#Frederic pryor free

On February 10, 1962, after almost six months of detention, Pryor was freed at Checkpoint Charlie, just before American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers was swapped for Soviet Spy Colonel Rudolf Abel at the Glienicke Bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam, East Germany, as a result of negotiations conducted by James B. While jailed, Pryor was intensively interrogated, although not tortured. Pryor's cell was directly above an East German torture room. The Stasi (East German secret police) arrested Pryor on charges of aiding the woman's escape after the police found a copy of Pryor's doctoral dissertation (an analysis of Soviet bloc foreign trade), he was accused of espionage and detained without charge. In August 1961, days after the Berlin Wall was erected, he visited East Berlin to deliver a copy of his dissertation to a professor there, and to contact a friend's sister, an engineer who вЂ“ unknown to Pryor вЂ“ had just illegally fled to West Germany.

#Frederic pryor free

In 1959, as part of his doctorate studies, Pryor went to Berlin, where he was finishing his doctoral thesis and also taking classes at the Free University of West Berlin. He studied economics at Yale University, where he received a master's degree in 1957, then undertook a doctorate program. He then spent a year in South America and Europe, which included three months living and working on a commune in Paraguay. He attended Oberlin College, where he received a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1955. Pryor, but spent most of their childhood in Mansfield, Ohio, and graduated in 1951 from Mansfield Senior High School. Frederic LeRoy Pryor and his twin brother Millard were born April 23, 1933, in Owosso, Michigan, to Millard H.