Scotland's Cold Warrior

Frank Meehan is 93.

He enjoys a peaceful retirement in the genteel town of Helensburgh.

He spends his time taking the air, enjoying the views,

reading, meeting friends,

and he's able to look back on

a life of extraordinary memories and secrets.

We were in the car, waiting.

I was getting more and more nervous.

And round the car was a group of East German goons,

you know, the security people.

I wonder if they have ever asked themselves...

A life dealing with the most powerful people on Earth.

Don't underestimate him, I'd say,

and I told that to Democratic friends after I'd seen him.

And they said, "Oh, Frank," you know,

"you're like everybody else - you've fallen for the old actor," you know?

A life spent at the heart of the events that shaped

the 20th century and continue to shape the world today.

What strikes me about Russia, these years,

is the tremendous sense of loss that they have,

of power and position.

This quiet man was a key player in the great standoff between

the West and the Soviet Union.

Frank Meehan is Scotland's Cold Warrior.

In his tenth decade,

Frank Meehan looks back on a life which

has taken him from Clydebank in the Blitz

through military service as a GI

to a 40-year career as a US diplomat.

But his path to the heart of the great 20th-century standoff

was an unusual one.

Frank's mother was from Dalmuir, his father from Northern Ireland.

In the 1920s, they tried building a life in America.

Homesickness brought them back, but their son, Francis Joseph,

was born in New Jersey on Valentine's Day 1924.

This gave him US citizenship, and it would shape his career and life.

He moved to Clydebank aged nine.

You spent your teenage years

-in this part of Scotland, the west of Scotland...

-Yeah.

..at a time when it was being bombarded by the German air force.

Yeah, we got a bad air attack in...

It was in March 1941.

I was then 17, I think, yeah.

A lot of deaths and a lot of destruction.

They were after the shipyards, Brown's Shipyards,

and Singer's Factory, which was doing munitions at this...

-Sewing machine factory.

-Yeah, but it had gone over to munitions.

Where were you on the nights of the bombardment?

We were in the shelter, and I remember listening to

the stick of bombs coming down.

You know, they started far away, then the stick comes,

you know, they come closer, it was a heavier bump.

And the house next door got incendiary bombed,

it was destroyed. So, yeah, it was not pleasant.

And did you work on the aftermath of the bombing?

I remember I worked cleaning out houses

that had taken incendiary bombs

where the whole contents had just sort of been burned up.

You had to clear them out and then they were going to be rebuilt.

And, um, I helped builders one vacation by carrying the hod,

-that proverbial job.

-So you were a brickie's labourer.

I was, yeah, I was...

Yeah, I think maybe that's what made me think it would be better

-to go into the Foreign Service.

-FRANK LAUGHS

I wasn't a great hod-carrier.

Britain was pretty impressive, I thought.

You know, the people I knew up in Clydebank, they were...

They took it all well, I thought.

After school and a degree at Glasgow University, Frank's life took

an odd turn for a Clydebank boy.

His country of birth came calling and

he was drafted into the US Army during the Liberation of Europe.

I was in an infantry company,

trained in the infantry and then we were sent up from France to Germany,

and to a little town called Marburg an der Lahn, north of Frankfurt.

And that was in late 1945, and so I...

That was my first look at Germany.

And could hardly believe it. It was so appalling.

Frankfurt was in ruins, and you wondered if it would be

possible ever to recover anything of, you know, civilisation there.

It was a ruin.

A desert, you might say.

So, that was my first look at Germany, and it was a very...

..ominous sort of look about the place.

You wondered if it would ever come back.

You were a fluent German speaker by this stage already.

Pretty good, yeah.

Did you talk to ordinary Germans about the Nazi catastrophe?

Did they...?

Did they show you any insight into what had been going on

during those years?

No, I don't think you got much of that.

I think they were being very careful.

First of all, you were an American, you know, and what were you?

You know, were you an investigator?

Were you someone who could turn them in if they said the wrong thing?

So I think there was great care in dealing with us.

At least, that was the feeling I had.

But I have to say that I gradually got to know people better

and then they would talk about the war years.

When did you first get intrigued by what was happening in...?

Cos you would spend your whole career in Communist Eastern Europe

and the Soviet Union.

When did you first get intrigued about what was going on

-on the other side of that divide?

-Right.

Well, as often happens in life, I think, someone,

some person had an influence on me.

It was a guy I knew, also a foreign service officer,

a guy called Dick Davies, who had served in both Warsaw and Moscow

by the time I met him, and he got me interested.

You know, he got me interested in Russia.

Once you get the Russian bug, you know, it's hard to lose it,

so I think I've had it ever since.

Can you remember what that curiosity was?

-Because, I mean, I share it, I have it too.

-Yeah, you're one too.

Yeah, I've got the bug, so what was it about...?

