Almost three years ago, the Academy Awards gave the Best Picture Oscar to Ben Affleck’s Iranian hostage drama Argo to encourage making more medium-budget movies for grown-ups. Bridge of Spies, Steven Spielberg’s Cold War film about the negotiations to exchange Soviet spymaster Rudolf Abel for American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, is very much in the Argo tradition.
With Spielberg’s eye for re-creating the physical environment of his childhood years, a screenplay rewritten by the Coen brothers, and Tom Hanks as master negotiator James B. Donovan, Bridge of Spies might well be better than Argo. Yet, while the liberties taken with history didn’t much hurt Argo’s impact (unless you are a Canadian annoyed by the diminishment of the heroic Canadian role), the rewriting of Bridge of Spies’ leading man to make the role more suitable for Hanks’ famous regular-guy routine has left Spielberg and the Coens seeming a little furtive.
* For all those mad at the United States for violating the sovereign skies of Soviet Russia, the offered explanation is that doing this, which was believed to have left many of our unnamed pilots in the Gulag who are not spoken of in Spielberg’s movie, had an important reason. Our “open” society gave Soviet spies access in a way that the Soviet police state kept our spies out. Our radars and air defense kept Soviet planes out of our airspace in the way that the big-winged Canberra recce bomber and the U-2 were not kept out, but as the movie points out, it was a close thing.
For those folks who for whatever reason cannot get this message, there is the message sent by the RB-47 Incident, where the Soviets shot down a recce bomber gathering radio intelligence in what we claim was international airspace above international waters, killing the intelligence specialists in the bomb bay and taking the pilots prisoner.
Jerry Pournelle has long claimed that “our people” performed a “wet job” on Soviet agents in Vienna. The Soviets did not get all indignant and tu quoque as in the U-2 incident, pounding the table, “You Americans think you are so virtuous, but you just committed acts of murder of our people!” No, they “got the message” regarding the asymmetry of the Cold War intelligence gathering standoff, and they stop molesting our aircraft. They were aware that their agents had free reign in the free countries and that they had a lot to lose if we quietly started assassinating them.
