ON New Year’s Eve in 1984, a small group of U.S. soldiers decided to exploit the Soviet weakness for drunken revelry to get as close as they could to a T-80 tank in East Germany. The men weren’t out on their own inebriated lark—they were part of a top-secret mission behind the Iron Curtain. A reporter once claimed that an Army major, Arthur Nicholson, was among them, though former colleagues insist he wasn’t. It hardly matters. The result was an intelligence coup for the U.S., as one of the soldiers not only observed the Soviet tank but also sneaked inside and photographed its interior. Nicholson certainly knew about the operation, even if he wasn’t directly involved. Within three months, however, he would be dead—very possibly as the victim of Soviet retaliation.
The name of the first man to die in the Cold War is well known, for better or worse. John Morrison Birch of Georgia was a Baptist missionary in China who assisted Lt. Col. James Doolittle after his daring bomber raid on Japan in 1942. Birch later enlisted as an intelligence officer; Chinese Communists executed him within days of Japan’s surrender. In 1958, he became the namesake of the John Birch Society, a fringe group that saw Red everywhere it looked.
Comments