On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  In August 1971, during the United States’ efforts to end its involvement in the second Vietnam War, when Zhou Enlai was asked if he was interested in mediating in the Vietnam War, the Chinese premier replied: “We don’t want to be a mediator in any way. We were very badly taken in during the first Geneva Conference.”

  21

  BERLIN

  COLD WAR

  Life changed dramatically for the Toppings in 1956. The AP appointed me bureau chief in West Berlin, and I moved from London, where I had been preoccupied with monitoring the Asian conflicts, to coverage of the high tensions of the Cold War in central Europe. When we arrived in Berlin, it was a smoldering flashpoint in East-West relations. Under the terms of the post-war Potsdam Treaty, the city had been divided into four sectors: American, British, French, and Soviet. The Soviet sector had been converted by Moscow into East Berlin, capital of satellite East Germany. West Berlin was an isolated enclave lying within East German territory, garrisoned by eleven thousand American, French, and British troops and linked tenuously by some one hundred miles of rail and autobahn lines to West Germany. The Western sectors were under constant Soviet pressure, the rail and highway lifelines to West Germany, ceded to them under the Potsdam accords, being subjected to frequent Communist harassment. Nikita Khrushchev was demanding that the Western powers sign a German peace treaty under which they would surrender their sectors in Berlin and recognize the city as the capital of East Germany. With some crisis erupting almost daily either on the border of the divided city or along the corridor to West Germany, I was fortunate in leading a first-rate bureau in our coverage of the news. My deputy was Reinhold Ensz, a talented German-speaking American staffer. We were backed by a courageous crew of German reporters and editors who not only covered the news but also serviced the local newspapers with the AP international report.

  Despite all the alarms, our family loved living in West Berlin. We found the Berliners typically independent, spunky, and cultured. We rented a pleasant house in suburban Dahlem from a stolid German landlord. Under the eaves of his attic we found a pile of flags of many nations to be displayed in turn according to which power ruled the city. At the American school Susan and Karen became accustomed to tanks of the U.S. garrison with guns on the ready lumbering by, although Karen, who was five, had to be assured on the first day that she would not be shot by the riflemen patrolling the grounds if she acted badly. Excitedly, the girls welcomed yet another sister, Robin, born in the American military hospital. Audrey divided her time between caring for our brood, writing, and pursuing her sculpting career at the arts center, the Hochschule für Bilden Kunst.

  Free West Berlin was thriving with good hotels, casinos, nightclubs, and a vibrant cultural life. At the Schiller Theater we saw Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and at the Municipal Opera House applauded the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by the young Herbert von Karajan. We became friendly with Lotte Lenya, the glorious singer and actress who fled Nazi Germany in 1933 with her composer husband, Kurt Weill. Visiting our home, she recalled the early thirties when she performed in Berlin under the direction of Bertolt Brecht. At his theater she gave her first performances as Pirate Jenny in Threepenny Opera, the lyrics written by Brecht. It was a role that later made her a star in the United States.

  Under the four-power agreement, with my correspondent’s license plate, I could pass through Checkpoint Charlie into Soviet-controlled East Berlin. Much of my reporting was based on what I viewed in East Berlin and circumspect conversations with sources when certain that police were not eyeing me. The East Germans opened the rest of their country to visits by Western correspondents only once a year for the international trade fair in Leipzig. Apart from news gathering, we made precious use of access to East Berlin to enjoy the Brecht Theater, where we saw a performance of Mother Courage and other plays by the great dramatist. One evening I took Efrem Kurtz, the distinguished American conductor, who often appeared with orchestras in Europe, to the East Berlin Opera. While we were driving in the misty night back to the West, my car was halted at Checkpoint Charlie by a Vopo, one of the dreaded East German border police. I became very uneasy when the green-clad helmeted guard leaned through the window and shone his flashlight into our faces. At the time Berlin was experiencing one of its recurring East-West confrontations during which access routes were sometimes suddenly closed. Curtly, the Vopo demanded our passports. I said to him in German: “We have been to the opera. This is Efrem Kurtz, the famous orchestra conductor.” The Vopo, a young man, scanned Kurtz’s face again, pulled out a pad from his pocket, and handed it to Kurtz. “May I have your autograph?” he asked.

