Studies in Intelligence Vol. 44 No.

3 (2000)

On the Front Lines of the

Cold War: The Intelligence
War in Berlin
Donald P. Steury

Conference in Germany

From 10-12 September 1999,

the CIA’s Center for the Study
of Intelligence (CSI) and the "There are only a few places on this
Alliierten (Allied) Museum earth where misery, hopelessness,
jointly hosted a conference on and toil in the strugle for one’s daily
intelligence activities in Berlin bread and yet, at the same time, joy,
hope, and great expectations have
from the end of World War II to intertwined [more] closely than here in
the construction of the Berlin Berlin…. It is by no means immodest to
Wall in August 1961. The event claim that world history has been
—the first public conference made in this city." --From
ever hosted by the CIA on Conference Welcoming Statement
foreign soil—was staged in the by Claus Henning Schapper, State
Secretary, Germany’s Ministry for
former US military SIGINT
Internal Affairs
facility on the Teufelsberg
(Devil’s Mountain), a Cold War
landmark just outside Berlin.
The conference marked the culmination of a two-year cooperative effort
by CSI and the Alliierten Museum. The Investorengruppe Teufelsberg,
which owns the site, provided financial and logistical support.
Warmed by the sun of a Berlin Indian summer, more than 150 Cold War
intelligence veterans, historians, journalists and other interested persons
gathered in the shadow of the domed towers of the "T-berg" to relive some
of the most critical years of the Cold War. Some were there just to see the
Teufelsberg. If any of the visitors were disappointed that it turned out to
be just another dingy government building, they concealed it well. In any
case, the broad windows of the dining hall offered an unmatched view of
Berlin and the surrounding countryside, while the mystery of the place
lived on in the still-present security arrangements, the barbed-wire fences,
and the silent, empty rooms that bore the marks of 30 years of intelligence
activity.

Berlin: The Intelligence War, 1945-1961 Conference at the Teufelsberg and

the Alliierten Museum, 10-12 September 1999

Agenda

Welcome
• Claus Henning Schaper, State Secretary, Federal Ministry of the
Interior
• Dr. Kuno Böse, State Secretary, Berlin Senate Office of the
Interior
• The Honorable John Kornblum, US Ambassador to the Federal
Republic of Germany
The March Crisis and the Berlin Airlift
• Dr. Donald Steury, Chair
• Professor Ernest
• R. May Dr. Viktor
• Gobarev Professor
• Wolfgang Krieger
Allied Military Intelligence in Berlin

• Dr. John Greenwood, Chair

• Dr. William Stivers
• Lt. Col. Daniel Trastour
• Col. Nigel N. Wylde

The Other Side of the Wall: KGB and Stasi

 • Professor Christopher Andrew, Chair
• Dr. Richard Popplewell
• Mr. Benjamin B. Fischer
• Dr. Vladislav Zubok

Spying Without Spies

• Dr. Gerald Haines, Chair

• Dr. Kevin C. Ruffner
• Dr. Donald P. Steury
• Dr. Vance O. Mitchell

Berlin in the Wilderness of Mirrors: Agents, Double Agents, and Defectors

• Dr. Richard E. Schroeder, Chair

• Ambassador Hugh Montgomery
• Mr. Nigel West
• Mr. Jerrold Schecter

Eisenhower, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Wall

• Ambassador Raymond L. Garthoff, Chair

• Professor Egon K-H. Bahr
• Dr. William Burr
• Dr. Vladislav Zubok

Battleground Berlin: Veterans Remember

• Dr. Helmut Trotnow, Chair

• Mr. Burton L. Gerber
• Col. Oleg Gordievsky
• Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin
• Mr. Peter M. Sichel

