Checkpoint Charlie Quotes

American tanks were sent to Checkpoint Charlie as a show of strength. Soviet tanks appeared there at about five in the evening on the twenty-seventh. The British soon deployed two antitank guns to support the Americans, while all the French troops in West Berlin remained safely in their barracks. For

Conny and I stood in line, along with other people, outside Checkpoint Charlie, the gate for foreigners into East Berlin. Many of those in line were Dutch, and I saw they were being passed without difficulty. Everything seemed routine: Hand your passport to a guard, walk down the line, and receive your passport back with a stamp that allowed you to spend the one day in East Berlin. I hoped it would be as easy for us when it was our turn to be checked. Finally we were in front of the window. The guard looked at our passports, looked in a book and then turned and said something to another man behind him. “Is there a problem?” I asked the man. He turned and gave me a stern look. “Come with

Such was the carnival atmosphere that Brenner, her boss, his wife, and a local journalist managed to summon up the courage to walk directly toward the white line of the border crossing—where twenty-eight years ago tanks had famously faced one another—to present the East German guards with bottles of champagne. The guards refused the offer, but they didn’t point their weapons, or bark out warnings. It was a surreal moment as the joyous posse from the Adler walked back to the café and prepared the bar for guests—lots of them.

BEHIND THE WALL The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, twenty-five years ago this month, but the first attempts to breach it came immediately after it went up, just past midnight on August 13, 1961. The East German regime had been secretly stockpiling barbed wire and wooden sawhorses, which the police, who learned of their mission only that night, hastily assembled into a barrier. For many Berliners, the first sign that a historic turn had been taken was when the U-Bahn, the city’s subway, stopped running on certain routes, leaving late-night passengers to walk home through streets that were suddenly filled with soldiers. As realization set in, so did a sense of panic. By noon the next day, as Ann Tusa recounts in “The Last Division,” people were trying to pull down the barbed wire with their hands. Some succeeded, in scattered places, and a car drove through a section of the Wall to the other side. In the following weeks, the authorities began reinforcing it. Within a year, the Wall was nearly eight feet high, with patrols and the beginnings of a no man’s land. But it still wasn’t too tall for a person to scale, and on August 17, 1962, Peter Fechter, who was eighteen years old, and his friend Helmut Kulbeik decided to try. They picked a spot on Zimmerstrasse, near the American Checkpoint Charlie, and just after two o’clock in the afternoon they made a run for it. Kulbeik got over, but Fechter was shot by a guard, and fell to the ground. He was easily visible from the West; there are photographs of him, taken as he lay calling for help. Hundreds of people gathered on the Western side, shouting for someone to save him. The East German police didn’t want to, and the Americans had been told that if they crossed the border they might start a war. Someone tossed a first-aid kit over the Wall, but Fechter was too weak to pick it up. After an hour, he bled to death. Riots broke out in West Berlin, and many asked angrily why the Americans had let Fechter die. He was hardly more than a child, and he wanted to be a free man. It’s a fair question, though one can imagine actions taken that day which could have led to a broader confrontation. It was not a moment to risk grand gestures; Fechter died two months before the Cuban missile crisis. (When the Wall went up, John F. Kennedy told his aides that it was “not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”) And there was something off key about Germans, so soon after the end of the Second World War, railing about others being craven bystanders. Some observers came to see the Wall as the necessary scaffolding on which to secure a postwar peace. That’s easy to say, though, when one is on the side with the department stores, and without the secret police. Technically, West Berlin was the city being walled in, a quasi-metropolis detached from the rest of West Germany. The Allied victors—America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—had divided Germany into four parts, and, since Berlin was in the Soviet sector, they divided the city into four parts, too. In 1948, the Soviets cut off most road and rail access to the city’s three western sectors, in an effort to assert their authority. The Americans responded with the Berlin Airlift, sending in planes carrying food and coal, and so much salt that their engines began to corrode. By the time the Wall went up, it wasn’t the West Berliners who were hungry. West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder , or economic miracle, was under way, while life in the East involved interminable shortages. West Berliners were surrounded by Soviet military encampments, but they were free and they could leave—and so could anyone who could get to their part of the city. The East Berliners were the prisoners. In the weeks before the Wall went up, more than a thousand managed to cross the border each day; the Wall was built to keep them from leaving. But people never stopped trying to tear it down.

