A Brooklyn insurance lawyer is handed the most hated client in America — and five years later he is standing on a bridge in Berlin, trading him back. Almost all of it happened.
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Work through the four short activities. Each word sits in a situation that gives its meaning away — you don't need to know the film yet. Say your answer out loud first, then reveal.
Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies (2015). Read each part, try the quick check from memory, then discuss. (There are spoilers ahead — that's the point; we're here to talk about it.)
Brooklyn, 1957. A quiet, grey-haired man paints watercolours by the water, collects a hollowed-out coin from a park, and is arrested in a cheap hotel room by federal agents. He gives his name as Rudolf Abel. He is a Soviet intelligence officer, and America wants him dead.
Someone has to defend him, and the job lands on James Donovan — an insurance lawyer with a comfortable practice, a wife and children, and no wish to be famous. He takes it, and then makes the mistake of taking it seriously. He argues that evidence seized without a proper warrant should not be used; he asks the court to treat the man in the dock as the constitution says any accused person must be treated. His firm is uneasy. Strangers stare at him on the subway. His family pays for his principles.
Abel himself is oddly restful company: stoical, courteous, faintly amused, and unshakeably loyal to the country that sent him. Asked more than once whether he is frightened, he answers, in effect, that worrying would not help. Donovan loses the trial — but he persuades the judge to spare Abel's life with a coldly practical argument: one day an American of similar value may be sitting in a Soviet cell, and on that day this man will be worth more alive than dead. The appeal goes all the way to the Supreme Court, and is lost there too, narrowly.
1. Who is Donovan, and why is his defence of Abel so unpopular?
2. What argument saves Abel from execution?
1. He is an ordinary insurance lawyer asked to defend a captured Soviet agent — and the country wants a conviction, not a real defence, so he is treated as a traitor for doing the job properly.
2. Not mercy but usefulness: Donovan argues that America may one day want to exchange him for a captured American, so he is worth more alive.
Meanwhile, high above the Soviet Union, young American pilots are flying a black aircraft at the edge of the atmosphere, photographing everything below. They are told the aeroplane cannot be reached. It can. Francis Gary Powers is hit, spins down, ejects, and lands in a field surrounded by farmers. He does not use the poison pin he was given. He is tried in Moscow, filmed for the world, and sentenced to years of prison and hard labour.
At almost the same moment, Berlin closes. Overnight the eastern authorities run barbed wire across the city, then concrete; families wake up on the wrong side of a border that did not exist the day before. An American graduate student, Frederic Pryor, crosses into the eastern sector on ordinary academic business and is picked up. His thesis, thick with statistics about trade in the communist bloc, looks to his interrogators exactly like espionage. He disappears into a prison for months.
Now Donovan's cold argument comes true. Quietly, unofficially, he is asked to go to Berlin as a private citizen — no title, no protection, no government to acknowledge him — and get the pilot back for the spy.
1. What happens to Powers, and what happens to Pryor?
2. Why is Donovan sent to Berlin, and in what capacity?
1. Powers is shot down over Soviet territory, captured alive and sentenced in Moscow; Pryor, an American student in East Berlin, is seized and held for months on suspicion of spying.
2. Because his prediction has come true and a trade is now possible — but he goes as a private citizen, with no official standing to fall back on.
Berlin in winter is a city of two hostile hosts, and Donovan discovers that he is not negotiating with one opponent but two. The Soviets want their officer back. The East German authorities want something quite different: recognition, a seat at the table, the dignity of being treated as a state. Each side would rather he dealt only with them. Donovan, with a heavy cold and a stolen coat, sits in unheated rooms and refuses to be hurried.
Washington wants the pilot. That is the deal on the table — one man for one man. Donovan will not take it. He insists that the student is part of the price, and holds out even when he is told, plainly, that the student is not worth the risk. It is a bluff sustained by nothing but nerve: he lets both sides believe that without the boy there is no exchange at all.
On a freezing morning the two parties walk out onto the Glienicke Bridge, the crossing between West Berlin and Potsdam, and stop a few metres apart. Nobody moves until word arrives that the student has been handed over at a checkpoint on the other side of the city. Then Abel walks east and Powers walks west, and two lives cross in the middle of a bridge. Donovan goes home to a country that spent five years calling him a traitor and now begins, quietly, to call him something else.
