The Year that Changed the World (36 page)

How vast was the gulf between the doyens of the Bush administration and someone such as Teltschik. In contrast to the American national security team, he saw events in the East as a “historic opportunity,” as he put it to me at the time. His individual role was critical to events in Hungary, and therefore to the revolutions elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Yet it is almost entirely unknown, even in Germany. “No one has told this history,” Teltschik told me in our meeting in Munich. “Not even me in my book, nor Kohl in his.”

CHAPTER 7

I took a series of reporting trips to Poland during the election campaign and its aftermath, traveling and interviewing extensively around the country. I was repeatedly struck by the comparative innocence of both sides. Solidarity had no inkling of how well it would do. Lech Walesa, in particular, railed at being drawn into early elections, convinced they would favor
the communists—who he assumed, mistakenly, would use their superior organizational power to stage an effective, all-out campaign.

Solidarity's spokesman Janusz Onyszkiewicz laughed when I asked him how he thought the vote would go. “We have no organization. We have no money. Poland is a complete political wilderness. No one has any idea what will happen.” The communist party's chief political pollster and campaign strategist, Colonel Stanislaw Kwiatkowski, advised official candidates that their “personality,” rather than their political affiliation would be what counts with voters. “We are confident,” he told me, sharing his projections that the communist party would win anywhere from a quarter to half of the Senate, as well as a majority of the contested seats in the lower house. Other party leaders, however, did not share his optimism. Jerzy Urban, the information minister, who was running as an independent in Warsaw, grumbled that Solidarity looked unstoppable. What would he do if he lost? He joked about opening a porno magazine. At least, I took him to be joking. In fact, that's just what he did—and wound up making millions.

While Solidarity won the election decisively, it can be argued that both sides lost, as the eminent British historian Timothy Garton Ash notes with trademark irony in his account of 1989,
We the People.
Often forgotten in the hoopla accompanying Solidarity's victory was an important fact: only 62 percent of Poles voted in this most important election in the nation's history—far less than the 79 percent in the 1975 parliamentary elections, when only communists ran. Most Poles were too tired, too dispirited, too fed up with politics and politicians to bother. Those who did vote crossed out communists with the flair and vigor—
pfft, pfft, pfft
—bred of decades of anger, frustration and disappointment. But few thought Poland would much change with Solidarity in the government, or that their own lives would improve. Yes, June 4 marked the death of communism in Poland. But it died as much with a whimper as a bang.

I moved on to Budapest shortly after the Polish elections, meeting Erich Honecker in Berlin as a sort of geopolitical detour. The behind-the-scenes dimension comes from interviews with the principals, Pozsgay and Nemeth in particular, as well as members of the Committee for Historical Justice. Grosz's calumny against Nagy at that decisive meeting of the Central Committee in the days leading up the funeral come from an interview with Nemeth by the National Security Archive in Washington, backstopped by Tokes, who also chronicled the downfall of Karoly Grosz and the mass defections from the party that would seal his fate. I also relied on the NSA interview for the material on the death threats Nemeth received during this period, as well as a CNN interview undertaken as part of the network's 1997 Cold War History Project.

The interview with Honecker took place on June 7, 1989, with the
Washington Post
and
Newsweek.
For Honecker's visit to Cuba, see Charles S.
Maier's brilliant
Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany,
1998. The segment on the Warsaw Pact summit in Bucharest and the genesis of the plot against Honecker is based on interviews with Schabowski and Nemeth as well as transcripts of Honecker's and Ceausescu's speeches of July 7, 1989. Honecker's mirror-image letters to Moscow, in 1980 and 1989, can be found online in the Woodrow Wilson Center's Cold War Archive. And, of course, Oskar Fischer should not be confused with Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister from 1998 to 2005.

Sources useful for the segment on America's awakening include, among others,
A World Transformed,
George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, 1998;
Germany Unified and Europe Transformed,
Zelikow and Rice, 1997;
American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War,
Robert L. Hutchings, 1997; James A. Baker,
The Politics of Diplomacy,
1995. Nemeth's account of his conversation with President Bush appears in an interview in the BBC–Spiegel Television documentary
The Fall of the Wall,
1994.

