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.
“The Advance”7 pages
# TREASURY ARRESTS ## (Items III - 5e, 9c, 11) Section 5(b) of the Trading with the Enemy Act gives the President authority, among other things, to regulate or prohibit transactions involving any property in which any foreign country or national thereof has any interest, by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. This authority has been delegated to the Secretary of Treasury by Executive Order 9193. Under these broad powers, all transactions or any specified category of transactions by Americans with foreign countries or their nationals may be controlled provided such controls are not arbitrary or capricious. Set forth below are certain types of controls which have been considered and which might be appropriate in the Berlin situation. While Section 5(b) of the Trading with the Enemy Act is only operative in time of war or declared national emergency, the existing national emergency declared in 1950, when the Communist Chinese entered the Korean War, is still in affent and would sustain action under the statute in the Berlin situation. ## 2. Blocking Controls Blocking controls might be limited or general. Limited blocking with respect to one or more Soviet Bloc countries would involve the freezing as of a given date of the assets in the United States of the affected Soviet Bloc countries. Limited blocking would involve no restrictions on current transactions between the United States and the countries blocked, but, of course, their blocked assets here could not be used for such current transactions. General blocking would involve a prohibition subject to licensing of all current financial and commercial transactions by the United States and U. S. nationals with such countries as are included in the general blocking restrictions and nationals thereof in addition to a freezing of the U. S. assets of such countries and their nationals.
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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 an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 163 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.