Only in Berlin by Duncan J.D. Smith

143 On 27 th May 1952 the Glienicke Bridge was closed to citizens of West Berlin and the Federal Republic. Later, after the Berlin Wall was erected on 13 th August 1961, citizens of the GDR were also prevented from using it: ironically, the ‘Bridge of Unity’ had now become a sym- bol of division (see no. 70). The bridge was one of the very few places in the world where the United States and the Soviet Union stood facing each other directly. It was thus deemed the ideal location for the exchange of prisoners during the the Cold War (1949–1989), especially since other nations would not get any say in the matter. The media dubbed it the ‘Bridge of Spies’ and it gained lasting celluloid fame in the 1966 Harry Palmer film, Funeral in Berlin , starring Michael Caine. The first and most famous prisoner exchange happened on 10 th February 1962, when the American pilot Francis Gary Powers was swapped for the KGB spy Colonel Vlyam Fisher (aka Rudolf Ivanovich Abel). Powers set out from the eastern end of the bridge and Abel from the west, the two simply nodding at each other as they passed. Powers had been captured on 1 st May 1960 after his U-2 aircraft was shot down by a surface-to-air missile over Sverdlovsk in Soviet airspace. Since the U-2 was designed for covert photographic surveillance, the Soviet government imprisoned him for espionage. Although later cleared by District VI Looking across the Glienicke Bridge from Berlin to Potsdam