It's worth noting, too, that if the White House was slow to fully appreciate the magnitude of changes under way in the East, the U.S. embassy in Warsaw was not. Declassified cables from the period show Ambassador John Davis and a senior political officer, Daniel Fried, to have been genuinely foresighted in predicting Solidarity's decisive victory in the elections and the general course of events on the ground. This cable traffic is available on the Web via the National Security Archive. U.S. reporting from Hungary was no less incisive, affirming once again that policymakers in Washington (as elsewhere) often hear only what they want to hear.

CHAPTERS 8–9

The saga of the Pan-European Picnic is chiefly based on interviews with Miklos Nemeth and the tenth-anniversary recollections of Laszlo Nagy, one of the key organizers. The bizarre tale of Frau Silvia Lux, an East German schoolteacher, and her children was told to West German television upon her arrival in Austria and reproduced in the documentary by BBC–Spiegel TV
The Fall of the Wall,
1994. (Transcript 3/13, Liddell Hart Centre of Military Archives, King's College, London.) Two quotes from Imre Pozsgay (“This invitation gave me a chance …” and “nerve-racking …”) come from the same source. (Transcript 3/25, Liddell Hart Centre.)

There is some confusion about the role of those “West German officials.” Bonn's ambassador to Budapest at the time, Alexander Arnot, told me that his consular officers had no role in the Pan-European Picnic; yet on-scene accounts make clear reference to people who identified themselves as such. Nemeth said that roughly a dozen West German officials were involved in the plot, including Chancellery officials, members of the
BND (West Germany's intelligence service) and the Budapest chapter of the German Red Cross. Arnot was not informed, according to Nemeth, at least not directly. Genscher's reactions to Nemeth's visit to Bonn can be found in his memoir,
Rebuilding a House Divided,
1998.

The related chapter, “The Great Escape,” draws on the same interviews, including one with Michael Jansen, the German diplomat tasked with organizing shelter for the tens of thousands of East German “tourists” holed up in Hungary with no plans for returning home. He spoke specifically of secretly shuttling personally between Vienna and Budapest in preparation for the Great Escape. Jansen went on to assist East Germans in Prague to escape to the Federal Republic during the events of late September and October.

See Rice and Zelikow for Fischer's charge of “treason!” The statistics on the number of East Germans encamped around Lake Balaton and elsewhere come from Maier's
Dissolution,
while the numbers on those who fled during the first days and weeks of the exodus are drawn from Rice and Zelikow. Gunter Schabowski colorfully described the reaction of the East German Politburo, as well as the story of Erich Honecker's disastrous “Big Idea.” The reactions of ordinary East and West Germans, as well as government officials, are drawn from a series of reporting trips in Berlin and other cities during September and October for
Newsweek.

For the account of George H. W. Bush's July visit to Poland and Hungary, see
A World Transformed,
Bush and Scowcroft. The quote from Nemeth (“We both knew …”) also comes from the BBC–Spiegel TV documentary. For the murmurings of German unification, beginning in earnest that September, see Zelikow and Rice as well as
American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War
by Robert L. Hutchings, the unnamed NSC aide who counted himself among those “thrilled, not to say astonished, onlookers.”

The interview with Ceausescu was the fruit of a play to his vanity. Recognizing his thirst to be noticed on the world's stage, I wrote through his ambassador in Bonn that Kenneth Auchincloss, my boss and the editor of
Newsweek International,
had always wanted to meet him. “Related to the Kennedys,” I intimated, precipitating an invitation with all the pomp and circumstance normally accorded a visiting head of state. As part of the deal I was given two weeks' free run of the country in advance of the interview. It was an unprecedented license to go everywhere, largely uninhibited by the police, talking to peasants in their fields, townspeople, the few dissidents not in jail. If Ceausescu's handlers hoped I'd write a flattering portrait of his tyranny, they were mistaken. The final result—a cover story published in August—was officially classified as a state secret, according to intelligence authorities I met in Bucharest after Ceausescu's death.

