When he finished, he turned to Eisenhower in good humor and asked if he was satisfied now that the situation was understood. Eisenhower joined the others in general laughter and said that he was.
Four days later, Acheson reacted to the Soviet proposal. He rejected any notion that the U.S.S.R. should share responsibility with Turkey for the defense of the Straits. The Montreux Convention could be revised, but the United States considered the Turkish Straits a matter of concern to its own strategic interests. Turkish sovereignty remained inviolate. Acheson did not have to spell out the administration's willingness to risk war.
The Cold War started on August 19, 1946.
Confronted by American resolve—symbolized by the naval task force in the eastern Mediterranean, headed by the Roosevelt and the Missouri—the Russians backed down. A month later, their tone on the Dardanelles was much softer. And after Stalin's death in 1953, the question of even revising the Montreux Convention was abandoned.
A week after Acheson had sent his reply to Moscow, New York Times reporter James Reston noted a shift in Acheson's thinking. While the undersecretary had previously held out for a “liberal policy” toward the Soviet Union, “when the facts seemed to merit a change—as he seems to think they now do in the case of the Soviet Union—he switched with the facts.”
Three years later, as secretary of state, Acheson was dining with President Truman in his private railway car on the way back to Washington from the dedication of the new United Nations Building in New York. Acheson's wife mentioned Central Asia, and that got Truman started. The waiters cleared away the dishes, and the president began to lecture on the history of Central Asia, the various emperors, the military campaigns, the migrations of populations. Toward the end of his exposition, Mrs. Acheson said, “This is amazing. I wouldn't have been surprised that you would know all about the Civil War, but this part of the world, I've never known anyone who knew anything about it.”
The president laughed and then told her why: “Well, my eyesight isn't any good. I was never any good playing games where you have to see what you're doing at a distance. I couldn't hit a ball if it hit me in the nose, so I spent my time reading. I guess I read nearly every book in the library. I got interested in this part of the world, and ever since I've read everything about it I could find.”
But, as Acheson commented, what Truman discussed that late afternoon was not simply a collection of unconnected events but the reasons why these migrations took place, and the pressures that were pushing them. His depth of understanding about the region was worthy of a scholar.
For Truman, as for Acheson, the Turkish crisis meant that the Soviets would not be content with a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Instead, they were engaged in a policy of renewed expansion. Especially in the Mediterranean and the Near East, where the Russians had traditionally sought territory and access to the sea, and where the British had stood fast against them, the Americans must now be prepared to draw the line. With the Truman administration's willingness to risk a hot war over the control of the Dardanelles, the Cold War had actually begun.
Four years later, the American Mediterranean task force that had been established at the end of 1946 was designated the Sixth Fleet. With this action, the navy's emphasis on the Pacific, which had been the central priority in naval thinking since the 1930s, came to an end. Henceforth, American naval strategy, built around the revived nineteenth-century practice of stationing American warships in friendly ports, was focused on the containment of the Soviet Union—the ultimately successful foreign policy objective of the United States for the next forty-five years.
Cloak-and-Dagger in Salzburg
HARRIS GREENE
On a local level, as opposed to a geopolitical one, the Cold War had an even earlier start. In Austria, for example, tensions between the former allies flared almost from the moment World War II ended. With help from the local populace in early April 1945, the Soviets had overrun Vienna: The city would subsequently be divided into four occupation zones—American, British, French, and Russian—as was the entire country. Vienna, like Berlin, was deep in the Soviet zone. Austria would remain occupied for the next ten years; it was not until 1955, when the treaty making the entire country neutral went into effect, that the last foreign troops left.
Austria hardly resounded with the sound of music in those first years of peace. Much of the country, especially those areas that the Russians had shouldered through, had been savaged by war. People lived squalid lives on the edge. Former concentration-camp inmates and refugees from Eastern Europe—displaced persons, or simply DPs—roamed the landscape; as late as the mid-1950s, thousands still lived in camps. Former POWs searched for wives and families who had themselves become displaced in the final convulsions of 1945. Desperately poor people, hungry and jobless, were willing to do anything to survive. Only black marketers and spies seemed to thrive: Intrigue became a profession in a world unnaturally filled with unexplained kidnappings, disappearances, and murders. A movie such as The Third Man, set in Vienna in 1947, seemed less fiction than documentary.
