professor, would you like to join the panel in the front of the room? why don't you? guess we'll start over there. >> thank you. hi. i'm susan cornwell. i'm a journalist. i work for reuters here in washington. and a couple of questions for hope harrison. you spoke about your surprise reading in the documents about ulbricht's condescending view of khrushchev. i just want to be sure, was it known before these documents came out that ulbricht had wanted to close the border for some time? i sort of lost the thread on whether he, you know -- whether that was new or not.

and i also wondered where in the documents was this letter that you mention january '61 from ulbricht to khrushchev? if i could ask mr. pedlow, before this time was it generally known that nato was prepared to use nukes to preserve access to berlin or is that something that's really only become clear in these documents at the cosmic plan or whatever, cosmic secret plan? and for mr. smyser, if he'll answer, was that conversation between kennedy and clay on the 27th of october, was that something that was in these documents? thank you. >> okay. thank you. i'll start. was it known previously publicly

that ulbrecht had wanted to close the border? not to the extent that it's clear in the documents. people knew there was a refugee crisis and that it was probably putting his regime at risk. so, you know, you put two and two together and, you know, people knew that he was more impatient than khrushchev was in doing something about it. so there was a general feeling ulbricht obviously is going to want to get control of this situation. but the details of the ongoing discussions about this and plans and conflicts, those details weren't known until i got those documents in moscow and berlin. i first published -- they are not part of these. those documents i initially published some in, in fact, 1993 with the cold war international history project. they are up on the website of the cold war international

history project. i think -- i translated a bunch of documents into english and put them up on the website. i think ulbricht's january 1961 letter is one of them. i'll have to double-check, but lots of excerpts are in my book, which is called "driving the soviets up the wall." certainly excerpts from them but some entire documents are up online, in english on that website. >> on the nato's possible use of nuclear weapons in a berlin access crisis, the general fact has been known since the end of the cold war, particularly when the british government began releasing some of its documents after the 30-year period had passed. we had a very general idea of what was in the so-called

berkons. they were just now released back in june with the nato declassification of its berlin files. now the details. so the idea of using nuclear weapons at that point was a demonstration they were specifically meant to be done near a soviet base so you could see it, but not actually kill anybody or hurt anything, okay? just we're serious about it. we have nuclear weapons. we're willing to use them but we're not starting it yet for real. >> with respect to the conversation between kennedy, that's my personal recollection, obviously. the kennedy library is not as systematic in its documentation as the state department or the cia or others.

some of the documents are very complete, some of them are not. particularly some of the conversations that bobby kennedy had with -- and this particular conversation with clay was recorded in general terms but not in specific terms. that's one of the reasons i mention it and that's actually one reason i hate to claim the same credit. i put it in my book because i was one of the few people who was still alive at that time, who was already alive at that time and who is still alive now, who was there and i felt i needed to record it so it would be there for historians. but it is not in any specific document except in general terms. >> good morning and thank you for your presentations. my name is chris farrell. and i'm the last commander of the soviet military liaison mission control facility in frankfurt, germany.

i have a question as to whether any of you can talk about the activities of the various military liaison missions during this period of all the four allied powers. >> i can talk a little bit about our mission. we had what we call the potsdam mission. that's where soviets had their headquarters. they were extremely active during this entire time and they were active also before the wall went up, going around, looking at things and so on and so forth. their problem was that the east germans, with soviet support, kept coming up with closed zones so that our liaison missions could not go everywhere in east germany that they wanted to go. sometimes they were rather surprisingly stopped in places where they had been able to go a week earlier.

so we had a great frustration because our military liaison mission knew before the wall went up that there was something going on. but, for example, all those caches of barbed wire and all that other stuff people have talked about now, our people did not see specifically. that's because they were in the prohibited zones. but we did have a mission there. it went around quite a bit. and it kept us informed, generally, about what the soviets were doing, but not in specific terms. >> anything else want to add something? >> i just can add something general, that this is one of the reasons khrushchev was worried about what ulbricht was up to on the border in berlin. when you pass new regulations that make it harder for the west -- for western officials to get into east berlin, they can then retaliate and do the same thing for us, which will make it harder for us to get to our military liaison missions in west berlin.

