Four years, twenty-one months, six months — all ended on one February morning
On 10 February 1962 three men held for four years, twenty-one months and six months were freed on the same morning: Abel and Powers on the Glienicke Bridge, Pryor at Checkpoint Charlie.
What it shows
10 February 1962. The first formal Berlin spy exchange released three men who had been held for wildly unequal lengths of time — at the same instant, at two different crossings, on terms written between a Brooklyn lawyer and an East Berlin one.
Notes & caveats
The Spielberg film compressed the Donovan / Vogel correspondence; the actual Pryor exchange was paired at Checkpoint Charlie, not Glienicke. The 'Bridge of Spies' English name attaches retroactively after this 1962 deal — earlier Cold War literature called it Glienicker Brücke or Friedenbrücke. Nothing on this sheet is taken from the film or its research materials: the durations, dates and terms come from Donovan (1964) and Whittell (2010) as carried in data/glienicke-five.json. Abel's and Pryor's arrest days are not given in the sources; their bars are placed by counting the stated time-held back from the documented handover, which is why they are labelled by month and year rather than by day.
Sources
- Donovan, Strangers on a Bridge (Atheneum 1964)
- Whittell, Bridge of Spies (Bloomsbury 2010)
- NARA Donovan papers
- Wolfgang Vogel papers (Bundesarchiv)
