The East German border guards were the hardest of the hard and politically proof-tested before they got the posting. If necessary, they would machine gun anyone trying to climb the Wall to escape to the West.
The story was still recent of Peter Fechter, an eighteen-year-old student who had gotten through the minefield and was halfway up the Wall when the searchlights found him. He was hit by a burst of fire from a watchtower. No one wanted to go through the mines to get him down. In sight of the West Berliners, he hung there on the barbed wire, screaming until he bled out and died.
The only good news about that awful night in 1963 was to see these brutes bleating with panic. They surrounded my car asking: “Herr Forsyth, wird das Krieg bedeuten?” “Will this mean war?”
It was two p.m. in Dallas, eight p.m. in London, and nine p.m. in Berlin when the news came through; ten p.m. when I went through Charlie. All examinations of my car and my papers were waived. I got back to the office in record time and checked the incoming tapes. That probably made me the best-informed person in East Berlin.
The media concentration was on a panicking America, but that fear was as nothing, compared with the situation on the Iron Curtain. I rang the East German Foreign Ministry for a comment. They were fully awake with desks staffed, but not knowing what to say until told by Moscow. So, terrified voices were asking me rather than the way it should have been.
The point about a Communist state, or any dictatorship, is that independent media are out of the question. So, despite denial after denial, the authorities persisted in the myth that the Reuters man in their midst had some kind of a direct line to the British government. On each of the two occasions I had flown back to the UK during my year in East Berlin, I was given earnest messages for the British Foreign Secretary, whom I had not the slightest intention of visiting, nor he me. When I said I was only going to visit my mum and dad, they tapped the sides of their noses and said, Ja, ja, we are men of the world. Wink, wink.
By midmorning, word was coming through that the assassin of Dallas was in handcuffs and was an American Communist. The panic deepened. On the streets, terrified passersby glanced at the skies, expecting to see the bombers of the Strategic Air Command heading east with their nukes. Then Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald right in the heart of a police station. If anything was possible to fuel the fires of conspiracy theory, it was that. And indeed the incompetence was pretty hard to believe.
But the United States kept its nerve. The vice president took over and was sworn in. The bombers remained grounded. The panic slowly subsided, to be replaced by grief as the TV pictures flashed of the funeral with the riderless horse. When another shot showed a small boy saluting his father’s catafalque, all Berlin, East and West, was in tears. Extraordinary times.
Christmas came. The two Berlins always reminded me
of the fairy story of two hostelries, one ablaze with light, feasting, dancing, and laughter; the other, across the street, dark and gloomy. So it was that first and, as it turned out, only Christmas for me in Berlin.
West Berlin lived in a slightly hysterical mood all those years while the Wall stood, aware it could be snuffed out within a night if the order was given in Moscow, like a partygoer drinking in the Last Chance Saloon. That Christmas, it let rip. The East Berliners did their best, but the contrast in prosperity of the two political and economic systems was stark.
It would be another twenty-six years before the Wall finally came down, and two years later the Soviet Union simply imploded. But back then both events were simply inconceivable. Yet in all this grayness and gloom, beyond all the bugged apartments and phone calls, behind the headlights in the rearview mirror, there was one lucky break for the Reuters man, of which I took the fullest advantage.
When East Berlin insisted on keeping the Reuters news service, a deal was struck. East Germany would have to pay 20 percent of the subscription fee in desperately scarce hard Western currency, and 80 percent in virtually worthless East marks. These would be banked in East Berlin. Problem: they could not be exported or converted—at any exchange rate at all. But no one could stop their being spent—locally.
Before I left London to take up the post, the Reuters chief Jerry Long explained all this to me and asked me with a straight face if I could try to reduce the blocked account, which stood at over a million East marks. Even with the office costs and Miss Behrendt’s salary, it just kept growing. With an equally straight face, I promised to do what I could.
The problem was, there was almost nothing to buy. In Communist solidarity, Cuba maintained a shop that sold superb cigars for East marks. Cuban produce was banned in the United States, but quite acceptable as a getting-to-know-you offering to an American officer in the West Berlin garrison.