From Dusk to Dawn: Berlin and the History of the Cold War

• The Honorable Vernon A. Walters, former US Ambassador to

West Germany and former Deputy Director of Central
Intelligence

On the dais, some of the most secret aspects of Cold War history were
coming to life. Featuring a mix of personal recollections and scholarly
presentations, the conference presented a broad view of Cold War
intelligence operations in Berlin that ran the gamut from agent operations,
to the Berlin tunnel, to US Air Force reconnaissance missions. In the initial
panel, Harvard diplomatic historian Ernest R. May joined Russian military
historian Viktor Gobarev and German Cold War historian Wolfgang Krieger
to provide a multifaceted overview of the crises in 1948 (Soviet saber-
rattling in March, followed by the Soviet blockade of Berlin and the
legendary US-British-French airlift). In another panel, chaired by
Cambridge University intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, Benjamin
B. Fischer of CSI’s History Staff explored the Agency’s penetration of the
Stasi (East German intelligence and security service) in the early 1950s.
The day concluded with a tour of the Teufelsberg and a reception hosted
by the Investorengruppe.

Panel on the March 1948 crisis and Berlin airlift. From left: Donald Steury,
Wolfgang Krieger, Ernest May, and Viktor Gobarev. Photo: W. Durie
The second day began with an interesting and informative panel on
technical means of collection, chaired by the CIA’s Chief Historian, Gerald
K. Haines. That panel was followed by one of the conference’s highlights—
a roundtable discussion hosted by CSI Deputy Director Dr. Richard E.
Schroeder and featuring veteran British historian Nigel West, American
author Jerrold Schecter, and Ambassador Hugh Montgomery, a veteran
intelligence officer and diplomat who now serves as a Special Assistant to
the DCI. Ambassador Montgomery participated in the Berlin Tunnel
operation in the 1950s.

The afternoon sessions on the second day opened with a panel on the
Berlin crisis of 1958-1961. Ambassador Raymond L. Garthoff, a longtime
expert on Soviet and East European affairs, led the discussion, which
included historians from the US and Russia along with Dr. Egon Bahr of
Germany. Dr. Bahr was a close adviser to West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt,
at the time that the Berlin Wall was erected in August 1961. In his panel
presentation, he painted a compelling picture of the frustration and
anxiety that confronted the West Berlin leadership during that crisis.
Ambassador Garthoff described how intelligence influenced US decision-
making in the crisis, and he presented new information on the "back-
channel" contacts between President Kennedy and Soviet Premier
Khrushchev at the height of the crisis.

At the Allied Museum, standing in front of a section of the Berlin tunnel.

From left: Oleg Gordievsky, Burton Gerber, Helmut Trotnow, Oleg Kalugin, Peter
Sichel. (Photo: W. Durie)

Conference attendees then visited the Alliierten Museum, where they held
a roundtable discussion on Cold War espionage in Berlin. Dr. Helmut
Trotnow, the museum’s director, chaired the session. Participants included
former intelligence officers from both sides of the late and unlamented
Iron Curtain. The CIA was represented by Peter Sichel, who served in Berlin
during the 1940s and 1950s, and Burton Gerber, a longtime (39 years)
former Agency officer with extensive experience in Soviet and European
affairs. Former KGB General Oleg Kalugin, who resigned in 1989 after
harshly criticizing the KGB and now lives in the US, contributed the Soviet
perspective. A unique perspective encompassing both sides of the story
was provided by former KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, who defected to the
West in 1985 after serving as a British agent inside the KGB for 11 years.
Attendees also took advantage of the opportunity to tour the museum
itself, which features a comprehensive collection of exhibits on the Allied
occupation of Berlin and the divided city’s role in the Cold War.

Conference participants also embarked on a tour of Berlin that included

the former Normannenstraße headquarters of the dreaded East German
Stasi. Few could resist the opportunity to sit at the desk of Stasi director
Erich Mielke, adorned with one of his treasures, Lenin’s death mask. The
tour included visits to formerly divided Berlin’s two Rathaüser (City Halls)—
the so-called Red Rathaus in the city center, and the Schoneberg Rathaus,
where President Kennedy delivered his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner"
speech. The tour included a visit to former Soviet facilities in Karlshorst—
once the KGB Rezidentura (Station) in Berlin, Soviet intelligence’s largest
foreign post during the Cold War.

