Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  Knowing nothing of the Bolshakov back channel or the exchange of private letters with Khrushchev, Ellsberg asked Kaysen whether it wouldn’t be more effective for Kennedy to send a more private message to the Soviet leader about U.S. superiority? Why all the noise? Couldn’t Kennedy just send him the precise coordinates of Soviet ICBMs and perhaps enclose copies of satellite photos?

  However, that overlooked Kennedy’s desire for a highly public response to reassure his domestic and West European audiences. White House spokesmen invited top national reporters to Hot Springs and briefed them beforehand so that the speech’s importance wouldn’t be missed. “Berlin is the emergency of the moment because the Soviets have chosen to make it so,” Gilpatric said.

  We have responded immediately with our Western Allies by reinforcing our garrisons in that beleaguered city. We have called up some 150,000 reservists, increased our draft calls and extended the service of many who are in uniform….

  But our real strength in Berlin—and at any other point in the perimeter of the free world’s defenses that might tempt the Communist probes—is much more broadly based. Our confidence in our ability to deter Communist action, or resist Communist blackmail, is based upon a sober appreciation of the relative military power of the two sides. The fact is that this nation has a nuclear retaliatory force of such lethal power that any enemy move which brought it into play would be an act of self-destruction on his part.

  Gilpatric then provided previously undisclosed details on hundreds of intercontinental bombers, including some six hundred heavy bombers, which could devastate the Soviet Union with the help of highly developed refueling techniques. He spoke of land-based and carrier-based strike forces that “could deliver additional hundreds of megatons.” Gilpatric said the U.S. had tens of thousands of tactical and strategic nuclear delivery vehicles, with more than one warhead for each of them.

  “Our forces are so deployed and protected that a sneak attack could not effectively disarm us,” he said. Even after enduring a surprise attack, Gilpatric said that U.S. destructive power would be far greater than any enemy could muster, and that America’s retaliatory force would survive better than that of the Soviets because of its concealment, its mobility, and its hardened targets.

  “The Soviets’ bluster and threats of rocket attacks against the free world—aimed particularly at the European members of the NATO alliance—must be evaluated against the hard facts of United States nuclear superiority,” said Gilpatric. “The United States does not seek to resolve disputes by violence. But if forceful interference with our rights and obligations should lead to violent conflict—as it well might—the United States does not intend to be defeated” (italics added).

  Finally, Kennedy had called Khrushchev’s bluff.

  PALACE OF CONGRESSES, MOSCOW

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1961

  Given the drumbeat in Hot Springs, Virginia, Khrushchev, back in Moscow, began to worry that a Berlin conflict was coming.

  During a break in the ongoing Moscow Party Congress, General Konev presented Khrushchev with evidence that the Americans were preparing for war. Though Konev remained by title the Soviet commander in Germany, Khrushchev considered much of his job to be as liaison, and the general was in Moscow as a party delegate.

  Khrushchev would later recall that Konev brought him intelligence on exactly what day and hour the West would begin hostilities in Berlin. “They were preparing bulldozers to break down our border installations. The bulldozers would be followed by tanks and wave after wave of jeeps with infantry men.” Khrushchev believed that the action had been timed to coincide with the first days of his Party Congress.

  Though there is no reason to doubt that Khrushchev got word of Clay’s unauthorized tank maneuvers, he could blame the timing of what followed more on his bothersome ally, Walter Ulbricht. Upset by Khrushchev’s decision in Moscow to abandon the East German peace treaty, Ulbricht decided again to take matters into his own hands in East Berlin. This time, however, he would face an America willing to push back.

  The stage was set for the first and last direct U.S.–Soviet military confrontation.

  18

  SHOWDOWN AT CHECKPOINT CHARLIE

  I do not believe that you sent me here to live in a vacuum and I know that I can be of no real service if it is deemed wise to be extremely cautious in Berlin. I may add, too, that I did not come here to add to your problems and that I am gladly expendable.

