How a Czech mole infiltrated the CIA and walked across the Bridge of Spies

On a snowy morning on Feb. 11, 1986, a quiet street in Berlin’s Wannsee district bore witness to one of the Cold War’s most dramatic exchanges. Czechoslovak agent Karel Köcher, a man who had spent more than a decade inside the CIA, stepped across the Glienicke Bridge into East Berlin, leaving behind the country he had infiltrated and the life he had built there.

Minutes earlier, Soviet dissident Anatoliy Sharansky had crossed the same bridge in the opposite direction, heading to freedom in the West. For Köcher, the exchange marked the end of a perilous career as one of the Eastern Bloc’s most successful moles.

The exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was one of the last on the Berlin bridge, which gained international fame through Steven Spielberg’s 2015 film Bridge of Spies. The movie dramatizes the earlier 1962 swap of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel for U-2 pilot Gary Powers and highlights the tense negotiations and human stories behind Cold War espionage.

Born in Bratislava in 1934 to a Czech father and a Jewish mother, Köcher studied mathematics and philosophy at Charles University before joining the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1958. By 1962, he had begun working for the Státní bezpečnost (StB), the communist secret police, under the codename Pedro.

Köcher's mission was audacious: to infiltrate the United States as a false emigrant and gain access to American intelligence. In December 1965, Köcher and his wife Hana “emigrated” via Austria to the U.S., where he presented himself as a political refugee seeking professional opportunities denied by the Czechoslovak regime.

By 1971, the Köchers had obtained American citizenship, and Karel had earned a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University. He joined the CIA’s analytical division, analyzing Soviet communications and diplomats—a position that allowed him to feed critical intelligence back to Prague and Moscow.

“While the Czechoslovak intelligence gave me trivial tasks, Moscow mostly left it to me,” Köcher told Reflex magazine in a 2016 interview. “They wanted information about who in the White House was hawkish, who was moderate, and who could authorize a nuclear strike.”

Köcher’s career unraveled in 1982 when the FBI learned of his double role. Following surveillance and eventual arrest in November 1984, he spent more than a year in custody, ultimately receiving a life sentence. His wife Hana, vital to the case as a witness, was also detained but refused to testify against him, successfully invoking spousal privilege.

Faced with a dangerous situation in prison, where fellow inmates even attempted to kill him, Köcher proposed a swap. “I often thought of Rudolf Abel,” he told Reflex, referencing the Soviet spy later played by Mark Rylance, who won an Oscar for his role in the Spielberg movie.

Köcher sent a note to KGB head Vladimir Kryuchkov, asking to be exchanged for Sharansky. The plan succeeded: the Glienicke Bridge witnessed nine people changing sides that day, with Köcher and Hana heading East and Sharansky, along with other political prisoners, moving West.

The swap was emblematic of Cold War tensions and the complex chess game of espionage. Köcher himself emphasized that the affair was less about ideological betrayal and more about geopolitical calculation.

“Just because you pass American secrets to the Russians doesn’t mean you give them information that allows an attack. They were genuinely afraid,” he explained. At the same time, his own superiors in Prague often resented the intelligence that had a calming effect on East-West relations.

Köcher returned to Czechoslovakia, where he worked briefly at the Ministry of Interior and the Prognostic Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences until 1990, after which he faded from public view. Sharansky moved to Israel, adopted the name Natan, and became a prominent politician, serving nearly a decade in government, including as interior minister.

Köcher’s story, however, continues to captivate historians and filmmakers alike. Speaking to Reflex on the 30th anniversary of his exchange, he praised Spielberg’s 2015 movie Bridge of Spies, noting that while it simplified events, it captured the human dimension of espionage.

“Spielberg didn’t demonize Abel; he showed him as a man of honor, someone to respect despite being on the other side in the Cold War,” he said. Köcher’s own exchange, negotiations, and narrow escapes read like a spy thriller, but they were rooted in real-world danger, loyalty, and the moral ambiguities of espionage.

Forty years later, the Glienicke Bridge remains a symbol of those tense, high-stakes negotiations, where ideology, strategy, and personal courage intersected. Köcher, now 91, is among the last surviving participants of that historic swap, a living link to an era of Cold War intrigue as Czechia enters a new era of espionage.