SUMTER, S.C. (AP) - It’s not every day that you find out that Tom Hanks is playing the lead role of your father in a Hollywood movie directed by Steven Spielberg.
But that is exactly what happened with Mary Ellen Fuller, a native of Brooklyn, New York, who has called Alcolu her home for the last seven years. Fuller is the daughter of a man who was involved in some of the most monumental events of the Cold War.
Her father was the late James B. Donovan, the famous lawyer, who in 1962 arranged for the release of Francis Gary Powers, an American pilot who was shot down while on a reconnaissance mission over Soviet Union. The event made international headlines in 1960 and would become known as the U-2 incident, named after the U-2 spy plane.
Steven Spielberg has called James Donovan his hero in various media outlets.
Donovan arranged for an exchange of spies between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, for which he received the Distinguished Intelligence Medal.
Fuller said that she had no idea a film was being made about her father and the incident.
“A friend of mine called and said ’you must be so excited about the movie coming out,’” Fuller said. “I was in shock.”
Donovan was already a man of many accomplishments in his career as an attorney before the U-2 incident took place on May 1, 1960. In 1957, he defended Col. Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy who had been captured in the U.S. Abel was convicted on three counts of conspiracy as a spy and sentenced to 45 years imprisonment at Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He served about four years of his sentence before Donovan had arranged for the exchange of Powers for Abel. The actual spy exchange occurred on the Glienicke Bridge connecting Potsdam, East Germany, to West Berlin on Feb. 10, 1962.
Fuller said during the spy-swap negotiations her family did not have a clue that her father was involved.
“We would get postcards from him in Scotland saying that he was on vacation playing golf,” she said.
Meanwhile her father was in a deserted house in Berlin meeting with Soviet officials and arranging for the exchange of the spies. Fuller was 12 at the time.
She remembers the night in February 1962 when her family found out about her father’s mission.
“I remember my mother receiving a phone call at two o’clock in the morning from The New York Times,” she said. “The reporter congratulated my mother. And my mother had to ask what the congratulations was for. We all thought he was just playing golf. It changed our lives forever.”
The U-2 incident strained relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, who were already in the middle of a Cold War and an arms race. A peace summit in Paris, scheduled to occur just weeks after the incident, was canceled.
Donovan was a private attorney in New York City. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he was a commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve and worked for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. The OSS was the wartime intelligence agency, and a predecessor of the CIA.
“So, naturally, he knew a lot of the top brass in the CIA because he had worked with many of them in the OSS during the war,” Fuller said.
He was an assistant trial counselor in the Nuremberg Trials in 1945, responsible for presenting filmed evidence of the Nazi abuses against the Jewish people during the trials.
“He was only 27 at the time,” Fuller said. “It was not something that he ever talked about.”
Donovan was involved in several other internationally known cases. He negotiated for the release of prisoners from the Bay of Pigs Invasion in Cuba in December 1962. He would travel alone to Cuba to meet with Prime Minister Fidel Castro. Donovan took his son, John, with him to Cuba during the negotiations as a sign of good faith.
“I remember receiving phone calls from Castro himself at our house in Brooklyn,” Fuller said.
At the same time that Donovan was negotiating for the exchange of prisoners in 1962, he was running as the Democratic candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in New York against long-time senator Jacob Javits. Donovan did not win the race.
“It was never a dull moment at our house,” Fuller said.
Fuller said her father always had an interest in the arts, and from 1968 to 1970, he served as the president of Pratt Institute, a prestigious art university in New York City. He died of natural causes in 1970, while holding that position.
Touchstone Pictures will release the film, called “Bridge of Spies,” on Oct. 16.
“I’ve been very pleasantly surprised on all of the productions coming out recently about my father and his work,” she said. “He truly lived a remarkable life.”
Fuller said that Mark Palermo of Able Strangers LLC is also working on several film productions on her father. Simon & Schuster Publishing House is reprinting her father’s book “Strangers on a Bridge” in September.
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Information from: The Sumter Item, https://www.theitem.com
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