The Berlin Wall (46 page)

Ulbricht had got some of what he wanted. Khrushchev had got almost all of what he wanted, and with far less trouble than he had feared. The West had shown it could live with a divided Berlin and a closed-off East Germany. Any more ambitious demands, Khrushchev realised, would risk conflict with the West and possibly war. He would have been aware, through the comprehensive network of Soviet intelligence operatives in West Berlin, that Clay had set up a special training ground where his troops practised knocking down lengths of cement-block wall identical to parts of the recently erected border barrier. Why provoke the Americans further?

Moreover, although the Americans had continued talks with Moscow even after 13 August, they had not given substantial ground. President Kennedy had written to Khrushchev recently, precisely regarding the ‘Ulbricht problem’:

This area would…be rendered less peaceful if the maintenance of the West’s vital interests were to become dependent on the whims of the East German regime. Some of Mr Ulbricht’s statements on this subject have not been consistent with your reassurances or even his own—and I do not believe that either of us wants a constant state of doubt, tension and emergency in this area, which would require an even larger military build-up on both sides.
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This may have resonated in the Kremlin. Another reason why Khrushchev had turned down the heat on the peace-treaty question (and was preparing to put it on the back burner) was that almost everything Ulbricht had done on his own initiative during the period between March and October seemed to underline the unwisdom of allowing the East German leader to determine questions of access to West Berlin. So long as the USSR retained a semblance of four-power involvement in Berlin, while at the same time supporting East German sovereignty in every other regard, it kept ultimate control. Otherwise
Moscow would be dependent on Walter Ulbricht’s will, and would essentially allow him to make policy.

Ulbricht himself had been in Moscow for over a week when the 22 October border incident occurred. Whether he was personally responsible for Allan Lightner’s avoidable detention at Checkpoint Charlie that evening, we do not know. However, whoever ordered the
Grepos
at the Friedrichstrasse crossing point to demand Lightner’s ID and then refuse to call a Soviet officer when the American diplomat so requested, must have known they were unleashing a crisis. They must have assumed themselves to be acting in the spirit of the leader’s desires.

There is absolutely no indication that Ulbricht, who was in constant contact with East Berlin from his Moscow residence, did anything to rescind that decision. The subsequent announcement by ADN that the East German authorities would continue to harass plain-clothes Allied personnel trying to cross into East Berlin must be seen as further evidence of a plan that had been authorised at the highest level.

On Wednesday 25 October, Clay decided to ‘test’ the East again. At 9.25 a.m. an American civilian official drove a car with US military number plates through the checkpoint. He refused, when challenged by the East Germans, to identify himself. Once more no Soviet officer appeared. An American officer then appeared and issued an ultimatum. If within an hour the East Germans did not allow the official through, a crossing would be achieved by force.
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At around ten a.m., American tanks appeared in the vicinity. Within a short time, ten had lumbered on to the Friedrichstrasse, where they sat with their engines running, fifty to sixty metres from the checkpoint. The two foremost tanks, as Soviet reports noted, were front-mounted with bulldozer blades. Also present were several jeeps and four armoured personnel carriers containing armed American soldiers.

At ten minutes to one, almost three and a half hours after the original incident, five jeeps, each containing four armed men, appeared. They escorted the civilian vehicle through into East Berlin, just as jeeps had accompanied Lightner the previous Sunday evening. Again, they turndled onward to a depth of about 200 yards before turning smartly and returning to the safety of the American sector. As they did so, two American air-force helicopters also flew over the area.

The tanks were withdrawn from Friedrichstrasse at two o’clock that afternoon, but all American forces in Berlin were placed on full alert. At the barracks in Lichterfelde, tanks were rolled out on to the parade ground. Armoured units were dispatched to the autobahn checkpoint at Dreilinden. Armoured personnel carriers were seen in the Tiergarten area, close to the border.

Within minutes, all this was known to Soviet Defence Minister Marshal Malinovsky and to Marshal Konev, who was also attending the XXII Congress in Moscow. Konev immediately ordered that a Soviet officer be stationed at the Friedrichstrasse crossing, opposite Checkpoint Charlie. The Soviet commandant, Colonel Soloviev, was instructed to receive his American counterpart.

