Clydebank man who played key role for US in Cold War dies at 98
FEW people who saw pensioner Frank Meehan make his way through the Clyde coastal town of Helensburgh on his mobility scooter could have guessed at the adventure of a life he had led.
But Mr Meehan, who has died at the age of 98, had an incredible life that included a key role in some of the most notable events of the Cold War.
The modest and unassuming man was a retired warrior, whose brilliant career in the US foreign service spanned almost the entire duration of the east-west stand-off which defined the second half of the 20th century.
Mr Meehan played a key role in the prisoner transfer in Berlin which was made into the Oscar-winning film, Bridge of Spies, starring Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance.
His parents were from Clydebank and moved to the US in hope of a better life in New Jersey and he was born there on St Valentine’s Day, 1924.
This brought him US citizenship, which would play a key part in his life as his family returned home to the Clyde when he was a young boy.
The Second World War was a constant presence in his teenage years and he survived the Clydebank Blitz, an aerial bombardment by the Luftwaffe that killed 500 Scots and destroyed thousands of homes.
“There was a bad attack on the shipyards in March 1941,” he told a BBC documentary. “I was 17. We were in a shelter and the bombing started quite far away but you could hear them getting closer. The house next door got incendiary-bombed and was destroyed.
“I worked clearing the rubble of houses that had been burned. I carried a bricklayer’s hod. I was not much good at that. Maybe that’s what made me think of the foreign service”.
He attended the University of Glasgow and was embarking on a career in journalism when his US citizenship changed his life.
He was drafted in 1945 and spent two years in the US Army, travelling across Germany and helping rebuild the shattered country.
Towards the end of his service he responded to an advert for the US Foreign Service. He claimed it was to get a weekend off in Berlin but he passed the exam with ease and after a period in Washington DC working on the Marshall Plan – the US scheme to fund and coordinate the rebuilding of western Europe – joined the US State Department.
Like many of his generation, Frank’s career was dominated by the Soviet Union and he became fascinated by what was then seen as the great enemy.
By 1960, he was based at the US Embassy in Moscow when Soviet forces shot down a US spy plane and captured its pilot, Gary Powers. The imprisonment of Powers would lead to perhaps the most dramatic and well- known incident in Frank’s career, when he played a key part in the “Bridge of Spies” drama.
He was stationed in Berlin when Moscow offered to swap Powers for a Soviet agent called Rudolf Abel, who’d been caught spying in Brooklyn.
The Americans also asked for the release of a young American student named Frederic Pryor as part of the deal.
Pryor had been studying in East Germany and had been arrested by the communist regime there and accused of spying. The incident was dramatised in Bridge of Spies, the 2015 Steven Spielberg film.
While Powers and Abel were swapped at the Glienicke Bridge, Pryor was handed over to Mr Meehan at Checkpoint Charlie in the centre of the city.
After a tense wait among what he called “East German goons” he walked Pryor to his freedom in the west.
None of Mr Meehan’s part in this incident made it into the Hollywood version, which he regarded as well made and “mostly” accurate. Over the course of the next 25 years, he became US Ambassador to Czechoslovakia then, in 1980, to Poland. He arrived in Warsaw right at the birth of Solidarity, the democracy movement that had emerged from industrial strikes at the Gdansk shipyard.
His final posting as ambassador was to East Germany and he retired just one year before communism crumbled across Europe.
He moved to Helensburgh with his wife Margaret, with whom he had four children, in what was, after years of state service, their 23rd family home.
The house next door was incendiary bombed and destroyed in the Clydebank bombing