"Tell the Major what you told me yesterday"
"Ach, again? OK. I was wounded in the war, see? An Ami antitank gun, clipped my Pz IV pretty good, took the rest of the cfew and my leg with it, see? So, in our glorious Völkische Republik, war cripples can have jobs as well, eh, lucky bastards that they are. The State's not satisfied unless you died at your job. Anyway, me, I take care of the litter in the Rosa Luxemburgsplatz, it's little more than a derelict yard where they haven't bothered to rebuild anything. Kids go there to do mischief, and not so young kids do the same, if you catch my drift. The young these days, they have the blood boiling all day long, so they sometimes look for a quiet place to..."
"All right, all right, we get it, Stick to the point, Hermann"
"Well, it began last week. I started hearing them at night, and you don't spend years around them without them leaving their mark on you. The sound of the tracks on the concrete, there's no hiding it. We had been ordered not to light our windows at night, or to peek at our windows - supposed to be a passive defense drill. But when the rumbling came so loud that the walls of my little flat started shaking, I couldn't resist and went to the windows."
"What did you see, Hermann?"
"Sixty-four tanks, Herr Major. A column of sixty-four T-55 tanks, advancing without a single light on. There were our police guiding them with small torchlights. And behind the tanks came a long line of trucks, dozens of them, all military."
"Okay, so the Soviets have shuffled some tanks and infantry at night. That's something, but seriously, Halley, I don't understand why you're raising such a big stink about it."
"It's the next day, sir. Herm, tell the Major what happened the next day."
"The next day, I went to work as usual, but the PLats was surrounded by riot police. They said the area was off-limits for a few days because of old bombs that had been discovered. But I knew they were lying, it made no sense - see, I knew the area had been used as a mass grave just after the war, so unexplosed ordnance my Berliner ass! I don't know what possessed me, but instead of going back home and enjoying a State-sanctioned day off, I hobbled to that building next to the Platz - the lovers use it as a secret passage, there a door in the boiler room that leads you to a yard in the next block, and the hedge of the yard leads into the Platz. So I went there to have a look. And that's where I saw them."
"Saw who?"
"Not who, what. The GAZ trucks I had seen the night before, a dozen of them. They were not carrying troops, Herr Major, they were carrying big sacks."
"Sacks?"
"Sacks of cement, you know, to mix concrete. And cinder blocks as well. And they were guarded, not by ordinary german conscripts, but by Minister of Interior Grenztruppen, the border guards. And there were two Russian officers. So I thought maybe they were building something secret, and I slipped into the Ami sector to report it. The Amis who took my leg, you know, they treated me correctly after that. Took the fire out pf my clothes, took me to a hospital as well. The Russkis, they would have watched me burn and pissed on my corpse"
Transcript of a conversation held March the 11th, 1962 at the US Berlin Garrison headquarters, between Captain George Halley, Major James Stemper, and a German informant called Hermann XXXXXXXX.
Two days later, Allied troops in Berlin signalled the East Germans were establishing a permanent barrier between the Eastern and Western parts of the occupied city as well as fortified checkoints at the highways leading into Berlin.
"The initial idea, you know, was never to just tighten pour grip in Berlin. The hardliners at the Politburo were pressuring Khrushchev into being firmer with the West. Ha! Firmer! A bunch of senile geezers who couldn't raise a boner together! Anyway, there were other options on the table these days, some of which did make my hair turn white."
"Really?"
"Oh, yes. The geezers were about to craok, they didn't care much about millions others dying as well, you knows? The hardliners were composed of two clans : the optimists who said the moment was more favorable than ever, with France and Great Britain deprived of their colonies, the Middle-East massively pro-Soviet, Latin America in the midst of revolutions... And well, the pessimists, saying we were losing our grip on the peoples of the Union, and that we needed to play our cards while we still had them. Nixon was seen as a strong, experimented opponent. So all options were discussed: Berlin, Cuba, and a surprise strike through the Fulda Gap."
"Gosh. What happened then?"
"Mrs Nixon was shot. Khrushchev seized the opportunity like an hungry wolf. He told the Politburo realized that if one of the most extreme options was exercised, the American President could very well think there was a link with the stupid assassination of his wife - and then we would deal with a rabid dog, a madman. He made it sure a few of the hardliners knew he'd sacrifice them on the spot rather than to risk the destruction of the Soviet Union."
"He threatened them directly?"
"Of course not. He had men like me to do that. So I went and met a few of these, how would you call them now? Chickenhawks? I remember Plezhanov, a junior Politburo member, and a firestarter. I met him in his home, in the presence of his kids, and told him that unless he saw the light I would accuse him of being a Zionist spy. When he realized I had the full authority of the First Secretary, he started blabbering about the burden of proof and other things like that."
"And what did you do then?"
"Why, I laughed! Burden of proof?
Burden of proof? I was a KGB colonel, First Directorate, with orders from the SecGen. If I had accused Plezhanov of having fucked with Lenin's mummy the next day a thousand witnesses would have confirmed it. And so, Khrushchev dodged that bullet, and the Politburo wisely picked more reasonable options. Not that it did the world much good, mind you."
Excerpts of a conversation between then-retired KGB General Leonid Grezhko and British Journalist Keith Holbert in the mid 1980s.