Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  Perhaps never in American presidential history had youthful image and ailing reality stood in such contrast. While others at the inauguration wore top hats and heavy coats against the chill, Kennedy took the oath of office without overcoat or hat. With only an electric space heater to warm him in an open reviewing box, he watched the inaugural parade for more than three hours with his new vice president, Lyndon Johnson.

  The next morning’s papers around the world painted the portrait of Kennedy that he wanted. Columnist Mary McGrory of the Washington Evening Star compared him to a Hemingway hero. “He has conquered serious illness. He is as graceful as a greyhound and can be as beguiling as a sunny day.”

  Yet for all Kennedy’s success at shaping media coverage ahead of his inauguration, he would quickly discover he had less influence over the actions of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. When Kennedy woke up at about eight in the Lincoln Bedroom on his first morning in office, he found that atop the congratulatory cables from around the world was the offer of an inaugural gift from Moscow that would be the first gambit in U.S.–Soviet relations during his presidency. Given the right conditions, Khrushchev would release the two airmen of the RB-47 reconnaissance plane who had been sitting in a Soviet prison since their capture the previous summer.

  It would be an early introduction for Kennedy to the world of U.S.–Soviet intrigue that swirled around Berlin, a place where, he would quickly learn, even seeming victories often contained hidden dangers.

  The “Sniper” Comes In from the Cold

  JANUARY 4, 1961

  David Murphy, the chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Berlin base, was hungry for success stories. So his heartbeat accelerated when he heard that his most valuable asset—a Polish agent with the code name of Heckenschütze, or Sniper—had phoned the secret number he had been given for emergencies over the Christmas holidays. Certain that his cover had been blown, Sniper wanted to defect. “Are you ready to give me and my wife protection?” he asked.

  Murphy had warned the CIA station’s special Berlin switchboard operators that if they missed Sniper’s call on the number that was designated only for him “they would be on the next boat home.” The caller had only said he was passing on the message on behalf of a Herr Kowalski, a code that began a set of prearranged responses. Sniper had planned his defection well. First, he had deposited perhaps three hundred photographed documents—including the names of several hundred Polish agents and organizational tables—in Warsaw at a dead drop inside a hollowed-out tree trunk near his home. The CIA had already recovered the treasure trove.

  Now it was the early afternoon of January 4, and a senior CIA official who had flown in from Washington was waiting with other operatives at the American consulate in Berlin, where they had arranged that Sniper would come in from the cold. The consulate, which was open to civilians, rested conveniently beside the military section of a U.S. compound on West Berlin’s Clayallee. Murphy had already arranged for an impressive office, wired with microphones and recorders, where Sniper would have his first debriefing.

  Murphy would recall later that he and deputy John Dimmer felt even greater tension than was usual for such high-profile cases, partly because after two years of receiving letters from Sniper—sometimes valuable though often indecipherable—no one had yet met the mysterious agent nor knew who he really was. Beyond that, Murphy’s Berlin Operations Base—known in clandestine cables by its acronym BOB—had been fighting a losing battle in the world’s most important and extensive spy war in a city that hosted more foreign and domestic intelligence agents than any other place on Earth.

  The CIA also needed a victory after having just lost its only penetration agent inside Soviet military intelligence, Colonel Pyotr Popov, through either sloppiness or infiltration. And by any measure, the United States was being outspied by Soviet and East German services in Berlin. The problem, in Murphy’s view, was that the CIA was a relative newcomer to the espionage business and too often combined the fierce determination of the youthful with the dangerous naiveté of the uninitiated. In that respect, Murphy reckoned BOB reflected the optimistic if not always fully professional American character as the United States embraced a more global role. Berlin was a place where both Murphy’s spies and America in general had been doing a lot of growing up in the decade and a half since World War II.