Meanwhile, through Hollywood films and bestselling spy novels, the public came to be both fascinated and intrigued by how Berlin became a city of spies.

Berlin’s alternative edge, exciting food scene, palpable history and urban glamour never fail to enthral and enchant. More than a quarter century after the Wall’s collapse, the German capital has grown up without relinquishing its indie spirit and penchant for creative improvisation. There’s haute cuisine in a former brewery, all-night parties in power stations and world-class art in a WWII bunker. Visit major historical sights – including the Reichstag, Brandenburger Tor and Checkpoint Charlie – then feast on a smorgasbord of culture in myriad museums.

new currency to replace the bankrupt Reichsmark in February 1948 led the following month to a dramatic walkout by the Soviet delegation at the Allied Control Council, which had governed Germany since the end of the war. The Russians had intentionally debased and over-circulated the Reichsmark by excessive printing, deliberately reducing the German population to penury, until bartering with cigarettes and the black market underpinned their economy. The introduction by the West of the new Deutschmark in June subsequently brought the hostility of the negotiating table out into the open. On June 16, Colonel Yelizarkov, the deputy to the commander of the Soviet Sector, withdrew from the Four Power Kommandatura [the governing body of Berlin].

Situated 177 kilometers (approximately 100 miles) inside the Soviet Zone of Occupation, West Berlin was isolated and vulnerable, surrounded by at least three hundred thousand Soviet troops and three thousand tanks. Although Stalin had signed in 1946 to formally grant the Allies access of supply into Soviet territory, the agreement could easily be thwarted if he so wished. Thus, on June 24, 1948, the Soviets mounted a blockade of the city, effectively turning the supply tap off from its western road,

Under the leadership of General Lucius D. Clay, the military governor of the American zone; the commander of the USAF, General Curtis LeMay; and William H. Turner, the head of the Anglo-American Airfleet, the United States and her allies responded with a three-hundred-day airlift, the biggest in aviation history. Flying

The Berliners now looked on their British, French, and American occupiers as true protectors, and

remember distinctly 1953, the uprising on the 17th of June, and I heard the adults saying ‘The Russian bear is coming!’ and I thought, even as a little girl, They kept these big brown bears?” The brutal suppression by the Soviets of an East German–workers’ revolt had reverberated throughout the western sectors of the city. “It was that kind of insecurity that was ingrained in all West Berliners, and no matter how small the incident, they felt it intensely, as we were surrounded by the Communists.

In early 1952, alarmed at the continued and rapidly increasing exodus of professionals and skilled workers from East Germany, Moscow flexed its muscles. Although initially pleased that this brain drain benefited the Soviet vision of the GDR by the departure to the West of potential opposition, it became obvious that this tap couldn’t be left open much longer.

As Walter Ulbricht tightened his grip on all facets of the GDR and the standard of living decreased under the economic constraints of a “command economy” through the latter half of the 1950s, so the migration to the West of the best of his workforce rapidly increased, escaping via the safest route—through the open borders of Berlin.

Margit Hosseini was also a child of this decade, and she undertook various visits to East Berlin with her family and witnessed firsthand the disparity in everyday living standards compared with her own life. “My French-born father was working for the government and had been transferred over to the French zone in 1949. The suburb of West Berlin that was my home was a world away from the life of my cousin in East Berlin. The only way my family crossed was by S-Bahn, and even as a child one immediately sensed and saw how quickly the atmosphere changed. . .

grew up in East Berlin and we could literally cross the street and we were in West Berlin and in a completely different world. The luxury of Coca-Cola, oranges, chocolate, and vegetables; you could buy all of this with your East money, you only had to put up with the exchange rate.