One anecdote about the interview bears inclusion. Into the second hour
of Ceausescu's monologue, Ken Auchincloss decided enough was enough is enough, even from the Danube of Thought. “Well, thank you, Mr. President,” he said, hoping to end the show. Ceausescu stopped in midgesture, the torrent of his words suddenly arrested. A funny look, almost boyish, at once disappointed and disbelieving, crossed his face. He had probably never, ever been interrupted like this. His fist, momentarily frozen above his head, slowly came down. His eyes lost their manic intensity and seemed to slide back into the real world from somewhere in Outer Megalomania. “But … but … but,” said the dictator plaintively. “I'm … I'm … not finished yet.”

CHAPTER 10

The interval from early September through mid-October was a whirlwind of travel from one East European capital to another: Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, East Berlin, Bonn, Vienna and back again. I've confined the narrative to interviews with the principals in the drama: Nemeth, Pozsgay, Schabowski, Walesa, Mazowiecki, Havel. But many others played large roles in the events. Among them, in Poland: Bronislaw Geremek and Janusz Onyszkiewicz, a mathematician and alpinist who became Solidarity's spokesman (and had spent years in jail) and went on to become defense minister and eventually vice chairman of the European parliament. In Czechoslovakia, besides Havel, Jan Urban, a dissident signatory of Charter 77, and his best friend, Ivan Gabal, both future founders of Havel's Civic Forum movement, were very helpful, as was Jiri Dienstbier, also a Charter 77 signatory and future foreign minister, as well as others who figure in these pages and many more who do not. I still remember Milos Jakes with the greatest distaste.

Interviews in Budapest included U.S. ambassador Mark Palmer, various opposition-party leaders and foreign ministry officials. The scene featuring Imre Pozsgay was a great cameo moment of 1989, and highly ironic. By disbanding the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party when he did, disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of members in his anticommunist zeal, Pozsgay destroyed his own career. Had he found a way to hang on to them, he might well have realized his ambition to be a democratic Hungary's first president, according to Rudolf Tokes.

CHAPTER 11

I was in East Germany for most of the period covered in these final chapters. The insider's account of Gorbachev's visit on October 7 comes from
Schabowski. Gorbachev's aide was Anatoly Chernyaev; the story is excerpted from his diary in the Archive of the Gorbachev Foundation. Gorbachev had added, “I will not say a word of support for Honecker. But I will support the republic and the revolution.” Chernyaev himself clearly saw this as a critical moment. Protests in Dresden that day drew twenty thousand people. The next day the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party planned to disband. Poland's communist party, he predicted, would not last past its next congress in February. “The dismantling of socialism as a world phenomenon has been proceeding. Perhaps it is inevitable and good. And a common fellow from Stavropol [Gorbachev] set this process in motion.”

I was a witness to the riots in East Berlin on the night of October 7, of course, but relied for background on events in other cities, including Leipzig, Plauen and Dresden, on contemporary news reports as well as two indispensable histories:
Wir sind das Volk,
a painstaking and ultra-detailed chronicle from October 7 through December 17, 1989, published in 1990 by Hannes Bahrman and Christoph Links, and
Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany,
1997, an autopsy of East Germany's final years by Charles S. Maier, a professor of history at Harvard University. The conversation between Egon Krenz and Milos Jakes, as well as the latter's aside concerning Gorbachev's behavior at the state dinner, is related in the BBC–Spiegel TV documentary,
The Fall of the Wall.
So is Jens Illing's frightening account of the security preparations for the night of October 9 in Leipzig.

Precisely who prevented that bloodbath, and how, remains unclear. I've reached the best judgment I could based on interviews with Schabowski, Krenz and other sources. Krenz's call to Soviet ambassador Vyacheslav Kochemasov is recounted by Maier as well as Zelikow and Rice, by way of the Russian envoy's autobiography,
Meine Letzte Mission,
1994. See also Elizabeth Pond,
Beyond the Wall: Germany's Road to Unification,
1993. The chilling directive announcing action against the “counter-revolutionaries … with weapons in the hand” can be found in
Wir sind das Volk.
The exchange between Helmut Hackenberg, the regional party chief, and Krenz comes from the BBC–Spiegel documentary. The eyewitness account of Erich Honecker's downfall on October 17 is told principally by Gunter Schabowski. Officially, Honecker's resignation would be for “health reasons.”