Berlin: Shaping Agreements

SENSING that a historic agreement could be in the making, small knots of West Berliners began gathering one evening last week at the massive iron gates of the Allied Control Council's palatial headquarters in Kleist Park. Every so often, Soviet Ambassador Pyotr Abrasimov or one of his aides would slip silently away on a mission to East Berlin--to consult, it was later disclosed, with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, who had flown in to oversee the crucial final stages of the 17-month-old talks on the future of Berlin. Then, shortly after midnight, the sound of applause came from the open windows of the second-floor room where the Big Four ambassadors--from the U.S., Britain, France and the Soviet Union--had been negotiating for nearly 14 hours. The applause was abundantly justified; the ambassadors had reached a pivotal agreement in the drawn-out process of ending a quarter-century of East-West conflict over the city.

Their slim draft of about a dozen pages, a so-called "umbrella agreement," will probably be worked over for months before the Big Four Foreign Ministers finally sign a Berlin Protocol. The ambassadors will meet once again early this week. Then, barring a last-minute hitch, they will dispatch the draft document to their governments for approval. Once that is secured, officials of the two Germanys and the two Berlins must hammer out the final details concerning access to the city and travel between West Berlin and East Berlin and between West Berlin and East Germany. The whole fragile structure of settlement could come apart at any step along the way. For that reason, the text of last week's umbrella agreement will not be made public until the Big Four ambassadors meet again, probably in September, to signify their governments' final approval by affixing their initials.

Even so, TIME's Bonn Bureau Chief Benjamin Gate was able last week to cable this assessment of the agreement's major points:

ACCESS. The most important achievement for the West was a Soviet guarantee of free and "unimpeded" travel along the three air corridors, two autobahns, three rail lines and two waterways that traverse the 110 miles between West Berlin and West Germany. The Soviets had long maintained that they were powerless to prevent East Germany from harassing traffic along the corridors; last week's agreement became possible only after the Russians consented to take specific responsibility for ensuring free access to West Berlin. The draft document specifies that passenger and freight trains, buses and trucks will be sealed before they enter East German territory, and only the seals will be subject to inspection by border police. Trains, now held to a 50-m.p.h. speed limit, will be allowed to go faster--probably 75 m.p.h. The East Germans, who now routinely halt and search all cars, will be restricted to doing so only in special cases--when they are looking for suspected criminals, for instance. The Big Four also agreed that officials in the two Berlins should work out arrangements that will permit the 2,100,000 West Berliners to cross the dividing wall on routine visits for the first time since 1966--probably on the basis of 24-hour passes, which West Germans who want to visit relatives in East Berlin can secure today.

REPRESENTATION. The Soviets' longstanding goal has been to make West Berlin a separate political entity; the West has recognized a special status for the still-occupied city, but also sought to entrench its connections with West Germany. The agreement gives something to both sides. It recognizes that West German consulates and embassies can represent West Berlin in trade and cultural affairs, a point never before conceded by the Communists. But by the same token it limits Bonn's claim to represent West Berlin in all matters. West Berliners will have a special stamp affixed to their West German passports. Similarly, the Western negotiators agreed that the Soviets could open a consulate in West Berlin, a move that underscores that city's separate status. Evidently anticipating such a step, the Russians not long ago secretly acquired a mansion in Grunewald, a prosperous and cosmopolitan neighborhood in the American sector.

PRESENCE. Much to East Germany's irritation, Bonn stresses its ties to West Berlin by maintaining a big governmental presence in the city. The West German bureaucrats, who handle a variety of trade, cultural and administrative matters--including disbursements of the $500 million annual subsidy from Bonn that keeps the city alive--will stay. As a concession to the Soviets, the Allies agreed to bar "official" visits by West German Presidents and Chancellors as well as full-scale meetings of the Bundestag in West Berlin (none have been held there since 1969). But it remains to be decided whether West German political parties will continue to be allowed to hold caucuses and other such activities in the city.

The negotiators were able to reach agreement only by deciding early on that they would not even try to resolve the unresolvable: West Berlin's legal status. Thus the whole city will remain under the "joint occupation" established by the Allied powers in 1944. Every day French, British and American military police will continue to cross into East Berlin to maintain that fiction. Yet the agreement is a considerable victory for the negotiators' pragmatic approach. In essence, the West traded symbolic concessions for the immediate and practical goal of unimpeded access between West Germany and West Berlin. And for the first time, the Soviets and their East German allies have acknowledged in writing West Berlin's intimate economic and cultural ties with West Germany. In that sense, the draft agreement is a plus for the West, neutralizing a pressure point that the Communists have squeezed off and on as their interests required since the Berlin blockade of 1948.

West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who flew back from a North Sea vacation last week for talks on Berlin and the international currency crisis, appeared jubilant over the progress of the negotiations. But his joy could be premature. Moscow may no longer try to root out West Berlin like a "cancerous growth," as Nikita Khrushchev used to put it. But there is a danger that over the next few years the Communists could use what now appear to be slight concessions--such as a Soviet consular presence in West Berlin--to encourage a gradual narrowing of West Germany's involvement in West Berlin, a connection that is the city's economic, and therefore political, lifeline.

Adroit Negotiation. Nonetheless, a final agreement on Berlin could lead within the next two years to a state treaty of some sort between the two Germanys and United Nations representation for both as early as the fall of 1972. More broadly, agreement would clear the way for settling a broad range of issues that now aggravate East-West relations in Europe. West Germany's Brandt, for instance, made it clear to the Soviets that there would be no Ostpolitik without a Berlin agreement. With such an agreement in hand, he could submit to the Bundestag the renunciation-of-force treaties that he negotiated with Moscow and Warsaw last year. That, in turn, would allow the Soviets to press for their much-desired European security conference, through which they hope, among other things, to win Western recognition of East Germany and to formalize the status quo in Eastern Europe.

A final Berlin settlement could also lead to the opening of negotiations between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations on mutual and balanced force reduction in Central Europe. If nothing else, last week's draft agreement demonstrates that the most intractable problems can yield when they are attacked with patient and adroit negotiation.

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