>> the allied military mission is one of the -- some material has been written on it already. it's certainly one of the great unexplored subjects of the cold war right now. >> hi. i'm a.j. davry with the national declassification center and want to play something that historians generally like, which is the what if scenario. if you take a look at the cuban missile crisis, some have commented that it is kind of a blueprint for what happened in southeast asia in terms of presidential decisions commanding control and so forth. if we take a backwards step to the berlin crisis, was the nature of white house and washington control of the crisis really justified and necessary,

given the personalities in place, or could the standard chains of command and standard organizations in place at the time answer the crisis? >> who should answer that? >> anyone who can. >> yeah. >> i'll bite a little bit. >> i could, because i know a little bit about the way it worked. the answer is that there was no way in the world it could be done through the standard officials. first of all, it was not kennedy's nature to follow established lines of authority. it was his nature to talk to people he wanted to talk to, to see people he wanted to see and essentially to run a wide open administration. you never knew whom he would be talking to. and he didn't want you to know whom he was talking to. so you could not run the most

senior level of the operation at the white house in accordance with any kind of established structure or any kind of bureaucratic system. having said that, however, you should recognize that below that, there was a lot of coordination. we've talked about this. my colleagues have. and all that they said meshes completely with my recollection, that there was a lot of -- i hate to use the bureaucratic, but i say it in the positive sense. there was a lot of bureaucratic activity. a everybody was talking to everybody else. everybody was making plans and so on and so forth. oddly enough, when john olsted went to the file to find a document or find anything that dealt with the file on closing off berlin or west berlin, there was no document in the file.

there was no contingency plan on that particular issue. which john really wrote about with some amusement or some frustration. but essentially there was an awful lot of coordination. if i may say one thing about general clay's attitude, he found this sometimes frustrating. because, for example, general norstad had a hat as nato commander but also as american commander. so he would -- as nato commander, have the british sitting next to him saying don't do this. don't do that. don't do the other, having gratefully coordinating plans with all the allies and then, as u.s. commander, he would have to give instructions on that basis. so we found very often in berlin that there would be moves that we could not control, functioning within nato, even though nato was being very, very

serious about the contingency plans for berlin. there was not as much ability to react quickly as we thought was necessary. that's one reason. i think we have a very good explanation of this today on nato. that's one reason nato took so many or wrote so many contingency plans. they just realized that they couldn't act as quickly as they would like in any kind of situation. >> i want to comment a little bit on a follow-up to that. as we heard, the way the kennedy administration worked, we would ignore many of the traditional chains of command and i would argue that they did that at their own peril at times. and to use one example, that's the famous decision to send the battle group to berlin. you might want to consult with

the supreme allied commander. or the commander in chief of the forces. both of them being general norstad. he doesn't find out about this until after the general decision is taken. he understood the reasons for doing this, really a psychological move. he quickly sent a message back saying if you want to do this, don't send a battle group, if this turns into war, but there are some existing shortfalls. send that to bring garrison up to strength. and garrison troops are completing their training in west germany. you'll have a huge convoy going into berlin and you won't be weakening the defense of western germany, western europe. nobody asked him. by the time he was able to make his proposal, the decision had already been made. there is some expertise in the traditional chain of command. >> needless to say -- >> presidents can do what they

like. >> general clay's presence in berlin did not go over terribly well with the army chain of command, general clark. you bring in another four-star general who sort of steps all over your chain of command. clark was such that he sort of felt diplomacy was way too important to leave to the diplomats. and as long as marshall conye was his soviet partner in berlin, he felt between the two of them, they could keep anything from erupting into a serious crisis. and then clay comes in and starts ordering american troops around without consulting any of the subordinate commanders. so beneath the scenes there's an awful lot just in army channels

dissatisfaction with the way this played out. in fact, what you'll find after the berlin crisis is over, the army goes back and completely reorganizes its chain of command in berlin and tightens it up a little bit. >> can i just say -- oh, sorry. can i just say something on general clark? a few weeks after general clay going to berlin, general clark came to visit him. they had a meeting in clay's office. i was not privy to sit in on that meeting, and i know why. because essentially clark read the riot act to clay. he said these are my forces. he said take your cotton-picking fingers off my troops. i don't know whether he was alluding to clay's southern background at that particular point, but whatever it was, it left clay with a funny situation.

