Chapter II: Iron Curtain 1945-1947
v  Fulton, Missouri, a quiet little town in the Midwest. Not much has changed since 1946.
v Less than a year since the war had ended, the flags were up to welcome Winston Churchill. But he came to Fulton bringing a somber message for the world.
v  Back from overseas came the Americans. For the second time in a century, the United States had been pulled into a world war far from its own shores.
v Three hundred thousand Americans never came home. But the rest returned to a country wealthier and happier than ever before.
v  War and the postwar rush to spend put American capitalism back on its wheels.
v In the first summer of peace, the Soviet soldiers rode home. They were awed to find themselves still alive.
v In the crowds that welcomed them, it was the lucky ones who found their sons or husbands. Some 27 million Soviet civilians and soldiers did not live to see this day.
v  Where the Germans had passed, nearly 70,000 villages had been destroyed. Cities lay in rubble. Stalin's prewar achievements, the factories and apartment blocks of the five-year plans, had been wrecked by the invaders.
v  For Russians the end of the fighting brought an instant of pure joy.
v  Berlin, the final battlefield.
v The capital of Hitler's Reich had fallen to the Red Army. Dazed Berliners waited to see what the conquerors would do to them. But there was no organized massacre; the survivors were allowed to live as best they could.
v Stalin even ordered his troops to feed the Berliners. But the soldiers looted homes, and all over the city they hunted down women.
v  Stalin's police chief, Beria, and foreign minister, Molotov, tour Berlin. Germany was divided into four occupation zones and each of the Allies took a sector of the German capital. The Allies had decided that Germany should compensate them for war damage.
v  The German population was forced to help the Russians seize industrial resources. Not just machines, thousands of craftsmen and scientists were kidnapped and taken to the Soviet Union.
v Central Europe was reverting to the Dark Ages. This was a space without law, shelter or mercy -- a continent of nomads. Millions of people uprooted by the Nazis were struggling home; now it was the turn of the Germans to be the victims.
v From the Mediterranean to the Baltic, the victors were shaping Europe in their own image. Poland, the invaders' route to Russia, obsessed Stalin. Eastern Poland had been annexed by the Soviet Union. As compensation, the allies shifted the whole country westward, giving Poland the eastern territories of Germany. The Germans were expelled.
v Poles, whose own homelands had been seized by the Soviet Union, now took over German farms and houses.
v  From all over Europe, some 12 million Germans were expelled from lands they had lived in for centuries.
v Today it's called 'ethnic cleansing.' Then, the Allies called it 'population transfer' and the British helped to move the Germans out.
v Victory in London. From six years of war, Britain emerged happy, but inwardly exhausted.
v For the moment, people cheered for king and empire as if nothing had changed, or ever would.
v The king's new prime minister was Clement Attlee. The British voters had swung leftwards, and Churchill was out. In foreign policy, the new Labour government held tightly to the American alliance.
v Ernest Bevin, the new foreign secretary, was a trade union veteran who mistrusted communists. He had backed Churchill's intervention in the Greek civil war. British interests were at stake here. The concern was that the conflict might threaten Britain's oil route from the Middle East through the Mediterranean.
v The strongest resistance movement, the communists, reached for power.
v But they didn't know that Stalin had told Churchill that he had no interest in a communist Greece. The British army moved in.
v The civil war was long and cruel.
v But Stalin kept his word, and left the Greek communists to their fate.
v The Soviet Union now dominated the nations along its western border. At first Stalin did not impose a Soviet system on his new empire. Instead, he built up pro-Soviet coalition governments. But the communists made sure that the police and security were in their hands. The Yalta Conference had given Russia control of central Europe.
v  In Berlin, where the Allies jointly supervised city life, the communists were careful.
v  Soviet communism had stood the test of war. The Red Army was the biggest on Earth, and General Eisenhower came to pay his respects to the world's newest superpower. But Stalin feared encirclement by the capitalist powers. At home he watched for treachery. Those who had been taken prisoner by the Germans and seen a glimpse of the West might become disloyal. They were being arrested in thousands. The Americans knew what was going on.
v  Poland. In the wreckage of Warsaw, the Poles began to clear the ruins. The Poles had fought the Germans on every front, East and West. Now they worked together to rebuild their country. Some loathed the new semi-communist government tied to Moscow. But others found reasons to accept it and live with it.
v  In Moscow, Poland's new puppet leaders were taken to the opera.
v The Poles agreed to a close alliance with the Soviet Union. Stalin promised to defend the new Polish frontiers against any German attempt to win back the lost territories.
v Stalin was at the zenith of his power. His colleagues felt terror in his presence.
v  To mark the Soviet elections, Stalin made a grand appearance. To his exhausted people, he promised no rewards but only more effort, more five-year plans for heavy industry.
v Then, in cloudy words, he warned that capitalism and imperialism made future wars inevitable. Did this mean war between the Soviet Union and the West? Abroad, alarm bells rang.
v  Stalin had relaxed his dictatorship during the war; but now he was tightening it once more. The Soviet Union's obvious suspicion of the West disturbed Washington.
v An American diplomat in Moscow, George Kennan was asked what he thought was going on.
v  Kennan's Moscow Embassy cable became history: an 8,000-word prophecy that the Soviet Union was in the mood to expand across the world and must be contained.
v  Kennan's telegram alarmed Washington. Days later, its message was reinforced when Churchill arrived in the United States as President Truman's guest.
v  Churchill was due to speak to a college audience at Fulton in Truman's home state. Privately, he showed Truman what he was going to say. The president, not sure that the American public was ready for an attack on its wartime Soviet ally, let Churchill test the water.
v  Since 1945, America had been extending its influence and power all over the world. Stalin grew nervous. He put pressure on Turkey to grant the Soviet Union a military presence in the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. America and Britain feared a threat to the Suez Canal.
v They were determined to keep Turkey free of Soviet interference.
v When the Turkish ambassador in Washington died suddenly, Truman used America's biggest battleship, the USS Missouri, to deliver the body to Istanbul.
v  Iran, like Turkey, lay on the southern borders of the Soviet Union, and for centuries had been hostile to Russia.
v During the war, Soviet and British troops had occupied Iran to protect their oil supplies. They even celebrated their partnership there.
v The old shah, thought to be pro-German, was dethroned and replaced by his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. There was an agreement that, once the war was over, the British and Soviet troops would both pull out.
v  Iran presented the Security Council of the newly founded United Nations with its first crisis.
v  The Soviet Union tried to prevent further discussion -- they lost.
v  Six weeks later, Stalin ceremonially withdrew his forces from Iran. But Truman, shaken by his behavior, suspected that Stalin was aiming at world domination.
v  The Clifford-Elsey report was kept secret. The report concluded that "a war with the U.S.S.R. would be more total, more horrible, than anything previously known."
v The United States still had the monopoly of atomic weapons. At Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, two atom bombs were detonated in July 1946. The warning to Stalin was plain. From now on all the big powers worked frantically to develop their own atomic and biological weapons.
v At the Paris Conference of Foreign Ministers, Molotov was determined to maintain joint allied control of Germany. But his American counterpart, Secretary of State Byrnes, wanted Germany to pay no more reparations. For Molotov, Byrnes was too concerned with German opinion. He was outraged.
v  It was at Paris that the wartime alliance began finally to break up. The Americans and the British were impatient to develop stable economies in their zones of Germany, without Soviet interference.
v  In 1945, the Allies had approved Poland's annexation of Germany's eastern provinces, up to the Oder and Neisse rivers. But now Byrnes suggested that the new frontier was unfair to Germany and might be changed.
v  Ordinary people were much worse off than the newsreels showed.
v  On the collective farms, war damage and the death of so many workers at the front were deepening a grave food shortage.
v  In Germany, too, hunger and disease were spreading. The nightmare of the Western Allies was that poverty would drive the Germans towards communism.
v  America's General Lucius Clay reflected, "There is no choice between being a communist on 1,500 calories a day and a believer in democracy on a thousand."
v Aid to Germany cost Britain over a million dollars a day. But British supplies were not enough to save thousands of Germans, who died that winter for lack of food and fuel.
v Britain too was weakening. The fierce winter of 1946-47 brought industry to a standstill. The country's economy, undermined by six years of war, began to seize up. Coal ran out, electricity failed, and food rationing grew even tighter.
v  The British could no longer afford all their heavy commitments in the Mediterranean. They told the Americans they intended to pull out.
v  In Washington, President Truman went to Congress. From now on, he announced, the United States would contain the advance of communism anywhere on the globe. This, at last, was the official declaration of the Cold War.
 
 
 

Chapter III: Marshall Plan 1947-1952
v Two years since the war's end. Poverty plagues much of Italy-- fertile ground for communism, which promises a solution to economic ills and injustice.
v As membership of the Communist Party reaches 2 million, America fears that Italy, and Western Europe, could fall to communism.
v May Day in Moscow, 1947.
v The Red Army was the largest fighting force in the world. Stalin had established control over most of Eastern Europe.
v The Soviet Union offered an alternative model for society -- public ownership and a centrally planned economy; in contrast to the Western belief in a mixed economy and free trade.
v In February 1947, a financial crisis forced the British government to tell Washington they were ending aid to Greece and Turkey. The administration feared the eastern Mediterranean might fall to communism. Truman used this opportunity to take the offensive.
v Truman pitched the struggle for the first time as between freedom and tyranny, the West and the communists. Truman had to persuade the often isolationist Congress to act. The anti-communism of the Truman Doctrine did just that.
v After five and a half years of a war to defeat fascism, Europe was bankrupt. Industry lay in ruins; homes were in rubble. People struggled to survive. The Communist Party, which had fought fascism, attracted new recruits.
v The man called on by Truman to face the communist threat was the newly appointed Secretary of State, General Marshall, the wartime military leader. He would plan the United States' response.
v In March, Marshall met Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov at a meeting in Moscow. Britain and France were there too. 'The Big Four' tried to agree on the future of Germany.
v Despite warm Russian hospitality, weeks of meetings got nowhere.
v At the heart of Europe's problems lay the question of a defeated Germany. Stalin wanted to keep Germany on its knees, concerned that otherwise it would rise up one day and threaten the Soviet Union again.
v The Americans believed that Germany must get back on its feet, before there could be a full European recovery.
v Marshall was now convinced of the need to act quickly.
v On his return from Moscow, he instructed the State Department to begin preparing ideas for a European rescue plan.
v Billions of dollars would be needed. Would Congress approve this enormous cost?
v The urgency was such that Marshall rushed forward his plan. He announced it at an awards ceremony at Harvard University.
v There were no film cameras present.
v Marshall proposed aid to Europe on a vast scale and invited the Europeans to respond.
v Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, immediately realized the importance of Marshall's speech.
v He had always wanted to involve the Americans in European reconstruction.
v The Soviet economy also desperately needed investment to make up for the ravages of four years of war on Russian soil.
v In theory, the Marshall Plan was open to both East and West. But would Stalin participate?
v In Paris, a Foreign Ministers' Conference opened to frame the European response to the Marshall Plan.
v Despite Stalin's caution, Molotov and a large Soviet delegation turned up at the conference table.
v Throughout the Cold War, spies were used by both sides. At this critical point, spies in London were passing their Soviet controllers document after document.
v After six days of meetings in Paris, Soviet intelligence gave Stalin new information about the Marshall Plan.
v As Molotov left the Paris meeting he accused the West of dividing Europe into two hostile camps.
v In Prague, the Czechoslovaks discussed whether to join the Marshall Plan. In the democratically elected government, a third of the ministers were communists.
v Stalin summoned the Czech prime minister, Klement Gottwald, to Moscow. With him came the foreign minister, Jan Masaryk. They arrived on the afternoon of July 9 -- and waited.
v When the Czech delegation left Moscow, Gottwald read a prepared statement. He couldn't hide his discomfort.
v Jan Masaryk was shattered by the experience.
v In September 1947, 16 European nations signed up for the Marshall Plan and requested $20 billion of aid. The Western alliance began to take shape. The battle lines of the Cold War were being drawn.
v That September 1947, Stalin revived the prewar Communist International as the Cominform.
v Through it, Stalin planned to control the countries of the Eastern bloc. He also instructed Communist parties in the West to take the initiative in seizing power.
v In American propaganda, the Cominform was represented as a sinister, shadowy conspiracy of evil.
v But its economic associate, Comecon, offered Russian aid to Eastern bloc countries -- sending grain to Czechoslovakia after a bad harvest.
v February 1948: The communists reach for power in Czechoslovakia.
v Workers' militias go on the march. Non-communists are arrested.
v Action committees take over the police and the labor unions. President Benes capitulates. The red flag flies in the center of Prague.
v In just five days the communists took over Czechoslovakia's government. Stalin's rule was imposed on the Czechs.
v Two weeks later, Jan Masaryk fell to his death from the window of his apartment in Prague. The argument still rages: Did he despair and jump? Or was he pushed?
v Masaryk was the son of Thomas Masaryk, the founder of the Czech state. His funeral symbolized the end of a free Czechoslovakia.
v The Communist takeover in Prague shocked Washington. There, the case for Marshall aid was still being argued before a partly isolationist Congress.
v On April 3, 1948, Congress approved $5 billion of Marshall aid.
