Part 1 (1/2)

FREDERICK KEMPE.

BERLIN 1961.

FOREWORD.

by General Brent Scowcroft.

Historians have scrutinized the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 far more deeply than they have the Berlin Crisis that preceded it by a year. For all the attention given Cuba, however, what happened in Berlin was even more decisive in shaping the era between the end of World War II in 1945 and German unification and Soviet dissolution in 1990 and 1991. It was the Berlin Wallas rise in August 1961 that anch.o.r.ed the Cold War in the mutual hostility that would last for another three decades, locking us into habits, procedures, and suspicions that would fall only with that same wall on November 9, 1989.

Furthermore, there was a special intensity about that first crisis. In the words of William Kaufman, a Kennedy administration strategist who worked both Berlin and Cuba from the Pentagon, aBerlin was the worst moment of the Cold War. Although I was deeply involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis, I personally thought that the Berlin confrontation, especially after the wall went up, where you had Soviet and U.S. tanks literally facing one another with guns pointed, was a more dangerous situation. We had very clear indications mid-week of the Cuban Missile Crisis that the Russians were not really going to push us to the edgea.

aYou didnat get that sense in Berlin.a Fred Kempeas contribution to our crucial understanding of that time is that he combines the aYou are therea storytelling skills of a journalist, the a.n.a.lytical skills of the political scientist, and the historianas use of decla.s.sified U.S., Soviet, and German doc.u.ments to provide unique insight into the forces and individuals behind the construction of the Berlin Walla”the iconic barrier that came to symbolize the Cold Waras divisions.

History, sadly, does not reveal its alternatives. However, Kempeas important book prompts the reader to reflect on crucial questions regarding the Berlin Crisis that raise larger issues about American presidential leaders.h.i.+p.

Could we have ended the Cold War earlier if President John F. Kennedy had managed his relations.h.i.+p with Nikita Khrushchev differently? In the early hours of Kennedyas administration, Khrushchev released captured U.S. airmen, published Kennedyas unedited inaugural address in Soviet newspapers, and reduced state jamming of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty broadcasts. Could Kennedy have more fully tested the possibilities behind Khrushchevas conciliatory gestures? If Kennedy had handled Khrushchev differently at the Vienna Summit in June 1961, would the Soviet leader have balked at the notion of closing Berlinas border two months later?

Or, on the other hand, as some have suggested: Is it possible that we should regard Kennedyas acquiescence to the communist construction of the Wall in August 1961 as the best of bad alternatives in a dangerous world? Kennedy famously said he preferred a wall to a wara”and there was reason for him to believe that was the choice that confronted him.

These are not small matters.

Another question raised by Kempeas compelling narrative is whether we, in the richness of time, will look at the Cold War in a more nuanced manner than we do now. The Cold War was not simply a standoff against a Soviet Union bent on world domination; it was also driven by a series of self-reinforcing misinterpretations of what the other side was up to. Berlin 1961as account of the miscommunication and misunderstandings between the United States and the Soviet Union at that crucial time makes one wonder whether we might have produced better outcomes if we had more clearly understood the domestic, economic, political, and other forces compelling our rivalas behavior.

These are speculative questions no one can answer with any certainty. Yet raising them in the context of Berlin 1961 is as relevant to navigating the future as it is to understanding the past. In the pages that follow are clues and cautions that are particularly timely during the first term of another young and relatively inexperienced commander in chief, President Barack Obama, who, like Kennedy, came to the White House with a foreign policy agenda aimed at engaging our adversaries more skillfully and understanding more reliably what lurks beneath seemingly intractable conflicts in order that we can better solve them.

I know something of such issues and challenges myself from our days dealing with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev when I served as national security advisor in President George H. W. Bushas White House.

The two U.S. presidents who dealt with Gorbachev, Bush and Ronald Reagan, were very different men. However, both understood that nothing was more important in trying to end the Cold War than the ways in which they engaged their Soviet counterpart.

Despite labeling the Soviets athe evil empire,a President Reagan engaged in five summit meetings with Gorbachev and worked on countless concrete agreements that helped build confidence between the two countries. As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and we worked to bring about German unification, President Bush resisted all temptations to gloat or breast-beat. He consistently sent the message that both sides were winning if the Cold War was ending. Through exercising such moderation in his public statements, he also avoided giving Gorbachevas enemies in the Soviet Politburo any excuse to reverse his policies or remove him from office.

