 Welcome back to Think Tech. This is movies you can learn from. Today we're going to talk about Bridge of Spies, which is really a very good movie with Tom Hanks, one of my old-time favorites, and Steven Spielberg, one of the great collaborations in recent movies, especially movies about the greatest generation. We've talked about some of those before. And for this discussion, we have two naval retired officers, Shackley Rufeno, formerly chief judge of the Second Circuit, and Michael Lilly, also a Navy officer retired, and formerly the Attorney General of the State of Hawaii. Welcome to the show, you guys. Glad to be here. Good to be here. So, Shackley, you go first. This Bridge of Spies is a really compelling movie, but it is also very educational, very informative, because it is essentially a true story. Yes, and that's one of the reasons I like it, actually, is it's a true story. It's basically about the arrest and later exchange of a Soviet spy who is operating in the United States in the late 50s, and the exchange took place in the early 60s. And it's the story of his arrest, trial, conviction, and then his exchange later on for a downed American pilot who had been captured by the Soviets during the Cold War. It was released in October of 2015, and as you mentioned, Tom Hanks is the star of the movie, although the acting throughout the movie is just excellent. Steven Spielberg was the director, the Cohen brothers, interesting way and wrote it while we went on to do their own movies later on. It takes place during the Cold War, and it's interesting to remember that during this period of time, the Soviets had fired off their first aid bomb in 1949, and the movie brings us out. When we all grew up, we were worried and told that there might be a nuclear war, and I remember being taught at school to get under the desk and to listen for the air raid sirens and things like that, which people probably laugh about today. That was very real in those days, and that was the kind of context in which all these saints nestled. So basically what happened was this Soviet spy named Rudolf Abel, which was his spy name, his real name was Fisher actually. He was operating an atomic secrets spy organization in the United States in the late fifties, and he was taking secrets that were being obtained from the Salimons and other areas of our atomic project, and ferrying those to the Soviet Union. He did that for about 10 years, he was based in New York City. He was arrested in, let's see, in 1957 and brought into federal courts, and then this man, James Donovan, who's a bank space, was a New York lawyer, and he was appointed to represent Mr. Abel during his federal court trial for, I guess, for his spying activity. Donovan is a very interesting person. He was a former commander in the U.S. Navy, Darryl Willmurtschew. He was part of the prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials in Germany after World War II that prosecuted the high brass Nazis, and he had become an insurance defense lawyer out of Wall Street, but during the war he'd also been general counsel of the Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner of the CIA, and so these people knew him, and we knew he was a good lawyer, and he knew he was drafted to put up the defense for Rudolf Abel, and the first half of the movie is always out there. Now the second half is about the exchange. Abel was convicted, he was given 30 years in prison, and so he was available and risen for possible exchange, and then apparently he was brought out of the movies, Donovan thought about this, and it had been better not to execute him. The death penalty from his solidly medical was a possibility in this case. At the same time, Francis Gary Powers was a lieutenant on the United States Air Force drafted by the CIA by the new chief, Dmitry Chonis' spy plane over Russia, and a group of people were drafted by the CIA, and at that time we didn't have very much photo reconnaissance of what was going on in the Soviet Union. We had some old Luftwaffe World War II photographs of the area by the west of the year-old, but we really didn't know what else went on, and because of the fight for the concern about nuclear war and nuclear weapons, we wanted to know how many bombers did they have, how many rockets, what was the state of their readiness to go to nuclear war, so one of the ways to find that, we didn't have, in those days there was no satellites, right, so the only way to find out was to fly airplanes. Initially they flew around the periphery of the Soviet Union and tried to look pin, which you couldn't see very far, so the CIA eventually contracted with Mcdowell Douglas, and that's through the famous scunt, or scunt works, uh, uh, Kelly Johnson, the famous engineer there, created the U-2 spy plane. Up to that time, the highest an airplane could go would be about 15,000 feet, but the U-2 was decide and actually flew effectively at over 70,000 feet. It was like a big glider with a jet engine, but quite an interesting airplane. There's, they still use it. There's still about 30 of them in the Air Force inventory that fly these flagship missions, and so he was, he was tasked to fly from, uh, Peshawar, Pakistan to Norway, who was the first mission that would cross the entire Soviet Union, and as, well, they, they thought at that time that the Soviet Union didn't have such an, uh, service to air missiles to shoot down an airplane that was flying that high. Turns out they