Khrushchev's Cold War

by Aleksandr Fursenko

  With this encouraging news from New York, Khrushchev threw even more energy into creating as favorable a climate for negotiations as possible. Since late August he had been signaling to key socialist allies in areas of particular interest to Kennedy that they should show restraint. In late September he redoubled his efforts to avoid trouble in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. Aware of U.S. sensitivity to events affecting Laos and Cuba, Khrushchev understood that any provocations there could upset Kennedy’s willingness to reconsider U.S. policy toward Berlin.

  EARLIER IN THE SUMMER the Chinese had predicted that under U.S. pressure Khrushchev might link his policies toward the third world with his plans for Berlin. During a visit to Moscow in July Chen Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, had expressed a concern that the Soviets would compromise on Laos to get a better deal from the United States in Central Europe.32 Beijing expected the West to try to blackmail the socialist bloc by linking these international questions and wanted Moscow to avoid the trap. “If we proceed with concessions on Laos,” said the Chinese, “then this will lead them to think that we will concede on other international matters.” Chen Yi hoped that the Soviets would choose to delink Southeast Asia from the turmoil over Berlin in an effort to gain some more tactical flexibility in Asia.33

  As Beijing had feared, Khrushchev’s tolerance for Vietnamese and Chinese risk taking in Laos, which was never great to begin with, waned as he looked for ways to ratchet down the Berlin situation. On August 31 the Kremlin adopted measures to restrain the Chinese and North Vietnamese and promote cooperation between the Communist Pathet Lao and the neutralists led by Souvanna Phouma.34 Throughout the summer the North Vietnamese and their Laotian clients had made a mockery of Khrushchev’s and Kennedy’s sole point of agreement at Vienna. Hanoi had refused to delay its policy of beefing up the military forces of the Pathet Lao and had trained the Laotians in a system of double bookkeeping to keep up the appearance of meeting Soviet demands for a coordinated policy with the neutralists.35 The Pathet Lao concealed troops as well as ammunition from its supposed ally Souvanna. Some were hidden in the areas under Pathet Lao control in the northeast; others were across the border in North Vietnam. The effect of this effort was that the Pathet Lao’s forces were actually twice as large as it declared them to be to its Lao partners.36 Souvanna was also not told of a secret contingent of two hundred North Vietnamese military advisers in his country.

  For months Moscow had been complicit in this charade, contributing two-thirds of the cost of maintaining this secret army. Despite Khrushchev’s understanding with Kennedy on supporting a unified, neutral Laos, the North Vietnamese expected the Soviets to continue this covert assistance, including the allocation of funds to build a secret road from North Vietnam to Laos that could be used to supply these undeclared forces.37 But in the third week of September the Soviets put the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, and the Pathet Lao on notice that this secret policy would have to stop.38 Moscow was not yet ready to call for an end to the secret army, but the Kremlin advised Hanoi and the Pathet Lao to start planning for a coalition government with Souvanna, to lower the figures for the force they expected to maintain, and to rework their demands for assistance because what they had requested was unacceptable.

  UNLIKE THE CHINESE and the Vietnamese, the Cubans lacked a history of being disappointed by Moscow, leaving them ill prepared for Khrushchev’s sudden adoption of a more cautious policy toward the island in September 1961. An increase in U.S.-sponsored covert activity over the summer had prompted Castro in early September to request additional military aid and send the chief of staff of the Cuban Army, Sergio del Valle, to Moscow to negotiate a package. Included on Castro’s long wish list was his first request for the best surface-to-air missiles in the Soviet arsenal. The SA-2 system had shot down Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 in 1960 and the U.S. government was now flying these reconnaissance aircraft over Cuba.39

  Initially it looked as if the Cubans would get what they wanted. On September 20 Cuban and Soviet negotiators reached an agreement for $148 million in aid, 40 percent of which would be an outright gift and the rest paid for through a ten-year loan with interest and some barter.40 A week later the Soviet Council of Ministers approved this recommendation. But then the Presidium, the true center of Soviet power, froze the initiative.41

  Soviet intelligence’s perception of the U.S. threat to Cuba had not changed. The KGB continued to send warnings to Moscow of a possible intervention by Kennedy. “From reliable sources,” cabled the KGB station chief Alekseyev, “the U.S. is preparing [an] intervention against Cuba for the end of November or the beginning of December and, from other data, for January 1962.”42 It did not matter because Khrushchev had tabled the discussion of Castro’s huge military request to give negotiations with the White House a chance.

