The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

76 NOVEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Celebrants standing on concrete planters in front of the com- mand post knocked over spotlights illuminating the U.S. flag. MPs propped up the lights precariously with crushed beer cans, which were readily available, and pleaded with people to stay off the planters. East German border guards and American MPs, who normally studiously ignored each other, exchanged friendly greetings. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the official U.S. military position was business as usual. On Nov. 12, I found the U.S. commander for Berlin, Maj. Gen. Raymond Haddock, coming through the checkpoint on his way to visit the Soviet sector. “People should not use this to try to change our mission,” General Haddock told me. “Our mission this week is the same as last week, and that is to protect the city, and guard freedom and security for the two mil- lion citizens of Berlin.” That mission did not last long. On Oct. 3, 1990, the day of German unification, I watched the Army’s Berlin Brigade band play “The Stars and Stripes Forever” on a stage in Marx-Engels Square in front of a roaring crowd of Berliners in what until that day had been East Berlin. Four years later, I attended the Berlin Brigade’s deactiva- tion ceremony. My planned visit of a few months in Germany turned into a five-year stay. In late 1994, I returned to the United States to take a position as a reporter for The Washington Post . I’ve periodically returned to Germany, most recently to research a book about the Berlin espionage tunnel, dug by the CIA and British Secret Intelligence Service before the wall was built. Like many visitors, I found Berlin vibrant, beautiful and, in many ways, unrecognizable from 1989. I took my family to the moving Berlin Wall memorial at Bernauer Strasse. Not for the first time, I felt grateful for the good fortune that allowed me to witness that wall fall. Stephen Vogel is a journalist and author who covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and reported for The Washington Post for more than two decades. He is the author of Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War ’ s Most Audacious Espionage Operation , published in September by Custom House, and lives in Barnesville, Maryland. Movie Night in the American Sector James A. Williams West Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany w hen the Berlin Wall fell, my wife and I were watching “Dead Poets Society” at an Army theater in the Ameri- can Sector. At the halfway point the projector stopped, and a voice asked me to come to the office for a phone call. Picking up the receiver, I heard Minister Harry Gilmore say that East Berliners were reportedly swarming into the western sectors of the city. Though that report had not been verified, I went to my office at once. My wife left the theater to link up with our daughter and to get warmer clothes for what was already an incredibly cold November night. They soon joined the growing crowd in front of the Brandenburg Gate. For four days we saw very little of each other. In Clay Headquarters I led a team that churned out endless sitreps, summaries and analyses for Washington and the world. U.S. Mission Berlin (USBER) and the military commands in Berlin had an extensive network of report- ing officers who combined their inputs for joint mes- sages. The system worked well because we had war-gamed similar contingencies earlier that year. We had expected that, as the number of refugees from Eastern Europe continued to rise, the Allied sectors of Berlin would be affected. But we did not expect that the East German regime would open the wall with no planning or notice. It was fortunate that the United States held the rotating chair- manship of the Allied Kommandatura that November. This meant that we spoke for the three Western sectors, and we coordinated and presented their joint approaches to the Soviet embassy in East Berlin. Those long-established channels worked well. A huge chal- lenge was to make clear to the Soviets that West Berlin authorities had the security situation under control, especially along the wall and near Soviet properties. Working together, the Allies met that challenge. For four days East Germans swarmed into the Western sectors. They did power shopping with “welcome money” supplied by the At the end of that long and joyous weekend, everyone in Berlin was exhausted. Banks had run out of cash because of all the claims for welcome money. Most alcohol in the city had been consumed—incredibly, there was no violence or rowdyism. –James A. Williams