It was one of the most evocative of Cold War rituals. On Glienicke Bridge linking East and West Berlin, prisoners held by each side would be exchanged, sometimes in a blaze of publicity. In 1962 it was the US spy plane pilot, Gary Powers, swapped for a Soviet spy. In 1986 it was the Russian dissident, Anatoly Shcharansky, released to the West as part of a larger exchange. They were moments of uneasy co-operation between the bitter enemies of the two blocs. And always, lurking in the background, was the man who had made the deal possible — Wolfgang Vogel, the East German lawyer, confidant of top politicians and officials in both Cold War camps.

To his defenders he was the man whose skill and contacts alleviated some of the cost of Cold War division. The former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt said after his death was announced: “We all owe him gratitude and respect.” To others, he was the cynical exploiter of human misery, earning substantial fees from the desperation of individuals persecuted by the communist authorities or families divided by the Iron Curtain. And he faced prosecution after the collapse of the East German regime in 1989, winning an appeal against an initial conviction on charges including blackmail and perjury.

Vogel was born the son of a Catholic schoolteacher in what was then the German territory of Silesia in 1925. He served briefly in the Luftwaffe during the war, and after the expulsion of the Germans from Silesia as it became part of Poland in 1945 his family settled in Jena in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, where he began his legal studies. He worked briefly for the Justice Ministry of the new East German state, and also began to co-operate with the Stasi secret police after declining to join the flood of refugees who headed for West Germany after the suppression of protests against the East German regime in 1953. He fostered excellent political contacts in East Berlin too, with rising stars such as the future Communist Party leader Erich Honecker.

At the same time Vogel managed to persuade his Western contacts that he was not a diehard communist ideologue, but rather someone who knew how to get things done. He had begun to make contacts and earn credibility in the West after qualifying in 1957 to practise law in West as well as East Berlin. This put him in an ideal position to facilitate deals where the ever more rigid separation of East and West made more formal co-operation so difficult.

After the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 Vogel became the main point of contact between governments which had no diplomatic relations and could not be seen to be dealing directly over sensitive issues. Vogel helped to negotiate the so-called “buying free” of more than 30,000 East German political prisoners by West Germany. It was a complex and unsavoury arrangement whereby a price was put on each prisoner’s head. The prisoner was released to the West once the Government in Bonn had transferred the agreed sum into an account run by the churches, from which East Germany could purchase Western goods and materials.

Acting as a private lawyer, Vogel also assisted in the emigration of more than 200,000 East German citizens to the West. The hard currency fees earned from grateful West German families thereby reunited helped to enrich Vogel. He cut an unusual figure with his Western suits and expensive watches, cruising around East Berlin in a gold-coloured Mercedes and schmoozing around the Western diplomatic circuit as an East German lawyer with friends in the highest of places.

Such friends enabled Vogel to negotiate his most public successes in deals that went well beyond relations between the two sides. In 1962, when he was only in his mid-thirties, he arranged for the exchange of the US spy pilot Gary Powers shot down by the Russians in 1960, for Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy caught in New York. Later the British businessman and agent Greville Wynne was swapped for the KGB agent Gordon Lonsdale. There were more than a hundred other international deals, most famously the release of Shcharansky on Glienicke Bridge in 1986 and the simultaneous exchange of several other prisoners. This involved negotiations with several countries including the US, continuing until the last minute on the bridge itself. It ended in a moment of high Cold War drama when the diminutive Shcharansky embraced Vogel before leaping across the bridge’s central line from East to West.

Vogel was unable, however, to work his magic three years later in 1989 as communist regimes began to implode. He was sent to negotiate the return home of thousands of East Germans camped in the West German embassy in Prague as they demanded emigration to the West. But Vogel, like the East Berlin regime he served, was powerless as communist authority in Europe collapsed and the rigid borders, which had provided him with so much employment, disappeared.

Vogel retired to Bavaria. But in the mid-1990s he faced prosecution on charges including forgery and claims that he had put pressure on East Germans to emigrate, so that their properties could be given to favourites of the Communist regime. He was convicted on several counts in 1996 and given fines and a suspended prison sentence, but appealed successfully.

“I was neither a resistance fighter nor a good Samaritan,” Vogel once said of his role. “My ways were not white or black. They had to be grey — otherwise it would not have worked.” It was indeed a grey zone in which Vogel so successfully operated, the zone in which Cold War opponents dealt with each other while formally living in hostile separation. To his critics, the deals over political prisoners meant he profited from communist oppression. To his admirers, his deal-making skills made Cold War Europe a slightly less hazardous and oppressive place.

He is survived by his second wife, Helga Fritsch. He had a son and a daughter with his first wife, Eva Anlauf, from whom he was divorced in 1966.

Wolfgang Vogel, lawyer, was born on October 30, 1925. He died on August 21, 2008, aged 82