Once the occupation armies arrived, they immediately put their intelligence organizations to work. Local Nazis had to be corralled. But another concern came to dominate: What was the other side up to? Already the Iron Curtain was descending. In Salzburg, Mozart's birthplace, the operations chief of the U.S. Army's 430th Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) was a man named Harris Greene. For him, the Cold War would begin on January 20, 1946. The story he related fifty years later may have had the flavor of a Keystone Kops misadventure, but it was a gambit in a game that was becoming increasingly hazardous and at times deadly.
The late HARRIS GREENE served with the CIC in postwar Italy and Austria and worked for the CIA from 1949 until his retirement in 1980. In the years that followed, he turned to—what else?—spy novels, publishing six.
THERE ARE DIFFERING OPINIONS on when the Cold War began. But I contend that it began, at least on a small scale, in occupied Austria. I can even cite the exact date: January 20, 1946, barely six months after the end of World War II. I was there, serving as operations chief for the U.S. Army's 430th Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) Detachment in Salzburg.
The key player in the historic drama that unfolded that Sunday was Richard Kauder, alias “Klatt,” a pudgy, forty-year-old Viennese with a weakness for women. Kauder was born Jewish but converted to Roman Catholicism to avoid the arrows and slings of Austrian anti-Semitism. A journalist, he had been recruited late in 1937 by the Abwehr, the military intelligence arm of the German armed forces, to run a small but important network of Russian spies.
When war between Russia and Germany came in June 1941, Kauder's agents at first supplied valuable information from Moscow. Kauder's network dissolved, however, after it passed on “bad” intelligence that helped set up a military disaster for the Germans in the great tank battle of Kursk in July 1943. After Kursk, the Germans never again seized the initiative against the Soviets, and they retreated until Berlin and the end of the war.
Kauder's military intelligence unit retreated with the rest of the German army, and when the hostilities were over, he ended up in the American zone of Austria. He fell into the hands of the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), the temporary American counterintelligence organization in Salzburg, which tried without success to debrief him.
One day in January 1946, the otherwise uncooperative Kauder came to his SSU contact officer and asked for protection. He said he believed he was being closely followed. SSU came to us at the 430th CIC Detachment and asked us to watch over Kauder.
Because of the heavy demands on our arrest and internment of German Nazis, SS, and Gestapo, we could spare only Special Agent George Milovanovich, from Ohio. George, who died in the 1950s, was a real linguist, speaking English, Russian, Hungarian, Serbian, Croatian, Czech, and Slovak. He was well over six feet tall but knew nothing about war or violence. He was hopeless at rounding up Nazis and was thus selected for “minding” Kauder. We ga
ve him a submachine gun without an ammunition clip and told him to arrest anyone who wanted to seize Kauder.
The evening of January 20, 1946, was clear and cold in Salzburg. Freshly fallen snow crunched beneath the tread of the few passersby in that defeated and occupied city. CIC got a phone call from Milovanovich asking for “backup.” He was in Kauder's apartment, and he didn't like what he saw from the window. Kauder's house, located in a blind alley, was filled with American MPs, he said. This was news to CIC. We rounded up people and sent two jeeps, carrying four CIC agents and four SSU personnel, to investigate. The vehicles arrived at Kauder's place at ten-thirty P.M.
Meanwhile, Milovanovich noted an MP, with pistol and 505 mp on his helmet liner, climbing the stairs to Kauder's flat. Despite the lack of bullets in his weapon, Milovanovich decided to brazen it out.
“Stop!” he shouted from the top of the stairs. The MP did not stop.
“Halt!” cried Milovanovich. The MP did not halt.