and that's one reason clay often consulted directly with kennedy, because kennedy would give him authority. but clay did something, which was actually about as fair as one could be and still have some measure of bureaucratic authority, and that was he would deal with general albert watson, two-star general, the commander of the u.s. forces in berlin. he was in berlin. clay would say to watson, i would recommend that at this point you do this. and watson, who had enormous respect for clay and who also rather liked the things that clay was doing would do it. for example, that's how the tanks got up to checkpoint charlie. clay was not in a position to order tanks around but was in a position to say to general watson, i think it would be a good idea if you brought some tanks up to the checkpoint and general watson would say, yes, you know, that is a good idea and off they would go, much to clark's frustration, because he felt that things were being taken away from him.

and clay, before he left berlin, sent a special message to kennedy, saying i understand that the u.s. army is angry about some of the things watson did in support of my policies here and i want to make sure that he is not punished and watson got a three-star command. so i assume he was not punished. this is the kind of thing that bureaucratically made berlin kind of the den of thieves. but that's how it had to be when you put someone like that in there. >> another what-if question and also the contingency plans. someone who is not on our panel, but who has recently published on this, fred kempe, his book, "berlin 1961" is, in fact, very critical of president kennedy and it's something that has not come up at all this morning.

fred basically puts together what some people have felt for a long time. but he puts it together in a really wonderful way in his book, in which he really says president kennedy wrote the script, quote/unquote, for ulbricht and khrushchev to be able to build the wall because kennedy, again and again -- this is the what if president kennedy had had a harder line with khrushchev? particularly at vienna, the most important time but before and afterwards really focused on west berlin. don't touch west berlin. don't touch our access to west berlin. don't touch the freedom of how people live in west berlin. but he didn't say anything about east berlin and four power control of berlin and he didn't say anything about free access back and forth between east and west berlin. so fred kempe's thesis is that if kennedy had had a firmer line

and hadn't sort of given khrushchev an easy out -- as long as you don't touch our access to west berlin, you don't touch what's going on in west berlin, your side is your side. you can do what you want. fred wonders a very big what-if question. would the wall have been built if kennedy had had a harder diplomatic stance in advance with khrushchev, because he had resisted for so long that maybe if -- fred's argument is that if kennedy had been firmer, maybe they wouldn't have built the wall. secondly, there was mention about contingency plans in the west. it's very frustrating that we have not been able to get access to any contingency plans in moscow because when i read the documents between khrushchev and ulbricht where they say the enemy took fewer counter measures than anticipated, they clearly expected something more. if they expected something more,

you would think that they had plans of how they were going to respond if the west, in fact, tore down the barbed wire or something. but, unfortunately, up till now, the russians haven't let out any of those kinds of documents. >> i'm inclined to be a little bit more gentle on kennedy than fred. and there are two reasons for that. one is because he was really surrounded by the soviet expert types and by, i'm sorry to say this -- i hope this is not an insult to anybody, but i also have a harvard degree -- by the harvard types, who really were very, very interested in finding some solution to the cold war. and the papers they wrote for him, i mean, i've tried to convey this -- my feeling about them. i think i've made it clear. they were ghastly.

they did not tell kennedy what fred kempe would have liked to have told him, you have to be tough on this. you have to be tough on that. that's why kennedy wanted clay to hear something slightly different. but also -- here again, i differ with kempe. i think once kennedy got the message that there were other things to do, he did them. as i said earlier, one of the things that is really quite astonishing when you look at kennedy's library documents and when you look at his actions is the degree to which he changed between the time that he became president and between the time of the cuban missile crisis. there is an enormous process of education for a young president. there is all something you can watch him process. it was certainly true with kennedy. he was a different man after the berlin crisis and by 1962 than he had been before.

and part of it, i've always felt, was his learning experience in berlin, that there were things that you could actually do. when he said i have a lot of people around here who have lost their nerves but i haven't. he was saying something that was very important. >> the question here? >> frank fletcher. i was looking at a document last night on the cia website from a report of -- from colonel pinkosky and he attributed the source of kruschev's belligerency on -- he didn't have direct access. this was through his patron, soviet marshall. his name escapes me at the moment. what were the wider sources of kruschev's attitudes toward berlin?

