Berlin 1961 (68 page)

After a perfunctory handshake, Grewe returned to the embassy to send home another grim cable to Adenauer.

U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON, D.C.
TUESDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER
24, 1961

Secretary Rusk was irritated that General Clay was providing him with un-solicited advice on how to conduct diplomacy with Moscow, then unilaterally making deployment decisions at Berlin’s border connected to those suggestions. On Rusk’s behalf, Berlin task force chief Foy Kohler called Allan Lightner at nine in the evening German time to get him back on the State Department reservation and to pull him out from under General Clay’s seductive spell.

Speaking to Lightner, Kohler shot down Clay’s advice that Rusk should use the unfolding border dispute as leverage for negotiations with Moscow. Beyond that, he reminded a defensive Lightner that he reported to Rusk and not to Clay. In his memo to Rusk afterward that reported on his chat with Lightner, Kohler complained, “The conversation was almost entirely in double-talk.”

Lightner assured Kohler that his role in the border-crossing incident two days earlier had been “entirely unexpected and rather embarrassing.” In all his life as a diplomat, Lightner had never encountered so much media attention, ranging from sneering insinuations in the communist press that he was crossing to meet with his mistress to excessive praise in the West Berlin press that the top American in Berlin was finally demonstrating U.S. testicles.

Kohler joked that Lightner’s name had become “a household word in the U.S.” overnight, which in the publicity-shy State Department wasn’t a compliment. What bothered Kohler more, he said, was that Clay had suspended the border crossings without Washington’s clearance, which Kohler called “a serious tactical mistake.” He believed the Soviet official’s eventual appearance at the border crossing on October 22 had achieved the U.S. purpose of showing that it remained the Soviets and not the East Germans who would guarantee U.S. free passage in East Berlin.

In putting a stop to the military escorts, Lightner apologized to his superiors in Washington that he had been “overruled by a higher authority,” namely Clay. At the same time, he wanted to know what Rusk thought of Clay’s ingenious idea of calling in the Soviet ambassador and informing him that the U.S. would refuse to negotiate with Russia until the East Germans canceled their expanded border inspections.

Kohler said Clay’s proposal was being considered but that many other factors would play into the decision of when and how to talk to the Russians. Thus, Rusk wanted Clay to resume his probes with “both armed and unarmed escorts of U.S. vehicles” if the East Germans continued to refuse American rights of free passage.

With that, General Clay had clear instructions to resume his escorts. The slap on Clay’s hand, however, was just as unmistakable. Rusk wanted him to stay out of U.S.–Soviet diplomacy, which was none of his business. For whatever reason, Clay’s superiors were encouraging his more assertive course but refusing to connect it with a more assertive diplomacy.

The outcome was destined to be an unhappy one.

CHECKPOINT CHARLIE, WEST BERLIN
FRIDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER
27, 1961

United States Army First Lieutenant Vern Pike had two concerns as he looked down the enemy tank barrels, adjusted his green army helmet with the bold white “MP” emblazoned across its front, and ensured his M14 rifle had its safety off, a bullet in its chamber, and its bayonet unsheathed.

Foremost in his mind, the twenty-four-year-old U.S. military police officer was worried for his wife, Renny, who at age twenty was increasingly pregnant with their twins. Pike had decided against sending her home for Christmas, as the young couple didn’t want to be separated for that long, but now that decision looked irresponsible.

That was due to his second fear. Pike knew from his training that the scene unfolding before him could escalate to war—perhaps even a nuclear one—and take with it him, his young bride, and their unborn twins, not to mention a good portion of the planet. All it would take was one nervous U.S. or Soviet trigger finger, he thought to himself.

It was just past nine in the evening, and ten American M48 Patton tanks were poised at the Friedrichstrasse crossing, facing an identical number of Soviet T-54 tanks about a hundred paces away. The showdown had begun to unfold several hours earlier in the afternoon when U.S. tanks had clanked up to the border as they had the two previous days to back up what were already becoming routine military escorts of American civilian cars into East Berlin.

