The message received by Abel before his capture
During the first few minutes of the Bridge of Spies, Abel is seen receiving and decoding a secret message. He smartly destroys the evidence during his capture by the FBI agents. What was that message about and did the FBI or CIA even establish this fact he indeed was in possession of a message at the time of his capture?
Best Answer
This can be answered with the real life events. Basically the hiding of any document is fictional as wiki page is describing the situation. But the fact that the FBI didn't find any document from him is real at that particular moment.(They found many things later)
As we saw on the first few minutes FBI was already knew that Rudolf Abel is a suspicious man. They got the information about him from another KGB associate / soviet spy Häyhänen who betrayed KGB and gave information to FBI.
From IMDb Trivia
when a KGB defector, Reino Häyhänen, gave them the key to deciphering the code, and also gave up Rudolph Abel
Then they followed Abel and find his activity suspicious. From wiki
On May 28, 1957, in a small park opposite Fulton Street FBI agents spotted a man acting nervously. From time to time the man got up, walked around, and eventually left. FBI agents were convinced he fit the description of "MARK". The surveillance continued on "MARK" and on the night of June 13, a light was seen to go on in Fisher's studio at 10:00 pm
When they arrested him they didn't get the thing that he dound in that park. But later after his arrest FBI searched the house again and found some spy stuff that wasn't shown in the movie.
During Fisher's detainment the FBI had been busy searching his hotel room and photo studio, where they discovered espionage equipment including shortwave radios, cipher pads, cameras and film for producing microdots, a hollow shaving brush, and numerous "trick" containers including hollowed-out bolts.[3] In Fisher's New York hotel room the FBI found four thousand dollars,[52][53] a hollow ebony block containing a 250-page Russian codebook, a hollow pencil containing encrypted messages on microfilm and a key to a safe-deposit box containing another fifteen thousand dollars in cash.[54][55] Also discovered were photographs of the Cohens and recognition phrases to establish contact between agents who had never met before
Now few things can be guessed. Writers didn't know what Abel found in that park. So they wanted to put it as mystery to the audience too. Clearly FBI didn't have release the contents of the documents (if they found that particular piece of paper or thing) So we can't know for sure what was in that piece of paper. I believe it was shown in the movie to establish the fact at the very beginning that he was a 100% soviet spy. They wanted to focus on the later plot, not on the face that he was a spy or not. So found a quick way to show it, and created that scene with the paper.
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