But before he did that, there was an operation unfolding on the borders between East and West in Europe that not only demonstrated the innovative brilliance of Dr Tommy Flowers and his General Post Office team – but also the continuing hazard of treachery within the nation’s secret realms.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Tunnel and the Traitor
The darkness that had settled over much of Europe was not easily penetrated from a distance; the nature of Soviet control was more insidious and destabilising than obvious displays of violence. The tanks would only come later. Unlike the Nazis, who had loudly coerced a wider public into communal hatreds – of Jews, disabled people, gypsies – the Communists operated by means of stealthy infiltration, and their targets were frequently unaware that they were about to fall victim. In East Germany, throughout the late 1940s, the disappearances of local politicians and journalists had begun as isolated cases, then gradually became hundreds, then thousands: men were found guilty of subverting Communist rule, and deported to labour camps in the permafrost wastes of Russia’s deep interior. There was no right of appeal, and very often no way back. These camps – freezing, insanitary, with starvation rations and guards for whom the power to administer beatings was a bonus – were lethal; it was for many, in essence, a slow death sentence.
In countries such as Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Soviet officials targeted not only opposition politicians, but also citizens who ran civic groups: not just unions, but also organisations such as the YMCA, the Scouts, the equivalents of the Women’s Institute. For Stalin to have complete control over a country, his agents had to be in charge of every level of the community. Youth clubs were particularly key. In the late 1940s, for instance, many young people in Budapest had developed a fondness for listening to American swing; the new Communist overseers of these clubs smashed their records.
This was the world that the codebreakers were listening to; a world where, incredibly, show trials were once again being conducted. They had been used in Russia in the 1930s by the super-paranoid Stalin to wipe out an entire generation of military officers and apparatchiks that he suddenly distrusted violently. Now these nightmarish pantomimes had begun anew in order to deal with defiant Hungarian politicians who dared to continue to oppose Soviet demands on their territory. There was hardly any pretence that the trials were legitimate. The point of them was a naked display of raw power, the power of life and death.
At Eastcote, there had been absolutely no doubt in the minds of the senior codebreakers of the true nature of Stalin’s leadership; there had been no question that his regime would thaw or change. For them, it was clear that the sharpening Cold War was an inevitability. As much as the gathering of coded communications enabled them to see into the heart of those nations behind the Iron Curtain, the patches of silence told their own story.
Where were the voices of the sophisticated, cultured young people of countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia? The Soviets smothered them, treating them like stubborn pre-electrical-age rural peasants, because that was all that the Soviets had experience of. Indeed, the only part of the Soviet bloc where such control was weaker was in Poland; there were pockets of the country with quite spectacularly ungovernable pre-electricity rural peasants, who answered to the grander and more metaphysically unassailable authority of the Catholic Church. Not even Stalin wanted to take on the Pope.
But the traffic of transmission worked both ways, and at around this time, in London, a close cousin to GCHQ – a special department that broadcast radio programmes directly into Eastern Europe – was being run by a lively mind called Sir John Rennie, who was later to head up MI6.
Rennie had been a diplomat in Poland in the late 1940s and early 1950s and had seen quite clearly how people there had to live with a constant sense of threat hanging over them. This was coupled with universal privations: scarce goods in shops, sparse quantities of certain foodstuffs. When he came back, he was to take over a brainchild of the former foreign secretary Ernest Bevin: this was the ‘Information Research Department’. The idea was very simply to broadcast propaganda – the truth about the failures and the multiple evils of Stalinist rule – to listeners from Warsaw to Bucharest. These radio programmes were the spy version of pirate radio: put out by secret transmitters, tuned into by young iconoclasts. It was a very serious business; even if anyone had cynical doubts about the suddenly rapacious nature of America’s military-industrial complex, this could hardly match Russia’s chilling and murderous treatment of those who even mildly disagreed. In this, Rennie shared the same point of view as GCHQ: there was a moral dimension here, not merely an icy calculation of geopolitical strategy.
Conversely, there were many young people in Britain at that time – as the nation was preparing for the bright, colourful coronation of its new young queen – who would have regarded such broadcasts from the heart of the British establishment as hopelessly reactionary, and held that there was virtue to be found in the more austere, less material Eastern bloc. Without direct knowledge of the millions of lives, the quantity of blood that Stalin had so casually shed, and without much of a sense of the boulder that pressed down on younger generations in Soviet bloc countries, these idealistic members of the Communist Party of Great Britain – otherwise simply known as The Party – could only see Russia and Communist Europe as striving towards a noble ideal, the creation of a serious, equal society, a dimension away from the raucous, greedy, ruthless capitalism of America. These young people would have honked with scorn at Sir John Rennie’s productions. A few years later, in the brilliantly horrible 1959 Boulting Brothers film satire I’m All Right Jack, union leader Fred Kite (played by Peter Sellers) grows moist-eyed as he compares the vulgar, gaudy consumerism of 1950s Britain to the purer life of the working classes in Russia. ‘All them cornfields,’ he sighs, ‘and ballet in the evening.’
