“Herr Forsyth,” it said, “do not ever come back to Magdeburg.”
And do you know? I never have.
OUTBREAK OF WAR
I recall with exact accuracy the date when I almost started the Third World War, for reasons that will become plain. It was April 24, 1964, and it was two o’clock in the morning. I was in my car, twisting and turning my way through the coffin-dark streets of East Berlin back to my flat from a visit to a charming young member of the State Opera Chorus.
I was in a suburb of the sleeping city that I did not know well, and had no map, so I simply headed toward the glow in the sky that was West Berlin, expecting anytime to happen upon a major boulevard that I knew would lead me back to the Stadtmitte district, where the Reuters office was situated.
I was still about a mile from it when I came to another road junction, a crossroads that I needed to go over. Standing foursquare across my path was a Russian soldier. He heard my engine approaching from behind him, turned, and held up a hand in the no-mistake “Halt” signal. Then he turned to face the other way. Because it was chilly, I had the windows up, but now I lowered the driver’s-side window and thrust out my head. That was when I heard the low rumble.
As I watched, the first vehicles appeared, coming from the right, meaning the east, and heading across the junction toward the west. They were lorries packed with soldiers, and it was obviously a very large convoy. It just went on and on. I got out of the car and watched for a few minutes. The trucks were then replaced by low-loaders carrying tanks. Nothing else moved. Apart from the Russians, the streets were abandoned.
Wishing to get home, I hung a U-turn and went back, seeking another way past the blockage.
Ten streets farther on, it happened again. Another fur-capped soldier at a crossroads, arms spread, barring traffic from crossing. More armor appeared, moving from east to west, which is to say toward the Wall. Then towed artillery. Now perturbed, I retreated again, found another side street, and continued home. By now, I was zigzagging all over the place, trying to get through.
The third time, the slowly rumbling traf
fic on the crossing involved more low-loaders but carrying mobile bridges. Then more mechanized infantry with motorcycle outriders. Though no expert, I calculated what I had seen as between four and five divisions of the Soviet army, in full battle order, moving through the darkness toward the Wall.
During the autumn of 1962, world attention had switched to the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it had been the received wisdom for years that if war between the Warsaw Pact and NATO ever came, the spark would come from the embattled and surrounded enclave of West Berlin.
The besieged half city was teeming with spy agencies, agents, infiltrators, and defectors. One West German spy chief, Otto John, had already been snatched from the streets of West Berlin (or so he said, when he later reappeared to explain himself to a skeptical world). In 1948–49, West Berlin had almost been snuffed out when Stalin closed the access motorways and tried to starve the Western outpost into surrender. Only a huge airlift had saved it.
Every day, West Berliners lived in fear of the moment when twenty-two divisions of Soviet-based military in East Germany would get their marching orders. That was why their mood was always slightly hysterical and their partygoing and sexual mores entertainingly louche.
And finally, with Kennedy dead and Khrushchev locked in a power struggle with rivals in the Kremlin, the spring of 1964 was as tense a time as had ever been. Not long before, the Russian tanks of Marshal Konev and the US tanks of General Lucius Clay had been parked barrel to barrel at Checkpoint Charlie with the Reuters man dodging between them.
What I had seen was not merely rolling, it was rolling toward the Wall. In silence, apart from the low rumbling, at two a.m. In rising anguish, I made it back to the Reuters office-cum-apartment and rushed upstairs. The question running through me was simple: What the hell do I do?
There was no question of calling anyone to consult. Telephonically, West Berlin and West Germany were cut off. All the East German ministries were closed.
Do nothing? Say nothing? And what if the worst fears were confirmed by the dawn’s early light? Finally I hit upon what I felt was the only thing I could do. Report exactly what I had seen, nothing more, nothing less. No embellishment, no suggestions, no speculation. Just the facts.
So I tapped out the story, watching the yards of hole-punched ticker tape spool out of the telex machine until there was nothing more to say. Then I hit FAST TRANSMIT and watched it disappear toward Bonn. By four a.m. I was in the kitchen brewing some very strong coffee. I kept returning to the office to check the machine for a response from the Bonn office, but there was none. I suppose their machine was on “automatic on-pass” to London. Actually, it was. I did not know what was going on west of the River Elbe, so I drank coffee and waited for what might become Armageddon as a watery sun rose over Pankow. Only later did they tell me what had been triggered by those yards of punched tape.
It seemed the night staff at Reuters in London had awoken with quite a jolt. In the suburban homes of the top men in Reuters, telephones rang, and the dispatch from East Berlin was read out to them. The story was not sent on to the agency’s clients worldwide, and thank heavens for that.
Night-duty officers in the British ministries were roused and they awoke their superiors. It was ten p.m. in Washington when the encrypted calls from London came through. Intelligence agencies were besieged with queries. They were as puzzled as the politicians. There had been no steady deterioration before that date.
Eventually, Moscow was contacted, and bewildered officials in the Kremlin put breakfast on hold to check with their own generals in East Germany. That was when the riddle was solved. Relief surged back across the Continent and the Atlantic. Those about to go to bed did so. Those about to get up did that, too.
A puzzled Soviet commander-in-chief of Warsaw Pact forces in East Germany explained that it was only a rehearsal for the May Day parade, scheduled exactly one week later.
In a rare extension of consideration for the citizens of East Berlin, the Soviets had decided to hold their multi-division military party in the middle of the night, when the streets were empty and, being Communists, it never occurred to them to tell anybody.
Of course, once the banal and ludicrous explanation was out in the open, a rain of derision fell upon the Reuters East Berlin office. My only response was to apologize but with the codicil: Well, you didn’t know, either. Which was grumpily conceded. Eventually, it seems a multi-ministry and multi-agency concordat was agreed not to mention it ever again. And so far as I know, from that day to this, it never has been.
HEADLIGHTS
The post of Reuters correspondent for East Germany involved a very large parish: East Germany itself, with compulsory residence in East Berlin, plus Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Visits to Prague and Budapest were not frequent, but mandatory. To Budapest I would always fly, but Prague was close enough for me to motor in my ghastly pink East German Wartburg car. This I did in the midsummer of 1964.
As always, I checked in to the Jalta Hotel on Wenceslas Square and greeted the bugging devices I knew would be somewhere throughout the suite. Elsewhere, crouched over their turning spools, would be the goons of the StB, the Czech secret police. Mr. Stanley Vaterlé, the ever-genial chief of reception, could be relied on to make the right phone call if I handed in my room key and asked for my car key. As I drew out of the guest car park, the StB car would swing in behind me. It was routine procedure, and both parties cheerfully pretended not to notice.
There was a sweltering heat wave that July, and the Jalta had air-conditioning, so after dinner I elected to go down to the basement, where the regime permitted a Western-style disco, which took only Western currency and was patronized by Western businessmen. There were also hostesses, usually university students making pin money on bar tips to help themselves through university or some other college. That night, I met Jana.
She was gorgeous, a twenty-one-year-old who could have stopped traffic on the highway. Her champagne glass was duly topped up; we got talking, then dancing. I was twenty-five; most of the other males were middle-aged, overweight, and beaded with sweat despite the cool air, whether from lust or exercise, it was hard to say.