were wrong, of course, and he was shot down. Uh, he, uh, he had a, uh, I guess a, a quarter was the, was the, some sort of needle in it that he could have committed suicide, and I guess some say he was expected to do that. I'm not sure about that, but anyway, he was captured, he was put on trial, and he was convicted, and he was sentenced to prison. I think it was when he was in prison. And so, uh, and that was, uh, let's see, the exchange, he was shot down on May 1st, 1960, so he had, uh, Abel in prison since about 57, so he was sitting in prison, and he had, uh, ours shot down in 1960, and so the CIA asked Donovan to come in and he bowed to Berlin and to try to negotiate exchange, uh, uh, branched Gary Powers for a Rudolph Abel, uh, which he did, and he went there, and, uh, that's the second half of the movie, basically. He goes to Berlin, it's a great, great, uh, visuals of Berlin, and at that time they were building the Berlin Wall, and tensions were really high, and things were pretty grim on the East, and East Berlin, and, uh, so he goes there and, and he begins negotiation. Turns out, at the same time that he's arriving there, a young man named Frederick Breyer was, who was an economic student from Yale, I guess, who happened to be going to school in East Berlin, and he was picked up by the East Germans, and, uh, and, uh, Don had learned about this, so when he begins his negotiations, he says, well, I want Rudolph, I'll exchange Rudolph Abel for, uh, for Francis Gary Powers, but I also want Frederick Breyer, and, and part of the drama of the movie is about how, how that worked out, about how he was able to, and they go back, and, and get something out, and eventually. So that's kind of a basic introduction, you know, there's a lot more to talk about, uh, uh, so I'll just, why don't I just leave it there, and we can go from there. Mike, I have so many questions I, I want to ask you, uh, but let me, let me start with some of the things that occurred to me after Shackley's description. Um, what does this, um, teach us about the Cold War? Maybe, you know, we have a kind of Cold War going on now. It's not the same. That was the, the original Cold War. Just how cold was it? And was it as dangerous as this one? Was it more dangerous? Less dangerous? Uh, it's hard to remember all of it. Shackley's reference to Duck and Cover, it was, it was a nuclear Cold War. Um, could we learn anything from this move about what Cold War is like? Uh, when I was growing up, I remember that turtle about hiding Duck, and we were told to go underneath our chairs as well, and not to look outside, because you're, you'd be blinded by the flash of the bomb. And when I was in Russia about 10 years ago, one of my tour guides at Mouskow was telling me about how he as a kid was taught to hide underneath the school. We had an interesting discussion there. We had a real connection. But I see some real parallels in the Cold War then as Cold War now. But I, I think we were a lot more terrified then, and maybe we ought to be a little more terrified today. But Steven Steeleberg, that was the director of this film, and I are both baby boomers. I was born in 46, so I'm one of the earliest baby boomers. And all of us that grew up in the late 50s and early 60s, we all know about powers being shot down as the U-2 over Soviet Union, and somehow he got exchanged or got returned a couple of the couple of three years later. But we didn't know anything about this spy, Rudolf Abel. And he was the master Soviet spy in the United States at the time, and he'd been there since the 40s. And, and so he was deeply embedded in the United States. He was one of these guys that if you ran into him, he'd be like a ghost. You wouldn't even see him. He sort of just fit into the background. And that's exactly the character that Mark Rylons. He's one of the greatest, I'd say he's one of the greatest actors in the world today. He's certainly the greatest British actor, and he's well known in Britain because he does theater work mostly and BBC, but he became more famous with this. And he also played Thomas Cromwell in the Wolf Hall series. He's an absolutely incredible actor. Tom Hanks had never worked with him. And when they did the first scene between them was when Tom Hanks meets him in prison. And Hanks goes to Steven Spielberg and says, my God, Mark Rylons, fantastic. He was, he plays such a subdued character. And, and as a subdued character, he's almost like bigger than life. His character is just explosive. And Tom Hanks told Spielberg, bake him, please don't let him drag me down. Because Dolovan, and he plays as this Ruddy Irishman, and he's a bulldog, and he's got to be tough. And he was afraid that this subdued character would just shrink him down. And I looked at pictures of the actual Rudolph Abel and they're almost close. The Mark Rylons is almost a clone of, of this guy Rudolph. So it's a, it's there are may just an amazing thing. And the Russians did have moles in the United States. He was the greatest. If you've seen the TV series Americans with King, it's about a couple that were embedded in the United States and spying on the United States for the Russia. It's similar to that. And, and he was actually transmitting intelligence data as Shackly was pointing out to the Soviet Union. He was very effective. And then Dolovan is a quintessential American, you know, he, he, he tells one guy, you know, the one thing that is different between us and the rest