66 THE 'DEADLINE CRISIS'

In 1961, interzonal trade represented 11 percent of the DDR's total foreign trade. It was an important 11 percent, composed of finished or semifinished products, special steels and machinery in short supply in East Germany. Interzonal trade represented about 2 percent of the Federal Republic's foreign trade. The terms and restraints on interzonal trade were, to a large extent, Bonn's conditions for Pankow's commercial access to West Germany.¹⁰⁵ Since the trade continues to be of relatively greater importance to the East German economy than to the West German, Bonn entered into trade agreements with Pankow as a rough *quid pro quo* for uninterrupted access to West Berlin.¹⁰⁶ Theoretically, this understanding—sometimes more tacit than explicit—should enable the economy of West Berlin to be less sensitive to potential blockade threats. In practice, cancellation has proven to be a rather clumsy tool for influencing Pankow's actions in Berlin crises. The trade agreements are a complex and unique relationship between West Berlin and Pankow regulated by Bonn. The agreements exhibit a mutual dependency by West Berlin and Pankow on the West German economy.¹⁰⁷

On political grounds, Bonn could make a reasonable case for maintaining commercial relations with Pankow without diplomatic relations. Bonn regarded the trade agreements as understandings between “peoples” and “currency areas” rather than governments. In Bonn’s view, nondiplomatic relations with the DDR enhanced the political influence of Bonn in East Germany in two respects: (1) it made a portion of the East German economy dependent on Bonn

105. The two parties used the Deutschmark-West rather than the Deutschmark-East. Bonn could curtail the trade by refusing export permits to West German firms, if a serious trade imbalance occurred. Horst Mendershausen, *Interzonal Trade in Germany, Part I: The Trade and the Contractual Relations, RM-3686-PR, The Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California, July, 1963*. pp. 15-29.

106. The "Berlin clause" in the agreements operated to the effect that any interference by Pankow of commercial traffic to West Berlin would result in an immediate cancellation of the complete agreement by Bonn. Mendershausen, *Interzonal Trade in Germany, Part II: Interaction with Early Berlin Conflicts, RM-3686-PR (Part II)*, The Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California, November, 1963, p. 38. Since the mid-1960's a specific Berlin clause is no longer used in the trade agreements.

107. Mendershausen considers interzonal trade a subject economists are wary of because of its political and esoteric character. He describes it as "silent" or "hostile trade" between "fictional partners." Officially, it is trade between "currency areas." Mendershausen, *Interzonal Trade in Germany, Part I*, pp. 12-15.

DULLES' FLEXIBILITY 67

and (2) it contributed to the standard of living of the East German population. Commercial relations did not constitute an accommodation with the DDR. Rather they gave substance to Bonn's claim of being representative for the whole German people. Bonn treated Pankow not as a foreign power but as an "authority" illegally administering the affairs of 17,000,000 Germans.

For these reasons, Adenauer opposed Dulles' accommodation to East German administration of the access routes.¹⁰⁸ Adenauer believed that short-term conveniences for access would endanger long-term security for Berlin. East German access controls would also irretrievably damage Bonn's legitimacy and foreign policy. Adenauer firmly believed that if his allies, as occupying powers, engaged in operational relations with the DDR, they would, in effect, abandon their commitment embodied in the 1954 Paris protocols to recognize Bonn alone as spokesman for Germany. Adenauer perceived the readiness of the United States to engage in operational relations with the DDR as a disturbing measure of Washington's reluctance to continue earlier policies toward Germany. He regarded Dulles' suggestion for a German confederation in the same light. While Bonn consented to study possible forms of confederation to find an acceptable version incorporating free elections, it generally treated confederation as antithetical to its own policy and interests.¹⁰⁹

Bonn feared isolation from its allies, particularly the United States, as the greatest single danger in the Berlin crisis. For the Soviets, Bonn's diplomatic isolation was the key to success. Moscow pressed hard throughout the period to shake the United States' confidence in Bonn. Adenauer felt constrained to strike a balance between supporting and restraining his allies. He had to go along to avoid isolation. He had to oppose them, carefully, when he believed they ignored Bonn's concerns. Dulles' and Macmillan's campaign to negotiate a way out of the "deadline crisis" placed great strains on their relations with Adenauer. And the negotiations which followed became extraordinarily awkward for him. He had to lobby vigorously for Bonn's place among presumed friends, not always successfully.

