Bridge of Spies Quotes

“Christmas 1961 was not a good time to be in jail as a spy in the Eastern Bloc. It was cold outside, miserable inside, and godless everywhere.”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“On the contrary, privacy was now more central than ever to the Soviet leader’s strategy. His extravagant bluffing about the size of his nuclear arsenal had to work, because without the impression of a meaningful stockpile, there could be no meaningful disarmament.”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“Eisenhower read the Alsop columns and fulminated. He called the missile-gap men “sanctimonious, hypocritical bastards.” But he also bowed to mounting pressure from his own senior staff to beef up the evidence that the missile gap did not exist. This was why he allowed two more U-2 flights before the summit. It was an understandable decision, and a disastrous one. It”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“In January 1960 Allen Dulles, who should have known better because he did know better, told Eisenhower that even though the U-2 had shown no evidence of mass missile production, the Russians could still somehow conjure up two hundred of them in eighteen months.”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“a time traveler would have been interested to note that in all Fisher’s appeals there was never any doubt that the Constitution’s protections applied to him as an alien. Back”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“If he kept his counsel, furthermore, no one need know that he had almost nothing to reveal. And what they didn’t know they could only imagine. After”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“Since the ingrained Soviet approach to the problems of life and politics is conspiratorial, it is no surprise that this approach finds its ultimate fulfillment in intelligence work. When such a man does finally see the light, as has happened, his disillusionment is overwhelming.” Fisher”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“If anything ever happens to me, just remember I was doing what I thought was best for the most people.” It”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“Shock and awe was not invented for Saddam Hussein. It was invented for Joseph Stalin, and it worked pretty well. On”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“In 1992 Pryor applied for permission to read his Stasi file. In 1994 it was granted, and he returned to a reunified Berlin. In the reading room established by then for victims of the secret police in the former Stasi headquarters on Magdalenenstrasse, the sheer heft of his ten-thousand-page file gave him what felt momentarily like special status. Then someone appeared with fifteen thousand and he took his place among the mortals. He”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies

“Twenty-six years later, each superpower had roughly nine thousand warheads. Harold Macmillan called the U-2 affair “a very queer story.” For the defense industry, it was also a very happy one. *”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies

“It was not hard in 1975 to identify powerful groups with an interest in torpedoing the Paris summit, chief among them the missile builders on both sides.”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies

“The wizard of Baikonur has done it again. Sergey Korolyov has put into orbit a five-ton space capsule carrying not one but two live dogs and has brought them safely back to Earth.”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies

“the thoroughbreds whose doctorates would catapult them to capitalism’s commanding heights.”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies

“saw in her old classmate “a certain naïveté . . . a certain lack of caution, a certain trustfulness.” Another college contemporary who remains close to him after many decades describes him as one of those who sensed that a “fundamental purity of heart” will protect them from life’s ambushes.”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies

“But there were others with reason to be thankful for the disappearance of that peculiar airplane—intelligence professionals enjoying the unprecedented influence conferred on them by the cold war’s cult of secrecy; military brass sitting atop armed forces that still consumed a tenth of the nation’s gross domestic product seven years after the end of the Korean War; and above all the missile manufacturers—Convair, Douglas, Lockheed, the Martin Company—girding themselves for an open-ended arms race to outproduce the Soviets in the technologies of an exotic new national defense that only Eisenhower seemed ready to resist. It is no surprise that many believed Article 360’s loss was no accident on America’s part; nor that some still do. *”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies

“the crumpled air intakes in room 20 are a monument to hubris and luck—great mounds of it, good and bad, accumulated over years of brinkmanship and blundering in the age of Dr. Strangelove. These bits of plane are also a question mark. What if? What if they had stayed in one piece and the aircraft—official manufacturer’s designation “Article 360”—had completed its mission and released its pilot as planned to stretch his cramped legs and sink a long martini in the hut by the concrete outside Adana that served as the American officers’ club? The question hardly bears thinking about, but it can be answered. If Article 360 had stayed aloft, so would hopes of détente at the great power summit scheduled for mid-May that year in Paris. Paris”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies

“had approximately ten operational nuclear warheads. Two months earlier Lanphier had argued before Congress that if Convair had been allowed to start building Atlas missiles in 1957 it would have four hundred of them by now. One month before the shoot-down he made a specific plea for an order for one hundred Atlases and twenty Titans. After May 1, he never had to plead again. A contract with Convair was signed and by 1963 the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command had thirteen Atlas missile squadrons with one hundred thirty-seven ICBMs between them. Twenty-six years later, each superpower had roughly nine thousand warheads. Harold Macmillan called the U-2 affair “a very queer story.” For the defense industry, it was also a very happy one. *”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“The phrase “conflict of interest” barely begins to describe Tom Lanphier’s rabidly partisan approach to advising one of the most powerful congressional allies of the American military-industrial complex. Yet he was in good company. Air force intelligence was crammed with highly competitive analysts who believed they were in a zero-sum game not only with the Russians but also with the army and the navy. If they could make the missile-gap theory stick, America would have to respond with a crash ICBM program of its own. The dominance of the Strategic Air Command in the U.S. military hierarchy would be complete—and Convair would profit mightily. It is hardly surprising that the information Lanphier fed to Symington and Symington to every politician and columnist who would listen was authoritative, alarming, and completely, disastrously wrong. Symington’s “on the record” projection of Soviet nuclear strength, given to Senate hearings on the missile gap in late 1959, was that by 1962 they would have three thousand ICBMs. The actual number was four. Symington’s was a wild guess, an extrapolation based on extrapolations by air force generals who believed it was only responsible to take Khrushchev at his word when, for example, he told journalists in Moscow that a single Soviet factory was producing 250 rockets a year, complete with warheads. Symington knew what he was doing. He wanted to be president and believed rightly that missile-gap scaremongering had helped the Democrats pick up nearly fifty seats in Congress in the 1958 midterm elections. But everyone was at it. The 1958 National Intelligence Estimate had forecast one hundred Soviet ICBMs by 1960 and five hundred by 1962. In January 1960 Allen Dulles, who should have known better because he did know better, told Eisenhower that even though the U-2 had shown no evidence of mass missile production, the Russians could still somehow conjure up two hundred of them in eighteen months. On the political left a former congressional aide called Frank Gibney wrote a baseless five-thousand-word cover story for Harper’s magazine accusing the administration of giving the Soviets a six-to-one lead in ICBMs. (Gibney also recommended putting “a system of really massive retaliation” on the moon.) On the right, Vice President Nixon quietly let friends and pundits know that he felt his own boss didn’t quite get the threat. And in the middle, Joe Alsop wrote a devastating series of columns syndicated to hundreds of newspapers in which he calculated that the Soviets would have 150 ICBMs in ten months flat and suggested that by not matching them warhead for warhead the president was playing Russian roulette with the national future. Alsop, who lived well but expensively in a substantial house in Georgetown, was the Larry King of his day—dapper, superbly well connected, and indefatigable in the pursuit of a good story. His series ran in the last week of January 1960. Khrushchev read it in translation and resolved to steal the thunder of the missile-gap lobby, which was threatening to land him with an arms race that would bankrupt Communism. Before the four-power summit, which was now scheduled for Paris in mid-May, he would offer to dismantle his entire ICBM stockpile. No one needed to know how big or small it was; they just needed to know that he was serious about disarmament. He revealed his plan to the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at a secret meeting in the Kremlin on”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“But there were also some generalities that made it seductive: a spy swap was an admission by everyone involved that they really did spy. It was an admission that spies got caught and that when they did, their spymasters needed them back—to debrief, punish, perhaps reward, and to persuade those still working the dead drops that someone was looking out for them. It was an admission by the spy traders that despite the wall and the codes of silence by which they lived, they could put their shadow war on hold long enough to hammer out a deal. In a way this was reassuring. But a swap was also a fleeting chance for the disclosure people—the best-connected reporters, or the luckiest—to glimpse the secrecy people in action and photograph the hell out of them and study the creases on their foreheads and then hold the evidence up to the light and ask: do these people make us safer, or are they as dangerous as the H-bomb secrets they supposedly try so hard to steal? First,”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“The purpose of his testimony was not to reveal anything the KGB did not already know. It was to provide a prelude to Rudenko’s closing harangue, which was in turn designed to shift the blame for the wrecked summit from Khrushchev back to the Americans.”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“Yet this was not in fact the strategy that Powers chose. A simpler soul in his position might have seen only a binary decision to make—to talk or not to talk. But the “deluded jerk from Virginia” assumed from the start that if he was to have any chance of saving his life, his honor, and the U-2’s most precious secrets, he would have to use his wits. He”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“The template was Richard III’s horseshoe at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485; without a shoe his kingdom was lost. Without a decent pressure suit for the CIA, the cold war was liable to heat up. The stakes were no higher than”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“contained evidence that Stalin may have been a paid informer of the czar’s secret police before 1917.”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“President Truman’s message to Stalin could not have been clearer if written in blood. It was a warning not to contemplate starting a new war in Europe trusting in the Red Army’s old-fashioned strength in numbers. And it signaled more concisely than any speech that Truman had accepted the central argument of George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram,” sent from the U.S. embassy in Moscow six months before the tests: the Soviet Union had to be contained. As Truman himself put it: “If we could just have Stalin and his boys see one of these things, there wouldn’t be any question about another war.”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“Shock and awe was not invented for Saddam Hussein. It was invented for Joseph Stalin, and it worked pretty well.”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“They asked if I could ride a horse, which I could,” he says. “They asked if I could lasso, which I could. What they didn’t ask me was if I could ride a horse and lasso at the same time, and the answer was I couldn’t.”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

“to live with. Powers did just that. He was a natural”
― Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War