what was going on? was he really at risk at that period because of berlin, of being deposed or on other matters? >> well, one of the -- khrushchev was ultimately ousted in october of 1964 and one of the reasons his colleagues told him in the stormy politburo meeting about this, they said you followed a practice of risking war. they said this was your policy. it wasn't that you did every now and then. you had a policy where you risked war too much. you did it three times. in suez, berlin and cuba. this was too risky. so they were, you know, how clear that was already in 1961, well, even when he began the berlin crisis in 1958, his closest adviser, his closest

colleague said wait a minute. you're going to go threatening. you are unilaterally abrogating for power agreements on berlin? wait a minute. you know, we need to talk about this more. and so instead of having a decision on that at that particular meeting, he forced a postponement of that decision and ultimately got khrushchev to back off a little bit in the sense that he then offered negotiations. okay. it was under threat. it was under the six-month ultimatum, but it was no longer him saying we are turning over our control of access routes to ulbricht. so there was always some unease with his policy on berlin. and when he was ousted in '64, you know, his colleagues said how risky he'd been, they also said, and what did you get out of it? a wall. you built a wall. that didn't look very good. so they were ultimately quite critical of that.

but the biggest reason he was on the defensive in the politburo was because of his criticism of stalin which he repeated in october of 1961 and an even bigger way than his denunciation of stalin in '56 which got mao very critical of him. so at the same time this crisis was -- this east/west crisis over berlin was going on and greg has talked about a crisis within nato, there was an absolute crisis in the communist bloc. i've talked about the one between khrushchev and ulbricht but there was also a bigger one between khrushchev and mao where the chinese felt, why does he keep talking with the west and he's going to all these negotiations and he's not getting anywhere and he's being too easy on the west. so the biggest criticism of khrushchev domestically was that he was too soft on the west.

and part -- so some people feel that that's partly why he tried to be more firm on berlin because he knew he had hard liners saying he's not doing enough and he's being too trusting of the west. and he needs to really act. >> time for one more question. >> oh, i had a two-parter. you can pick then. one's an easy one. what was the nationality of nato secretary general sticker and how did that influence his -- the way he approached the issue. the second question you'll have to decide which one you can answer is from a u.s. perspective, what are the most significant examples where we correctly anticipated soviet east german actions and when did we -- when were we surprised by what they did? >> i'll take the easier one. dirk sticker was from the

netherlands and also very experienced. he had been the dutch ambassador to nato for a number of years. was an excellent secretary-general. surprised. ron? >> yes and no. no, i -- i can only recall, you know, in berlin and some of the other stuff i studied on german affairs and so on and so forth. i would say that there were times when through the cia, also through open sources because we were reading the newspapers which often told us a great deal, we could sufficiently, accurately anticipate what was going to happen. we couldn't tell exactly what was going to happen. we couldn't say it in detail but we could tell there were pressures in one direction or another. so we had that. on the other hand, what was always difficult for us was not

that we could tell in general what the east germans or the soviets or others were thinking but that we could never tell the specifics. this was our great frustration with the wall. as i had said earlier, we knew they had to do something. now when you write something in quotes, you are not saying something specific. and that was our problem. there was the anticipation that they might shut down access. there was anticipation that they might draw a circle around all of berlin. there were all kinds of things that we were talking about and certainly separating east and west berlin was one of the options that we thought might very well be picked. but you could not, you know, say this is it. our penetration of east germany -- i hope my cia colleague doesn't mind me saying this. our penetration of east germany was not as good as, for this

kind of purpose, it should have been. >> i may comment on this issue about what was reported or not. i know the cia is sometimes criticized for not predicting events before they happen. the interesting thing about the wall, and its coming down, we were criticized. didn't the cia see this coming? didn't they know it was going to happen? the rejoinder to that is not even the east germans knew it. the government itself did not know that wall was going to open up on 9 november. what happened was there was the meeting of the politburo. the representative of east berlin was at this meeting, and then he was told to go to speak to the journalists waiting in the other room and just tell them that they were working on easing travel restrictions. he went out, whether purposely or by accident and said, guess what. we are removing all travel restrictions. and the jo