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.
“Fuller”2 pages
# AIR TRAVEL AND TRANSIT ITEMS (Item III - 3) At the present time Soviet and/or satellite airlines, on scheduled runs, overfly four NATO countries and make traffic stops in eight NATO countries. Opportunity thus exists for harassment of Soviet bloc civil airlines by NATO countries as a countermeasure to bloc harassment of access to Berlin, whether civilian or Allied military. It is true that NATO countries have generally received air routes into the bloc in return for those which they have granted to bloc lines. It is to be expected that retaliation for harassment of bloc lines would be visited upon the lines of NATO countries in the bloc. However, bloc routes to the West are undoubtedly more important to the Communist Governments than Western routes into the bloc are to Western Governments. Hence an exchange of harassments would bring greater net pressure upon the bloc than upon the West. Care must be exercised, however, to avoid giving the Soviets a pretext for harassing traffic in the Berlin corridors. In general, the countermeasures should be used with discrimination against either the Soviet Union, certain or all of the satellites, or both, as appropriate. Since the Soviet Union is not a signatory of the Chicago Convention, while the satellites most active in the civil air field Czechoslovakia and Poland are, there exists a natural basis for distinction should this be desired. There are many ways in which harassment can be carried out. Those that will be selected by a particular country will depend upon the nature of the contractual relationship between the country and the respective bloc governments as well as upon the internal legal and administrative organization of the country itself. This paper simply lists a number of possible measures from which there can be selected those which best suit particular circumstances. They are grouped according to the organization of the civil air items in BERCON-TRI D-18a. Item 3a
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 163 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.