v The Marshall Plan was born from the need to feed the hungry, and to prevent communism spreading over Europe.
v Twenty percent of the aid were loans; 80 percent grants. The first shipments were foods and fertilizers.
v Next, machines to improve agricultural efficiency.
v In the four years of the Plan, the Marshall agency spent $13.5 billion in 16 countries.
v Europe's purchase of American goods and machinery redirected many Marshall aid dollars back into American industry, fueling a postwar boom.
v One of the countries most in need of help was Greece -- devastated by the Nazi occupation and years of civil war.
v In the north, government troops still hunted out communist guerrillas.
v During the four years of the Marshall Plan, Greece received nearly $700 million of economic assistance. Young Americans were thrust into positions of heavy responsibility.
v In the hill villages of northern Greece emerging from civil war, the Marshall planners came up with a scheme to meet a local need.
v American mules arrived in Greece after a long sea voyage.
v The farmers drew lots.
v The only problem was that the American mules were very much larger than the animals local farmers were used to.
v Industrial Europe faced other problems.
v France, 1947. Workers at the Renault factory near Paris went on strike. When communist ministers backed them, they were expelled from the government. Several months of disruption followed.
v Strikes spread. In the fall, 3 million workers took to the streets.
v Ministers feared civil war.
v The United States made it clear to Paris that there would be no Marshall aid to French industry until the government had the communist threat under control.
v Acts of sabotage culminated in the derailing of an express train -- causing 20 deaths. The strikers lost popular support. The disruption ended.
v The French Fourth Republic would now receive Marshall aid: $2.7 billion of it.
v Yugoslavia had gone communist at the end of the war, without help from Moscow.
v The Yugoslav leader, Tito, became an ally of Stalin. But it was an uneasy alliance.
v The split came in 1948 when Stalin expelled Tito from the Cominform. Following the rift, Tito turned to the West.
v After a series of disastrous harvests, Tito requested American economic assistance.
v In 1950, he signed an agreement with the United States government. Yugoslavia emerged from behind the Iron Curtain.
v American agents distributed more than $150 million worth of aid.
v But as well as 'doing good,' Washington was preparing other tactics.
v In Italy by 1948, the Communist Party led by Togliatti dominated the left-wing Popular Front. The Christian Democrats, led by De Gasperi, ran the government.
v In April, the first general election since the war raised expectations of a communist victory through the ballot box.
v Some Italians feared a communist victory.
v In the United States a campaign was orchestrated to persuade Italian-Americans to write to relatives urging them not to vote Communist. Ten million letters were sent.
v Letter writing was not enough. The newly created CIA decided to take the offensive.
v This led to a debate within the young CIA. Did it have the legal authority to carry out covert operations?
v CIA lawyers studied the wording of the new National Security Act.
v The CIA then intervened. It began covert operations in support of anti-communists and of the Christian Democrat Party.
v The church too, mounted a powerful campaign against the communists.
v A network of election committees was created. They worked in close parallel to the organization of the Catholic church.
v Pope Pius XII and the Catholic church had supported the fascists throughout their decades of rule.
v But the Vatican totally opposed communism. Just days before the election, Pius XII excommunicated many members of the Italian Communist Party.
v On April 18, 1948, Italy went to the polls.
v The Christian Democrats won a landslide victory. Italy would remain a member of the Western alliance. The communist share of the vote was almost halved.
v The CIA, too, drew its conclusions from the election victory.
v Now that Italy had elected to stay in the western bloc, the United States released a flood of Marshall Aid.
v In Turin, the Fiat motor company received giant new assembly line machines from Detroit and Pittsburgh. Fiat was re-equipped with some of the most sophisticated machinery in Europe.
v Fiat's recovery would fuel the revival of Italian industry.
v The Marshall Plan also demonstrated the United States' desire to secure Europe's future.
v The message was: "Modernize your economies, and you too can be like us".
v The Marshall Plan set out to build a European consumer society. The United States wanted a free enterprise Western bloc, peaceful, united and tied to American trade and capital.
v The Soviet Union was forced to build its own rival bloc. The people of the socialist countries would eye the West for 40 years -- and wonder.
 

Chapter IV: Berlin 1948-1949
v  In 1945, British and American pilots had rained death and destruction on Germany.
v Now in 1948, they were flying again to Berlin.
v This time, they were keeping the city alive.
v Berliners were a beaten people in 1945. Their fate was in the hands of the Russians, Americans, British and French -- their conquerors. Germany was divided into four occupation zones -- Soviet, American, British and French. Three and a half million Berliners lived in a city 110 miles behind the Russian lines. Berlin was linked to the West by a highway and a railway which ran through the Soviet zone. The city itself was divided into four sectors -- Soviet, American, British and French.
v  Berliners had lived a precarious existence for years. Food was at near-starvation levels and currency was worthless. The black market was king.
v  British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had a plan for Germany. He didn't like the Germans but believed that European recovery depended on them.
v  Soviet military maneuvers near Berlin. By 1948 the honeymoon among the Allies was long over. The Soviets wanted a weak Germany under Four Power control. America, Britain and France were secretly planning a new German state in their occupation zones.
v Spies told the Soviet military governor, Marshal Vassily Sokolovsky, about the plan.
v  Sir Brian Robertson, the British military governor, and his American counterpart, Gen. Lucius D. Clay, had to implement the Western plans.
v  The Allied Control Council met regularly in Berlin. Usually, as here, the proceedings followed a well-worn path. The American Gen. Clay and his Western partners exchanged routine information with their Soviet counterparts. But on March 20, 1948, Sokolovsky wanted more.
v  The former Allies provoked each other. The West had no intention of budging from Berlin but knew the Soviets wanted them out. They feared Stalin might risk war to achieve it.
v The Western Allies planned a currency reform in their zones. It would wipe out black market profiteers by making old currency valueless, and it would tie Germans to the West. The Russians weren't told.
v May Day 1948. In the Soviet zone, Stalin had merged the Socialist and Communist parties. The new grouping, the Socialist Unity Party, was out in strength.
v There was even a side swipe at Winston Churchill.
v For the demonstrators, the real target was the city council, the Magistrat, which wanted to run all Berlin on Western lines.
v  The stage was set for confrontation between the Socialist Unity Party and their pro-Western opponents. These were led by Ernst Reuter, whose family had once been forced to flee from Hitler. His election as mayor of all Berlin had been vetoed by the Russians.
v  West Germans lined up for their new money -- the deutschmark. Each person could exchange 40 marks and only 40 marks. All other old money was worthless. The Soviets retaliated by issuing their own new currency, which, they insisted, would include all of Berlin.
v  Gen. Clay and the Western Allies were persuaded by Ernst Reuter to issue the new deutschmark in West Berlin.
v The new deutschmark, stamped with a "B" for Berlin, was introduced in the Western sectors on June 23. There were now two currencies in the city.
v Berliners discovered that the Western d-marks were worth more.
v  The introduction of the new Western currency in Berlin infuriated the Soviets, who debated what to do next.
v  The Soviets blocked all major road, rail and canal links between West Berlin and Western Germany. They made no concerted effort to seal every route, but delivery of the 12,000 tons of food and coal normally supplied by the West to Berlin every day was now impossible. The Soviets cut electricity supplies to factories and offices. West Berliners could do little. Their only large power station had been dismantled for reparations by the Soviets in 1945.
v The Western Allies imposed a counter-blockade on the Soviet zone. Workers throughout the whole of Berlin faced unemployment and hardship.
v  Stalin's purpose was clear: to force the Western Allies to change their policies or quit Berlin.
v In 1945 the Western Allies had made a written agreement with the Soviets. Planes could fly along three air corridors 20 miles wide to two Berlin airfields, Tempelhof and Gatow. Seaplanes could also set down on Lake Havel.
v The British responded to the challenge. They planned an airlift. Foreign Secretary Bevin put his weight behind the idea.
v  Gen. Clay, the American commander, didn't believe an airlift would work. He had wanted to test Soviet resolve by running an armed convoy through the blockade. Reluctantly, he agreed to pursue the airlift idea with Ernst Reuter.
v  The Berlin airlift began at the end of June. The Americans called it "Operation Vittles", the British "Plain Fare".
v The airlift had to deliver 2,000 tons of supplies a day. Without it, West Berliners couldn't survive: they had coal for only 45 days and food for only 36.
v  Thousands of Berliners found jobs -- and one hot meal a day -- working for the airlift.
v  Each of the larger planes carried nine tons.
v  The British hired civilian operators.
v  America now raised the stakes by sending B-29 bombers, capable of carrying atom bombs to Britain. The move was highly publicized.
v  Clay argued once again that he be allowed to confront the Soviets with an armed convoy.
v  So, no armed convoy, but more planes for the airlift.
v  In August, Stalin visited an air show near Moscow. He was confident that the Soviet blockade of Berlin's Western sectors would be enough to force the Allies back to the negotiation table.
v But time wasn't necessarily on his side. The West's counter-blockade of coal, steel and machine tools was beginning to bite.
v When Western diplomats asked for talks, he agreed.
v  In Berlin, the Western Allies and the Soviets returned to the negotiating table. The Russians demanded the withdrawal of the Western deutschmark from the city.
v They also applied pressure in the air corridors.
v  Bad weather caused delays and accidents.
v The airlift was not delivering enough food and virtually no coal had been stockpiled for the harsh winter to come. Berliners knew they were living on the edge. Electricity came on for only four hours a day.
v  The Soviet blockade didn't prevent West Berliners from moving about freely within the city. The eastern sector behind the Brandenburg Gate could be very enticing.
v  The Russians offered West Berliners the chance to buy food in the Soviet sector. Nearly one in 10 accepted. The Soviets didn't impose a complete blockade. But West Berliners who went to East Berlin were harassed.
v  Tension among the former wartime Allies was increasing. The city was splitting apart.
v On September 6, communist-led activists converged on a full meeting of the city council in East Berlin. They were looking for trouble.
v  Councilors driven out of the City Hall met in the safety of West Berlin. With them was Ernst Reuter, who now appealed to all Berliners to gather at the Reichstag to protest. RIAS -- Radio in the American Sector -- spread the news.
v  Nearly 300,000 Berliners, many from the East, assembled at the Reichstag.
v  When the rally was over, the Soviet flag on the Brandenburg Gate was torn down. East sector police and Soviet soldiers opened fire. Twelve people were injured. One young Berliner was killed. And the day was not yet over. A delegation went to the Allied Control Council, where they feared a deal with Stalin to withdraw the Western d-mark from Berlin was being hatched. The Allies got the message. The d-mark stayed.
v  The blockade and the airlift went on.
v  Airlift pilots could fly up to three missions every day. An American pilot brought his own 8 mm movie camera.
v  Halvorsen promised the children that he would return with chewing gum and chocolate dropped from tiny parachutes.
v  Word of Halvorsen the candy bomber spread quickly. He was summoned to see his commanding officer.
v  For both East and West, radio was an important weapon in the propaganda war. Radio in the American Sector -- RIAS -- was run by William Heimlich.
v  A young Berlin dancer called Christina Ohlsen became a popular RIAS performer -- and later Mrs. Heimlich.
v  In December 1948, West Berliners voted for a new council to run their half of the city. The Socialist Unity Party, which dominated the old council in the Soviet sector, boycotted the elections.
v  Ernst Reuter was now mayor, with Luise Schroeder as his deputy -- but only in one half of Berlin.
v For the American garrison in Berlin and for Gen. Clay, Christmas entertainment was provided by Bob Hope and by the great Tin Pan Alley composer Irving Berlin.
v  Operation Vittles -- the American code name for the airlift -- was working at last, thanks to an unusually mild winter. On Easter Sunday 1949, a record 13,000 tons was airlifted in 24 hours. The gamble had worked. Berlin could be supplied indefinitely by air.
v  The Soviets had failed to drive the British, Americans and French out of Berlin. The Allied counter-blockade was hurting the Soviet zone. On May 12, 1949, Stalin called it quits.
v  Many people thought the ending of the Berlin blockade meant an end to the Cold War.
v  It was Gen. Clay's time to go back home. After a goodbye parade, he paid a final visit to Berlin.
v  The day Gen. Clay said, 'Auf Wiedersehen,' the head of the future West German republic, Konrad Adenauer, addressed Berliners.
v  In April 1949, British Foreign Secretary Bevin's dream of a strategic alliance between Western Europe and North America came true with the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty.
v  August 29, 1949 -- the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb.
v The American nuclear monopoly was over.
v The world was now split down the middle by two competing superpowers.
v At its heart lay a divided Germany and a divided Berlin.