You could see the divide. It was right there.

I think it was, you know, what often lures young people - the unknown.

You know, it was just, what was this world?

Who were these people who had, you know,

almost collapsed under a German attack,

had fought their way from Stalingrad right to Berlin

and now had this weird system that I couldn't understand

and wanted to understand?

And of course, there was a professional point of it too.

I could see that, you know,

if I was going to move into this field of international relations

and the American Foreign Service, that Russia was going to be

the main problem that we would have to look at.

Why the American Foreign Service?

Because you've got this dual identity,

part Scottish, part American.

Why the Americans and not the British?

I read in the Army newspaper, Stars And Stripes,

that you could get a three-day pass to take the examination,

and a three-day pass was something that any GI would, you know,

would look at carefully.

And I went up to Bremerhaven to do the written exam.

Didn't do terribly well in it, Allan,

but managed to scrape through.

Enough to be eligible to take the oral examination,

which I did then a little later.

Did a bit better in that, I think, so...

Frank's career in the Foreign Service took him to Moscow.

There, he would soon be drawn into the story of Gary Powers.

-NEWSREADER:

-The Supreme Soviet in Moscow hears Premier Khrushchev

announce that an American plane was shot down over Soviet territory,

but it also leads to an admission that the US

has been conducting reconnaissance flights high over the Soviet Union

by U-2 planes like this one.

It is a civilian-piloted, unarmed research plane

carrying special photographic equipment.

Powers was a pilot of the top-secret U-2 spy planes.

In May 1960, he was shot down over the Soviet Union.

He survived and the plane's wreckage was captured by the Soviets.

It plunged both superpowers into a crisis.

None of us knew about the plane.

I didn't know what a U-2 was,

I doubt very much whether anybody in the embassy knew.

But suddenly,

Khrushchev was making a speech in the Supreme Soviet.

He said, "We've shot down this American plane, this spy plane."

He said, "The Americans are probably wondering

"what happened to the pilot," which of course we were wondering...

He said, "Well, I just want to tell them we have the pilot."

That was really... That started a lot of things off.

So that must have gone through the embassy like a bolt of lightning.

We were all astounded.

What do you do?

Where are Soviet-American relations going now?

He was put on trial.

He was put on trial and given a prison sentence.

Then there was a rather interesting incident

where the Russians put what was left of the U-2 on display,

so the question was, who would go to look at it?

I was not involved in the decision-making on this point,

but I think the ambassador's thinking

was that it wouldn't be a good idea to send a military guy to do it,

because they might sort of engineer some incident

which would cause further difficulties in bilateral relations.

So the upshot of this was that I was told to go and look at it.

So you must have been quite nervous.

It would have been a tense few moments for you.

Yeah, I was pretty nervous. I wondered what was going to happen.

I was on my own, which is, when I think on it, rather curious.

I would have thought it would have been better

to send somebody with me.

There was a security guy sort of checking people as you went in.

I went up to him and showed him my diplomatic ID.

He looked at me in that cold way they did.

He then looked at the ID again and looked at me again.

Then a big grin spread over his face and he said, in Russian,

"Be my guest. It's your plane. Go ahead."

THEY CHUCKLE Could you make sense of the plane?

When you looked at it, did it make any sense to you?

No, I wouldn't know one end of a plane from another.

This was a rather peculiar plane.

But I'd been down to see it anyway, you know?

Frank returned to Berlin,

where he was to play another part in the Gary Powers' story.

Less than two years later,

America learned that Moscow was prepared to swap the pilot

for Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy who had been caught in Brooklyn.

The swap was to take place near the Berlin Wall,

and Abel's American lawyer, James Donovan,

was asked by the CIA to help mastermind the trade.

This is the story told in the 2015 film Bridge Of Spies,

and Frank played a key role in it.

The exchange took place at the beginning...

February 10th, I think, 1962,

where Powers and Abel were exchanged on Glienicker Bridge.

I was...

I went over to East Berlin to pick up Frederic Pryor,

the student who had been arrested.

You're talking about it as though it's quite a matter-of-fact thing.

-Hmm.

-But actually you were a young diplomat

-and you were right at the epicentre.

-Yeah.

Of the global Cold War,

which could have exploded at any moment into the Third World War.

Did you feel the burden on your shoulders?

I don't remember it that way.

I mean, there were tense moments, obviously.

I didn't know, for instance, when I was walking over to get the kid,

Pryor, I didn't know how he would be -

would he be well? Would I get him?

Would I be able get out myself? It was all sort of touchy stuff.

Frederic Pryor was waiting in a car

on the east side with Wolfgang Vogel,

an East German intelligence officer whom Frank had befriended.

I went over and I said something like,

"Well, Wolfgang, I'm ready. Have you got Pryor?"

