The Greatest Traitor

by Roger Hermiston

  There was dirt on the streets of Wedding, but there was glitter too. It attracted its fair share of visitors from the Soviet sector, looking for attractive items at reasonable prices. One of those who turned up at Semel one day was Boris, who told Mickey he was looking for a fur-lined wind jacket. When Mickey told Blake about this interesting Russian, Blake instructed his agent to buy a good-quality jacket from one of the best men’s shops on the Kurfürstendamn and sell it to Boris at half the price. Boris was pleased with his purchase and next showed an interest in buying a Swiss watch for his wife. When Boris said he could not afford the watch (at a deliberately-inflated price set by Mickey), the agent said he could pay by other means. Could Boris supply a dozen pots of caviar, because he knew he had a friend who was interested in buying the delicacy? The deal was struck.

  The friend who wanted the caviar was, of course, Blake, and Mickey contrived a meeting between the two men in his flat on Wielandstrasse. There, over liberal amounts of wine and brandy, Boris told Blake about his job, while Blake – who gave his name as de Vries, his wartime resistance pseudonym – explained that he was a Dutch journalist, the correspondent on a newspaper in Berlin. The two men got on well, and Boris readily accepted Blake’s invitation to meet again the following week at a nightclub. It was the start of a profitable working relationship that would last for several years.

  Boris had been primed to co-operate with this ‘Dutch journalist’ by the KGB, but – according to Blake – he only realised that the other man was in fact a Soviet agent working in SIS when he picked up a newspaper and read about Blake’s trial in 1961. ‘Though, ostensibly, the luxury articles which I obtained for him were in exchange for the caviar he continued to bring me, it was well understood between us that what I was really interested in was the information he was in a position to supply,’ Blake explained. ‘He apparently accepted my explanation that I needed it as background material and my assurance that nothing he told me would ever be published by my newspaper.’

  In the way of these counter-intelligence schemes, some of the intelligence Boris supplied to Blake was genuine, in order to build up his credentials as an important recruit back at SIS headquarters in Broadway. Excited by Blake’s reports, Whitehall sought ever more detail from this excellent source. They would instruct Blake to ask Boris specific questions on burning questions of the moment and, on nearly every occasion, the ‘plant’ responded with the required information. Thus the KGB believed fulfilled two objectives. One, to raise the stock of their prize agent in the eyes of his superiors at SIS; the second, through the misleading material Boris fed Blake, to deceive the West about the true state of the Soviet economy and so influence policy-making. It was one of many sources of information that helped to obscure the fundamental truth about the economies of the Eastern Bloc – that they were inherently weak and structurally unsound. Had that been known in the late 1950s, the Cold War might, for good or ill, have ended much sooner than it did.

  Horst Eitner, the SIS agent who brought Blake and Boris together, was typical of the cast of colourful characters who threw themselves into the city’s espionage world, but for whom loyalty always came with a price tag. He was a major figure in Blake’s ‘legitimate’ spy work during his time in Berlin but, as it turned out, would also have a prominent role to play in his eventual downfall.

  Eitner actually began his espionage career with the Gehlen Organisation (forerunners of the BND) in 1951. Reinhard Gehlen, a former general in the German Army and a spymaster for Hitler, was not shy of recruiting ex-Nazis, employing hundreds of them like Eitner, who had emerged from the Allied prison camps after 1945. He was trained at one of Gehlen’s spy schools at Bad Worishofen but, as time went on, and as a German who felt resentment at both East and West for the occupation of his country, he increasingly saw Gehlen as a mere appendix of the CIA. More importantly, the payments received for his work were poor and often slow to arrive. Some ‘business’ friends of his had contacts with SIS, to whom he transferred his allegiance at the end of 1953. There, he was run by two officers, known only to him as ‘Peter’ and ‘Peter 2’, before Blake inherited him at the beginning of 1957. Blake resurrected his cover name from his Dutch resistance days, ‘Max de Vries’, for his dealings with Eitner. What Blake did not know, at the time he first met Eitner, was that ‘Mickey’ was also working for the Russians.