  Khrushchev also kept an eye out for anything Washington might find provocative in Central Europe. In the last week of September he asked Ulbricht to show some restraint. The East Germans had already indicated their eagerness to tighten the vise around the U.S. military contingent in West Berlin. “Under the present circumstance,” Khrushchev wrote to Ulbricht, “since the measures for the safeguarding and control of the GDR borders with Berlin have been implemented successfully…such steps which could exacerbate the situation, especially in Berlin, should be avoided.”43

  KHRUSHCHEV’S INITIAL efforts to defuse the superpower conflict passed unnoticed by Kennedy. By the third week of September the president was uncharacteristically pessimistic about the future. A journalist close to the Kennedy family caught a glimpse of his mood on September 22. Elie Abel had been invited to the White House to discuss the possibility of doing an authorized study of Kennedy’s first term.44 He saw Kennedy in his private study just as he was preparing to leave for a weekend at Hyannis Port. Below the window, Abel could hear the whirring of Marine One, the helicopter that was to take the family to Cape Cod. “What’s on your mind?” Kennedy asked Abel. When Abel told him about the book idea, Kennedy became introspective. “Why would anyone write a book about an administration that has nothing to show for itself but a string of disasters?” Kennedy started talking about what was on his mind. Such was his concern that he was about to make a huge error over Berlin that he raised the history of the Bay of Pigs debacle. The minutes dragged on, yet Kennedy was too absorbed to leave, as he was scheduled to. He shouted at his aides to tell the helicopter pilot to “turn off that thing; I’m not leaving yet.” Abel later recalled what happened next: “We sat there for a while in the odd position where I, a private citizen, was busy assuring the president of the United States that his administration would not turn out to be a string of disasters and that as he got hold of the job, he and I and all his friends would be proud of his administration, that he would do great things.”

  As Kennedy agonized over what step to take next to avoid an armed confrontation over Berlin, Khrushchev was wondering why he had not received any response to the feeler that he had sent to Kennedy through the New York Times’s Cyrus Sulzberger. On September 24 the Soviet press attaché in the United States, Mikhail Kharlamov, asked the president’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, if Kennedy had received the message. “The storm in Berlin is over,” Kharlamov said, “give it to him.”45

  Kennedy, who had probably not received the note from Sulzberger, got this message. Salinger passed it to him late that night in a New York hotel suite, where Kennedy was staying before a speech the next day at the United Nations. Chewing on an unlit cigar, Kennedy liked what he heard. “He’s not going to recognize the Ulbricht regime—not this year, at least—and that’s good news.”46

  If Khrushchev had sent the message to prevent the president from unilaterally ratcheting up the crisis another notch in his speech to the UN, he need not have worried. Kennedy had already planned to use the speech to hint that his government was rethinking the diplomatic approach to the crisis. “We are committed to no rigid formula…. We see no perfect solution…. But we believe a peaceful a
greement is possible which protects the freedom of West Berlin and allied presence and access, while recognizing the historic and legitimate interests of others in assuring European security.”47 Although Khrushchev may not have viewed this as a step forward, Kennedy had also decided to send only one additional division to Europe, instead of the six that the Pentagon wanted to deploy.48 The president was trying to avoid doing anything provocative while it was still possible to coax Khrushchev to back down from his threat to sign a peace treaty in 1961.

  THE MESSAGE from Kharlamov was evidence that Khrushchev was getting impatient for some kind of dramatic recognition from Washington that the Berlin crisis was over. Probably aware that a note passed from one Soviet official to an American official would not be enough to end the tension, Khrushchev decided a few days later to write directly to Kennedy. He chose to make it a private letter to convey the seriousness of his concern and of his desire to reach an agreement. This would be a new tactic. He had never sent a private letter to Eisenhower, even though the leaders of their respective blocs had weathered crises over Suez, Iraq, and Berlin together.

