Authors: Frederick Taylor
It was thanks in great part to these intrepid officers that, within hours of the commencement of ‘Operation Rose’, the Allied representatives in West Berlin knew two things: first, that East Berlin remained relatively peaceful; and second, that although Soviet units had moved into position in a ring around the capital, the emphasis of that ring seemed to be defensive rather than offensive. It was a curious, and often ignored, positive aspect of spying during the Cold War that it could calm fears as well as raise the alarm. In the days following the border closure, the West’s officers and agents in East Germany made a powerful contribution to peace by their ability to discern and analyse the Soviets’ intentions.
A cable from the British commander in Berlin, General Delacombe, during the evening of 13 August, informed London that two Soviet divisions had deployed defensively on the approaches to West Berlin, ‘to prevent any attempt by dwellers in border areas to make a mass break for West Berlin’.
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Similar assessments came from Allan Lightner and his French counterpart.
Journalists, including Robert Lochner, the American-born and German-raised director of RIAS, had also found their way into East Berlin
during the early hours and supplied eyewitness accounts of the tragic, sometimes chaotic scenes at the border crossings, especially the Friedrichstrasse station. Media people were also, being extremely mobile, and usually with fluent language skills and good local contacts, better able than the diplomats to judge the mood in both East and West Berlin.
Such free-ranging observers certainly enjoyed a huge advantage over the administration’s planners in Washington and at Hyannis Port. Dean Rusk, a farmer’s son from Georgia, had studied briefly in Berlin before the war, but had gained his political and military experience in wartime South-East Asia. He neither liked nor pretended to understand the Germans. Rusk was not alone in this within the cabal of decision-makers, and at that time the State Department’s European section, many of whose experts did understand (and even like) the Germans, was woefully understaffed.
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This information shortage, which caused a sensitivity gap, had serious short-term and even long-term effects on relations between America and the people of West Berlin and West Germany.
For years, the Western governments and media had poured scorn on the bogus Communist regime in the East, promoted the legitimacy of German reunification, and emphasised the whole of Berlin’s integral importance to the German nation. And now? To the disgust of the West Berliners, the sealing of the border—an obvious first step towards the final division of Germany—was greeted by cowardly silence on the part of the Western Allies, especially the Americans.
Secretary Rusk was personally responsible for the failure of the Western commandants to issue a formal protest on Sunday 13 August.
After their meeting with Mayor Brandt, the three Allied commanders in Berlin weighed up their options, in the presence of their military and civilian advisers. They discussed the wording of a strong statement that might be sent to Marshal Konev’s headquarters in Berlin-Karlshorst. The French commander, General Lacomme, then decided, to the exasperation of his colleagues, that he could not sign such a direct protest without consulting his government. With the French Foreign Ministry all but closed for August, like the rest of Paris, and the minister himself, the aristocratic M. Couve de Merville, absent on vacation, this promised to be a lengthy process.
By the afternoon, however, the commandants had agreed on a basic
text that they felt could be issued in the form of a press release. This would represent an indirect protest only, without mention of countermeasures, but it would give an early signal of solidarity with the West Berliners, just hours after the East German action, and would therefore be better than nothing. Lacomme agreed that he could go this far without recourse to his ministerial boss. The drafting of the press release began.
At this point, Ambassador Foy Kohler, Special Assistant to Dean Rusk for European Affairs, rang up from Washington and asked to speak with Allan Lightner. Although the line was an open one, and the call was therefore assuredly the subject of a Soviet/East German wiretap operation, they discussed events. Lightner mentioned almost as an afterthought that the Allied commandants planned to release to the press a general statement criticising the Soviets’ and East Germans’ outrageous activities. The minimum they could decently do, pending instructions.
Kohler asked Lightner to read the statement out over the line. America’s most powerful civilian representative in Berlin duly did so, for the benefit of Washington—and almost certainly the
Stasi
and the KGB. When he had finished, Kohler paused. ‘The Secretary is right here,’ he told Lightner in his gentle but insistent Ohioan tones. ‘Let me tell him about it.’
Lightner waited out a long, 3,000-mile silence. Finally Kohler returned. ‘I have strict instructions for you, Al,
not
to issue anything in Berlin,’ he said. ‘You can’t go ahead on this thing. Anything that’s going to be said on this issue has to come from the capitals. As a matter of fact, we’ll get something out ourselves this afternoon.’
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That ‘something’ was the super-cautious State Department press release. After authorising this, Rusk left the State Department to attend a baseball game.
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It is difficult to see why, apart from a control-freakish desire for first expression, Rusk’s more or less meaningless statement took precedence over an announcement by Allied representatives in Berlin. An informal protest on the part of the commandants, however non-binding and ultimately unthreatening, would have had the virtue of coming from officials who exercised military and political power on the spot, and might therefore have had a positive influence on West Berliners’ morale.
The result of Washington’s reluctance to commit would be a slow-burning outrage in both West Berlin and West Germany.
If the Western Allies swallowed this, the Germans’ reasoning went, what would they not swallow? It was a genuinely concerned question, which demanded a genuine and straight answer.
How to supply that answer?
The Berliners were fortunate that during that weekend help was at hand, in the shape of a very distinguished American opinion-former, Edward R. Murrow.
Fifty-three-year-old Murrow was America’s most famous broadcast reporter of the age, celebrated for his reports for CBS from beleaguered London in 1940 and for his war reporting from the European front after the D-Day landings. He had allowed himself to be poached by Kennedy earlier in 1961 for the directorship of the powerful United States Information Agency, spearhead of America’s Cold War information and propaganda offensive. Since assuming office, Murrow had travelled extensively to outposts of his worldwide information empire. On Saturday 12 August, the great broadcaster happened to arrive at his latest stop, Berlin.