 

Chapter V: Korea 1949-1953
v The United States leads the United Nations into a war against communism in Asia.
v In winter, under attack from the Chinese communists, the U.N. troops are thrown into full-scale retreat.
v  The Cold War has become a hot war.
v August 1945. At the end of the Second World War, the Japanese army that had occupied Korea for 35 years surrenders.
v  Russian and American troops liberated Korea -- meeting together just as they had in Germany.
v As occupying powers, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to divide Korea along the 38th parallel -- as a temporary measure. South of the divide, the Americans were in control.
v  American generals installed a hard-line anti-communist -- Syngman Rhee.
v  Rhee was appointed as first president of the new Republic of Korea in 1948.
v American troops withdrew.
v North of the 38th parallel, the Russians were in control.
v They established a communist regime through a network of people's committees. Kim Il Sung, who had spent the war in the Soviet Union, was groomed for power.
v  The Democratic People's Republic of Korea was proclaimed with Kim Il Sung as its president.
v As Soviet troops withdrew, Kim dreamed of uniting Korea under communism.
v  In March 1949, Kim Il Sung went to Moscow: his secret agenda to seek Stalin's permission to invade the South.
v  Stalin, preoccupied with crisis in Berlin, rejected Kim's request to invade.
v By the end of 1949, the international situation had been transformed. The Soviets detonated their first atom bomb.
v And the communist revolution in China was finally successful. Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the People's Republic of China.
v A treaty of friendship between Mao and Stalin created a communist global alliance, opening a second front to the Cold War in Asia.
v Stalin was now confident that the United States lacked the will to respond to events in Asia. In April 1950 he finally gave approval for Kim Il Sung to invade South Korea.
v June 25, 1950: the North Korean Army launches its surprise assault on the South.
v  Equipped with Russian tanks and artillery, and directed by Soviet advisers, 10 combat divisions of the North Korean army flooded south.
v  Sunday morning in Korea -- Saturday evening in Washington. The Sunday papers prepare to go to press.
v  Senior officials were recalled that night to the State Department.
v  The South Korean ambassador went immediately to the State Department to see Assistant Secretary Dean Rusk.
v  The following day, the Security Council met. Moscow was boycotting the United Nations because of its refusal to admit communist China.
v  The United States seized the opportunity to condemn North Korean aggression.
v  Two days later, the Security Council voted to create a United Nations military force to defend South Korea.
v  Under the U.N. flag, soldiers from 16 nations would fight against communism.
v  President Truman addressed the nation.
v  The United States mobilized for war. The reserves were called up.
v  Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the allied supreme commander in Tokyo and the legendary victor of the Pacific war, was appointed to lead the United Nations' forces.
v  The nearest troops to Korea were the American occupation force in Japan -- few of whom were ready for combat.
v  The U.S. Task Force sent to Korea didn't imagine their stay would be for long.
v  It wouldn't be that easy. Rhee's South Korean army was in retreat.
v Two divisions threw their weapons away and joined the refugees fleeing the communist advance.
v  With the capture of the southern capital, Kim Il Sung won a great victory for communism.
v  American troops fared no better than the South Koreans. With no effective anti-tank weapons, the American line collapsed.
v Within days, American troops were reeling back in disarray, under assault from the tiny communist regime of North Korea.
v  Around the world, America's allies rallied behind the United Nations flag. The British prime minister pledged his support.
v  Troops from 15 nations began to arrive in Korea to join the Americans in the U.N. army.
v Gen. MacArthur took a gamble to turn the tide of the war.
v With the U.N. forces driven back to a tiny enclave at Pusan, a vast seaborne invasion, 150 miles behind enemy lines, would attempt to sever and then roll back the North Korean advance.
v Dawn, September 15, 1950.
v The largest invasion fleet since the Second World War bombards the port of Inchon.
v American and Korean marines go ashore in huge numbers.
v  Within two weeks, U.N. troops were engaged in a fierce battle to recapture the southern capital, Seoul.
v 50,000 civilians were killed in the crossfire.
v  After finally recapturing Seoul, MacArthur reinstated Syngman Rhee in the parliament building. MacArthur's association with Rhee's increasingly vicious regime caused concern in Washington.
v  Rhee's jubilant army was the first to cross the 38th parallel into North Korea.
v  The U.N. troops too advanced into North Korea. MacArthur's war aim now appeared to be hot pursuit of the invader.
v  The giant Yalu River marks the boundary between North Korea and China. Across this border, the Chinese leadership followed the war with alarm. They feared the American army in North Korea would invade the Chinese mainland.
v  From devastated North Korea, an urgent message went out to Beijing.
v  The communist leadership in Beijing was deeply divided over intervention. Mao received secret cables from Stalin telling him to enter the war to save North Korea. Wanting to assert China's power in Asia, Mao was agreeable. Meanwhile, the U.N. and South Korean armies continued the race north.
v On October 19, Pyongyang fell. It was the only communist capital ever to fall to the West during the Cold War.
v  MacArthur was surprised to be summoned to Wake Island in mid-Pacific for a meeting with President Truman. MacArthur assured his commander in chief there was no possibility of China entering the war.
v He took the award of yet another medal as a signal that he could continue the advance toward China. When the president asked him to stay for lunch, MacArthur refused.
v While Truman and MacArthur were talking, Mao ordered the Chinese army, called the People's Volunteers, to enter Korea. Half a million Chinese began to cross the Yalu River and waited -- for the U.N. forces to approach the border.
v As they crossed the Yalu in enormous numbers, the Volunteers sang this song.
v  Unaware of the massing of the Chinese troops, the U.S. Army paused for Thanksgiving. Roast turkey and cranberry sauce were served up. MacArthur and his soldiers still thought the war would be 'over by Christmas.'
v  Next morning, 300,000 Chinese attacked.
v  As in China's long civil war, Mao believed that greater motivation could defeat an enemy with superior arms.
v  In the next swing of this seesaw war, U.N. forces across North Korea were thrown back, abandoning vehicles and equipment.
v  American soldiers called it 'bug out' fever.
v  At a Washington press conference, journalists repeatedly pressed Truman on the possible use of the atom bomb.
v  British Prime Minister Clement Attlee was sufficiently alarmed to fly to Washington for crisis talks.
v  Next day, Truman assured Attlee that there were no plans to use atomic weapons.
v  At home that winter, for many American families, the pain began with a call at the door.
v  Retreating U.N. soldiers adopted a scorched earth policy.
v After withdrawing from Hungnam, American engineers blew up the dockside.
v The Chinese, rapidly advancing, recaptured the northern capital, Pyongyang.
v At the beginning of 1951, Seoul fell again to the communists.
v Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway was appointed by MacArthur as the new field commander. At last, U.N. troops began to slow the Chinese advance.
v  From the beginning, the United States enjoyed air supremacy.
v  When Russian MIG-15 fighters with well-trained Russian pilots were sent to the war zone, they posed a challenge to American supremacy.
v  The presence of Russian pilots risked bringing the Soviet Union into direct conflict with the United States.
v  When the U.S. deployed the F-86 Saber, they slowly won back mastery of the skies. This enabled American aircraft to keep up a constant offensive on ground targets.
v  MacArthur now called for the bombing of Chinese cities and for the pursuit of the war in mainland China. This was too much for Truman.
v  By the summer of 1951, the two sides had fought themselves to a stalemate in the hills of Korea -- almost at the point at which the fighting had begun a year earlier. Every month brought another 2,500 U.N. casualties.
v  Armistice talks began in July 1951 but got nowhere. Both sides found the other's attitude impossible.
v  One of the main stumbling blocks at the truce talks was the fate of the prisoners of war. Both North and South Koreans maltreated their prisoners. One in three American POWs held by the North Koreans died during the first winter.
v  Concerned by the numbers dying, the Chinese took over control of the prisoners. They organized daily lectures to indoctrinate them.
v  Back home, few people wanted to know.
v  In Japan, the Korean War galvanized the economy -- generating $3.5 billion dollars of spending. Japan, the ex-enemy, now became a bastion of capitalism in the struggle with communism in Asia.
v  In South Korea, the U.N. held 130,000 communist prisoners. Each one was asked if he wanted to return to his country of origin or stay in the non-communist world. The communists were outraged when almost half of POWs chose not to return to their communist homes. Violent protest dogged the camps.
v When the armistice talks resumed at Panmunjom, the fate of the prisoners delayed the negotiations for months on end.
v As the truce talks stalled, the relentless bombing continued.
v American bombers dropped almost as much explosive on North Korea as they had on Germany during World War II.
v  Estimates suggest that in the North as many as 2 million civilians were killed.
v  Throughout the war, both sides committed horrible atrocities.
v Northerners killed southerners accused of sympathizing with the enemy; Rhee's supporters massacred those suspected of being communists.
v In seemingly endless violence, innocent civilians were often the victims.
v At Panmunjom, the talking continued.
v Spanning two years, there were hundreds of meetings.
v 1952. Election year in America. Two years into the war, Truman decided not to run for the Democrats. The Republicans chose Dwight D Eisenhower. His slogan: 'I shall go to Korea.'
v  Eisenhower defeated the Democrats in a landslide victory.
v There were changes in the east also. In March 1953, the communist world mourned the death of Stalin. Stalin had kept the war going. His successors wanted to end it.
v  A cease-fire was finally agreed on July 27, 1953. The Chinese, the North Koreans and the U.N. backed the agreement. The South Korean president, Syngman Rhee, opposed the truce and refused to sign.
v The massive job of exchanging prisoners of war began: 75,000 communist prisoners were handed over. 12,000 United Nations POWs were also set free.
v  Bernie Galing also went home. Florence was there to meet him.
v  54,000 Americans didn't go home. The war claimed the lives of 3,000 men from the armies of 15 other nations.
v In China, Mao called it a "great victory" and the Volunteers returned home as heroes. An estimated half a million Chinese soldiers had died in the war.
v  In North and South, 3 million Koreans were killed, wounded or missing. Another 5 million were homeless.
v  No victory -- but the West held the line. In Korea, communism had been contained.
v  40 years later, at the end of the Cold War, Korea was still divided by the same line.
 

Chapter VI: The Wall 1958-1963
v  It started as a barbed wire fence.
v Dividing a city.
v Imprisoning its people.
v The very image of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall.
v Memphis, Tennessee -- March 1958.
v  Elvis Presley hits West Germany.
v  West Germany was NATO's front line along the Iron Curtain. Since 1955, the Americans had been training a new West German army. Some thought that could mean a German finger on NATO's nuclear trigger.
v German rearmament brought back nightmares for many Europeans, above all for the Russians. The new weaponry alarmed East Germany -- the German Democratic Republic.
v  Berlin, deep in East German territory, was under the joint occupation of the former wartime allies. Now in West Berlin, 12,000 British, American and French soldiers were surrounded by half a million Soviet and East German troops. Western rights of access were protected by four-power agreement.
v Each day thousands moved freely between the Soviet and Western sectors. Berlin's open border gave East Germans access to the glittering West -- which Soviet and East German leaders wanted to end.
v  In November 1958, the West rejected Khrushchev's Berlin proposals. Khrushchev now offered East German leader Walter Ulbricht a peace treaty. It threatened Western rights in Berlin.
v  American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, seeking common ground for a bargain over Berlin, consulted America's allies. But talks between the West and the Soviet Union led nowhere.
v  But the talks persuaded Khrushchev to shelve his Berlin ultimatum and head West. He chose the world's largest aircraft for the journey -- Soviet built. In September 1959, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev became the first Soviet leader to visit America.
v  In talks with Eisenhower, a new spirit of cooperation eased the crisis.
v But Khrushchev's hopes for a Cold War truce only lasted six months. On the eve of a grand peacemaking summit in Paris, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down in Soviet airspace. Khrushchev was enraged.
v  The summit collapsed before it had even begun.
v 1959: East Germany celebrated 10 years of socialist achievement. Walter Ulbricht, party leader, boasted of rapid industrial progress and of a socialist democracy that Germany had never known before.
v Official films portrayed a paradise for workers and peasants. The reality was shortages and chaos.
v Private farms were forcibly collectivized, and the state's resources poured into heavy industry -- at the expense of consumer goods.
v Obediently, East Germany copied the Soviet model, down to thought control of its people.
v East Germany, its leaders claimed, was succeeding through sheer will power.
v But in spite of hard work and enthusiasm, only Soviet support kept the economy going. East Germany could not compete with the swelling prosperity of the West.
v  Every month, thousands of East Germans fled across the open Berlin border and took refuge in the West. Most refugees were young and skilled. But their departure was bleeding the East German economy to death.
v  As his people drained away, Ulbricht became anxious. He urged Khrushchev to recognize East Germany as a sovereign state, with control over its own borders. Khrushchev, outwardly sympathetic, played for time.
v  Ulbricht argued that there could be no lasting peace in Europe until both German states, East and West, were recognized. But Moscow was in no hurry. The German question must wait until after the American presidential election.
v John F. Kennedy took office in January 1961. He had campaigned for a more vigorous American foreign policy.
v  Kennedy agreed to meet Khrushchev at Vienna in June 1961.
v The president arrived bruised. His invasion of Castro's Cuba at the Bay of Pigs six weeks before had failed. Khrushchev concluded that Kennedy was weak. He had decided to bully the new president.
v  Khrushchev had renewed his ultimatum, and increased the Soviet arms budget. Kennedy asked his advisers to list America's military options.
v  In July, Kennedy asked Congress for extra defense funds and called reservists to arms.
v  As the Berlin crisis darkened, the flow of refugees became a torrent.
v Fear rose that East Germany might collapse, pitching NATO and Soviet forces into conflict.
v  By July, the East Germans were desperate. They begged the Soviets to let them stem the flow.
v  East German border controls were intensified. Undetected by Western intelligence, Khrushchev and Ulbricht were planning harsher measures.
v  On August the 12th, Soviet and East German forces were mobilized.