1961, the tide of refugees seeking sanctuary in the West was reaching worrying levels. More than 2.1 million people in ten years, a sixth of the entire population, simply walked out of their front doors and never returned.

Ulbricht began pressuring the Soviet leader for a solution to the growing problem of the refugee crisis, too. On June 15, 1961, in an international press conference, he uttered the prophetic words “Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten!” (“No one has the intention to erect a wall!”) Perhaps he was telling the truth, but in reality he had, in January of that year, already set up a secret commission on finding a way to close the borders. It was also the first time the term “Mauer” (“Wall”) had publicly been used by anyone.

Bowing to what he saw as inevitable to save the GDR, Khrushchev seized the initiative and finally ordered Ulbricht to build a wall. “We will give you two weeks to make the necessary economic preparations . . . then you will issue the following communiqué:

The role Adolf Knackstedt played in the Berlin story of 1961, when Operation Rose was about to commence, was unique.

His was a true American experience. He was originally born in the Bronx and then became a returning Volksdeutscher in the Second World War, a German refugee living amid the rubble of the Third Reich under Soviet occupation, a

From there he was attached to a small intelligence element and sent back to the USA for further training at the intelligence college at Fort Holabird, Maryland, where he finally became an agent, ready for duty in Berlin.

For the next two and a half years Knackstedt lived a clandestine military life.

and his men operated offline from the military, living in safe houses in German neighborhoods. He was a key figure, working with the West German police in processing the thousands of refugees pouring into West Berlin.

The flow of refugees in 1960 had reached such a level that the West Berlin Senate simply couldn’t handle the influx and made getting them out of Berlin a priority.

By early August, Knackstedt’s team were hearing worrying stories from refugees about large amounts of construction materiel being stockpiled at various locations

At 1:11 a.m. on Sunday, August 13, the East German radio service interrupted their Night-time Melodies show for a special announcement: “The government of the States of the Warsaw Pact appeal to the parliament and government of the GDR and suggest that they ensure that the subversion against the countries of the Socialist Bloc is effectively barred and a reliable guard is set up around the whole area of Berlin.” The message was clear, but many in the West didn’t hear it, as tuning into East German radio programs for enjoyment was unheard of. The

The US military’s security hut was located at the exact spot where the world’s two dominant political and economic systems now collided. When they reported back into their command center, the order came back: “Do nothing!

Drafted and approved by Ulbricht and Honecker, it stated, “In order to prevent the enemy activities of the vengeful and militaristic powers of West Germany and West Berlin, controls will be introduced on the borders of the German Democratic Republic, including the border of the Western sector

Speed was of the essence. Honecker had to catch the city unawares in order to prevent serious opposition. The majority of East Berliners were asleep in bed, and that’s where Honecker wished them to stay.

During the night, the West Berlin police force would mobilize thirteen thousand of its officers under the orders of Chief Superintendent Hermann Beck. Reports of military trucks and armed Vopos at the Brandenburg Gate and elsewhere, plus the S-Bahn being closed, had caused panic at his headquarters

At first, we thought they were going to overrun us and march into West Berlin, but they remained precisely within one centimeter inside the sector boundary.

Provoking military conflict had been specifically forbidden by Khrushchev. Commander-in-Chief Ivan Konev’s tank divisions encircled the city as a display of force, nothing more. This was Ulbricht’s show, and he would dictate the pace of Phase Two. On August 15, along the border of the US and Soviet Sectors on Zimmerstraße, workers began to erect a more permanent structure

Slowly but surely, the tension evolved into anger among the West Berlin spectators. They couldn’t understand what was happening, and they demanded action to stop this insane division of their city. They couldn’t understand the ineptness and non-presence of the Western garrison troops, especially that of the Americans. It seemed as if the West agreed with what was happening

Margit Hosseini’s family, now safely back together after the drama of August 13, feared, like all West Berliners, for the future of their city. In a wider political sense, many questioned the Allies’ response, and more significantly what America would now do. Just as worrying was what the Russians intended. Would they attempt a second blockade of the city? Or would they simply invade and capture it? As Hosseini remembered, “There was very little reaction coming first from America,

Equally, neither Britain nor France seemed to want to raise a hand to protect us. None of the Allied powers in the city had issued any objection or strengthened their garrisons.

