet Union took place in February 1962, when Gary Powers, pilot of a U-2 spy plane shot down over Yekaterinburg two years before, was exchanged for Col Vilyam Fisher, aka Rudolf Abel, of the KGB.

But it wasn’t always a straight one-for-one exchange. In June 1985 23 US agents who had been held in eastern Europe were handed over in return for a senior Polish agent, Marian Zacharski, and three others arrested in the West.

The highest-profile exchange was on February 11th, 1986, when the human-rights campaigner and chess prodigy Anatoly Sharansky was exchanged for husband-and-wife spies Karl and Hana Koecher.

Sharansky subsequently moved to Israel, changed his first name to Natan and founded a political party with another former dissident, Yuli-Yoel Edelstein.

All of this history hangs over the bridge when you visit it today, as my wife and I did recently in the hands of a German friend with a sense of history. As he pointed out, you can still see the mark of the border line in the centre of the bridge, and the slight difference in the colour of the metal supports. It’s a hidden gem that’s worth a pilgrimage.

Glienicke Bridge, Bundesstrasse 1, Berlin, Germany

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