v  By early morning, East German troops were ready, lined up in battle order along the sector border. It was Berlin's last hour as one city.
v On the morning of Sunday August 13th, Berliners woke to find a divided city.
v Teams of workers under armed guard started erecting a barbed wire barrier through the center.
v  The barrier split Berlin.
v Families were torn apart.
v  The anger of West Berliners boiled over: They demonstrated against the division of their city.
v They could not believe that the Western allies would allow the barriers to remain. The demonstrations continued, but the West offered little protest.
v Mayor Willy Brandt tried to calm the crowds; he feared bloodshed if they attacked the barriers.
v The allies were unsure how to react. Western rights had not been challenged.
v  For the allies, the closed border stabilized the tense Berlin situation. It was ordinary Berliners, and their families, who paid the price. In East Berlin, one soldier saw his last chance to escape.
v  Three days later, concrete blocks began to replace the barbed wire.
v Along the sector boundaries rose the Berlin Wall, carving the city in two.
v In West Berlin morale was low.
v Confidence in allied protection crumbled. Mayor Willy Brandt sent an angry letter to President Kennedy demanding action.
v  But Kennedy realized that a gesture was needed, a sign that America still meant to defend West Berlin. He ordered a show of force.
v An American troop convoy was sent to Berlin up the autobahn across East Germany. The plan was to test East German reaction, and to reaffirm allied access rights to Berlin. The Americans were stopped and counted. ...
v They waited ... and were let through.
v The troops arrived safely.
v America's vice president, Lyndon Johnson, flew to the city as Kennedy's personal representative. He was accompanied by Gen. Lucius Clay, hero of the Berlin airlift. Johnson brought a message from President Kennedy.
v  Many more made an impulsive dive for freedom.
v  Later Heinz Karstens helped his wife to escape.
v Where the border ran down the middle of the street, windows overlooked the West.
v Helping people escape became a routine assignment for West Berlin's Fire Brigade.
v The East Germans blocked even this last loophole.
v People swam lakes and canals, clung under trains, hid in cars, climbed barriers under fire. Hundreds failed. Many died.
v Despite the human suffering, East Germany justified the Wall as a bulwark of peace.
v  Escapes went on; killings went on. Telephone lines were cut; now the two cities could no longer talk.
v At the few allied crossing points, tension was high. In October an American diplomat was stopped by East German guards as he was crossing to visit the theater in East Berlin.
v The Americans decided to make an issue of it and assert their right to free movement in Berlin. Lucius Clay was back on the scene.
v  To test East German reaction, Clay ordered armed American soldiers to escort vehicles back and forth across the border at Checkpoint Charlie.
v  To underline his point, Clay moved tanks up to the checkpoint.
v The Russians brought up their tanks and guns.
v The two sides faced each other barrel to barrel.
v  The soldiers pulled back, but the Wall remained. The East Germans built it higher, and backed it with fences, trip wires and tank traps.
v During the first year, 50 Germans died trying to cross to the West. One of them was 18-year-old Peter Fechter.
v  The Wall was the supreme symbol of the Cold War's cruelty and Europe's division. Its message was a bitter one: Whatever happened beyond that line, the West might lament, but would not interfere.
v  In 1963 President Kennedy visited West Berlin.
 

Chapter VII: Cuba
v Throughout the 1940s and '50s, the Caribbean island of Cuba had been America's playground; beaches, booze and casinos. Havana had it all.
v Cuba's land and industry were owned almost entirely by American corporations.
v Cuba's leader, Fulgencio Batista, was a brutal dictator. His people were turning against him. After years of guerrilla fighting in the mountains, a charismatic 33-year-old lawyer, Fidel Castro, entered Havana on the 8th of January, 1959.
v In this perfect order, over 500 members of the former regime were accused of crimes against the people, tried and executed.
v Fearing the rise of a new dictator, thousands fled to exile in the United States. But to most people Castro was a hero.
v Most important of all, Castro nationalized millions of acres of land held by American companies and gave it to the people.
v Eager to tell the world of his revolution, Castro flew to New York to speak at the United Nations.
v President Eisenhower was too busy to see him. But Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, was delighted to embrace a new revolutionary and offered him economic assistance.
v With nowhere to refine the Soviet oil, Castro was faced with economic disaster.
v He sent in his militia and took over the foreign refineries in Cuba.
v America's retaliation was swift.
v As tension mounted, Castro nationalized a further billion dollars worth of American investments.
v An irate President Eisenhower declared a complete trade embargo and ordered the CIA to recruit Cuban exiles. They would be trained to destroy Castro's regime.
v Over a hundred people died when "La Coubre," a freighter unloading arms and ammunition from Belgium, exploded in Havana harbor. CIA sabotage was suspected, but never proved.
v Castro turned to the Soviet Union for help.
v At a secret base in the Guatemalan jungle, American CIA agents had been training Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. This, they thought, would be the impetus for the Cuban people to rise up and overthrow Castro.
v The plan was presented to the new president, John F. Kennedy.
v The CIA badly misled the new president, promising him an easy victory and an end to the Cuban problem. Kennedy agreed to the invasion, but demanded crucial changes to hide America's involvement.
v Just three days before the planned invasion, Kennedy denied any possibility of American intervention.
v As Kennedy spoke, the invasion force was gathering. An advance wave of American bombers planned to destroy Castro's air force on the ground. The president, worried that this might reveal Washington's role, ordered the operation scaled down.
v On April the 15th, 1961, just six American bombers, disguised in the colors of the Cuban air force, took off from Nicaragua for a crucial attack on Cuban airfields.
v But with so few bombers, only three Cuban planes were destroyed.
v Seven civilians were killed.
v As they buried those who had died, Castro, seeking Soviet support, finally declared that the revolution was socialist.
v The following day, just 1,500 exiles, equipped with American arms and ammunition, arrived at the Bay of Pigs, 125 miles to the south of Havana.
v American planes were to protect the invasion force as they hit the beach. But Kennedy, now faced with international condemnation for the initial bombing, canceled the air support.
v Castro's remaining air force quickly destroyed the ships carrying vital ammunition supplies.
v Mistakenly believing that this was a full-scale American invasion, Cuba mobilized all its forces.
v Without American air support or resupply, the invasion force was outnumbered and outgunned.
v Within 72 hours, the invaders were either captured or dead.
v Castro had survived and humiliated Kennedy.
v The CIA was told to think again.
v Everything was suggested; from assassination, to spraying LSD into a television studio to make it seem as if Fidel had gone mad.
v Whatever they tried Castro took in his stride. More secure within his own country, he sought to export revolution to the rest of Latin America.
v Alarmed by this prospect, America kept up the pressure on Castro.
v In the spring of 1962, a "practice invasion" of a Caribbean island was mounted by 40,000 American marines.
v Castro's pleas inspired the Soviet leader Khrushchev to make a daring offer. He had boasted to the world of Russia's nuclear strength, but in reality he knew just how limited his long-range missile force really was.
v But he did have medium-range nuclear missiles.
v In July 1962, under the nose of the Americans, the first of 150 Soviet ships, loaded with heavily disguised nuclear missiles and over 40,000 troops, sailed for Cuba.
v CIA agents in Cuba reported that Russian troops and missile trailers had been seen in the streets of Havana. Washington dismissed the reports as rumor.
v But the CIA had noticed the increase in Soviet ships heading for Cuba.
v On October 14th, a U-2 spy plane was ordered to fly across the island to try to discover what was going on.
v The next morning, the Photographic Interpretation Center in Washington started analyzing the pictures that the U-2 had taken.
v At 8:45 a.m. on October the 16th, the CIA informed Kennedy that without any doubt there were Soviet missiles in Cuba.
v The president called his advisers to the White House.
v The missiles in Cuba made the Americans more vulnerable than ever before. The Russians were so close they could strike without warning.
v Robert Kennedy, the president's brother and closest adviser, became concerned that if America's might was used without warning against a small island, world opinion would turn against them.
v As the arguments continued, the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, and the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, kept a long-standing engagement at the White House.
v For the next two days, Kennedy stayed away, keeping up with a congressional election campaign. In Washington, his advisers tried to come up with a solution.
v A conclusion was reached. Not to bomb, but to blockade.
v The Navy would stop and search all ships heading for Cuba. They called it "a quarantine."
v But in case the quarantine didn't work, preparations were made for air strikes, and a massive American invasion force was made ready.
v President Kennedy was in Chicago. Now he was needed in Washington. The press were growing suspicious.
v That afternoon, the Soviet ambassador was called to an urgent meeting with Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
v At 7 o'clock, Kennedy announced to the world for the first time the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba, and that a blockade was now in force.
v The first response from Moscow came the next morning: Khrushchev was not going to back down.
v As the superpowers prepared for conflict, Cuba announced a 'combat alarm'. Over a quarter of a million people stood by to repel an American invasion.
v The American fleet now encircled Cuba. The Soviet ships stayed on course. With confrontation imminent, Kennedy wanted direct contact with Moscow. He sent his brother Robert to meet in secret with the Soviet ambassador.
v Nerves were being stretched to breaking point.
v People tried to prepare for a possible nuclear holocaust. A wave of panic buying swept across America.
v Almost at the last moment, the missile ships appeared to have slowed down, or altered course.
v That evening, as Kennedy dined with friends at the White House, a toast was proposed to celebrate. Kennedy declined. "The game," he said, "was hardly over."
v At 9:24 p.m. the State Department received a letter from Khrushchev for the president.
v Khrushchev rejected all of Kennedy's demands. The missiles already in Cuba were being prepared for action.
v For the first time in its history, America's Strategic Air Command moved to Defense Condition 2. The next step -- DEFCON 1 -- would be war.
v Just after dawn on the morning of the 25th, Kennedy ordered the interception of the Bucharest, a ship carrying Soviet oil. He knew there was no possibility of an oil tanker carrying missiles, but it was a signal to Khrushchev that he was deadly serious.
v That afternoon, at the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson confronted his Soviet counterpart, Ambassador Zorin.
v As the Soviet ambassador prevaricated, the U-2 photographs were brought into the meeting for the world to see.
v With work continuing on the missile sites in Cuba, the buildup of U.S. invasion forces in Florida increased.
v The Americans prepared for conventional combat. They were unaware that the Soviet forces were equipped with short-range tactical missiles, tipped with atomic warheads, ready to annihilate any invader.
v On October the 26th, with tension increasing, Kennedy received a telegram from Khrushchev.
v Khrushchev went on to offer that if the United States declared that they wouldn't invade Cuba:
v "The necessity of the presence of our military specialists in Cuba will disappear". At last, it looked as if cooler heads were prevailing.
v The next morning, everything changed. Khrushchev tried to push for a better deal. He demanded a trade. His missiles in Cuba for U.S. missiles in Turkey.
v President Kennedy was prepared to take the American missiles out of Turkey. But they were part of America's contribution to NATO and he could offer Khrushchev no promises.
v As Kennedy considered the options, he received news that the crisis had escalated again. In continued American reconnaissance, a U-2 spy plane overflew a Soviet anti-aircraft site in the east of Cuba. This time, the Soviet commander gave the order to launch a surface-to-air missile against it.
v Castro sent a message to Khrushchev
v He said a U.S. attack was just hours away, and once launched, the Soviet Union should retaliate immediately with "an annihilating strike."
v In Washington, Kennedy was still trying to avoid a world war.
v There was little confidence that this ploy would work. Plans for the invasion continued.
v They left the White House fearful that America could soon be engulfed in nuclear war, a war that once started, might be impossible to stop.
v Kennedy sent his brother to another meeting with the Soviet ambassador.
v Khrushchev, fearing that this might be the last chance to escape war, rushed a message, accepting Kennedy's terms, to Radio Moscow.
v It was broadcast to the world.
v Under close American surveillance, Soviet ships took the missiles back home.