At precisely 4:45 p.m., after another successful and uneventful operation, U.S. commanders had ordered the American tanks withdrawn to Tempelhof Air Base. Pike, whose military police platoon supervised Checkpoint Charlie, then took a cigarette break with Major Thomas Tyree, who commanded the tank group. From the warmth of a drugstore on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse, they looked out the window toward the East and turned to each other in disbelief.

“Do you see what I see?” said Tyree to Pike.

“Sir, those are tanks!” Pike responded with alarm. “And they aren’t ours.” He calculated that they were no more than seventy to a hundred yards from where they stood.

Though they looked to be newly built Soviet T-54 tanks, their national markings were obscured. All the more mysterious, the military personnel driving them and manning their guns appeared to be wearing unmarked black uniforms. If they were Soviet—and it was hard to imagine they were anything else—they were preserving deniability.

“Vern,” said Tyree, “I don’t know whose tanks those are, but get the hell to Tempelhof and get me my tanks back, quick as you can.”

“Yes, sir,” said Pike, glancing at his watch. The U.S. tanks had left ten minutes earlier, so it would not take long for him to catch them. He jumped into his military police car, a white Ford, and raced through Friday rush-hour traffic, weaving in and out with his siren blaring and his “gumball machine,” as he called his rooftop light, rotating. He caught up with the tanks just as they were arriving at their base.

Pike shouted out his window at the lead tank, which was driven by his Berlin neighbor, Captain Bob Lamphir. “Sir, we’ve got trouble at Checkpoint Charlie; follow me and let’s get back there as fast as we can go.”

“Whoopee!” yelped Lamphir as he ordered all the tanks to turn around and head back to the border. Pike later recalled how the thrill of impending danger surged through him: “Here we are at five o’clock in the afternoon rush hour on an October Friday in Berlin, racing down Mariendamm towards Checkpoint Charlie with my little MP car going
bebop, bebop
out in the front. And every living Berliner within eyesight gets the hell out of the way.”

Just before the American tanks had returned to the scene at 5:25 p.m., the Soviet tanks had withdrawn to parking areas on a vacant lot near East Berlin’s main boulevard of Unter den Linden. If not for all the potential peril, the scene had the atmosphere of a French farce, with the Soviet actors rumbling behind the curtain just as their American counterparts rushed onto the stage. In expectation that their opponents might return, the U.S. tanks remained and arranged themselves in defensive positions.

Some forty minutes later, at just past six in the evening, what appeared to be Russian tanks returned and assembled themselves with guns pointed across the line. A
Washington Post
reporter who had gathered at the crossing with dozens of other correspondents announced it was “the first time that the forces of the two wartime allies, now the world’s biggest powers, had met in direct and hostile confrontation.”

In reference to the lack of national markings, CBS Radio correspondent Daniel Schorr called them, “to borrow a term from Orwell…the un-tanks. Or we may one day hear that they were just Russian-speaking volunteers who had bought some surplus tanks and come down on their own.” Schorr reported on the curious scene: In the West, the American GIs sat atop their tanks, smoking, chatting, and eating dinner from mess kits. West Berliners, held back behind rope barriers, bought pretzel sticks from street vendors, and presented flowers to GIs. The Western scene was all lit by enormous floodlights beamed from the communist side—an effort to intimidate using superior wattage. On the Eastern side, the apparently Russian tanks sat in darkness with their black-uniformed crews. “What a picture for the history books!” Schorr exclaimed.

Clay required confirmation for his masters in Washington that they were Soviet. It was not an academic point: for the U.S., the danger of a confrontation with Soviet tanks was that it could turn into a general war. East German tanks posed another sort of difficulty, because their deployment was prohibited in East Berlin under the four-power agreements.

Under orders to ascertain the tanks’ origin, Pike and his driver Sam McCart climbed into an Army sedan and weaved through the barricades and down a side street well past the tanks, where they parked and then walked back. It was part of the surreal nature of the showdown that both sides continued to respect military freedom of movement at the border, so Pike could drive through without impediment.

Pike was surprised at the tanks’ illogical two-three-two formation, which made it impossible for the rear tanks to fire upon the enemy. Beyond that, they also were making themselves easy targets. Pike walked up to the rear tank and saw nothing to help his investigation: “no Russians, no East Germans, no one.” So he climbed onto the tank and down into the driver’s compartment. There he confirmed it was Soviet by the Cyrillic script on the controls and the Red Army newspaper by the brake handle, which Pike could identify, given his smattering of Russian. “Hey, McCart, look at this,” he said as he climbed out of the tank and showed him the newspaper that he had taken as evidence.