of the world is we have the Constitution. And this guy is really, really a constitutionalism and American. He actually took the Abel case up to the United States Supreme Court and wound up challenging the search and seizure. And he lost the case five, four. But that was after only after, after the argued the case, Supreme Court brought it back and asked it to be argued again. So he almost won that case. It was very close. It's a seminal case and search and seizure. And, but this guy is, you know, he's, Dolovan is, is just a nostalgic and, and Hanks is brilliant in it. Rylan's got the Academy Award for best supporting actor. I think he, and in my estimation, he and Hanks were both best actors. I mean, they were, he wasn't just a supporting actor. So, you know, I was mentioning how us baby boomers knew about powers we didn't know about Abel. And so that's why when Spielberg found out about this Abel side of the story, he decided he looked into it. He thought this would be a great movie. And so this movie is mostly about the characters. It's mostly about Donovan played by Hanks and Abel played by Mark Rylan's. And, and powers is almost like a sub story of the whole thing, including prior Shackley was talking about. But there are sub stories. The real story is about these two characters. And as strongly American as Donovan is, he and, and Abel become this, these great friends. They, and, and the friendship is not born out of values. It's born out of respect. They like one another. They like one another as a person. People called Abel a traitor. But Donovan said, wait, he's not a traitor. If he was traded, if he was American trading American secrets, he'd be a traitor to America. But he was a Soviet that was going after American speaker. That's not a traitor. He's being faithful to the Soviet Union. We have spies in Russia, and we're doing the same thing. They're not traders. They're doing their, their, their spy craft. So he, he respected the fact that he was doing something that, that we do in the Soviet Union and the other side of the coin. So what happened to Abel? I liked Abel. I liked the actor. Of course, it was, it was great. But I liked him for what he did. I respected him for what he did. I respected him for the way he handled Donovan, Tom Hanks, that I wondered at the end, he made these very cryptic, but very wise comments to Tom Hanks. It really was well written this movie. Right, you know, right, every statement of the dialogue. So at the end there, he says, Tom Hanks asks him, are you going to be okay when you go back to Russia? And he says, I don't know if they, they just put me in the back of the car. That will be, you know, a bad thing. I may not live through that. But if they hug, hug me and shake my hand, then maybe I'll live through it. They don't know what I told the Americans. And so you see it, the last moment that I, maybe I didn't watch this carefully enough, they didn't shake his hand. They just put him in the back of the car. Do you think he survived? Yeah, he did. He was reunited, apparently you're reunited with his wife and daughter, who we talked about, and lived until 1971 and in Russia. And apparently, Donovan had tried to go back later on on a trip to Russia and to, and to look him up. But for some reason, it was never, never made possible by the, by the Soviet authorities, unfortunately. Yeah, well, you know, one thing is the lawyer thing, I wanted to ask you about that shackley. So here's a guide. And he has a certain amount of military experience, like a lot of people. But who was it? Alan Walden was the senior partner at his firm, and approaches him and says, you need to do this for your country. He says, why? You know, I'm in the insurance industry. I don't do that work. I never did that work. I don't want to do that work. And somehow, Alan Walden appealed to him on a patriotic level. And indeed, Donovan was a patriot beyond patriot. He took that case and ran with it all the way, including, you know, to, to, to envelop the trade with this fellow prior. That was a remarkable thing. And he stuck with it. Maybe he had his thing about Yale and her house. But he was, he was determined to do it two for one. And the government was the American government said, don't do that. We didn't bargain for that. We won one on one, not two for one. And so I make him a patriot and a moral person with enormous, you know, moral values. It's part of that greatest generation, isn't it? One interesting event yet in the movie that I like was early on, when your Tom Hanks character is being introduced, he's, he's negotiating a civil lawsuit with another lawyer in a club or bar someplace. And he represents the insurance company. And he, and the other guy represents five motorcyclists who are apparently hit by a, by a car that Hanks insurance company insured. And Hanks is saying, well, that's one, that's one incident. That's one accident. And the other guy say, well, no, it's five, because there are five people who are injured, right? You've heard that before, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Later on, when, when he's in Germany and in Berlin, and he's negotiating the release of not one, but two people in exchange for, for one Russian spy, that comes up again. And he says, he says, oh, no, it's just one transaction. Well, you know, these lawyers, well, I, you know, but, but to, to that point, though, I thought probably the most remarkable part of the movie, I really would be