To help them transmit their messages, they received instructions about codes and ciphers, as well as how to operate a radio transmitter. All spies were given a well-conceived legend, or cover story. They learned how to use their cover story and fake identity cards. The students at the Farm learned other practical skills, like how to pick a lock, how to parachute safely, and how to inflate a rubber boat, often their means of entering a country or leaving it.
Since the agents would be working behind enemy lines, they were schooled in sabotage. They learned how to use explosives to destroy locomotives, power-plant turbines, communication centers, and telephone systems. They learned to disable railroad cars by removing the grease in the gearboxes and by putting sugar in gasoline tanks to destroy engines.
Of course, no schooling is complete without a final exam, and the Farm was no exception. Each of the aspiring spies had to prove to their instructors that they could survive and gather meaningful intelligence. Each was given an assignment that involved working for one week as an undercover agent in a U.S. area that was similar to one controlled by the Allies, such as England, and conduct a brief mission gathering intelligence or creating an opportunity for sabotage. One assignment — or scheme, as it was known — called for a team of three agents to work in one of the East-Coast industrial cities that was not too far from the Farm: Baltimore, Richmond, or Philadelphia. The team was to find a defense plant that was guarded by the FBI and “blow it up.” Actually, they had to breach plant security and place a note on the plant’s main boiler that said, “This is a bomb.” Once they were safely away from the factory, they called the FBI and reported their “bomb.” Some of the teams that were unsuccessful in their sabotage were punched and beaten before the FBI agents called OSS to see if the “saboteurs” were really working for the OSS.
Another scheme was more complicated. Using false identity cards produced at the Farm, agents were expected to get inside secure defense plants or similar sensitive operations. Once inside, they were to get their hands on some sensitive information, sneak it out of the plant, and transmit the secret material to colleagues in code.
One agent acquired letterhead stationery from a famous Hollywood studio and wrote a letter to the manager of a steel mill, explaining that the agent was interested in making a short film about the contribution that the plant was making to the war effort. When the agent showed up at the steel mill, he invited the manager and his wife to dinner. As the agent said years later, “He wined and dined me, I wined and dined him.” No one bothered to check his credentials to make sure that he was, in fact, representing the movie studio.
A group of agents-in-training was sent to Baltimore. As trainee Ed Weismiller put it, “We were simply to come back with as much information as we could about what was going on that had to do with the war effort. If we got in trouble, they didn’t know us.” Weismiller decided to visit the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad yard, figuring there would be plenty of war-related activities there.
He arrived at the yard, confident of his legend. He played the part of a writer. “With any lie,” he said, “you learned to make it as close to the truth as possible.” The B&O officials were pleased that he’d chosen to write about their railroad. They asked for his ID, which was normally prepared by a railroad security officer. Acting embarrassed, he told them that he had spilled coffee on it (and on his shirt). He had changed his shirt, but he’d neglected to pick up his ID. But he promised to bring it with him the next day. The ID was never mentioned again.
After deftly handling the problem with his ID card, Weismiller had the run of the facilities. In fact, he was given a car and a driver, as well as a photographer to work with him. According to Weismiller, when the trio arrived at a secure area, he was told that, although he wasn’t supposed to be in such an area, “surely there’s no harm” if he looked around. Weismiller recalls collecting “notebooks full of information” that he should not have had access to. One lesson he learned: “Just being a nice guy could get you into the most sensitive areas.” He returned to the Farm and shocked everyone with his stack of intelligence. Weismiller had passed his final exam.
When World War II ended in Europe in 1945, the victorious Allies, as part of the peace treaty, divided Germany into four parts — one each for the United States, England, France, and Russia. The Soviet Union gained control of the eastern part of the country, while the other three Allied nations controlled the western part. (Eventually these sections became East Germany and West Germany, respectively.) This division of the country was also duplicated in the capital city of Berlin, with the Allied section in the western part of the city and the Soviet section in the east.
But Berlin was deep in the Soviet section of Germany. Although the Russians agreed to the division of Berlin in 1944, they refused to assure that the Americans, French, and British would be allowed to enter the city. Tension between the two sides escalated until June 1948, when the Soviets blocked all western access to the capital. In this first real crisis of the Cold War, the West was not going to be denied by the Soviets. Since such tension was typical in the divided city, it should come as no surprise that Berlin in the early 1950s was a city of intrigue, espionage, and danger.
An uneasy peace prevailed between the Russians and the other Allies, but each side was suspicious of the other. The United States wanted desperately to know what the Soviets were thinking. The big fear for the U.S. was that the Soviets would attack West Germany without warning, or in diplomatic language, with “a cold start.” The U.S. knew that the Soviets possessed nuclear weapons. Would they use them on the West? This question and others would need to be answered by U.S. intelligence agents.
The U.S. recognized that the best intelligence was firsthand intelligence, like that gathered through decrypted messages. Intercepted messages provided information that was not colored by the spy who gathered it. Having no success planting a spy in East Berlin, U.S. intelligence was at a loss about how to penetrate the Soviet sector of the city. So, in February 1954, members of the CIA met with members of MI6, Britain’s intelligence agency, at a posh London townhouse. Among those present at the meeting were Peter Lunn, head of MI6’s Berlin station; George Blake, a member of MI6’s Y Section, which concentrated on the Soviet threat; and William King Harvey, the CIA’s head of station in Berlin.