The Berlin Allied commanders could do very little but issue letters of protest to the Soviet commander of the city. West Berlin was not under threat, so in essence the principles agreed to at Potsdam in 1945 had not been violated: for Allied troops in the city, free access to East Berlin had not been prevented yet, and the right of self-determination by the West Berlin population was not under threat as such.

By the second week, despite fierce mass protests by West Berliners, the East Germans now began to transform the barbed-wire barricade into a more physically imposing structure. More troops and workers were drafted in, and the barricades were strengthened. There was no going back—the city was to be entombed.

Major General Corbett now addressed the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen, in acknowledgment for twenty-nine years of service by the military police at Checkpoint Charlie, we ask you to please rise for the final dismissal of the detachment.” Commandant Cann walked to the podium as Major Godek took his cue and stood to attention before him, with the honor guard waiting for the signal. General Cann solemnly gave the order, “Please close the Checkpoint Charlie control point.” One MP from each nation then marched to the side of the building to ceremoniously lock its doors and remove the Allied checkpoint sign.

The day before, more than twenty thousand of his countrymen had moved from their initial camps inside Czechoslovakia into Austria and freedom; more than five hundred a day were fleeing across the Hungarian border. The GDR was bleeding to death.

Mr. Schabowski, what is going to happen to the Berlin Wall now?” Unwittingly, he had made the fatal error of not stating that the press release was embargoed and would come into effect the following day at 4 a.m. More significantly, Schabowski had also failed to state that there would be strict criteria each applicant would need to fulfill

soon the few regular barflies of the Adler were being joined by dozens of West Berliners eager to see what was happening for themselves. Brenner called her boss, Albrecht Raw, who soon arrived with his wife to get the place ready for what they expected to be a flood of people over the next few hours.

What the Allies didn’t know at the time was that the previous day at noon, the GDR’s minister of defense Heinz Keßler had declared a state of emergency for the NVA and that as a result thirty thousand troops were now on standby, which included the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment. This was an elite Stasi-run, motorized formation

The vehicle for Germany’s reunification would be through Article 23—where as long as the majority of the GDR population voted to accept the FRG’s laws and institutions—reunification could be processed within a six-month time frame.

The Wall was dead, and so were the dreams of Ulbricht, Honecker, Mielke, and Krenz. Under a new prime minister, Lothar de Maizière, the Treaty of Monetary, Economic and Social Union was signed on May 18.

As representatives of all those who have served here before you—for nearly three decades, day and night, you have served at this crossroad between East and West. You have done so loyally, and with dedication.” Coming to the end of his speech, the American commandant paid tribute to the place they had served, and what the Allies’ role had now brought about: “A city long divided is repairing its severed arteries, and its pulse is growing stronger. For the contribution you have made to the freedom and the well-being of Berlin, you have earned the thanks of all free men.” The audience burst into applause. The

back in Washington, DC, the White House was stunned by what it witnessed on television as East Berliners began pouring through the checkpoints. Secretary of State James Baker recalled that many of President George H. W. Bush’s cabinet were caught unaware.

Back in Bonn, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, and in London, events in Berlin were taking everyone by surprise.

