The Dark Game

by Paul B. Janeczko

  Not only did Blake keep the Soviets current on the tunnel, but he also continued to work for them until he was arrested by British intelligence agents in 1961. After serving almost six years of his forty-two-year sentence, he escaped. The Soviets smuggled him out of England, and he eventually wound up living in Moscow.

  The question remains: since the Soviets knew about the tunnel, why did they let it go on for nearly a year before making a big show of “discovering” it? And if they knew the Americans were tapping their communications, were they simply feeding the CIA disinformation? And if they were, how could the project have been worth its $25 million to $30 million price tag?

  As you might expect, there are many divergent assessments of the success of the operation. One Western intelligence officer called it a “bonanza to Western counterintelligence specialists.” But a CIA operative of the era offered his opinion of the intelligence gathered via the tunnel: “Whether it was sexy, hold-your-breath data, I tend to doubt it.”

  There are theories as to why the Soviets did not “discover” the tunnel sooner. One likely answer is that they waited until Blake was reassigned by MI6 to London in order to protect him from being found out. Since Blake knew about the tunnel from the first day of its planning and was in Berlin while the tunnel was being dug, fingers would soon point to him as a Soviet mole. The KGB did not want to lose Blake. Some historians feel that the KGB waited because they actually wanted the Americans to hear their transmissions, as a way to let it be known that Russia had no intention of invading Germany and going to war with the U.S.

  On balance, however, some valuable information was gathered from the tapped conversations. The U.S. learned, for example, a great deal about the Soviet and Eastern European order of battle, or its military organization. Others feel that the intelligence was valuable to check against similar information obtained from other sources. Tim Weiner in his recent history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, writes that “The evidence suggests that the CIA gained two invaluable and untainted kinds of knowledge from the taps. The agency learned a basic blueprint of the Soviet and East German security systems, and it never picked up a glimmer of warning that Moscow intended to go to war.”

  The Berlin tunnel did not alter the course of the Cold War, despite the efforts of the Soviet propaganda frenzy. In 1961, the Soviets built the Berlin Wall, separating East Berlin from West Berlin. The wall, and the Cold War, lasted nearly thirty more years, until 1989. On November 9, after a peaceful demonstration against the totalitarian government, East Germans began tearing down the wall. Unlike in the past, however, the Soviets did not intervene with force. Mikhail Gorbachev, the reform-minded head of the USSR, decided that the problem of reuniting Germany was best left to the German people.

  DURING THE COLD WAR, U.S. code breakers worked diligently at Arlington Hall, Virginia — a former girls school across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. — on intercepted Soviet messages, knowing that breaking a code is usually the product of hard work, playing hunches, and a little luck. Such was the case when Cecil Phillips, a code breaker at Arlington Hall, realized that the messages were double-enciphered. In other words, the message was enciphered, and then that enciphered message was again enciphered by another method, called a one-time pad. Each sheet in the pad was filled with columns of random five-digit numbers that the sender and receiver of a secret message would use to add another layer of difficulty to their messages.

  To use a one-time pad, a sender enciphers a message by “translating” each word of the message, called the plaintext, into a group of five-digit “words” that are found in his codebook. Let’s say that the first word in the plaintext is EXTREME, and the codebook’s equivalent is 37857. If the sender stopped there, that in itself would present a tough but breakable system for the code breakers. But here’s where the one-time pad is used. The “word” 37857 is added to the first group of random digits on the one-time pad, say 11961. The addition of those two numbers was made using what is called Fibonacci arithmetic, in which numbers greater that 9 are not carried over. So, 37857 + 11961 = 48718, and that is what the sender transmits as the first word of the message. If the next “word” of the plaintext message is 65237 (for DANGER), that number is added to the second group of random numbers on the one-time pad, and so on through the entire message. When the sender and receiver of a secret message were finished with their work, the sheet they used for it was destroyed, thus creating an unbreakable code. The next sheet was used for the next message, and so on.

