Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  Ulbricht had rebuilt the street as Stalinallee to be a showcase for the power and capabilities of communism, “the first socialist road of Germany,” whose purpose was to provide “palaces for the working class.” So construction crews from 1952 to 1960 produced a long row of eight-story apartment houses of Stalinist monumental architecture. Wartime rubble was transformed into high-ceilinged flats with balconies, elevators, ceramic tiling, marble staircases, and—a luxury at the time—baths in every apartment. To provide a sufficiently wide and long promenade for military marches, builders made Stalinallee a tree-studded, six-lane, ninety-meter-wide, two-kilometer-long highway. Stalinallee would provide the backdrop for the annual May Day parade, but it also was where the 1953 workers’ uprising gained its momentum.

  Only a short distance from Stalinallee, Donner described the quiet desperation of East Berliners who had passed through the ravages of World War II, only to again land on the wrong side of history. The Raabe-Diele was one of the oldest pubs in Berlin and sat on Sperlingsgasse, a narrow lane still blocked in the middle by wartime ruins that had not yet been cleared. It had but three tables, a counter, benches along the walls, and simple, tattered chairs.

  Its sole proprietor was Frau Friedrich Konarske, who at age eighty-two had worked the same counter for fifty-seven years. She would not discuss her own sad life but happily gossiped with Donner about her clientele, all men save for a loud, forty-something woman who drank straight shots while recounting her stomach operations.

  “Ten drunk men are better than one half-sober female,” complained Konarske.

  Two middle-aged men strummed their guitars at a table by the window and sang sentimental songs. As they prepared to go home, a man with a hunchback shouted a last request in a squeaky voice. “Play ‘Lili Marlene.’ That’s what I want to hear. And then I’ll buy you a round.”

  The best-dressed man in the bar—and who, because of that, the others took to be a Communist Party member or state security officer—shouted his objection on the grounds that the song had been one of Hitler’s favorites.

  The hunchback protested angrily, “What’s that? ‘Lili Marlene’ was played during the war in order to give voice—yes, to give voice—to the longing of the soldiers for peace. It has nothing to do with Nazism.” And it was true: the song had been written during World War I by soldier Hans Leip while he marched to the Russian front from Berlin. The hunchback protested that even Americans and Englishmen loved the song.

  “It’s a universal melody!” shouted an inebriated young man who looked like he had been a boxer, with his large, flat nose, cauliflower ears, and finger-tips yellowed by nicotine. One after another of Frau Konarske’s clientele sounded agreement in an uprising against the supposed communist, but the singers still hesitated, as momentary acts of defiance could result in long jail sentences.

  Made courageous by drink, the boxer type threatened the well-dressed man: “If you don’t want to listen, you can leave.” He then began to sing the first verse alone, after which the two musicians joined in, followed by one additional voice after the other, until the entire pub joined in song around the still-silent man in the dark suit who sipped his beer.

  Frau Konarske offered drinks on the house. She then took Donner aside and showed him the small, framed text behind her on the wall, dating from World War II. It read: WE SHALL GO TO OUR DEATH JUST AS NAKED AS WE CAME INTO THE WORLD.

  She asked the stranger, “Do you think that anyone will take over my place after I am gone? All my relatives and friends are in West Germany. Do you think they want to come over to East Berlin and work in a little hole from ten in the morning until two at night?”

  She answered her own question: “No.”

  9

  PERILOUS DIPLOMACY

  The American government and the president are concerned that the Soviet leadership underestimates the capabilities of the U.S. government and those of the president himself.

  Robert Kennedy to Soviet military intelligence agent Georgi Bolshakov, May 9, 1961

  Berlin is a festering sore which has to be eliminated.

  Premier Khrushchev to U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn E. Thompson Jr., at the Ice Capades in Moscow, on the goal of the Vienna Summit, May 26, 1961

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  TUESDAY, MAY 9, 1961

  Wearing a white shirt, a loosened tie, and a jacket held casually over one shoulder, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy bounded down the steps of the side entrance to the Department of Justice on Pennsylvania Avenue and extended his hand to Soviet spy Georgi Bolshakov.

