Icelandic Missile Crisis

The Icelandic missile crisis was a conflict between the Europa Bund and the United States in 1962 that is widely believed to be the closest the world has come to an outbreak of global war since the end of the Great War in 1919.

Iceland had long been part of the Danish realm, but had been granted extensive self governance in personal union with the Danish crown in 1918 and had developed foreign relations on its own behalf. Notably, due to its geographic position and close economic ties to the UK, the Icelandic government had economic and increasingly political ties to the English-speaking world.

In 1944 Iceland obtained full independence. The impetus for this was the signing of a Danish-German defense treaty which allowed Germany to station troops inside Danish territory in an emergency. The ambiguous wording of the treaty opened up the possibility for German troops to be stationed in Iceland, an extremely unpopular concept among the Icelandic people. The Icelandic government, dominated by the nationalist Independence Party, quickly staged a referendum that resulted in a resounding vote for independence. Denmark made some protests but did not attempt to interfere, and Iceland became a completely independent country and was welcomed into the United Nations. Notably, Iceland did not create a military, relying instead on its coast guard and police force.

During the 1950s Iceland continued to deepen its ties with the Anglo-American bloc. In 1955 Iceland signed a mutual defense treaty with the USA. As part of the treaty, which required the USA to defend Iceland in the event of an attack on its territory or territorial waters, the USA based significant military forces on the island, and built a long-range radar station at Keflavik airport. Iceland was strategically important due to Anglo-American fears that the German navy, especially German submarines, might enter the Atlantic through the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap in order to interdict transatlantic shipping in a future global conflict. The Europa bund, under German leadership, protested the presence of American forces in Iceland, but given the pre-positioning of much larger American forces in the UK, these protests were considered *pro forma* and neither regarded on the American side, nor followed up on the German side.

In 1960 an Icelandic coastguard officer named Lieutenant Commander Eiríkur Kristófersson was made military attache at Iceland's small embassy in Tokyo. Kristófersson approached officers of the Gehlen-amt based at Germany's embassy with an offer of information from the Keflavik base. Although he took money, his main motivation was ideological, as he was unhappy about the presence of American weapons on European soil. Kristófersson, codenamed TOPAZ, operated for two years, giving the Gehlen-Amt high quality information about American deployments in Iceland and the North Atlantic.

In 1963 TOPAZ revealed the deployment of American Jupiter missiles at several sites dispersed around Iceland. The Jupiter missile was a medium range nuclear weapon with an operational range of 2700km. Although the Americans had deployed Jupiters in the UK, their presence in Iceland was very threatening chiefly because the Bund´s anti missile defenses were mostly stationed in the Low Countries, anticipating missiles would be incoming over the English channel. The possibility of a Jupiter strike on Germany over the north sea, a route with much fewer anti-missile defenses, would potentially leave the Bund vulnerable. The theoretical extreme range of the Jupiters put Berlin within reach of an American strike.

Gehlen-Amt officers, working at the personal direction of Director Gehlen without any official orders from the Chancellor, persuaded TOPAZ to defect to Germany along with his young family. A few days later the Icelandic officer gave a press conference in Berlin where he accused the Americans of stationing nuclear weapons in Keflavik, accompanied by infographics showing the missile´s ability to hit Berlin. Chancellor Speer demanded that the USA withdraw its nuclear weapons, and deployed the *Kriegsmarine* to enforce a naval blockade around Iceland to prevent further deliveries of war material. President Goldwater, a known war hawk, denounced the blockade as illegal and ordered the United States 2nd fleet into the North Atlantic to enforce "freedom of navigation". American forces in the UK, Gibraltar and Malta went onto high alert, as did German forces in Curacao and the Azores Islands. Both sides began to mobilise, conducting war readiness drills, and raising fears of a general nuclear exchange.

The crisis did not ultimately result in a war. Frantic negotiations at the League of Nations in Geneva did not produce an agreement, and communications between Berlin and Washington were sporadic, with Speer at one point suspecting from the odd tone of a message that Goldwater had been overthrow in a covert military coup. Some war hawks in Germany, informally led by Marshall Ferdinand Schorner, advocated aggressive confrontation in the belief that Germany would win any subsequent war. The breakthrough came when Richard Helms, the cultural attache in the American embassy in Berlin who was widely known to be the CIA station chief, approached a pro-government German journalist to set up an informal channel. Helms, believed to be acting on his own initiative, was able to hash out an agreement whereby the USA would withdraw its missiles from Iceland in exchange for the withdrawal of German missiles from the Azores islands.

The agreement was seen as a victory for Germany due to a perception that the USA had "backed down", but the main emotion around the world was relief that a nuclear conflict had been avoided. Although tension remained, both German and American leadership made tentative steps towards trying to regulate their competition. One key measure was the installation of a "hotline" between the Chancellery in Berlin and the White House in the United States. Both Chancellor Speer and President Goldwater lost power partly due to perceptions of excessive brinksmanship during the Crisis - Goldwater lost the election in 1964 when his opponent, Lyndon Johnson, emphasised that Goldwater was too eager to seek military confrontation with Germany. Speer´s political loss was more subtle, but his unsuccessful bid for the office of head of state in 1970 resurrected criticisms of his behaviour that resulted in him ultimately losing the Chancellery.

TOPAZ has been living under Gehlem-Amt protection in Denmark ever since the crisis ended.