The newsboy Jimmy Bozart knew that the two schoolteachers who lived on the sixth floor of 3403 Foster Avenue in East Flatbush were reliable tippers: Every week, they paid him 50 cents for their Brooklyn Eagle subscription; actual cost, 35 cents.

For a 13-year-old boy in 1953, that was money worth having. “You didn’t get too many 15-cent tips,” Mr. Bozart, now 75, said this week.

One of those weekly tips would turn out to be the stuff of a vivid chapter in the history of international espionage gimmickry and dramatic Cold War diplomacy that played out across the front pages more than a half-century ago, and that is the subject of an acclaimed film by Steven Spielberg released last month.