James Donovan, an insurance lawyer in Brooklyn, finds himself personally entangled in the Cold War. First he is assigned to defend Rudolph Abel, a Soviet spy to whom the U.S. government would like to provide the trappings of a fair trial; then the CIA entrusts him with the delicate negotiations for the release of Francis Gary Powers, an American pilot taken prisoner after his U-2 spy plane crashes in Russia. The title of the film refers to a bridge that used to link West Berlin and Potsdam in East Germany and was often used for the exchange of prisoners between the American and Soviet secret services.

"As a youngster growing up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, I had a tremendous amount of awareness of what was happening during the Cold War, but I didn’t know anything about the exchange of Rudolf Abel for Francis Gary Powers. I knew about Powers because growing up everyone had heard that his U-2 spy plane had been shot down and that he had been put on public display at a very public trial, but the story kind of ended with a spectacular shoot down. I didn’t realize that something had happened subsequent to his capture, which was this very backroom exchange, this spy swap between Abel, a Soviet spy, and Powers, the American spy pilot. So there was a lot to this story that really pulled me in." [Steven Spielberg]