108. *The New York Times*, November 23, 1958, p. 1.

109. *The Herald Tribune*, January 21, 1969, p. 8; see Adenauer's memoirs of this period, *Erinnerungen, 1955-1959* (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt, 1967), chapter 14.

68 THE 'DEADLINE CRISIS'

8. *The Decision to Negotiate*

The Western powers agreed to negotiate, but the agreement was a composite mix of perceptions. Dulles and Macmillan wanted negotiations with the Soviet Union in order to avoid war and to exert political counterpressures on Moscow. They considered Soviet proposals in the "deadline crisis" to be negotiable. Acheson and the Eisenhower Administration's domestic critics perceived risks in a negotiating strategy—a strategy they believed inappropriate to the crisis. De Gaulle agreed with Acheson that the threatening tenor of Soviet demands precluded useful negotiations. De Gaulle finally agreed to negotiate after the Soviets retracted their deadline in March and consented to a foreign ministers' conference to be followed by a summit conference with a wide agenda. He probably felt the wider the agenda the more readily he could steer the negotiations away from the issues most sensitive to Adenauer and himself, or veto any incipient settlements which seemed undesirable. Adenauer shared this view.

The Western decision to negotiate combined the option Dulles and Macmillan urged—to conduct serious negotiations—with the option de Gaulle and Adenauer preferred—to conduct no negotiations or very broad negotiations. The decision to negotiate, therefore, contained latent contradictions. This kind of decision could rather easily come undone in practice, as eventually happened. The decision held through the Paris summit conference in the spring of 1960. After that time, the Western powers could no longer agree on negotiation as an appropriate strategy. For the moment, the United States and Britain had the chance to test their hypothesis that Moscow initiated the crisis because of a security interest in consolidating its Eastern European empire.

The Western powers miscalculated in their early decision to negotiate. They underestimated Moscow's fears of West German rearmament and failed to communicate that they were really unwilling to concede what the Soviets desired. Acheson's option, a military demonstration, might have avoided early confusion, although it contained significant risks. It had the benefit of warning Khru-shchev not to expect a political payoff from the crisis, but it risked producing an exchange of provocations. He would have been more informed of the hazards in his policy, even though he probably would have pressed on to remove all doubt.

PART II

# Berlin Negotiations and the U-2 Incident

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THE UNITED STATES IN WORLD AFFAIRS

Khrushchev's management had gone beyond abstract peace appeals and attempted to reinforce its "peaceful coexistence" propaganda with pressures of a more direct sort. Pleas for a "relaxation of tension" and fraternization of leading statesmen had alternated with the fomenting of acute diplomatic crises. Soviet behavior in periods of international stress had given the impression that the U.S.S.R., while pretending to be concerned only with protecting its own interests against suspected Western encroachments and with defending "peace" against its alleged Western enemies, was really engaged on a calculated effort to wear down Western nerves, create disunity among the Western peoples and governments, and even, perhaps, frighten the Western nations into making concessions which they refused to make spontaneously. The frequency and intensity of these periodic crises or "probing movements" had increased in recent years as the U.S.S.R. gained confidence from its proved advantages in the misfile and satellite field. Since the launching of the first Sputnik in October 1957, there had been a succession of war scares over Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Taiwan. The Berlin crisis opened up by the Soviet note of November 27, 1958 was merely the latest in a practically unbroken series. Meanwhile, as they hurried the world from one alarm to another, Khrushchev and his associates had continued their suave appeals for "peace and friendship," liquidation of the "cold war," and the beginning of honest, peaceful competition between the two systems. Which were to be believed, the assurances of good will or the practical signs that Moscow had made up its mind to keep the Western powers on the run?

