Francis Gary Powers was an American pilot whose Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Lockheed U-2 spy plane was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission in Soviet Union airspace, causing the 1960 U-2 incident.
Steven Allan Spielberg is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. A figure of the New Hollywood era, he is the most commercially successful director of all time. Spielberg is the recipient of various accolades, including three Academy Awards, a Kennedy Center honor, a Cecil B. DeMille Award, and an AFI Life Achievement Award. Time magazine named him one of the 100 Most Important People of the Century in 2013.
Thomas Jeffrey Hanks is an American actor and filmmaker. Known for both his comedic and dramatic roles, he is one of the most popular and recognizable film stars worldwide, and is regarded as an American cultural icon. Hanks's films have grossed more than $4.9 billion in North America and more than $9.96 billion worldwide, making him the fourth-highest-grossing actor in North America.
Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, real name William August Fisher, was a Soviet intelligence officer. He adopted his alias when arrested on charges of conspiracy by the FBI in 1957.
Telefon is a 1977 spy film directed by Don Siegel and starring Charles Bronson, Lee Remick and Donald Pleasence. The screenplay by Peter Hyams and Stirling Silliphant is based on the 1975 novel by Walter Wager.
The Good Shepherd is a 1955 nautical and war novel by C. S. Forester. It illustrates the difficulties of the Battle of the Atlantic: the struggle against the sea, the enemy, and the exhaustion brought on by constant vigilance. It also details the problems of the early radar and ASDIC equipment available and the poor communications between the fleet and Admiralty using HF Radio and early manual cryptography. A film adaptation, Greyhound, was released in 2020 starring Tom Hanks.
The Glienicke Bridge is a bridge across the Havel River in Germany, connecting the Wannsee district of Berlin with the Brandenburg capital Potsdam. It is named after nearby Glienicke Palace. The current bridge, the fourth on the site, was completed in 1907, although major reconstruction was necessary after it was damaged during World War II.
Edward Thomas Hardy is an English actor, producer, screenwriter and former model. After studying acting at the Drama Centre London, he made his film debut in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (2001). He has since been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, two Critics' Choice Movie Awards and two British Academy Film Awards, receiving the 2011 BAFTA Rising Star Award.
Konon Trofimovich Molody was a Soviet intelligence officer, known in the West as Gordon Arnold Lonsdale. Posing as a Canadian businessman during the Cold War he was a non-official (illegal) KGB intelligence agent and the mastermind of the Portland Spy Ring, which operated in Britain from the late 1950s until 1961.
Sebastian Koch is a German television and film actor. He is known for roles in the 2007 Academy Award-winning film The Lives of Others, in Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies, and as Otto Düring in the fifth season of the Showtime series Homeland.
The Mackintosh Man is a 1973 British-American Cold War neo noir spy thriller film, directed by John Huston and starring Paul Newman, Dominique Sanda and James Mason.
Frederic LeRoy Pryor was an American economist. While studying in Berlin during the partition of the city in 1961, he was imprisoned in East Germany for six months, then released in a Cold War "spy swap" that also involved downed American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. He spent the bulk of his career as a member of the Swarthmore College faculty, as a professor of economics.
Bridge of Spies may refer to:
Wolfgang Vogel was a German lawyer active in East Germany at the time of the Cold War who had brokered some of the most famous swaps of spies or exchanges against ransom of political prisoners between the Soviet bloc and the West. A bridge between two worlds during three decades, he came to symbolize the ambiguity of his time and environment, and his career was cited as material worthy of Len Deighton and John le Carré.
James Britt Donovan was an American lawyer and United States Navy officer in the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the Office of Strategic Services, ultimately becoming general counsel of the OSS, and an international diplomatic negotiator.
Matt Charman is a British screenwriter, playwright, and producer from Horsham, West Sussex. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his 2015 film Bridge of Spies, directed by Steven Spielberg and co-written with Joel and Ethan Coen. Charman started out writing for theatre, making a breakthrough as writer-in-residence at the National Theatre in London, where then-director Nicholas Hytner described Charman as having "a priceless nose for a story".
Bridge of Spies is a 2015 historical drama film directed and co-produced by Steven Spielberg, written by Matt Charman and the Coen brothers, and starring Tom Hanks in the lead role, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, and Alan Alda. Set during the Cold War, the film tells the story of lawyer James B. Donovan, who is entrusted with negotiating the release of Francis Gary Powers—a U.S. Air Force convicted pilot whose U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960—in exchange for Rudolf Abel, a convicted Soviet KGB spy held by the United States, whom Donovan represented at trial. The name of the film refers to the Glienicke Bridge, which connects Potsdam with Berlin, where the prisoner exchange took place. The film was an international co-production of the United States and Germany.
Giles Quintin Sykes Whittell is an English author and journalist who has worked for The Times as Correspondent in Russia and the United States.
The Courier is a 2020 historical spy film directed by Dominic Cooke. The film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Greville Wynne, and is based on the true story of a British businessman who was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service to be a message conduit with a Russian spy source Oleg Penkovsky in the 1960s. Rachel Brosnahan, Jessie Buckley, and Angus Wright also star.
