Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  And much worse was to follow.

  8

  AMATEUR HOUR

  The European view was that they were watching a gifted young amateur practice with a boomerang, when they saw, to their horror, that he had knocked himself out. They were amazed that so inexperienced a person should play with so lethal a weapon.

  Dean Acheson on President Kennedy’s handling of the Bay of Pigs debacle, June 1961

  I don’t understand Kennedy. Can he really be that indecisive?

  Premier Khrushchev to his son Sergei after the Bay of Pigs

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  FRIDAY, APRIL 7, 1961

  It was Washington’s first warm spring day, the perfect temperature for President Kennedy’s walk through the White House Rose Garden with Dean Acheson. Kennedy had suggested the stroll, explaining to Acheson that he sought urgent advice. Though Kennedy was in shirtsleeves, Acheson remained his usual formal self in jacket and bow tie. In his only compromise with the weather, Acheson removed his bowler hat and carried it under his arm.

  Truman’s former secretary of state expected Kennedy to quiz him on his ongoing NATO or Berlin projects, as he was leaving the next day for Europe to brief the Allies on his progress. Instead, Kennedy said he had another, more pressing matter in mind. “Come on out here in the garden and sit in the sun,” the president said, directing Acheson to a wooden bench, then settling down beside him. “Do you know anything about this Cuba proposal?”

  Acheson conceded he did not even know there was a Cuba proposal.

  So Kennedy sketched out the plan that he said he was considering. A force of 1,200 to 1,500 Cuban exiles—soldiers who had been trained by the CIA in Guatemala—would invade the island. They would be supported by the air cover of B-26 bombers, also flown by exiles. The idea was that once the exiled Cubans established a beachhead, as many as 7,000 insurgents and other Castro opponents already on the island would rise up in revolt. Without requiring the use of American troops or aircraft, the U.S. would remove Fidel Castro from power and replace him with a friendly regime. The plan had been hatched by the Eisenhower administration, but it had been revised in Kennedy’s early weeks. It was supported throughout by U.S. intelligence equipment, trainers, and planners.

  Acheson did not hide his alarm. He said that he hoped the president wasn’t serious about such a crazy scheme.

  “I don’t know if I’m serious or not,” Kennedy said. “But this is the proposal and I’ve been thinking about it, and it is serious in that sense. I’ve not made up my mind but I’m giving it very serious thought.”

  In truth, the president had already given the plan his go-ahead almost a month earlier, on March 11, 1961. He had signed off on the last details on April 5, just two days before his conversation with Acheson. He had altered only two important aspects, having moved the landing place to allow for a less spectacular invasion, and ensuring that there was a suitable airfield nearby for tactical air support. Otherwise, “Operation Mongoose” was much the plan that the Eisenhower administration had passed down to Kennedy.

  Acheson said he would not “need to phone Price Waterhouse” to determine that Kennedy’s 1,500 Cubans were no match for Castro’s 25,000 Cubans. He told Kennedy such an invasion could have disastrous consequences for America’s prestige in Europe and for relations with the Soviets over Berlin, where they likely would respond with their own aggression.

  Yet it was precisely because of Berlin that Kennedy wanted there to be no obviously American assets involved. He wanted to avoid giving the Soviets any pretext to do something similarly disruptive in Berlin.

  The two men talked awkwardly for a little longer before Acheson left the Rose Garden without having exchanged a word with the president about anything other than Cuba. As he left for Europe, Acheson dismissed the Cuban matter from his mind, as “it seemed like such a wild idea.”

  He was confident wiser minds would prevail.

  RHÖNDORF, WEST GERMANY

  SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 1961

  West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s concerns about how to manage his relationship with Kennedy had grown so great that he summoned his friend Dean Acheson to meet with him in Bonn to talk strategy before his visit to the U.S. a few days later.

  Legions of Germans were out for Sunday walks on pathways under the flowering fruit trees beside the Rhine River as Adenauer, in a less leisurely manner, sped by them with Acheson in his Mercedes from the airport to his home. The chancellor savored high-speed drives in the well-engineered German cars that had become such an export hit, and Acheson held tightly to his seat as Adenauer’s driver accelerated to keep pace with a lead jeep.

  A soldier sat in the jeep’s open back, providing directions with outstretched paddles. If the soldier extended a paddle out to his right, it was a sign to Adenauer’s driver that he was going to pass traffic by driving up over the sidewalk. If he pointed one up to the left, it meant the driver would scatter oncoming traffic as he passed to that side. Acheson smiled grimly at Adenauer and noticed that “the old man was just having a wonderful time.”

  A small group of Adenauer’s neighbors had gathered to applaud the legendary political couple’s arrival at the chancellor’s home in the Rhine-side village of Rhöndorf. The eighty-five-year-old Adenauer looked to the zigzag stairway heading up the hill about a hundred feet from the street to his door and said to his sixty-seven-year-old guest, “My friend, you are not as youthful as you were the first time we met, and I must urge you not to take these steps too fast.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Chancellor,” Acheson replied, smiling. “If I find myself wearying, may I take your arm?”

  Adenauer chuckled. “Are you teasing me?”

  “I wouldn’t think of doing so.” Acheson smiled. The good-natured banter was an elixir for Adenauer’s troubled spirit.

  Acheson spent much of the day calming an Adenauer whom he found “worried to death—just completely worried” about Kennedy. Adenauer’s greatest concern was that Kennedy was scheming to make a peace deal behind his back with the Russians on any number of issues that would sell out German interests and abandon Berliners. He worried as well about the rise of a new hostility among Americans toward Germans after years of postwar healing, inflamed by the shocking revelations of William Shirer’s newly published book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and the imminent trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Israel.

  Beyond that, Adenauer said, he was disturbed by reports that the Kennedy administration was shifting its deterrence strategy from its overwhelming reliance on nuclear weapons to the relatively new notion of “flexible response.” That would involve a greater emphasis on conventional weaponry in all military contingencies regarding Berlin. Though such a policy change could have significant impact on West German security, the Kennedy administration had neither consulted nor briefed Adenauer or other West German counterparts.

  As he argued against the new strategy, what Adenauer didn’t realize was that Acheson was one of its leading proponents and architects. Adenauer was convinced the West could only contain Moscow if Khrushchev was certain a Soviet move on Berlin would prompt a devastating U.S. nuclear response. He feared that Moscow would regard any change in the U.S. approach as an invitation to test Washington’s resolve. Though he did not say so to Adenauer that day, Acheson disagreed because he doubted any U.S. president would ever risk millions of American lives for Berlin—and he reckoned Khrushchev knew that as well.

  So Acheson instead focused his efforts on reassuring Adenauer that Kennedy was as determined as his predecessors had been to defend West German and West Berlin freedoms. Acheson briefed Adenauer in some detail on the Kennedy administration’s military contingency planning regarding Berlin and on Kennedy’s own skepticism about Russian intentions.

  Adenauer sighed with satisfaction. “You have lifted a stone from my heart.”

  But at the same time, Acheson had to disappoint the chancellor about one of his fondest dreams. For the mom
ent, Kennedy had rejected the plan considered by Eisenhower to place a fleet of U.S. Polaris missile submarines under NATO control, thus making the alliance a fourth nuclear power. The U.S., Britain, and France would keep their monopoly. Instead, Kennedy would put five or more Polaris submarines at the disposal of NATO, but under U.S. fleet commanders, and with caveats on their use so restrictive and the process of using them so complicated that it would fail to satisfy Adenauer’s desire for a more easily accessible nuclear deterrent.

  In short, Kennedy’s evolving view toward handling Berlin military contingencies—reflected in KGB reports at the time from Paris and elsewhere—was that he wanted to ensure that any Berlin conflict remained local in character and would not escalate into a world war. That required not only backing off American reliance on nuclear arms in any Berlin confrontation, but also opposing the notion of NATO possession of atomic weapons.

  Adenauer closed the day in typical fashion, inviting his guest to the rose garden to play the Italian bowling game of bocce. Removing his jacket but leaving on his tie, with sleeves rolled down, Adenauer looked disarmingly formal as he began the precision throwing game by tossing the smaller “jack” ball forward, then following it with larger balls, the goal being to land closest to the initial throw.

  When Acheson was near victory, the chancellor changed the rules and began to carom shots off the sideboards.

  At Acheson’s protests, Adenauer smiled: “You are now in Germany—in Germany I make the rules.”

  Acheson smiled, knowing his mission had achieved its aim. He had reduced Adenauer’s alarm over Kennedy, he had predelivered whatever disappointing news Adenauer would get in Washington in a more palatable manner, and he had set a more promising tone for the first Adenauer–Kennedy meeting.

  What Acheson couldn’t control were two events that would overshadow Adenauer’s visit: a historic Soviet space shot and the U.S. debacle in Cuba.

  PITSUNDA PENINSULA, SOVIET UNION

  TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 1961

  On the day of Adenauer’s flight to Washington, Khrushchev was in retreat at his villa in Sochi, on the Pitsunda Peninsula of the Black Sea’s eastern coast, where he was resting and receiving regular updates on the Soviet plans to put the first man in space the following morning. He had also begun preparations for the 22nd Communist Party Congress in October.

  Khrushchev would later explain his frequent retreats from public to Pitsunda by saying, “A chicken has to sit quietly for a certain time if she expects to lay an egg.” Though the metaphor had a negative connotation in English, Khrushchev described its meaning in a positive manner: “If I have something to hatch, I have to take the time to do it right.” Pitsunda was where he caught his breath in the rush of history or wrote a few pages of it himself. It had been there, between his walks through the pine grove and past cabanas on the beach, that he had crafted his 1956 speech breaking with Stalin. He liked to introduce guests to his ancient trees, many of which he had given human names, and to show off his small indoor gym and private, glass-enclosed swimming pool.

  It was a measure of how important Khrushchev considered relations with Kennedy that amid all his other demands that morning he had still been willing to receive Walter Lippmann, the legendary seventy-one-year-old American columnist, and his wife, Helen. It was not just Lippmann’s national influence and access to Kennedy that endeared him to Khrushchev, but also the fact that his columns had been consistently friendly to the Soviets.

  With the schedule for the space launch firmed up, however, Khrushchev passed word to Lippmann on the tarmac in Washington, in the first-class cabin of his plane to Rome, that their meeting would be postponed. “Impossible,” Lippmann boldly responded in a scrawled reply to Soviet Ambassador Menshikov.

  By the time the Lippmanns landed, Khrushchev had decided he would see them, but he would not breathe a word concerning plans for his potentially historic space launch with the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the following morning.

  Khrushchev had accelerated the original May Day launch date after a training accident on March 23 killed the flight’s intended cosmonaut, Lieutenant Valentin Bondarenko. Shortcuts taken by the Soviets to rush their first man into space ahead of the Americans had likely contributed to Bondarenko’s death, which came after flames engulfed his oxygen-rich training chamber. The Soviets did not disclose any of the details of the accident. They did not even announce the cosmonaut’s death, and airbrushed Bondarenko from all photographs of the Soviet space team.

  Undaunted, Khrushchev grew all the more determined, and further accelerated the Soviet target launch date to April 12. The timing was chosen to keep Moscow ahead of the U.S. Project Mercury mission that was scheduled to launch astronaut Alan Shepard into space on May 5. If the flight succeeded, Khrushchev would not only make history but also get a badly needed political boost. If Gagarin’s mission failed, Khrushchev would bury all evidence of the launch.

  Oblivious to that background drama, Lippmann and his wife arrived at Khrushchev’s sanctuary at 11:30 in the morning, and would remain for eight hours of walking, swimming, eating, drinking, and talking before spending the night.

  Lippmann savored his access to U.S. and world leaders, and it didn’t get any better than meeting the communist world’s leader in his Black Sea lair. Before he had begun writing a column, Lippmann had been an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson and was a delegate to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which resulted in the Treaty of Versailles. Lippmann had coined the phrase “Cold War” and was the leading U.S. voice suggesting that Washington accept the new Soviet sphere of influence in Europe. Moscow’s interest in Lippmann was so great that a KGB spy ring in the U.S. was working through his secretary, Mary Price, to gather information on his sources and subjects of interest, an infiltration Lippmann had not yet discovered.

  The tall, large-boned Lippmann towered over the short, squat Khrushchev as they walked the compound. In a lively afternoon game of badminton, however, the fiercely competitive Khrushchev teamed up with the Lippmanns’ portly female minder from the foreign ministry and thrashed the more athletic Lippmanns, who were surprised by his agility. Khrushchev viciously and repeatedly struck the shuttlecock only a few inches above the net, often aiming at his opponents’ heads.

  During a lunch break, Khrushchev’s second-in-command, Anastas Mikoyan, joined the group for a three-and-a-half-hour conversation the focus of which was so exclusively on Berlin that Lippmann, like Ambassador Thompson before him, concluded that for the Soviet leader, nothing matched the importance of Berlin’s future.

  White House, State Department, and CIA officials had briefed Lippmann before his departure, so he was able to float a trial balloon on their behalf. Lippmann questioned why Khrushchev considered the Berlin matter such an urgent affair. Why not negotiate a Berlin standstill of five to ten years, during which the U.S. and the Soviet Union could attend to their relationship’s other problems and create an atmosphere more conducive to a Berlin agreement?

  When Khrushchev sharply dismissed the notion of further delay, Lippmann pressed him for reasons.

  A German solution, said Khrushchev, must come before “Hitler’s generals with their twelve NATO divisions get atomic weapons from France and the United States.” Before that could happen, Khrushchev said he wanted a peace treaty setting in stone the current frontiers of Poland and Czechoslovakia and guaranteeing the permanent existence of East Germany. Otherwise, Khrushchev insisted, West Germany would drag NATO into a war aimed at unifying Germany and restoring its prewar eastern frontier.

  Lippmann took mental notes while his wife scribbled down the conversation verbatim. Both tried to remain sober by pouring out the considerable amounts of vodka and Armenian wine that Mikoyan served them into a bowl the Soviet leader had provided them in an act of mercy.

  Time and again, with Kennedy as his intended audience, Khrushchev told the Lippmanns he was determined to “bring the German question to a head” that year. Lippmann would later report to his readers that the Sovi
et leader was “firmly resolved, perhaps irretrievably committed, to a showdown” over Berlin to stop the gusher of refugees and to save the communist East German state.

  Khrushchev laid out his Berlin thinking to Lippmann in three parts, offering greater detail than he had previously provided for public consumption. Lippmann’s three-part report on their talks would win him a second Pulitzer Prize—and appear in 450 newspapers.

  First, Khrushchev told the columnist, he wanted the West to accept “there are in fact two Germanys” that would never be reunited. The U.S. and the Soviet Union therefore should codify through peace treaties the three elements of Germany: East Germany, West Germany, and West Berlin. This would fix by international statute West Berlin’s role as a “free city.” Thereafter its access and liberty could be guaranteed, he said, by symbolic contingents of French, British, American, and Russian troops and by neutral troops assigned by the United Nations. The four occupying powers would sign an agreement with both Germanys that would produce that outcome.

  Because Khrushchev doubted Kennedy would accept this option, he sketched for Lippmann what he called his “fallback position.” He would accept a temporary agreement that provided the two German states perhaps two or three years during which they could negotiate a loose confederation or some other form of unification. If the two sides reached a deal during that period of time, it would be written into a treaty. If they failed, however, all occupation rights would end and foreign troops would leave.

  If the U.S. refused to negotiate either of his first two options, Khrushchev told Lippmann, his “third position” was to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany that gave Ulbricht full control over all West Berlin access routes. If the Allies resisted this new East German role, Khrushchev said he would bring in the Soviet military to blockade the city entirely.

  To cushion the blow of this threat, Khrushchev told Lippmann he would not precipitate a crisis before he had the chance to meet Kennedy face-to-face and discuss the matter. In other words, he was opening his negotiations with the president through the columnist.