Finally, Milovanovich decided to use Russian. “Stoi!” he shouted. This time the “MP” stoi-ed, but he also pulled out his .45-caliber pistol, the one the Viennese called “pocket flak” because of its ammo size. Clearly unused to the weapon, he fired it wildly. At that moment, the two jeeps bearing the CIC and SSU men arrived. Firing, mostly into the air, became general. An “MP” tried to slug a CIC man with his pistol but was disarmed. In a matter of moments, four of the “MPs” were surrounded by armed CIC and SSU men, who marched them off to imprisonment. In front of Kauder's house sat a huge automobile, a Nazi Horch, with double rear tires four feet in diameter. Inside the Horch lay a preferred instrument of Soviet kidnapping: a Persian rug in which a captive could be wrapped so tightly that he could barely breathe, much less cry out.
At CIC headquarters, the prisoners were brought before me. Their “MP” uniforms revealed, under the U.S. jackets, the complete uniform of the Soviet army. In Salzburg, a Soviet repatriation mission with quasi-diplomatic status had been operating since the war's end. Although the Americans knew the mission was mostly NKVD (Soviet secret police), the Soviets spent most of their free time at the American PX buying food and giving no cause for worry. The four prisoners were from this mission.
How did the Soviets get ahold of American MP uniforms? An alcoholic American warrant officer had been virtually living at the Soviet mission, where he was fed vodka nonstop. Since he was the logistics officer for the MP battalion in Salzburg, getting uniforms from him was not difficult.
The Soviet group stood impassively in a circle around me. I informed the leader of the prisoners, Major Passichnik, that he and his little team would spend the night at the Landesgericht jail, a stopping point for hundreds of German SS and Gestapo officials en route to the U.S. internment camp. The major could not believe his ears.
“You are going to put us in a German cell?” he thundered. “Why don't you put us in an American CIC prison?”
Because, I told him, the Americans don't have their own prison or cells. This inability to match the NKVD cell for cell or prison for prison so shocked this gentleman that he and his fellow prisoners went meekly across the square to incarceration.
We still had not informed CIC's Vienna headquarters of the situation and the arrests; nor could we do so without also informing the Soviet high command: The CIC's communications landlines ran through the Soviet zone of Lower Austria to Vienna. The report on the prisoners would have to go to Vienna by air.
Salzburg had an airport. But it was a tiny one, commanded by a U.S. Air Force first lieutenant named Frost. We approached the lieutenant, who initially and promptly turned down the request to fly to Vienna as too dangerous. He said he would fly to the American airfield at Tülln, twelve miles outside Vienna. This was quite unsatisfactory, because it meant that any messenger could be intercepted by the Soviets outside Vienna. (The remaining officers at the Soviet mission in Salzburg had already advised NKVD headquarters near Vienna to intercept any reports on the prisoners.) We virtually promised Lieutenant Frost a medal for delivering top-secret info and convinced him to fly to Vienna and land at dawn on a street in an American ward. Frost had but one airworthy plane, a Piper Cub, which had been used as an artillery-spotting craft.
Fortunately, Frost hadn't arrived until after the war and was desperate to win any sort of a decoration. Once he agreed, we wrote up the report on the Soviet repatriation mission, placed it inside double envelopes (top-secret style), and delivered it to the lieutenant, who immediately took off in his Piper Cub.
Frost, recognizing the nonfighting character of his aircraft, headed north until he reached the Danube River and then flew “on the deck,” skimming the Danube's murky waters, often scarcely fifty feet above the river. In Soviet-con-trolled Lower Austria, two MiGs rose to demand why he was flying over Sovietcontrolled territory, but they did not dare dive down on the Piper Cub lest they find themselves in the Danube. So Frost flew on, landing the Cub at daybreak in an American-controlled ward on a street that had been cleared of traffic. He came to a stop a few feet from a wall. Frost hopped out, jumped into a waiting CIC jeep, and was conveyed to General Mark W. Clark, former military chief on the Italian front and now American high commissioner for Austria. Clark read the CIC report intently.
