The Year that Changed the World (16 page)

Miklos Nemeth also flew home from Bucharest to a world markedly different from the one he had left. Suddenly, America woke up.

In early July, President Bush embarked on his first official trip through Eastern Europe. At a reception in Warsaw, he regaled guests with a list of Polish baseball “greats”—Stan Musial, Tony Kubek, Phil Niekro. He went on for half an hour about the American-Polish connection. The next day in Gdansk, the birthplace of Solidarity, he shot V-for-Victory signs and reveled in the crowds and banners reading
DOWN WITH COMMUNISM
and
SOVIETS GO HOME
. We like democracy, he told anyone who would listen. Try it. You'll like it, too.

Writing of the trip in his memoir,
A World Transformed,
Bush noted that “change was in the air” in Poland and Hungary, and that the West had an obligation to act as a “responsible catalyst” in shaping events in Eastern Europe. As they followed the president around Warsaw and Gdansk, many reporters wondered. Baseball greats? Change in the air? The horse was out of the barn. The train had left the station. Communism, by the time Bush visited, was all but officially dead in both Poland and Hungary. To speak of “catalyzing” events that were accelerating faster than any of us could comprehend seemed either arrogant or, worse, out of touch. Naturally, any administration would want to claim a role in such dramatic history. But the facts were otherwise.

At least, that is how I felt at the time. We now know that, during that trip, Bush experienced something of a transformation. Once on the ground, he was quick to grasp the full dimension of what was happening in the East. In Warsaw, he met General Jaruzelski for what was to be a ten-minute tea. It turned into a two-hour heart-to-heart talk. Solidarity's overwhelming victory meant the general might not have the votes to be elected president. He could not bear the humiliation of defeat and was thinking of resigning. That would leave Poland in
potentially severe straits, because oddly enough Jaruzelski had emerged as the one man both Solidarity and the communists trusted enough to lead them through a perilous period. “I told him his refusal to run might inadvertently lead to serious instability and I urged him to reconsider,” Bush wrote in his memoir, conscious of the irony: “Here was an American president trying to persuade a senior Communist leader to run for office.” He also discussed the problem with Solidarity leader Lech Walesa the next day in Gdansk, where he drew a crowd of 250,000 people. His efforts helped. When Bush left for Hungary, James Baker would report, Jaruzelski was positively “beaming.”

In Budapest, on July 13, the political situation was no less delicate. The anticipated flood of East German tourists was beginning. The campgrounds around Lake Balaton were filling up. Publicly, Bush came to Hungary offering a modest package of economic aid and trade concessions. Privately, he thanked Nemeth for all that he had done so far to dismantle the Iron Curtain and spark change at home and across the region. Then the president suggested that the time might not be far off to go even further. “We both knew what he was hinting at,” Nemeth said in a later television interview. “It was very simple. We could feel it in the air. Our East German ‘tourists' were not going to go home.” As the men parted, Nemeth gave Bush a memento—a bit of barbed wire clipped from the Iron Curtain.

The oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, asked why he did what he did, used to reply,
“Il faut aller voir.”
It's necessary to go see. From the moment George Bush set foot in Eastern Europe and saw for himself, U.S. policy perceptibly changed. From a cautious wariness of Gorbachev and his intentions, it morphed into a realization that events had gone well beyond his ability to stop them, even had he wished. The focus quickly became how to help, even how to keep up. Cold War diehards allied with Cheney and others were pushed to the fringe. From then on, “these guys were excluded from the inner circle,” not entirely to be trusted, one White House adviser later told me. The trip also helped pry Scowcroft “out of his box,” the set way of seeing that characterized the conservative general's worldview, according to this official. A policy of engagement, constant communication and partnership with America's European allies—and even, to
a surprising degree, the Soviet Union—became the order of the day. U.S. policy went from out of touch and even obstructionist to a model of restrained, sober and knowing competence, helping to shape the international climate for change and culminating in the brilliant management of something that at this moment still remained almost unthinkable: the fall of the Wall and, in its aftermath, German unification.