  General Lucius Clay to President Kennedy, October 18, 1961

  In the nature of things, we had long since decided that entry into Berlin is not a vital interest which would warrant determined recourse to force to protect and sustain. Having for this reason acquiesced in the building of the wall we must recognize frankly among ourselves that we thus went a long way in accepting the fact that the Soviets could, in the case of East Berlin, as they have done previously in other areas under their effective physical control, isolate their unwilling subjects.

  Secretary of State Dean Rusk to General Clay, October 26, 1961

  DAHLEM DISTRICT, WEST BERLIN

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1961

  The evening that would trigger the year’s decisive crisis began innocently.

  E. Allan Lightner Jr., America’s top diplomat in West Berlin, hurried his wife, Dorothy, so that they would not be late for a performance of an experimental Czech theater company across town in East Berlin. She had read about the show in a local paper, and it seemed an inviting diversion after two months and nine days of unrelenting pressure after the Berlin border closure.

  It was crisp autumn weather in West Berlin’s smart Dahlem district, where the Lightners lived in a spacious villa that had been confiscated from a ranking Nazi after the war. Their neighbors were preparing for winter. Some had used the day to rake their lawns clean of brown and yellow leaves shed from beech and oak trees. Others were removing their heavy down comforters from storage to air them out across clotheslines and on balconies.

  Though Lightner had failed to anticipate the Wall, it had done his career no harm. No posting had a higher profile than one on the Cold War’s fault line. Like many State Department wives of the time, Dorothy embraced her husband’s career and its privileges; staff considered her pushy and overly demanding of their services. The Lightners had always savored their outings in the Soviet zone, where the socialist world’s top artists performed. However, since August 13, their visits had taken on greater symbolic value. East Berliners who recognized Lightner would often thank him just for showing up.

  Lightner knew there was a slim chance their journey across town would be more eventful than usual. That week, the so-called East German People’s Police, the Volkspolizei, or Vopos for short, had begun spot checking documents of Allied civilians. The move was not only in violation of the four-power procedures but it also contradicted Soviet instructions, most recently from Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, that the East Germans should change nothing at the border without Soviet sanction.

  Ulbricht had apparently approved the move from his position in Moscow, where he was fuming over the content of Khrushchev’s speech to the Party Congress. Though Kennedy had considered the Soviet leader’s address to be belligerent, Ulbricht had focused instead on Khrushchev’s decision to extend his year-end deadline for a war-ending peace treaty. In Ulbricht’s view, Khrushchev was back to his old habit of dithering over Berlin at East German expense. Ulbricht’s own speech three days later had called the treaty a “task of the utmost urgency.” Ulbricht needed the treaty to consolidate his August triumph by further expanding his control of East Berlin while isolating and demoralizing West Berlin.

  Yet words had never been enough with Khrushchev, so Ulbricht would unilaterally expand border inspections, figuring the West would complain but not resist after having accepted the far greater indignity of the border closure. In doing so, however, the East German leader was underestimating the determination of the newest U.S. factor on the ground: General Lucius
Clay.

  Together, Ulbricht and Clay would initiate a superpower confrontation that their masters in Moscow and Washington had neither wanted nor anticipated—though both adversaries would suspect the showdown was by the other side’s design.

  Encouraged by Clay, that week Lightner had instructed his U.S. Mission to resist the new East German procedures. He had prohibited his staff from submitting to the checks, and his own secretary had turned back her car just a day earlier rather than show her papers. Lightner and Clay were livid that British Prime Minister Macmillan had accepted the new controls without a peep of protest, which they considered another dose of British appeasement. London’s orders to local commanders were clear: after ceding the wall, this wasn’t a battle worth fighting.