His name was Erik Yaw, and he was a sergeant in the US Army.” Sergeant Yaw listened carefully to Spitzner’s proposal of wishing to get to the West with Peggy, who was now asleep in a car near the sergeant’s. At first, the American soldier didn’t react, but just stared at the East German while he mulled over what he’d listened to.

pair conversed in broken English as Yaw asked several questions as to why Peter was here, why he wanted to escape to the West, and more importantly, how they would get through the border crossing in his car. Spitzner outlined the plan. They would need to drive out of the center of the city—toward Treptower Park—in order for Peggy and him to then get into Yaw’s trunk, before returning to drive through the border controls. Spitzner noticed how the American was wrestling with his thoughts as to what he should do now. Peter was dreading the reaction of “It’s too dangerous, sorry.” And then like a thunderbolt to his brain came the magical words: “Okay, I’ll do it!

the decade of the 1980s came to a close, to the outside world there didn’t seem to be any particular signals that the fabric of the East German state was coming apart from within. With Erich Honecker looking firmly in control

Christopher Gueffroy (a young East German waiter) was shot by the border guards—the last person to be killed attempting to cross the Wall—at the Britz Canal area. Later in March of that same year, the last fatalities crossing the actual border were Winfried and Sabine Freudenberg, who tried to escape in their makeshift balloon, which they had filled with helium. Sabine was captured by the Stasi before they took off, and Winfried almost certainly died falling to earth.

For a US military posting to a hot spot such as West Berlin, one had to have a record of good conduct and exceptional service. Tom had impressed his superiors with his eagerness to take more language courses, but a transfer to Berlin came with good and bad news. “The US Army cannot, and will not, try to rescue any unit, or anyone else,” said his lieutenant, “if war breaks out in Berlin. Two things can happen to you if the Russians decide to take Berlin. Neither one of them is good.

the one thing all American personnel found fascinating about their British colleagues was that they had an escape plan if things got ugly with the Soviets.

We were the only unit in the American military that had eye-to-eye contact with the enemy every day. I mean, we were so close to them, we could hit them with a rock. In appearance, these Russians looked poor, with only one uniform, poor equipment, their food and supplies weren’t great, and they were mainly confined to their barracks

When our train stopped at the border, as you looked outside, you could tell from their downcast eyes that they were afraid to look at you. I always believed they were terrified to show any emotion to anybody from the western side, thinking that one of their own might be watching them, as if there was some sort of secret communication going on. If you caught the eye of a young East German girl—she was not going to smile back at you. She’d turn her head away. It was very sad.

President Kennedy had bowed to the “Berlin Mafia” in the White House who despaired that the Berliners’ morale was plummeting due to inaction and felt that the United States must make a significant public gesture of support to shore up those fearing capitulation, none more so than the city’s mayor, Willy Brandt.

Stung into action, Kennedy, to the city’s relief, ordered his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, to accompany the hero of the ’48 Berlin Airlift—General Lucius D. Clay—to the arrival of the US Army’s 1st Battle Group. Despite Johnson’s initial misgivings, his antenna for political opportunity quickly had him playing the part of conquering hero. Amid public adulation and relief at their presence, both men toured the city with wide press coverage,

Before it was designated “Checkpoint Charlie,” the crossing was one of many created and agreed upon by the military planners ruling over a defeated city in 1947. It was located at the junction of Friedrichstraße with Zimmerstraße and Mauerstraße (whose historical name ironically means “Wall Street”). Almost two weeks after the East Germans had erected the barrier, on August 23, 1961, their Ministry of the Interior announced that among a group of border crossings, this checkpoint would be the only one where the Allied military would be allowed entry into their sector of the city.

The name “Charlie,” though it would become quite catchy to fans of spy novels and films over the years, had a more prosaic backstory. The Allied checkpoints covering entry into East Germany, and then into Berlin, derived their names, simply, from the letters in the NATO phonetic alphabet

It was far easier for the Stasi and the KGB to infiltrate West Berlin, due to the lack of security around the city’s transportation networks that led to the east. During the Cold War, more than thirty thousand assets worked for the Stasi in the Federal Republic, and a great many of them filtered through to or via West Berlin, which as a military city was chock-full of targets the Warsaw Pact would require intelligence on.

