Frederic Pryor

Frederic LeRoy Pryor (April 23, 1933 – September 2, 2019)^[1][2] was an American economist. While studying in Berlin during the partition of the city in 1961, he was imprisoned in East Germany for six months, then released in a Cold War "spy swap" that also involved downed American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. He spent the bulk of his career as a member of the Swarthmore College faculty, as a professor of economics.

Frederic LeRoy Pryor^[2] and his twin brother Millard were born April 23, 1933, in Owosso, Michigan, to Millard H. and Mary S. Pryor,^{[citation needed]} but spent most of their childhood in Mansfield, Ohio, and graduated in 1951 from Mansfield Senior High School.^[1] He attended Oberlin College, where he received a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1955. He then spent a year in South America and Europe, which included three months living and working on a commune in Paraguay.^[1][2] He studied economics at Yale University, where he received a master's degree in 1957, then undertook a doctorate program.^[1]

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.^[3][4] 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 – unknown to Pryor – in violation of East German law, had just fled to West Germany.^[2][5] 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 in Hohenschönhausen prison.^[6][2][5] Pryor's cell was directly above an East German torture room.^[4] While jailed, Pryor was intensively interrogated,^[2] although not tortured.^[4]

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,^[2][7][8] as a result of negotiations conducted by James B. Donovan.^[2]

Pryor's involvement in this incident is dramatized as a subplot in the 2015 film Bridge of Spies starring Tom Hanks as Donovan.^[5] Actor Will Rogers depicted Pryor.^[9] Pryor was not consulted for the film, about which he commented, "It was good. But they took a lot of liberties with it."^[5]

Pryor received his doctorate from Yale in 1962, but his purported involvement in espionage and his imprisonment limited job opportunities in government—his preferred career—or industry.^[5][1] Pryor did not want to teach but went to work in academia, as an economics instructor at the University of Michigan until 1964 and as a staff research economist at Yale until 1967. He joined the economics faculty at Swarthmore College in 1967;^[2] "Swarthmore didn't care" about his imprisonment, Pryor recalled. "In fact, I think the students kind of got a kick out of having an ex-con teaching them". He became a full professor, and chaired the department for three periods in the 1980s.^[1] Pryor specialized in comparative economics;^[1][4] he retired from active work at the college in 1998, but remained a professor emeritus.^[2][1] Pryor published 13 books and more than 130 scholarly articles.^[1][10]

Pryor worked as an economic advisor in Ukraine and Latvia, was employed as a consultant to the World Bank in Africa, served as a Research Director to the Pennsylvania Tax Commission, and was a research associate at both the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, California, and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.^[1] He twice served as judge of elections, a local elected position in Pennsylvania.^[1] He won research grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Council of Soviet and East European Studies, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He served as a trustee at historically black colleges such as Miles College, Wilberforce University, and Tougaloo College.^[1]

On March 26, 1964, Pryor married Zora Prochazka, who was also an economist.^[2] They remained together until her death in 2008.^[1]

Pryor died on September 2, 2019, in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, where he had lived the final 11 years of his life. He is survived by his son and three grandchildren.^[1]

• Pryor, Frederic (1963). The Communist Foreign Trade System. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press. ISBN 9780262160087.
• Pryor, Frederic L. (1985). A Guidebook to the Comparative Study of Economic Systems. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. ISBN 0133688534.

• Pryor's resume
• Works by or about Frederic Pryor at the Internet Archive