1. Why is the negotiation so awkward for Donovan in Berlin?
2. What does Donovan refuse to give up, and how does the exchange finally happen?
1. He has two counterparts with different aims — the Soviets want their officer; the East Germans want to be recognised as a real government — and he has no official standing at all.
2. He refuses a one-for-one swap and insists on the student as well; the handover on the bridge is held until the student has been released at a checkpoint elsewhere in the city.
This is a film of pressure: what people prefer, what they are warned to do, and what is overdue. English has three structures for exactly that — and all three do something strange. They put a past form on a present or future meaning.
Read the note in brackets and write the missing words. Say each sentence aloud before you check.
1. we stopped pretending and put the offer on the table. (the moment for this arrived a while ago)
2. You pack something warm — Berlin in February is brutal. (urgent advice; there's a consequence)
3. I walk than spend another hour in that car. (a preference between two options)
1. It's time (also: It's high time / It's about time — and notice the past form after it: stopped)
2. 'd better / had better (+ bare infinitive: pack)
3. 'd rather / would rather (+ bare infinitive, with than for the comparison)
Same three structures, but now the verb is the problem. Write the correct form.
1. I'd rather you (not / say) that in front of the whole room.
2. We'd better (leave) now, or we'll miss the last crossing.
3. It's high time the government (tell) the public what really happened.
4. He'd rather (say) nothing at all than betray the people who sent him.
1. didn't say (would rather + new subject + past)
2. leave (had better + bare infinitive)
3. told (it's high time + past)
4. say (would rather + bare infinitive, same subject)
Fill each gap so the sentence works. Then read the whole thing aloud, twice.
The man across the table was blunt. "I'd rather you (not / mention) the student at all," he said. "We (better / keep) this to one man for one man." Donovan didn't move. "It's time somebody (ask) for both of them," he answered, "and I'd rather (wait) here all winter than go home with half a deal."
didn't mention · 'd better keep (had better keep) · asked · wait
Notice the pattern: a past form after would rather + a new subject and after it's time; a bare infinitive after had better and after would rather with the same subject.
Carry all three into the Speak tab. Negotiation is built out of them: what you'd rather, what they'd better, and what it's high time somebody said.
Unusually for a thriller, the skeleton of this one is documented: the lawyer, the spy, the pilot, the student, the bridge, the date. What the film adds is atmosphere — and, in a few places, danger that was never there.
James B. Donovan really was an insurance lawyer — a partner at the New York firm of Watters and Donovan. He was not, however, an innocent abroad. During the war he had been general counsel of the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime intelligence agency, and at Nuremberg he worked under the American chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, handling the visual evidence of Nazi crimes. When the bar association asked him to defend the captured Soviet agent, he took the case as public service and gave the fee away: $10,000, half to Fordham University and the rest split between Harvard Law School and Columbia Law School.
The prisoner's real name was William August Fisher, born on 11 July 1903 in Benwell, Newcastle upon Tyne, to Russian revolutionary émigrés. He moved to Moscow in 1921, was recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1927, and arrived in the United States in November 1948, living in Brooklyn as a painter and photographer under the name Emil Robert Goldfus. He was arrested on 21 June 1957.
The name he gave — Rudolf Ivanovich Abel — belonged to a dead colleague, and giving it was a message: when Moscow saw that name in American newspapers, they would know he had been captured rather than defected. He was convicted on 25 October 1957 and sentenced on 15 November to 30 years. Donovan's plea against execution is on the record almost as the film has it: an American of equivalent rank might one day be captured, and an exchange could then serve the national interest. He also fought the search of Abel's hotel room as a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and took it to the Supreme Court, where Abel v. United States was decided against him in 1960 by five votes to four.
