Khrushchev’s main concern remained the situation in Berlin, and on August 3 he met with Ulbricht to discuss it. Not wishing to encourage Ulbricht’s slight defeatism, Khrushchev opted to conceal the Kremlin’s emergency plans from the East German. Instead Khrushchev merely suggested that once the barriers were up the Soviets and the East Germans would announce in a joint communiqué that this had been done in the interests of the socialist world. When Ulbricht asked that his people be told something before the wall went up to prevent fear of economic strangulation, Khrushchev disagreed. Predicting a mass rush for the exits, he told the East German that the best way to create panic would be to tell the public anything before the barriers were erected. “We have to do this the way we introduced the new currency regime,” Khrushchev said, referring to how the Soviet regime had suddenly introduced an East German mark in the early 1950s.60 He wanted the wall to be built without warning, a sudden fait accompli.
Khrushchev went on to outline his thinking on how this border closing should proceed. Although he wanted the wall to go up secretly, he also proposed to position Soviet tanks along the border with the Federal Republic of Germany behind a wall of Soviet troops. His intention was to send a signal to the Western governments without creating a war scare among the populations of Europe and the United States. He did not want public hysteria; he just wanted to do enough to deter Washington, Bonn, Paris, and London from intervening to prevent the closure of the border. Ulbricht worried that these steps might not be enough. “Perhaps your units will need reinforcements,” he said. Khrushchev disagreed. “[T]his would evoke a negative reaction (from the Germans) and as a demonstration [of power] this step would not have any decisive meaning.”61
Again Khrushchev asked how long this would take. Ulbricht now believed the iron ring could be constructed within two weeks, instead of the eight days he had previously predicted. This was good enough for Moscow. In a moment of generosity, Khrushchev assured the German that it would be up to the GDR to decide the best moment to start the operation. Whenever it decided to go ahead, Moscow would be ready. “The date for the beginning of border control was to be August 13, 1961,” Khrushchev later recalled. “We kidded among ourselves that in the West the thirteenth is supposed to be an unlucky day. I joked that for us and for the whole socialist camp it would be a very lucky day indeed.”62 August 13 was a Sunday, and it made sense to launch this operation in the middle of a weekend, when few East Germans would be working in West Berlin.
DESPITE THE PENKOVSKY penetration and the timely visit of John McCloy, the Kennedy administration did not pick up on any of Khrushchev’s plans. The Kremlin followed a very strict policy of secrecy about the plan for Berlin, even at the risk of annoying its allies. Moscow stonewalled the nosy Polish leader Wladyslaw Gomulka, who kept asking about the agenda items for the forthcoming Warsaw Pact discussions.63 The wall operation was also closely held in Moscow. Instructions to the KGB and the other relevant ministries regarding a worldwide propaganda campaign to accompany the unveiling of the wall were not distributed until the last possible moment.64
In a message to the Kremlin, Ulbricht insisted on even stricter measures to preserve the security of the operation. Remembering perhaps how quickly copies of Khrushchev’s secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress had reached the West in 1956, he didn’t want the Soviet government to prepare any materials for the visiting delegations that could reveal the secret. “In connection with this meeting,” he wrote, “we will provide to the representatives of the fraternal parties only those materials that can be published.”65
The Warsaw Pact representatives gathered in Moscow on August 3 for a three-day session on Berlin.66 In his speeches Khrushchev prepared the entire group for the building of the Berlin Wall and the expected international tensions that would ensue. “No one can give a guarantee that there will be no war,” he told them.67 Although he did not expect any Western attack, he advised his comrades that the bloc should “strengthen our defense, strengthen our military forces…. We must, comrades, show them our will and decisiveness, [or they]will say that we are bluffing and consequently will strengthen the pressure against us.”68 Khrushchev and Ulbricht, who gave his main speech on August 4, both addressed the more likely possibility of a Western economic embargo against East Germany. Moscow and East Berlin hoped that the Poles, the Hungarians, and the Czechs would be able to find a way to reduce some of the pressure on the East German economy were this to happen.