With the backing of Soviet first secretary Leonid Brezhnev, Erich Honecker now took on the mantle of leadership, ruling with his small clique, including the minister of state security, Erich Mielke. Ulbricht retained the official title of head of state, but this new leadership was now closely aligned with Moscow. The ailing and somewhat bitter Ulbricht would suffer a stroke and pass away in August 1973. The Wall was his legacy, and by 1976 construction of a fourth-generation Wall began. “Grenzmauer 75” would be state-of-the-art in design and construction, a world away from the prefab first version of 1961. The new iteration was speedily installed, comprising L-shaped reinforced concrete sections

This new barrier ran a length of more than 106 kilometers (65 miles), at a cost of more than sixteen million Ostmarks. The “Death Strip” was reinforced with more powerful searchlights, trip wires, automatic flares, and fields of spikes (pleasantly titled “Stalin’s Grass”). New electronic sensors laced the fencing, too. It was quite impregnable, and escapes through it dropped significantly, to only single figures.

Wood and his friends knew their phones were tapped, and he was personally aware of being monitored. His daily routine would have him cross through Checkpoint Charlie into the western zone, mainly to coordinate coverage with Uli Jörges, or report on West Berlin stories, occassionally meet our guys in the military to trade gossip, or simply do some shopping. Uli Jörges was aware of the East German intelligence service’s surveillance in West Berlin as well as East. “The Stasi obviously bugged my phone in our West Berlin Reuters office, and we knew they had mapped out our homes and wherever we stayed.

The Russians now decided in July to support the Cubans as part of a grand strategy to win more concessions in Berlin and redraw the missile imbalance, harking back to Khrushchev’s assessment of Kennedy as a man who would bark but ultimately not bite at this Soviet initiative. It was a calculated risk.

The world rejoiced, but as Kennedy confided to Presidents Eisenhower and Truman in private phone calls, he fully expected the Soviets to now focus more on the Berlin question and push for more concessions. However, the balance of power was shifting in his favor because of how the Soviet leadership now perceived him. Khrushchev for one had been shocked at the display of strength shown by Kennedy during the Cuban crisis, having been convinced he had the man’s measure.

The trip to West Berlin was scheduled for June 26, within the itinerary of the president’s ten-day trip. The eight-hour visit would live in the minds of Berliners for decades to come as the glamour, excitement, and hope that encapsulated the Kennedy presidency lived up to its legend.

The level of adulation that greeted Kennedy’s motorcade shocked all who witnessed it,

And I could clearly see this young man now huddled against the Wall. He was lying in an ‘S’ shape and first he screamed, cried, and pleaded for help. As time elapsed, slowly, his voice got weaker and weaker, until he stopped. It was so heart-rendering [sic] that in the middle of nowhere was a human being dying, and two groups were facing each other, too worried to act, because they didn’t know what the other one was going to do. “You felt anger and sadness at the same time. Lots of onlookers like myself were crying or shouting ‘Murderers!’ at both the Americans who stood motionless and the Vopos who stared blankly back at us holding their machine guns close to their chests.

Finally, the brutalism of the Wall was there for all to see. President Kennedy discussed the incident at the cabinet level, as did Ulbricht and Khrushchev. The patrol commander and the two guards who shot and killed Fechter were personally awarded a flag by Ulbricht himself for their action, but this became an act seen around the world as shameful, and one the GDR would never recover from.

Clay was pushing his authority beyond his remit set by Washington, and he knew it. In a personal letter to President Kennedy, he laid out his frustrations at the lack of decision-making he could wield in Berlin, and his need to show support to the West Berlin population. He went as far as he dared in also criticizing the president’s handling of the barriers going up in the first place that summer. Minor infractions against the Allies’ right of access were stepping-stones to ultimately losing Berlin,

A large crowd of perhaps five hundred West Berliners had now gathered at Checkpoint Charlie, with the world’s press anxiously waiting by the phone or on radio mics to describe the sight of two wartime allies, for the first time, facing off, guns loaded.

eyes were on Checkpoint Charlie. At about midnight in Berlin, Kennedy reached Clay on a secure line in his frenetic map room in West Berlin. “Hello, Mr. President,” Clay said. “How are things up there?” Kennedy asked in a voice that was attempting to be relaxed. “We have ten tanks at Checkpoint Charlie,” the general calmly replied. “The Russians have ten tanks there, too, so now we’re equal.

