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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## SECRET We have made no underlying assumptions as to the nature and character of the public disclosure of these preparations except to take for granted that their scale and character will become matters of general knowledge during the next two months as the call-ups, contracts, and possibly requests for supplemental appropriations, become known. We should not rule out the possibility that an economic stabilization crisis may not materialize out of a Berlin build-up under certain relatively favorable conditions: Given a program at or perhaps even below the lower end of the $5 - $15 billion range -- Given a "conventional build-up" rather than a "Berlin crisis" send-off for such a program -- Given the greater slack in our economy in 1961 than in 1950 -- Given today's dinner memories of shortages, speculation, and direct controls -- Given the readier availability of Federal Reserve monetary restraints in 1961 than in 1950 (when the "pagging" policy still prevailed) -- Under these conditions, it might well be premature to request sweeping direct control powers, since such a request will itself tend to have a substantial destabilizing impact. ## II. Preliminary Conclusions 1. Preparedness measures for the Berlin capability will not, at least initially, result in general shortages of materials, facilities or manpower available to the civilian economy. An analysis of the over-all economy in 1961-62, without additional stress from the Berlin crisis, discloses substantial unused resources and capacity to produce. (See Appendix A.) There are very substantial stockpiles of materials which could, within limits, be used to relieve shortages of the types of strategic and critical materials that are heavily relied upon in a military build-up.
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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.