 

Chapter VIII: Vietnam 1954-1968
v  Thousands of square miles were laid waste. Billions of dollars were spent.
v Over 3 million died as the Cold War moved to Vietnam.
v Dien Bien Phu, 1954. One of the defining battles of the Cold War. Despite substantial American backing, the French finally lost control of their Vietnamese colony. They were defeated by the communist-led army of General Giap.
v  There was a new regime in Vietnam. It was nationalist. But it was also communist.
v After Dien Bien Phu, the French left Vietnam for good.
v An International Peace Conference temporarily divided Vietnam into North and South, and agreed that countrywide elections would be held in 1956. America opposed the elections. They never took place.
v  Ho Chi Minh, North Vietnam's leader, had lived in France and trained in Moscow. To many Vietnamese he was a national hero, but Washington saw him as an instrument of the communist bloc.
v The North Vietnamese embarked on radical land reforms. Landowners and so-called rich peasants were persecuted, pilloried and imprisoned.
v The party's cruel policies helped aggravate a refugee crisis. By 1955, close to a million people, some encouraged by American agents, had fled south.
v In South Vietnam, the United States underwrote the regime of President Diem, an anti-communist, determined to resist Hanoi. Ruthless and autocratic, Diem was intolerant of any opposition.
v In 1960, to fight Diem and to unite the country under Hanoi, the Communists created the National Liberation Front, known to its opponents as the Viet Cong. Such movements were encouraged by Moscow.
v  Within a year of his election, after suffering the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba and a crisis in Berlin, President Kennedy set out to show strength in Asia.
v  Village leaders in the South who supported Diem were being assassinated by the National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong.
v In 1961 alone an estimated 4,000 Diem officials were killed.
v To isolate the peasants from Viet Cong control, Diem's troops burned entire villages to the ground. The inhabitants were moved into fortified "strategic hamlets," built under the supervision of American advisers. These upheavals were extremely unpopular and won new recruits for the Viet Cong.
v Advisers from the United States trained the South Vietnamese army in counterinsurgency.
v Violence was routine.
v  Summer 1963. Saigon witnessed horrifying scenes. Buddhist monks burnt themselves to death, in protest at Diem's religious intolerance.
v South Vietnamese protesters organized a wave of demonstrations. A group of generals plotted a coup against Diem and sounded out America's support.
v  But Washington did nothing to stop the coup. President Kennedy was receiving mixed messages. Some officials even said America's Vietnam policy was succeeding.
v  Events overtook the plan to withdraw. On November 1, 1963, a group of generals attacked the Presidential Palace, believing that they had, or would have American support.
v By the next day the government was overthrown. Diem and his brother were murdered by their own soldiers after they had earlier taken refuge in a church.
v At first, the people of Saigon responded with enthusiasm to Diem's overthrow. But it left the country with no clear leader.
v Within three weeks of Diem's murder, President Kennedy was himself assassinated.
v As Kennedy was buried in Arlington Cemetery, America remained committed to South Vietnam.
v  Lyndon Johnson had vast ambitions at home. But, like Kennedy, he was determined not to lose Vietnam to the communists.
v Johnson sent McNamara to repledge America to South Vietnam's cause. The strategy was unchanged, the promises more spectacular.
v  Gen. William Westmoreland, a veteran of Korea and World War II, took charge as President Johnson began to increase the American war effort.
v  In August 1964, an American destroyer, the USS Maddox, on patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin, exchanged fire with North Vietnamese torpedo boats.
v  Two days later, the ship's captain thought he was again coming under attack. One of the pilots was not so sure.
v  Ignoring the conflicting evidence, the Pentagon insisted there had been a second attack.
v  Johnson used the incident to push the Tonkin Gulf resolution through Congress. It would allow the president to wage war in Vietnam.
v In South Vietnam, the Viet Cong were stepping up operations. They now had 170,000 men and women in the field. They could move and operate throughout most of the country.
v They repeatedly launched attacks in the heart of Saigon.
v  Saigon was in a constant state of crisis. Ministers came and went, with each regime as unpopular and corrupt as the last.
v Johnson was exasperated.
v  Johnson was in the throes of the 1964 election campaign. The Great Society he hoped to build was the central issue. But communism and the Cold War were -- as ever -- near the top of the agenda.
v  Johnson played up Cold War fears in his election commercials, painting his Republican adversary as a trigger-happy warmonger.
v  Johnson won by a landslide.
v North Vietnam was a peasant society with virtually no industry. Ho Chi Minh sought aid from China and the Soviet Union.
v In February 1965 Hanoi gave Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin a warm welcome. He agreed to increase military aid to the North Vietnamese.
v  While Soviet Premier Kosygin was still in Hanoi, the Viet Cong launched an attack on Pleiku airbase. Eight Americans were killed. A hundred more were wounded.
v Johnson responded with air power. He launched Rolling Thunder, a campaign of bombing against the North. He hoped it would boost Southern morale and get Ho Chi Minh to the negotiating table. The North did not respond.
v  The first American ground troops landed at Da Nang in March 1965.
v  The United States had embarked on what would be the longest military war in its history.
v Three weeks after the marines landed, the Viet Cong bombed the American Embassy in Saigon.
v Johnson believed communist China lay behind such attacks.
v  In fact China was now supplying less aid than the Soviet Union.
v Although they got few aircraft, North Vietnamese pilots were being trained in the Soviet Union.
v  The situation in South Vietnam worsened as Viet Cong attacks continued.
v In June, a military outpost at Dong Suay was destroyed. An elite South Vietnamese regiment was decimated, and there were many civilian casualties.
v McNamara returned to Vietnam to reassess the war.
v He looked for the statistics that would help him manage the conflict.
v  President Johnson was now convinced that without the support of a massive American army, South Vietnam was doomed.
v  Vietnam was a television war.
v  The Viet Cong kept fighting. But in response to the American troop buildup, Hanoi was preparing to send thousands of North Vietnamese to join the fighters in the South.
v Westmoreland feared that South Vietnam would be cut in two.
v In the Ia Drang valley in the Central Highlands, the armies would meet head-on in the first major battle of the war.
v  Although the Americans defeated the North Vietnamese at Ia Drang, casualties were heavy: 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers were killed; 300 elite American infantry died in the battle.
v  The GIs had gone to South Vietnam to fight communism. But often they met hostility from those they thought they were helping.
v American troops found it impossible to tell which Vietnamese were friends and which were foes.
v  Instead of trying to hold territory, the Americans used their superior mobility to launch search and destroy missions.
v The attempt to save South Vietnam was destroying it.
v Viet Cong operations continued.
v  In another attempt to encourage the North Vietnamese to negotiate, Johnson stopped Rolling Thunder.
v Then started it again.
v The tactic failed.
v The Communists' vital supply route was the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It was a network of tracks linking the North with the South via the jungles of Central Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
v  The trail wove through theoretically neutral Laos and Cambodia. Both suffered heavy American bombing.
v  The scale of Soviet aid to North Vietnam was affected by growing tensions between the Soviet Union and China.
v  Moscow sent missiles to North Vietnam. And more than a thousand Soviet advisers worked on air defenses against the Americans.
v  Each year the American casualty rate increased.
v  At the beginning of 1967, the Americans used B-52s to bomb communist bases near the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon. They were trying to clear the area of Viet Cong.
v The savagery and apparent futility of the war aroused increasing dissent back home.
v  Desperate to put more pressure on Hanoi, in August Johnson extended the bombing of the North to within 10 miles of the Chinese border.
v  Johnson was weakened by the growth of the anti-war movement in America.
v  In public Johnson staged a show of optimism and support for General Westmoreland and his troops.
v  In 1968, in the fields and on the rivers, massive preparations were being made by the communists for concerted attacks throughout South Vietnam.
v Weapons, ammunition and supplies were moved to the South for an offensive planned for the Vietnamese new year, Tet. The communists hoped to spark a general uprising across the country.
v  The strength of the Tet offensive came as a shock to Westmoreland and the American public.
v On television they saw their South Vietnamese allies fighting the Viet Cong in the streets of Saigon itself.
v Worse still, they saw the American Embassy penetrated by Viet Cong commandos.
v  With the Tet Offensive at its height, leading American politicians were turning on the president.
v  The fiercest battle was to recapture the ancient city of Hue.
v  When Hue was eventually retaken, the Americans found that thousands of civilians had been murdered by the communists. Tet was a major defeat for the Viet Cong. Their main objective -- to inspire a nationwide uprising -- had failed.
v But Johnson had been stunned by the scale of the offensive. Disillusioned, Secretary of Defense McNamara was leaving office. Johnson replaced him with Clark Clifford.
v  Johnson was persuaded that the war could not be won on the battlefield, and that he must negotiate.
v  In May 1968, peace negotiations began in Paris. They were soon deadlocked. The communists were determined to rule a united Vietnam. But the United States was not prepared to abandon the South.
v As the difficult negotiations continued, the Republicans were campaigning for the presidency.
v In public, Richard Nixon supported Johnson's peace efforts.
v  In fact, Nixon's campaign team was having secret talks with the South Vietnamese government.
v  America's war in Vietnam was to last another four years.
 
 

Chapter IX:  Make Love, Not War
v Beatlemania hits the United States. With sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll - the '60s shake American values. The work ethic, military duty, even family life are under attack.
v The Cold War continues, but for a generation, it's time to make love, not war.
v In 1960 America was moving towards the peak of its prosperity and power. The Democrats' choice to run for president was young Jack Kennedy, good-looking son of an Irish-American multi-millionaire.
v The Republican Party choice, Vice President Richard Nixon, shared Kennedy's patriotic anti-communist fervor. But he had not been groomed for television.
v Kennedy had attacked Eisenhower's conduct of the Cold War. To America and the world, he proclaimed ...
v Kennedy increased the military budget. Defense contracts brought the military industrial complex unparalleled strength and riches. It meant more jobs.
v America was booming. The state of California, where much of the aerospace industry was based, became the sixth largest economy in the world.
v Postwar settlers in California left behind the decaying cities of the East. They found suburban life in the sun affordable, idyllic.
v This good life was not available to all Americans.
v The Constitution and the Bill of Rights had not removed the wedges of prejudice that were driven through American society.
v Black Americans too wanted freedom.
v Where Kennedy meant freedom from communism, they meant freedom from hunger, from fear, from humiliation.
v In many Southern states, laws prevented blacks and whites traveling together, eating together, even going to the same school.
v Black Americans were denied jobs and the right to vote.
v Civil rights activists demonstrating against unjust laws were careful not to provoke the police by any display of aggression.
v They were beaten just the same.
v It wasn't the first time armed whites had assaulted unarmed blacks, but now television was watching.
v Discrimination against blacks damaged America's credibility as freedom's champion in the Cold War.
v Kennedy was being urged by his brother, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, to back the Civil Rights Movement. Aware that he needed the votes of white Southerners, Kennedy found it difficult to commit himself.
v August 28, 1963 -- a civil rights rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington urged the White House to ban racist laws and give black Americans equal job opportunities.
v A quarter of a million people showed up to listen to a 34-year-old Southern Baptist minister.
v George Wallace, Democratic governor of Alabama, saw the growing civil rights movement as part of a communist conspiracy.
v In the name of national security, Attorney General Robert Kennedy gave the FBI permission to tap the telephones of Martin Luther King and his colleagues.
v J. Edgar Hoover, chief of the FBI, was convinced that the Civil Rights Movement had been infiltrated by communists.
v In the buildup to the 1964 election campaign, President Kennedy took his wife on a ceremonial visit to Dallas. There, he met his death.
v Americans tried to find outsiders to blame for their president's killing. There was a fear that the assassination might be the start of a communist attack on the United States.
v In one of the richest countries in the world, millions of people were living in poverty, without decent housing, without health care, without education.
v Amongst blacks, unemployment was nine times that of whites.
v Central to Johnson's vision of the Great Society was the abolition of racial discrimination. In July 1964, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Bill.
v The Cold War military buildup continued. The United States remained on high alert against a Soviet nuclear attack. It prepared to counterattack on an unimaginable scale.
v An increasing minority were questioning the cost and the effect on American life.
v The defense industry was a generous employer. The Pentagon presented the military machine as the defender of the American dream.
v Throughout 1964, Johnson was on the campaign trail to get himself elected president and to build the Great Society.
v His Republican opponent was Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona. He voted against the Civil Rights Bill.
v Goldwater promised to get tough with the Soviets. He denounced Johnson's Great Society as creeping socialism.
v The American people needed more convincing. Goldwater was heavily defeated.
v On the Berkeley campus of the University of California, dissent flourished.
v The students borrowed the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement. They organized strikes and sit-ins.
v In the confrontation with the students, the police became increasingly heavy-handed.
v The press and the public had little sympathy.
v American ideals of political freedom were now being extended into the personal realm.
v The pursuit of happiness seemed incomplete without the exercise of sexual freedoms.
v The free enterprise system richly rewarded the adroit merchandising of sexual fantasy.
v American men were still marching off to war. In March 1965, President Johnson began sending ground troops to Vietnam.
v Despite the extension of the military draft, Johnson's war in Vietnam enjoyed popular support.
v While some young Americans went off to war in Vietnam, others were seeking thrills of a different kind. They rejected American materialism, not for communism but for love, peace and rock 'n' roll.
v All over the country young men of draft age turned on, tuned in and dropped out.
v These young Americans rejected the work ethic and monogamy for spontaneity, sensuality and psychedelic drugs.
v Mostly the flower children did their own thing. The police, obliged to play the heavy father, were often totally at a loss.
v The vast majority of Americans spurned youth counterculture. Hollywood film star Ronald Reagan was out to become Republican governor of California.
v Reagan urged a massive effort to win the war in Vietnam.
v "But protest against the war was growing. There were marches and draft-card burnings. The war, these Americans argued, was immoral and unjust."
v At the Oakland Draft Induction Center, Berkeley students organized a blockade, trying to prevent conscripts registering for military service. The army was forced to bus the conscripts in behind a massive police cordon.
v Most Americans still supported President Johnson's war in Vietnam. Some saw the anti-war protesters as little more than traitors.
v Many could not understand why Johnson did not use more of America's massive firepower to end the war. But Johnson did not want to risk a wider conflict.
v Johnson's war dragged on. By the end of 1967, there were half a million American soldiers in Vietnam.
v Millions took notice when heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali defied the draft. He declared his allegiance to a non-American cause -- Islam.
v In the black ghetto of Oakland, California, activists trained as paramilitaries in what they saw as a civil war against a racist police force.
v Led by Huey Newton, they called themselves the Black Panthers. Where the peaceniks offered flowers, the Panthers pointed guns.