In this alternating strategy of appeals and threats, the apparatus of Soviet diplomacy had played an essential, if subordinate, part. The normal function of diplomacy is to resolve disputes and adjust differences. Moscow, however, had made it rather clear that it was not interested in settling its many differences with the West unless they could be settled in such a way as to give it a clear-cut ad-

BERLIN, DISARMAMENT, AND THE ATOM

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vantage in terms of the promotion of Communist interests. The primary task of Soviet diplomacy was not to seek accommodation of East-West differences, but to carry forward the over-all offensive on the diplomatic front just as others were carrying it forward on the propaganda, organizational, and economic fronts. In their negotiations with the West, whether the nominal objective was a settlement of the problems of Germany and Central Europe or joint measures to alleviate the arms race, the Communists sought only the kind of agreements that would leave the balance of advantage to them. "Never yet," as Secretary Dulles observed, "has the Soviet Union made any proposal designed to promote ending the 'cold war' except on terms that it calculated would help international communism to win the 'cold war.' "²

Some observers professed to find an exception to this rule in the conclusion of the Austrian State Treaty in 1955. In that one instance, Moscow after years of stubborn obstruction had suddenly reversed itself and accepted a settlement which embodied definite advantages for Austria and no inordinate gains for the U.S.S.R. itself. But even this unexpected bit of complaisance could be viewed as part of the wider diplomatic offensive that had culminated in the Geneva "summit conference" of that year, an event which in retrospect was generally felt to have been highly serviceable to Soviet world interests. The Austrian treaty was a price that Moscow had been willing to pay in order to gain the fresh opportunities afforded by a meeting at the summit. More commonly, negotiations with the West had been quite openly employed by the Soviet Union as a means of trying to extort concessions from its antagonists and to convince world opinion, against all the evidence of the facts, of the Soviet will to peace and the obstructiveness of the Western powers, especially the United States.

Because this kind of diplomacy was fundamentally alien to non-Communist ways of thought, the Soviet Union and its allies enjoyed a considerable advantage in every diplo-

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matic encounter with the West. A substantial section of world opinion, deeply troubled by the East-West conflict and fearful of its potential consequences, attached importance to agreement for its own sake without worrying too much about the precise nature of the agreements reached. To people of this turn of mind, Soviet plans for the solution of world problems often seemed more plausible than the well-founded objections which the Western governments were in the habit of raising whenever Moscow brought forward some startling new proposal.

The Western governments themselves had shown considerable reluctance to admit the difficulty of arriving at a real accommodation with their antagonist. Despite many warnings that Moscow's peaceful protestations could not be taken at face value, Western actions reflected an unquenchable hope that the Russians would eventually prove "reasonable" and "sincere" and conclude agreements that would be "fair" to both sides. In recent years these hopes had been substantially encouraged by Khrushchev's evident preference for "peaceful competition" rather than war, and by his admission that the arms race was a heavy burden for the U.S.S.R. as well as the West. Paradoxically, such hopes were also likely to be encouraged by Moscow's more threatening moves, of which the demand for Western evacuation of Berlin was the latest and in some ways the most alarming. Actions of this kind, as the Soviet leaders undoubtedly realized, encouraged the West to reflect on the possibly fatal consequences of *not* reaching agreement.

Yet much as they would have liked to arrive at an agreement or a series of agreements that would really put an end to the "cold war," the Western powers since their experiences with Stalin had never felt it possible to trust the unsupported word of the Soviet Government about any matter of importance. Particularly in the field of disarmament, they had regularly insisted that any agreements they did conclude must contain reliable guarantees to ensure their enforcement. This in itself had usually been more

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than enough to arouse the animosity of the U.S.S.R., which had consistently taken the position that the demand for adequate measures of inspection and control was inconsistent with its own dignity and security. A further impediment to real agreement, if Soviet statements could be believed, was the unwillingness of the United States to "reconcile" itself to the Communist control of Eastern Europe and mainland China. Khrushchev had sometimes hinted that fundamental agreement would be easy if only Washington would concede that the "socialist" part of the world was going to remain "socialist." Even if no question of principle had been involved, the record of Soviet foreign policy did not inspire official Washington with much confidence in the genuineness of these intimations.