  He had been approached towards the end of 1956, not by the KGB, but by the GRU – Soviet Military Intelligence. From SIS, he received a regular monthly wage of 250DM, which would sometimes rise to 400DM, with bonuses for successful jobs. When the Russians came calling, he asked for 500DM a month and his request was readily accepted. As well as paying more generously, the Soviets proved less demanding than the British: whether his reports were good or bad, he would almost invariably receive his 500DM each month. Eitner had a wife, Brigitte, and three young children to support; he also sent payments to his parents in Cottbus. His flat on Wielandstrasse did not come cheap. In addition, he also had extravagant tastes and an expensive drinking habit.

  They were an odd couple, Blake and Eitner. Blake was cool, calculating, cerebral and restrained in his behaviour; Eitner was an earthy, boisterous extrovert, a carouser and a womaniser. Although each man used the other coldly for his own ends, these polar opposites worked together effectively, and even enjoyed each other’s company. ‘The reason for the nickname [Mickey] was obvious the moment one saw him,’ Blake wrote. ‘He bore a strong resemblance to Mickey Mouse. He was small, agile, with bandy legs and large ears. If the expression on his face had been less than cheerful, it might have been called rat-like.’

  Just to complicate matters for Blake, Eitner’s wife was also doing occasional shifts as a Russian spy, having previously been in trouble with the Soviet authorities for spying on behalf of the CIA. She acted principally as a courier between the GRU and her husband. A pretty, vivacious, highly-strung Polish woman, she was fond of ‘Max’, who would bring her small presents to cheer her up: ‘He was a charming man and very good company. He liked to tell us stories about his time in the British Navy in which, he told us, he’d served as an officer during the war. But Max could be moody, too, you know. One minute he was gay and laughing, and suddenly he would turn very serious and dry up.’

  Eitner had no idea Blake was working for the Soviets; but Blake eventually learned of the German’s identity as a double agent. His handler, ‘Dick’, revealed the truth about a year after Blake had started running Eitner: ‘I thought the recruitment by them pretty pointless, but as a sister organisation was involved, it was apparently very difficult to do anything about it. On the other hand, it did not seem to matter very much and so it was left at that.’

  The partnership endured until April 1959 when Blake finished his tour of duty and another SIS officer, known to Eitner as ‘Temple’, replaced him, but he had not heard the last of Mickey. An episode on the evening of Sunday, 16 October 1960 would spark off a chain of events that would once more draw them together. The consequences for both would be calamitous.

  13

  Discovery

  At just after 1 p.m. on Sunday, 22 April 1956, East German engineers peered through a hole in the wall they had just dug and were able to take their first look down the length of the Berlin tunnel. They were amazed by what they saw: ‘Man, look at this . . . it goes all the way under the street . . . it’s fantastic!’ Their surprise and appreciation of the sheer technical excellence of the underground listening post was completely genuine, unlike the mock outrage about to be expressed by their political masters in Karlshorst and the Kremlin.

  Yevgeny Petrovich Pitovranov, chief of the KGB in Berlin, Ivan Serov, overall Chief of the organisation and Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party, had all known about the tunnel and had finally come to a joint decision to stage its discovery on that April weekend.

  The tunnel had lasted eleven months and eleven days. For nearly all of that time, this elite group at the very top of the Soviet political
and intelligence establishment had been aware of its existence, even before the first sod had been dug from the ground. George Blake, their mole at the heart of the Secret Intelligence Service, had provided them with full details as far back as February 1954.

  Khrushchev, under pressure from his critics at home and abroad, was looking for a tough gesture with which to appease the old guard in the Kremlin and retain their support. Abroad, he was irritated that two of his measures for easing Cold War tensions – the withdrawal of troops from Austria, and Soviet recognition of West Germany – had not prompted any reciprocal gestures from the West. The ‘discovery’ of the Berlin tunnel, and the chance to castigate the underhand West for its ‘nest of spies’, provided the propaganda coup for which he had been looking.