  Clay disagreed. If Washington permitted the East Germans to interfere further with what had been Allied rights since 1945, Clay was convinced the U.S. would undermine already fragile West Berlin morale and erode what remained of Allied legal standing. Given his preparatory conversations in Washington, he also remained confident that Kennedy was more determined than his advisers to hold the line in Berlin. For the moment, however, his enemies had been pushing back because they sensed Clay lacked the influence with Kennedy that he had won with Truman.

  So for Clay, the situation presented a triple opportunity. First, he could demonstrate renewed U.S. resolve in Berlin. Second, he could restore the self-confidence of both U.S. troops and West Berliners. Finally, he could demonstrate to his opponents in Moscow and Washington that he had President Kennedy’s backing.

  There was only one problem: Clay himself was uncertain where his wavering president stood.

  Unlike Clay, Lightner did not consider himself a Cold Warrior, but that’s what he was. The fifty-three-year-old Princetonian derided as “parlor pinks” his fellow Ivy League intellectuals who wrote and spoke naively about “the great Russian experiment” of communism. He grumbled to Dorothy that a couple of months in the Soviet Union would change their tune fast enough. Experience had shaped those views. Lightner had been posted as a young man to Stalin’s Russia, until 1941, when he’d evacuated wartime Moscow with the embassy’s documents. After that, he had worked with anticommunist exiles in Scandinavia, shared bomb shelters in London with intrepid Brits, and had a hand in sculpting the postwar agreements that he was sorry had ceded so much of Europe to Soviet control.

  Lightner told friends that if Clay had been present on August 13, the U.S. military would have broken through the earlier barriers, and the East Germans would not have risked war to replace them. He bought into Clay’s argument that the U.S could not afford to retreat further, but he worried that Clay would not be able to overcome a far more bureaucratic U.S. structure in Berlin than the one he had faced in 1948. Lightner bridled at his own confusing, double reporting line—as the number two to both General Watson in Berlin and Ambassador Dowling in Bonn.

  As that night’s script would have it, East German police stopped Lightner’s Volkswagen sedan as it snaked through the first of the checkpoint’s three low red-and-white zigzag concrete barriers—two jutting out from the curbside to the left and another reaching in from the right. Following procedure, Lightner refused to show his papers to the East Germans and insisted on seeing a Soviet representative. Most often, the East German police would then wave American diplomats through. Under the new orders, however, the East German officer refused to let Lightner pass. Given it was Sunday, he said he could not reach a Soviet representative and then repeated his demand that Lightner show his papers or turn back.

  Again Lightner refused, and was now egged on by Dorothy, who lectured the East German on four-power rights from the passenger side of their car. For the next forty-five minutes, tempers flared, voices rose, and arguments raged, but still no Soviet official appeared. So Lightner concluded it was time to escalate. After sending an alert through to Clay from his special car phone, Lightner prepared to muscle through. Though he knew the Vopos had shoot-to-kill orders for countrymen trying to escape, he thought it was a safe risk that they would not shoot an American diplomat trying to enter. That would be an act of war.

  “Look,” Lightner said to the policeman by his window, “I’m sorry, but I’m going to assert my Allied right for us to enter any sector of Berlin.”

  He gunned his engine.

  “Get out of the way! We’re coming through!”

  Lightner jerked his car forward, forcing a couple of Vopos to leap aside. However, the vehicle could negotiate the tight, concrete maze only in slow motion. So an expanded group of Vopos on foot caught up to the car and stopped him again. This time they surrounded his vehicle.

  One shouted angrily: “You can wait here until morning for a Russian to show up! If he shows up even then!”

  In the background, Clay had begun moving the military pieces. He had ordered forward a platoon from the 2nd Battle Group to make its way the ten miles to Checkpoint Charlie from McNair Barracks in Lichterfelde with two armored personnel carriers, closely trailed by four M48 tanks mounted with bulldozers. To direct the operation, Clay and the Berlin military commander, General Watson, had retreated to the emergency operations center, known as “the bunker,” established for just such an event in the basement of the U.S. consulate on the Clayallee. Though built initially in 1936 as a subheadquarters for the Third Reich’s Luftwaffe, the building had served as Clay’s nerve center during the Berlin Airlift and it would do so again now.