v America's black ghettos were now war zones. In the summer of 1967, there were riots in Newark and Detroit.
v In Detroit the police called for a war budget of $9 million to buy military equipment.
v For too many Americans, Johnson's Great Society was a sham.
v In March 1968, as the war in Vietnam and conflict at home continued, Johnson threw in the towel. He declared he would not run for a second term as president.
v Martin Luther King still pursued his dream.
v The following night, Martin Luther King was killed by a white gunman.
v Behind the mule wagon carrying King's coffin was a bare-headed Bobby Kennedy. He was grieving -- and campaigning to become the Democrats' next presidential candidate.
v Bobby Kennedy won the Californian primary. His rival, fellow Democrat Eugene McCarthy, was also for peace. McCarthy supporters, watching television, saw another Kennedy killed by an assassin's bullet.
v The burning issue was the war in Vietnam.
v Vice President Hubert Humphrey was confident he would win the nomination. He supported Johnson's dream of a Great Society -- and, in public, the war in Vietnam.
v The hopes of the anti-war faction within the Democratic Party now lay with Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota.
v The authorities were nervous. A hundred thousand anti-war demonstrators were expected in Chicago.
v The demonstrators gathered in the city's parks in preparation for a march on the convention hall.
v Mayor Daley had no intention of allowing them to march anywhere and wanted them out of the parks.
v Inside the convention, Daley prevented McCarthy delegates debating the war on prime-time TV.
v On the day the Democratic Party was due to nominate its presidential candidate, anti-war protesters battled it out with police.
v As the Democratic Party convention lined up behind Humphrey, the peaceniks made one last attempt to march on the convention hall.
v The police were waiting for them -- and for anyone else who stayed in the street.
v At the convention, McCarthy's supporters were overwhelmed.
v Vice President Hubert Humphrey became the Democrats' candidate for the presidential elections in November.
v He would face a tough and seasoned Republican Party opponent.
v Richard Nixon's victory was wafer-thin -- less than 1 percent of the vote.
v The Cold War and the war in Vietnam would continue.
Chapter X: Red Spring
v  Prague, 1964. Nikita Khrushchev visits Antonin Novotny, the loyal communist ruler of Czechoslovakia.
v Khrushchev boasted that the Soviet system was dynamic and healthy.
v Communists were brothers, members of the same family, sharing resources, sharing a joke.
v But only four years later the Soviet Union returned to Prague with tanks.
v Khrushchev brimmed with confidence. He hated formality; he acted on impulse; he loved a fight.
v He wanted to make the Soviet Union happy as well as glorious.
v  To show his confidence Khrushchev allowed an American exhibition into Moscow in 1959. For the first time, Russians could touch and taste the American achievement.
v  But Khrushchev knew that the Soviet Union was beating America in the space race.
v For Khrushchev, here was evidence that communism meant not just power but technical progress.
v The first generation of Soviet cosmonauts -- Gagarin, Titov and the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova -- became instant national heroes.
v They personified Khrushchev's vision: a modernized, vigorous Soviet Union which would lead the world into the future.
v The Soviet Union's natural resources seemed limitless. Khrushchev believed that the Soviet people would work even harder if they were freed from fear and poverty.
v  But the Cold War's pressure to rearm kept the old priority for heavy industry alive, especially in the expanding defense sector.
v  The Cold War also kept huge armed forces in the field. Khrushchev tried to cut them back, but the generals resisted.
v  Cities like Sverdlovsk 900 miles east of Moscow were dominated by giant armaments plants. Production was a matter of fulfilling -- or outstripping -- targets set by the planners in Moscow. Patriotic propaganda kept the workers straining to produce more and faster.
v  Khrushchev and the party still relied on propaganda and patriotism to keep the economy going.
v  Government film celebrated the onward march of communism.
v But most people in the Soviet Union still lived in hardship and overcrowding.
v  Khrushchev was impatient to see Soviet people living as well as Americans -- or even better. He tried to shift the planned economy towards light industry and consumer needs. But the Soviet establishment, set in its ways, resisted change.
v  To solve the housing shortage, prefabrication seemed the answer. In the 1960s, apartment blocks shot up around every Soviet city.
v For millions of Russians it was an opportunity for a new life.
v  Living conditions improved, but there was still a shortage of goods in the shops.
v  To solve the food shortage, Khrushchev rushed through agricultural reforms. He launched the Virgin Lands campaign, which plowed up the natural grasslands of central Asia and planted them with wheat. Khrushchev boasted that he would overtake America in meat, milk and grain. Volunteers poured out to the Virgin Lands with the old communist zeal.
v  But there were not enough fertilizers, railroad cars or grain silos. Much of the harvest was wasted.
v  Moscow, the showcase capital city, was allowed special supplies.
v  People wanted more out of life, and found ways to get it. Russians who worked in the defense industry got special privileges. Soviet home movies recorded changing behavior -- the company picnic.
v  Resorts were run by the party and the trade unions. Millions of families took a free vacation. Official films showed the world a new image of modern Soviet man and woman. Western lifestyles were alluring.
v  But the new sounds, the new dances, still found their way in -- the twist with a glance over the shoulder.
v New portable radios could sometimes pick up forbidden programs from abroad.
v  But most ordinary Russians received only what the state approved.
v  The young were trying to make up their own rules. The old Russian family was losing control of its children. In vain, the communist youth movement tried to preserve traditional morals.
v  Writers and artists grew bolder, challenging the censors. The young crowded to hear new voices, speaking from the heart.
v  The party was in control everywhere. In 1962, hard-liners persuaded Khrushchev to visit an exhibition of modern art. They hoped he would be shocked, and restore even tighter censorship.
v  The hard-liners succeeded. Khrushchev exploded and shouted abuse at the painters and sculptors.
v  The censors stifled free speech in other parts of the Soviet Empire. In Czechoslovakia, where a rigid Stalinist leadership blocked all reform, the struggle was the same -- the free-thinking artist trying to elude the party censor. In those years Vaclav Havel began to write for the theater.
v  Whatever went wrong, the communist system itself must never be blamed. Khrushchev had still not solved the problem of food supply. But he was buoyant about his grand schemes. He ordered everyone to grow corn claiming -- wrongly -- that new Soviet varieties could survive in cold climates.
v  In 1963, the harvest failed. There were bread shortages and renewed rationing. Wheat had to be imported from the West.
v  The Soviet people, officials and citizens alike, were losing patience with Khrushchev. His great plans all seemed to end in calamity. Khrushchev's peasant boisterousness amused the West but it shocked Russians. They found him clownish, irresponsible. Over Cuba, he had nearly blundered into nuclear war.
v  The Politburo selected Leonid Brezhnev to lead the attack on Khrushchev. In October 1964, Khrushchev was deposed.
v  Few people missed Khrushchev. Many wanted a firm hand on the tiller again.
v  Stability was restored in the Soviet Union, but unrest stirred in the empire. In Czechoslovakia, the repressive regime of Antonin Novotny still stamped on demands for a more open society.
v  By February 1968 the Czechoslovak reformers were taking over. Brezhnev flew to Prague to size up the new leader, Alexander Dubcek. Brezhnev accepted that some change was inevitable.
v Alexander Dubcek seemed a loyal communist who would alter only what was necessary. By March 1968, Dubcek and the new president, Ludvik Svoboda, were in charge -- but their reforms were already shocking the rest of the communist world.
v The reformers were confident that they could bring communism up to date. The party would still lead -- but by consent, not force. There would be freedom to speak and write, to travel and organize. There would even be a form of market economy. Dubcek's vision was named: "Socialism with a human face."
v One of the first changes was the ending of censorship. Suddenly the papers were full of truth, revealing the crimes of Stalinist Czechoslovakia. Everywhere crowds gathered in anxious debate.
v After two decades of terror and silence, Czechs and Slovaks had found their voice again.
v  Western styles and visitors poured in.
v This May Day there was genuine joy. Trust was growing between the people and their leaders. But could communism be reformed?
v  In May, a grim Soviet prime minister, Alexei Kosygin, visited the Czechs. Soviet dislike of Dubcek's reforms had turned to horror. Moscow feared the Communist Party might lose power. Worse, Dubcek might change sides in the Cold War. A few hard-line Czechoslovak Communists agreed with the Kremlin.
v  In the early summer, Warsaw Pact troops staged very public maneuvers in Czechoslovakia. After the exercise, they left their signals network in place. The warning was not hard to read.
v Threats from Moscow and the Warsaw Pact failed to make Dubcek climb down. In July, Brezhnev, Kosygin and the entire Politburo arrived from Moscow with renewed demands.
v  Two days later the Czechoslovak leaders made some concessions. But it was too late. The Soviet Politburo had already decided to solve the problem -- by force.
v On the night of August 21, Soviet paratroopers seized Prague Airport. Soviet and Warsaw Pact armies burst through the Czechoslovak frontiers.
v As the invasion began, the Czechoslovak leaders were meeting in Prague.
v  Before their arrest, the party's leaders managed to condemn the invasion. By morning, Soviet tanks had taken over the center of Prague.
v  Czechoslovakia's kidnapped leaders decided resistance was hopeless. In a tragic broadcast, Dubcek broke the news.
v  The Czechoslovak experiment, the most daring attempt to marry communism with democracy, had failed.
 

Chapter XI: Détente
v  By the end of the 1960s, the Soviet Union seemed likely to match America's nuclear arsenal. The two superpowers faced a choice -- slow down their competition -- the process that would be called détente -- or continue an arms race that could end in all-out war.
v 1969 -- A new American president came to power.
v Richard Nixon had new ideas about how to make the Cold War less dangerous. He was ready to accept the Soviet Union as America's nuclear equal.
v  Although Nixon wanted to revise America's Cold War strategy, his first priority was to get American troops out of the war in Vietnam.
v By 1969, this war had cost the lives of 30,000 GIs and there was still no end.
v  America's ally, President Thieu of South Vietnam, met Nixon on Midway Island. Nixon told Thieu he planned to pull out American troops and hand over the ground war to the South Vietnamese.
v  In July 1969, the first American troops were pulled out.
v  But Hanoi put on its own pressure with a new offensive in the South. American generals proposed bombing North Vietnam's bases in neutral Cambodia.
v Nixon agreed to the bombing but insisted the raids in Cambodia be kept secret.
v  Laird was right. Anti-war demonstrators protested.
v  They called out the names of soldiers killed in Vietnam.
v  The bombing of the communist bases in Cambodia was no miracle cure.
v  American GIs still came under attack in South Vietnam.
v  Nixon now ordered a ground assault into Cambodia.
v  Nixon's invasion of Cambodia produced violent protests on American campuses.
v At Kent State University, National Guardsmen shot four students dead.
v  Fighting men alone could not guarantee security. Soviet leaders wanted arms agreements that recognized their nuclear parity with America. They also wanted American understanding in their quarrel with China.
v The Communist Party chief Leonid Brezhnev championed relaxation of Cold War tension with America -- the policy that would be called détente.
v He was on his way to the very top of Soviet power.
v  In Europe, the Cold War showed itself most painfully in the Iron Curtain that divided the two Germanys.
v West Germany's new Chancellor, the Social Democrat Willy Brandt, had his own ideas for improving relations with the Soviet bloc.
v The Germans called it Ostpolitik.
v  Willy Brandt became the first West German chancellor to visit East Germany.
v  Brandt's visit was a triumph. To ordinary East Germans, he seemed to bring hope of change.
v But the Americans were worried.
v  Brandt's next destination was Moscow.
v He hoped to remove Russia's fear of its old German enemy. Brandt was willing to recognize Europe's postwar borders and the division between East and West.
v  Brandt had come to recognize Poland's western border carved out of territory seized from Nazi Germany in 1945.
v The German chancellor visited the site of the Warsaw Ghetto.
v Words failed him; he knelt at the memorial to Jewish fighters who resisted the Nazis.
v  In a divided Germany, these steps towards détente brought welcome cracks in the Berlin Wall.
v Families and friends separated by the Wall could see each other once again.
v  The architects of America's new approach to the Cold War were Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.
v  The two men preferred to work in secret. Through secret back channels, they set up summit meetings in Beijing and Moscow.
v  Nixon and Kissinger wanted the summits in China and the Soviet Union to help America get out of Vietnam. They also hoped to bring China into their diplomatic game.
v  Soviet leaders were alarmed after Kissinger and then Nixon returned jubilant from China.
v  In March 1972, North Vietnam launched a new offensive in the South. Nixon responded with more air attacks.
v Would the Soviets receive Nixon in Moscow while his planes were bombing their North Vietnamese ally?
v  Kissinger was uncertain whether Moscow would allow the summit to go ahead.
v  May 22, 1972 -- Richard Nixon became the first serving American president to be received in the Kremlin.
v The summit reached agreements to limit offensive and defensive nuclear weapons, and it laid the foundation of détente.
v For Brezhnev and Nixon, this was the most dramatic proof yet of the new relationship between their two countries.
v But first the Soviets had to make their point on Vietnam.
v  The American Congress gave Nixon a hero's welcome.
v  Two weeks after Nixon's return from Moscow, five men working for his re-election campaign were arrested for breaking into the Washington headquarters of the Democratic Party. It was the start of a major scandal -- Watergate.
