It must be observed here that television coverage, which was to play a very important part in the events described in this book, was in these incidents of such significance as to deserve fuller treatment.
All television news coverage in advanced countries is undertaken by lightweight electronic cameras, capable of recording their images on 25 mm videotape, or of having their material beamed live from the scene. On 31 December ENG (electronic newsgathering) cameras from many countries were in position at many places along the Berlin Wall, and were able to secure — and to send out live throughout the world — shots of the rioting.
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.
THE BARONZOV MEMO
The objectives of our operations in the Middle East and Southern Africa have now been achieved. We are in a stronger position than we dared originally to hope. In particular:
1 We have now re-asserted our control in Poland and East Germany. Although we have executed counter-revolutionaries there, some American newspapers will easily be persuaded to say that, because we are returning the US television crew, we are being conciliatory. The Polish and East German counter-revolutionaries have learned that the West will not support them during a Thompson presidency; Thompson is thus revealed to them as a broken reed. If there is trouble in Poland or other Eastern European socialist states in 1985 or 1986, it will now be easier to intervene in Yugoslavia, if needed, and to implement existing plans for the invasion of West Germany. It will be clearly shown that the regime in the Soviet Union cannot be shaken by subversion and coups d’état.
2 We have seized a very strong position in the Middle East. The North Arabian (i.e., Saudi Arabian and Iraqi) oil supply is now in Egyptian hands. We must ensure that this continues to mean in Soviet hands. Israel has been neutralized under guarantees which should for the time being be honoured.
We can allow the Iranians to send oil to the United States and Europe, across sea lines that we should increasingly be able to command, because there will be a sufficient scarcity of it to put the capitalist countries at a severe disadvantage. Their own capitalist laws of supply and demand mean that the price of oil will stay very high. This will speed the march of these countries towards reliance on nuclear energy, though we can agree with, stimulate and support the many sincere environmentalists in those countries who say that this form of energy is dangerous and immoral. They will argue that it is especially dangerous and immoral for nuclear technology to come to poorer countries, so these poorer countries will have to rely increasingly on those who control the North Arabian oil supply, that is, on the Egyptians and the Soviet Union. We can also use the oil weapon to increase our control over the economies of socialist countries in Europe, especially Poland and the German Democratic Republic. We should be highly conservationist, and not allow anybody to have too much oil from Arabia. One of our main objects in the summit negotiations with President Thompson should be to try to extend our hold over Arabian oiclass="underline" if possible, not just Saudi Arabian and Iraqi oil, but oil from some of the Lower Gulf states as well.