BERLIN: With Flags Flying

Crises elsewhere may come and go, but Berlin remains the No. 1 testing spot of the cold war. In Berlin last week the cold war got perceptibly hotter. It all began when two junketing U.S. Congressmen, Massachusetts Democrat Edward P. Boland and New York Republican Harold C. Ostertag, motored into East Berlin to see one of the standard tourist sights: the ponderous Red army war memorial. They rode, accompanied by a U.S. Army Lieutenant, in a radio-telephone-equipped Army sedan. East German Volkspolizei approached the parked car and forced the party at pistol point to follow them to a nearby guardhouse. From there the Congressmen were taken to Soviet headquarters at Karlshorst, and were told they had violated the laws of East Berlin by operation of the sedan's radio transmitter. After four hours they were released.

Forthwith, Major General Charles Dasher, the U.S. commandant in Berlin, called on the Soviet commandant. Major General P. T. Dibrova, to protest the Volkspolizei's "lawless . . . ruffianism," and to say that of all the incidents in recent years, "I consider this the most serious." Dibrova replied that he could not accept the protest. Reason: East Germany is a sovereign state now; East Berlin is its capital, and no longer a Russian-occupied sector. Dibrova's statement was dutifully echoed by the East German official Communist newspaper Neues Deutschland, which condemned the West for taking refuge behind "nonexistent four-power status."

Plainly, this was one more move in the Communist gambit to force the West to deal with satellite East Germany as a sovereign nation. Britain, France and the U.S. got off blunt protests to Soviet Ambassador Georgy Pushkin, announcing that they would continue to hold Russia responsible "for the welfare and proper treatment" of all their citizens in the Soviet sector of Berlin. U.S. Ambassador James B. Conant went further. He hurried to Berlin, defiantly drove through the heart of East Berlin with U.S. and ambassadorial flags flying. "We will remain in Berlin until Germany has been unified," announced Conant in a voice loud enough to be heard throughout Germany. "We are determined to retain the four-power status of Berlin as it has been in the past."

In Washington, the State Department preferred to take the line that Communist Commandant Dibrova's attitude had not yet been supported by higher Russian authority, and therefore did not constitute a formal abrogation of Soviet obligations. The State Department's attitude is that the Russians usually feel things out carefully in Berlin before doing something drastic: perhaps Conant's flying of the flag would cause them to think twice. Instead, at week's end the Russians applied the squeeze a little tighter. The East German regime refused to renew the annual permits under which West German barges deliver 1,500,000 tons of supplies to West Berlin.