James B. Donovan

[tense music] In 1957, the FBI arrested Rudolf Abel, a suspected Russian spy in New York City.

Abel was tried for espionage, defended by insurance lawyer James Donovan, convicted, and sentenced to 30 years imprisonment.

In 1960, US Air Force pilot Francis Gary Powers was flying surveillance over the Soviet Union when his plane was shot down.

Captured by Soviet forces, Powers was sentenced to 10 years confinement.

In 1961, during the construction of the Berlin Wall, American economics student Frederic Pryor was arrested in East Berlin and detained by the authorities of the German Democratic Republic.

The lives of these four men would interconnect in a remarkable prisoner exchange that took place in 1962 at locations in Berlin that would become synonymous with the Cold War.

In 2015, director Steven Spielberg released Bridge of Spies, a dramatization of these events focused on the figure of James Donovan, played by Hollywood stalwart Tom Hanks.

The film would receive major critical and financial success and occupies a distinctive place within nostalgic espionage.

And the Kennedy administration wanted very eagerly to negotiate the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners, but didn't want to interact directly with Castro.

So they recruited a private fixer named James Donovan, who was the former general counsel of the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA, to perform a private mission separate from the White House to negotiate for the Bay of Pigs prison release.

And James Donovan was made famous in the movie, The Bridge of Spies, the Steven Spielberg film.

So Donovan is successful And he negotiates for the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners in exchange for, I think it was a $40 million ransom in goods and kind, like medicine, food supplies.

Right.

The country really was not doing good at this point, on account of the Panic of 1873, and there were a lot of people who thought that all that gold up in the Black Hills could save them.

For historian James Donovan, in his book A Terrible Glory, quote, some people in the government began to consider another option, buy the Black Hills from their owners.

After all, jobs were scarce, other western fields had cooled, and an infusion of gold would be good for the precarious economy.

The Panic of 1873 had ushered in a depression, and bankruptcies were frequent, crime rates up, and farm prices down, in no small part due to one of the most severe grasshopper plagues to ever hit the Midwest.

It was a trade, a man for a man.

On one side stood James Donovan, an American lawyer.

On the other, Ivan Shishkin, the most senior KGB officer in Europe, although nobody knew that at the time.

Below them, rowboats drifted on the Havel River.

William Fisher's trial ran for 10 days that October in a Brooklyn federal courtroom.

He chose not to testify.

His court-appointed lawyer, James Donovan, a Brooklyn insurance attorney who had helped prosecute war crimes at Nuremberg, had taken the case almost on impulse.

The prosecution's chief witness was none other than Rhino Highhannon, wearing a comically absurd disguise because he feared Soviet reprisals for his family back in Russia.