  “Hi, Georgi, long time no see,” the attorney general said, as if reacquainting himself with a long-lost friend, though he had met him only briefly once, some seven years earlier. Beside Kennedy stood Ed Guthman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who had become his press officer and sounding board. Guthman had arranged the unprecedented meeting through the man who had delivered Bolshakov by taxi and stood beside him, New York Daily News correspondent Frank Holeman.

  “So shall we take a walk?” Kennedy asked Bolshakov. The attorney general’s casual manner was disarming, considering the unconventional, unprecedented contact he was about to initiate. He nodded to Guthman and Holeman to stay behind as he and the Russian spy walked onto the Washington Mall in the spring evening mist, making small talk about the magazine that Bolshakov had been editing that day.

  At Kennedy’s suggestion, the two men sat on a secluded patch of lawn, the air scented with freshly mowed grass. The U.S. Capitol stood in the background to one side, and the Washington Monument to the other, with the Smithsonian Castle’s front gate directly behind them. Lovers on early evening walks and small groups of tourists looked to the rain clouds above, which threatened a storm.

  Bolshakov described his closeness to Khrushchev, and he offered himself up as a more useful and direct contact to the Soviet leader than Moscow’s ambassador to the United States, Mikhail Menshikov, whom Bobby and his brother had come to consider a clown.

  Bobby told Bolshakov that his brother was eager to meet with Khrushchev, and that he hoped to improve communication in the run-up to their first meeting so that the two sides could get the agenda right. The attorney general said he already knew about Bolshakov’s links to some of Khrushchev’s top people and was confident he could play that role, if he was willing. “It would be great if they receive information firsthand, from you,” Bobby said. “And they, I believe, would have a chance to report it to Khrushchev.”

  After a roll of thunder, Kennedy joked, “If a bolt of lightning kills me, the papers will report a Russian spy killed the president’s brother. It could trigger a war. Let’s get away from here.” They first walked briskly and then accelerated to a run to escape the downpour, regrouping in the attorney general’s office after riding up in his private elevator. They removed their wet shirts and continued their conversation while wearing undershirts and sitting in a tiny room with two armchairs, a refrigerator, and a small library.

  Thus began one of the most unique and—even years thereafter—only partially understood relationships of the Cold War. From that day forward, the attorney general and Bolshakov would communicate frequently—during some periods as often as two or three times monthly. It was an exchange that went almost entirely unreported and undocumented, an omission Robert Kennedy would later regret. He never took notes at the meetings, and reported on them directly and only orally to his brother. Thus the Bolshakov–Kennedy exchanges can be reconstructed only imperfectly through a dissatisfying Robert Kennedy oral history, Soviet records, Bolshakov’s partial recollections, and the memories of several others who were involved at one point or another.

  President Kennedy had approved of his brother’s initial meeting with Bolshakov without consulting or advising any of his chief foreign policy advisers or Soviet experts. That reflected the Kennedys’ increased distrust of his intelligence and military apparatus following the Bay of Pigs, their penchant for clandestine activities, and their desire to put the pie
ces in place as carefully as possible for a smooth summit meeting.

  For Khrushchev, however, Bolshakov was more of a useful pawn than a significant player. On a complex chessboard, Khrushchev could deploy Bolshakov to draw out Kennedy without revealing his own game. From the beginning, the structure of the exchange provided the Soviet leader with an advantage. President Kennedy could learn from Bolshakov only what Khrushchev and other superiors had provided him to transmit, while Bolshakov could extract much more from Bobby Kennedy, who so intimately knew the president and his thinking.

  Bolshakov was just one of two channels Khrushchev was working to reach Kennedy in early May, and while top Soviet officials engaged in both to their maximum benefit, their U.S. counterparts knew only about the formal contact made five days earlier. It was then that Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had telephoned Ambassador Thompson with Khrushchev’s belated response to Kennedy’s letter of two months earlier, inviting the Soviet leader to a summit meeting.