With so many factors working to prevent a satisfactory outcome, the Western governments were bound to approach each new round of negotiation with the U.S.S.R. with considerable reservations. Admittedly, the effort had to be made, not only as a matter of deference to world opinion but because of the ever-present possibility that the Soviet Union might again reverse its stand as it had done in the Austrian treaty question. There were times when the West, too, seemed to be subordinating its diplomacy to political warfare requirements. But where the U.S.S.R. habitually dealt in pat slogans and slick formulas which were transparently aimed at impressing world opinion, the Western powers continued to advance carefully worked out and technically sound proposals whose only fault was that they were unlikely either to be accepted by the U.S.S.R. or to elicit much applause from those sections of the international public that wanted to see agreement on almost any terms.

Partly for these reasons, by the beginning of 1959 the area of direct diplomatic discussion between the U.S.S.R. and the West had been narrowed down to two main issues. One lay in the field of disarmament, a subject that was normally within the province of the United Nations but had not been discussed there in any comprehensive

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way since the days when Sputnik had opened up the new world of outer space and emboldened the U.S.S.R. to demand a basic reconstruction of the United Nations Disarmament Commission.³ Since the autumn of 1958, however, the three nuclear powers (the United States, Great Britain, and U.S.S.R.) had been engaged at Geneva in trying to write a treaty providing for the discontinuance of nuclear weapons tests—a subordinate but none the less important aspect of the disarmament problem. Another late 1958 venture in the disarmament field, a technical discussion of factors involved in guarding against surprise attack, had bogged down in procedural arguments, and Washington indicated early in 1959 that it did not favor a resumption until the governments concerned could agree on what the talks were intended to accomplish.⁴

The other and more critical field of current East-West discussion concerned the general problem of Germany and European security, particularly as affected by Moscow's recent demand for a fundamental change in the status of West Berlin.

## 27. SEARCH FOR THE SUMMIT

The question of Germany and European security in its current form was a heritage of the ill-fated Geneva "summit" conference of 1955. Though it had produced no solid agreement among the four powers that shared responsibility for German affairs (the United States, Great Britain, France, and the U.S.S.R.), that meeting had at least reflected an apparent consensus as to how Europe's central political problem should be attacked. On both the Eastern and Western sides, the underlying assumption at Geneva had appeared to be that Germany should in due course be reunified through the fusion of its Eastern and Western sections, and that this process should be accompanied by the conclusion of a final peace treaty with Germany and the establishment of new security arrangements in Europe which would afford due protection to all of

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Germany's neighbors. Although the United States subsequently maintained that the U.S.S.R. had actually agreed at Geneva to the reunification of Germany through free elections, Moscow had repudiated this interpretation and had since backed away from even the rough procedural outlines which for a brief moment had apparently been accepted by both sides.

In accordance with their interpretation of the results of the Geneva conference, the Western powers and the German Federal Republic had consistently maintained since 1955 that the first step toward restoring normal conditions in Central Europe must be the reunification of Germany through free elections. But the U.S.S.R. and the Communist "German Democratic Republic," which had every reason to fear that free elections in Germany would result in overwhelming defeat for Communism, had insisted with equal pertinacity that the whole question of reunification should be left to the two German governments while the great powers concentrated on the conclusion of a German peace treaty. The kind of treaty they had in mind, the Communists had made plain, was one that would require the removal of Western Germany from NATO and would establish the whole of Germany as a neutral and partially demilitarized area. This prospect was as unattractive to the West, especially the German Federal Republic, as that of German reunification through free elections was to the East.

Here, for all practical purposes, matters had rested until the U.S.S.R. in its note of November 27, 1958 had raised a new issue by demanding that negotiations be started within six months with a view to terminating the four-power occupation regime in Berlin. The wartime agreements that had established the existing state of affairs in Berlin were now obsolete, Moscow had contended. The time had come for the four powers to withdraw their military forces so that normal conditions could be restored in the divided city. Recognizing that the Western powers might feel some concern about the fate of the 2,200,000 people