The tanks’ crews, about fifty men in all, were sitting on the ground a short distance away, apparently getting briefed on their mission. Pike walked up close enough to hear they were speaking Russian. When one of the Soviet officers spotted him, Pike turned to McCart and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

After driving back, they reported to Colonel Sabolyk, who was Pike’s superior, that the tanks were Soviet. When Pike explained how he had found out and showed the newspaper, Sabolyk said in shock, “You did
what?
”

The disbelieving colonel put Pike on the phone to the emergency operations center, which connected him with Kennedy’s special representative so he could hear for himself. “Whose tanks are they?” Clay asked.

“They are Soviet, sir,” Pike said.

“How do you know?”

When Pike told him, Clay was silent on the other end of the line. Pike felt as though he could hear him thinking, “Oh, God, a lieutenant has started World War Three.”

Pike had dared to undertake the mission partly because he felt young and invulnerable, but also because by then American soldiers thought little of Soviet discipline, morale, or military capability. Though GIs knew they were outnumbered, they also felt superior. When driving into West Berlin on the Helmstedt Autobahn from West Germany, Pike had seen Russian grunts hawking their belt buckles, caps, and even Soviet medals as souvenirs in exchange for
Playboy
magazines, chewing gum, ink pens, or especially cigarettes.

At less generous moments, GIs would flick burning cigarettes to the ground just to watch the Russians scramble to recover them for a few drags. Pike recalled later that their gear was of poor quality, their boots flimsy, their field jackets old; they looked to Pike like hand-me-downs from previous conscripts. He told friends that “their body odor would chase a buzzard off a shit wagon.”

Pike had little more regard for their tanks, which maneuvered badly. The drivers were often from Asian minorities, Pike had noticed, because he reckoned they were the only ones able to fit into compartments that had been built too small. He and his men chuckled when the first tanks had rolled up that day and officers standing on the road struggled to position them using exaggerated hand movements and semaphores, apparently to overcome language and handling difficulties.

But nothing was very funny about Pike’s realization that the Soviet army could “simply swat us out of the way if they ever decided to take the Western half of the city.” Pike recalled his orientation briefing when he had reported for duty in West Berlin.

“You are the first line of defense,” his commander had said. “The best way to get out of here if the balloon goes up is to put on a
Strassenmeister
[street cleaner] armband on your left arm, pick up a broom, and start sweeping down the Autobahn all the way to West Germany. That’s the only way you’re going to get out of Berlin alive.”

Pike had laughed then, but not now. He calculated the possible outcomes as he stamped his feet to stay warm. Either U.S. or Soviet leaders would blink and withdraw from the battlefield, or someone would shoot and a war would begin. In any case, he couldn’t imagine his wife, Renny, heavy with twins, grabbing for a broom and sweeping her way out of Berlin.

The scene before Pike varied between one of imminent threat and touching human drama.

At one point, an eighty-year-old East Berlin woman decided to take advantage of the confusion to simply walk across the border to escape as a refugee. From the West Berlin side and only thirty feet away from her, her son shouted repeatedly at her to keep walking though an East Berlin policeman blocked her path. The crowd watched in fear as her son shouted over and over again:
“Mutter, komm doch, bitte!”
(“Mother, come on, please!”).

The officer, whose standing orders were to shoot to kill those trying to flee, stood to the side and called off his dog in a random act of mercy. The old woman took ten more faltering steps before falling into her son’s arms as she crossed the line to freedom amid onlookers’ cheers.

Down the street from the unmarked Soviet tanks in the capitalist West, bathed in light from six high-powered searchlights mounted by the East Germans on wooden towers just the day before, four U.S. M48 Patton tanks rested, the first pair on the white painted line on Friedrichstrasse separating East and West. Two more tanks were in a lot just off Friedrichstrasse, and four more were poised for action a quarter mile away. Near them were five personnel carriers and five jeeps loaded with MPs wearing bulletproof vests and with bayonets fixed to rifles.