One can do no more than speculate on how either a tougher or a more conciliatory Kennedy might have altered history in the Berlin of 1961. What is indisputable is that the events of that year put the Cold War back into a deep freeze at a time when Khrushchevas break with Stalinism might have presented us with the first possibilities of a thaw.

Berlin 1961 walks us through those events in striking new ways, exploring the fundamental natures of the two primary countries, the U.S. and the Soviet Union; the domestic political environments of each; and the crucial roles played by the personal characters of their leaders; and then weaving it all into the equally important stories of how those factors played out in the countries of East Germany and West Germany themselves.

It is an engaging, richly researched, thought-provoking book that captures the drama of the time in its colorful Berlin setting, and challenges the conventional wisdom regarding one of the Cold Waras most decisive years.

INTRODUCTION:.

THE WORLDaS MOST DANGEROUS PLACE.

Who possesses Berlin possesses Germany, and whoever controls Germany controls Europe.

Vladimir Lenin, quoting Karl Marx.

Berlin is the most dangerous place in the world. The USSR wants to perform an operation on this soft spot to eliminate this thorn, this ulcer.

Premier Nikita Khrushchev to President John F. Kennedy at their Vienna Summit, June 1961 CHECKPOINT CHARLIE, BERLIN.

9:00 P.M., FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1961.

There had not been a more perilous moment in the Cold War.

Undaunted by the damp, dangerous night, Berliners gathered on the narrow side streets opening up onto Checkpoint Charlie. The next morningas newspapers would estimate their numbers at about five hundred, a considerable crowd considering that they might have been witnesses to the first shots of a thermonuclear war. After six days of escalating tensions, American M48 Patton and Soviet T-54 tanks were facing off just a stoneas throw from one anothera”ten on each side, with roughly two dozen more in nearby reserve.

Armed with only umbrellas and hooded jackets against the drizzle, the crowd pushed forward to find the best vantage points toward the front of Friedrichstra.s.se, Mauerstra.s.se, and Zimmerstra.s.se, the three streets whose junction was Berlinas primary Easta”West crossing point for Allied military and civilian vehicles and pedestrians. Some of them stood on rooftops. Others, including a gaggle of news photographers and reporters, leaned out of windows from low-rise buildings still sh.e.l.l-pocked from wartime bombings.

Reporting from the scene, CBS News reporter Daniel Schorr, with all the drama of his authoritative baritone, declared to his radio listeners, aThe Cold War took on a new dimension tonight when American and Russian fighting men stood arrayed against each other for the first time in history. Until now, the Easta”West conflict had been waged through proxiesa”German and other. But tonight, the superpowers confronted each other in the form of ten low-slung Russian tanks facing American Patton tanks, less than a hundred yards aparta.a The situation was sufficiently tense that when an American army helicopter flew low overhead to survey the battleground, an East German policeman barked in panic, aGet down!a and an obedient crowd dived facedown on the ground. At other moments an odd calm reigned. aThe scene is weird, almost incredible,a said Schorr. aThe American GIs stand by their tanks, eating from mess kits, while West Berliners gape from behind a rope barrier and buy pretzel sticks, the scene lit by floodlights from the eastern side while the Soviet tanks are almost invisible in the dark of the East.a Rumors swirled through the crowd that war was upon Berlin. Es geht los um drei Uhr (aIt will begin at three in the morninga). A West Berlin radio station reported that retired General Lucius Clay, President Kennedyas new special representative in Berlin, was swaggering toward the border Hollywood-style to direct the first shots personally. Another story spread that the U.S. military police commander at Checkpoint Charlie had slugged an East German counterpart, and that both sides were aching for a gunfight. Still another account had it that entire Soviet companies were marching toward Berlin to end the cityas freedom once and for all. Berliners as a breed were drawn to gossip even in the worst of times. Given that most of those in the crowd had experienced one if not two world wars, they reckoned just about anything could happen.

Clay, who had commanded the 1948 airlift that had rescued West Berlin from a three-hundred-day Soviet blockade, had set the current confrontation in motion himself a week earlier over an issue most of his superiors in Was.h.i.+ngton did not consider a war-fighting matter. Breaking with established four-power procedures, East German border police had begun to demand that Allied civilians present their ident.i.ty cards before driving into the Soviet zone of Berlin. Previously, their vehiclesa distinctive license plates had been sufficient.