Conspiracy theorists have since claimed that Murrow’s presence was no concidence, that it ‘proved’ the West—or at least the United States—had been forewarned of the sealing-off of the border. Somehow, the theory goes, the whole project had its origins in a secret compact between the American administration and the Soviet dictatorship, to create stability in Central Europe at the Germans’ expense. Why else would America’s foremost propagandist arrive at exactly that time, except to mastermind a propaganda smokescreen that would conceal the truth about Washington’s betrayal of Berlin?
The theory does not fit, as the actual events clearly show. Murrow’s host was the director of the American-backed RIAS radio station, Robert H. Lochner. Lochner had spent the whole night of 12—13 August back in his old journalistic role, observing events in East and West Berlin. Arriving, exhausted, back at RIAS headquarters, he picked up Murrow. They debated whether to change their plans for the day. Lochner had planned to invite an East Berlin student of his acquaintance to lunch, to
give Murrow an ‘inside’ view of things ‘over there’. With the border closed, this was no longer possible. Moreover, a cocktail reception had been arranged for Sunday evening, at which the recently appointed USIA chief would get the chance to meet local broadcasters and media personalities, and military and civil officials. Should they proceed with what seemed like a mere social frippery?
It was decided that the reception should go ahead as planned. Any sense of ‘fiddling while Rome burned’ would be more than compensated for by the useful contacts Murrow would make. And in any case, why should Walter Ulbricht come between Americans and their cocktails?
Meanwhile, Lochner took Murrow first to see the border-sealing process from the Western side—and also the crowds of angry, frustrated West Berliners. Then they crossed into East Berlin:
We went first to the Brandenburg Gate on the Western side and we went to the then still-existing rear wing of the famous Adlon Hotel, which is right next to the Brandenburg Gate and in there with the windows open we heard the noise of the hammers pressing the door, the street open, making a tremendous noise, and the angry shouts of the hundreds of West Berliners who were confronting them. And drinking warm, lousy East Berlin beer, Murrow reminisced a little about the many times before the war that he’d been in Berlin as a correspondent.
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For the two ‘Americans on the spot’, it was a busy afternoon. They later dropped by the home of the powerful German newspaper magnate, Axel Springer, a grand villa on the Bernadottestrasse in Wilmersdorf. Springer’s tabloid
Bild
was the largest-selling newspaper in the country and a powerful mouthpiece for post-Nazi conservatism.
Springer was critical of America’s passivity. ‘You’ll have to clear away the barricades,’ he asserted. ‘I’ll guarantee that the Russians will accept it.’ According to Lochner, the USIA director seemed shaken by Springer’s words.
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Murrow was now convinced that he must alert America to the situation in Berlin. He called his deputy at USIA, Donald M. Wilson, in Washington and exhorted him to crank up the message on the border closure. The world should know how ugly this business was, and soon.
Wilson complied—Murrow was the boss, after all—though like many others he still guessed that the measures were temporary. He was, however, struck by the passion that crackled down the transatlantic line. Murrow was usually unflappably professional in his judgements and behaviour.
Lochner asserts that Murrow also contacted the White House. Slipping away from the party at the High Commission, Murrow spoke with Kennedy from the phone in Lightner’s bedroom. He impressed on the President the seriousness of the situation. Not the danger of war so much, but the devastating impact that Western inactivity was having on West Berlin’s morale. Perhaps Murrow’s vivid, reporter’s analysis helped Kennedy to understand that he had to take firmer, or at least more definite, measures than Rusk and the State Department people had so far countenanced.
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All this would have been early Sunday afternoon in Hyannis Port, just after Kennedy had finished his round of phone calls with other members of the administration and had approved the (to many in Berlin) feeble initial response to the sector-border closure.
Meanwhile, three and a half thousand miles away, the reception at the US High Commission in Berlin continued. More news kept pouring in all the time. More protests at the border. A major speech by Mayor Brandt. The hurried arrival from Bonn of a key political ally of Chancellor Adenauer, West German Parliamentary President Eugen Gerstenmaier. Lochner was approached by a senior West German intelligence official, with whom he was on friendly terms. The man was seriously upset. He drew Lochner into a corner. ‘Isn’t it incredible?’ he wailed. ‘Our secret services are so lousy that we had no inkling of this coming on!’
Mayor Brandt had spent the afternoon touring the sector border. At 6.30 p.m., he addressed the West Berlin city parliament. After reciting with great precision and in full detail all the ways in which the East Germans’ action in sealing off East Berlin gratuitously transgressed against existing agreements, he called for urgent Western action to reverse these illegal acts. He referred to ‘powers of darkness’ and to ‘the barrier fence of a concentration camp’ that was being erected through the heart of the city. He requested Allied reinforcements for the beleaguered half-city he ruled. The mayor called, in effect, for moves that would show
the East that America took what was happening seriously, and that the West meant business. None the less, Brandt also called for restraint from his own population. No provocations. No giving the enemy excuses to become even more blatant in their outrages.
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Brandt’s speech was that of a passionate politician and a great leader-in-the-making. He expressed the Berliners’ fury and pain, while at the same time channelling their feelings away from futile revenge. It was, however, also the speech of a man with very little actual power. As a mere mayor, words remained his only weapon.
Kennedy was said to have been irritated by the speech as it was summarised to him in his next ‘check-list’. ‘Look at this!’ the President bristled, reading Brandt’s demands. ‘Who does he think he is?’
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Monday 14 August dawned. The Eastern side of the sector border still teemed with East German military activity. The big anxiety, for the Ulbricht regime, was that large numbers of ‘border-crossers’ might attempt to flood across into the West. For whatever reason, they didn’t. The numbers sneaking across the border through thinly guarded areas and as yet unblockaded features such as canals and lakes amounted, by comparison with what the Communists had feared, to a mere trickle.