After much discussion, the conversation turned to the idea of digging a tunnel to reach and tap the Soviet phone lines in Berlin. Some historians credit Harvey with the brainstorm, but the British must have had a hand in it as well. In 1949 the British had executed Operation Silver in Vienna when Peter Lunn was the British head of station. They had dug three tunnels to tap the Soviet lines. The longest tunnel in Operation Silver was only seventy feet long. The one in Berlin would need to be twenty times longer.
Never short on self-assurance, the rotund Harvey would direct the digging of a similar tunnel in Berlin, a project in which the British SIS would assist. The U.S. would be responsible for digging the tunnel itself, and the British would dig the vertical shaft to reach the cables that were the target of the operation. They would also provide an expert to connect the actual tap. The CIA called its part of the operation Gold. The British called their part Stopwatch.
The CIA planning was extraordinary. Questions were asked. Problems were anticipated, solutions suggested. With information provided by an informant in the Soviet state-run telephone operation, the U.S. knew that the spot they needed to reach with the tunnel was under Schönefelder Chaussee, a major highway that ran along the southern edge of Berlin. Running along the highway was a fence that separated the Soviet sector from the American sector. On the other side of the fence lay a large vacant lot that would be the starting point of the Berlin tunnel. The U.S. Corps of Engineers would build three large warehouses on this property, and from inside one of the warehouses they would begin digging the tunnel. To reach the target beneath Schönefelder Chaussee, the tunnel needed to be about 1,500 feet long, roughly as long as five football fields. E
ngineers figured that a six-foot-high tunnel of that length would displace about three thousand tons of sandy soil.
The planning reached this point before someone asked how they would dispose of so much soil. Trucking it out would arouse the curiosity of the suspicious Soviet guards patrolling along the fence. Then someone at the meeting said, half in jest, that they should dig a hole and bury it. But how can you bury a mountain of soil? Before long, the army engineers came up with a plan that would allow them to do just that. And it would involve one of the other of the three warehouses.
Construction work on the warehouses began in December 1953. The U.S. made no attempts to disguise their building project. In fact, they even hired German contractors to do some of the work. There was nothing unusual about two of the buildings, but on the roof of the warehouse closest to the road, the U.S. installed a set of parabolic antennas to create the impression that it was a listening post, thus offering an explanation for the barbed-wire-topped fence that enclosed the property. This building also had a full cellar hole dug. The engineers explained to the German workers that the deep cellar would give them extra storage space. In reality, what the engineers planned to store in the cellar was three thousand tons of soil!
To make sure that the design of the tunnel was sound, the Army Corps of Engineers built a 450-foot tunnel with the same design at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. The digging went well, but to ensure that the longer tunnel in Berlin would hold up, the army decided to line it with six-foot curved steel plates that engineers used in building huge dams in the western United States.
By September 1954, the warehouse construction was complete. The digging equipment was ready. So were the men who were going to work on the tunnel for the next four months. The first step in the operation was to dig a vertical shaft eighteen feet across and twenty feet deep. From the end of the shaft, the engineers turned east and dug a six-and-a-half-foot-high horizontal tunnel. They dug with hand tools, advancing slowly, erecting slats along the way to prevent a cave-in. When one section of the tunnel was dug, the slats were removed and the tunnel was reinforced with 125 tons of three-inch-thick curved steel plates, jammed into place, then bolted together. To strengthen the tunnel, a thousand cubic yards of concrete had been pumped into the space between the steel plates and the dirt walls.
The Americans knew that the Soviets were watching them as the warehouses were being built, so they needed to be careful not to do anything that would tip off the Soviets to the true purpose of the construction. Before the digging had progressed very far, someone raised a security issue: what would happen if the Soviets noticed that the “engineers” who were working on the project, emerged from the buildings covered in dirt? Would that be a red flag for the Soviets? The U.S. wasn’t taking any chances. They had a washer and a dryer installed in the warehouse so the diggers could wash their uniforms before leaving the warehouse.
The next problem that the diggers faced involved the water table, the point where the ground becomes saturated with water. Engineers calculated where the tunnel could extend without the danger of hitting the water table. But when water started seeping into the tunnel, they knew that they had miscalculated. The tunnel needed to be elevated enough to avoid the possibility of flooding. But such a maneuver would bring the tunnel uncomfortably close to the road. The decision was made to continue. The project had gone too far to stop.
Finally, on February 28, 1954, the tunnel was complete. When the diggers reached the spot directly below their target cables, they had removed 3,100 tons of dirt and completed a 1,476-foot tunnel. But completion brought a new worry: what if noise from the activity in the tunnel reached the street? After all, the tunnel was only eighteen inches below the surface of Schönefelder Chaussee. Solution: the tunnel was lined with sandbags to muffle any sounds. The sandbags also offered a convenient shelf to hold power and signal cables.