He said to me, "Frank, we're not ready yet.

"Just get into the car and we'll wait."

What he was waiting for was word from the bridge that

the Powers-Abel exchange had taken place.

When that took place, then we got the word, or he got the word.

How did the word come through?

We were in the car, waiting. I was getting more and more nervous.

Round the car was a group of East German goons, you know,

the security people. One of them came over.

They must have had word from the bridge.

They came over to see Vogel and said, "Well, you know, it's OK."

It was at that point that Vogel turned to me and said,

"OK, fine, you can go." So that was the end of it.

So you got out the car and walked across.

Walked across. As simple as that.

-Nothing to it.

-Did Pryor say anything to you after that?

He thanked me. He thanked me. But we had arranged...

He wanted to see his mother and father.

I did not go with him

up to meet his parents.

I sort of finished little bits of business I had to do at

Checkpoint Charlie, just then went off on my own.

-Did you see the film?

-Yes, I did.

What did you think?

Good film. Yeah, good film.

What you'd expect from Spielberg.

The Berlin scenes were great.

The recreation of the wall was perfect.

I mean, it really took me back to this weird bit of my life,

you know, weird bit of German history,

where you had this strange thing in the middle of the city.

-It was a good movie.

-Historically accurate?

-Yeah.

-Mostly.

Yeah, mostly.

After a spell as ambassador to Czechoslovakia,

Frank took up the same role in Poland in October 1980,

his arrival coinciding with the birth of Solidarity -

the democracy movement that had grown out of strikes

in the Gdansk shipyards.

-Did you have contacts with the revolutionaries?

-Yeah.

We had very good contacts. He was really smart.

He was politically a very clever guy, I thought. A moderate too.

He was leading this, what I thought,

what I think you could say was a revolution,

but he was doing it in an extremely careful, clever, moderate way.

He had to deal with militants on his own side in the Solidarity movement.

Part of his problem was to sort of control them

so that they didn't push things far too fast. He was good at that.

I was impressed.

Were you conscious that you were laying yourself open to the charge

that the American Foreign Service is always open to,

which is that you're pushing the American interest in countries that

are in the sphere of interest of another power, that you're advancing

American interests at the expense of America's traditional rivals?

Well, I think that's what you're sent to do, really.

-Interfering in the internal affairs of another state?

-No.

No, I think that was... That's what they'd say I was doing.

No, I think there's a stage well before that where you have

American interests in mind.

The whole business of trying to chart what was going on in Poland,

and especially the question of the Soviet interest

and Soviet courses of action and what was likely and unlikely.

That was all pretty heavy stuff,

pretty important stuff that you had to try and follow.

So I spent a good deal of time on that.

Then in the winter of 1981, into '82, martial law.

After all the months of chaos,

it was Eastern Europe's traditional answer to major reform -

a swift, highly efficient military operation that clamped in

martial law throughout the country.

-The last military coup in Europe.

-Was it? Yeah.

I was in Washington, which was not a smart thing to do.

So you missed it.

I think if there's going to be a revolution in Eastern Europe

and you're the American ambassador, you should be in the country for it.

So I had things to do in Washington.

I'd sort of gone home...

It wasn't only official.

We hadn't been home in four years.

We were kind of anxious to see the kids and stuff like that.

But not a good idea to be there when the action is in the other site.

-I was told to get back in quickly.

-And you managed to?

-Yeah.

-They sealed the borders, didn't they?

Yeah. I got in by flying to Berlin

and then being driven to the border,

the Polish-East German border,

and then the embassy in Warsaw

sent down a little van for me,

to take me into Warsaw.

Not only me but to take some communication specialist

that we were rushing in with some equipment that was needed

for this sort of rather edgy bet we were going into.

Sad going back into it, though.

The thing had changed, obviously,

and it was... From then on, it was not as much fun, I'd say.

When we look back on it now, it seems the beginning of the end

for Communism, but that's something we've imposed on it in retrospect.

-It didn't feel like that at the time, did it?

-I mean... No.

I think you're right there.

It looked, to me, as if you'd have quite a lot of martial law,

but things were moving. I mean, you might not see them.

Frank's last posting as an ambassador

was back in Communist East Germany,

between 1985 and 1988.

His study at home in Helensburgh is full of mementos

from his long career.

Well, Allan, these are the commissions I mentioned to you.

There are three of them, one for each embassy I had.

Czechoslovakia is the first there.

-And that's from Jimmy Carter.

-From Jimmy Carter.

And then, as I think I said to you,

I was sort of pushed into Warsaw rather quickly

when Solidarity started going,

so that was again from Carter,

but right at the end of his administration...

That was a key appointment, wasn't it?

Yeah. That was the biggest one I had, really,

and I think the most important one I had,

and then the third one was East Germany,

which I always regard as a booby prize, you know?

