Abel: The True Story of the Spy they traded for Gary Powers

The story behind Spielberg’s film Bridge of Spies

On 10 February 1962, Gary Powers, the American pilot whose U-2 spy plane was shot down in Soviet airspace, was brought to Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge, where he was to take part in the most famous prisoner exchange in history.

The man Powers was traded for was one Colonel Rudolf Abel, a cover name for KGB Colonel Vilyam Fisher, one of the most extraordinary characters in the history of the Cold War.

Tracing that story from the most unlikely of beginnings in Newcastle, to Moscow and beyond to the streets of New York,Abelis a singular and absorbing true story of Cold War espionage to rival anything in fiction.