I spy dramatic licence under Bridge of Spies

Bridge of Spies (2015)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Entertainment grade: B+
History grade: B–

In the climate of overwhelming mistrust that characterised the cold war, both the Soviet Union and the United States developed technical and human resources to spy on each other. Sometimes, they caught each other out.

Truth

Bridge of Spies begins with the claim “inspired by true events”, which has taken over from “based on a true story” as an even less committal assertion of realism in cinema. At some level, everything is “inspired by true events”. Game of Thrones is inspired by real events in medieval history, and it’s got dragons in it. Lord of the Rings was inspired by Tolkien’s experiences in the first world war, and it’s got orcs. Historians may be relieved to find that Bridge of Spies has neither, and is actually a pretty good re-creation of cold war history – albeit largely from an American perspective and with plenty of dramatic licence.

Representation

The film’s action begins in 1957, with the arrest and trial in the United States of the Soviet intelligence officer known as Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance). The officer’s real name was William Fisher; he had been born to a Russian mother in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, before emigrating to the Soviet Union. He gave the name of another KGB colonel, Rudolf Abel, to the US authorities on his arrest and was not rumbled, so history generally knows him by that name. Abel was provided with a lawyer, James B Donovan (played in the film by Tom Hanks). It is true, as the film suggests, that Donovan’s family and the general public were hostile to his efforts – though the incident in the film where someone shoots a gun through the windows of the Donovan family home is invented.

Sentencing

Despite Donovan’s efforts, Abel is convicted. Yet Donovan has a quiet word with the hostile judge, encouraging him to avoid the death sentence: “It’s possible that an American of equivalent rank might be captured by Soviet Russia, and we’d want someone to trade.” This seems an extraordinary and convenient premonition, but it is accurate – except Donovan said it not in private, but in court on 15 November 1957: “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.” This is reproduced in Donovan’s memoir, Strangers on a Bridge.

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Surveillance

Seemingly following hot on the heels of Abel’s sentence, an American U-2 spy plane is shot down by the Soviets. In fact, this happened in May 1960, two and a half years later. The American space agency Nasa stated that one of its weather research planes had gone down in an accident near Turkey. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev waited two days to let this phony cover story sink in before presenting the captured pilot, Gary Powers (played in the film by Austin Stowell). “We did this quite deliberately, because if we had given out the whole story, the Americans would have thought up another fable”, he said at the time.

Spies

U-2 pilots were given a poisoned pin so they could commit suicide in the event of possible capture. “If capture is a foregone conclusion, you go down with your plane,” growls Powers’s commander in the movie. Bridge of Spies’ reconstruction of what might have happened in the cockpit after Powers’s plane was hit by a Soviet missile is brilliantly filmed, but implies that Powers had no opportunity to use his pin. In real life, Powers claimed that it was up to pilots whether to use it or not. He made the decision to live. This infuriated some in the US government, who considered it his duty to die rather than reveal the mission. It is not known exactly what Powers said to his captors. The film gets around this by just not really showing him saying anything, focusing instead on the hardships of his internment and interrogation.

Exchange

Bridge of Spies keeps up its brisker-than-true-events pace by chucking up the Berlin Wall immediately – though it was really constructed in August 1961, over a year after Powers’s capture. Donovan is sent to Berlin to negotiate a prisoner exchange: Abel for Powers. He arrives in the dead of winter, so you may assume another few months have passed. Even in 141 minutes of runtime, Bridge of Spies doesn’t really have enough space to flesh out the parallel story of Frederic Pryor, an American student imprisoned in East Germany on suspicion of espionage. It shoves bits of it in anyway. The dramatic scene in which Pryor is arrested as the wall goes up is fiction – Pryor was on vacation in Denmark at the time. Furthermore, in the film, it’s not clear until the last possible second whether the East Germans will hand over Pryor at the same time the Soviets release Powers. Without spoiling the ending, it didn’t happen like that in real life – as Pryor’s own account reveals.

Borders

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Donovan glances down from the S-Bahn to see a group of defectors getting shot as they try to leap over the wall from East to West Berlin. Around 100 East German defectors are thought to have died or been killed in connection with the East German border regime at the wall between 1961-1989, so to glimpse several killings at once would be an extraordinary coincidence. The real Donovan made no such claim in Strangers on a Bridge. Only one man was identified by the Berlin Wall Memorial as having been shot at the wall in the winter of 1961-62: Dieter Wohlfahrt, who was killed on 9 December 1961.

Verdict

Splendid performances make Bridge of Spies compelling viewing, and the sped-up timeline gives it dramatic pace – even if it might leave a few historians’ heads spinning.