Then it was time for SIS to do their part. It took the British eighteen days to complete their work digging the “tap chamber,” a small room where the cables would actually be tapped. A reinforced concrete roof was added to the room to prevent the roadway from breaking through under the weight of passing traffic. When the chamber was sound, SIS agent John Wyke took over. Those who worked with Wyke remembered him as a smooth ballroom dancer and quite the ladies’ man. But MI6 also knew him to be a veteran of many missions for the SOE, having worked in the Middle East for most of the war. Most important for this operation, John Wyke was the SIS’s phone tapping expert.
Wyke’s work was always delicate and demanding, more so in the damp and confined space. Gently and carefully, Wyke scraped the dirt until he found the three cables encased in black rubber and, he believed, pressurized by nitrogen, a common practice in the 1950s to keep moisture out of cables. He knew that once he cut through the rubber sheathing on the cables, the nitrogen would escape. The resulting drop in pressure would be detected by the Soviets. The engineers solved this potential problem by building a concrete barrier with a steel door to pressurize the tap chamber and separate it from the pre-amp room. (It turned out that the cables were not pressurized.)
Wkye next attached wires to the exposed cable — probably with alligator clips — and began to draw power from the cables. Once again, the work called for a deft hand. If he drew off too much power, the Soviets would be sure to notice it. As expected, Wkye did a masterful job, and the tapping began on May 11, 1955.
Because the signals coming from the taps were weak, they needed to be amplified. So from the tap chamber they were fed into the next section of the tunnel, which was filled with delicate electronic equipment. (This heavy equipment was moved slowly down the tunnel by a forklift with a converted electric motor over wooden tracks.) The near end of the pre-amp chamber was fitted with a torch-proof steel door set in a thick concrete wall. The door was alarmed and fortified with a lock and a slide bar. Near the door hung a sign that read ENTRY IS FORBIDDEN BY ORDER OF THE COMMANDING GENERAL. Bill Harvey made it policy that the door was to be locked at all times except when people were in the chamber. A telephone connected the chamber to the operation center in the warehouse.
The scope of the operation is staggering. The three cables, carrying 1,200 communication channels, yielded over 50,000 reels of recording tape, or, put another way, twenty-five tons of tape. These tapes were flown to London for analysis. At its peak, the SIS Main Processing Office in London employed three hundred workers who recorded 75,000 conversations and fully transcribed 17,000 of them. The daily output of printed transcript pages, if bound into books, would make a stack 10 feet wide, 15 feet deep, and 8 feet high! The Washington, D.C., team recorded 18,000 six-hour tape reels of German Teletype messages. Each tape could hold more than two hundred hours of messages.
But as Allen Dulles, director of the CIA at the time of the tunnel construction, wrote in The Craft of Intelligence, “Most intelligence operations have a limited span of usefulness. . . . This is assumed when the project starts.” He and the operatives had no idea, of course, how long the tunnel’s usefulness would last. Its lifespan turned out to be eleven months and eleven days.
On April 22, 1958, Bill Harvey woke to the sound of his telephone ringing. As soon as he heard the words, “We’ve got a problem,” he bolted from bed and raced to the warehouse and into the tunnel. The Soviets had discovered the tunnel. All the technicians had been evacuated from their posts at the first sign of trouble.
While the Soviets toiled for ten hours to batter their way into the tap chamber, Harvey ordered sandbags and barbed wire to be piled up where the tunnel crossed into the American sector of Berlin. Harvey hurriedly scribbled out a sign in German on a scrap of cardboard that read, You are now entering the American sector. When the sign was propped up on the sandbags, he ordered his men to set up a heavy machine gun. Although the gun was not loaded, he hoped that it would deter any enemy soldiers who were tempted to explore beyond the barricade. To add to the scene, Harvey crouched behind the machine gun.
At three o’clock that afternoon — nearly fourteen hours after the tunnel was discovered — Harvey heard footsteps approaching from the direction of the tap chamber. Before the Soviet soldiers could spot the barricade and sign, Harvey yanked back the bolt of the machine gun. Its unmistakable metallic sound echoed down the tunnel, stopping the soldiers in their tracks. After a brief pause, they retreated down the tunnel. Within thirty minutes the Soviets had cut the tap cables. One of the linguists muttered, “It’s gone.” Indeed, it was. After running for eleven months and eleven days, Operation Gold/Stopwatch was finished.
What the CIA and SIS did not know is that George Blake, the SIS agent who had arrived to work at the Berlin station, was a Soviet mole. Blake was the Y Section agent who attended the February 1954 MI6–CIA meeting in London. Two days after the meeting, Blake met with his Soviet handler. As Blake later wrote, “I handed to him film of the minutes taken at the meetings together with the accompanying sketches and plans which I had been able to photograph in my office during lunchtime the previous day.” Blake also reported that his handler was impressed by the scope and boldness of the plan. In fact, the handler “asked me to meet him again soon so that we could discuss it in more detail and I could keep him informed of any fresh developments.”
The Dark Game Page 10