SUMMARY: It's been 30 years since one of the 20th century's biggest historic events: the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although the East German dictatorship subsequently collapsed, cultural and political divisions remain, more than a generation after reunification. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports on the wall's legacy, the polarizing issue of immigration and the lingering stain of anti-Semitism.
Steven Spielberg’s movie captures the essence of the Cold War in the tale of a man whose “legend” was so encompassing, U.S. agents did not learn his true identity until the Soviet Union started to collapse.
Hollywood loves the smoke and mirrors of espionage. For decades, it has made a dirty, dangerous business look glamorous on silver screens.
“Bridge of Spies,” the cold-war epic directed by Steven Spielberg, contends for six Academy Awards Sunday, including best picture. The brilliant Briton Mark Rylance is up for best supporting actor. He plays the Soviet spook who the FBI knew as Col. Rudolf Abel before and after his arrest in New York in 1957. Tom Hanks stars as the noble lawyer James Donovan, who defended the mysterious colonel up to the Supreme Court. In 1962, at the behest of the CIA, Donovan handed his imprisoned client over to the Russians in exchange for the captured pilot of a U–2 spy plane shot down over Sverdlovsk. The swap took place at the Berlin bridge connecting communist East Berlin to the West — thus the title.
The movie tries to be true to life. But it reconstructs five grim years in two hours and twenty-one minutes. As it often is, the truth was stranger than its fictional portrayal.
I’ve written on American intelligence over three decades, as a reporter for The New York Times and as the author of histories of the CIA ("Legacy of Ashes") and the FBI ("Enemies"). I see Rylance, an actor’s actor, as the heart of the film. He bears an astonishing resemblance to Abel; his silence and cunning captures the essence of espionage. A gray man in a gray suit slips through the shadows in a black-and-white world carrying encrypted secrets.
Now to the story’s facts and fictions:
J. Edgar Hoover had been on the warpath against Soviet spies for a decade when a drunken KGB courier walked into the U.S. Embassy in Paris in April 1957. Reino Hayhanen feared for his life, having fouled up to a fare-thee-well. He had taken $5,000 intended for the American Communist underground in New York, gone on a bender, and bought a one-way ticket to Paris. The CIA station chief delivered him to the custody of the FBI in New York. After the defector dried out, he gave the Bureau its first deep look inside a Soviet spy operation in the United States. Hoover’s nightmare came to life.
Hayhanen told the agents an astounding story. He had a legend — a false identity — and a forged American passport when he boarded the Queen Mary for New York. He served as a courier carrying money and encoded microfilm messages sent to and from Moscow. Many messages were hidden in hollowed-out coins, secreted in New York’s parks and sidewalks. (A trick nickel makes a cameo appearance in the movie.) Hayhanen named his top superior as the First Secretary of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations — who had just left New York, never to return — and his main contact as Col. Abel, alias “Emil Goldfus,” an artist with a studio in Brooklyn.
The FBI’s Edmund J. Birch led a squad trailing the artist. Carrying a hidden camera in a briefcase outside a Manhattan restaurant, he got a clear shot — “one beautiful picture of his face,” Birch remembered. Haynahen identified the face as Abel’s. The FBI watched the suspect around the clock. He never did anything suspicious. The evidence was hearsay.
The Bureau wanted to make an espionage case but they lacked clues. Hoover was livid. On his orders, without a warrant, and outside the law, his agents grabbed Abel, tossed his apartment, and found extensive evidence of spy craft.
But unless the FBI broke Abel, the illegally seized evidence was likely to be inadmissible in court. He was initially charged under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the immigration statute that the Justice Department used when an espionage case could not be made.
FBI agents grilled him for more than two years — first in a broiling prison for illegal immigrants outside McAllen, Tex., on the Mexican border, at “a wetback camp, in a wire cage,” said the FBI’s Ed Gamber, who interrogated Abel for six weeks and later testified in court. “He was a gentleman, he was polite; he was a nice guy.” And he never broke. Then teams of FBI agents braced him at the Atlanta federal penitentiary, one of the toughest prisons in the United States. “I’ll talk with you about art, mathematics, photography, anything you want to talk about, but don’t ask me about my intelligence background,” Abel said. “I have not said anything, and I’m not going to now.”
Playing Abel in “Bridge of Spies,” Rylance has a great line eliding that silence in three words. If he cooperated, he asks, “Would it help?” History suggests not.
In real life, prosecutors persuaded a federal judge to allow use of the evidence they had seized. Abel was quickly convicted and sentenced to thirty years. Donovan almost immediately won an appeal before the Supreme Court, which granted an extraordinary 90 minutes for argument. He cited the Constitution’s ban against warrantless searches and jailing, arguing that Abel’s arrest and imprisonment were an affront to American justice.
Anyone who follows the court may be shocked to read that, after long deliberation, only five justices sided with the government. The minority of four wrote: “This is a notorious case, with a notorious defendant. Yet we must take care to enforce the Constitution without regard to the nature of the crime.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower was outraged. “We would have to expose all our intelligence sources and methods in order to obtain a conviction,” Eisenhower fumed at a National Security Council meeting attended by Vice President Richard M. Nixon in May 1960, seven weeks after the decision– and shortly after the U–2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was shot down. “About all the FBI can do is keep spies under surveillance.”
The only thing of import Abel ever said to the FBI was an insult: “American intelligence walks in baby shoes.” And he had a point. Not until the end of the cold war did the CIA and the FBI learn that the man they knew as Abel was an entirely different person.