For three days, the Soviets in Vienna demanded the release of the prisoners in Salzburg, and for three days, Clark stalled, blasting his Soviet opposite number, Field Marshal Konyev, every time the latter called or came to a four-power meeting.
Back in Salzburg, Major Passichnik and the other three prisoners were raising hell, promising their Austrian jailer all sorts of dire consequences. The jailer was both happy to have the Soviets in his grasp and appalled by the threats he was hearing, and daily he sent a list of them to the Americans.
Finally, having toyed with the Soviet field marshal enough, Clark told me by telephone to let the prisoners go. I had the Soviets showered and shaved and brought before me in freshly pressed uniforms. In English and German, I dressed them down for breaking their diplomatic status and said I was returning them to the Soviet high command.
It was a quiet three-car convoy that set out for the “border” between the Soviet and the American zones with the Russians on board. The country road led north from Salzburg to Linz and thence east to the railroad bridge that crossed the Enns River into Lower Austria. Upon reaching the Enns, I explained to the Soviets that they must walk across the railroad bridge until they saw fellow Russians. We watched intently with binoculars what transpired. We noted that the NKVD had arrived with a Black Maria—a truck with a canvas top. As each of the Soviets, led by Passichnik, clambered into the truck, he was “aided” by a rifle butt to his posterior; 1946 was still the era of Stalin, and the penalty for failure was not a pleasant one.
After a brief stay in an interrogation center in Germany, Kauder was back in Vienna. The Americans never established which side he had been working for, but we felt he was a Soviet double agent who had purposely fed the Germans bad information about Kursk. Kauder was given his freedom by SSU and remained in Austria. American intelligence lost track of him in 1950.
As for Lieutenant Frost, he got a Bronze Star for his low-level flight in the Piper Cub. He had taken part in a war, after all—the Cold War.
The Great Rescue
DAVID CLAY LARGE
Vienna and Berlin were the only cities on the historical fault line of the Iron Curtain where the two sides directly confronted each other. While Vienna's potential for trouble diminished with time, Berlin's only seemed to grow. The divided city was 110 miles within the Soviet zone of occupation—and later, East Germany (or the German Democratic Republic, as it was formally called). Berlin became the most dangerous flash point of the Cold War. Its importance, early on, was strategic. If the Soviets could force their former allies to evacuate Berlin, demoralization and a sense of abandonment by the U.S. might spread over Western Europe. They might have achieved a principal goal: a unified, demilitarized, and politically nonaligned Germany—whi
ch, no doubt, would eventually drop into the Communist camp. Who could tell which countries might follow? It was the domino argument—or the “bandwagon effect,” as it was called then—but it made sense, perhaps more than it would in Asia in the 1960s. Later, as the two sides hardened their positions and allowed them to petrify, the importance of Berlin became largely symbolic, especially with the building of the Wall in 1961. But that is getting ahead of our story.
Another event played just as decisive a part in turning Berlin into a symbol. That was the Soviet blockade of the Western-held sectors of the city, severing all road, rail, and river access. The Soviets made the introduction of the Western deutsche mark in June 1948 as their excuse, but the underlying purpose was to prevent the establishment of a separate West German state. In this chess game, the response of Great Britain and the United States was to institute an airlift, utilizing the three twenty-mile-wide air corridors the Soviets had allowed them in 1945. So began “The Great Rescue,” as David Clay Large aptly calls it. The airlift has to be counted one of the genuine triumphs in the history of military logistics: By the time the Soviets backed down in May 1949, Western Allies had achieved a practically bloodless strategic victory. In just four years, they had transformed Berlin from Hitler's capital to the “outpost of freedom,” the symbolic bastion of the so-called free world.
DAVID CLAY LARGE is a professor of history at Montana State University and an authority on modern German history. Among his books are Where Ghosts Walked: Munich's Road to the Third Reich; Berlin; and, most recently, And the World Closed Its Doors: The Story of One Family Abandoned to the Holocaust. Large is working on a book about the 1936 Olympic games. He divides his time between Bozeman, Montana, and San Francisco.
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