The meetings ended on August 5 with a partial victory for Khrushchev and Ulbricht. Their socialist allies were generous in offering moral support for the wall operation. The pact passed a resolution in support of closing the border. However, each of the Eastern European leaders also reminded the Kremlin that there was a limit to the economic assistance that they could offer East Germany. They had weak planned economies of their own.69
Returning to Berlin immediately after the conference, Ulbricht turned to the many preparations required before the border could be closed a week later. On Monday, August 7, he informed the East German Politburo of the talks in Moscow and the decision to close the border on the night of August 12–13.70 On Wednesday, August 9, he assured the Soviets that all necessary preparations would be completed by Saturday and supplied a timetable for the weekend’s events.71
Ulbricht laid out for Khrushchev via the Soviet ambassador in East Berlin how he planned to choreograph the night of August 12–13 to minimize the possibility of leaks to the West. He would invite the formal cabinet of the East German government (the Council of Ministers) to his country house outside Berlin at the last possible moment on August 12. Around midnight he would convene this group to approve the Warsaw Pact resolution calling for the closure of the border. As the group was rubber-stamping the decision, East German policemen would form lines along the sectoral boundary and begin unrolling barbed wire, which would have been distributed to them in advance as part of an “exercise.” Ninety minutes later, if all went according to plan, an official announcement of the sealing of the East Berlin border would be sent to the GDR’s press agency for distribution to the world.72
Khrushchev received this report from Ulbricht on August 10, the same day the Kremlin announced that Marshal Ivan Konev, the former commander in chief of the Warsaw Pact forces, who had played a major role in Stalin’s military campaign against Hitler, was returning as commander in chief of Soviet Forces in Germany. Khrushchev was responding to Ulbricht’s earlier request that something be done to prepare the East German population for the tense days to come. The selection of a war hero like Konev to be in Berlin signaled Moscow’s direct involvement in what would be happening there.73
The new commander in chief reached Berlin slightly ahead of Khrushchev’s statement. A bulldog of a man with the hands and face of a Ukrainian peasant, Konev took some pleasure in surprising the Western liaison officers assigned to his new command. The American, British, and French missions in East Berlin had already been invited to a late-afternoon meeting with Colonel General Ivan I. Yakubovsky, the commander in chief of the Soviet Group of Forces in Germany. Standing next to Yakubovsky when they arrived was the diminutive Konev. “Gentlemen, my name is Konev,” he reportedly said with a twinkle in his eyes. “You may perhaps have heard of me.”74 The gathered mission chiefs could only smile.
Konev’s appointment was the only public act that any Western intelligence professional could later point to as a possible signal of what was to come.75 At the time, however, the appointment passed without anyone in the White House or even at the Pentagon suspecting a change in Khrushchev’s tactics.
Konev quickly met with Ulbricht to assure himself that the East Germans were indeed ready for the operation. According to the plan created in July, the Soviet armed forces would remain in the background throughout the operation unless the Western powers made a provocative move. There was no mention in the plans sent to the Soviet Presidium in the first days of August of what steps the Soviet armed forces might take if the U.S. Ber
lin command tried to test the East German police action in the early moments of the operation. In his meeting with Ulbricht, Konev stressed two points: First, the operation had to proceed quickly, and second, the ability of the citizens of West Berlin to move back and forth to West Germany should not be affected by this action.76
As Ulbricht met with Konev, the top level of the East German security police received its first briefing on the coming operation. On Friday, August 11 the East German police chief, Erich Mielke, revealed to them the code name for the closure of the Berlin border, Operation Rose, and instructed them to do all their preparatory work “under the strictest secrecy.”77
EARLY IN THE morning on August 13, East German police began stringing barbed wire and tearing up roads along West Berlin’s twenty-seven-mile border with East Berlin and the remaining sixty-nine miles of border with East Germany. Concrete barriers did not go up for another two days along the line separating the two Berlins, but within the first few hours of Operation Rose police stood in a wall-like formation to prevent any traffic through the historic Brandenburg Gate, once the symbol of a united Germany. Khrushchev’s iron ring sliced through 192 streets, thirty-two railway lines, eight S-Bahn (city train lines), four subway lines, and three autobahns.78 Where a river or lake defined the border between East and West, the East Germans later built submerged barriers, but on this first day special marine patrols were organized. Left untouched were the three railway lines and three highways through East Germany that linked West Berlin to West Germany. The goal of Operation Rose, as Konev had earlier reminded Ulbricht, was to restrain the East German population, not to prevent movement from West Germany to West Berlin.