  Gromyko had apologized to Thompson that Khrushchev himself could not personally transmit his interest. The Soviet leader was leaving Moscow for yet another trip to the provinces to put the pieces in place for his October Party Congress, and he would not return until May 20. But speaking on Khrushchev’s behalf, Gromyko said the Soviet leader “deplored the fact that discord” had grown between the two countries over the Bay of Pigs and Laos.

  Reading carefully scripted language, Gromyko said, “If the Soviet Union and the U.S. do not consider that there is an unbridgeable gulf between them, they should draw the appropriate conclusions from this, namely that we live on one planet and therefore ways should be found to settle appropriate questions and build up our relations.” Motivated by that end, Gromyko said Khrushchev was now ready to accept Kennedy’s invitation to meet, and believed “bridges have to be built which would link our countries.”

  What Gromyko wanted to know from Thompson was whether the Kennedy invitation “remains valid or is being revised” after the Bay of Pigs. Though Gromyko had posed the question politely, its underlying message was an impertinent one. He was asking whether Kennedy still dared meet with Khrushchev after having so badly shot himself in the foot in Cuba.

  With that, Khrushchev’s approach to President Kennedy had entered its third stage. The first had been Khrushchev’s initial flurry of efforts to meet Kennedy directly after the U.S. election and during his first days in office. The second had been Khrushchev’s withdrawal of interest following the new president’s hawkish State of the Union message. Now Khrushchev was again eager to meet and press his perceived advantage over a now weakened opponent.

  Thompson put down the phone and prepared a cable. He immediately concluded that if the president wished to reverse a perilous worsening of relations, the dangers of agreeing to such a meeting were far outweighed by its necessity. Thompson followed his 4:00 p.m. secret telegram reporting on his conversation with Gromyko with a similarly classified message to Secretary Rusk that urged the president to grasp Khrushchev’s extended hand. Critics would argue that Kennedy was walking like wounded prey into a bear trap, but Thompson suggested Kennedy reveal publicly that he had issued the invitation to Khrushchev long before the Bay of Pigs, and that the Soviet leader was only now responding.

  Thompson then laid out his arguments in favor of the meeting:

  The very prospect of such a summit would prompt the Soviets to take a “more reasonable approach” to issues such as Laos, nuclear testing, and disarmament.

  A face-to-face meeting would be the best place for Kennedy to influence crucial decisions of the October Party Congress that could set the stage for the superpower relationship for years to come.

  Because Mao Tse-tung opposed such U.S.–Soviet consultations, Thompson suggested the “mere fact of meeting will exacerbate Soviet–Chinese relations.”

  Finally, showing the world a willingness to talk directly to Khrushchev would influence public opinion in a way that would make it easier for Kennedy to maintain a strong U.S. position in favor of defending West Berlin’s freedoms.

  Despite the negative turn in relations with Moscow, Thompson also argued that Khrushchev had not fundamentally altered his desire to do business with the West, nor had he abandoned his foreign policy doctrine of peaceful coexistence. Thompson often worried about being labeled by his Washington critics as a Khrushchev apologist, but he nevertheless argued that the Soviet leader had not initiated confrontation with the West in the Third World but had merely taken advantage of U.S. setbacks in Cuba, Laos, Iraq, and the Congo.

  However, too much was at stake for Kennedy to agree to such a summit without preconditions that would more thoroughly test Soviet intentions—and avoid further foreign policy mistakes. Through diplomatic probes, Kennedy wanted to determine whether Khrushchev genuinely wished to improve relations.

  After a day of reflection, Kennedy responded cautiously to Thompson through Rusk. Rusk wanted the ambassador to tell Khrushchev that the president “remains desirous” to meet the Soviet leader and hoped they could still do so by early June in Vienna—the Soviets’ preferred location. Kennedy regretted, however, that he couldn’t yet make a firm decision but would do so before Khrushchev returned to Moscow on May 20.

  What followed were the conditions.

  Most important, Rusk cabled that Thompson should relay to Khrushchev that the chances for such a summit weren’t good if the Soviets didn’t change their approach to the ongoing conflict in Laos. The Geneva talks were beginning the following week, and Kennedy wanted to end the war and achieve a neutral Laos. But the Soviets had been stalling in Geneva while fighting escalated.

