Fighting Over a Few Words

It was on a sweltering August night ten years ago last week that steel-helmeted East German troops poured out of trucks all along the 25-mile border between East and West Berlin. In a matter of hours, the Communist soldiers had thrown up the hideous concrete-block wall that became the instant symbol of cold war realities. The Western capitals were paralyzed; to respond would be to risk thermonuclear war. Yet in accepting the Berlin Wall, the West was forced to live with the fact that families would be divided and a whole people would be left with no exit. That a city of 3,000,000--2,000,000 of them sealed in the Western sector --should be slashed in two by wire and watchtowers still seems fantastic. But to Berliners the barrier has become oddly familiar, a topic of conversation only on the still frequent occasions when a would-be escapee is shot down while trying to make it to the West.*

Though the Berlin Wall may have become a permanent fixture, West Berlin's role as a pressure point in East-West relations may be coming to an end. Last week, after three days of marathon talks that ran for a total of 23 hours in West Berlin, the Big Four ambassadors (U.S., France, Britain and Soviet Union) were tantalizingly close to a broad agreement that would resolve important aspects of the long unsettled status of the isolated city. Washington officials caution that "while we are fighting over relatively few words, they're very important words." The negotiations will resume briefly this week, and could result in final agreement then or when they are reconvened in mid-September.

The 17-month-old talks went into high gear last May, when the Soviets unexpectedly agreed to guarantee free access to West Berlin by rail and autobahn from West Germany, 110 miles away. Currently, the conferees are hung up on a few key details--precisely what the Soviets mean by "unimpeded" access to West Berlin, what political role Bonn will be permitted to play in the city, and whether the Soviets should be allowed to establish a consulate there.

Soviet Ambassador Pyotr Abrasimov's pithy reports on the progress of the secret sessions ("What is long is good"; "Where there are roses, there are also thorns") have won him a reputation among newsmen as the leading epigrammarian among the Big Four. At the end of last week's three-day session he said only, "No comment." When Abrasimov is ready to be more specific, it may well indicate that a historic agreement has been struck.

*So far, fewer than 5,000 have succeeded, and 65 are known to have died trying.

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