  In Spycatcher, Peter Wright, former assistant director of MI5, offers a “very close approximation of the kind of challenge we were faced with” at Arlington Hall:

  After deciphering many intercepts, Arlington Hall created a long list of code names and tradecraft words, such as:

  ARSENAL: U.S. War Department

  BABYLON: San Francisco

  THE BANK: Department of State

  BOAR: Winston Churchill

  CARTHAGE: Washington, D.C.

  COUNTRY: United States

  ISLAND: Great Britain

  KAPITAN: President Roosevelt

  PUT ON ICE or IN COLD STORAGE:

  deactivate an agent

  As the drama of the Berlin tunnel played out, there were people in the U.S. government who continued to see the Soviet Union as a threat to the United States. Influenced by Soviet propaganda and scant factual evidence, parts of the U.S. government were convinced that there was a “bomber gap” between Russia and America. They believed that the Soviets possessed a large fleet of long-range bombers that could reach America’s shores and wipe out U.S. cities and military installations. Those who believed in this wide imbalance in offensive weapons were pressing President Dwight Eisenhower to do something about it. Eisenhower, never convinced that such a bomber gap existed, nevertheless agreed that the military did need credible evidence about the military capabilities of the Soviet Union. At the same time, he believed in working for better relations with the Soviets.

  In April 1953, the RAND Corporation, a Washington, D.C., think tank, issued an impact report that stated “the enemy will have the capability that many in the U.S. military and intelligence communities already believe, that the U.S. has not kept pace with advances in military technologies.” Further, the study reported that the United States suffered from gaps in intelligence gathering. “Our intelligence tells us essentially nothing” about Soviet plans and capabilities, the report declared. To avoid “another Pearl Harbor,” the United States needed to begin to close the intelligence gap as quickly as possible. Richard Helms, former CIA director, recalled that there was “an extraordinary absence of knowledge” in the intelligence committee about the Soviet military. Lawrence Houston, the CIA’s general counsel at the time, recalled later that the lack of intelligence “was just appalling.” To make matters worse, the world learned that the Soviets had tested its first thermonuclear bomb on August 12, 1953.

  It was in this atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that Eisenhower gave permission in 1954 for the CIA to design and build a spy plane. He gave this order with reluctance, fearing that such a spy plane could actually precipitate a Soviet attack. The group that would execute the project consisted of many of the country’s brightest engineers, scientists, businessmen, and government officials. They set up shop in Burbank, California, at Lockheed Aircraft Company. Before long, the group referred to its offices and labs in an aircraft hangar as Skunk Works because they had to keep everybody away from their work.

  The men of Skunk Works decided that if the spy plane had any chance of avoiding detection as it flew its secret missions, it needed to fly high enough and fast enough to avoid Soviet surface-to-air missiles and any fighter planes sent to intercept it and shoot it down. Of course, it needed a sophisticated camera system that would take the pictures that would provide reliable intelligence. Last, the plane needed to be designed, built, and tested as quickly as possible and in utmost secrecy. In short, the design group set out to build the most advanced es
pionage device ever created. If they could do it, the plane could very well prevent war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

  The task before Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson, a brilliant airplane designer for Lockheed, and his staff was staggering. The plane had to be able to reach a maximum speed of about 500 miles per hour, have a range of 2,200 miles, and a ceiling of about 13 miles (70,000 feet). But that mandate created mechanical as well as design challenges. Edwin Land, brilliant inventor (of among other things, the Polaroid camera) was responsible for the design. One historian wrote that Land envisioned a subsonic jet adapted from sailplane designs.

