A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  Popov’s first assignment was to the GRU rezidentura in Vienna. In November 1952 he took the incredible risk of dropping an envelope into the automobile of an American diplomat. In Russian, his letter contained an anonymous offer to sell the table of organization of a Soviet armored division, and specified the street corner on which he could be met if American intelligence authorities were interested in the proposition.

  The Vienna plumbing was in place. Because there were obvious risks in meeting an anonymous, alleged Russian at a place of his choosing in the international sector of Vienna, the meeting area was staked out with a protective surveillance—a pair of officers in two radio-equipped vehicles. A shabby Volkswagen stood by, ready to whisk the alleged Russian and Alex, a recently naturalized Russian-speaking contact man, to a safe house in the U.S. district of Vienna. The meeting was recorded and monitored by a case officer and a technician.

  The Russian’s document was obviously authentic, and neither Alex nor our backroom auditors had any doubt that our guest was a Soviet officer. Even better, the Russian’s civilian clothes were strong evidence that he was an intelligence officer. Alex followed his brief perfectly. He convinced the apprehensive Russian that he would have to return to the safe house a week hence. By that time, Alex said, the document would have been evaluated by experts and the requested payment of 3000 Austrian schillings (then $280) approved. Although the Russian gave every indication that he was interested only in a one-time deal, Alex stood firm.

  Within hours after the cable reporting the development reached my office, George Kisevalter, a fluent Russian-speaking case officer, was en route to Vienna. In Washington, we effected a maximum security hold-down on the case, and at the work level knowledge of the operation was literally restricted to a handful of officers. Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner were the only senior officers not directly concerned with the case who had any knowledge of it. I handled every aspect of the operation in Washington.

  It was weeks before Kisevalter was able to gain Popov’s confidence and much longer before he could confidently reconstruct the Russian’s motive for approaching us. It was not, as Popov first insisted, because he needed 3000 Austrian schillings to cover the official funds he had spent carousing. One way or another he could have replaced the money. It was the process of thinking his way through the problem that triggered his bold approach to us.

  Popov was a peasant, and would forever see the world through a peasant’s eyes. Despite the repeated promises of the communist authorities and Stalin to improve peasant life, as far as Popov was concerned nothing had been done. Life in the villages would remain at subsistence level as long as Stalin and the communists retained power. As he moved about in the Soviet-occupied zone of Austria it was immediately apparent—Stalin’s propaganda notwithstanding—that even the poorest Austrian farmer enjoyed a standard of living beyond what any Russian peasant could ever hope to achieve. Popov loathed Stalin, his henchmen, and what he was convinced would be their political legacy. It was because of his conviction that the United States was the only power fully capable of resisting Stalin that Popov came to us.

  The Popov operation ran for some six years, enduring his transfers from Vienna to Moscow, to East Germany, and finally to the GRU headquarters office in East Berlin. By 1958, Popov’s security had eroded. Under deep suspicion, he was recalled from Berlin in 1959 and arrested in November. After a series of counterintelligence moves the KGB brought the Popov operation to term in October when a Moscow CIA contact was seized at a brush meeting with Popov. When a furious attempt to recruit the CIA officer failed, the KGB loosed a blast of publicity, and the case officer was expelled from the USSR. After a secret trial, Popov was executed by a firing squad in June 1960.

  Popov could have escaped with his family at various times after he began his work with us. We never urged him to remain in place, never understated the dangers he was running or the threats to his security, and we frequently reaffirmed our offers of safe haven. Popov was fully cognizant of the dangers he risked. His final reply to an offer of escape is a measure of the man. “I was born a Russian and I will die a Russian. This is one thing those bastards will never take away from this peasant.”

  Pyotr Popov was an outstanding example of the value of an agent in place. For years, he was the best U.S. source of early-warning intelligence. Until he fell under suspicion, Popov single-handedly provided the most valuable intelligence on Soviet military matters of any source available to the United States. His reporting had a “direct and significant influence on the military organization of the United States—its doctrine and tactics—and permitted the Pentagon to save at least 500 million dollars in its scientific research program.”* He identified more than six hundred Soviet intelligence officers, and provided information on hundreds of Soviet agents. As I recall, we budgeted some $400 a month for his wages. Rarely did he accept payment for anything but expenses, nor in a given year was his Agency income as much as $3500.

  As one of my colleagues wrote, “Popov was an imperfect man. He drank too much. He was forgetful. He was bored by what he considered political nuances and he saw the world in black and white. Given the opportunity, he ran breathtaking—in retrospect, almost insane—risks. Although he loved his wife and children, he was hopelessly devoted to a … mistress. But for six years he trundled bales of Top Secret information out of the secret centers of Soviet power. In the process he shattered the Soviet military intelligence service, caused the transfer of the KGB chief (a four-star general and one of the most powerful men in the USSR).”

  Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, the Russian peasant, was an authentic hero.†

  *David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 281.

  †The Popov operation is described in detail in William Hood, Mole (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1993).

