Documents / FOIA release
This Top Secret study by the Interdepartmental Coordinating Group on Germany and Berlin, dated July 12, 1961, and released by the Central Intelligence Agency, answers NSC Directive No. 58 of June 30, 1961. It sets out courses of action for the Berlin crisis but does not judge their merits. It covers imminent presidential decisions, a three-phase timetable running to January 1, military preparations and mobilization, covert action, economic sanctions, public information, negotiating positions and checkpoint procedures for East German personnel.
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believe the present tripartitely-agreed procedures for use in the event that an express agency relationship does not exist do not draw the line at a point which will receive public understanding and support in that they involve a procedural innovation likely to give rise to criticism that the West is making an issue of who stamps a document. It is necessary to translate this criterion into concrete terms. Obviously, it has to be given some concrete embodiment if it is to be operationally useful. We would not wish to be in a position of being willing to meet any "GDR" demand provided only that the traffic keeps moving. The obvious next point which can be defined with precision would be maintenance of existing procedures across the board, whether the "GDR" officials are acting expressly as agents or not on the basis of an imputed agency theory. An important problem would be the development of some rationale for accepting present procedures from "GDR" officials in the face of an explicit Soviet denial that they are acting in an agency capacity. One possibility, of course, is that the West could simply take the position that we do not really care what the Soviets say about this. Facts are facts, and a basic fact is that the "GDR" is a puppet of the Soviet Union. Hence, any action involving the rights of the Occupying Powers in Berlin must be considered to involve the basic responsibility of the Soviet Union. In this matter, the "GDR" officials are not free agents but are subject to continuing Soviet control, just as the "Government of the GDR", despite "peace treaty" and all the rest, will continue to operate as a puppet, subject to policy direction from the Soviet Union. Another possible approach which gets away entirely from any attempt to ascribe agency would be for the West merely to acknowledge that, while we cannot prevent the Soviets from signing a so-called "peace treaty" with the "GDR", we cannot accept that such a document could have any effect on our rights with respect to Berlin and access thereto. We might then say that we will insist on undisturbed physical access to Berlin, and as long as this continues under present procedures, we will accept the execution of these procedures by "GDR" representatives (or alternatively--it is a matter of indifference to us who executes these procedures). We will, of course, continue to hold the Soviets basically responsible for maintenance of our rights, including those of access. ## Underlying Assumption The underlying assumption of the existing contingency plans has been that, while the plans in their current form may have the effect of forcing the issue at a relatively early stage, they would also result in clearly exposing Communist intentions to interfere with Western access. A clear statement of the arguments for the existing contingency plans and for reopening them on this point is contained in another paper on this subject which says: Present...
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 163 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.