  If the mechanics of the U-2 were groundbreaking, the design was even more controversial. The body of the aircraft was about 50 feet long, but the wingspan was almost 80 feet. The original U-2 had a landing gear like a bicycle wheel, a tail wheel and a single main wheel beneath the body of the plane, located just ahead of the wing. In addition to the landing gear, the U-2 had a wheel at the end of each long, flexible wing. However, because designers wanted the craft to be as light as possible, these wheels were released after the plane was airborne! Without these wing wheels, landing the U-2 was challenging and dangerous, requiring the pilot to touch down on the landing gears, then carefully and gently tip the plane to one side until the wing tip dragged on the ground and slowed down the plane.

  While a team of Skunk Works engineers worked on creating a spy plane, another team worked on the cameras. After all, the whole point of the project was to obtain clear pictures. The cameras needed to do two things: take panoramic pictures as well as high-resolution shots of specific targets. In an early model, two cameras were used. One was mounted in a way that looked directly below the aircraft, while the other swiveled left and right to take panoramic shots. In an attempt to reduce the weight of the plane, a second design used just one camera, which took pictures from several overlapping positions, moving from horizon to horizon for panoramic pictures. At the same time, when the camera focused on scenes directly below the aircraft, it produced remarkably clear pictures. From an altitude of nearly eleven miles, the camera could capture objects as small as thirty inches wide, roughly the size of the top of your refrigerator. The camera could record a 125-mile swath of land on a single strip of film.

  To convince Eisenhower that the camera could do exactly what the CIA and the designers said it could do, they sent a test flight directly over the president’s farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and photographed his cows from more than ten miles high. When the initial flights over the Soviet Union began, the early pictures were of the Kremlin and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s summer home, driving home the point to Eisenhower that the spy plane could go, in a sense, right where the Russians lived.

  As design of the U-2 continued a bit ahead of schedule, the CIA worked on recruiting pilots for the dangerous spy missions. The best pilots were in the air force, but because of the sensitive and politically explosive nature of spy flights over the Soviet Union, the president refused to allow active military pilots to fly the U-2s. If something should go amiss, he did not want the project to look like a military operation. So the CIA identified the best air force pilots, who were then allowed to resign from military service. As civilians, they were free to be hired by the CIA. This process of hiring former air force pilots was called “sheep dipping,” a reference to a process in which sheep were dipped in disinfectants to kill parasites.

  A third group of engineers set to work on a flight suit that would protect U-2 pilots. The engineers well knew the damage that could be done to the human body at such high altitudes. At 65,000 feet, bodily fluids, blood included, vaporize. In addition, the cardiovascular system is placed under tremendous stress. Although the cabin of the U-2 was pressurized — just like the cabin of a commercial jet airliner — engineers were concerned that they needed to do more to protect the pilot. They needed to build a flight suit that would save the pilot if he needed to bail out at such high altitudes.

  Since a person’s body can actually expand at high pressure, the main function of the suit was to keep the body from stretching to a deadly level. The cotton-and-nylon suits were custom built to fit individual pilots. The suit was lined with inflatable tubes that would expand at a drop in air pressure. These air-filled tubes kept the body from expanding. The suits were modified as new information was gained from test flights. For example, an expandable chest bladder was added to help the pilots breathe more naturally if the pressure dropped. This bladder was later expanded to cover the upper part of the body.

  Working around the clock with a spirit of cooperation frequently absent in government projects, the U-2 project was completed in eighteen months from concept to delivered product. More remarkable, perhaps, than completing the project well before the deadline was that it was completed under budget.

  The first U-2 flight occurred in July 1956; the plane returned with remarkable pictures that began to show that the fears of some in government were unfounded. There was no “bomber gap.” Nor were the Soviets leading in the arms race. The flights continued, always with the direct approval of the president for each one. Over the next four years, the CIA flew twenty-four U-2 missions over the Soviet Union, some from bases in England and Germany, others from bases closer to the Soviet Union, such as in Pakistan. The CIA estimates that by the time the U-2 program ended in 1960, the planes had produced 1,285,000 feet of film that covered nearly 1.3 million square miles of the Soviet Union, about 15 percent of the nation’s landmass.