A formal decision by the East German government preceded this operation. Ulbricht had gathered the GDR’s Council of Ministers at his country home in the daylight hours of August 12, earlier than originally planned. As it turned out, they needed the extra time to discuss the plan and only at 11:00 P.M. reached agreement that the wall should go up. The delay caused some awkwardness for Ulbricht when as the ministers were being driven home, they saw Soviet and East German tanks that had already received orders to move in preparation for the construction of the barriers. Besides this somewhat embarrassing hiccup, there were some real difficulties with policemen and railwaymen who, disgusted by the closure of the Berlin border, refused to cooperate.79
Soviet military representatives reported back to Moscow that the operation had gone nearly flawlessly.80 While there had been some popular resistance along the border, its significance was played down. The East Germans seemed to have everything under control, and at no time during the night had Ulbricht’s men requested assistance from Soviet forces. Even more satisfying was evidence that not only had the operation caught the West by surprise, but Western troops were staying in their barracks. No alert of any kind had been detected at the NATO garrisons in West Berlin.
KENNEDY WAS BACK from a Sunday sail off Hyannis Port when he first received reports of the barriers dividing Berlin. The closure of the border was already over eighteen hours old, and he was angry that neither the CIA nor the State Department’s representatives in Berlin had given him any warning.81 But there was really nothing he could do about Khrushchev’s wall. Theodore Sorensen later summarized the view shared by the president and his closest associates: The wall was “illegal, immoral and inhumane, but not a cause for war.”82 Much harder to admit was the sense that it might prove to be, in the words of Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek, a “godsend.”83 The Kennedy administration knew that the flight of East Germans via West Berlin—it was estimated that 3.5 million East Germans had already left their homes for the refugee centers in the enclave—posed a daily threat to the stability of Khrushchev’s German satellite. In bringing this hemorrhaging to an abrupt end, the wall might reduce the pressure compelling Khrushchev to crusade for a peace treaty. Kennedy’s only responses were therefore designed to restate the U.S. commitment to West Berlin. He immediately dispatched retired General Lucius Clay, the hero of the 1948–1949 Berlin airlift, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson to West Berlin to reassure the population of the divided city. A week later he sent a convoy of sixteen hundred troops along the autobahn to show the flag and to reinforce the U.S. occupying force.84
Kennedy faced the same moral dilemma as had Eisenhower during the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Now, as then, the U.S. president believed he had to turn his back on the plight of the citizens of the socialist bloc to prevent a wider war. Kennedy had not considered that the building of the wall might be a possible scenario flowing from the Vienna ultimatum. His greatest concern had been, and remained, a Soviet military effort to strangle West Berlin. Although the new wall now seemed to rule out a Soviet military assault into West Berlin, the Western access routes remained vulnerable. Kennedy was not prepared to risk everything by destroying a wall that was being built on East German territory.
