WMark I. Kaminsky and Harvey C. Bennett were American tourists who were detained in the Soviet Union in 1960. Kaminsky was put on trial, sentenced to seven years' jail, then expelled from the Soviet Union as a spy.
WBridge 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, 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 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.
WHeinz Barwich was a German nuclear physicist. He was deputy director of the Siemens Research Laboratory II in Berlin. At the close of World War II, he followed the decision of Gustav Hertz, to go to the Soviet Union for ten years to work on the Soviet atomic bomb project, for which he received the Stalin Prize. He was director of the Zentralinstitut für Kernforschung at Rossendorf near Dresden. For a few years he was director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Soviet Union. In 1964 he defected to the West.
WMorris Berg was an American catcher and coach in Major League Baseball, who later served as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Although he played 15 seasons in the major leagues, almost entirely for four American League teams, Berg was never more than an average player and was better known for being "the brainiest guy in baseball." Casey Stengel once described Berg as "the strangest man ever to play baseball".
WRuth Fischer was an Austrian and German Communist and a co-founder of the Austrian Communist Party in 1918. She later became a staunch anti-Stalinist activist.
WBoris Morros was an American Communist Party member, Soviet agent, and FBI double agent. He also worked at Paramount Pictures, where he produced films as well as supervising their music department.
WFrancis 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.
WArkady Nikolayevich Shevchenko was a Soviet diplomat who was the highest-ranking Soviet official to defect to the West.