General Clay was informed by Secretary of State Dean Rusk that Berlin was not so crucial an interest to be worth risking a global conflict with Moscow. Unbeknownst to everyone (including Clay), and only recently discovered, the president’s brother Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, had spent the previous six months establishing a back channel of communication with the Kremlin (through the Soviet spy Georgi Bolshakov) in order for both sides to find a way to back off from the brink of potential Armageddon. On the morning of October 28, Konev began to withdraw one T-54 from the eastern side of the border at Friedrichstraße. Minutes later an American M-48 departed, too.

The Russians must have put a stop to Ulbricht’s willingness to risk a conflict with the West.” The incident was one of the most iconic and certainly dangerous moments of the Cold War, as the fifteen-hour standoff had the world watching to see whether the USA and the Soviet Union would actually start World War Three over Berlin.

The city of Dresden is in the Elbe River valley, and it was known to many Germans and Allies alike as the “Valley of the Clueless”—Tal der Ahnungslosen—because the population there couldn’t receive West German television. Kelley said, “During the Cold War the West German government went to great lengths to inform and influence the East German populace, and the media played a prominent role in the effort. By the early 1980s West German television’s broadcast coverage extended to virtually the entire territory of the GDR, save for the corner of the country near Dresden.

Covert work like this contained some surprising facets. It was known that Soviet bases were not provided with toilet paper and men often resorted to using communications sheets or pages torn from manuals. So all Allied intelligence teams were equipped with rubber gloves and plastic bags so they could trawl through waste-disposal areas looking for redeemable information.

surprise. A dark figure towered over the boot. ‘It’s okay now, we’re across the border, you can get out of the boot.

Peter and his daughter were the last fugitives to flee the GDR via Checkpoint Charlie. They live happily as free Germans.

.” Dealing with the Soviets was never dull, and all three commandants generally tried to always have constructive relations with them. But when the British troops started putting ropes and ladders into the River Spree to lend those trying to swim across to freedom a helping hand, the Soviet officials remonstrated with General Corbett. “I wouldn’t want to have to fight them, I can tell you,” he said and smiled, “I would not, because quantity has a quality all of its own—three hundred and fifty thousand troops and two thousand tanks do focus one’s mind as to an enemy’s capabilities.

The buildup in 1989 saw the Allies monitoring the protest movements that were going on in the East—such as in Leipzig and in Dresden, and the growing clamor of East Germans to travel abroad, or even within the Eastern Bloc. The opening of the Hungarian border in June was the flash in the powder keg, with thousands pouring across the now unprotected border, many of whom came right the way back around into West Berlin itself.

We were watching events very carefully, as you may imagine. But I don’t think we thought that, even until quite late on, that the GDR would collapse.

After a massive military parade, the Soviet leader’s pronouncements to the media in a public walkabout (unheard of by any Eastern Bloc leader until then) shocked Honecker and those closest to him in the SED hierarchy—Gorbachev announcing to the cameras, “A party that lags behind the times will harvest bitter fruit.

For the ailing Honecker, this was a disaster, which had quickly followed a fiery meeting, with the German and Russian men clashing verbally in private and in a meeting of the East German politburo, Honecker deriding Gorbachev’s reformist policies compared to what he believed were the GDR’s economic success. The Soviet leader had audibly hissed his derision at the old East German, with Honecker’s excuses met by deafening silence around the politburo table.

A general atmosphere of unease gripped Berlin, reinforced when the sudden news came through that Erich Honecker had been forced to step down. The younger generation within the East German politburo, led by his deputy Egon Krenz, had taken Gorbachev’s visit and his official rebuke on the need for the regime to change as a signal to make a grab for power. Krenz had long been seen as the heir apparent and had risen through the SED ranks to become

By November 4, an even bigger rally had taken place in Berlin—where half a million protestors gathered in Alexanderplatz to not only hear speakers from the country’s leading democratic movement that had been set up that September—New Forum—but Krenz himself, who spoke to the crowd promising change.

