WARREN - Whenever retired U.S. Army Col. Bob Mangold had someone new working in his intelligence office, he'd make them get in a car and drive out to look at the Berlin Wall.
Mangold, of Cortland, said he did this for the 50-or-so military linguists working under him in the Berlin office of the Joint Refugee Operations Center because it was sobering.
Seeing the wall up close with bricked-up buildings embedded in its western face, with the shards of broken glass sticking out of the top to deter escape, with the East German guards patrolling with orders to shoot defectors on sight gave his staff the proper context for their job of interrogating people who made it across.
''When you walked up to that, or drove by it, for a military person, it meant to me that this was serious business. Those folks on the other side meant business. You can't take any chances, and you have to be on your guard,'' the 66-year-old Cortland resident said Sunday.
The wall, which was a daily reality of Mangold's life from 1972 to 1975, came down 20 years ago today, after being erected in the early 1960s. Berlin was also a special case during the Cold War, occupied by both the Allies and Soviets, with different zones in each, but it was smack in the middle of East Germany, which was created when the victorious Allied and Soviet forces divided the country after World War II.
East German leaders decided to wall off the two halves of Berlin because of a flood of people who were crossing into West Berlin. Guards were ordered to shoot to kill anyone trying to cross, and people did anything to get over or under the wall.
''Younger people would try to escape,'' Mangold said.
He recalled one case in which twin brothers living on the eastern side of the wall dug a tunnel from their home into the United States sector of Berlin. When this happened, the police would pick them up and take them to Mangold's office, where interrogators would question them to find out who they were.
He wanted to be clear during the interview that he adhered to Army guidelines on interrogation, stating that he never resorted to tactics such as sleep deprivation or torture. Citizens gambling with their lives by trying to make it over the wall were resettled in Western Germany, he said, and both civilians and military personnel from the other side were valuable.
"(We questioned them on) the whole gamut of subjects, from their economic and industrial capabilities to social problems. You were interested in the whole, on everything you could find out,'' Mangold said.
The information would be passed on up the lines through the military and the Central Intelligence Agency. They were interested in piecing together a holistic snapshot of what life was like on the other side of the wall. Mangold's view of the eastern end extended as far as his line of sight from platforms that were built higher than the wall on the Western end of Berlin.
Mangold's glimpses into the other side of the Cold War conflict were sometimes eerie. He said one of the young border guards made it over to the other side after a dash through the checkpoint. The guard was found in his uniform, hiding in a hut in Western Berlin.
''How he made it, I'll never know ... The CIA ultimately took him,'' Mangold said.
Other defectors were not so lucky. Mangold said some of those who were shot attempting to cross the wall were left to slowly die where they fell.
In 1989, as one East Bloc government after another fell, the case was the same in East Germany, which led to the demise of the wall.
Leo Nypaver of Howland served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Berlin in 1948, before the Wall was built, but during the Berlin Airlift, when RAF and United States Air Force cargo planes kept the city supplied with food after Soviet forces tried to force the Allies out with a blockade of the city.
Nypaver helped to build an airfield at one of the city's airports to help accommodate more planes. He said there were so many flights that the constant drone of aircraft engines was in the background.
The city had still not dug out from the effects of six years of aerial bombardment in World War II and heavy combat in the last days of the war, when it was taken by the Soviets.
''There was rubble everywhere,'' Nypaver said. ''We used the rubble for the runways.''
Nypaver said he saw the wall while he was on vacation in Germany in 1986 with his wife. He said he could see the gun turrets on the walls manned by a special branch of the East German armed forces, who kept watch over the border.
Twenty years ago today, Mangold remembers breathing "a great sigh of relief" when he heard the news that the wall was coming down.
"It meant freedom for all those people and it lessened the possibility of war," he said.
Mangold said, on the 20-year anniversary of the wall's fall, he wanted people to remember everyone who tried making it across and could not.