I wanted Moscow, didn't get it,

and so I got East Berlin as a sort of booby prize,

but one I liked, though.

-And that's from Ronald Reagan.

-That was from Reagan.

And Reagan was the president I saw...

..not much of him, but I saw him in a working situation,

and I found that he was extremely good.

Republicans and many Democrats in America

think of him now as the president who won the Cold War.

There was a lot more to it than that.

Russia was beginning to crackle and rumble...

You must have been in office, probably in East Germany,

when he made that famous speech,

saying, "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

I was there. Yeah.

There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable.

Come here to this gate.

Mr Gorbachev, open this gate.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

And I must say, I thought, "Hmm..."

You know?

OK, not bad PR,

but is it going to do anything, you know?

And it turned out the idealist was right.

Yeah. Don't underestimate him, I would say.

I told that to Democratic friends after I'd seen him,

and they said, "Oh, Frank, you're like everybody else.

"You've fallen for the old actor," you know?

But I was impressed by him. He was good.

So, you must have served at least half a dozen presidents.

-Let's just count them. Truman first.

-Yeah.

Eisenhower. Kennedy.

Lyndon Johnson.

Nixon.

-Ford.

-Yeah.

Carter.

-Reagan.

-Reagan.

-Bush Senior.

-Yeah.

-That's nine presidents you worked for.

-Gosh.

How time goes by!

That's quite a career.

Yeah. It was good.

Frank retired just a year before the Berlin Wall fell,

and in the countries he'd served in,

the Communist regimes were swept away one by one.

It's one of the great mysteries, to me,

as I look back on it in my own work.

I still have difficulty

understanding exactly what

happened to the Russians,

that they decided to pack in and leave East Germany.

And to give that up to simply go home

seemed to me, then, an almost inexplicable decision,

and it still seems to be puzzling.

We had that period in Russia, seven, eight years,

when it looked as though Russia might well democratise,

-even Westernise...

-Hmm.

..and Yeltsin looked like a succession of Westernising tsars,

going back into the 18th century, but Putin emerged from that.

Why did that happen, do you think?

One of the difficulties I have is knowing just what produced Putin,

and what is producing change in the Russian leadership now.

I don't know if you've been struck by this,

but we have Putin and Medvedev,

who have been trading jobs,

you know, president and prime minister,

happily, since, what, 2000, or something like that.

I've been... That can't go on for ever.

And I have no sense of what is producing leadership change there.

So this is much more like a personal autocracy, a monarchy,

-than the Soviet Union ever was like?

-Yeah.

The more I look at Russia today,

the more I'm reminded of the last years of the Tsars -

Russia, say from, you know,

1900 to 1917 -

but I think it suits them,

and what strikes me about Russia, these years, is

the tremendous sense of loss that they have,

of power and position.

You know? They've lost so much since the fall of the Soviet Union,

and I think that part of Putin's hold on Russia

is that he expresses this.

-And to some extent, Putin mitigates the humiliation.

-That's right.

For instance, by taking Crimea back.

Crimea doesn't belong to anybody but Russia,

is the Russian view of it, so that would tremendously popular.

Let me ask you about the country that you served for decades.

-The United States.

-Uh-huh.

The election of Donald Trump.

Does that... That changes things fundamentally, doesn't it?

Trump is a phenomenon.

He's a political phenomenon...

that we don't quite...at least I don't quite grasp yet.

He broke most of the rules that I would have given him

if he'd come to me and said,

"How do I become an American president?"

And what it has left me is with a kind of rather obvious thought,

you know, if a guy has done all this by breaking the rules,

you wonder if he might not think,

"You just keep on breaking rules and you'll win."

Let me ask you about the strange divided identity you have

between being Scottish and American.

-Hmm.

-How do you feel?

Do you feel Scottish, or do you feel American?

I feel American, I think, yeah.

But, you know, I know Scotland well.

Must know it well, since I grew up here,

and have tremendous affection, obviously,

for Scotland.

I don't want to be too sentimental on it

but I love it.

But I am an American.

Why did you decide to settle in retirement in Scotland

and not go back to the United States?

Well, that's a fairly easy one.

Margaret wanted to...

My wife wanted to come here,

and I felt I owed it to her a bit

because I'd dragged around Eastern Europe all our married life,

and we were counting up, when we came here,

when we came to Helensburgh,

it was our 23rd full move

in our married life.

Now, when you've asked a wife to do that,

I think you do owe her something.

-And are you happy here?

-Yeah. Yeah, I am.

I mean, I miss the States, you know?

It's good fun there.

Lots of things happen.

I'd like to be in Washington now, for instance,

to see all this stuff.

I'd like to watch it close up.

HE CHUCKLES

-Thank you very much. That's great.

-You're very welcome, Allan.