NATO – A Bridge Across Time - Newsdesk Media

Left: Frederick Forsyth c.1970
Right: A still from the film of
Frederick Forsyth’s The Fourth
Protocol (1987), starring Michael
Caine and Pierce Brosnan
The Atlantic Council
The Wall…
Always the Wall
Frederick Forsyth’s Cold War Berlin
I
do not recall the exact day but it
was surely in early August 1963
that Harold King, the iconic
Bureau Chief of Reuters’ bureau
in Paris called me in, and he was
not best pleased. I thought it was I who
had invoked his impressive ire, but it was
news from London.
“The buggers want to offer you Berlin,”
he growled. It was flattering that he
should not want me to leave after only
18 months in crisis-torn Paris, but West
Berlin was an unmissable chance. It had
a staff of four under the veteran German
Alfred Kluehs. It would be good to work
under him, I ventured.
“Not West Berlin, idiot,” grumped the
Paris Chief. “East Germany.”
My heart did one of those chicane
swerves. It was a one-man bureau, so
that meant Bureau Chief. I was still just
24. The parish east of the Iron Curtain
comprised East Germany, Czechoslovakia
and Hungary. It was huge and, apart from
its three national armies, contained three
Soviet army groups.
All three countries had harsh regimes,
vicious secret police apparats and about
one Western correspondent – the Reuters
man. But the core was East Berlin,
glowering and snarling behind the recently
erected Berlin Wall. This was the absolute
height of the Cold War, nine months after
the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the general
agreement was that if World War Three
and mutual wipe-out ever came, Berlin
would probably be the spark.
Forty-six years later a word of
explanation is in order. After 1945 the
Reich was divided into four zones:
American, British, French and Russian,
between the east and the west the Iron
Curtain went up. But Berlin, set 110 miles
inside East Germany, was subject to a
different treaty and though divided into
four sectors, was decreed an open city.
For East Germany that was virtually a
death sentence.
West Germany shrewdly decreed that
while she would refuse the validity of East
German degrees in politics, philosophy,
history etc (communist propaganda) she
would accept degrees in maths, physics,
chemistry, engineering and so forth.
Between 1945 and 1961, tens of thousands
of young East Germans waited until they
graduated, then grabbed a bag, took the
train to East Berlin and simply walked
into the West. Once in West Berlin they
would be flown down the air corridor to a
new life and career in the West.
East Germany had been industrially and
comprehensively raped by the USSR with
most of her assets put on trains heading
east. Now the cream of her youth was
simply draining away towards the West.
Finally, in August 1961, working 24 hours a
day and with Soviet agreement, they put up
the Wall and closed the last aperture.
The reaction of the West was volcanic.
Everyone knew why they had to do it, but
that was not the point. The Wall broke every
treaty on the city of Berlin. NATO led the
charge. Every embassy was closed, every
diplomat and trade delegation withdrawn.
And that meant foreign correspondents.
All the East German press people in the
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