The conference concluded with a keynote address by Ambassador Vernon

Walters, who was US Chief of Mission in Germany when the Berlin Wall
went down and is a former Army General, Deputy Director of Central
Intelligence, and veteran of many sensitive diplomatic troubleshooting
missions during the Cold War era. Those who stayed to the end were
treated to a trip to the once-famous Glienicke Bridge—the site of
numerous Cold War prisoner exchanges—accompanied by Oleg Kalugin
and Francis Gary Powers, Jr. Powers’s famous father had walked across
that span when he was exchanged for Soviet "illegal" Rudolf Abel in 1962.

In conjunction with the conference, CSI released a collection of

declassified intelligence documents, On the Front Lines of the Cold War:
Documents on the Intelligence War in Berlin, 1946 to 1961 . This volume gathers
together long-range National Intelligence Estimates, current reporting and
operational records, and raw intelligence materials—including two German-
language reports from the CIA’s agent inside the East German intelligence
service.

Excerpts from Conference Speeches

and Panel Discussions

On the Berlin Blockade: Stalin severed ground links between West Berlin
and West Germany in June 1948. The Soviet leadership was confident that
this "blockade" of West Berlin would force the Western Allies to abandon
their positions in the city. Instead, the US, Britain, and France mounted a
massive effort to supply the city, which held out for nearly a year, at which
point the Soviets backed down.

"I think it’s important to set the Berlin Crisis in the general context of the
Cold War…. That is, it is hard to imagine a post- war world in which there is
not a high degree of conflict between the West and the East…. [But] the
point that seems to me to be the least predetermined…was the shift from
essentially the political [and] ideological Cold War [in 1946-47] to an
essentially military Cold War. The precipitant for that, in my view, was the
Berlin crisis of 1948….

Berlin is really pivotal to the rest of the Cold War. It is the driver for the
need for credibility because…it is…an island which the United States and
the other Western powers are committed to defend and they cannot
defend. They cannot defend with conventional forces. They have to be able
to threaten that they will resort to strategic nuclear warfare…. So, there is
this intense need for credibility which is the function of the commitment in
Berlin. And Berlin remains pivotal…. It is the central point of détente, the
Berlin Wall, and the fall of the Berlin Wall is the symbol of the unraveling of
the Cold War…. You can write, study, think about the history of the Cold
War entirely with Berlin as its focus…. --Professor Ernest R. May
Diplomatic Historian Harvard University

"Did Stalin really want to begin a war, starting with the Berlin Blockade,
and before with the March crisis? After analyzing the Soviet documents, I’ll
say certainly no…. [His intention] was to challenge Western powers,
especially the United States, in Berlin…. For Stalin, it was just a natural
continuation of his usual line of behavior. He did it all his life,…with his
party comrades, his associates, with actually everybody in the Soviet
Union." --Dr. Viktor Gobarev, former Soviet and Russian Army Officer
Senior Risk Analyst, SAIC Inc.

"General [Lucius] Clay [American Military Governor of Germany in the late

 1940s, had] a mandate to get along with the Soviet Union and I think he
wisely stuck to it…. In retrospect, we can be very grateful that he did,
because what Clay and his successors really preserved was the essential
framework of those international treaties which…I strongly believe really
kept open the option of German reunification in 1990. Without the
Potsdam Agreement, of course, the international legal status of Berlin as a
four-sector unit—the way it was managed throughout the Cold War—would
not have been possible. His other reason…was that Clay was a very
unusual man in one respect: he really believed in the possibility of
rebuilding German democracy. Now when you think back on 1945 when he
started this job, and up to ’49, [and] put yourself in the position of these
people and of those times, this was a pretty imaginative and, in many
ways, a pretty hopeless enterprise to get involved in and to try to carry out,
and to believe in. Clay did believe in that and…we owe him a great deal…." -
-Dr. Wolfgang Krieger, Visiting Professor of History Toronto University

On Intelligence Operations in Berlin: From the end of World War II until the
Berlin Wall went up in August 1961, West Berlin served as a major strategic
intelligence base for the Western powers. For the Soviet KGB and the East
German HVA (the foreign intelligence arm of the Stasi), the sizable Allied
intelligence presence in Berlin provided opportunities for penetration of
the Western services.