  Murphy’s most insuperable competitive problem was recruiting local talent, and in that respect he had fallen far behind both Moscow’s KGB and the East German Ministry for Security. The sad truth was that it was far easier for the communists to infiltrate the West’s open society, to manipulate key individuals, and to plant agents than it was for the CIA to operate within Ulbricht’s strictly controlled and monitored East Germany.

  The CIA had evolved rapidly from the wartime Office of Strategic Services into America’s first peacetime civilian intelligence service. It had drawn together in a single agency both clandestine operations and intelligence analysis. By comparison, the KGB was both more experienced and more extensive. It was a proficient external and internal intelligence service that had been forged during the Russian Revolution, then battle-hardened through Stalin’s purges and war with Nazi Germany. Despite the Soviet Union’s distracting political power struggles, it had operated with stunning continuity and ongoing successes.

  Murphy’s most immediate concern was the increasing effectiveness of the East German secret police, which in just a decade and a half was already outperforming its predecessor, the Gestapo, as well as the KGB. A widening army of internal informants, a data-gathering system of German efficiency, and a broad network of agents in key Western positions of influence were allowing Ulbricht and Moscow to foil many CIA case efforts before they could even get started.

  With BOB already operating in full-alert status, a caller phoned at 5:30 p.m. saying that Kowalski would arrive in a half hour. The caller asked that Mrs. Kowalski be given special attention—the first indication that Sniper was not coming alone. At 6:06 p.m., a West Berlin taxi dropped off a man and woman, each of them carrying small bags. The chief of the station’s Eastern European branch watched briefly as they apprehensively walked toward the consulate entrance, and then quickly ushered them inside.

  As is so often the case in the spy business, matters were not what they had initially seemed. Sniper explained that the woman was not his wife but his mistress and that he would want asylum for her as well. He then asked that she be removed from the debriefing room because she knew him only as the Polish journalist Roman Kowalski. In fact, he said, he was Lieutenant Colonel Michael Goleniewski, who until 1958 had been the deputy chief of Polish military counterintelligence. He had acted as a double agent, reporting not only to the CIA but also to the KGB on anything the Poles might be hiding from their Soviet masters.

  The CIA would whisk him by military aircraft on the following day to Wiesbaden, West Germany, and then on to the United States. Goleniewski would provide the names of countless Polish and Soviet intelligence officers and agents. He would help unearth a spy ring at the British Admiralty, uncover George Blake as a KGB spy in British intelligence, and expose Heinz Felfe, a KGB agent who had served as chief of West German counterintelligence. Of potentially greater importance, Goleniewski pointed to the presence of an undiscovered mole burrowed deep in U.S. intelligence.

  There was only one problem: even before his briefings had ended, mental illness began to cloud Goleniewski’s credibility. He drank to excess and played Victrola records of old European songs at high volume. He would later insist that he was Tsar Nicholas II’s son, Alexei, the only surviving heir of the Romanov imperial family, and that Henry Kissinger was a KGB spy. The most senior CIA operatives would never agree upon whether he was a genuine defector or a Soviet provocateur.

  Kennedy was entering a world of intrigue and deception for which he had only inadequate preparation.

  4

  KENNEDY: A FIRST MISTAKE

  The United States Government was gratified by th
is decision of the Soviet Union and considers that this action of the Soviet Government removes a serious obstacle to improvement of Soviet–American relations.

  John F. Kennedy, at his first press conference as president, on the Soviet release of captured U.S. airmen, January 25, 1961

  Each day, the crises multiply. Each day, their solution grows more difficult. Each day, we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger. I feel I must inform the Congress that our analyses over the last ten days make it clear that, in each of the principal areas of the crisis, the tide of events has been running out—and time has not been our friend.

  President Kennedy, five days later, in his State of the Union Address, January 30, 1961

  THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW

  10:00 A.M., SATURDAY, JANUARY 21, 1961

  Nikita Khrushchev summoned the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Tommy Thompson, to the Kremlin at ten a.m., or two in the morning in Washington, where President Kennedy had not yet returned to the White House from his inaugural revelry.

