Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy arrested by the FBI, was exchanged for Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of the CIA spy plane that had been shot down over Soviet airspace two years earlier.

Rudolf Ivanovich Abel was the alias of William August Fisher, a Soviet intelligence officer, created to alert his Soviet KGB handlers when Fisher was arrested in the USA on charges of espionage by the FBI in 1957.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. An agency of the United States Department of Justice, the FBI is a member of the U.S. Intelligence Community and reports to both the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. A leading American counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and criminal investigative organization, the FBI has jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crimes. The FBI maintains a list of its top 10 most wanted fugitives.

A prisoner exchange or prisoner swap is a deal between opposing sides in a conflict to release prisoners: prisoners of war, spies, hostages, etc. Sometimes, dead bodies are involved in an exchange.

Francis Gary Powers was an American pilot who served as a United States Air Force officer and a CIA employee. Powers is best known for his involvement in the 1960 U-2 incident, when he was shot down while flying a secret CIA spying mission over the Soviet Union. Powers survived, but was captured and sentenced to 10 years in a Soviet prison for espionage. He served 21 months of his sentence before being released in a prisoner swap in 1962.