The top-secret negotiations, the hushed rumours and the planes converging on Ankara, a third-country location that was kept secret until the final moment. There was much cold war-style intrigue in the buildup to Thursday’s prisoner exchange, the latest in a long line of swaps between Moscow and the west that dates back to the cold war.
It started on a cold and clear morning in February 1962, when two groups of people gathered at each end of the narrow Glienicke Bridge, separating West Berlin and East Germany. On one side, they were dressed in US military police trenchcoats; on the other in Soviet-issue fur hats. The Russian spy Rudolf Abel walked across the bridge towards the Soviet side; American pilot Gary Powers, arrested in the Soviet Union, walked past him towards West Germany.