  Allied troops were on alert in Berlin during July 1958 as the on-and-off-again Soviet squeeze on the city tightened. East Germany had become increasingly aggressive in measures to stem the flow of tens of thousands of refugees from drab, depressed East Berlin into glittering West Berlin, most of them en route to free West Germany. Like the Allied commanders, I was always alert to the possibility that the Soviets might shut off indefinitely the access routes to West Berlin or let their East German puppets invade the Western sectors possibly touching off a war. To assess Communist intentions, I interviewed refugees, ventured into East Berlin to pick up gossip, and monitored the Eastern media. The United States was in tense confrontation with Walter Ulbricht’s regime over its detention of nine American servicemen whose helicopter had strayed over East Germany and had been forced down on June 7, 1958. Ulbricht was insisting on direct negotiations with Washington for their release, something the United States was refusing to do, since it would constitute official recognition of East Germany.

  Day after day, I pestered officials in East Berlin for an opportunity to see the American servicemen—five army soldiers, two artillery officers, and two helicopter crewmen—who were being held incommunicado somewhere in East Germany. Late in the night of June 30 the phone in my home rang and an unidentified voice said: “Please come to the Foreign Ministry in East Berlin tomorrow morning at 08:45.”

  When I turned up at the Foreign Ministry, I was greeted by a press spokesman, who said: “I am happy to advise you that your request to see your countrymen has been granted.” Not unexpectedly, as we talked, in came a bevy of other correspondents. Looking them over, I became aware they were all from Communist newspapers published in East Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Among them was John Peet, a former Reuters correspondent, who had defected to the East. We were led to four limousines whose windows were curtained. A leer was all I got when I asked our destination as we drove south on the autobahn. Hours later, drawing a curtain aside to peer out at road signs, I saw we were approaching Dresden, the city which had been firebombed by the Allies during World War II, and soon after we drew up before an old villa. With a pretense of elaborate courtesy the press officer asked me, since I was a special “guest,” to proceed ahead of the other correspondents. We were led into a bedroom on the upper floor of the villa, where abruptly I came face to face with the American prisoners, some of them only half dressed. Startled, they looked at me suspiciously. I pulled out my U.S. Defense Department accreditation card from a hip pocket and, holding it up, said: “Topping, Associated Press . . . may I see your senior officer?” Major George Kemper stepped forward. Before I could be silenced, I tipped him off that all the others were Communists, adding: “I suggest you and your group get together and decide whether you want to hold a press conference and, if so, what you would like to say.” The correspondents were then herded to a lower floor and seated before a battery of press cameras.

  The staging of the so-called press conference indicated that the East Germans were hoping the Americans would voice appeals to Washington to negotiate their release. When I asked permission to tell Major Kemper, who had been chosen by his comrades as spokesman, of the nature of the diplomatic exchanges, I was cut off by an East German official, who said: “No statements.” However, as the conference went on, pressing loaded questions, I managed to convey to the soldiers what was at st
ake, that in effect they were being held for ransom, the price being diplomatic recognition. “That’s enough for us,” Kemper said. “You can tell them that we’ll sweat it out as long as it takes.” There were shouts from the other solders: “You’re kidnappers . . . kidnappers.” The East Germans reacted by shutting down the conference. My story, filed on return to West Berlin, describing the Dresden propaganda fiasco was front-paged in non-Communist newspapers throughout the world. Neues Deutschland, the official newspaper of the East German regime, accused me of misrepresenting what had occurred. But interestingly, the Communist correspondents who witnessed the event did not in their accounts take issue with me.

  My Dresden encounter became the centerpiece of the week’s press section of Time magazine. Embarrassed by the widespread negative publicity of the Dresden affair throughout the world, the East Germans released the solders. My great reward came thereafter in the letters of thanks from the families of the servicemen.