Czechoslovakia produced high-quality long-playing records of classical music, and Hungary very good pigskin luggage. Both maintained a loss-making “prestige” shop in East Berlin. Eventually, even the East German border guards lightened up. They would say nothing about the cargoes going west in the boot of the Wartburg and I would say nothing when a sack of fresh oranges disappeared while I was in the customs shed on the way back. And there was the caviar.
Each Soviet satellite country maintained a prestige restaurant in East Berlin. There was a Haus Budapest with Hungarian cuisine, a Haus Sofia for Bulgaria, and so on. The Haus Moskau served borscht, Stolichnaya vodka . . . and caviar. That first Christmas, I really helped Reuters reduce its surplus marks pile with a mountain of Beluga and enough Stoly to ensure all the bugs in my bedroom could record were the snores.
HELPING OUT THE COUSINS
Secret police forces reckon that two or three in the morning is the lowest point of the human spirit, when reactions are at their lowest. That was about the hour that the alarm went off on a certain morning in March 1964.
A direct phone line between the Reuters office in East Berlin and West Berlin or Bonn was forbidden. My colleagues could contact me only by telex, which of course could be monitored by the Stasi, and left a printed record, which could be read later in case a phone call could be so quick that it might be over before they woke up.
But in my office, an alarm bell was fitted to summon me from bed to the machine in case of an emergency. This was definitely an emergency. The Soviets had shot down an American plane outside Magdeburg.
The armed forces hate to have to ask the media for help, but US Air Force HQ at Wiesbaden, West Germany, was in quite a state. I punched out a quick ticker tape asking for more details. While I waited, I got dressed. So far as sleeping was concerned, the night was over.
What came back thirty minutes later made more sense. The downed aircraft was an RB-66, which I knew from my own air force time to be a twin-engined (jet) light bomber converted to photographic reconnaissance. Less politely put, a spy plane, gorged with long-lens cameras pointing down and sideways.
Its mission had been to patrol along the frontier, training angled cameras at something east of the border, inside East Germany. But in this case it had strayed over the border. Any promotion for the navigator was now highly problematic, though that was not his immediate problem.
There had been a quick panic call, then silence. Seconds later, around ten p.m., the blip on the USAF’s radar had vanished. At one-thirty, Wiesbaden asked Reuters if their man in East Berlin could find it. The reason they needed to know was the Four-Power Treaty.
Under the terms of the treaty, the Western Allies based in West Berlin had the right to send a patrol car into the Soviet Zone (now East Germany), provided they stated the exact destination. They could not just go a-roving. Without a precise location for their missing spook, they could not leave West Berlin. They also wanted news of the crew: alive, injured, dead, certainly in Soviet hands somewhere.
It was a needle in a haystack, but the orders were clear. Get out there and find it. While waiting for my details, I had packed a gunnysack with bread, cheese, and two flasks of coffee, and written a hasty message for Fräulein Behrendt. Then I left in the Wartburg car for Checkpoint Charlie. As ever with the East Germans, speed was of the essence.
They were methodical and ponderous. They got there in the end but, contrary to spy fiction, they moved like snails. I suspect I was probably in West Berlin before the tail car had got back to the Normannenstrasse HQ to prod the night-duty officer awake. Thirty minutes later, I was out the other side of West Berlin on the westward autobahn and swerved off at the sign to Dessau. From there it was bleak, night-black farmland. I used my pocket compass to keep heading west along B-roads and winding lanes.
Dawn came and the country folk awoke while their city-dwelling masters slept on. The first to appear were farmworkers. I stopped to ask if anyone had heard of a plane belonging to the “Amis” (Americans) coming down nearby. I was completely ignored. At the third halt, instead of saying I was the press from Berlin (official and therefore government), I said “from London.” Immediately, the cooperation and helpfulness were unrestrained. I just flashed the British passport to prove my claim and they all tried to help. The denizens of the workers’ paradise really hated the place.
At first no one had an inkling, then someone thought it was “over there”—pointing west toward Magdeburg. A group of road workers told me there had been flames in the sky to the west and mentioned a small village, which I found on my road map.