Page:The Minority of One 1961-10.pdf/3

“The Legitimate Activities of Free Men”

By Friedrich J. Jaeger

The Soviet Government’s accusation that “all kinds of revanchists, extremists, saboteurs and spies are being transferred from the Federal Republic of Germany to West Berlin” has been branded in the White House’s response of August 24th as “one more step in a deliberate campaign of deception and attempted intimidation;” as “false” charges and allegations; and as “an act of cynicism and irresponsibility.” The Presidential statement went on to say that “the slanderous remarks of the Soviet Government” in actuality pertained to “the legitimate activities of free men in West Berlin...” There is no shortage of authoritative Western statements that shed light on the nature of the West German activities described by the Soviets as spying and sabotage, and by the White House as “the legitimate activities of free men.” As far back as August 21, 1953, the West Berlin daily TELEGRAPH quoted from a speech by Ernst Reuter, then mayor of West Berlin: "Berlin is in a position to create serious difficulties for the Soviet Union and the German administration in Pankow. Berlin could be the most effective atom bomb ever produced.” The incumbent mayor of West Berlin Willy Brandt has his own definition of his city’s political role. According to him it is a “thorn in the side of the East.” The mayors were not the only nor the first politicians who fully appreciated the cold-war opportunities in Berlin. They were preceded by the WALL STREET JOURNAL which, on December 13, 1952, recommended that the US. Administration “encourage go-slow movements in Red .. . factories and mines . . . and ship in extra ration cards and imitation money for spreading further confusion in Iron Curtain countries . . . It would mainly be to throw some sand into the gears of industry and to delay Red political organization of the satellite countries.” The same tactics were recommended by a host of other American private and official spokesmen. Marguerite Higgins stated in an interview (U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT, January 2, 1956) that “if the West would encourage the East Germans to resist I think you could make life so uncomfortable for the Russians that they’d get out of East Germany with their Communism, if you had a resistance movement, the same sort of thing that you had in Morocco against the French.” In actuality, all these recommendations were quite dated. They expressed the established policy of the U.S. administration in Germany ever since the establishment of a separate Supreme Court in the U.S. Sector in Berlin on August 6, 1945, started the chain of events which culminated in the political division of the city. When, on June 23, 1948, the Western allies introduced a separate currency in their three sectors of Berlin, contrary to a written Pledge they had given a few days earlier, a serious campaign was launched to cripple the economies of East Berlin and East Germany. A few quotes, out of the many available, will suffice to show how “legitimate” are “the activities of free men,” encouraged by the American authorities. The NEW YORKER of September 8, 1951 described the activities of the West Berlin “Association of Freedomloving Jurists,” organized by a certain Horst Erdmann (alias Theo Friedenau), a paid agent of the U.S. Secret Service: “They have more than three thousand field-workers who carry messages and perform all the tough, dirty anonymous chores that daily resistance against a powerful enemy requires. Messages and reports are sent by hand in code to the Berlin headquarters. The staff members are paid from funds the Committee gets from the government in West Berlin and from the Ministry of All-German Affairs in Bonn.” Another organization, “The Fighting Group Against Inhumanity,” founded in 1948 by Rainer Hildebrandt, was described in the N. Y. Times of May 19, 1952 as “a militant antiCommunist group with headquarters in the United States sector of Berlin. The organization’s leaders say it is supported largely by the Ford Foundation in the United States, which has made a grant to it, and that it receives some money from the West Berlin administration . . . The organization trains East Germans in resistance technique.” REUTER’s correspondent in West Berlin reported on October 12, 1952 the “revelation by the State Premier of Hesse, Herr August Zinn, of an organization alleged to have planned to execute certain left-wing politicians ‘in the event of war.’ The West Berlin anti-Communist organizations grew up shortly after the split of Berlin in 1948. Today there are over 30 of them, the majority in the U.S. Sector. Many of these groups have admitted close contacts with Western intelligence agencies, and with the main West German parties.” The West German magazine DER SPIEGEL of October 15, 1952 reported that an official of the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps, Sterling Garwood, helped and financed “Liquidation, Inc.” NATIONS BUSINESS revealed in April, 1952: “No Government official will admit it, but we are training men to be spies, saboteurs, specialists in the tougher forms of psychological warfare. They are being taught to slip into the Russian fabric on their own to do some unravelling. They learn to blow bridges, railroad trains, and war plants . . . One of our men can . walk up to a key building in a hostile country and stick some gooey plastic material on the wall . . . In a few hours, or if he wishes, in a few days, the building will blow up.” When East German courts tried members of the "Fighting Group Against Inhumanity" in 1952, a document was presented incriminating the Ford Foundation as having paid $150,000 to the National Committee for a Free Europe. This money was subsequently forwarded to the "Fighting Group." The document in question bore the signature of a Martin Quigley, Information Officer, and was dated March 21, 1952. When in January, 1953 Georg Derringer, the then East German Foreign Minister, was arrested as a spy, the American and British press used the occasion to ridicule the East German regime. Typically, however, they were less anxious to carry a REUTER January 16, 1953 dispatch to the effect that "German sources in West Berlin declared that for some time Derringer had been...supplying agents of the British Intelligence Service with internal information about East Germany and Soviet policy." A highly incriminating part in supporting such "legitimate" activities has been played by certain American labor organizations. A Special Correspondent for the NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, Art Noyes, reported on March 15, 1953 from Frankfurt that the “AFL transmits approximately 10,000 dollars a month to the US. C.I.A., which in turn passes the money on to a group called the Kampfgruppe . . . The Kampfgruppe . . . has a top-secret spy section, whose operations are known only to US. Intelligence.” On September 29, 1954 The N.Y. Times carried a report from Bonn by M. S. Handler: “The numerous United States intelligence agencies (are) submerged for the most part in the jungle warfare in Germany. The jungle warriors include the enemy’s operatives of all hues and garbs, but they also include hundreds — some say thousands — of double agents who operate for one side against the other and vice versa for mere pittances...Sometimes ridiculous situations arise. The story is told that one big U.S. agency pumped false information into East Germany to rattle Soviet intelligence and another U.S. agency bought the information back as valuable evidence of something new going on in the Communist ranks . . . According to some reports there are more than two score Allied agencies at work in West Berlin.” Numerous arrests of spies and saboteurs have amply proved that RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) is also a tool of American Intelligence. Fred J. Cook, in his article on the C.I.A. in THE NATION of June 24, 1961, recounted that “in 1955, a C.I.A. communications expert, studying a detailed map of Berlin, discovered that at one point the main Russian telephone lines ran only 300 yards from a radar station in the American sector. The C.I.A. dug an underground tunnel, tapped the cables and, for months, before the Russians got wise, monitored every telephone whisper in the Soviet East Sector.” Against this sampling of Western depictions of the internal situation in Berlin, President Kennedy’s denial of the Soviet charges as “false,” has little chance of convincing informed people. Little surprise that the Daily Express of London, of September 2, 1960 opined that “the West Germans scandalously abuse the position of Berlin. That city was not split into four to provide them a base for a diplomatic campaign against the Russians . . . The Germans hurl their pebbles at the Russians and shelter behind British and American troops. It is time the Germans came to their senses.” Speaking about the then prevailing travel ban between East and West Berlin, B. B. Drayson, Conservative M.P., said on November 15, 1960 in the House of Commons: “The trouble arose, of course, out of meetings of various organizations which took place in September in West Berlin. The House may remember that at that time there were rallies of ex-prisoners of war associations which caused a certain amount of concern in this country. In a leading article at the time, the Daily Mail said: ‘To hold the gatherings now is perhaps a little provocative.’” There is nothing new about the facts recounted above. They are known to everyone acquainted with the Berlin situation. They certainly are well known to President Kennedy. His definition of the provocations in Berlin as “the legitimate activities of free men” is an attempt to coerce the Soviets to concede, on pain of war, that facts are not facts, and, moreover, to submit to ever more hostile provocations.

Mr. Jaeger is a West German political writer. During World War II he spent several years in the United States as a prisoner of war. His "Nazism: Resurrected or Continued?" appeared in the August, 1961 edition of TMO.