STRANGERS ON A BRIDGE

Originally published in 1964, this is the enthralling, insider account of the Cold War spy exchange that has become the subject of a major motion picture by Steven Spielberg starring Tom Hanks (coming from Dreamworks in Fall 2015, called "Bridge of Spies").

In the early morning of February 10, 1962, James B. Donovan began his walk toward the center of the Glienicker Bridge, which then linked West Berlin to East. With him, heavily guarded, walked Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, master spy and for years chief of Soviet espionage in the United States. Approaching them from the other side, under equally heavy guard, was Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot, whose exchange for Abel Mr. Donovan had negotiated. These were the strangers on a bridge, men of East and West, representatives of two opposed worlds meeting in dramatic truce.

Every part of the story is as fascinating as the exciting end. Abel was the most gifted, the most mysterious, the most effective spy in our time. His trial, which began in a Brooklyn United States District Court and ended in the Supreme Court of the United States, chillingly revealed the methods and successes of Soviet espionage.

No one was better equipped to tell the whole absorbing history than James B. Donovan, who was appointed to defend one of his country’s enemies and did so with scrupulous skill—from the first interview with Abel to the exchange on the bridge in Berlin. Here is the enthralling inside story of the great spy case of a generation.

This book is not a movie tie-in. The author, however, is the man who Tom Hanks will play in the movie. The Coen brothers will revise the screenplay, Marc Platt is producing.

Born in New York City in 1916, James B. Donovan graduated from Fordham University and Harvard Law School. A line officer in the Navy during World War II, he became general counsel of the Office of Strategic Services. He then was associate prosecutor at the principal Nuremberg trial. He was Democratic candidate for United States senator from New York in 1962, served as a general counsel for the Cuban families committee, obtaining the release of more than 9,700 Cubans and Americans from Castro's Cuba, and was president of the Board of Education of the City of New York.