Otto von Habsburg, scion of the Austrian monarchy, was driving from Vienna to Budapest, and hence to Debrecen in eastern Hungary, where he would deliver a lecture at the university founded by his father before the First World War. At dinner that night, following his talk, he mentioned how beautiful the border region was. Conversation soon turned to the political changes under way. The Iron Curtain still divided East from West, everywhere but in Hungary. Why not celebrate this fact, a local activist named Ferenc Meszaros suggested.

He meant it as a joke, a sort of conversational lark. Those gathered convivially around the table, wineglasses in hand over a fine meal of game, vied with one another to come up with ever more inventive proposals. Among the more bizarre was to convene a picnic on the Austrian-Hungarian border. There would be a blazing bonfire, complete with a pig roasting on a spit. Hungarians could sit on one side of the border fence, while Austrians sat on the other. They would toss tasty morsels back and forth to one another over the Cold War barrier. What better way to call the world's attention to the unfairness of this ugly geopolitical divide?

Everyone had a good laugh. But ten days later, Meszaros again brought up the idea, this time more seriously, at a meeting of one of Hungary's new political parties, the Democratic Forum. As before, it was treated as a joke by most, but not by a young woman named Maria Filep, who was organizing a political retreat called the Common Fate Camp for students from around the Soviet bloc. Thinking
a picnic would be a fine way to wrap up her program, she and Meszaros set about organizing it.

They settled on a name, place and date—the Pan-European Picnic, to be held in Sopron, Hungary, at 3 p.m. on August 19, 1989—and invited Habsburg and Imre Pozsgay to act as sponsors. For the passionate Pozsgay, the invitation was a godsend. Fresh from his triumph in revising the official history of 1956, he was looking for ways to publicize that Hungary was quietly opening its borders and bolting from the communist bloc. He immediately went to see Nemeth. Right then and there, the two men decided. “That's when we began to make the picnic into something else, something much bigger,” Nemeth told me. “It was to be the solution to our East German problem.”

As anticipated, East German tourists had begun their summer travels. Tens of thousands had already arrived, filling hostels in Budapest and descending on the campgrounds around Lake Balaton; many more thousands would soon follow. Nor had they missed the message in the very public dismantling of the border fence. Since May and early June, hundreds had ditched their cars in fields and woods along the border and hiked toward the frontier with Austria. When caught, they were politely turned back by Hungarian guards, often with a smile suggesting they were free to try again as soon as the patrol had passed. Many of them found their way to the West. But so far, those were an intrepid few. The vast majority of East Germans seemed too frightened to try to escape. For Nemeth and Pozsgay, the challenge was how to embolden them.

So these poor East Germans became pawns in an elaborate plot, one of the most creative geopolitical double games ever played. Under a 1969 treaty, East Germany and Hungary were obliged to honor one another's travel laws. Hungarians enjoyed remarkable freedom; they passed to and from Austria and other European countries largely without restraint. East Germans, by contrast, were confined to the East bloc. The Hungarians could not simply ignore the treaty, throw open their checkpoints and, like pharaoh, let their people go.

Besides, what they were doing was dangerous. Twice in the past year, communist hard-liners made moves to cast out the reformers, once
even contemplating the use of force. Only a few months before, Russian troops had brutally put down pro-democracy movements in Georgia and Uzbekistan. Beijing's Tiananmen Square massacre was a more recent reminder. Immense subtlety was therefore required, and the Pan-European Picnic seemed the perfect instrument. “This invitation gave me a chance to do something quite different, not what the picnic organizers had in mind at all,” Pozsgay said in an interview. “We decided to make the picnic a precedent. We would use it to show that East Germans could freely leave Hungarian territory.”

Officially, the organizers went about planning their picnic. With backing from the sponsors, they put together a group of partners: students, activists from political parties in Sopron such as the Democratic Forum, local environmentalists and civic action societies. They settled on a logo—a white dove breaking through barbed wire (on some, a white rose)—and arranged for food, tents and buses to ferry guests to the site. T-shirts were made, maps were drawn up, invitations went out by fax to national and international media. Radio Free Europe would be there, broadcasting news of the event on its Germanlanguage programs. Western television networks arrived, including many from West Germany, which were viewed daily throughout the German Democratic Republic, as well as in Hungary. Of course, the organizers duly applied for permission from the local authorities, especially the commander of the Sopron border guard. They assumed that Hungarian police would keep a close watch. This was the frontier, after all. But they requested a special dispensation: to symbolically open a border gate that had been closed for the past forty years so that a small number of Austrians who wished to attend the festival could do so and be greeted as they arrived by an even smaller group of official Hungarian delegates.