He was born in 1903 in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, as Willie Fisher, the son of a Bolshevik. He went to the Soviet Union, became a committed Communist, and was given training, a legend, and a role in Moscow’s spy network before World War Two. He came to the United States after the war and worked in silence, undetected, for nearly a decade. And he lived on for nearly a decade after the great swap, dying on November 15, 1971.
Twenty years on, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist. And today another colonel trained by its vicious spy service rules in the Kremlin.
Hollywood would never greenlight that movie. No one would believe the script.
SUMMARY: More than 33,000 men and women who worked at nuclear facilities have died from related illnesses, and more than 100,000 Americans were diagnosed with cancer and other diseases after helping build the country's nuclear stockpile. That toll had never fully been revealed until a year-long investigation by McClatchy News. Jeffrey Brown speaks to McClatchy's Lindsay Wise.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): McClatchy's team found the federal government had never fully revealed the true toll of what happened to men and women working at nuclear facilities.
Back in 2001, the government set up a compensation fund for some of those workers. The investigation found that more than 33,000 of them have died from related illnesses. That’s more than four times the number of Americans killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
And there were more than 100,000 Americans diagnosed with cancer and other diseases after helping to build the country’s nuclear stockpile over the decades.
Lindsay Wise is one of the leading reporters on the McClatchy team. She joins me now.
And welcome to you.
I want to fill in the picture first. What kind of work and workers were most impacted, most exposed?
LINDSAY WISE, McClatchy Washington Bureau: Well, these were workers at plants, more than 300 plants all over the country.
They did everything from pipe fitting and production work, blue-collar work, to nuclear physicists and scientists. And we even found in our database some CEOs who ran the contracting companies that managed the plant.
JEFFREY BROWN: You refer to this as a hidden legacy. It’s a little known casualty of the Cold War, but how much was known?
LINDSAY WISE: Well, this is what I found so interesting working on this project, which was that I feel like when we talk about the Cold War and the history of the Cold War, we often talk about it as though it was a war without any casualties, without any American casualties.
And what we were able to do at McClatchy is we obtained a database from the Department of Labor for the compensation program, and we were able to crunch the numbers and analyze the data, and find the number of people who had applied and then been compensated for illnesses and died.
And so that told us that there were people who gave their lives as part of the Cold War.
SUMMARY: President Obama and leaders in the European Union announced new penalties against Russia a day after citizens in the Ukrainian region of Crimea voted to secede. But Russia appeared unfazed in the face of its toughest sanctions since the end of the Cold War. Meanwhile the Ukrainian government vowed to oppose the annexation, with force if necessary. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
SUMMARY: After Sunday's referendum, Crimea's parliament dispatched a delegation to Moscow to work out details of joining Russia, reflecting the jubilation of that region's ethnic Russian majority. But not everyone in Crimea is happy about the results. Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner talks with Judy Woodruff from Simferopol about the reactions on the ground.
SUMMARY: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has declared Crimea independent from Ukraine. How quickly will Russia move to annex the region, and will Moscow stop there or push to neutralize the whole country? Judy Woodruff talks to Cliff Kupchan of the Eurasia Group and Nikolas Gvosdev of the Naval War College for perspectives on Putin’s goals and the standoff between Russia and the West.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): The crisis in the Ukraine, which has pitted Europe and the U.S. against a re-expanding Russia, entered a new phase today.
War games began in Poland today, as U.S. and Polish forces performed joint air and naval exercises. They were long-planned, but have now become part of the U.S. response to Russia’s seizing much of Crimea, a Ukrainian region where ethnic Russians predominate.
Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested last week he could intervene elsewhere as well.
PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN, Russia (through interpreter): If we see that lawlessness starting in eastern regions too, if people ask us for help, we reserve the right to use all options at our disposal to protect those citizens.
GWEN IFILL: On Friday’s NewsHour, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey said such action would be dangerous.
GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff: If Russia is allowed to do this, which is to say move into a sovereign country under the guise of protecting ethnic Russians in — in Ukraine, it exposes Eastern Europe to some significant risk, because there are ethnic enclaves all over Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
GWEN IFILL: Indeed, much of Eastern Ukraine does have sizable Russian-speaking populations.
And other nations in the region, including Moldova, Belarus, and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, are also home to large numbers of ethnic Russians. This isn’t the first time Moscow has moved to annex regions beyond its borders. During the Five Days War in 2008, Russia effectively gained control over portions of neighboring Georgia.
Estonia’s foreign minister said today the entire continent should be concerned.
URMAS PAET, Foreign Minister, Estonia (through interpreter): Russian aggression changes the situation for the whole of Europe. It influences Europe’s security. And the fact that Russia uses its power to protect Russians living abroad affects all European countries, as Russians live all over Europe.
GWEN IFILL: In the face of that prospect, the European Union is talking sanctions. The U.S. has already imposed some penalties and travel bans.
And starting Thursday, a dozen more American F-16 fighter jets will arrive in Poland. F-15s are headed to Lithuania, and NATO is stepping up reconnaissance flights over Poland and Romania.
SUMMARY: What are the boundaries of Vladimir Putin’s ambitions? Gwen Ifill talks to Janusz Bugajski of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Nadia Dink of the National Endowment for Democracy about the historical precedent for Russia trying to destabilize or partition countries that have ethnic Russian populations.
A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.
The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.
It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.
The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis.
Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.
The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said.
