News was trickling out about the new Communist challenge in Berlin, even though, in the untidy way of information-gathering, few people, even on the spot, were sure exactly what that challenge consisted of.A little later that same Saturday night, John C. Ausland, duty officer for the Berlin Task Force at the State Department, was woken by his bedside phone at his home in Washington. On the line was the night officer from the department’s recently established operations centre. The man informed Ausland that garbled news about some kind of Communist move in Berlin was starting to come over the wire services’ teletype network. There was talk of sector border crossings’ being ‘blocked’, but it was not clear what this entailed. Temporary restrictions by the East of cross-sector traffic within Greater Berlin had happened before, of course. Ausland told his caller to stay in touch and went back to sleep.Around four a.m. Washington time on Sunday—already ten in the morning in West Berlin—the night-duty man called Ausland back.
