An exciting film which however varies wildly from the real truth

Rating: 8/10 (15 April 2016)

This film is an example of myth-making, whether intentional or not I do not know. There is very little chance that the U-2 spy aircraft supposedly 'shot down' in 1960 by the Soviets in the notorious 'U-2 Incident' was really shot down at all. The various existing stories significantly contradict each other. The Russians say they fired one S-75 Dvina missile, but two different internet sites say that seven or thirteen missiles were fired, one shooting a MIG-19 out of the sky by mistake. I do not believe that any of these stories is true. We now know that Lee Harvey Oswald insisted the plane was never really shot down, and papers released in 2012 by the CIA show that they never believed either that their own man, the young pilot Francis Gary Powers, was really shot down. So why should the film suggest that he was and perpetuate a now discredited myth? It was apparently impossible for the Soviets' S-75 missile to hit a target flying at above 70,000 feet as the U-2 was. Nor did they have the guidance and control capacity to hit the plane even if a rocket existed which could get that high with any semblance of accuracy. The film shows the plane crashing nose-downward, which contradicts the official report that it crashed nose-upwards. But it appears that the truth is it never crashed, and merely landed normally, as part of a complex and mysterious political plot. It has been suggested that this was to derail détente, but that may not be the whole story. There are other ambiguities regarding Powers himself. There seems to be no certainty as to his birthplace. In the 1960s he was said to be from Pound, Virginia, but on Wikipedia it says Jenkins, Kentucky, or perhaps Burdine, Kentucky. All three places are near one another on the Kentucky-Virginia border, and I used to know the area well. In the old days, apart from Highway 23, there was nothing but dirt tracks. The region is one of the wildest and most remote in the entire Appalachians. I have spent many, many weeks there in the distant past. The area was populated almost entirely by genuine hillbillies, who lived in log cabins and still hunted with flintlock rifles. I know this because I met them as a child, entered their log cabins, and held their flintlocks. I was not allowed to fire one because the gunpowder was precious and they cast their own lead ball shot from an iron mould. But the boy who let me hold and aim his own precious flintlock, which had an immensely long barrel and had 'belonged to my great-great-great-grand-pappy', was from about 1800 or even earlier. Using it, the family got most of their wild meat. The boy told me, in words I shall never forget: 'I can shoot the head off a squirrel at a hundred yards with my flintlock.' It was from this wild area that Powers was supposed to have originated, as well as another well known and notorious CIA-linked figure. (The coincidence of two major spy figures coming from the same dot on the map is impossible.) I also knew as a child a genuine local man who told me the CIA and FBI both had a special connection with Pound, Virginia, and that he had been hired himself by the FBI to do messenger work across the South and to report regularly to Pound. When Powers died mysteriously in 1977, many people thought he had been murdered. So all of these matters are extremely murky, and we shall probably never know the real truth about any of it. As for the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, I do not know what the film's agenda is for showing him as a quiet gentle, thoughtful, and artistic man, who is repeatedly described as 'honourable'. Why also is the entire American population shown in the film as foaming-at-the-mouth McCarthyites who want to lynch Abel and Donovan? Are Soviet spies being set up as the new heroes? What is going on with this film? The idea that the supposedly naive insurance lawyer Donovan would be taken to see Allen Dulles, who would tell him he could carry out his own private negotiations with the Soviets at the height of the Cold War involving a spy and a captured pilot, is totally and outrageously ludicrous. Donovan had been part of the legal team at Nuremberg and must have had intelligence affiliations already in the 1940s. Rudolf Abel (aka Willie Fisher) appears to have been a failure as a Soviet spy in America, and it defies belief that the Soviets would exchange a high-value captured American airman for him. The suspicion is that the American and Soviet security services cooperated secretly, with or without the knowledge of their own governments, to stage these phoney events. The film does not make clear that Abel had been in jail for four years before the swap for Powers, and was hence 'old news'. The film maintains that the East Germans resented and defied the Soviets, which is absurd, since East Germany was the most supine and devoted Soviet satellite state in the entire Warsaw Pact. If the Germans had behaved as shown in the film, they would have been summarily executed. Why are we expected to swallow all this nonsense? The direction of the film by Stephen Spielberg is superb, and the performances by Tom Hanks as the lawyer Donovan and Mark Rylance as Abel are outstanding in every way. (Powers features only as a minor figure in the two parallel stories shown here, which only come together with the spy swap on the bridge in Berlin.) But how much better and more interesting the film would have been if it had been accurate, and had explored the many mysterious byways and unanswered enigmas and contradictions. Instead, it adds to the existing, enormous disinformation overload.