  Chapter 13

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  DIGGING IN

  Agent operations were not the only means of penetrating the security defenses of the Soviet Union. There were also technical operations ranging from broken ciphers, which were so important in the defeat of Germany and Japan, to sophisticated electronic eavesdropping, high-altitude aerial reconnaissance, and telephone and mail intercept.

  The spark that kindled one of our most ambitious technical efforts was detected in late 1948, when we noted that the Soviet military, intelligence, and diplomatic headquarters in Germany and Austria were beginning to change from using ultra-high-frequency (UHF) radio transmissions to existing telephone landlines for communication with Moscow. The UHF traffic between Moscow and the Soviet-occupied areas was subject to interception—a passive but relatively inexpensive activity. The intelligence yield was not great, but it did contribute to the order of battle and early warning data we were under pressure to produce. As the UHF traffic dwindled, demand for early warning and other data on the USSR skyrocketed. Our interest in the Soviet landlines intensified.

  By 1951 our research showed that the landlines followed the original conduits established for telephonic traffic before World War I in Austria and Germany. The proximity of these lines to areas in which we might work suggested a long-shot possibility of breaking into the mass of communications between Moscow and the Soviet occupation headquarters in Austria, Germany, and the Central Group of Forces in Hungary. However slight our chances, the potential product of a successful operation appeared to justify an all-out effort.

  Landlines can be intercepted only by tapping the telephone cables. Breaking into the lines—most of which were tucked underground—would be a considerable undertaking, but would have one advantage over radio monitoring. Aside from the enciphered classified messages, there would be a flood of clear text communications transmitted by Teletype and, we hoped, a bounty of telephone chatter from which substantial nuggets might be mined.

  Within the Agency, knowledge of the operations—known as SILVER in Vienna and GOLD in Berlin—was restricted to the officers directly involve
d. In Washington, Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner were fully informed. As Frank’s deputy and chief of operations, I was, in effect, the action officer, and at times dealt with routine matters which in other operations would have been the lot of an officer with a year’s experience under his belt.

  At the time we were getting under way, William K. Harvey was chief of the Counterintelligence Staff. Until his transfer to Berlin, Bill did much of the spadework on the intercept program. He worked closely with Frank Rowlett, an outstanding cryptographic specialist who had transferred to the Agency from the National Security Agency. An early step was the assignment of a communications specialist to Vienna and another to Berlin. The operation was so closely held that in Vienna only the office chief and his deputy were informed. When Bill Harvey took over the Berlin base in 1952 only he and the specialist had full knowledge of the activity.

  Within the Agency offices, cover stories within cover stories had to be invented to explain the presence of the specialists and the various closed doors to their fellow officers.

  Allen Dulles briefed the President, the secretaries of state and defense, and the general commanding the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Before the first on-the-ground action was taken, the ambassador in Bonn and the general commanding the occupation force were briefed. The cooperation at these levels was outstanding.

  The first steps were to identify and recruit agents in East Germany and Austria with access to the telephone routing diagrams showing the lines carrying the important traffic. This is easily said, but it required months to recruit the agents able to produce the data we needed. Had the Russians got a cogent whiff of our interest in the landlines, we would have had no choice but to bring the effort to an end. When the circuits carrying the bulk of Soviet military, diplomatic, and intelligence traffic between the various headquarters in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, and Moscow were identified, inviting targets were uncovered in Vienna and Berlin. Both cities were under Allied and Soviet military occupation at the time.

  We were well along with this research in Austria when our Vienna office learned that the British had independently come upon the same idea and had made considerable progress in tapping into the underground cables. The potential value of the intercept product in Austria and Germany meant there was too much at stake to risk any overlapping effort in such a narrow field. The British agreed, and we each cooperated to the hilt at all times.

  Underground telephone lines are considerably more difficult to break into than those above ground. Landlines are highly vulnerable to moisture, and are routinely monitored with sophisticated devices that immediately pinpoint the slightest break in the cables’ protective conduits. Like firemen responding to a blaze, repair crews dash directly to the spot where trouble is detected. The lines can be intercepted only by cutting into the protective sheath through which the cables run. In the seconds available before the alarm sounds, it takes a highly developed mix of physical dexterity and applied science to fool the sensitive monitoring devices.

  The months of research indicated that the best site for a tap in Berlin lay less than two feet underground, alongside a heavily traveled highway, some three hundred yards within the Soviet-occupied area of Berlin. The highway was regularly patrolled by Soviet military police.

  By 1953, Harvey had settled into Berlin as chief of base. In Berlin, as in Vienna, the necessary plumbing was in place and functioning. By August, Bill had the Berlin plan well in hand. A tunnel, with about 6 feet of head room and 1800 feet long, would be dug from the U.S. sector in Berlin to the buried cables some 900 feet within the Soviet-occupied sector. A spacious building, ostensibly a military warehouse, was constructed to serve as an on-site headquarters and cover the entrance to the tunnel. It would also explain the to and fro of our personnel, and mask the movement of engineering equipment. Before the digging began, experiments in tunnel construction were conducted in New Mexico and in Surrey, England. The disposal of 3200 tons of earth was dealt with in daily increments.