  In March 1959, Khrushchev toured East Germany to shore up the satellite state. I observed him in East Berlin on March 7 on a podium before a staged torchlight rally of some 100,000 people during which he demanded the withdrawal of Allied troops from West Berlin. He had just come from Leipzig, where he warned of the perils of a new war and declared that the Soviet Union would never permit the liquidation of Communism in East Germany. For the monster Berlin rally, the East Germans had erected a speak-er’s platform in an open square. It was torn down shortly before the rally began. The Soviet secret police had Khrushchev speak instead from a more secure podium with his back against a building wall. The incident was one of many indications of how shaky was the Soviet grip on the people of East Germany. At the time, Khrushchev was keeping a tight cap on the territory. About 400,000 Russian troops were garrisoned there reinforced by an East German army and security police totaling some 270,000. Khrushchev apparently was taking precautions knowing that many in the restive East German population were waiting for an opportunity to rise up. Soviet lines of communication across East Germany were not entirely secure. I reported that it was unlikely that Khrushchev would risk war by seizing Allied access routes to West Berlin or by violent intrusion into the city. I thought the real danger to peace, observing Khrushchev’s tactical adventurism, lay not in any deliberate act risking war but rather in some miscalculation by him in dealing with the Western allies, particularly with the United States.

  Berlin turned out to be another way station in my career as a journalist. In the summer of 1959, the AP brought me home on leave and asked me to speak at a convention of newspaper managing editors on the West Coast. When Audrey, our four daughters, and I arrived in New York, there was a message from Manny Freedman, the foreign news editor of the New York Times, asking me to visit his office. I never made it to the AP convention. Freedman offered me a job, and I joined the Times. Since my rebuff by Cyrus Sulzberger in 1948 when posted in Nanking, I had not sought a job with the Times. I was happy with the AP, which I respected enormously. I went over to the Times for several reasons. It was evident that the Times had hired me to go abroad, where my main interest lay, and I felt the paper would give me more opportunity to write broader interpretive stories. Out of vanity I had also come to envy the greater attention and weight given by the governing decision makers to the reporting of special correspondents for the leading newspapers.

  Stalwart and ready as always, Audrey took our youngsters by train across the continent to Camrose, Alberta, her hometown, parked them with her sister, Sylvia Cassady, and went to Berlin alone to handle the onerous chore of packing up while I reported for work at the Times. So much for the life of the wife of a foreign correspondent. When she returned with our children to New York, we rented a beach house on Bell Island in Connecticut and re-discovered America after an absence of thirteen years.

  The Times had me tagged for posting abroad, but in keeping with the usual practice, I was to spend at least a year on the Metropolitan staff for familiarization, and also, spending the year on the Metropolitan staff was in fact a means of testing my skills. On my first day in the office I was summoned to meet with the managing editor, Turner Catledge. As I entered his office, Catledge, a courtly southerner, was chuckling. “Wes Gallagher just phoned to complain about us taking you from the AP,” he told me. Gallagher was then general manager of the AP. Catledge asked me how much the foreign news editor had arranged to pay me. He nodded, still chuckling, and gave me a raise on the spot.

  When I joined the Times, I told Freedman that I would go anywhere except Moscow. I had heard tales of how difficult it was to live in Moscow, and I thought going there with a big family would be too much of a burden. No correspondent with four kids had braved Moscow. My hesitations were overcome with the imposition of executive firmness and flattery, and I was earmarked forthwith for the Soviet capital. The paper wanted a Moscow correspondent with experience in covering Communist regimes. In preparation, I spent nine months on the Metropolitan staff on rewrite and as a reporter with very little time for Russian language lessons. The night before I was to leave for the Soviet capital in advance of my family, Freedman invited Audrey and me to dinner at his Manhattan home. The guests of honor were Catledge and his wife, Abby. Over drinks before dinner, the managing editor chatted about our assignment to Moscow and what life would be like there. “I would never send a correspondent with children to Moscow,” he told us soberly, as he leaned nonchalantly against the living room mantel-piece. Audrey looked up at him astonished. “But Mr. Catledge, we have four children,” she said, rather plaintively. Catledge frowned. “Well, I don’t want to hear about it,” he said with a shrug. The next morning I left for Moscow. Audrey and our daughters followed several weeks later.