  As the drama unfolded, U.S. provost marshal Lieutenant Colonel Robert Sabolyk monitored the scene at Checkpoint Charlie through binoculars from his white wooden military police shack a hundred yards away from the confrontation. With orders to keep matters under control until reinforcements arrived, the former collegiate boxer jumped into his staff car and sped forward around the first barrier, then steered wide around the second, screeching to a halt directly in front of Lightner’s Volkswagen. He nearly amputated the black-booted legs of several Vopos, who jumped back and screamed in protest.

  About then, four American tanks rumbled up to the thick white-painted borderline that designated the West Berlin limits. Another MP ran from the command shack to Dorothy Lightner’s door and politely suggested she leave the immobilized VW. She refused to budge from her husband’s side.

  So the MP retreated to the shack, only to return several minutes later. “I’m sorry, but General Clay orders Mrs. Lightner to get out,” he said.

  He added in a whisper to her husband, so as not to be overheard by the Vopos: “We have a project in which we don’t want Mrs. Lightner to be involved.”

  Once the MP had cleared her from the scene, two infantry squads of four men each unsheathed the bayonets of their M14 rifles and took up positions on either side of Friedrichstrasse. With the gun barrels of four U.S. tanks pointing directly at them, the Vopos pulled back. Lightner shifted into first gear and drove his VW slowly forward, flanked by the two U.S. Army squads. Having passed the last barrier and thus successfully penetrated communist territory, the platoon leader asked Lightner whether they should stop there.

  “No,” the diplomat said.

  It was the first time in postwar Berlin that a fully armed infantry unit from U.S. occupying forces had marched into the Soviet sector. To further establish the continued right of Allied free passage, Lightner drove two blocks into East Berlin to the next intersection, then turned the car around and started back—all the time escorted by his armed guard. With U.S. cannons trained on them, East German police held their positions.

  Safely back on American ground, Lightner prepared to drive through a second time to make his point. By this time, word of the confrontation had spread across Berlin. Reporters and photographers had gathered to track each move. With his heart beating through his chest, Albert Hemsing jumped into Lightner’s passenger seat. The German-born forty-year-old public information officer had worked for the Marshall Plan’s film unit in Paris after the war, making movies to support the European reconstruction effort. But he’d never been i
n this sort of action adventure. Vopos would later insist his breath smelled of alcohol.

  When East German police blocked Lightner’s path again, he waved out his window for the armed units to rejoin him. They escorted him through once more, and the East Germans again stood aside. In the meantime, the U.S. Mission’s political adviser, Howard Trivers, had telephoned Soviet headquarters to request that a Russian officer come to Checkpoint Charlie and set matters straight.

  By the time Lightner’s VW returned from its second round-trip, a Soviet representative had arrived. Following talks with the Vopos and the Americans, the Soviet apologized that the East Germans had failed to recognize Lightner’s seniority. So Lightner drove through a third time, on this occasion trailed by a second civilian car. The Vopos stood aside again, and it seemed that the U.S. victory was complete.

  The two U.S. vehicles then engaged in something of a victory lap, driving up Friedrichstrasse to Unter den Linden, East Berlin’s broad central boulevard, then turning left at the Brandenburg Gate, and then turning left again back to Friedrichstrasse. At about 10:00 p.m., a more senior Soviet official arrived, the deputy political adviser Colonel Lazarev. He apologized for the East German behavior, blaming it on the lack of facsimiles of Allied license plates from which they could judge which vehicles were to be checked. However, at the same time he angrily protested the U.S. “armed incursion” into the Soviet zone.

  Lightner and his wife had missed their theater date, but Clay congratulated them on their performance. The next morning Clay crowed to the press that the “fiction is now destroyed” that it was the East Germans who were responsible for preventing Allied access to East Berlin.