interested in your thoughts about it. This when he was negotiating with the Russians. And he didn't know who he was dealing with. He didn't know who was who. And you figure out, he was a moving target. And he had to, you know, examine the authority of the individual he was with, and somehow penetrate, you know, that that level of, you know, vagueness that they threw on. He really didn't know who had authority to make a deal. And to me, that was, you know, it was just like he was learning on the job, how to be a real negotiator, a real spy, in an international sense, in a very difficult, dangerous environment, and remarkable that he would do that. What? What's but? And, you know, he was at risk, he was at risk. Even that altercation on the street, where those young fellows in East Berlin attacked him, took his overcoat, remember that? They set that up. That was not an accident. They were softening him up. And so, you know, he was in a time of great risk, great threat. But he managed, I guess it really takes an insurance defense lawyer to be able to handle that kind of thing. It's too credit to the profession, you know, Michael. When he was doing those negotiations, there were two countries that he was dealing with. He was dealing with an East German lawyer and a Russian KGB chief. So, the KGB chief could negotiate for powers. But we didn't recognize East Germany. East Germany wanted recognition in the world. But they were under the thumb of the Soviet Union. But they weren't recognized as a sovereign state by the United States. And they had Pire, the kid. And so, they were trying to just engineer powers for Pire. But Pire was a low-level thing, just a kid power. I mean, Abel was the top chief. So, you want to get a top person in response. And so, that's why powers was so important. But the Soviet, so he had to deal with so many different levels. He had to deal with the Soviet Union and the East Germany, and then his own government that sometimes would try to undermine him. But he insisted that there be a two-for-one. And he actually got that two-for-one. And, you know, getting back to lawyers, there were two books that are the major books about this exchange. One is James Donovan's book called Strangers on a Bridge. And the other was Bridge of Spies by Giles Whittle. And when we first talked about this, I went and found and read Bridge of Spies by Giles Whittle. And then I realized that's not what the movie was based on. It was based on Donovan's book. And Giles Whittle wound up suing Spielberg for taking his name and putting his book name on this movie. And I never could find out what happened. And I just assumed what happened was that they settled the thing. And I'm sure Giles got a good settlement out of that because he just took his name. I mean, Bridge of Spies was his book. The difference in the book is, like this movie, it's primarily, the Donovan's book is primarily about his representation of Abel and engineering the exchange. Whereas the Bridge of Spies is much deeper about the whole story at all levels. I mean, he goes back into the history of the Soviet spying on our nuclear things, going back to the Rosenbergs, and then much more detail on towers and the stories. So it's great to read both books. They're complementary of one another. Another thing, Jacqueline and I were talking earlier about the judge that handled the case of Abel. Wasn't he the pits, wasn't he? Well, the actual judge was, he'd been on the bench for several decades, and he was a highly respected judge. And he would never have done or allowed what happened in this movie, which didn't happen, by the way, where Donovan goes to his residence and has an ex-party communication. Oh, yeah. And tried to convince him not to give the death penalty because he wants, he thinks in the future that Abel could be exchanged for some other person in the future that we could get back. And that never happened. It never happened. In fact, what had happened in the courtroom and during his argument on sentencing, he made a plea that there might be a time in the future when we'll want to get somebody back that they got that's high level, and we've got powers and we can exchange them. So that never happened. And I mean, the ex-party didn't happen and never would have happened. It would have been entirely inappropriate. Yeah, I am wondering about, you know, the public reaction. This was in the time of McCarthy. And Donovan was being criticized. His home was attacked. His kids were attacked in school for representing a spy. And that was kind of McCarthy-esque, wasn't it? And not that that wouldn't happen again today. I think it might. But I think that was a sign of the times. That's what we had in the Cold War. That's what we had about these filthy, pinko, communist people. That was, you know, the American reaction to the Cold War, although we were also involved in the Cold War. You'll see what's exactly. Oh, well, a couple of things I'll mention that I thought of as I was watching. First off, there are a number of interviews of Steven Spielberg and others and Tom Hanks and so on on YouTube for anybody who's interested. And they talk about a lot about how they click this movie together, which is very interesting. A couple of things is I was in Moscow once, and I went to the Military Museum there. And they have, I saw over in the corner was this big pilot junk, and I walked over there. And it turns out that was what was left of Gary Power's YouTube. They kept