In West Germany, the playwright Bertolt Brecht went a little further: he made the unusual journey across to the other side to live in East Berlin. For him and other Germans, Konrad Adenauer’s government, fattened with vast quantities of Marshall Aid American money, was not yet free of the shadow of the Reich; for all the ‘de-Nazifying’ programmes that had taken place, there seemed now to be a more generalised silence, a determined reluctance even to think about the recent past. For figures such as Brecht, East Berlin had a contrasting purity. So what if the shops were empty, and the debating chambers were free of dissenting voices?
The parallel worlds encompassed in Berlin were sharpening in their contrasts. As mentioned, even without that colossal sum of US cash, the economy of the Federal Republic under Adenauer would still have leapt ahead; and as it was, by 1953, West Germany and its people were enjoying comfort that would have seemed unimaginable just eight years beforehand. East Berlin – the landscape still pocked with so many grey and dusty bomb-sites – was a more morose proposition. Before the looming concrete symbol of the Berlin Wall, there were tightly guarded checkpoints, and barbed wire. Citizens of the East who wished to pass across could still just about do so.
After his terrific intelligence successes in Vienna, Peter Lunn was transferred in 1953 to Berlin. Lunn’s tunnel, the construction beneath the Vienna streets that had enabled a close circle of young secret listeners to intercept a wild array of Soviet intelligence, was an idea that was even better suited to Berlin. Unlike the last time, when the buccaneering Lunn had chosen to keep the operation from the higher reaches of the Foreign Office, for fear of their closing it down out of diplomatic panic, there were now a (small) number of well-placed senior enthusiasts willing to give it the go-ahead; not only in the Foreign Office and War Office but also across the Atlantic.
And again, though Lunn was attached to MI6, this ambitious operation – to burrow beneath the divided city, and to physically modify Soviet telephone lines – was handled by an extraordinarily secret branch of GCHQ’s Y service. In other words, it was not even known about by all the MI6 agents who were operating in the streets above
. It was, however – tragic-comically – known to one particular British operative whose subsequent betrayal was to blow up infuriatingly in the faces of the Western Allies. But in 1953, the Allies thought they had done everything imaginable to keep what was termed Operation Gold utterly clandestine. The Americans, too, kept a very close guard on the numbers of people who had any kind of knowledge about what was going on. As with so many other codebreaking and interception operations, this was to be an Anglo-American affair with complete trust between the two powers.
This was an even more intricate construction job than the one beneath Vienna, but the Americans had access to a property which was particularly close to a cluster of East German diplomatic telephone lines. The target for the interceptors was mouth-watering. Across these lines would be carried calls to and from Moscow, plus to all the other significant Eastern European capitals. It would be like listening to the heartbeat of Soviet Russia: the orders, the plans, the directives, the intelligence on military manoeuvres.
Constructing a tunnel underneath alien territory without being detected was one thing; building it so that it could house complex interception technology without the tunnel overheating and crippling vital machinery was another. Once again, this was a job for the Research Department at Dollis Hill: a couple of engineers were sent over to fathom not only how to combat unexpected difficulties like build-ups of condensation, but also to bring new techniques in tapping phones that would ensure that the Soviets would never realise what was happening. Phone-tapping itself at that stage involved metal clamps; but according to security expert Richard Aldrich, the Dollis Hill wizards also brought an innovative technique that allowed clamps and cables to be frozen. The zero temperatures would help ensure that the East Germans never heard any giveaway clicks or ticks while they were making their calls.
On top of this, agents managed to obtain from East Berlin maps and plans of key buildings and key telephone lines in their target areas. Peter Lunn and his team had done the most breathtaking job, for once it was operational, the Berlin Tunnel began to harvest an astounding amount of intelligence. There were hundreds of telegraphic and voice circuits planted on lines deep in the tunnels, and the interceptions gathered were sent immediately back to London where, in an elegant building next to Regent’s Park, hundreds of staff transcribed the conversations that had been bugged. These conversations were then sent off for analysis. The Americans set up a sort of express bureau in Berlin near the site of the tunnel, so that they could analyse the intelligence in something close to real-time. Yet while there can be no gainsaying the terrific chutzpah and ingenuity of the entire idea, the fact was – both grimly and yet at the same time slightly farcically – the Soviets had known all along.
The reason for this was that one of the chosen British few who knew about the operation was the agent George Blake. A couple of years previously, Blake had been captured in the Korean War; his Communist gaolers subjected him to brainwashing. Rather more than this, it was during this period of imprisonment that he was approached and turned by Soviet intelligence. By 1953, Blake was back in London at MI6 and part of the rarefied circle of people working within Section Y. According to Richard Aldrich, when Blake received detailed plans of the tunnel system to be built, he took a copy, climbed aboard a pre-designated London red double-decker bus, and there he met his Soviet contact, to whom the plans were passed.