  With the deluge of photos taken from ten to twelve miles in the sky — higher still when spy satellite surveillance began in the 1960s — the CIA established the Photographic Intelligence Division (PID), whose job was to make measurements using photography. In addition, the analysts of PID compared pictures of the same area taken weeks apart, looking for any changes such as ongoing construction of landing fields, hangars, or rocket launch towers. Their keen eyes searched for the smallest clue that the Russians were preparing to use long-range bombers or missiles.

  Despite the success of the intelligence gathered from the flights, President Eisenhower was never at ease with the missions even though he was led to believe by the CIA that the U-2s were virtually invisible. But the agency knew differently. In fact, it had received information two days after the first flight that Russian radar had, in fact, detected the spy plane and had made several unsuccessful attempts to shoot it down. Nonetheless, the flights continued and thousands of intelligence photos were processed and analyzed.

  The CIA assured the president that even if the U-2 was intercepted, the chances of the plane and its pilot surviving a ten-mile fall to earth were practically zero. In fact, safeguards were in place to make sure that neither man nor machine survived a missile strike so that no information about the design and function of the U-2 could be gathered by Russia. Every pilot carried poison pins coated with shellfish toxin. A jab of the pin would kill the pilot. In addition, each U-2 included an explosive charge under the pilot’s seat. Should the pilot need to eject from the aircraft, he would set the charge, which would destroy the plane, its instruments, and the camera in seventy seconds after the pilot ejected. Richard Bissell, the director of the project, told Eisenhower that it “would be impossible, if things should go wrong, for the Soviets to come in possession of the equipment intact.”

  After four years of successful flights of the U-2, the CIA’s luck ran out in the spring of 1960. In April, a U-2 flight over Tyuratam, in what is now Kazakhstan, took pictures of a site that analysts found suspicious. Although the site was under construction, it looked like a launch area for large missiles that could reach the United States. The CIA desperately requested a U-2 mission to get a better look at the site. Bissell pressed the president, who finally and reluctantly agreed to one more flight.

  On May 1, 1960, Francis Gary Powers, a sheep-dipped air force pilot, powered his U-2 into the sky from a runway in Peshawar, in northern Pakistan. His flight plan called for him to fly across a weste
rn part of the Soviet Union before he landed in Norway. About four hundred miles into Soviet airspace, his U-2 was shot down. Despite all the precautions installed to destroy the plane and the pilot, Powers and the remains of the plane fell to earth near Sverdlovsk. He was quickly surrounded by villagers and turned over to the KGB.

  Although the CIA knew that Soviet radar had detected the high-flying spy plane, the agency felt that neither the Soviet jet fighters nor its missile could catch up with the U-2. Powers himself testified that he had “no idea what happened.” He further testified, “I heard and felt a hollow-sounding explosion. It seemed to be behind me and I could see orange-colored light.” Historians seem to agree that the U-2 “flamed out,” meaning that its engine cut out in the thin atmosphere of 70,000 feet. Such a flameout is often accompanied by an explosion of gases at the plane’s tail.

  As the plane started to tumble out of control, Powers was afraid that he would lose his legs if he fired the ejection seat. Fighting centrifugal force, he pushed back the canopy. However, the resulting loss of pressure triggered his flight suit to inflate, just as it had been designed to do. But, with the suit inflated, he could no longer reach the switch to activate the charge that would destroy the plane. When the tube to his oxygen mask pulled loose, Powers was free of the plane. His parachute opened at the prescribed altitude, and he floated to earth.

  As soon as news of the missing plane reached the White House, where it was assumed that both plane and pilot were lost, the administration began preemptive damage control. The story they spun was that a U.S. weather plane was missing over the Soviet Union. The administration suggested that the pilot had become disoriented after a malfunction of the oxygen system. Even as the spin was fed to the world’s media, the Soviets were preparing a surprise for our government.