Updated August 01, 2024 at 11:48 AM ET
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was originally published in August 2022. It has been updated with the latest exchange of prisoners.
In a darkened exhibit hall at the International Spy Museum, Executive Director Chris Costa recounts the most dramatic prisoner swap between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
In 1960, the U.S. had limited human intelligence on the ground inside the Soviet Union, and desperately wanted more information on its military capabilities.
"So we had spies in aircraft that could take pictures of the Soviet Union," said Costa.
One of those pilots was Francis Gary Powers, who was working for the CIA and was flying a U-2 spy plane 70,000 feet above the Soviet Union when he was shot down.
The Americans didn't think the Soviets could take down a plane at that altitude, and they didn't expect a pilot would survive such an emergency.
They were wrong on both counts, and the result was high drama at the height of the Cold War.
"Hostage diplomacy"
A complex exchange on Thursday involved the release of more than two dozen people jailed in the U.S., Russia, and four other countries. Those freed included three Americans who were held in Russia — Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former Marine Paul Whelan and Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva.
The Russians who were freed included Vadim Krasikov. He was convicted of a 2019 killing in Germany and sentenced to life in prison. The German judges said the killing was ordered by Russian government officials.
"The deal that secured their freedom was a feat of diplomacy," President Biden said in a statement. "All have endured unimaginable suffering and uncertainty. Today, their agony is over."
While Washington and Moscow have done deals for decades, they usually involved trading spies for spies. The new twist is that an increasing number of private citizens are becoming entangled in foreign legal systems.
"During the Cold War, it was very much understood by both sides. This was a bit of a gentlemen's game," said Costa. Before running the Spy Museum, he worked at the White House, where he dealt with cases of Americans detained or held hostage abroad.
"What we're seeing play out now is really more hostage diplomacy," said Costa.
In another recent example, the U.S. exchanged an infamous Russian arms dealer, Viktor Bout, for American basketball star Brittney Griner in December 2022. Griner was convicted and sentenced to nine years for having a small amount of cannabis oil in her luggage when she landed at a Moscow airport.
The old rules
That doesn't mean it was easy to broker a deal in the Cold War, but the dynamics were different.
"When my father was shot down, there were all sorts of misinformation, fake news being published as to how he was captured," said Francis Gary Powers Jr., the son of the pilot.
He's referring to the U.S. government and media, which genuinely didn't know how Powers' plane was taken down initially, or how the case should be portrayed publicly.
"They thought sabotage. They thought pilot error or they thought flame out. They thought UFO encounter," Powers said with a chuckle.
Three years before Powers was captured, the U.S. had convicted a Soviet spy, Rudolph Abel. He had posed as a photographer in Brooklyn, but was secretly passing along coded messages stuffed inside hollow coins.
The U.S. and Soviet governments each feared their own spy would spill secrets while being interrogated by the adversary.
"Our governments wanted to get them back, to be debriefed, to find out what happened. How did you get caught? Do the Soviets have the missile technology to shoot down the U-2?" said Powers, founder of The Cold War Museum outside Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile, the Soviets "wanted to debrief Rudolf Abel to find out how he got caught so that they could improve their intelligence systems in the future."
Director Steven Spielberg turned the story into a movie in 2015, called "Bridge of Spies."
Tom Hanks plays the American lawyer at the center of the negotiations. He makes the case that the convicted Soviet spy shouldn't be put to death, because if an American is captured, "we might want to have someone to trade."
That American turned out to be Francis Gary Powers. Still, Powers would be held for nearly two years.
Already difficult negotiations were further complicated by the U.S. insistence that a second American detainee be released. He was Frederic Pryor, a graduate student held in communist East Germany on suspicion of spying.
A deal was eventually struck, freeing the two Americans and the Soviet spy.
Powers died in 1977 in a helicopter crash in California. In 2017, Powers Jr. traveled to central Russia to visit the site where his father touched down by parachute. There he met a number of residents who still remembered the day an American pilot fell from the sky more than a half-century earlier.
A series of swaps
In those intervening years, multiple U.S.-Russia prisoner exchanges have been worked out, most involving actual or suspected spies.
The biggest such case was in 2010, when the U.S. exchanged 10 Russian spies caught in the U.S. for the freedom of four Russians who had been arrested in their homeland, accused of spying for the West.
Throughout his term, President Biden has sought to win the release of Americans that the government has classified as "wrongfully detained." But Russian leader Vladimir Putin has demanded a high price.
"He's not easy to deal with," said Oleg Kalugin, a former Russian spy who was Putin's boss in the 1980s, when Putin was a young intelligence officer.
"Putin is sly, smart and he manipulates people and circumstances if he can," said Kalugin, who's 89. After decades in the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB, he became a critic of the Soviet Union in its final days and eventually moved to the U.S.
He says he wasn't much impressed by Putin when he was his boss. Now, they really don't care for each other.
"He called me a traitor. I called him a war criminal," said Kalugin.
U.S.-Russia relations continue to spiral downward over the war in Ukraine and a host of other issues.
But there's still a broad consensus on the need to keep lines of communication open to deal with issues like prisoner swaps or potential military confrontations.
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