"The Federal Republic, with West Berlin, was the only Western state on
which Moscow received even more high-grade intelligence from an allied
agency—in this case, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung [the HVA]—than it
did from the KGB…. In addition to receiving a very large amount of
intelligence from the HVA, the KGB depended on East German support for
many of its own intelligence operations…. All the heads of the Stasi up to
and including Erich Mielke were, of course, not merely Stalinist loyalists,
they were Soviet agents." -- Dr. Christopher Andrew, Professor of
Modern and Contemporary History Cambridge University

"On the first of October 1945, I was assigned to Berlin…[as]…the acting

head of OSS in Berlin, a unit of probably something like eight intelligence
officers, and another twelve support people. Our targets were: ferreting out
Nazis who had gone underground, members of the German Intelligence
Service, members of the Gestapo, and most importantly, finding scientists
and technicians whom we could ferret out to the West and [thereby] deny
to the Russians…. Our targets changed according to the information we
collected on the changes in the political situation in East Germany. We did
not target the Soviet movements of troops…until it became obvious that
the Soviets were intent on imposing a Soviet-style government in East
Germany.

"…We had from the start very good contacts with people in the
government, because of the [wartime] contacts we had. Through [contacts
with the German resistance] we knew people who were senior officials in
government agencies during the Nazi time. Largely anti-Nazi, and
therefore, ultimately anti-Communist, and as you may realize, in this
country [i.e., Germany] a large portion of the civil servants were taken over
by the post-war administration. There was the de-Nazification process, but
if you were not guilty of any crimes, or [had not] been a senior Nazi official,
you had to continue to run the country and the people who ran it before
ran it afterwards. Because of that we had very good contacts—not only in
Berlin, but also in Eastern Germany—to Government officials." -- Peter
Sichel, Former OSS and CIA officer

"The era under discussion here, 1945 to ’61, was really the golden age for
human espionage in Berlin…. The first and most important aspect of the
situation was, of course, the vast amount of sympathy for the Western
Allies as a result not only of the airlift, but then in ’53, the repression of
the 17th of June [East German] rebellion against the occupying Soviet
forces. It did not create a wave of sympathy for the Soviet occupiers, and
made Berliners and even the others in the Soviet Occupation Zone much
more responsive and willing to help…. Now at the same time…another
aspect of this environment which was so conducive to successful human
operations was the evolution, certainly on the American side and I’m sure
on the British and French sides as well, of a more focused approach to
requirements and the need for certain kinds of information…. In the first
period of the initial base in Berlin, the focus of operations was on
essentially two things. One, the huge black-market operation and…
secondly, the search for Nazi war criminals and other miscreants.

…no one in the Berlin Base in that era spoke Russian. There was no focus
on the Soviets—in fact, they were still considered our allies. As a result,
there was a very narrow attention span to the requirements for
intelligence…. With the establishment of CIG, and then CIA in 1947, there
was some clearer focus on the need for intelligence. But…the interest was
mostly directed towards the threat of war and the immediate tactical
concerns about what Soviet forces were up to…and a great deal of the
effort of the Berlin personnel was on war planning, stay-behind activities,
rat lines—escape [routes] for downed American and allied pilots—in the
event of a military confrontation….