The meeting between the commanders did little to defuse the situation. Soloviev could no longer simply dismiss things as a ‘misunderstanding’. In this publicly escalating situation, the Soviets could not disown the East Germans without losing face. Soloviev therefore stonewalled, complaining of American stubbornness and pointing out that uniformed Allied personnel were not subjected to demands for proof of identity. The checkpoint incident on 22 October was described as ‘an act of armed provocation that cries out to heaven’.
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During the afternoon of 25 October, several more American civilian vehicles were escorted on short tours of East Berlin. The East Germans did their best to make things awkward, in one case having a car drive at speed out of a side-street as an American vehicle and its armed escort—a jeep loaded with soldiers, plus two bayonet-wielding GIs on foot—were returning slowly to the checkpoint after their excursion. Only the swift reaction of one of the foot escort, who threatened to fire at the oncoming car’s windscreen, averted a contrived traffic accident that would have given the East Germans an excuse for restricting American drivers in East Berlin.

After night fell, the East Germans directed powerful searchlights at the Western observers, making it difficult for them to see what was happening on the Communist side. The Americans retaliated by mounting a hugely powerful searchlight of their own on one of their tanks. The 100,000-candlepower beam was so dazzling that the
Grepos
were forced to turn their backs on it and withdraw into their guard hut. They turned off their own searchlights shortly after.
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That evening, a further escalation occurred. Unidentified tanks were spotted, moving in the direction of Unter den Linden. They parked in a bombed-out lot within what had once been the Prussian Crown Prince’s palace. The next morning, a Russian-speaking CIA man with diplomatic cover was sent to check out the situation. He strolled up to one of the group of parked tanks. When a soldier popped up out of the turret, he asked him in German how to get to Karlshorst. The man stared at him in blank incomprehension. The American asked the same question in Russian. He was treated to a friendly grin and a stream of travel instructions.
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There was a total of thirty-three Soviet tanks parked a few hundred yards from Checkpoint Charlie. They stayed there all through 26 October.

This was the first time in years that Soviet armour had been seen inside East Berlin city limits. Even on 13 August, they had held back and allowed the East German NVA to man the potential front line within Berlin. Ten forty-ton American tanks and five armoured personnel carriers were now parked and at the ready in Friedrichstrasse. By now, the British had decided to show willing. According to Associated Press, they moved three anti-tank guns into position near the Brandenburg Gate, trained precisely on the area where the Soviet tanks were parked.

This was starting to look genuinely dangerous.

At three p.m., the Americans decided to test the border yet again.
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The tanks moved towards the border, three of them stopping right on the line with their big guns trained on East Berlin. Then an American civilian in a blue German-made Ford Taunus threaded his way through the barriers the East Germans had placed there in order to slow down traffic. He progressed on to the Eastern side until he was stopped and asked for his documents. The man refused. He sat in his car for some time. Then American provost-marshal Colonel Sabolyk appeared on the scene again. He walked through the border post, past the East German border police, and got into the Ford.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Sabolyk told the driver. The man turned the car around but halted just before they got back to the border line. By now the area was filled with hundreds of civilian spectators—the theatre being
played out here had become a kind of grim, high-stakes entertainment for the locals as well as the international press. Sabolyk leaned out of the car and asked for a Soviet officer to be summoned. He was told by a
Grepo
captain that such a decision was up to his superiors.

‘That means no,’ Sabolyk retorted. He indicated the American tanks, which were turning over their engines, and said: ‘We’re coming over. Tell that to your superiors.’

Three jeeploads of soldiers, wearing bullet-proof vests and with bayonets fixed, escorted the Ford Taunus into East Berlin. The jeeps peeled off once they reached the final barrier and the way was open. The car, containing the original driver and a Russian-speaking member of the provost-marshal’s staff, cruised around East Berlin for five minutes or so, then drove back to the checkpoint. The East Germans again stopped it and demanded documents. The Americans again refused.

‘This is the worst example of international impudence the world has known!’ bellowed an East German officer.