However, there was a heartening and grimly amusing twist too; for even though the Russians now knew everything, they had to ensure that the British and Americans did not know that they knew. This meant, in essence, that Soviet intelligence could not issue specific warnings to East German officials; if they had done, the Allies would have realised, and doubtless then tried something even more cunning. All the East German officials were told was that they ought to take general care when in conversation on the telephone. There was an almost comical horror on the part of the Soviets when they realised just how incredibly negligent the East Germans were about such warnings.
And so it was that despite Blake’s efforts, in fact the Berlin Tunnel did yield excellent, useable intelligence. There was plenty there for the Regent’s Park personnel back in London to translate and analyse. Among the deliberate false leads and trails – this was, after all, a means for the Soviets to burrow into British and American intelligence, by gauging their reactions to carefully seeded false messages – there was a wondrous amount of day-to-day genuine traffic, with a wealth of references that helped the British fill in all sorts of knowledge gaps about Soviet placements and intentions.
Indeed, there came a point when this curious farce had to be ended by the Soviets; and that day came in 1956, when they feigned carrying out repair work beneath the streets and ‘accidentally’ burrowed through to the Allies’ tunnel, with its array of quite dazzling up-to-the-minute Dollis Hill equipment. The Russian engineers were said to have been rather impressed with the technology. And with this faux discovery, they also went public. The tunnel hit the newspapers. The story clattered around the world. The circumstances of the betrayal and discovery were of course maddening; and yet on either side, there was some admiration of the sort of ingenuity and nerve that went into the work of eavesdropping on the enemy.
Back in 1953, the landscape had once more shifted: Stalin died in the spring of that year. There began an extended process of wrangling in the Soviet Politburo to determine his successor. The Americans under Eisenhower and the British under prime minister Winston Churchill looked on; did the passing of this titanic figure make war less or more likely? Strikingly, there were figures within the CIA who were advising the White House that Stalin himself had been – in his own way – a stable force, not given to reckless acts, and skilled at steering away from potential points of conflict. Now, in the spring of 1953, the concern was that whoever came next – senior politician Georgi Malenkov was thought by many to have the natural advantage – might be more manic and less able to deal with the colossal pressures that were being exerted all over the world. One factor was predicted to remain exactly the same: there would be no new flicker of warmth in the relationship between the two superpowers. The Cold War was to remain at dangerous freezing level.
The death of the tyrant also caused some within the White House to wonder why it was that the National Security Agency had failed to provide advance intelligence concerning Stalin’s terminal illness. Indeed, according to author Matthew M Aid, signals intelligence intercepts in the weeks and days beforehand – detailing Stalin’s meetings with Indian and South American dignitaries – suggested that he was functioning as normal. When the news of his death broke, it came not from a decyphered message, but from the international news agencies. Added to this, during this period, the NSA was locked in bitter competition with the relatively recently formed CIA, which had its own little codebreaking department and which had actually poached some codebreakers across from the NSA. History always shows that fractured cryptological operations are never as successful as those properly unified under one umbrella.
This was not the most fruitful period for the codebreakers in Eastcote either; but there was little that could be done against the intractable problem of the Russians changing their codes after having understood their vulnerability. Added to this, it was unreasonable to expect the codebreakers to be end-of-the-pier fortune tellers, seeing clearly into all possible permutations of the future. Within the Kremlin, for instance, there were conversations and whisperings that would never have been transmitted across the airwaves; the only way that they could have been intercepted would have been for a secret listener to be hidden somewhere within the same room. As it happened, the boffins of Dollis Hill were, throughout the 1950s, working on listening devices that could be used some distance away from a target building, to pick up and record whatever was being said from within. But such miracles were hardly universally available.
Nor, as the furious political struggle within Russia in the gaping wake of Stalin’s death continued, could the codebreakers ha
ve possibly anticipated the uprising to come in what had seemed one of the most compliant of Moscow’s stolen states. In the summer of 1953, industrial workers in the Russian sector of Berlin, the very heart of the German Democratic Republic, suddenly staged protests. The initial cause appeared to be the preposterous productivity targets set by Kremlin apparatchiks, and the consistent authoritarianism of the country’s ruler Walter Ulbricht. But these violent Berlin demonstrations were to spread from one East German city to another.
The Soviet response to this East German insubordination was a foretaste of how Moscow would deal with all such future disobedience across its Eastern European empire: it sent in Russian tanks and Russian troops. Here was a point at which both Britain and America leaned forward; with the possibility of the contagion of further unrest – and resulting industrial paralysis – would it be wise to help or encourage these young urban workers? It was thought, on balance, that it would be wiser not to; any visible signs of the Western powers working actively to destabilise the East might be – in those frayed, frightened, leaderless times in the Kremlin – the very spur just one ambitious senior Politburo figure would need to declare war.
The Spies of Winter Page 35