  “Have you read the Inaugural Address?” Thompson asked. Khrushchev appeared weary to Thompson, as if he had spent the entire night awake. His voice was hoarse.

  Not only had he read the speech, Khrushchev said, but he would ask Soviet newspapers to print the entire text the following day, something no Soviet leader had done for any previous U.S. president. “If they will agree to do so,” Khrushchev said with the satisfied chuckle of someone who knew Soviet editors did as he dictated.

  Khrushchev then nodded to Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov, signaling that he should read Thompson the English version of an aide-mémoire that contained his inaugural gift for Kennedy: “The Soviet Government, guided by a sincere desire to begin a new phase in relations between the Soviet Union and the U.S., has decided to meet the wishes of the American side in connection with the release of two American airmen, members of the crew of the RB-47 reconnaissance airplane of the U.S. Air Force, F. Olmstead and J. McKone.”

  Kuznetsov said the Soviets would also transfer to the U.S. the body of a third airman that had been recovered after the plane was shot down.

  Khrushchev had carefully calculated precisely how and when to execute the offer, timing it on Kennedy’s first day in office for maximum impact to demonstrate to the world his goodwill for the new administration. However, he would at the same time continue the incarceration of U-2 pilot Gary Powers, who, unlike the RB-47 fliers, had already been convicted of espionage and sentenced to ten years after a show trial in August. The cases couldn’t have been more different in Khrushchev’s mind. For him, the U-2 incident was an unforgivable violation of Soviet territory that had undermined him politically and humiliated him personally ahead of the Paris Summit. He would exact a higher price for Powers at another time.*

  Back in November and just after Kennedy’s election, when asked by an intermediary how the Soviet leadership could best pursue a “fresh start” in relations, former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Averell Harriman had urged Khrushchev to release the airmen. In any case, Khrushchev’s thoughts had been running in that direction. The pilots had served their electoral purpose. They could now play a diplomatic role in jump-starting a more positive U.S.–Soviet relationship.

  The aide-mémoire said Khrushchev wanted to “open a new page in relations,” and that past differences should not interfere with “our joint work in the name of a good future.” Khrushchev said he would release the airmen as soon as Kennedy approved the draft Soviet statement on the matter and promised to prevent future aerial violations of Soviet territory and ensure the freed airmen would not be used for anti-Soviet propaganda. If Kennedy did not accept his terms, Khrushchev made clear he would try the two men on espionage charges—as he had done with Powers.

  Thompson improvised a response without seeking instructions from Kennedy, whom he would not disturb during his first night in the Lincoln Bedroom. Thompson said he appreciated the offer, but the U.S. maintained that the RB-47 had been shot down outside Soviet airspace. The U.S. thus could not accept wording in the Soviet draft that amounted to a confession of a deliberate incursion.

  Khrushchev was in a flexible mood.

  “Each side is welcome to maintain its own view,” he said. The U.S. could make whatever statement it wished.

  With that settled, Thompson and Khrushchev then engaged in one of their frequent exchanges on the merits of their respective systems. Thompson complained about a January 6 speech in which Khrushchev had portrayed the U.S.–Soviet struggle as a zero-sum game of class struggle around the world. Yet the two men tangled in an amicable manner that reflected an improved atmosphere of cooperation.

  Khrushchev joked that he would cast his vote for Thompson to stay on as ambassador under Kennedy, an extension Thompson wanted but had not yet received. The Soviet leader winked that he was unsure whether his intervention with Kennedy would be helpful.

  Thompson laughed that he also had his doubts.

  When Khrushchev’s offer to release the airmen reached Kennedy, the new president was suspicious. He asked National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy whether he was “missing a trick.” After weighing the dangers, however, Kennedy concluded he could not pass up the opportunity to bring the American airmen home and show such dramatic results with the Soviets in the first hours of his presidency. He would take Khrushchev’s offer.

  Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent Thompson the president’s positive response two days after Khrushchev made his offer.

  In the meantime, Khrushchev had served up a menu of other unilateral conciliatory gestures. As promised, Pravda and Izvestia ran the full, uncensored text of Kennedy’s inaugural address, including even the parts Khrushchev did not like. Khrushchev reduced the jamming of Voice of America radio. He would allow five hundred elderly Soviets to join their families in the U.S., he approved the reopening of the Jewish theater in Moscow, and he gave the green light for the creation of an Institute for American Studies. He would allow new student exchanges and would pay honoraria to American writers for their pirated and published manuscripts. The state and party media reported in a celebratory chorus on the Soviet people’s “great hopes” for improved relations.

  Thompson saw how delighted Khrushchev was at having taken the initiative in U.S.–Soviet relations. What he didn’t anticipate was how quickly Kennedy would come to dismiss Khrushchev’s gestures, partly on the basis of a misreading of one of Thompson’s own cables.

  It would be the first mistake of the Kennedy presidency.

  NEW STATE DEPARTMENT AUDITORIUM, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25, 1961

  Even as the thirty-fifth president of the United States prepared to trumpet the release of the U.S. airmen at the triumphant first press conference of his five-day-old presidency, he had also received new information from Moscow that made him question Khrushchev’s true motivations. Eager to be useful to Kennedy, Ambassador Thompson, in a cable designed to prepare the president for his first media encounter, had drawn attention to the inflammatory language of a secret Khrushchev speech on January 6: “I believe the speech should be read in its entirety by everyone having to do with Soviet affairs, as it brings together in one place Khrushchev’s point of view as Communist and propagandist. If taken literally, [Khrushchev’s] statement is a declaration of Cold War and is expressed in far stronger and more explicit terms than before.”

  What Thompson failed to tell Kennedy and his superiors was that there was nothing at all new in what Khrushchev had said. The Soviet leader’s so-called secret speech was little more than a belated briefing to Soviet ideologists and propagandists on the conference of eighty-one Communist Parties the previous November. The Kremlin had even published a shortened version two days before Kennedy’s inauguration in the party publication Kommunist, though that had gone unnoticed in Washington. Khrushchev’s call to arms against the U.S. in the developing world was less an escalation of the Cold War, as Thompson suggested, than it was the result of a tactical agreement with the Chinese to pr
event a diplomatic breakdown. Lacking that context, Kennedy concluded Khrushchev’s words were “game changing.” He thought he had found the clue to unlock, to paraphrase Churchill, the enigma inside the riddle of Khrushchev.

  Kennedy’s interpretation of the speech was prompting him to devalue and distrust all of Khrushchev’s conciliatory gestures.

  The president had initially responded to Khrushchev’s moves with positive signals of his own. The U.S. had lifted a ban on Soviet crabmeat imports, it had resumed civilian aviation talks, and it had ended U.S. Post Office censoring of Soviet publications. Kennedy had also ordered his most senior military officers to tone down their anti-Soviet rhetoric.

  Beyond that, President Kennedy was learning from his initial intelligence briefings that Moscow wasn’t as threatening an adversary as the candidate Kennedy had said it was. He had learned in ever greater detail how wrong his charges had been that the Soviets had created a “missile gap” in Moscow’s favor.

  Yet none of that altered Kennedy’s conviction that Khrushchev’s speech was profoundly revealing and aimed quite personally at him. Though that shift in thinking would significantly color his State of the Union message in five days’ time, Kennedy was not yet ready to volunteer his shifting thoughts on Khrushchev at his press conference—and no one asked. Reporters had not anticipated much news that day, since it was a sufficient sensation that Kennedy was hosting the first presidential press conference ever to be broadcast live on television and radio across the nation. It was a dramatic departure from Eisenhower’s practice of recording his press conferences and then releasing them only after careful editing.