Student in ‘Bridge of Spies’ prisoner exchange

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

Delegations from the United States and Soviet Union stepped onto 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, waiting for word that another American had been released from an East German prison, almost 20 miles away. That prisoner was Frederic Pryor, a 28year-old graduate student who had been detained in East Berlin for nearly six months. Mr. Pryor, who was denounced as a spy by his captors but never charged with a crime, died Sept. 2 at his home in Newtown Square, Pa. He was 86.

His family announced his death with notices in newspapers in suburban Philadelphia and his hometown of Mansfield, Ohio. The cause of death was not specified.

Frederic LeRoy Pryor was born April 23, 1933, in Owosso, Mich., and grew up in Mansfield, Ohio. His father was the wealthy owner of a manufacturing company, his mother a homemaker.

Mr. Pryor graduated in 1955 from Oberlin College in Ohio, where he majored in chemistry. He received a master’s degree in economics from Yale in 1957. Yale conferred his Ph.D. in 1962, shortly after his return from captivity in Berlin.

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 retired in 1998.