Behind the scenes, Pozsgay moved to put his parallel plan in place. He telephoned an ally in the government, Interior Minister Istvan Horvath, and told him of the invitation. Then they sat down with Nemeth. Would Horvath please arrange for the border to be opened, as the organizers had requested? “Horvath's involvement was vital,” Nemeth later told me. “He supervised the police and militia. Without his instructions, the whole affair could have ended in tragedy.” They also contacted the head of the Hungarian border guard, Gyula
Kovacs, who relayed the instructions to the commander in Sopron: not only was the border to be opened, but guards were not to be stationed in the immediate vicinity. The only barrier separating Hungary from Austria would be a small mesh net designed to keep wild animals away. All this had to be done in strictest secrecy,” Nemeth recalled. “I did not tell anyone else in the government.”

Then came the master stroke. As the day of the picnic approached, flyers similar to those distributed by the official organizers—but coming from a different source—appeared in the camps where East German vacationers were staying. They were plastered on walls and in hotels, wherever East Germans would see them. Priests holding religious services in the camps helped spread the word; camp managers passed out leaflets. Come one, come all, to the Pan-European Picnic. Eat, drink and be merry. Snip a piece of the Iron Curtain as a souvenir. But be careful not to stray. The border is unguarded. Why, you might stumble into Austria and no one would notice! Handy maps were disseminated that provided directions on how to find one's way on the Austrian side of the border. So as not to “stray,” of course!

Nemeth, Pozsgay and their allies had been attempting to lure East Germans to cross the Hungarian border for months, ever since May 2. They even staged a replay of that telegenic moment, on June 27, when the foreign ministers of Austria and Hungary, Alois Mock and Gyula Horn, met at the border and ceremoniously picked up outsize wire cutters and began snipping at the fence. Never mind that much of it had already been removed. With laughs and handshakes, they handed out bits and pieces as souvenirs for the journalists summoned to witness the occasion. Nemeth later told me he wanted to make sure the world got the message. “Something important is happening,” he sought to say. “Pay attention.”

The Hungarians thought the message was clear. But East Germans still didn't seem to get it. The Pan-European Picnic hence became what an American football quarterback might call a Hail Mary—an all-or-nothing throw downfield, aiming for a touchdown. For the Hungarian conspirators, this translated, essentially, into a plan to lure a bunch of East Germans out of the country, over the border to freedom, in hopes that thousands of others would follow. Nemeth called it “priming the pump.”

Pozsgay organized the operation as secretly and discreetly as possible. Honecker had been increasingly insistent that any East Germans caught trying to cross the border illegally be returned for prosecution. East German secret police had been making themselves ostentatiously visible in the camps around Lake Balaton and the border regions, urging GDR citizens to return home and warning of the penalties of escape, not only for themselves but for their families left behind. Neither Pozsgay nor Nemeth knew whom to trust. Authorities reporting to allies such as Interior Minister Istvan Horvath could most likely be counted on. But in addition to the border police there were armed members of the so-called Workers' Guard, a paramilitary organ of the communist party controlled by conservatives under Karoly Grosz. In a subsequent BBC/Spiegel TV documentary, Pozsgay would describe the picnic as a “nerve-racking operation,” all the more so because it was organized in cahoots with the West German government.

The day of the event, August 19, arrived. In effect, it was two events—the one very public, and the other private. Once combined, their effect was explosive. The official program began around 2 p.m. in Sopron, with a press conference in German, English and Hungarian. Buses then took the delegates and their foreign visitors, including a small army of reporters, to the picnic site. The organizers were aghast. They could barely get near the picnic area. They expected only several hundred people. Ten or twenty times that many showed up. People were everywhere. “A mass of Austrian guests, invited and not invited, had come across the border, rushing through the cornfields, making it impossible for anyone to move about,” one of them recalled. “It was impossible to control such a crowd. No one was expecting anything like this. It was absolute chaos.”