NATO had established a new Situation Center at its headquarters in Belgium, to monitor crises and ensure allied preparedness. In the middle of the night between August 20 and 21, 1968, the Situation Center was quiet. At 2:09 a.m. the Associated Press put out a „flash“ report on its wire service announcing that Warsaw Pact tanks were rolling into Prague. The Situation Center remained quiet. The one teleprinter was out of order. Although several national capitals were aware of the invasion, they did not inform anyone at NATO. At 3:15 a.m., the duty officer at SHAPE, eighty-five kilometers away, called his colleagues at the Situation Center. Only then did the Situation Center rouse NATO’s senior officials. The officials did not arrive at the center until 4:15 a.m., and the NATO delegations were not advised of the conflict until 5:00 that morning.
NATO’s Situation Center was set up to receive information from SHAPE but also from national ministries. It was to collate this information and distribute it to all the national delegations, allied capitals, and major NATO commanders. But the allies had not alerted NATO when they learned of the invasion; the national intelligence authorities on which NATO relied for its intelligence had not passed on word; and NATO’s radar network had failed to spot Soviet aircraft entering Czechoslovakia. For the first twelve hours of the crisis, NATO headquarters „functioned almost entirely on press reports.”
—Timothy A. Sayle, Enduring Alliance, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 160-161.