Protests in West Berlin underscored the moral implications of the wall. The stunned acceptance of the early morning was followed by waves of protest, especially along the corridors of freshly laid barbed wire separating the two Berlins. Three thousand people gathered by early evening at the western end of the Brandenburg Gate. When they started throwing stones east, the East German police opened water cannons on them from the other side. In the southwestern corner of the city, the East German police lobbed tear gas canisters and then used truncheons to disperse an angry West German crowd that had surged into East Berlin. Meanwhile desperate East Germans, including policemen, tried to crash through or jump over the barriers, which were flimsy in these early hours of the division.85
Despite the hurt and fear felt by Berliners, the federal government in Bonn also recognized instantly the utility of the wall. The day after the first barriers went up, Adenauer announced he would not cut trade ties with East Germany. The dreaded economic sanctions would be imposed only if the Kremlin went through with its threat to sign a peace treaty.86 Even Adenauer’s hard-line defense minister, Franz Josef Strauss, appealed for calm among West Germans. “If shooting starts,” he said, “no one knows with what kinds of weapons it will end.”87
KHRUSHCHEV WAS RELIEVED by the lack of a forceful Western response. “War might have broken out,” he said.88 Not only had there not been any Western efforts to remove the barriers, but Kennedy, Macmillan, de Gaulle, and Adenauer seemed to have ruled out any immediate plans to penalize the Eastern bloc for this step. The Kremlin’s secret retaliatory measures could be kept on the shelf.
THE BUILDING of the wall did not end the Berlin crisis of 1961. Neither the Soviets nor the East Germans believed that stanching the flow of refugees had solved the problem. For the remainder of the month of August the Soviet government continued its campaign of psychological pressure on the West in preparation for a treaty showdown. For the first time in nearly twenty years foreign military attachés were invited to observe Soviet army maneuvers. On display were units equipped with nuclear-tipped battlefield missiles.89 No effort at military posturing was more impressive than the announcement at the end of the month that the USSR planned to break its self-imposed moratorium on nuclear testing. Two days later, after three years of abstinence, the Soviet Union began a nuclear test series at its testing range at Semipalatinsk in Central Asia.
Soviet saber rattling emboldened the East Germans to engage in provocations of their own. On August 22 they announced the establishment of a hundred-meter no-man’s-land on both sides of the Berlin Wall. The residents of West Berlin were warned that they might be shot if they approached closer than a hundred meters to the boundary.90 The next day the East Germans unilaterally reduced the number of crossing points that could be used by the West from seven to one, which became known as Checkpoint Charlie, at Friedrichstrasse.91
The Soviets were prepared to accept additional border controls so long as they did not raise the risk of confrontation with the West in Berlin. However, Ulbricht’s new policies, neither of which had been cleared ahead of time by Moscow, involved taking
rights away from the West. On August 24 the Soviet ambassador and Konev met with Ulbricht to explain why it was wrong to declare a no-man’s-land on the Western side of the Berlin boundary. “The establishment of a 100-meter security zone on West Berlin territory and the granting of permission to the police to use force against trespassers in this zone,” the Soviets said, “could lead to a clash between the GDR police and the forces of the Western powers.” The next day Ulbricht issued a statement rescinding the zone and assuring the West that the agencies of the GDR had “no intention of interfering in the internal affairs of West Berlin.”92 However, he refused to back off his plan to maintain only one checkpoint, and Moscow tolerated this small act of defiance.
BY THE END of August Soviet and East German actions were suggesting a policy in flux. All Soviet actions were of course authorized, but Khrushchev was changing his mind. He was back in Pitsunda, where the sunny isolation had again set the wheels of his imagination in motion.
Although Kennedy had responded meekly to the Berlin Wall, the daily reality of the U.S. military commitment to West Berlin was wearing at Khrushchev’s determination to sustain this self-made crisis. For all the hints and intelligence that he had received before Kennedy’s July 25 speech, Khrushchev apparently was not prepared for the scale of the conventional buildup initiated by the U.S. president. At the meeting with McCloy, Khrushchev had tried to scare him by stressing the Soviet Union’s conventional superiority in and around Berlin. “Each division you send to Europe,” he said, “we can match with two of our own.”93 From the start of this crisis he had based his confident prediction of a 5 percent chance of war on the assumption that the United States was so outgunned in Berlin that it had no realistic military options to defend its position. The measures laid out by Kennedy in his speech, which had since been implemented by the United States and accepted by Europe, invalidated the basic premise of Khrushchev’s Berlin gambit. Mikoyan’s prediction of U.S. willingness to engage in a conventional battle, not Khrushchev’s assumption that war was impossible in the nuclear age, seemed to have been borne out.
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