Arrested student unwittingly caught up in Bridge of Spies prisoner exchange
Frederic Pryor Cold War prisoner b April 23, 1933 d September 2, 2019
One of the most dramatic moments of the Cold War occurred on February 10, 1962, on a bridge connecting the then-divided states of East and West Germany, when two high-profile prisoners – American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and a convicted Soviet spy known as Rudolf Abel – were exchanged.
Delegations from the United States and Soviet Union stepped on to the Glienicke Bridge, between West Berlin and Potsdam, East Germany, in a tense scene portrayed in the 2015 Steven Spielberg film Bridge of Spies.
The two groups stood on opposite sides of a white marker in the middle of the bridge for 20 minutes, waiting for word that another
American had been released from an East
German prison, some 30 kilometres away.
That prisoner was Frederic Pryor, who has died aged 86. He was then a 28-year-old graduate student who had been detained in East Berlin for nearly six months. He was denounced as a spy by his captors but never charged with a crime.
In 1961, Pryor was completing his PhD dissertation in economics at Yale University. He had been in Berlin off and on for almost two years, conducting research on the trade policies of countries in the Communist bloc. He routinely drove his sports car into East Berlin to attend conferences and meet colleagues before being caught up in the hard political realities of the Cold War.
On August 13, 1961, Communist authorities in East Germany barricaded their half of Berlin behind barbed wire and hastily built concrete walls – what instantly became known as the Berlin Wall. Less than two weeks later, Pryor drove to East Berlin on what he expected to be his farewell visit.
His plan that day was to listen to a speech by East German leader Walter Ulbricht; to deliver a copy of his dissertation to a professor who had helped with his research; and to meet the sister of a friend.
The friend’s sister was not at home. (Only later did Pryor learn that she had fled to the West.) When he returned to his car, it was surrounded by officers from Stasi, the East German secret police.
‘‘The Stasi were staking out her apartment to catch anyone coming to get her stuff,’’ Pryor said later. ‘‘I didn’t even get into the apartment, but they arrested me.’’
When they found a copy of his dissertation – filled with statistics and other information about the Soviet bloc – they accused him of economic espionage. He was taken to a notorious prison, where he was questioned for up to 10 hours a day.
‘‘They interrogated me every day for four and a half months,’’ he later said. ‘‘Good practice for your German, by the way.’’
His parents moved to Berlin to help secure his release, but as the weeks turned to months
he had almost no contact with them or anyone on the outside. The letters and packages they sent to him never arrived.
The East Germans provided Pryor with a lawyer, but ‘‘once you’re arrested, you’re always convicted’’, he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2015. ‘‘I expected five or 10 years in prison. I made peace with that.’’
Meanwhile, the US government was seeking to negotiate the release of Powers, whose spy plane had been shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. In exchange, the United States would turn over Abel – a British-born Soviet spy whose real name was William Fisher.
US intelligence officials enlisted Abel’s court-appointed lawyer James Donovan (played by Tom Hanks in Bridge of Spies )to arrange the exchange. Pryor unwittingly found himself a part of high-stakes Cold War negotiations – in part because of the presence of his parents in Berlin.
Under pressure from the Soviets, East
German authorities reluctantly agreed to release him as part of the Powers-Abel prisoner exchange. ‘‘The East Germans weren’t happy about releasing me,’’ Pryor said. ‘‘When my lawyer drove me to Checkpoint Charlie’’ – the central crossing point between East and West Berlin – ‘‘they had us sit there for half an hour. The East Germans deliberately delayed the exchange of Powers and Abel, who were not supposed to be exchanged until after I was released.’’
Powers, Abel and the two countries’ diplomatic parties were forced to stand in the cold on Glienicke Bridge until US officals learned that Pryor had been freed.
He flew back to the US on a commercial flight and within 48 hours was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his parents were living at the time.
‘‘I did not know about the Powers-Abel switch until I crossed the border,’’ he said at the time. ‘‘I’m a private citizen and I don’t particularly enjoy the attention given me. I’d like to resume a normal life.’’
Frederic LeRoy Pryor was born in Michigan and grew up in Ohio. He majored in chemistry at college, before doing a masters at Yale in economics from Yale. Yale conferred his PhD in 1962, shortly after his return from captivity.
When he applied for jobs with the auto industry, he was turned down. ‘‘They said no, they didn’t want anyone with a prison record,’’ he recalled. ‘‘I said, ‘But it was the commies!’ They said, ‘Tough.’ ’’
Instead, he turned to the academic world. He taught at the University of Michigan and worked in research at Yale before joining the faculty at Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College in 1967. He published more than a dozen books and more than 100 scholarly papers, examining the economics of Eastern Europe.
His wife of 44 years, economist Zora Prochazka, died in 2008. Survivors include a son, and three grandchildren.
Pryor said he was not consulted by Spielberg about the movie. He had to buy a ticket to see it at the cinema. ‘‘Almost everything the movie showed about me was fiction,’’ he said. He thought Will Rogers, the actor portraying him, looked ‘‘like a delinquent’’.
As he left the cinema, ‘‘another person asked me what I thought of the film, and I said parts of it were inaccurate . . . He asked how I knew that, and I said ‘I’m Frederic Pryor.’ ’’ –
‘‘They interrogated me every day for four and a half months. Good practice for your German, by the way.’’