‘You seem to have forgotten,’ said the man from the provost-marshal’s staff, ‘that we do not recognise you, and God forbid we ever should!’

The driver then flashed his lights in a pre-arranged signal. The jeeps roared forward and escorted the car back into West Berlin. Meanwhile, a carload of British personnel had also driven through from East Berlin. They had waved their IDs and been allowed through. This was starting to look like a farce, albeit a deadly one.

As an older Berliner said to the
New York Times
: ‘If you could not act when they split the city on 13 August or when they cut you down to one crossing point, how are you going to make this stick?’

The Russians decided that they could not leave all the bullying to the Americans. The next morning, 27 October, after yet another American sally into East Berlin, they brought up ten tanks. Marshal Konev had spoken to Khrushchev. The leader had told his c.-in-c. to match the Americans exactly. But no shooting.

Once more, Khrushchev, with his strange and unnerving combination of impulsiveness and calculation, was engaged in both provocation and calibration. He was still involved in a major international congress, where he had launched another outspoken attack on Stalin—an attack that had led directly, while the congress was actually in progress, to the removal of
Stalin’s body from the mausoleum it had shared with Lenin’s since 1953. Khrushchev’s continuing denunciations of Stalin were unpopular with the Chinese, the Albanians and various other unreconstructed organisations and individuals within the movement.

As a show of strength to foes in West and East, Khrushchev had ordered the resumption of nuclear testing. A thirty-megaton device was detonated on 23 October, during the first week of the congress, and an even bigger test-bomb would be dropped from more than seven miles above the island of Novaya Zemlya in the icy Barents Sea on 30 October, just as the congress was winding down. The gigantic flash of the explosion could be seen 700 miles away, and a swirling mushroom-like pillar of smoke rose up to fifty miles into the atmosphere. Despite this ruthless show of world-destroying power, and despite his ruthless coup in dividing Berlin, Khrushchev’s alleged failure to confront the West remained a background issue. The Chinese delegation left before proceedings were over. The Sino-Soviet split—in which Beijing would accuse Khrushchev of ‘restoring capitalism’—would not become fully public for another couple of years, but it was pretty much a reality by October 1961.

While pursuing a reforming, anti-Stalinist line, Khrushchev could not afford to show weakness on a key foreign-policy matter like Berlin. Hence the tough stance, and his order to Konev to match power with power. The two sides did indeed end up with ten tanks each, facing each other across the border. The American tanks had their engines running, and the ones with the bulldozer blades were prominently displayed. American helicopters continued to ‘buzz’ the checkpoint and carry out observation flights over East Berlin, ignoring East German and Soviet protests.

Once Clay was told that the tanks were definitely Russian, he was quick to gain propaganda advantage. ‘The fact that Soviet tanks appeared on the scene,’ he declared at a press conference in Dahlem, ‘proves that the harassments which were taking place on the Friedrichstrasse were not those of the self-styled East German government but ordered by its Soviet masters.’

At the time, and for years afterwards, Clay’s view—that the Russians unleashed the Checkpoint Charlie confrontation in order to humiliate
America—was generally accepted. However, what now seems more likely, with the hindsight afforded by several decades and the gradual unearthing of documentary evidence, is something different. Once more, Khrushchev had found himself forced by Ulbricht’s aggressive anti-Western stance into going further than he wanted. Looked at this way, the decision to bring Soviet armour into East Berlin might be represented, not as an escalation, but as an attempt to claw back control of the crisis from the East Germans.

The stand-off lasted sixteen hours through a ‘chilly, drizzly night’.
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It was the first and only time during the Cold War that American and Russian forces faced each other at close proximity, fully armed and ready to fire if either side made a false move. Nor, as Defence Minister Malinovsky would carefully point out to the Central Committee, was the crisis necessarily localised. American and Western aircraft and warships were put on full alert throughout the world. During the Checkpoint Charlie confrontation, four missile-firing atomic submarines of the Polaris class were submerged in the North Sea, Malinovsky reminded his colleagues—each with sixteen warheads aimed at targets in the Soviet Union.
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