FRANKFURT, Germany — Wolfgang Vogel, the point man for spy swaps and prisoner exchanges between West and East Germany during the Cold War, has died, his family said Friday. He was 82.
His wife, Helga, said he died Thursday in Schliersee, a small town in Bavaria state. Vogel had suffered a heart attack this year.
A lawyer by trade, Vogel made it a career of sorts as the main point of contact for the governments of the then-divided Germany when the two had few formal ties or links. They reunified in 1990.
He gained a sense of acclaim, if not notoriety, for overseeing the exchange of KGB spy Rudolf J. Abel for Gary Powers in 1962, the American pilot shot down over the Soviet Union while piloting his U-2 spy plane in 1960.
He also oversaw the exchange of others involved in espionage or imprisoned in East Germany in exchange for those held in the west, including Jewish dissident Anatoly Scharansky, who spent nearly nine years in Soviet captivity on espionage charges.
In another case, in 1985, 23 people held by East Germany on espionage charges were exchanged for four agents of the German Democratic Republic convicted by the U.S.
All the deals were staged on the Glienicker Bridge between Potsdam and West Berlin, which was then called, with some irony, the “Bridge of Unity,” though it served the two sides only as a border crossing.
But Vogel’s efforts also were low- profile and he was credited with helping more than 200,000 people leave East Germany so they could reunite with their families in West Germany.
Vogel’s reach inside the East German government was so extensive that when former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt wanted to visit the country, it was Vogel who helped arrange it.
Schmidt later dubbed Vogel “our mailman.”
No information was immediately available about Vogel’s funeral.