v As election day approached, Kissinger returned from one of his many negotiating rounds with the North Vietnamese. He told Nixon he at last had a deal on Vietnam.
v  South Vietnam refused to sign. With his deal facing collapse, Kissinger hastily reassured Hanoi America still wanted an agreement.
v  This latest setback in the Vietnam peace talks did not damage Nixon. He was easily re-elected for a second term.
v Back in Paris, Kissinger had to put Thieu's objections to the North Vietnamese.
v  Le Duc Tho left Paris and the talks broke down.
v Nixon ordered air raids on North Vietnam, hoping to bludgeon Hanoi into agreement and at the same time bolster the South.
v Over 12 days, Hanoi and Haiphong came under the most sustained bombing campaign of the war.
v The bombing served its purpose. North and South Vietnam were ready to agree to the deal that Kissinger put together.
v Under the peace accords, American troops would leave Vietnam; the Saigon government would remain in power but North Vietnam's troops would stay in the South.
v Nixon called it "peace with honor".
v  Regardless of Watergate, the process of détente continued. Brezhnev came to America for a second summit with Nixon.
v In California, the Soviet leader partied with Hollywood film stars.
v The Russians were still keen to deal with the American President.
v  In spite of Nixon's denial of guilt over Watergate, he was accused of obstructing justice and faced impeachment by Congress.
v In August 1974, Richard Nixon, the man who took America into détente, gave up the fight and resigned.
v His successor was Gerald Ford.
v The Soviet leadership was astonished by Nixon's downfall.
v  In Vietnam, the 1973 peace accords had not stopped the fighting. By April 1975, South Vietnamese troops were struggling to defend Saigon against Hanoi's final offensive. They could expect little help from the Americans.
v  South Vietnamese who had fought and worked alongside the Americans against the communists besieged the U.S. Embassy.
v The Americans were getting away -- but they had lost the war and now they could not even save thousands of their South Vietnamese friends.
v  The Soviet Union proclaimed its self-confidence. It believed it was a superpower equal to America and boasted history was on its side.
v This rosy view ignored one problem. The treatment of Soviet dissidents like the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn threatened to derail détente.
v  American passions flared over restrictions on the emigration of Soviet Jews.
v  In the Soviet Union, where memorials kept alive the remembrance of a terrible war, détente had few enemies.
v Soviet leaders hoped to guarantee their country's status and security with a treaty to be signed in Helsinki which would recognize the postwar division of Europe.
v But this treaty had a stumbling block -- human rights.
v  After overcoming the doubts of his colleagues, Brezhnev arrived in Helsinki, keen to cut a figure among leaders from East and West.
v  Both sides believed they had the agreement they wanted.
v  Thanks to détente, rockets could now point the way to coexistence, rather than war.
v  Soviet and American spacecraft made history, docking together 140 miles above the Earth.
v  In space, cooperation was replacing years of Cold War confrontation.
 

Chapter XII: Backyard
v Gen. Schneider wasn't needed -- other plotters assassinated him.
v The murder shocked the nation. Moderate politicians rallied to Allende and consolidated his election victory.
v In the shanty towns of Chile there were high hopes as the newly elected president set out on reform -- without, he hoped, outside interference.
v  Allende's first big step, supported by all Chilean political parties, was the nationalization of copper, Chile's biggest industry, still under effective U.S. control.
v  Allende pressed on with what he called his "Social Revolution." School children were given a daily glass of milk.
v The middle classes were on edge.
v  In the Chilean countryside, peasants, chanting pro-Cuban slogans, began seizing the land.
v  Chile's economy was increasingly put under state control. This upset foreign financiers and the World Bank in Washington, which cut off credits.
v  In November 1971, Fidel Castro arrived to support Allende's policy of change through the ballot box.
v  The dangers didn't just come from the right. Castro's Cuban policy of armed revolution found favor with Chile's extreme left, who were hostile to Allende's methods.
v But most Chileans ignored the call to armed struggle.
v As inflation mounted, the right attacked economically. CIA money helped pay for Chilean truck owners to bring the country to a standstill. At the U.N., Allende accused ITT of trying to provoke a civil war.
v  Moscow was the next stop. There Allende sought the money he needed to stave off bankruptcy. But the Russians, already spending a fortune to support Cuba, were unimpressed.
v  Santiago, Chile's capital. June 1973. With the government's popularity actually increasing, some frustrated right-wing military officers took to the streets in an attempted coup.
v As the world's press recorded the failed takeover, Swedish cameraman Leonardo Hendricksen, his camera still running, was gunned down and killed.
v Allende responded by placing greater reliance on the military. Gen. Augusto Pinochet was appointed as his loyal chief of the army.
v Once again the truck owners paralyzed the world's longest and thinnest country. Shops closed for lack of goods. Hunger stalked the streets. Middle class housewives came out to bang their pots and pans in protest. The violent right laid their plots.
v  Just after midday on Tuesday 11th September, under orders from Gen. Pinochet, British-made Hunter jets swooped over the Moneda presidential palace starting fires which were to burn for weeks.
v  That morning from the Moneda, Allende had broadcast to the nation.
v  Hours later, Allende was dead.
v  Gen. Pinochet immediately stamped his mark on the country. In the capital, suspects were rounded up into the National Stadium.
v Many, like folk singer Victor Jara, were never seen alive again.
v  When he entered the White House in January 1977, Jimmy Carter promised a new U.S. attitude to the rest of the world.
v  In Nicaragua, U.S. ambassadors were used to a different role. In the 1930s, U.S. Marines had put the tyrant Tacho Somoza in power. More than 40 years later, Nicaragua was still ruled by a Somoza.
v A politically moderate newspaper owner, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, dared to challenge the dictatorship.
v  Chamorro's murder electrified the cowed people of Nicaragua. Somoza declared a state of siege. The U.S. woke up to popular anger against the super-rich family which had been its ally for more than four decades.
v  From the hills where they had been secretly training for years, guerrillas emerged who proudly bore the name of the 1930s anti-Yankee rebel, "Sandino."
v But in the town of Esteli, Somoza's World War II U.S. tanks carried the day. Two thousand people died in what became a dead city. The Sandinistas regrouped, pitting their rifles against Somoza's might.
v  The Sandinistas' will to win triumphed; Managua went mad with joy.
v Jimmy Carter had left it very late before abandoning the Somozas and accepting the new Sandinista government.
v  The U.S. would not be lectured to. The tide of conservatism, which was to bring Ronald Reagan to power, was rising.
v In Nicaragua, Somoza's land was shared out and the family's business monopolies were taken over. Education and health care became widely available.
v But not everyone was happy with the revolution.
v  In the shadows, opponents of the revolution plotted their revenge.
v Inexperienced Sandinista guerrillas struggled to run a war-torn country.
v  Throughout Central America protest mounted against right-wing military rule. In El Salvador the Catholic Church had become a haven for the oppressed.
v On the concrete steps of the cathedral in San Salvador the military decreed that demonstrators for human rights should be discouraged -- nothing very new for El Salvador.
v In a massacre in 1932, the military had killed up to 40,000 people. In 1979, the cameras were on hand to record the color of the blood.
v Archbishop Oscar Romero was the cautious leader of Salvadoran Catholics. When he spoke out, the reaction from the right was immediate.
v  In March 1980, as he was saying Mass in a private chapel, the archbishop was murdered by a single assassin's bullet.
v At his funeral, the military struck again.
v  On December 3, 1980, three U.S. nuns and a woman lay-worker started the long drive into town from San Salvador's international airport. On the way they were raped and killed. Their corpses were discovered in a shallow grave.
v The killings, by El Salvador's National Guard, prompted President Carter to withdraw aid to the Salvadoran military. But within six weeks Carter had resumed funding an army whose atrocities continued.
v  In town, those suspected of being sympathetic to the guerrillas were easy prey for government forces. At night, bodies were dumped on waste ground or left on city streets.
v Like the Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua, the Salvadoran guerrillas wouldn't give up. The war damage was immense.
v In the United States, the new Reagan administration blamed Cuba and Moscow.
v  In El Salvador, U.S. military advisers were hard at work bolstering the army against the guerrillas.
v The Atlacatl Brigade was the crack unit. In 1981 it went on a search and destroy mission in the guerrilla-controlled Morazan Province.
v At about 5 o'clock in the morning of December 11, it would go into action near the village of El Mozote.
v Hundreds of civilians were slaughtered. The U.S. State Department said it could find no evidence of a massacre.
v  As the Reagan administration moved to shore up the right in El Salvador and bring down the left in Nicaragua, neighboring Honduras became a base for all sorts of U.S. activity.
v Honduras was the main place where a force was being trained to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. That force was the Contras.
v  The Contras were funded from Washington. This undeclared war upset the U.S. Congress.
v An amendment by Rep. Boland of Massachusetts curtailed Reagan's funds for arming the Contras.
v  Washington was planning another small war. On the Caribbean island of Grenada, where the British Queen Elizabeth was still head of state, a left-wing government was using Cuban contractors to build a new tourist airport.
v The U.S. suspected a strategic motive.
v In October 1983 when left-wing Prime Minister Maurice Bishop was assassinated by more extreme Marxists, Washington had an invasion plan ready for Reagan's approval.
v  The United States hadn't bothered to consult the British queen, or Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It was all over in a few days.
v  Many welcomed the Americans. Within six weeks, their work done and President Reagan's image enhanced, the U.S. troops left.
v In Nicaragua, Reagan's crusade against the Sandinistas was stepped up.
v  Nicaragua's precious stock of oil went up in smoke; the economy was reeling. And, all the while, ways had to be found to contain the U.S. backed Contra invasion.
v The Sandinistas asked the Soviets for help.
v  The Sandinistas, with help from Cuba, vowed to defend their borders and the revolution.
v  Angry at Reagan's continued support for the Contra war, the U.S. Congress, again led by Rep. Boland, voted in October 1984 to deny them any further assistance.
v  To help pay for the continuing bloodshed in Nicaragua, Reagan's men secretly sold arms to Iran.
v The American dollar, and the failures of the armed left, crushed Latin American revolutionary dreams.
v  1990. Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega asks the Nicaraguan people to vote him president.
v Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter was there to see fair play.
v Violeta Chamorro, Ortega's opponent, narrowly won a surprise victory. Washington spent nearly $10 million dollars backing her campaign.
 

Chapter XIII: Star Wars
v  A strident anti-communist for most of his adult life, Ronald Reagan believed America lagged behind the Soviet Union in the arms race.
v  In the first years of Reagan's presidency, the Soviet Union's armed might appeared to be at its peak.
v  The Soviet Union had been the first into space, but now a fear lurked in the hearts of top Soviet commanders -- fear of American technological superiority.
v  The aging Kremlin rulers were still willing to bear the crippling cost of being a superpower.
v For the peoples of the Soviet Union, this meant a life where everyday items were in short supply.
v  Brezhnev introduced a new face into the ranks of the Kremlin leadership -- Mikhail Gorbachev.
v He was ordered to reform Soviet agriculture. The land that Stalin had brutally collectivized had never delivered plenty. Soviet farming was grindingly inefficient.
v  President Reagan was portrayed by a vocal minority of Americans and many Europeans as a war monger.
v  The United States and the Soviet Union already possessed nuclear arsenals large enough to wipe each other out.
v Both sides were constantly introducing more powerful and accurate missiles.
v The renewed arms race and Reagan's anti-Soviet rhetoric revived the anti-nuclear movement in Western Europe.
v Peace campaigners could not have imagined that the revulsion they felt for nuclear weapons also had an echo in the White House.
v  Advances in computers and laser technology promised to give Reagan -- and he believed the whole world -- a way out of the nuclear dilemma.
v Work was going forward on a revolutionary new defense system.
v  Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, "SDI" -- nicknamed "Star Wars" after the movie -- envisaged satellite- and ground-based weapons that could destroy Soviet missiles with darts and laser beams.
v  Many American politicians and scientists campaigned against what they saw as Reagan's expensive folly.
v  Reagan's critics said that SDI was hugely expensive and would never work. They were appalled by the deep cuts in welfare programs that would be needed to pay for it.
v Ronald Reagan soon discovered that his close ally, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was also critical of SDI.
v She tried to persuade her friend not to abandon the nuclear deterrent for his beloved "Star Wars."
v  Leonid Brezhnev died in November 1982. The ailing KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, succeeded him. Andropov was frightened by SDI and Reagan's anti-Soviet speeches.
v Convinced that the West was plotting war, Andropov ordered a worldwide alert. The KGB monitored every aspect of life in the West.
v  The Americans stepped up spy flights in sensitive areas along the Soviet Union's long borders.
v Aircraft packed with electronic surveillance gear looked like civilian airliners and often flew close to passenger routes.
v  On August 31st 1983, a South Korean airliner left Anchorage for Seoul. Unaccountably, Flight KAL 007, with 269 people on board, deviated into Soviet air space, more than 300 miles from its normal route.
v  The Korean airliner came down off Sakhalin Island, killing everyone on board.
v  A mood of crisis now gripped both East and West. Arms control talks were broken off. Soviet SS-20 rockets were now confronted by cruise and Pershing missiles deployed in Western Europe.