it. So I've actually seen the YouTube. What else is it like today? Your question was about the times. Yeah, you know, like we've covered with you guys, we've covered the greatest generation in World War II. A couple of expressions of that. And Spielberg and Tom Hanks, you know, they collaborate on that kind of thing. Saving Private Ryan would be another one. But this was not World War II. This was not the common definition of the greatest generation. And somehow yet, it's connected. Don't you agree? It's, well, yeah, I mean, the immediate aftermath of World War II was the beginning of the Cold War, right? So this was the worst part of the Cold War, the coldest part, if you will. And then, you know, in those days, I remember when the Berlin Wall fell on the end of the Soviet Union, I didn't believe it was happening. People came and told me, oh, you know, it's over. I said, no, no, that's impossible. But I got what happened. And then we went, you know, we thought everything was going to be rosy and Russia was going to be a democracy and all this stuff. Turns out that was dead wrong. And we're still living with the consequences of that. And we've got, we're almost back where we were in the times of the Cold War. Although nobody seems to be particularly worried about nuclear attack these days. We're here to talk about it. But there isn't the same sort of concerns that we had during the Cold War period about being at risk for a nuclear war. Yeah. I can remember early in the 60s when it was really the height of the fears. You know, I had, my dad was in the Pentagon, which everyone always calls as round zero. That's where the Russian bomb will come down. And so we lived right across the river in Arlington. And I had a go-to bag and my dad had a place for us to all go to in West Virginia going over the Appalachians to be on the other side of the blast. And if he called us and said go, we were, I just grabbed my go-to bag and we got in the car and we would go to this place in West Virginia. So he knew where we were. But he was in ground zero at the Pentagon. It was that serious. People were building underground bomb shelters all over the United States. We were all fearful of a nuclear war. But I think there's so much parallels to the day because we're back into another Cold War. Well, is this, how is this one different than that one? You know, I mean, for example, when I read last couple of days about how somehow the pilot that took the Russian jet into Spain mysteriously died. And there have been so many other assassinations and poisons and what have you, including Novali, of course, but you know, many others around the world. And Putin is not the only one who does that. And so, you know, I would say that the Cold War now is more high tech, although certainly the YouTube, as Shackley said, was very high tech. But then, you know, the Russians were more high tech. They could reach him at 70,000 feet. And nobody in the US intelligence knew that. They found out the hard way. But I feel that the technology now is more. For example, those microwaves on 60 minutes. You know, that's really high tech. We don't understand that yet. I mean, we don't understand how to defend against it. And there's so many things happening now that, yes, you can make the parallel, but how does it compare in terms of risk? And as Shackley pointed out, also, we could have a nuclear confrontation now. Remember, this was only a year away from Bay of Biggs. And of course, the showdown with Kennedy about nuclear weapons at Cuba. So it's not impossible. It could happen. And maybe we have to tell our kids about duck and cover. There's a couple of factoids. The second YouTube shootdown was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. There was another one shot down and the pilot killed. Donovan was actually, during the Kennedy administration, he was asked by President Kennedy to go to Cuba to negotiate the repatriation of the people who were picked up and imprisoned as a result of the Bay of Pigs and some others. And he did that. And he was able to obtain the release of about 19,000 people, men and women and children from Cuba. So he was quite a guy. You know, he had this amazing career where he really made a tremendous contribution to our country. Great patriot. Back then, Jay, this is late 50s, 1960. John Kennedy, one of the reasons he was elected because there was a belief that there was what they call a missile gap, that the Russians had way more missiles than we did. And so we were at great risk. Turned out it was all bogus. It wasn't true. I'm not blaming Kennedy because the CIA put that out, intentionally put it out because they wanted that. But there was no missile gap. They were way behind us. But today, Putin's not only threatening to use nuclear weapons in the Ukrainian conflict and also if NATO gets involved, but he's even threatened to put nuclear weapons on satellites. And we've had agreement from day one that we're going to denuclearize space. We weren't going to take weapons into space. But some of that may be off the table. If he puts nuclear weapons in space and talk about danger, we're all at really a risk. You know, when Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg collaborated on World War II movies, they were trying to send a message, I think. The message gets clearer now because this is 2015, they made the movie. And that was after Maiden Square in Kiev. That was after, you know, Eastern Europe was becoming