ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

of the occupying powers but in practice promised to be extremely complicated. We
would have had to set up a court, fly in judges, and so on. In the end, we decided it was
easier to hand the hijackers over to the Germans for punishment. But the punishment was
light enough that hijackers kept coming, and the Polish authorities were very frustrated
by their inability to stop this. They started putting undercover air marshals on LOT
flights, sometimes several on a flight, and usually the air marshals themselves were very
tempted to stay in the West, if only because they were in big trouble for allowing the
hijacking to happen.
There were many emotional experiences at these all-night sessions with people who
suddenly found themselves in the West and faced the unexpected decision of whether to
stay or go back to Poland. These were ordinary Poles who happened to be on the airplane
but once they were in our sector, they knew that if they chose to stay we would allow
them to do so. Sometimes you could see families debating through the night what to do
because it was clearly a momentous life decision. Quite a few chose to stay, though I do
not have the statistics. This was primarily on the commercial flights that came in. We
also had some hijackings by people who would take crop dusters or similar small aircraft
and just fly out. One fellow got an old plane somewhere, painted red stars on it so that it
wouldn't be shot down, and used a roadmap to find Berlin, flying just several hundred
feet above the road. The ingenuity was amazing.
One interesting thing in my dealings with the Soviets that I forgot to mention consisted of
visits to their Embassy in East Berlin. The Embassy was and remains still this huge
building on the famous avenue Unter den Linden. Once my Soviet counterpart gave me a
tour of the building, starting with an enormous marble staircase in the lobby. He asked
me: “Do you know where that marble comes from?” I said, “No.” He said, “Well, that is
marble that Hitler was taking to Moscow to build a monument celebrating his victory
over the Soviet Union. We brought it back here and made it into the staircase of the
Soviet Embassy in Berlin.” I don't know if that's an apocryphal story or not. It sounds
apocryphal, but it’s also very Soviet. There was also a chair in a reception room on the
second floor where some visitors were taken. It was an old leather chair, and he told me
to sit in it and asked, “Do you know what chair that is?” And I said, “No.” He said,
“Well, that was Hitler's favorite chair from the Reichskanzlei.” I mean, a lot of people
would not be proud to have Hitler's chair or to put you into Hitler's chair but clearly the
Soviets took pride in this, an ever present reminder of how they had beaten the Nazis.
Q: Did you get any sense from the diplomats you dealt with that things were beginning to
loosen up in the Soviet Union?
PERINA: Not really, and the developments in Poland suggested the opposite. But one
thing that I began to perceive and that really became apparent in my next assignment at
NATO was how very scared the Soviets were becoming of American technological
know-how, and particularly of SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative). This was about the time
that SDI was coming into the news as part of Reagan's plan to make nuclear weapons
obsolete. It was, of course, very controversial, with much debate on whether it was really
possible to build a shield against nuclear attack that would take away the threat of nuclear
38