Candy Bombers Over Kuntsevo

File No. 77-B/4. The first C-54 Skymaster arrived over Joseph Stalin’s Kuntsevo Dacha at 0200 hours on June 27, 1948. It was not expected. In Berlin, General Lucius D. Clay, the American military governor, was still waiting for his first shipment of what the press were calling “Operation Vittles.” He would wait some time. The pilot, a Captain Gail Halvorsen, had his orders: deliver the cargo to the designated coordinates, await further instructions. The coordinates had been helpfully updated by a desk clerk in Clay’s office, a man named Henderson, later identified as a GRU asset with a gambling problem and a catastrophic misunderstanding of basic geography. Henderson thought he was diverting a single crate of bourbon to his handler. He had, instead, rerouted the entire Berlin Airlift.

The second plane dropped three tons of Hershey’s chocolate bars, pulverising the premier’s prize-winning black tulips. The third delivered 10,000 sacks of flour, blanketing the dacha and its very surprised guards in a fine white powder that set off a panic about chemical weapons. For ten hours, the full might of the United States Air Force rained CARE packages, powdered eggs, and Wrigley’s chewing gum onto the private gardens of the most dangerous man on Earth. From his window, Stalin watched a planeload of dehydrated potatoes crush his greenhouse. He did not emerge. He did not have to. His chief of security, Nikolai Vlasik, was already on the phone to Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD, describing the attack in terms that curled the telephone wire. Beria, smelling a rival’s fuck-up, was only too happy to agree.

By dawn, it was a competition. Whose incompetence was this, exactly? Georgy Malenkov, Stalin’s deputy, blamed Andrei Zhdanov, the Leningrad party boss, for failing to secure Moscow’s airspace. Zhdanov blamed the Air Defence Forces. The Air Defence Forces, who had reported a flight of “unidentified capitalist delivery-pigeons” and been told to stop drinking on duty, blamed the meteorologists. The only man not blaming anyone was Henderson, the CIA mole, who had been paid his thirty pieces of silver, misinterpreted the panicked screams coming from Berlin as praise, and was at that moment trying to book a flight to Buenos Aires from a payphone. It was a failure of imagination so total, it bordered on art. The West thought they were saving a city; instead, they had catered a paranoid dictator’s personal nightmare.

The official Soviet response was silence, punctuated by the execution of 47 mid-level logistics officers and the entire Moscow weather bureau. At the Kuntsevo Dacha, the cleanup took three weeks and cost 1.2 million roubles. Beria, ever the opportunist, presented Stalin with a freshly baked chocolate cake made from the literal spoils of war and a list of 200 names for ‘prophylactic arrests.’ He was promoted. Halvorsen, the pilot, was quietly reassigned to a weather station in Alaska. And Stalin, it is said, developed a lifelong hatred for chewing gum, the sound of low-flying aircraft, and tulips. The Berlin Blockade was lifted a week later. There was no announcement. It just... stopped. Nobody in the Kremlin wanted to mention Berlin for the next thirty years.