unstable. That was after Putin was becoming very aggressive. And I believe that they were making this movie not just for an historic, you know, review adventure, not just to make a documentary, documentary drama kind of movie. I think just as in the other movies around World War II, they were trying to tell us something. They're trying to give us a takeaway. They're trying to educate the public about something they thought was important. Both Tom Hanks, if you've ever, while you've seen interviews with him and Spielberg, you don't have to see a lot of interviews to know where those guys are coming from. They're super patriots and they want to celebrate this kind of patriotism. But what do you think they intended to convey in this movie? I'm asking for either of you to respond to that. Boy, beyond what the story itself was about, I mean, it's a worrisome story for the reasons you just mentioned that, you know, we're still at nuclear loggerheads and we have China now involved, which we didn't have during the Cold War. And so I guess in a way it's a kind of warning. Though times are so different, you know, people don't seem to take it as seriously. Perhaps we should and maybe that's how the movie can help. Well, and also, Spielberg said, I made the movie because it was a bloody good story. Well, not, you know, yes, of course, but it's within his ambit. What he loved doing it and he did it with great realism. The U2 in there was a real U2 at Beale Air Force Base. The only thing digital in the whole movie was when they shot down the U2 and it blew up. Everything else was real. They built the wall. Edge would go by on a train and he'd look down and see people trying to reach the wall. Well, they built a styrofoam wall, looked like a concrete wall that went for three quarters of a mile. And it was so real. The street scene with those thugs, it actually happened. That actually happened except they didn't steal his coat. He threw that in. People did shoot into his house there were bullets that came through the window of his house. There were so many levels of this movie were completely realistic. And so I think that's what brings the authenticity so well home in this movie. It's a thing to really learn from. Exactly, exactly. Those parts were filmed in East Berlin, apparently, which was still pretty rundown at the time. The bridge where the exchange took place, the Glenicky Bridge. That's the bridge over the Hobble River between Potsdam and Berlin. And I've actually been there. You can go there now. And it's interesting. It's about two kilometers from where the WANC conference was held in the estate on the WANC area of Berlin, where the final solution was determined by the leaders of the Nazi party. It was so realistic to actually be on the bridge during that exchange. It was the tensest part of the whole movie because it came so close to falling apart because it prior was being released to checkpoint two or Charlie. And so he had to get word that prior was being released. And the government agent was telling Donovan, and this actually happened. He says, we got powers. Let's just switch. He says, no, I'm waiting for prior. And he says, no, just do it. And he's no, I'm waiting. And according to the book, what they believed was the East German government held prior back just to sort of stick a finger in our eyes and throw a monkey wrench into the whole thing. And by the way, the dramatic nighttime scene didn't happen. It happened about 8.45 in the morning. So it wouldn't have been quite as dramatic having it there in a Casablanca foggy airport type scene, you know, that being on that bridge in the dark and it's kind of cold and foggy that gave it even more realism even though that's not exactly how it came down. I don't know. February in northern Europe, it'd have been pretty grim looking. I'm reminded that Spielberg made Schindler's List. It's a towering film, a towering education for people, a towering education for those who might deny or question the Holocaust. He was doing that for a reason that was so powerful, that movie. And I suspect that at this point, it is a filmmaking career. He always wants to send a message. You know, he can afford to do that, essentially. One thing that came up in the movie that I'd be interested in, you guys' opinion is, I got the impression that the action between the Soviet representative and the East German Vogel, the so-called lawyer for the family, that that was orchestrated, that they deliberately picked up prior just because the way it looks in the movie anyway, they picked him up about the time that Hanks arrived in Berlin. And so they were orchestrating kind of a mutton routine between powers and prior in negotiating with Hanks. I don't know if you guys got that. No question about it, because remember, he was also negotiating with Abel's wife and cousin, this guy named Drew's. And they were neither. They were complete phonies. They were put up by the Soviets. And so the Soviets were using everybody. So they set up these, the so-called wife and the cousin, and Vogel was the attorney representing. I mean, there wasn't any aspect of that from the Soviet side that wasn't orchestrated. So wheels within wheels? Who do you trust? If I had to pick one word, you know, to try to get through the, I call the fog of espionage, I would pick the word trust. Who exactly do you trust? Because the stakes are so high, especially the bridge. It also shows what a great negotiator Donovan was, you