  The letter to Kennedy began with calculated insincerity.49 Noting that the world had expected the Vienna meeting to have “a soothing effect,” Khrushchev remarked, “To my regret…this did not happen.” In the same spirit, he offered a fanciful account of how he had tried to restore a better relationship. He said that he had been prepared to send a letter, with proposals that he did not specify, in late June but that Kennedy’s July 25 speech had made that impossible. Nowhere in his letter was any hint that at least until mid-August he had intentionally chosen a policy of pressure to get his way.

  He now asked Kennedy to appoint a special representative for consultations. He wanted to supplement the Rusk-Gromyko talks with a conversation along a less formal channel. He again suggested George Kennan but this time added Llewellyn Thompson as a possible liaison through whom the two leaders could swap proposals directly. Khrushchev even raised the possibility of a quick summit with Kennedy in Moscow. It seemed as if the clock had been turned back to the spring, before Khrushchev had started the crisis.

  Kennedy responded a few weeks later, but nothing came of this exchange of letters.50 Khrushchev was still hung up over Western access routes to West Berlin and refused to let the United States maintain its forces in the city without a “token” Soviet contingent nearby. Meanwhile Kennedy still had nothing new to say. What the U.S. president had not mentioned in his UN speech was how much his own policy review was bogging down. The Europeans were primarily responsible for this. The French were opposed to negotiations, and the West Germans were being coy. The State Department was also having difficulties developing new ideas. With no new proposals and the possibility of further complicating Western allied diplomacy, Kennedy had no interest in using his brother or anyone else to make the kind of private approach that he had experimented with on the test ban issue before Vienna.

  KHRUSHCHEV DID NOT react as one might have expected when Kennedy brushed off his private letters. Intelligence from Washington may have been the reason. From sources reporting to the Soviet military intelligence service, the GRU, Khrushchev had a reasonable idea of the difficulties Kennedy was encountering in trying to alter the U.S. policy on Berlin. Georgi Bolshakov, who had served as the intermediary between Robert Kennedy and the Kremlin in May 1961, collected much of this helpful information on Kennedy’s handling of the Berlin issue.51

  Despite Khrushchev’s requests to restart the back channel discussions, the Kennedy brothers had decided not to avail themselves of Bolshakov. He, however, was by now welcome to meet with members of the Kennedy policy elite, and he used this entrée to develop new sources on the Berlin policy review. From sources close to Walt Whitman Rostow, the head of State’s Policy Planning Staff (perhaps Rostow himself), Bolshakov reported that Kennedy was considering a three-point plan for resolving the crisis: (1) Make West Berlin into an international city, guarantee its rights and the rights of free access to it; (2) confirm the existing borders of Germany; (3) establish a demilitarized zone in the center of Europe and, possibly, a nuclear-free zone.52

  Bolshakov was also able to report on why the process seemed to be taking so long. His administration contacts were blaming the Western Europeans, especially the French. Washington believed that de Gaulle was choosing to be disruptive of efforts to forge an allied policy in a vain attempt to win the sympathies of West Germany.53 The good news for the Kremlin was that according to Bolshakov, the Americans had also noticed that Adenauer’s thinking on negotiations was changing. He seemed to be softening.54

  IN OCTOBER 1961 Khrushchev decided to take yet another step to create the right conditions for negotiations on Berlin with the United States. He chose the Twenty-second Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, scheduled for mid-October, as the occasion to announce that the Soviet Union would lift the Berlin ultimatum. Khrushchev did not intend to end the Berlin crisis—his demands and his goals remained the same—he was simply suspending it. Nevertheless, given all that he had said about the need for a resolution in 1961 (to the East Germans and, most important, to his Kremlin colleagues), this was going to be a retreat for him personally. What did Khrushchev have to show for five months of dangerous international tension other than the ugly Berlin Wall?