Convinced from personal experience that the Soviets would whittle away at the Westas rights like soft salami unless they were confronted on the smallest of matters, Clay had refused, and ordered armed escorts to muscle the civilian vehicles through. Soldiers carrying bayoneted rifles and backed by American tanks had flanked the vehicles as they wound their way through the checkpointas low, zigzag, red-and-white-striped concrete barriers.

At first, Clayas tough approach was vindicated: the East German border guards backed down. Swiftly, however, Khrushchev ordered his troops to match U.S. firepower tank for tank and to be prepared to escalate further if necessary. In a curious and ultimately unsuccessful effort to preserve deniability, Khrushchev ordered that the Soviet tanksa national markings be obscured and that their drivers wear unmarked black uniforms.

When the Soviet tanks rolled up to Checkpoint Charlie that afternoon to halt Clayas operation, they transformed a low-level border contest with the East Germans into a war of nerves between the worldas two most powerful countries. U.S. and Soviet commanders operating out of emergency operation centers on opposite sides of Berlin weighed their next moves as they anxiously awaited orders from President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

While leaders deliberated in Was.h.i.+ngton and Moscow, the American tank crews, commanded by Major Thomas Tyree, nervously sized up their opponents across the worldas most famous Easta”West divide. In a dramatic nighttime operation on August 13, 1961, just two and a half months earlier, East German troops and police with Soviet backing had thrown up the first, temporary barriers of barbed wire and guard posts around West Berlinas 110-mile circ.u.mference in order to contain an exodus of refugees whose flight had threatened the continued existence of the communist state.

Since then, the communists had fortified the borderline with concrete blocks, mortar, tank traps, guard towers, and attack dogs. What the world was coming to know as athe Berlin Walla was described by Mutual Broadcasting Networkas Berlin correspondent Norman Gelb as athe most remarkable, the most presumptuous urban redevelopment scheme of all timeathat snaked through the city like the backdrop to a nightmare.a Journalists, news photographers, political leaders, spy chiefs, generals, and tourists alike swarmed to Berlin to watch Winston Churchillas figurative Iron Curtain a.s.sume a physical form.

What was clear to them all was that the tank showdown at Checkpoint Charlie was no exercise. Tyree had seen to it that his men had loaded their tanksa cannon racks that morning with live ammunition. Their machine guns were at half-load. Beyond that, Tyreeas men had mounted several of their tanks with bulldozer shovels. During exercises in preparation for just such a moment, he had trained his men to execute a plan to drive into East Berlin peacefully through Checkpoint Charlie, which was permitted under four-power rights, then crash through the rising Berlin Wall upon their returna”daring the communists to respond.

To produce warmth and steady their nerves, the U.S. tank drivers gunned their engines to a terrifying roar. However, the small Allied contingent of 12,000 troops, only 6,500 of whom were Americans, would stand no chance in a conventional conflict against the 350,000 or so Soviet soldiers who were within striking distance of Berlin. Tyreeas men knew they were little more than a trip wire for an all-out war that could go nuclear faster than you could say Auf Wiedersehen.

Reuters correspondent Adam Kellett-Long, who had rushed to Checkpoint Charlie to file the first report on the showdown, worried as he monitored an anxious African American soldier manning the machine gun atop one of the tanks. aIf his hand shook any harder, I feared his gun would go off and he would have started World War III,a Kellett-Long thought to himself.

At about midnight in Berlin, or 6:00 p.m. in Was.h.i.+ngton, Kennedyas top national security advisers were meeting in emergency session in the White House Cabinet Room. The president was growing increasingly nervous that matters were getting out of control. Just that week, Kennedyas nuclear strategists had finalized detailed contingency plans to execute a nuclear first-strike on the Soviet Union, if necessary, which would leave Americaas adversary devastated and its military unable to respond. The president still had not signed off on the plans and had been peppering his experts with skeptical questions. But the doomsday scenarios colored the presidentas mood as he sat with National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Lyman Lemnitzer, and other key U.S. officials.

From there they phoned General Clay over a secure line in his map room in West Berlin. Clay had been told Bundy was on the line and wished to speak with him, so he was taken aback when he heard the voice of Kennedy himself.

ah.e.l.lo, Mr. President,a Clay said loudly, abruptly ending the buzz behind him in the command center.

aHow are things up there?a Kennedy asked in a voice designed to be cool and relaxed.