know, to be able to manage all that and pull it off successfully, even though the CIA guys were focused on the exchange of Abel for powers and didn't care so much about prior accordion, moving any leg. They don't come off that well in the movie and probably in the book. They were pushing him around and he was standing fast. He comes off stronger than they were. So what are you left with on this and what rating would you give this on the scale of 1 to 10 and maybe beyond? Michael, you first. I'm going to give it a 10 plus on character, characterization. I mean, as I mentioned, I think it was a character thriller, psychological thriller, the cinematography and the realism of everything, the U2, the wall, the bridge, when he had to cross over into East Germany and he stood in a long line and was freezing cold, the tension, and there was sort of a darkness when they went into the second half of the movie and he's working in East Germany and in East Germany. You get this dark pallor to the thing and it's no longer colorful. You can feel like you're in East Germany and after the war when everything was so subdued and the Soviets are in charge and it's fraught with danger. So the writing, the music, the cinematography and mostly the characters and I'm saying Tom Hanks and Rylance, these are one of the greatest acting you'll ever see on set. Yeah, Rylance, so understated, so powerful. I actually liked him. I actually liked him. Yeah. Yeah. And why put that, he was likable. Although, I like that phrase, the praise he worked in, there's Stoichy Magique about stand-up man, how they worked that into the film and compliments Tom Hanks at the end with that comment. Very appropriate. It was just beautifully written, beautifully done and I mean, it's true. It's a true story, very important history. I think everybody should see this movie. We were just, Mike and I were talking before we started about how people don't know enough of our history to be able to manage the present effectively and history simply repeats itself over and over and over again. How does this help, Shatly? How does this movie help us manage the present? Well, it provides information so that you can see what things actually were really like. I mean, it's not made up. This is the truth. This actually happened and things like that are happening now. I mean, then there was a big exchange in the Ukraine situation. Remember, one of Putin's pals was exchanged for someone and you know, there's that exchange for that young woman basketball player and they're trying to and they're trying to do an exchange. Who is it? Tucker Carlson was trying to ask Putin to release the Wall Street Journal reporter. You know, this stuff goes on all the time. This is real life and we shouldn't forget that. And my main is an old man now. I really fear that yet younger people, especially in America, we just don't, we don't have enough appreciation for how bad things can really get in a real, in a real hurry. And I just hope that we don't have anything bad happen. Well, and we have to appreciate the nuance. You know, this movie, you know, you don't hate the Russians. You don't hate these Germans. They're bad, but you don't hate them. They're people. And I think that Spielberg did achieve that. He showed you the reality of the human condition on both sides of the wall. I'm sorry, Michael, go ahead. Well, you just pointed out something that just occurred to me when I was in Russia about 12, 10 years ago on a river cruise. I found all the Russian people just like us. I mean, they were just people. They were people, somebody you'd meet in Alabama or California or New Jersey. And one of them, one of the tour guides, Russian said, after about a week and a half of our tour, he said, you know, have, have you realized that we are more alike than not? And that maybe it's our politicians that should be fighting. That's a remarkable statement. That's the life. And I just, I can't wait. They're just ordinary people. All the Russians I met were ordinary people. I want to make one other comment that I meant to add was there's a subtle level of comedy in this film that the Cohn brothers were largely responsible for. And I'll give you one example. And it's just, it's, but it's very subtle. They're in the court and Hanks comes back after a court conference and he's gotten some bad news back there. And he sort of tells him, it's not going so well. And then he, then he looks at Rylance and says, don't you ever worry? And just without what very subdued without spinning without a break, Rylance looked up and says, would it help? Right. He does, he does that more than once during the movies. Would it help? So Shackly, we, we missed your rating. We got a close now, but what is your rating on this movie? Oh, that's the excellent movie 10 plus everyone should see it. I agree with you guys. 10 plus. Thank you very much. Mike, Lily, Shackly, with federal great discussion, important that we appreciate this a lot. We want to announce that think tech Hawaii is moving into a new phase and will not be producing regular talk shows after April 30th. We will retain our website and YouTube channel and will accept new content on an ad hoc basis. We are also developing a legacy archive program to provide continuing public access to our content. If you can help us cover the costs of the transition and the development of our legacy archive program, please make a donation on think tech away.com. Thanks so much. Aloha.