  Ventilation is one of the difficult engineering problems in a long tunnel. Air had to be circulated in and out of the lengthy tunnel. The ventilation problem was compounded by the need to ensure that no noise leak from the tunnel or from the 6-by-8-foot space where taps were close to the surface on the Soviet-patrolled highway.

  Technically, the tap itself represented the greatest security threat to the operation. It was a tribute to the competence of the British technicians that the lines were opened, the taps installed, and everything returned to normal before the Russians noticed any fluctuation in the closely monitored landlines. The tapping was completed in August 1955.

  At the time, this was the most elaborate and costly secret operation ever undertaken within Soviet-occupied territory. Some of the tunnel anecdotes are true. From the outset American personnel, hidden in the apparent “warehouse” and armed with binoculars, maintained a twenty-four-hour-a-day watch of the area stretching from the warehouse to the tap site into the Soviet sector. As dawn broke one morning, the watcher dropped his binoculars, pushed the panic button, and shouted that a dusting of snow was melting on the warm ground above the tunnel. The melted snow marked the tunnel path from the warehouse to the tap site as precisely as if it had been laid by a surveyor’s transit. The crisis was eased when the first half hour of early-morning sunlight melted all of the light snowfall. A few hours later, Harvey had contrived a temporary solution to the problem: in mid-winter and without any explanation, squads of Quartermaster soldiers stripped every available air conditioner from Army premises throughout Berlin.

  There is less that need be said about the cesspool inadvertently breached as the tunnel engineers navigated beneath a bombed-out farm, or the laundry that had to be established in the warehouse to cope daily with the inexplicably soiled clothing of those working underground.

  Despite the number of personnel directly involved in the operation—translators, analysts, case officers, clerical staff, security guards, and consumers—security was maintained within the Agency. At the time, I thought that this number of personnel—each having knowledge of some aspect of the complex activity—was about as extensive as was feasible from a security viewpoint. The difference in this staff—who were security vetted, indoctrinated, and trained in security practices—and those who were later involved in some of the most ambitious covert action operations was profound. There was, for example, no possibility of thoroughly indoctrinating and closely monitoring the security of the hundreds of people involved in the Bay of Pigs paramilitary action.

  The cooperation of senior military personnel in the field and in Washington was impeccable, as it was at the highest levels of the State Department in Washington and abroad. In retrospect, the tunnel was an operational triumph. Bill Harvey, who pushed the operation through its innumerable, and sometimes apparently unsolvable, problems, deserves great credit.

  The operation ran for eleven months and eleven days. On April 22, 1956, the Soviet authorities decided that its exposure would no longer imperil George Blake, a KGB agent in place in one of the most secret sections of the British intelligence service. The fact that Blake was involved in the tunnel operation from the time the first shovel was put to earth has caused a number of writers to believe that the entire intelligence product was tainted with deception, and of trivial value. I disagree.

  By the time the operation was in full swing, the 600 tape recording machines functioning in the “warehouse” were consuming 800 rolls of tape daily—some 1200 hours of recording. In Washington, fifty translators fluent in German, Russian, and sometimes both were employed fulltime. This was in addition to the on-site teams in Berlin and those functioning in the UK. The fact that only three landline cables were tapped is misleading. These three cables contained 172 circuits, each of which was capable of simultaneously carrying eighteen separate channels. At full blast, 3214 lines could be recorded.

  The value of the intelligence that poured out of the tunnel was such that for two years after the site was closed, analysts an
d reports officers were still involved in processing the take. Trivial it was not.

  Our most optimistic estimates were fulfilled twenty times over. A valuable by-product of the torrent of clear text, routine administrative communications, was floods of chitchat. At the lowest level, some lonely communications clerks were gossips, regularly swapping small talk with their distant colleagues. Even more rewarding were the man-to-man exchanges between senior Soviet officers who were convinced that they were far too intelligent and disciplined ever to disclose anything of possible interest to any potential eavesdropper. Little did they know. Their unvarnished comments on the quality of Soviet military equipment, the intellectual capacity of fellow officers, and the wisdom of Moscow’s military policies were in more than one sense priceless. SILVER and GOLD proved to be apt cryptonyms.

  The tunnel data provided detailed information on the Soviet army and air force, weapons, equipment, plans, combat readiness, personnel, and administration. Information on KGB and GRU officers and assignments was regularly sifted from the mass of recorded material. The tapped lines gave uniquely candid glimpses of the opinions, character, and professional inclinations of many of the most senior officers in the Soviet military establishment. This one project fulfilled intelligence requirements that could not possibly have otherwise been satisfied. Because the bulk of the data was fundamental to any assessment of the Soviet military establishment, it remained valuable for a decade and more.