  Special envoy Averell Harriman, who was leading the U.S. delegation in Geneva, had reported to Kennedy that he doubted Khrushchev was ready to accept a neutral Laos because the “commies in Geneva are full of confidence and appear utterly relaxed about achieving their goals in Laos.” The Soviets, Harriman said, were maneuvering to put the U.S. in the unacceptable position of having to attend the conference before they had an effective ceasefire, hardly the actions of a country that would engage usefully in a summit meeting.

  Beyond that, Rusk told Thompson that “for domestic political reasons,” the president wanted Khrushchev to provide some prospect that he would work toward Kennedy’s goal of achieving a nuclear test ban agreement during their Vienna talks. Furthermore, the president wanted assurance that any public statement in Vienna would exclude reference to Berlin, a matter he was unprepared to negotiate.

  Three days later, President Kennedy was test-driving the same message via his brother as RFK sat in his undershirt with Bolshakov at the Justice Department.

  It suited Bolshakov fine that Bobby had picked May 9—a national holiday in Moscow—for their first, furtive meeting. Though it was just another workday in Washington, the Soviet embassy’s staff had the day off to celebrate the sixteenth anniversary of the Nazi defeat. That served Bolshakov’s purpose of concealing even from his closest comrades the ultrasecret conduit to President Kennedy that he had established.

  In going forward with the contact, Bolshakov had disregarded the opposition of his nearest superior, the station chief, or rezident, at the embassy for Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. For Bolshakov’s boss, it was unthinkable that a mid-level Soviet agent would establish the most important U.S.–Soviet intelligence back channel imaginable. In meeting with Robert Kennedy, Bolshakov was connecting with a man who was at the same time the president’s brother, his closest confidant, and his attorney general, thus overseeing all the counterintelligence activities of the FBI.

  What gave Bolshakov the confidence to nevertheless pursue such a high-level mission was the sanction of the Soviet leader himself through Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei, editor of the newspaper Izvestia and Bolshakov’s friend. Adzhubei had recommended Bolshakov to Khrushchev as someone who could help counsel him when he was planning his first trip to the U.S. in 1959. (Until shortly before then, Bolshakov had loyally served Marshal G
eorgy Zhukov, the decorated war hero and defense minister whom Khrushchev had purged.)

  What followed was Bolshakov’s new posting to the U.S. under the cover of embassy information officer and editor of the English-language Soviet propaganda magazine USSR. It would be Bolshakov’s second tour in Washington, the first having come under cover as correspondent for the news agency TASS from 1951 to 1955.

  For a cloak-and-dagger operative, Bolshakov had an unusually high profile as Washington society’s favorite Soviet. He was a gregarious, hard-drinking bon vivant with wisps of black hair, piercing blue eyes, and a central-casting Russian accent. His friends and acquaintances included a number of Kennedy circle insiders: Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee; reporter Charles Bartlett, who had introduced the president to his wife, Jacqueline; the president’s chief of staff, Kenny O’Donnell; his special counsel, Ted Sorensen; and his press secretary, Pierre Salinger.

  However, Bolshakov’s most important link to Kennedy had been Frank Holeman, a Washington journalist who had been close to Nixon and was now trying to ingratiate himself with the Kennedy administration. With his six-foot-eight frame, Southern accent and manners, deep voice, and ever-present bow tie and cigar, he was known by colleagues as “the Colonel.” Though only forty years old, Holeman was a Washington fixture, having covered presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and now Kennedy. He knew Washington was all about contacts, and he had them everywhere.

  Bolshakov had worked Holeman as an unpaid informant from the time they had met at a 1951 Soviet embassy lunch in the American correspondent’s honor. Holeman had endeared himself to the Kremlin by blocking a National Press Club effort to ban Soviet journalists from membership in response to the Czech government’s jailing of the entire Associated Press bureau in Prague. Explaining why he had done so, Holeman joked that the club should be a place where all parties could “swap lies.” He then went even further on behalf of the Soviets, landing club membership for a new Soviet press officer, an individual likely to be a spy.