The forerunner of the KGB, the NKVD, obtained Goldfus’ birth certificate. It could criss-cross the Soviet Union at will. The Russian Premier showed no special interest. Shooting safty grab bars through seven glass encased windows in the belly of the U-2, the camera recorded everything along a 3,500 km (2,700 mile) course up to 200 km (125 miles) wide, and it could provide up to 4,000 pairs of stereoscopic photographs. It was a cold and grey October and we were wearing overcoats.The Americans tested their first fusion or hydrogen bomb on March 1, 1954.The Russian illegals programme and America’s U-2 programme intersected for a moment when the two exchanged spies passed each other on February 10, 1962 on the Glienicke Bridge outside Potsdam. How many "sleepers" the KGB had installed in the West can never be known. All he said was he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese’.The U-2 spy plane programme was a great mission as it involved America’s great technical prowess and project management abilities. Johnson gave them the Lockheed U-2, nicknamed "Dragon Lady", a single-jet engine, ultra-high altitude reconnaissance aircraft capable of day and night, high-altitude (70,000 feet) and all-weather intelligence gathering.

The Russians kept prying on America with human intelligence, the leading edge of this being the illegals programme. It was also known as the RDS-6S, or Second Idea Bomb. The first nuclear test was still a well-kept secret. They were ready in four years.The Russian climaxed this race with the Tsar Bomba, which was the largest, most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever detonated. Both were symbols of two great and successful spy operations undertaken by the two powers. The U-2 was basically a XF-104 (an early Starfighter) with extended wings that stretched 103 feet and large fuel tanks, and highly sophisticated cameras. It ran for six seasons. This was the period before satellite reconnaissance and when both alliances were at hair-trigger nuclear alert and round-the-clock bomber patrols.Glienicke Bridge is a bridge across the Havel River in Germany, connecting Berlin’s Wannsee district with Brandenburg’s capital Potsdam."But Stalin knew, and the Russians were getting a good deal of information from Project Manhattan. Castle Bravo was the first in a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapon design tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands. So it went to Lockheed’s legendary aircraft designer, Kelly Johnson, for help. It was detonated on October 30, 1961. This is equivalent to 10 times the amount of all the explosives used in World War II combined. Truman chose to tell Stalin only that the US possessed "a new weapon of unusual destructive force". This was later made into the film Bridge of Spies, directed by Steven Spielberg, with Tom Hanks as the lawyer, and James Donovan as the man who facilitated the exchange. He is believed to be the agent who handled the "atomic spies", Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Vivian Fuchs, who worked on Project Manhattan, the super-secret American nuclear bomb programme in Los Alamos.Abel was a Russian "illegal", meaning a Russian agent with a false but artfully created legend. The 36-inch focal length lens resolved features as small as 2. The Americans, shut out by a police state, sought to achieve their objectives by technological means.

The RDS-6S layer cake design was detonated on August 12, 1953, producing a yield of 400 kilotons, about 10 times more powerful than any previous Soviet test.The writer, a policy analyst studying economic and security issues, held senior positions in government and industry. Little was known about what was happening behind this "Iron Curtain", and with the bomb-building frenzy creating a huge trust void with both sides seeking information about the other and its intentions. He also specialises in the Chinese economy. Incidentally, the US still operates the U-2, 71 years after it entered service. The real Goldfus had died at only 14 months, having been born on August 2, 1902, in New York. It is named after the nearby Glienicke Palace.In the same year the Russian nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov developed a design for a layered fission-fusion-fission bomb and called it the "sloika", or layered cake. The first Soviet atomic test was codenamed Pervaya Moiniya — or First Lightning — and took place at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan on August 29, 1949. The pilot, Gary Powers, baled out as the crippled U-2 came down towards earth and was captured by the Russians. The device was the most powerful nuclear device detonated by the United States and its first lithium deuteride-fuelled thermonuclear weapon and had a yield of 15 megatons.

The series The Americans, which scored big in the Emmy awards recently, is about a group of Russian-Americans "illegals" operating in the United States. As the conference was winding down, the hosts asked the Indian team if there was anything particular we wanted to do before leaving for India, and the Chief and I suggested a visit to the Glienicke Bridge, where the first great spy exchange took place between the US and the Soviet Union.Rudolf Abel entered America with a genuine birth certificate, a forged draft card and a forged tax certificate, all under the name of Emil Robert Goldfus, along with $1,000.At the Potsdam Conference, however, President Harry S. The Russians, wartime allies of the US, were kept so well abreast of the programme that when the Trinity explosion was triggered off at Alamogordo on July 16, 1945, the allied leaders were scheduled to meet at Potsdam for a conference the following week. Mark Rylance as Rudolf Abel won the Oscar for the supporting role in 2016.The first spy exchange took place in February 1962, when the Americans and Russians exchanged Col. It was a three-stage hydrogen bomb with a yield of about 50 megatons.But Rudolf Abel was clearly at the top of the pyramid. Rudolf Abel of the KGB for Maj. The illegals programme was the jewel in the crown of Soviet intelligence operations. Many of the illegals were "sleepers", who would be woken up when a job was required to be done and required their expertise and skills.5 feet. The Russians could only watch helplessly. Then suddenly, out of the blue, a U-2 mission from Peshawar overflying Russia and to land at Bodoe in Norway was shot down over Sverdlovsk in Russia. The design was very similar to the first US "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, using a TNT/hexogen implosion lens design. Francis "Gary" Powers of the CIA. The Americans codenamed it as "Joe 1".The CIA wanted a plane that the Russians couldn’t see or track, let alone shoot down. Based on this, a complete identity was created with superbly forged documents to support a carefully crafted timeline. When the onset of the Cold War and when a near-impenetrability separated the West from the Soviet Union, which was best defined by Winston Churchill’s "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an ‘Iron Curtain’ has descended across the Continent". It was just the right setting for spies coming in from the cold. The star of this was the U-2 programme. This was Truman’s account: "On July 24 I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Soviets were more focused on American technologies, while the Americans were focused on Soviet intentions and military dispositions..The U-2s flew from bases at Hakodate in Japan, Peshawar in Pakistan and Lanark in Cyprus, and ranged over Russia since 1957.In the autumn of 2010, Vikram Sood, retired RAW chief, and myself were in a conference at Potsdam organised by the Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung. It usually started with a visit to cemeteries to search for identities of boys or girls who died early and to match the age of the agent