Caught up in Cold War prisoner exchange

American held in East Berlin for months

One of the most dramatic moments of the Cold War occurred Feb. 10, 1962, on a bridge between East and West Germany, when two high-profile prisoners — American pilot Francis Gary Powers and a convicted Soviet spy known as Rudolf Abel — were exchanged.

Portrayed in the 2015 film Bridge of Spies, delegations from the United States and Soviet Union stood on opposite sides of a white marker in the middle of the bridge for 20 minutes, tensely waiting for word that another American had been also been freed.

That prisoner was Frederic Pryor, a 28-year-old graduate student who had been detained in East Berlin for nearly six months. Pryor had been denounced as a spy but never charged with a crime.

As he was completing his PhD in economics at Yale University, he had spent almost two years in Berlin researching trade policies of countries in the Communist bloc. He routinely drove into East Berlin for conferences and to meet colleagues.

On Aug. 13, 1961, the Berlin Wall went up. Two weeks later, Pryor drove to East Berlin.

Among other appointments, he planned to meet the sister of a friend. She was not at home. (Only later did Pryor learn she had fled to the west.)

“The Stasi were staking out her apartment to catch anyone coming to get her stuff,” Pryor told a publication of Swarthmore College, where he was a longtime faculty member.

“I didn’t even get into the apartment, but they arrested me.”

Having found a copy of his dissertation — filled with statistics and other information about the Soviet bloc — they accused Pryor of economic espionage and sent him to a notorious prison.

“They interrogated me every day for four and a half months,” he later said. “Good practice for your German, by the way.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. was seeking the release of Powers, whose U-2 spy plane had been shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. For him, they would turn over Abel — a British-born Soviet spy whose real name was William Fisher, in prison for espionage.

East Germany reluctantly agreed to release Pryor in the exchange. “I did not know about the Powers-Abel switch until I crossed the border,” Pryor said at the time.

Frederic LeRoy Pryor was born April 23, 1933, in Owosso, Mich., and died Sept. 2 at home in Newtown Square, Penn., age 86. He leaves a son and three grandchildren.