With the passage of time, war plans began to fade into the background as
more strategic objectives loomed. As a consequence, [during] the…‘50s,
certainly the mid-to-late ‘50s, human operations in Berlin took a much
broader approach to intelligence requirements and the search for
information. The further factor that made this such a golden operating
area was the ready access at that time across the border of the sectors
within the city, less so into the Soviet Zone, but still access was
reasonably easy. Certainly for an East Berliner to come into West Berlin it
was no problem at all unless he [was one of] a very small number of
functionaries who were supposedly prevented from doing so, but with a
modest amount of imagination, they, too, could cross the border. It meant
for a ready approach for East Berliners…willing to help the Allies [and thus]
provided an enormous pool of individuals who were anxious to tell their
stories. Who not only were willing to talk, explain what they did, tell about
their careers, but [also] readily volunteered the names of their friends who
stayed behind but who would be willing to help the West if approached in
the proper way…. Until the Wall went up, that continued and it meant that
we had numerous opportunities to approach individuals and to acquire the
kinds of assets we needed. It did require a high degree of selectivity….
-- Ambassador Hugh Montgomery, Special Assistant to the DCI

"The refugees, as they were coming out of East Berlin, went through a
refugee processing point, which sort of worked like the old-fashioned card
system. We could put stops into the system based on things we were
interested in, based on targets, and anyone who hit one of those stops
would be called in and we could debrief the person. Sometimes we would
be trying to recruit that person…to go back and not be a refugee,
depending on what their circumstances were, and work for us there.
Sometimes we were asking them for the names and numbers of friends
and colleagues, family members. Then we would use the refugee to invite,
[in] a certain way—[that is, to get] a secure message across to the target to
come over here and be interviewed and then possibly recruited."
-- Burton L. Gerber, former senior US intelligence officer

"I was connected with the…production [and] training of East German

illegals, KGB illegals, and Soviet citizens…[and] East German citizens. If I
had more time I would be able to tell about the very vast cooperation…
between the KGB and the Stasi in the production of false West German
passports, and Austrian and Swiss and British and other passports. There
were two factories, one in East Berlin and another outside Moscow, which
were producing dozens and dozens [of] valid blank passports, West
German passports for the numerous illegals. And also I was able to follow
their training on the territory of the GDR [from the KGB Rezidentura in]
 Karlshorst…. It was extremely sophisticated. For example, the passports
were blank, but the names, identities, dates, all the officials and stamps—it
was always real. There was always a real identity behind it…. And another
thing, because a big part of the audience is American here, I can tell you
that in the early 1970s…. I was still attached to the business of the illegals,
my department had [one]…I think he is still alive. He was very, very happy
that day. Smiling and even laughing. He said, "Today is my most happy day
of my life. Come, come and see it." And he pulled out the drawer of his
desk and got out…[his] American blank passport. It took ten years, from
1961 to 1971, to produce, because it was so complicated. So complicated.
But they produced it and there was no difference. Just impossible to find
the difference…." -- Oleg Gordievsky, former Soviet intelligence officer,
British agent and defector

On the 1958-61 Berlin Crisis: In November 1958, Soviet Premier Nikita

Khrushchev threatened to abrogate what remained of the quadripartite
regime by signing a separate peace treaty with the East German
government and withdrawing Soviet forces from Berlin. This was seen as
the opening move in an attempt to push the Western Allies out of Berlin.

"During the late 1950s and early 1960s, East-West tensions over Berlin
were the most critically difficult and complex foreign policy problems faced
by US Presidents. Although by no means as risky as the Cuban missile
crisis, the Berlin crisis helped make this period the most dangerous days
of the Cold War. Intelligence analysts believed that the Soviets did not
seek war over Berlin. Nevertheless, over four years…US Presidents [and
other] US leaders wondered whether the Berlin problem would lead to
open conflict. But conflict was avoided and both sides found ways to live
with disagreement over Berlin." -- Dr. William Burr, Senior Analyst,
National Security Archive

The second Berlin crisis cannot be understood other than by looking at

Khrushchev’s personality. The major explanations [for provoking the crisis]
could only be found in Khrushchev’s head, not in any policy papers, nor in
any policy analysis. In fact, we don’t have any documents that convincingly
present…any schematic preparations or calculations that explain a radical
change in policy towards Germany in 1958, inside the Kremlin, inside even
Khrushchev’s close circle…. One psychological explanation…is that
 Khrushchev was a person who was increasingly dissatisfied…with the
results of his foreign policy in general, but particularly for his normalization
of relationships with the United States….

