Volume 44, Number 16 · October 23, 1997
The Bloodless War
By Thomas Powers
Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War
by David E. Murphy, by Sergei A. Kondrashev, by George Bailey
Yale University Press, 530 pp., $30.00
For those who like their history built on dates it may be said that the cold war began sometime during the eight weeks between the formal surrender of the German armies on May 8, 1945, which ended the Second World War in Europe, and July 4, 1945, when the Soviet military authorities first allowed American organizations to set up shop in Berlin. For an exact date we might choose May 17, on which day, according to Battleground Berlin, a fascinating and important new account of the opening campaigns of the secret cold war waged by the CIA and the KGB, the OSS officer Frank Wisner passed on to Washington the report of three men he had unofficially slipped into the occupied city in the hope of 'establishing contacts in an area which will shortly be denied to us'—that is, to commence spying on the Russians.
Review, 5655 words
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