VERNON A. WALTERS
Walters who had been a brilliant military intelligence officer—and is in the Intelligence Hall of Fame—saw the fall of the Berlin Wall coming and had made some preparations. However, no one else in the government paid any attention to his prediction because the CIA and the NSA as well as the DOD Service Military Intelligence units all had nothing suggesting such a possibility in all their reports. They were all relying on spies. But the East Germans and the Russians had no idea that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a possibility, and their assessments said that it was not possible. Our spies reported that and out intelligence agencies assumed that they knew what they were talking about. Walters, however, based his judgment on reading very thoroughly all the publicly available information, and visited the American Zone of Berlin and inspected the Wall, its culture, the reports from the East Germans who had managed to escape, and it was very clear to him.
Vernon A. Walters was a United States Army officer and a diplomat. Most notably, he served from 1972 to 1976 as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, from 1985 to 1989 as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations and from 1989 to 1991 as Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany during the decisive phase of German Reunification. Walters rose to the rank of lieutenant general in the U.S. Army and is a member of the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.