On 1 May 1960, a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft flown by Francis Gary Powers was brought down near Sverdlovsk by a Soviet surface-to-air missile. Powers survived, and that is what wrecked Washington. On 5 May the American authorities announced that a NASA weather aircraft had gone missing after the pilot reported trouble with his oxygen — then Khrushchev produced the living pilot and the wreckage. On 11 May Eisenhower publicly acknowledged the spy-flight programme and his own part in it, an unprecedented admission for an American president. The Paris summit opened on 15 May and collapsed on the 16th: Khrushchev wanted a condemnation of the flights and a promise to stop them, and Eisenhower would not apologise. Powers was convicted in Moscow on 19 August 1960 and sentenced to three years' imprisonment followed by seven years' hard labour.
His homecoming was cold. He was criticised for not destroying the aircraft's equipment and for not using the poison pin concealed in a silver dollar he carried. He was in fact cleared — Senator Prescott Bush said he had conducted himself in exemplary fashion — and the CIA gave him its Intelligence Star in 1965. But full public vindication came only long after his death in a helicopter crash on 1 August 1977: in 2012 he was posthumously awarded the Silver Star, along with the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Prisoner of War Medal.
Frederic Pryor was 28, an American doctoral student in economics at Yale, writing a thesis on trade in the Soviet bloc. He went into East Berlin on 25 August 1961 — days after the sealing of the city began on 13 August — to hear a speech, deliver his dissertation to a professor and call on a friend's sister, who had, unknown to him, just fled west. The Stasi held him for nearly six months in Hohenschönhausen prison and interrogated him almost daily, though he was not tortured. He was accused of espionage, in large part because of the statistics in his own thesis.
The exchange took place on the morning of 10 February 1962. Abel and Powers crossed at the Glienicke Bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam. Pryor, however, was not on the bridge: he was released separately at Checkpoint Charlie in the city centre, and the bridge handover waited on confirmation that it had happened. Donovan negotiated as a private citizen at the request of the CIA's Allen Dulles — and the two-for-one outcome was genuinely his doing.
Nobody shot at the Donovan house. The film's most frightening domestic scene — gunfire through the family's windows — did not happen. The real hostility was letters, telephone calls, the label "Commie lover", pickets outside the building and unpleasant remarks aimed at his children. Serious, but not violent.
The judge is treated unfairly. The private scene in which a judge urges Donovan to go through the motions is invented; Donovan's own memoir speaks of Judge Mortimer Byers with respect. And Donovan was not alone. The film's lone-wolf citizen in a foreign city is dramatic licence: he had substantial CIA and State Department backing throughout.
The film also has Donovan witness a shooting at the Wall from a train. His book refers to such killings, but there is no evidence he saw one. And Pryor, who was never consulted about the film and bought a ticket like everyone else, put it bluntly afterwards: almost everything the film showed about him was fiction.
Finally, the story does not end where the credits do. In December 1962 Donovan signed an agreement with Fidel Castro to exchange 1,113 prisoners taken at the Bay of Pigs for $53 million in food and medicine, and by 3 July 1963 his negotiations had brought 9,703 men, women and children out of Cuba. The man on the bridge got very good at this.
This is the heart of the lesson — do it all out loud. The timer keeps you going; fill the time with detail.
Tell the story of Bridge of Spies in your own words, as if to someone who has never seen it. Move through the arc: the arrest in Brooklyn → the lawyer nobody envied and the trial he lost → the plea that saved the spy's life → the pilot shot down and the student seized → the freezing negotiation in Berlin → the morning on the bridge.
Work in at least five key words (ordeal, clandestine, vilify, scruples, stoical, expedient, concede, leverage, due process, bargaining chip), and use today's structures where the pressure is highest: "Washington would rather he took the one-for-one deal", "he'd better not lose his nerve now", "it's high time somebody asked for both men."
Build an argument. When a country catches an agent of a hostile state, should that person get the full protection of the law — a real defence, real rules of evidence, a real appeal — or is that a luxury a country under threat cannot afford? Answer the strongest objection to your own position: that due process for enemies costs lives, or that abandoning it costs the country its identity. Bring in modern examples if you know them.
Prisoner exchanges are still happening today. Is trading people ever a clean deal, or does every swap create the incentive to take more prisoners? Make your case.
Stuck for an idea? Pick one of these and run with it: