On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  “And Grandma, what kind of man is Khrushchev?”

  “When he dies, we’ll find out.”

  The humor feature was not transmitted by the Central Telegraph Office, and that evening a television news commentator announced that Bassow had been expelled for violating “standards of behavior.”

  In May 1961, I left Moscow on assignment to cover the Russian delegation at the fourteen-nation conference on Laos in Geneva. The conference had been convened at a time when the Cold War seemed close to turning into a hot one in Asia. The Geneva parley eventually reached an agreement in July providing for the establishment of a unified neutralist government under Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma. But shortly thereafter, the pro-Communist Pathet Lao faction broke away. It continued to dominate eastern Laos, safeguarding a key segment of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the North Vietnamese supply route to the Vietcong in the south.

  While in Geneva, Audrey and I attended a dinner given by Chen Yi, the then Chinese foreign minister, in honor of Chester Ronning, who was heading the Canadian delegation to the Laos conference. Ronning had asked Chen Yi if he could bring me, an American correspondent, to the dinner. Chen replied: “Of course, but only as your son-in-law.” The Chinese delegation to the conference had not granted any interviews to American correspondents. Chen and I hit it off rather well. In command of the armies which had captured Nanking and Shanghai, he told me how he had enveloped Chiang Kai-shek’s capital, and I told him what it was like covering the entry of his troops into the city.

  There was also an interesting encounter with a Russian spy. One of my contacts in covering the Russian delegation was a Soviet official who obviously had the job of what we called “bird-dogging” American correspondents. He became particularly interested in me because I was the Times correspondent in Moscow and once in chatting with him I had mentioned that my mother was born in the Ukraine. One afternoon I strolled with him through the garden of the Palais des Nations, in which the negotiations were taking place, and he mentioned a memorandum which had been made available by the U.S. delegation to American correspondents. It dealt with matters relating to the American negotiating stance. It was officially classified as restricted, which meant, although not deemed secret, it was sensitive enough so that it would be made available only to designated individuals. The Russian asked with a broad smile if I would let him have a copy of the memorandum, since, after all, it had been distributed to many Americans. It was a KGB tactic. Once a target is sucked in by some minor exchange, then intimidation follows together with demands for higher-priority information. I told the friendly Russian with an innocent smile that I would be glad to ask the American delegation for a copy of the memorandum for his information. He turned pale and quivered. I never saw him again.

  While the conference was still in progress, John F. Kennedy, the newly elected forty-three-year-old president, and Nikita Khrushchev agreed to meet in Vienna in June to discuss the East-West confrontations in Berlin and Indochina. Kennedy headed for Vienna with the burden of having suffered a major foreign policy reverse. The CIA-managed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles had been thrown back in April with heavy casualties. I went directly from Geneva to Vienna to cover the talks in the company of other Times reporters, among them Russell Baker, who was then with the Washington Bureau and later a popular columnist. Before leaving Geneva, Baker and I had drinks in a hotel bar with Joe Alsop, the superhawk Washington columnist, and we listened to him, as he stared at us over his outsized horn-rimmed glasses, hold forth on the need for Kennedy to disable the North Vietnamese by bombing Haiphong. It was reflective of the aggressive mood then among conservatives in the United States. Haiphong had not yet been bombed because of the danger of hitting Russian and other Eastern European shipping, although it was known the port was being used to supply North Vietnam with military matériel.

  In Vienna I covered the Russian delegation while James Reston, the columnist and Washington bureau chief of the Times, looked after the American side. On June 4, I glimpsed Kennedy for the first time since our 1951 meetings in Saigon. He was coming down the stairs of the Soviet Embassy at the side of Nikita Khrushchev after two negotiating sessions with the Soviet premier. Kennedy looked rather exhausted. I didn’t know at that moment that he had agreed, at the suggestion of his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to see Reston privately in the American Embassy following the meeting with Khrushchev. After covering a press briefing by the Russian delegation, I was alone in an upper-floor room of the press hostel writing my dispatch when Reston walked in. “What are you writing?” he asked. I responded by reviewing the contents of the Soviet briefing. “Wait,” he said. “I’ve just talked to Kennedy.” Startled, I left my typewriter, perched on a chair, and listened raptly to Reston’s account of his meeting with the president.

  In a vacant room in the American Embassy Reston had waited for more than an hour for Kennedy to arrive. When the president entered, he sat down on a couch beside Reston, tipped his hat forward, and breathed heavily. Reston told me the president looked angry and was obviously shook up. Kennedy had been through two sessions with Khrushchev, which were much more contentious than he had anticipated. The Russian had handed him a virtual ultimatum contained in an aide-mémoire. The United States must sign a German peace treaty by December, which would in effect give legal status to East Germany and control over the access routes to Berlin. If the United States did not agree, the Soviet Union would sign a separate treaty and move unilaterally to dominate the access routes to Berlin. Kennedy responded by warning that the United States would fight to maintain access to its military garrison in Berlin. Kennedy told Reston he thought he knew why Khrushchev had taken such a hard line with him. He felt sure that Khrushchev thought that somebody who had made such a mess with the failed Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion lacked judgment and any president who made such a blunder and did not see it through thereafter had no guts. Kennedy told Reston there was now a need for him to demonstrate firmness and the place to do it was Vietnam.

  The story which Reston filed to the Times that night served Kennedy well and was reassuring to the American public, but it puzzled me. He pictured the president as engaging in a calm manner with the Russian, writing that there had been “no ultimatums and few bitter or menacing exchanges” and that Kennedy had departed Vienna in a “solemn, although confident mood.” The story was in keeping with the official American version of the dialogues. But in fact, the threats that Kennedy was subjected to by Khrushchev and his reactions were more accurately portrayed in Reston’s memoir, Deadline, published in 1991. It was akin to what he had told me about his off-the- record briefing by Kennedy.

  When Kennedy returned to Washington, he undertook emergency measures against the possibility of war over Berlin, including a doubling of draft quotas and a call-up of National Guard units and Reserves. In July, Kennedy asked Congress to approve a $3.25 billion military buildup and funds to make ready and stock fallout shelters as a precaution against the possibility of nuclear war. Kennedy was obviously putting on a show of strength to warn Khrushchev and to lay the basis for any future negotiation, but the magnitude of his response to the Soviet leader’s threats surprised me. It seemed to me that at Vienna that there had been more theatrics on the part of Khrushchev in his meeting with Kennedy than realpolitik. Recalling my experience in Berlin, I doubted that Khrushchev would follow through on his threat to take over the access routes. I had reported from Berlin on verbal ultimatums one after another and repeated harassment of the autobahn and rail lifelines to West Berlin, but each time the Soviet leader had backed off from a possible military clash. In fact, by August, the ultimatum issued by Khrushchev in Vienna proved as empty as the ones he had put forward previously, and as a fallback Khrushchev conspired with Ulbricht to begin construction of the Berlin Wall.

  In briefing Reston, without elaborating, Kennedy had said that Vietnam was the place he had to demonstrate firmness in the test of wills with Khrushchev. I found this puzzling. The test of wills in
Vietnam logically was more with Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong than with Khrushchev. The Russians were supplying some material aid to Ho Chi Minh’s forces, notably surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries, but the crucial decisions about military strategy and politics were being made in Hanoi and Peking, not Moscow. Ho Chi Minh’s troops were being trained and armed with modern weapons in South China. Khrushchev himself was embroiled in a deepening ideological quarrel with Mao.

  According to what the Russians imparted at their Vienna briefing, Khrushchev’s emphasis had been on Berlin, not Southeast Asia. He had proved amenable to whatever agreement on a coalition government headed by Souvanna Phouma would be reached at the Geneva Conference on Laos. This was not surprising, since the proposed settlement yielded to the Pathet Lao continued control of the gateway territory in Laos to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. As for Vietnam, the Russian historian Roy Medvedev later quoted Khrushchev as having told Kennedy: “If you want to, go ahead and fight in the jungles of Vietnam. The French fought there for seven years and still had to quit in the end. Perhaps the Americans will be able to stick it out for a little longer, but eventually they will have to quit too.”

  En route to Vienna, Kennedy had stopped off in Paris to meet with President Charles de Gaulle. Recalling the French military disaster, de Gaulle warned Kennedy against becoming bogged down in Indochina. He told Kennedy that France would not repeat the mistakes of the past by sending troops to Indochina, although his nation was a member of SEATO, which was committed to resisting Communist expansion. Two months earlier, at a meeting in New York, Kennedy received similar advice from General Douglas MacArthur, who was quoted by Arthur S. Schlesinger, the historian, as telling the president: “Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland should have his head examined.”

  Nevertheless, after his return to Washington, Kennedy tripled the number of American military advisers working with the South Vietnamese army, authorizing them to accompany the troops on combat missions.

  I was back in Moscow in October 1962 when my fear of some dangerous miscalculation by Khrushchev seemed to materialize with eruption of the Cuban missile crisis. CIA spy planes had spotted some 22,000 Soviet troops and technicians at work constructing missile sites. They were implanting forty-two medium-range nuclear-tipped missiles with ranges of 1,100 miles. Another twenty-four intermediate missiles with ranges of 2,200 miles were en route to the island aboard disguised Russian merchant vessels. In addition, Khrushchev had dispatched forty-two IL-28 nuclear bombers and twenty-four SAMs. Khrushchev intended with this massive nuclear capability to balance or outweigh the superior intercontinental missile capability of the United States and also that of the mid-range Jupiter missiles sited in Turkey. The Cuban base would also give him leverage in his confrontation in Berlin with the United States, France, and Britain.

  As the crisis mounted, I recalled how Kennedy had been shaken by the aggressiveness and bluster of Khrushchev in their confrontation in Vienna and wondered whether Kennedy would show the Russian that he was mistaken in assessing the president as lacking in guts. Two images hovered in my mind. One was of the young Kennedy, who in Saigon had demonstrated toughness in his encounter with the bullying French general de Lattre. The other image was of his close adviser, Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson, the American ambassador to Moscow who had been recalled three months earlier to Washington. Thompson had been at Kennedy’s side in the meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna. A brilliant Kremlinologist, he was respected by Westerners and Russians alike. He was openly admired by Khrushchev, who gave a picnic for Thompson, his wife, Jane, and two daughters when they were returning to Washington. Embracing Thompson in farewell, Khrushchev teased the ambassador about the possibility of another international crisis. Thompson guessed he was referring to Berlin, given the Vienna confrontation. Like other correspondents benefiting from his incisive briefings, I had great admiration for Thompson. Audrey and I were quite close to the Thompsons personally. Our daughters took ballet lessons with his daughters, Sherry and Jenny, in Spasso House, the embassy residence. Once, the good-humored ambassador came to a masquerade party we hosted wearing a red wig, dressed in an old bathrobe, and carrying the cleaning lady’s mop, all of which served to utterly baffle the KGB agents tailing his limousine and the Russian guards at the gate. I was grateful that this man of profound acuity and engaging personality was with Kennedy as the president faced off against Khrushchev. My concern as to whether Kennedy had guts enough in the confrontation with Khrushchev was soon dispelled when he imposed a naval blockade on Cuba to prevent the arrival of the Russian ships, and massed troops and planes in southern Florida for a possible strike at Soviet installations on the island.

  At the height of the crisis, Moscow was a frightened city with Kennedy pictured in the Soviet propaganda as an ominous, threatening figure. Our older daughters, Susan, then ten, and Karen, eight, came home worried one afternoon after conversing with their Russian schoolmates, and Karen asked anxiously: “Kennedy doesn’t want war, does he?” Attending a PTA meeting, we listened to a Soviet army general speaking to the parents about the missile crisis. Glancing at us and hesitating, he obviously skipped over pages containing anti-American diatribes. (When we were leaving the Soviet Union, the general sent us flowers and a note thanking us for allowing his children to be friends with our kids.) Near midnight, leaving our apartment to go to the Times office to await delivery of the official newspaper, Pravda, in which most major Soviet announcements were made, I would look at my four daughters sleeping in their double-decker beds and Audrey in the adjoining bedroom and persuade myself that it was beyond belief that Kennedy would loosen missiles that would obliterate us all. But fears that a missile strike was possible, if not likely, were in evidence not only in Moscow households but also in the subtle emanations from the Kremlin. Khrushchev and his cohorts were braced for an American strike on the Soviet missile bases in Cuba and girding for the possibility of a nuclear exchange between the two countries. Filing dispatches to New York via London on a shaky telephone line tapped by the KGB police, I reported the stark apprehensions of the Russian people as well as the pronouncements of their leaders and hints imparted by their subordinates. In Washington, Max Frankel, the State Department correspondent, was covering the American side in the exchanges with the Kremlin, and in turn, day after day, we led the front page of the Times under banner headlines. My only link to the home office was the shaky telephone line tapped by the KGB. Fortunately, I had at my side the second man in the Times bureau, the very able Ted Shabad, a fluent Russian-speaker and expert on the geography and resources of the Soviet Union. I felt driven by the need to report and interpret Soviet attitudes as faithfully and accurately as possible so that Americans would have the information and understanding required to cope effectively with Khrushchev’s manipulations. It was a complex task in the environment of extreme tension permeating the two countries.

  Once at a crucial juncture in the crisis when Kennedy was demanding that the Russian rocket-bearing ships turn about, I telephoned Manny Freedman, the foreign news editor, to report a rumor circulating in Moscow that Khrushchev was seeking a summit meeting with Kennedy. Freedman listened but then impatiently snapped: “We’re not going to put up with that.” His retort, more as an ordinary American than an editor, induced in me a feeling of estrangement. I wondered if some Americans viewed me as a messenger of the enemy. I never knew whether Freedman passed my tip to our Washington Bureau. In fact, on October 24, in a letter to Bertrand Russell, the British pacifist leader, Khrushchev had said that a summit meeting would be useful.

  The crisis eased on October 28 when Khrushchev messaged Kennedy informing him that the Soviet rockets in Cuba were being dismantled and the other ships loaded with missiles recalled. In exchange Kennedy gave assurances there would be no invasion of Cuba, and in a secret deal negotiated by his brother, Robert Kennedy, the president pledged removal of the obsolete medium-range Jupiter missile bases sited in Turkey targeted on the Soviet Union. Llewellyn T
hompson had early on suggested that Khrushchev might be looking for such a deal.

  The enormous relief felt by the Russians was very much in evidence when Audrey and I attended a reception in the Kremlin on November 7, celebrating the forty-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was attended by about one thousand Soviet officials and foreign diplomats and was the first time that Americans had been invited to the Kremlin since the eruption of the missile crisis. At the reception in the gilded banquet hall of the Palace of Congresses, Khrushchev, vodka glass in hand, stood at the head of a phalanx of members of the ruling Presidium with the number two, Leonid Brezhnev, at his side. The Soviet leaders were clinking glasses toasting each other as if to demonstrate their solidarity. Circulating among the Russian guests, I detected near hysterical relief. A prominent Russian magazine editor whispered to me: “I thought a missile might come through my roof at any moment.” Suddenly, to my consternation, I saw Audrey sidle out of the throng of Russian and foreign guests to a spot directly before the Soviet leaders, take a Leica out of her handbag, and begin photographing Khrushchev. I observed KGB agents converging on her from all parts of the hall. Journalists had been required on entering the hall to check their cameras, but Audrey had ignored the order. Unruffled by this blonde apparition standing before him, Khrushchev waved off the swarming KGB agents and posed smiling as Audrey continued to take photographs, which were published the next morning on the front page of the Times.

  The incident seemed to break the ice, and led by Khrushchev and his wife, Nina, the Soviet leaders began to mingle with the guests. Surrounded by journalists, Khrushchev accepted questions from correspondents. Tension has not yet completely eased, he told us, but our rockets are out of Cuba. Grimly, he said: “We were very close—very, very close to a thermonuclear war. If there had not been reason then, we would not be here tonight, and there might not have been elections in the United States.” As for Berlin, Khrushchev seemed to be backing off. “The Berlin problem is now assuming greater acuteness because Berlin is not Cuba,” he said, but then added: “We do not want Berlin. We do not need it. We are asking for peace and a peace treaty.” He spoke about the need for peaceful coexistence, compromise, and mutual concessions in East-West relations. Earlier in the day, Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky, speaking before a military parade in Red Square marking the anniversary, omitted the usual Soviet warnings about Berlin which were sounded before the Cuban crisis.