  When I became foreign editor in 1966, after tours in Moscow and Southeast Asia, I sent no correspondent abroad without my full awareness of family circumstances. Also, none went to posts such as Moscow, Tokyo, or Peking without adequate language preparation, which meant for some as much as a year of study at Harvard or some other suitable school. These policies paid off handsomely in more productive staff performance.

  22

  MOSCOW

  THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT AND THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

  Working as a journalist in the Soviet Union was a consuming but rewarding experience. I was pitched into it on June 1, 1960, in fact, only a few hours before landing at the Moscow airport. Invited into the cockpit of the British airliner taking me to Moscow from London, I reported in my first dispatch what was entailed for a foreign aircraft to pass through the tight Soviet security air screen. On the following day, I attended the funeral of Boris Pasternak, in his little summer cottage surrounded by white birch trees in the artists’ community at Peredelkino close to the Soviet capital. Invited with several other correspondents into his dacha, I paused at the bier of the seventy-year-old poet, who lay in an open coffin in the drawing room surrounded by flowers. As the celebrated pianist Sviatoslav Richter played Franz Liszt’s “Consolation” and then a Tchaikovsky funeral dirge, KGB agents stood about in the room taking photographs of the mourners at this farewell to the 1958 Nobel Prize winner in Literature who had been a symbol of resistance to Soviet oppression. For accepting the Nobel Prize he had been vilified by the official Moscow Union of Writers as taking “thirty pieces of silver” from the West. His death on May 30 had been virtually ignored in the Soviet press, but more than a thousand people gathered outside his home on this day to render homage. The lips of many of them moved in unison as an actor from the Moscow Art Theater recited Pasternak’s poem Hamlet. The coffin was carried into the garden lifted by many hands over the heads of the massed mourners. I followed the coffin as it was borne to the burial place on the crest of the hill. Although I knew Pasternak only from his poetry and his magnificent novel Doctor Zhivago, I instinctively joined in the outpouring of grief. I could think of no sadder introduction to this nation that I was to live in and cover for the next three years.

  The pace of news coverage of the Sovi
et capital was demanding, intense, and highly competitive. I wrote at a battered desk in a tiny crowded office sitting opposite my fellow Times correspondent, initially Osgood Caruthers and later Ted Shabad. There was always a Russian guard at the gate of our shabby tenement building. During my first three months I covered an array of stories such as the trial in the Hall of Columns of Francis Gary Powers, the civilian pilot employed by U.S. intelligence who bailed out over the Soviet Union after his U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down on May 1 by a surface-to-air missile. Powers pleaded guilty to the charge of espionage and was sentenced on August 20 to three years’ imprisonment and seven years at hard labor.* Soon after there was the marvelous yarn of Strelka and Belka, the frisky dogs who orbited the earth seventeen times on August 20 aboard the second Soviet space ship, becoming the first living creatures to return safely from outer space. The epic space event took place the following spring, April 21, 1961, when I heard a broadcaster on Moscow Radio intone repeatedly: Govorit Moskva! Govorit Moskva! (“Moscow Speaks! Moscow Speaks!”). It was the call which Moscow Radio reserves for its most important announcements. On that morning, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to enter space. In a five-ton space ship named Vostok (“East”), Gargarin in 1 hour and 48 minutes had made a single orbit of the earth and landed in good shape. The flight, resounding evidence of the technological advance of Soviet society, brought a great outpouring of pride and happiness among the Russians. But the achievement also stood in glaring contrast to what was lacking in the everyday existence of the average Russian. Audrey recalls that on the day of the flight she could not find any eggs in the local open market or in the nearby shops. When I returned home from the Central Telegraph Office after filing a story on the epic space event, I walked up eight flights of stairs to our apartment because yet once again the elevator was not working.