Khrushchev faced a huge problem of legitimacy inside the Communist

Bloc and inside the Soviet Union…. He…defeated the opposition, which
constituted the vast majority of the Politburo, but he clearly couldn’t fill
Stalin’s shoes…. Domestically he expected to move more successfully…
than Stalin had ever planned towards Communism. Inside the Bloc he
aimed at improving relationships primarily with China and Yugoslavia. By
1958,…Khrushchev’s personal diplomacy towards Yugoslavia and
particularly towards Mao, towards China, was in deep, deep trouble….
Khrushchev had to do something to improve his credentials as a
statesman, something radical….
-- Vladislav Zubok, Senior Research Fellow, National Security Archive

On the Berlin Wall: East German troops closed the sector border between
East and West Berlin over the night of 12-13 August 1961, first with barbed
wire and then began building the Berlin Wall. The Allied powers felt unable
to respond, except through military action, which probably would have led
to war. Egon Bahr was Press Secretary and adviser to West Berlin Mayor
Willy Brandt (later West German Chancellor). At the conference, Dr. Bahr
gave vent to the frustrations experienced by the German Berlin
administration during this tragic period, which physically divided families
and cut off the livelihoods of thousands of Berliners.

"It took hours to convince the [Allied] commandants to give orders that
[would put] at least some armed, uniformed people in jeeps patrolling the
line. It took more than 24 hours before the commandants got permission to
transmit a small, weak protest to their Soviet colleagues on the other side
in East Berlin. It took more than 48 hours before the…High Commissioners,
the four Ambassadors, established the protest from Bonn to East Berlin. It
took 72 hours before the first protests came from Washington, Paris,
London, to Moscow. This was the reality. After three days, when it was
absolutely clear for the Eastern side and the Communists that no major
tough reaction could be expected from the Western side, they started to
build up the Wall." -- Dr. Egon Bahr, former adviser to Mayor Willy
Brandt
Question from the audience: [During] the three days that the barbed wire
was up, before the Wall went up, what would have happened had the West
German people come forward, and with their own wire cutters, for
example, began removing the barbed wire on their own?"

Oleg Kalugin, [former KGB General]: "They would have been shot."

"I’m 60 years old. I spent 22 years of my career in the KGB, [advancing]

from Lieutenant to Colonel…. I finished my career in London as acting head
of the KGB station in London. Meanwhile, in the last years of my career as
an operations officer in…the KGB, I was also a British secret agent, working
for the British Secret Intelligence Service until my downfall, when I was
found out, seized, and taken from London. Sent from London to Moscow
[and] put under house arrest….

It started probably in Berlin. The 11th of August, 1961, I arrived here in Berlin
as a young diplomatic trainee. First I had a conversation with a man who
later became Soviet Ambassador to Germany, and he said, "You know
what, if you want me to describe the situation to you here, the whole
republic is sitting on their suitcases. If something drastic doesn’t happen
in the near future, no people will be left in the republic…[by] Christmas….
Then there was another man, [a] Second Secretary, who obviously knew
what was going to happen. The night of the 13th I heard the tanks and the
artillery equipment and other heavy military vehicles going in the direction
of the Brandenburger Tor. Next morning I went for a walk, I went to the
Brandenburger Tor and there it was. Barbed wire, guards, many troops,
tanks hidden on the corners…. As a young and idealistic student, I was
really very depressed. Excited over the political scale of the event but very
depressed because of the German people…. I don’t know how it was in
1989, but in 1961 the great majority of the people in East Germany were
against Communism, against the system, against the tyranny, and they
took it very seriously as a new serious test of their resilience, their
preparedness to fight…. The churches were full…. It made a tremendous
impression on me. But meanwhile, I had given already the promise to
become an officer of the KGB. But the mood of the German people
remained in me, and when, in 1968, the Soviet and other East European
troops…invaded Czechoslovakia, I said, "This is the end of it. I don’t want to
work for that regime." -- Oleg Gordievsky, Former KGB officer Defector
to the West
 "I had lunch with the Soviet Ambassador…[on November 1st], here in Berlin,
and I said to him, ‘You want to try and win over the Germans, and you built
that wall that keep husband and wife, and father and mother and children
apart.’ He said, ‘That wall serves a useful purpose, and it will be here in a
hundred years.’ I said, ‘Mr. Ambassador, if you really believe that, you’ve
lost contact with reality.’ By this time, there were millions of people fleeing
the DDR [the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany], coming out
through Hungary. The Embassies in Prague and Warsaw and everywhere
else were filled with people. I said, ‘You know, your party song, the
Internationale, says, "the volcano is thundering in its crater. The final
eruption is at hand."’ I said, ‘It is, but it’s not the one you’re looking for!’" --
Ambassador Vernon Walters, Ambassador to Germany, 1989-91,
former DDCI, adviser to several Presidents

