The Third World War: August 1985

One sequence was, however, secured from within East Berlin itself. An American documentary unit happened to be working on a programme on the German Democratic Republic. The director, who had won acclaim at the time of the Vietnam War for his strongly anti-war attitude, had been given considerable latitude to move about Berlin by the East German authorities. By chance he was on his way, with his camera crew, to interview an East German trade union leader when rioters began to threaten the trade union headquarters. His camera crew, their electronic equipment readily available, had secured some particularly vivid pictures, many of them in close up, before the police became aware of their presence. When two plain clothes officers intervened to stop their recording, the East German driver of the car in which they had been travelling shouted ‘Give me the tape’, grabbed the roll of recordings, and disappeared into the crowd. The cameraman, his recordist and the documentary director were immediately arrested, but the next day the film, smuggled across the wall by dissidents, appeared on West Berlin screens. The pictures on it made plain, beyond any possibility of argument, that the rioters were not the usual run of urban malcontents but men of responsibility and discipline. The film also contained some ugly shots of East German police firing deliberately into the crowd, and pursuing and savagely beating the rioters.

The American crew and the director were charged with having instigated the riots, and, for good measure, with being responsible for the death of two policemen. The fact that the director had a high reputation as a left-wing sympathizer added to the irony of the situation, but did nothing to help his case.

The Federal Republic makes no move. There is now some strain between Western Europe and the United States. The stoppage of the flow of oil from the Middle East and hindrance to shipping in the Mediterranean is beginning to hit the EEC, which claims that its own interests in the dispute are not being considered. The Community asserts a right to import oil from Iran and to complete freedom of movement for the shipping of its members and insists that it must be a party to the coming summit discussions.

3 January 1985. The President of Mexico is assassinated.

9 January. The German Democratic Republic now announces the arrest of the American TV crew. They will be tried on a capital charge of instigating the riots and murdering two policemen in East Berlin on 31 December.

10-18 January. The US declares that it must have more naval forces in the Gulf in order to stabilize the situation there. A US task force is despatched to Bandar Abbas.

19 January. Egypt invites the Soviet Union to take control of the Suez Canal. The US Sixth Fleet effectively closes the northern exit.

20 January. The Inauguration Day message to President Thompson from Soviet President Vorotnikov is hailed by a frightened world as astonishingly placatory, and presaging a new detente. President Vorotnikov says:

a. The Egyptian government has today asked the Soviet Union to take control of the Suez Canal. The Soviet government has said it would wish to do this only in co-operation with US observers on the spot, because the sole Soviet object will be to enforce the mutual standstill agreed with President Carter after his Christmas Day messages. Both the Soviet Union and the Americans may feel, in their different ways, that the other side has broken that standstill in the past three weeks. ‘But from the beginning of your presidency I beg that we should work together on these difficult issues.’

b. The members of the American TV crew accused of the capital offence of the murder of policemen in East Berlin are being repatriated immediately through West Berlin. (At the same time it was revealed that the driver who had carried away the film, and a number of other dissidents traced through him, had been executed as being ‘primarily responsible for the murders in which the American journalists had merely been participating onlookers’, and that death penalties had also been carried out ‘on two Polish counterrevolutionaries who had in November brutally murdered the mayor of Wroclaw’.)

c. President Vorotnikov urgently invites President Thompson to a summit meeting, which he hopes will take place ‘during this very first week you are in office’.

This ‘Soviet plea for a Munich detente’, as the Peking Daily called it, had been preceded by the following secret communication from Soviet Foreign Minister Baronzov to the Politburo on 19 January.