  Blake was warned by Sergei Kondrashev some days in advance that the tunnel was about to be ‘blown’ but it was still a period of great worry for him: ‘I had naturally been watching these developments, which I knew were about to occur, with some anxiety, on the alert for any signs of suspicion on the part of SIS or the CIA that the Soviets might have been forewarned.’

  As it happened, the unusually bad spring weather offered the Soviet planners the cover they had been looking for to stage an accidental find. Heavy rains had begun shorting out the long-distance cables, so the Karlshorst signals team had a legitimate reason for descending on Schönefelder Chausee beneath which the taps had been placed.

  Meanwhile, Pitovranov, together with General Andrei Grechko (Commander in Chief of Soviet forces in East Germany) and Georgy Pushkin (Soviet Ambassador in East Berlin), began to draw up the equivalent of a modern-day PR plan for Khrushchev on how best to exploit the revelation. They agreed that a strong public protest should be made to the headquarters of the American Army in Europe; their ‘German friends’ would then be briefed to comment unfavourably on the affair; reporters from West as well as East would be invited to take a good look at the tunnel; and a group of technical experts despatched to study all the equipment. Most interesting of all their recommendations was this final suggestion: ‘Regardless of the fact that the tunnel contains British equipment, all accusations in print should be addressed exclusively to the Americans’.

  Their reasons were twofold. First, by pinning the blame for the tunnel completely on the Americans they could divert suspicion away from SIS and, most importantly, from Blake. Secondly, on the very day the tunnel was ‘discovered’, Khrushchev and Bulganin were halfway through a state visit to Britain. They did not want their unruffled progress undermined, or to embarrass their hosts with accusations of spying while there were negotiations over Hungary and the Middle East that might just move in their favour.

  Back in Berlin, many in the CIA had assumed the Soviets would not want to advertise the fact that their communications had been so totally compromised. They were surprised when, carrying out Khrushchev’s wishes to the letter, Colonel Ivan Kotsyuba, Acting Commandant of the Berlin Garrison, called a press conference on Monday, 23 April, to inform the world of this ‘blatant act of imperialist aggression’. The Soviets accused the US of tapping ‘important underground long-distance telephone lines’ linking Berlin with other nations. They conducted official tours of the tunnel, sending carefully chosen delegations of workers from East Germany to gaze on this ‘damning evidence’ of the CIA’s use of West Berlin as an espionage base against the ‘peace-loving East’.

  The Eastern side of the tunnel took on a carnival-like atmosphere. A snack bar was set up and an estimated 90,000 East Berliners toured the ‘capitalist warmongers’ expensive subterranean listening post’.

  The KGB story, as told in the East German press, depicted heroic Soviet technicians surprising the hapless Americans, forcing them to abandon their earphones and recorders and flee humiliatingly down the tunnel. In reality, a senior American officer on site had a smart idea to halt the advancing Soviets: a 50-calibre machine gun was brought into the tunnel and set up on a tripod. When the Americans heard the Soviets coming, the slide was pulled back on the gun, making a very loud, unmistakable noise that echoed around the enclosed space. The intruders promptly turned on their heels and disappeared back into the East.

  In the West, there was no sense of ignominy about the tunnel’s discovery; instead the operation generally amused and delighted the public. American newspapers marvelled that the CIA was capable of such a remarkable clandestine manoeuvre, and revelled in the fact that US intelligence was now competing on level terms with the Soviets, long acknowledged as masters in such matters. For Time magazine it was the ‘Wonderful Tunnel’. The Boston Globe confessed it would never have believed that American intelligence agents, thought to be stumbling neophytes, could be ‘that smart’.

  Despite Khrushchev’s aims, America, and specifically the CIA, emerged as the real winner in the propaganda battle. Only eight years old, the agency was still viewed with scepticism in Washington, where not everyone had been convinced about its usefulness, or that it spent its money wisely. The obvious technical ingenuity of the project silenced the critics but what, really, was the practical benefit of this 6.7 million dollar project? For five years afterwards the CIA was utterly convinced that the Berlin tunnel had been a ‘unique source of current intelligence of a kind and quality that had not been available since 1948’. They believed it to be their best insight into Soviet intentions in Europe.

