Revolts in East Germany, Hungary

In October 1953, major newspapers in Western Europe and the United States blossomed with headlines about a seeming outbreak of revolts behind the Iron Curtain, aimed at Red Army occupiers. The venerable Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that from 500 to 1,000 Czech, Polish and German partisans were fighting pitched battles with East German security forces.

The Boston Daily Globe reported a spreading revolt by “Red Army deserters, anti-Communist East Germans and Czech partisans,” continuing, “It is not clear whether there is liaison between several reported bands. It is known, however, that their numbers are large enough that they have engaged Soviet and East German peoples’ police units in pitched battles and that 10,000 or more Red Army and Communist police have been ordered out in the Berlin area alone in an attempt to root them out.” The Washington Post kicked the number of guerrillas up to 5,000 to 10,000.

In Washington, a puzzled Allen Dulles, the director of central intelligence, dispatched impatient cables to his European stations, wondering why the media had more details on the “uprising” than his own CIA.

So, what was afoot? Was the CIA-financed Radio Free Europe succeeding in the “rollback of communism” campaign that commenced during the Truman administration, and escalated under President Eisenhower? Were oppressed Eastern Europeans heeding Washington’s propaganda campaign and taking up arms to topple puppet governments installed by Stalin?

Two books now at hand offer fascinating insight into, respectively, RFE’s role in the aforementioned “uprising” in East Germany in 1953, and a far more reaching disturbance in Hungary three years later. Both record a cruel outcome to implied promises that spanned two administrations, particularly during the first years of Republican rule under Ike.

Let us deal first with the 1953 events that caused the press excitement. Only after several days did the true story emerge. The “guerrilla armies” consisted of five young Czech men, armed only with four pistols, who sought to reach West Berlin so that they could enlist in the U.S. Army Special Forces, then return to help liberate their country. They killed the driver of a truck, which they soon had to abandon, and continued their trek on foot.

The men included two sons of Gen. Joseph Masin, a hero of the Czech resistance during World War II. The story is told in highly readable style in Barbara Masin’s Gauntlet: Five Friends, 20,000 Enemy Troops, and the Secret That Could Have Changed the Course of the Cold War (Naval Institute Press, $29.95, 410 pages, illus.). She is the daughter of Joseph Masin, one of the five young men, and a granddaughter of Gen. Masin. From early childhood, she heard stories of her father’s saga. Interviews and documentary sources enabled her to tell the full story.

“Gauntlet” is a thriller — desperate men trudging through the snow of a Central European winter, ill-clothed, short of food, “gaunt, mud-caked and unshaven,” cowering in the brush to evade pursuers. There were gun fights with East Germans Vopos, several of whom died (one officer apparently being accidentally shot by his own men). Two of the youths were captured; but the three others trekked 200 miles in 31 days, evading 24,000 Soviet and East German troops, to the safety of West Berlin. And, as planned, they indeed enlisted in the Special Forces.

The one accurate part of the wild media stories concerned the massive reaction by Soviet and East German security forces. Thousands of troops mobilized to try to stop the youths; their failure suggested vulnerabilities that might had been exploited by organized guerrilla forces, had they existed. They did not.

As Ms. Masin points out, many Czechs believed the “rollback of communism” broadcasts of RFE, beamed over East Europe from 23 stations on the periphery of the Iron Curtain. They also heard the spiels about “captive nations” from arch-conservative Republican politicians with eyes on the “ethnic vote” in many states.

What the Czechs (and other Europeans) did not know was that the CIA and other agencies had already written off “roll-back” as unfeasible. A 1949 attempt to stir revolt in Albania went belly-up in spectacular fashion, and CIA officers realized that Iron Curtain security was too tight to permit guerrilla operations that worked in World War II.

Nor were the East Europeans aware of a private warning Dulles gave the White House in August 1953 that “the big problem we face when we call for action behind the Iron Curtain is the extent to which we are willing to back that action if serious trouble develops. It would be both immoral and inefficient to provoke massacres …” Dulles subsequently told Congress, in a closed hearing, that efforts to stir uprisings “would need outside military support, which the U.S. government was not ready or able to provide.”

The Czech regime’s hatred of the escapees continued for years. After leaving the American army, Joseph Masin married a German woman and settled in Cologne. In 1961 an FBI agent told him that a defector had stated that the Czech secret service, the Statni Bezpecnost, or StB, had ordered him assassinated. Masin refused to leave Germany, as agents urged. The controlled Czech press denounced the men as “a collection of bloodthirsty, drunken hooligans and casual murderers in the service of the Western imperialists.”

Let us now move now to the far more visible Hungarian uprising of 1956, vividly described by Charles Gatti in Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Stanford University Press, $24.95, 264 pages). Mr. Gatti, a native of Hungary, witnessed the uprising. He eventually became a professor of political science in the United States, now at the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University.

Mr. Gatti delves deeply in the politics of the revolt, both in terms of tangled internal politics, and Budapest’s relations with Moscow. He also dissects the “what can we do?” anguish in Washington when the shooting began.

Perhaps the most cynical recorded remark came from Vice President Richard Nixon at a White House meeting when debate was underway about possible U.S. intervention. Mr. Nixon opined that “it would not be an unmixed evil, from the point of view of U.S. interest, if the Soviet iron fist were to come down again on the Soviet bloc …” even though it would be better if the “present liberalizing” between the USSR and satellites continued. And indeed the “iron fist” did arrive, with Red Army tanks.

As far as CIA involvement was concerned, Mr. Gatti notes that the agency had only one person in the Budapest station who spoke Hungarian, and his chief duty was issuing visas. As does Ms. Massin, he sorely faults RFE, but also notes that policy guidance, such as it was, was confused. He further points out that had the insurgents paused to look at a map, they would have realized the futility of trying to force the Soviets out of their country.

The Iron Curtain would continue to cleave Europe for decades more. These books display why the Soviets were forced to rely on harsh brutality to keep their satellite empire intact.

Joseph C. Goulden is writing a book on Cold War intelligence. His e-mail is JosephG894@aol.com.