The opening of the border checkpoints and the gradual lowering of any threat of a potential aggressive act by the security forces of the GDR over the next few days lent a surreal atmosphere to the city as both sides figured out what their next moves would be.

For the civil and military authorities, on both sides, it was a very delicate dance as neither wished to overstep their perceived authority or encourage any escalation toward confrontation.

I scowled. “Attu has been of utterly no importance to anybody since May 1943. Is this your version of sending me to Siberia? What are my transgressions?

You’ve been there before?” “Twenty-odd years ago on the U-2 program.” Ross was intrigued; he’s still a collegiate at heart — young enough to be eager-beaverish. “What’s it like up there?” “The end of the world.

Then for the first time he smiled. Myerson’s smile would frighten a piranha. It meant only that he hoped I would end up in trouble to my hairline. As I went to the door he said to my back, “You’ve got to go on a diet, Charlie. You hardly fit through doors any more — you haven’t got any sideways.” He was still smiling — a wicked glitter of polished teeth.

It was a crude destructive attack without any of the clandestine finesse that usually characterized warfare in our field — it was as if someone had decided to conclude a game of chess by blasting all the pieces off the board with a fire hose.

The File, and recalled a more personal message

A sliver of a man stood on a corner beside a charcoal garage door, a plume of smoke twisting from his hand. He looked more like a shadow than a person, the offspring of Marlene Dietrich and Checkpoint Charlie, born with a genetic predisposition to survive in the catacombs.

As he smiled and waved to the crowd, Kennedy felt the expectation and marveled at the scale of the event and what his visit meant to the city. Sections of the prerehearsed speech that would not offend the Soviets in their own backyard were now quickly replaced with his desire to speak from the heart instead: There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin . . . !

Now, swept along by the crowd before him and glancing at his index card where he had scribbled the correct phonetic pronunciation he desired, the president uttered his famous words: All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, “Ich bin ein Berliner.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the Western Allies had no intentions from the beginning to take risks, or drastic counter-measures, to stop the building and subsequent policing of the Berlin Wall. Nikita Khrushchev and Walter Ulbricht appreciated the Western Powers’ weaknesses and were inspired in initiating “Step Two” of their plan.

Khrushchev and Ulbricht attempted to save face by holding their own high-profile meeting in East Berlin a few days later, and uniquely, Michael Howard, having witnessed Kennedy’s historic speech at the Rathaus Schönberg, now watched the Communist response. “I went over with a couple of my colleagues to the East to listen to Nikita Khrushchev speak in East Berlin. He turned up with Walter Ulbricht in an open car. It was a very heavy day—quite an ominous portent. And there were quite big crowds, which had fairly obviously been told to come along.

Instead, tragedy struck that would destabilize international relations. Major Nicholson was shot and killed that afternoon outside tank sheds located on Ludwigslust Sub-Caliber Range 475, in a move that stunned the West, brought shock and revulsion down on the Kremlin, and created a crisis between the superpowers

The protracted failure to provide or permit any medical attention at all ensured that the wound he had received had been fatal. It would be this culpable negligence that would be the final straw of repeated aggressive incidents toward Allied missions (one estimate had them numbered at least four to six times a year). It froze American-Soviet relations, as President Reagan’s administration castigated Moscow. Although it wasn’t known at the time how serious Nicholson’s injuries were, just as serious was the repeated firing on Allied personnel by Soviet troops.

Nicholson was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on March 30, posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and the Legion of Merit. In an unprecedented move, President Ronald Reagan signed the papers to promote him posthumously to the rank of honorary lieutenant colonel. Three years later, amid the thawing of relations between the superpowers as Gorbachev met with Reagan at summits in Geneva and Reykjavik, an official apology for his death was finally issued by Soviet defense minister Dmitry Yazov. President Reagan had consistently brought up the subject of his killing at every opportunity with the Soviets.