v The Soviet leadership believed a nuclear attack by the West was imminent. A British agent inside the KGB sent warnings to London.
v  Allied and domestic concern rose.
v  Reagan tried to reassure Andropov.
v  Ronald Reagan, encouraged by his wife Nancy, consulted Suzanne Massie, a popular writer on Russia, to help him understand his Cold War adversary.
v  But to whom in the Kremlin could Reagan talk peace? In February 1984, Yuri Andropov died. His successor, Konstantin Chernenko, was too frail to start a dialogue. The West looked for some small sign of change.
v  March 1985 -- Konstantin Chernenko was dead. At his funeral, world leaders paid their respects to Mikhail Gorbachev and weighed up the new, younger man in charge of the Soviet Union.
v  Gorbachev took over a superpower sick with social breakdown, corruption in the Communist party -- and alcoholism.
v To tackle these ills and to revive a decrepit economy, Gorbachev called for reconstruction, or 'perestroika,' and a new spirit of honesty -- 'glasnost.'
v  In Washington, Reagan had to overcome objections from inside his own administration before he could meet the new man in the Kremlin.
v  Geneva, Switzerland -- November 1985.
v The stage was set for the first superpower summit in six years.
v Reagan too was keen to find out whether he could do business with Gorbachev.
v  Many people in the West wondered whether the 74-year-old Ronald Reagan was up to taking on the 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev.
v  The summit agenda -- human rights, Afghanistan and arms control -- was daunting but the body language was encouraging.
v The two leaders immediately held a private meeting.
v  But were they really getting along?
v  The two leaders were divided above all by Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative -- Star Wars.
v  Mikhail Gorbachev left Geneva without agreement on his main objective: curbing the arms race. But the United States and the Soviet Union were talking again.
v One year into the Gorbachev era and the Cold War continued. The Geneva call for a second summit was repeatedly postponed. Fears of nuclear war remained -- and even increased.
v  A nuclear disaster did occur -- but not between the two superpowers. In April 1986, an explosion ripped apart Number 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine north of Kiev.
v The disaster highlighted the incompetence of the Soviet system as volunteers started the lethal task of cleaning up the huge radioactive leak.
v  Chernobyl, its surroundings and large areas of Ukraine and Byelorussia were heavily contaminated and emptied of their population.
v  Reykjavik, Iceland -- the second Reagan-Gorbachev summit.
v Gorbachev now decided to re-examine Reagan's first-ever arms control proposal -- known as the 'Zero Option.' Reagan had offered not to deploy cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe if the Soviets withdrew their SS-20 rockets.
v Brezhnev had turned Reagan down flat; the new American missiles had been stationed in Europe.
v Now Gorbachev wanted to cut a deal.
v  Ronald Reagan did want disarmament. But would he give up his Strategic Defense Initiative -- SDI?
v  The chance to make the most momentous agreement since the Cold War began -- the elimination by the United States and the Soviet Union of all but 100 nuclear weapons each -- was lost.
v  Moscow -- another foreign aircraft breaches Soviet air space. Passersby watched amazed as a Cessna light aircraft landed in Red Square.
v Its pilot was a young West German -- Matthias Rust.
v  Gorbachev set Rust free, but used the incursion as an excuse to dismiss several members of the Soviet high command.
v Media, the fax machine, the computer were opening up the U.S.S.R.
v Gorbachev and the Politburo watched satellite television in their offices. After Olympic boycotts, the 1986 Goodwill Games were seen live on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
v Soviet television was changing. It risked a live debate with Margaret Thatcher.
v  Gorbachev's policy of 'glasnost' brought pop culture out into the open.
v  The Soviet people were being plunged into wrenching change.
v  Gorbachev reacted to growing opposition by pressing ahead with plans to reform the Communist Party.
v  Washington, D.C. -- Ronald Reagan still pursued his "Star Wars" vision. The Kremlin now believed that it would never happen and therefore should not delay agreement on arms reduction.
v Gorbachev, in the United States for the first time, had come to sign an historic treaty. His visit, seen live on Soviet TV, enhanced his standing at home -- and abroad.
v  A Russian saying Reagan had learned from Suzanne Massie now seemed appropriate.
v  Though far less comprehensive than what was mooted at Reykjavik, Reagan and Gorbachev signed an agreement abolishing an entire category of nuclear weapons.
v In front of the world's cameras, the Americans destroyed their cruise and Pershing missiles.
v The Soviets dismantled their SS-20s. In another milestone in reducing Cold War tension, inspection teams from both sides supervised the destruction.
v In his last year as president, Ronald Reagan paid his first ever visit to the Kremlin.
v What Mikhail Gorbachev and the journalists wanted to know was: What did Ronald Reagan think about the Soviet Union now?
v  Together, the two leaders had seized their chance.
 

Chapter XIV: The Wall Comes Down
v  The Berlin Wall: part of the Iron Curtain that cut Europe in two.
v Beyond the wire, armed force had always held down the peoples of the Communist world.
v In 1989, the Wall was still intact, but there was a new mood in Moscow.
v  December 1988. Gorbachev met George Bush and outgoing President Ronald Reagan. Gorbachev had decided that the Cold War must be brought to an end.
v The Americans remained cautious.
v  By 1989, Gorbachev was determined to loosen Soviet control over the nations in the Communist bloc.
v Gorbachev told the peoples of Eastern Europe that they had the right to choose their own futures. But his listeners wondered what would happen if non-Communists won power. Would the Soviet Union really stand aside?
v  But not everybody wanted freedom from Moscow. Communist leaders like East Germany's Erich Honecker relied on Soviet support to stay in power.
v  Hungary 1956. Soviet tanks smashed the Hungarian attempt to win democracy and independence. Imre Nagy and the other leaders of the uprising were executed.
v Economic reforms improved life for a while, then hit disaster. By 1989, the Communist government was losing control.
v But Soviet troops remained in the land. The Hungarian people were growing angry again. Fear drove the regime to promise political changes, and more democracy.
v  In March 1989, Prime Minister Nemeth visited Moscow. The Hungarian leaders were planning free multi-party elections. But would this be too much for Gorbachev?
v  A nameless grave in Budapest hid the murdered leaders of the 1956 uprising. Now the government agreed to rehabilitate them, the dead and the living.
v Erzsebet Hrozova was 18 when she fought in the uprising. She spent 12 years in prison.
v  Imre Nagy and his comrades were given a public funeral. The government declared that the 1956 revolution was justified. The crowd listened to the names of the martyrs.
v Everyone knew that this was not just an act of mourning. It was a national cry of outrage.
v  A month before, the Cold War had lost a symbol. The Hungarian government took down the barbed wire on its border with Austria and the West. The Soviet Union did nothing. Although travel was still not completely free, the Iron Curtain was starting to unravel.
v  Hungary's boldness alarmed the hard-line Warsaw Pact leaders. None was more shocked than the East German ruler, Erich Honecker. His state formed the Soviet empire's frontier with the West.
v  The Poles, like the Hungarians, were breaking with the communist system. Faced with a wave of political strikes, led by the opposition movement Solidarity, the regime had given way.
v  In 1981, with Soviet approval, Solidarity had been crushed by the Polish army. Its leaders were imprisoned.
v Now, in early 1989, the government opened round-table talks with Solidarity. The Polish Communists were prepared to share power, to discuss a shift towards democracy.
v  In June, elections were held.
v  They produced a stunning defeat for the Communists. Solidarity won 99 out of 100 seats in the Senate. Within weeks the first anti-communist prime minister in the Soviet bloc took office.
v  At the Warsaw Pact Summit, the leaders were divided. Honecker, like Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu, was alarmed by what was happening in Poland and Hungary.
v  In July, President Bush visited Poland and Hungary. The West gave them moral support for democratic change, but little more.
v  In Hungary, Bush was presented with a piece of barbed wire, a souvenir of Hungary's dismantled Iron Curtain.
v  On his Wyoming ranch, James Baker, Bush's secretary of state, discovered a real friendship for Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister.
v  Baker confirmed to Shevardnadze that the United States would tread carefully in Eastern Europe and would not exploit Soviet problems there.
v  Already, in communist China, a surge of demands for human rights and democracy had ended in tragedy. On Tiananmen Square, in Beijing, tanks and troops had attacked peaceful demonstrators and slaughtered them.
v The world shuddered. Would reform in Eastern Europe end like this?
v Erich Honecker, in East Germany, admired the Chinese solution to political protest. Honecker refused to admit that anything was wrong with his own system.
v  But in reality, East Germany was rotting away. Pollution, poisoned air and water; the economy was running down; the police state stifled all initiative. There was apathy in public, daydreams in private.
v  That summer, East Germans rushed to take holidays in Hungary. There was an escape hatch; Hungary's border with the West was weakening. In Budapest, East Germans besieged the West German Embassy, demanding help to emigrate.
v  The West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had confidence in Gorbachev. Kohl planned to rescue the Hungarian economy if the East Germans were allowed to go West. He trusted Gorbachev not to block the deal with the Hungarians.
v  The Hungarians agreed to let the East Germans cross to the West.
v Honecker called the refugees moral outcasts.
v  The refugees had been traveling from East Germany to Hungary in the hope of getting to the West. Now East Germany blocked travel to Hungary. Desperate, the fleeing East Germans turned to Czechoslovakia.
v They gathered at the West German Embassy in Prague.
v  When the embassy was full, the refugees climbed into the garden.
v  More and more refugees crammed themselves into the embassy and refused to leave.
v  The Czech police made futile attempts to stop the inrush. Inside the embassy, the overcrowding and squalor grew worse day by day. Both German governments, East and West, were at their wits' end.
v West Germany's foreign minister, Hans Dietrich Genscher, came to Prague. Under Soviet and West German pressure, Honecker had consented to a face-saving deal.
v  The refugees could go to West Germany, but only if their train crossed East German territory first. Then Honecker could claim that he had expelled them and canceled their citizenship.
v  Back in Prague, a new wave of refugees stormed the embassy fence.
v Their last chance of reaching the West seemed to be vanishing.
v Within a few days, another 7,000 people had scrambled into the embassy gardens.
v Some East Germans chose to stay and protest.
v The Lutheran churches were sheltering an opposition movement. Inspired by Gorbachev, the protesters dreamed of turning East Germany into a democracy.
v  In Leipzig, the police struck back. On September 4, Western journalists filmed plainclothes security men as they attacked the demonstrators.
v  Soon came a new chant of defiance: We are staying here!
v  Every Monday in Leipzig, there were demonstrations at the Nikolai church. They swelled into mass protests.
v The police tried to stop them. But the government was losing its nerve.
v  Only Honecker seemed to notice nothing amiss. On the eve of East Germany's 40th anniversary that October, he was confident as he waited with his colleague Egon Krenz to greet his senior guest, Mikhail Gorbachev.
v The Soviet delegation already knew that the East German regime was tottering.
v The outward show of victorious celebration went ahead.
v Then, at the torchlight parade of Communist youth, the marchers dropped their rehearsed slogans. They began to chant another name: "Gorby!"
v Honecker pretended not to notice.
v  In a series of increasingly surreal meetings, Gorbachev tried to inject a sense of reality.
v  As the leaders met at the closing reception, a plot was hatching against Erich Honecker. A group in the East German Politburo had decided to try and get rid of him.
v  At dinner with Gorbachev and the leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries, Honecker was a complacent host. Meanwhile, a hostile crowd was gathering outside.
v  Honecker was planning to stamp out the new opposition. No one was sure how far he would go.
v  That evening the demonstrations in Berlin continued.
v In Leipzig earlier that day, the authorities made ready to meet the demonstrations with armed force.
v  That night, the police charged and scattered the demonstrators.
v But an even larger protest rally was called for two days later. The army was on standby.
v  As the Leipzig demonstration moved off, the local Communist Party leaders realized that 70,000 people were already on the streets.
v Alarmed, the Soviet ambassador telephoned the commander of Soviet forces in the region.
v  The Leipzig Communists begged the opposition to talk with them. Then, without higher orders, they pulled back the East German police and troops. The demonstration went off peacefully. For East Germans, this was the turning point.
v  Now Honecker's allies deserted him. He was voted out of power by Egon Krenz and the entire Politburo on October 17.
v  Now Egon Krenz was in charge. He promised democratic reforms. He assured the people that he would make it easier for East Germans to travel West -- the issue which had set off the whole crisis.
v  On November 1, Krenz visited Gorbachev in Moscow.
v  In vain, Krenz offered new freedoms. The street demonstrations grew bigger, and asked for more. In East Berlin on November 4, a crowd of half a million people gathered.
v  On November 9th, 1989, Gunter Schabowski told journalists in Berlin that restrictions on travel to the West would be lifted. The government meant the change to start next day.
v But Schabowski mistook the timing.
v  The news flashed round the city. East Berliners rushed to see if the checkpoints in the Wall were really opening.
v  The border guards were baffled.
v  That order was to stop anyone trying to escape, but the crowds were huge now. Suddenly the guards gave in.
v They opened the barriers.
v  West Berliners arrived from the other direction. They began to demolish the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate.
v  Across this Wall, two worlds had faced each other in arms.
v Now their enmity was dumped into history. Germany would be reunited. But Europe's revolution against communism was not yet done.