In early morning mists we had driven through deserted West Berlin to reach Glienicke Bridge, our rendezvous. Now we were at our end of the dark-green steel span, which crosses into Soviet-occupied East Germany. Across the lake was Potsdam; the silhouette of an ancient castle was on a hill to the right. On both sides of the lake were heavily wooded parks. It was a cold but clear morning on February 10, 1962.
Beneath the bridge, on our bank of the lake, three Berliner fishermen were casting but occasionally looked up in curiosity. A few white swans were cruising.
At the other end of the narrow bridge, called “Bridge of Freedom” in 1945 by our GIs and the Russians, we could see a group of men in dark fur hats. One tall figure was Ivan A. Schischkin, a Soviet official in East Berlin who had negotiated with me the prisoner exchange which three governments were now to complete.
It was nearly 3 A.M. in Washington, but at the White House the lights burned and President Kennedy was still up, waiting for word. There was an open telephone line from Berlin to the White House.
United States military police in trench coats were moving about at our end of Glienicke Bridge. In a small sentry shack West Berlin uniformed guards, abruptly ordered to abandon their bridge posts a little while before, sipped coffee from paper cups; they looked bewildered and vaguely apprehensive. Their loaded carbines were stacked in a corner.
Two U.S. Army cars pulled up behind us. Surrounded by burly guards was Rudolf I. Abel, gaunt and looking older than his sixty-two years. Prison in America had left its mark. Now at the last moment he was drawing on ingrained self-discipline.
Rudolf Ivanovich Abel was a colonel of the KGB, Soviet secret intelligence service. Abel was believed by the United States to be the “resident agent” who for nine years directed the entire Soviet espionage network in North America, from a Brooklyn artist’s studio. He was trapped in June, 1957, when a dissolute Soviet subagent betrayed him. Abel had been seized by the FBI, indicted and convicted of “conspiracy to commit military and atomic espionage,” a crime punishable by death.
When first arraigned in Federal Court in August, 1957, Abel asked that the judge assign “counsel selected by the Bar Association.” A committee of lawyers recommended me for assignment by the court as defense attorney. After four years of legal proceedings, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld Abel’s conviction by a vote of 5 to 4. The Colonel meanwhile had been serving a thirty-year term in Atlanta Penitentiary.
At his sentencing on November 15, 1957, I had asked the judge in open court not to invoke the death penalty because, among other reasons:
It is possible that in the foreseeable future an American of equivalent rank will be captured by Soviet Russia or an ally; at such time an exchange of prisoners through diplomatic channels could be considered to be in the best national interests of the United States.
Now on Glienicke Bridge, negotiated “after diplomatic channels had been unavailing,” as President Kennedy later would write me, such an exchange was about to take place.
At the opposite end of the bridge was American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. In a distant section of Berlin, at an East-West crossing known as “Checkpoint Charlie,” the East Germans were about to release Frederic L. Pryor, an American student from Yale. He had been arrested for espionage in East Berlin in August, 1961, and publicly threatened with the death penalty by the East German government. Final pawn in the Abel-Powers-Pryor exchange was a young American, Marvin Makinen of the University of Pennsylvania. In a Soviet prison in Kiev, where he was serving an eight-year sentence for espionage, Makinen unknowingly had received a Russian pledge of his early release.
When I walked to the center of Glienicke Bridge, concluded the prearranged ceremony and brought back what I had been promised “behind the Wall” in East Berlin, it would be the end of a long road. To a lawyer in private practice, this had become more a career than a case. The legal work was time-consuming; the related nonlegal work even more so.
I was Abel’s only visitor and only correspondent in the United States throughout his imprisonment of almost five years. The Colonel was an extraordinary individual, brilliant and with the consuming intellectual thirst of every lifetime scholar. He was hungry for companionship and the trading of thoughts. While in Federal prison in New York, he once was reduced to teaching French to his cellmate, a semiliterate Mafia hoodlum convicted of strong-arming garbage collectors.
So Abel and I talked. And corresponded. We agreed and we disagreed. About his case; American justice; international affairs; modern art; the companionship of animals; the theory of probabilities in higher mathematics; the education of children; espionage and counterespionage; the loneliness of all hunted men; whether he should be cremated, if he died in prison. His range of interest seemed to be as inexhaustible as his knowledge.
At the very outset I must state what Abel never told me. He never admitted to me that any of his activities in the United States had been directed by Soviet Russia. This may seem incredible, but it is true. He could have been a KGB colonel who had decided to undertake such espionage on his own. However, I always proceeded on the premise that the United States government’s proof of Abel’s guilt—and the guilt of the Soviet which sent him—was overwhelming. The entire defense was based on this assumption. Furthermore, he knew my belief, tacitly accepted it and never denied its truth. We even assumed it in our discussions. But he never expressly declared it, even to me.
Why was this? Did he think I was naïve, a Soviet sympathizer or confused? Not at all. In the last analysis, such an express admission not only would be against his every instinct, disciplined for thirty years, but more to the point, it was unnecessary for his legal defense. The latter was the criterion of our communication in this area. I once asked him his real name. He deliberated and then said, “Is that knowledge necessary for my defense?” I said no. He tapped his foot and said, “Then let’s talk about more pertinent matters.”
Moreover, he accepted from the outset the paradoxical position in which I had been placed by court assignment. He understood my conviction that by giving him an honest defense to the best of my ability, I would be serving my country and my profession. But he recognized the distinction between knowledge required to defend his legal rights and other information, not pertinent to his court defense but perhaps valuable to United States counterintelligence agencies. Candor with caution was required and observed on both sides.
This unique lawyer-client relationship has enormously aided me in writing about the case of Colonel Abel. I never would have been clear in my professional conscience if in any manner I took advantage of the fact that Abel has now disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. He knew that I intended to write this book, begun in 1960 shortly after the Supreme Court decision. Indeed, he said that since some book about the case would undoubtedly be written, he would rather have me undertake it than entrust the task to a “professional writer who might exaggerate or distort facts to increase popular consumption.”
At this late date, I do not intend to have his faith in me misplaced. Even that declaration is unnecessary, for I know nothing which could be used against him, wherever he now may be. The very facts which make dangerous in American eyes a Soviet spy who will not talk must serve in his homeland as proof of patriotic devotion. Nathan Hale was executed, but respected, by the British and his memory has been revered by us.
The day I was assigned to the Abel defense, I decided to keep a diary on the case. First, in so complicated a legal matter the diary could be helpful for basic review from time to time. Second, it would be reassuring in the event my client were executed and I had to face the suspicion, however unfounded, that I failed to give him an honest defense. Finally, it would be a personal notebook on what appeared to be my most challenging assignment in law since the Nuremberg Trials.
It is from the written records—the original diary expanded from contemporaneous notes, letters to and from Abel and his “family,” the official transcript of court proceedings, and finally, cabled reports to the State Department on my East Berlin mission—that this book has been written. Why did I accept the defense assignment? What was Abel like? Why did our Supreme Court divide 5 to 4 in upholding his conviction? What are the feelings of an American who goes behind the Berlin Wall, without diplomatic status or immunity, to negotiate with the Soviets? Was the final exchange on the Glienicke Bridge in the best national interest of the United States? All these questions, and more, answer themselves in the written records.
Sitting alone late one night, back in 1957, I thought of my daily relationship with Abel and wrote in my diary (a little stiffly, I now think):
We are two dissimilar men drawn close by fate and American law . . . into a classic case which deserves classic treatment.