  When the truth emerged about Blake’s betrayal, they were forced to question that assumption. The KGB had known about the tunnel all along, and the voluminous intelligence the CIA believed it had gathered about the Soviet Army, Soviet intelligence, the Soviet atom bomb programme, and all the personalities in the Soviet political and military hierarchy could no longer be trusted. Was it laced with deliberate disinformation? Though later analysis on both sides would suggest not, it was impossible to be sure.

  Joe Evans, a CIA officer based in London who analysed a lot of the tunnel material, noted: ‘In a disinformation campaign, literally thousands of Soviets in East Germany would have had to know something about this operation, and to know the KGB had an inside source. That would have left George Blake’s security in tatters.’ Some years later, Blake’s handler, Sergei Kondrashev, endorsed Evans’s view and officially dismissed the disinformation theory: ‘It would have been impossible. Why? Because with such huge amounts of material going through different lines – diplomatic, military, GDR lines and others – to insert a page or two of disinformation into such a huge amount of material, well, just a simple analysis using simple methods would show that the disinformation contradicts the huge bulk of real material. So it wasn’t done.’

  With this, Kondrashev revealed another startling piece of information – that the KGB had even kept the secret of the tunnel from its own side, its military counterparts the GRU and the Red Army, the main users of the cables being tapped. This extraordinary piece of subterfuge in the Lubyanka was intended to protect their precious asset. ‘We didn’t tell the military about the existence of George Blake. We simply couldn’t betray our secret to anyone,’ said Kondrashev. ‘He was too important for us. You realise that at the time, George Blake was of course one of the most important sources at the heart of the British Secret Service. He was crucial for us.’ Unless and until the Soviet archives throw up fresh information, the astounding conclusion must remain that the KGB were ready to let the West listen into Red Army communications in order to protect Blake. Nothing better illustrates his importance to the KGB than this remarkable action – or inaction.

  There is one other, completely speculative yet fascinating theory about why the KGB did not exploit their knowledge about the tunnel: could it have been because they wanted the listeners-in to know what the Soviet policymakers were thinking and doing? Did the KGB actually want the West to realise no attack was planned on them? Could it have been one of the very first calculated acts of détente? Post-Stalin, this was a period when policymakers in the Kremlin were thinking far more of accommodation with the West. It’s an unlikely scena
rio, perhaps, but the Berlin tunnel has thrown up so many surprises over the years that this theory is not beyond the realms of possibility.

  As to the value of the 443,000 fully transcribed conversations, which led to 1,740 intelligence reports, Joe Evans and David Murphy had no doubt. Examples from both officers illustrate the major advantages the tunnel information could offer to their political masters.

  At the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow in February 1956, Khrushchev denounced Stalin and the cult of personality, and discussed the regime’s previous crimes and misdeeds in his famous ‘secret speech’. It was an extraordinary turn of events. ‘Delegates to the Congress were buzzing about the speech for days afterwards. We heard some of that on the tapped cables, and so thanks to the Berlin tunnel we were the very first to report news of the speech to Western intelligence – and then to the Western world,’ recalled Joe Evans.

  Further scoops were put to use in May 1959 when Christian Herter, Eisenhower’s new Secretary of State, sat down for face-to-face talks in Geneva with his Soviet counterpart, Andrei Gromkyo. They were attending a Foreign Ministers’ conference on the status of Berlin and the future of Germany. One of the themes in the run-up to the conference was – yet again – the accusation by the Soviets that the West was misusing West Berlin for intelligence and subversion purposes. It was a diplomatic card the Russians played very strongly. Herter came equipped for the meeting with Gromkyo with a comprehensive memorandum, courtesy of the CIA and the long-closed Berlin tunnel. Murphy described their encounter: ‘Gromyko was invited to the villa, and he sat there for two hours while the Secretary of State read him, word by word, every single thing from this memorandum about East German and Soviet intelligence operations in East Berlin. We had completely turned the tables on the Soviets. It was the first time we had used counter-intelligence material in this way, and we were able to do it because the tunnel had provided it to us.’