  When making the announcement at the party congress on October 17, he tried hard to cover this defeat by exaggerating what Kennedy had given him. He had taken this step, said Khrushchev, because “the Western powers were showing some understanding of the situation, and were inclined to seek a solution to the German problem and the issue of West Berlin.”55

  Khrushchev had originally intended to use this congress to reassert Moscow’s leadership over world communism. The Albanians were still in ideological rebellion from the Soviet party, and the Asian parties were unhappy with Moscow’s new caution in Southeast Asia. As a sign of their displeasure, the Laotian, Vietnamese, and Chinese Communists had refused to back Khrushchev in his criticisms of the Albanians. Even the Indonesians, who had echoed Khrushchev’s criticisms of Stalin in 1956, refused to provide any rhetorical support in his crusade against the Albanians.

  Khrushchev encountered a contradiction between his hopes to ease the Berlin crisis and his goal of pulling the socialist world closer together. Abandoning the pledge to resolve the Berlin situation in 1961 would further weaken the Kremlin’s credibility as the beacon of socialism and incite even more criticism of Khrushchev’s pet idea of peaceful coexistence.

  The Chinese, masters at Communist semiotics, led the criticism. They knew well how to annoy fellow Marxist-Leninists. A few days after giving his own report at the party congress, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai announced he would return to Beijing before the end of the conference. Never before had the Chinese left in the middle of a major international Communist gathering. To make sure that Khrushchev felt the slap personally, Zhou made a solitary pilgrimage to the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum in Red Square on the day of his departure. In spite of Khrushchev’s destalinization campaign, the mummified Stalin remained on display next to Lenin. On Stalin’s sarcophagus, Zhou left a telling wreath: “To Josif Vissarionovich Stalin—the great Marxist-Leninist.”56

  The most bitter response came from the East Germans. Ulbricht avoided open disagreement with Khrushchev in Moscow. Instead he chose even more dramatic means to vent his own displeasure. A year earlier the East German leader had followed willingly as Khrushchev set out to achieve his maximum objectives. Ulbricht’s primary concern had been to close the gates in Berlin, whereas Khrushchev had insisted on trying to achieve everything East Germany needed to be a fully sovereign state at once, to “draw a line under the Second World War.” In November 1960 Khrushchev had assured Ulbricht that this would be possible in 1961, once the East had a good feel for Kennedy’s psychology. Now, after a six-month-long propaganda campaign, the East German people had come to associate a peace treaty with domestic stability. Ulbricht too had convinced hims
elf that the wall alone could not assure him either political legitimacy or economic security. Khrushchev’s sudden abandonment of the effort, without achieving any Western concessions, left his East German ally raw and vengeful. There had been no warning from the Kremlin before Khrushchev lifted the ultimatum, so it appears Ulbricht decided to initiate some unilateral changes of his own.57

  ON OCTOBER 22, 1961, Allen Lightner, the senior American diplomat in West Berlin, tried to take his wife to the theater in East Berlin and instead found himself the star of an international incident. This was not his first visit to East Berlin. Since August 23 Lightner, like all Western allied personnel, had been restricted to the use of the border point at Friedrichstrasse known as Checkpoint Charlie to enter the Soviet zone. While the reduction of the number of entry points from seven to one had been inconvenient, Lightner had not had any trouble entering via Checkpoint Charlie and did not expect this particular evening to be any different. He had not counted on the complexities of Soviet–East German relations.

  At 7:15 P.M. the East German police, the Vopos, stopped the Lightners as they attempted to enter at Friedrichstrasse in their personal car. When the Vopos requested that Lightner show identification, he refused and demanded entry, as was his right as a member of one of the four-power missions in Berlin. But the East Germans wouldn’t let them in. Lightner then asked to see a Soviet officer. The East Germans stalled. This new East German tactic was directed as much at Moscow as at the West.

  After waiting nearly an hour, Lightner decided to try his luck at driving around the maze of roadblocks that littered the first few yards of East Berlin territory. Luck was not with him that night. As the car cleared the maze, a group of East German guards formed a line to prevent it from going any farther. Again Lightner requested a Soviet officer. Again he was refused. The performance in East Berlin a lost cause, Lightner and his wife nevertheless refused on principle to turn around and go home.