The Berlin Wall was torn down on 9 November 1989.

On the Tank Confrontation of October 1961: On 27-29 October 1961, a
border crossing incident involving a US State Department officer on official
business escalated into a standoff between US and Soviet tanks at
Checkpoint Charlie.

"Our lead tanks [in the tank confrontation] had bulldozer attachments for
the purpose of clearing away trucks or barbed wire, whatever kinds of
impediments that might have been placed temporarily in the road, but
they also could have been used for hitting the Wall. [A few days earlier,]
General Clay had ordered the commandant [in Berlin] to have the
American Engineer Company set up a mock section of the Wall in the
forest and use some tanks with bulldozer attachments to practice
knocking down the Wall…. This [exercise]…had not been authorized from
Washington and, indeed, was not known by anyone in Washington.
General Bruce Clark, the Commander in Chief of US Forces in Europe,
learned of it…and was very angry. Even though he had once been a
subordinate of General Clay, [General Clark] bawled him out…but didn’t
report it back to Washington. But Soviet intelligence—presumably with
East German operatives—had seen and photographed this exercise and
this [intelligence] was presented, we know now from other former Soviet
officials, to the Politburo a few days before [the tank confrontation at
Checkpoint Charlie], about the 20th or 21st of October…. So we have, I
think, a rather interesting situation in which intelligence had provided
rather strong circumstantial evidence for a faulty conclusion on the part of
the Soviet leaders with respect to our intentions. -- Ambassador
Raymond Garthoff, former intelligence analyst, Senior Fellow,
Brookings Institution
 "…The Soviets [normally] did not have their tanks in East Berlin. On the day
in question, two teams, each team made up of a CIA officer and a State
Department officer, went to East Berlin separately, with no communication
between them, with firm instructions as to what they would do and what
risks they would take, and when they would be back to West Berlin…one
[of them] in the morning, one in the late morning…. The first team did
indeed find the tanks without markings. Unclear as to what they were.
Observation didn’t help. But they watched them, and the CIA case officer
got an idea and threw a rock at one of the tanks. The top popped off, and
a lieutenant came up and he yelled out, "Chto eta?" ["What was that?"]. In
the meantime, the other team found them, at just about the time the world
was beginning to find them as they approached Checkpoint Charlie…. That
team noted that there was no communication going on between the tanks,
but they had kept open those microphones that exist on the side of tanks
so the infantry can communicate with the tank commander. They got up
as close as they could, and at a certain point they did hear one of the
outside people speaking into the tank in Russian. So this information was
brought back, and so they did know that…the tanks…they were facing
were Russian. It did make a difference, of course, whether you [were]
dealing with Russian or with East German tanks. -- Burton L. Gerber,
former senior US intelligence officer

Donald P. Steury, a CIA Senior Historian, is Visiting Professor of International

Relations at the University of Southern California.

The views, opinions and findings of the author expressed in this article should
not be construed as asserting or implying US government endorsement of its
factual statements and interpretations or representing the official positions of
any component of the United States government.