| Here is an example of my research. I was very much aware of some of the events at the time; for example, the riots that occurred in East Berlin beginning on June 17th 1953, the first of many demonstrations against the communist rulers of Eastern Europe that finally resulted in our victory in the Cold War.
Other happenings were secret at the time and were unknown to me until uncovered by research. For example, at the time I was unaware that in 1953 we secretly constructed a tunnel from the American zone of West Berlin to a location under East Berlin telephone exchange where we surreptitiously intercepted and recorded 40,000 hours of telephone conversations and copied 6,000,000 hours of Teletype traffic. A somewhat detailed description of that project appears in the book at page 171.
(Throughout the book I have designated the sections dealing with my historical research as "The Times".)
THE TIMES: On 22 October 1953 American Intelligence Officers briefed a group of operatives from the British Secret Intelligence Service with respect to their plan to dig a tunnel from West into East Berlin and intercept encrypted Russian military communications. Among the British agents advised of the plan was George Blake, a Russian KGB mole, who disclosed the existence of the tunnel project to Sergei Kondrashev, his KGB contact at a London meeting the following December.
The idea for the tunnel had emerged the previous year as East Berlin became the most important communications center in communist Eastern Europe for traffic between Moscow and the political capitals of the satellite states. The Soviets were switching from wireless radio communications to telephone lines since radio signals could be intercepted and wires could not except by physical connection, and thus were more secure. The wires were strung on poles or were underground. U. S. Intelligence thought underground cables offered a more suitable opportunity for a tap since the cables were not easily observed and the tap could remain in place without detection. The idea was tested in the spring of 1953 when an American intelligence agent was able to temporarily patch a line from an East Berlin telephone exchange into West Berlin in order to determine what sort of traffic might be intercepted. The results were gratifying and the project was approved at the highest level of the American government.
Although the Soviets knew of the creation of the tunnel before construction began, they did not wish to compromise their highly placed agent, Blake, so they did nothing to impede its progress. ...
Here are some other examples:
THE TIMES: On February 2, 1953 President Eisenhower delivered his first State of the Union Address to Congress and said:"Our country has come through a painful period of trial and disillusionment since the victory of 1945. We anticipated a world of peace and cooperation. The calculated pressures of aggressive communism have forced us, instead, to live in a world of turmoil.
"From this costly experience we have learned that the free world cannot indefinitely remain in a posture of paralyzed tension, leaving forever to the aggressor the choice of time and place and means to cause greatest hurt to us at least cost to himself."Eisenhower then outlined a more aggressive policy against communism, In Europe and worldwide."The policy we embrace must be a coherent global policy. The freedom we cherish and defend in Europe and in the Americas is no different from the freedom that is imperiled in Asia."
THE TIMES: On Monday, March 2, 1953, the day I departed Bremerhaven and began my tour of duty in Germany, significant events were occurring elsewhere.
Thirteen hundred miles to the east, at a dacha just outside Moscow, seventy-three year old Josef Stalin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and Premier of Russia was found in a coma. He had been the undisputed leader of World Communism and Dictator of Russia for twenty years. Without regaining conscientiousness he died three days later and was succeeded by Georgy Malenkov.
On that same day, March 2, another incident directly connected to the Cold War but not then appreciated as such, took place. The Hanoi dictatorship of Ho Chi Minh instituted a Soviet inspired land reform program in Indochina by which farmers owning as little as two acres of rice land were declared to be landlords as distinguished from agricultural workers. As a result, approximately 15,000 "landlords" were declared to be enemies of the state and executed. The following year, on May 7, 1954, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu surrendered to the communist Viet Minh and on July 21, 1954, at the Geneva Conference on Indochina, upon condition that unifying free elections would be held within two years, the country was partitioned at the 17th Parallel, creating North and South Viet Nam.
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