Neill Prew had the chore of interceding with the Army provost marshal whenever one of the GIs broke loose from the discipline and the conditions in which they were working. “One time, one of the GIs was missing several hours after he was due to check back in. Vyrl was worried he might have been kidnapped and taken into the East, even that he might have defected. But it all turned out OK. The GI had had a fender bender and had been unable to contact his unit.
“The provost marshal, a Southern Baptist, hated the way the kids drank and used foul language and couldn’t understand why a civilian was so solicitous about their welfare.”19
In 1954 Vyrl’s wife fell seriously ill; then Vyrl himself had a heart attack. Mrs. Leichliter died en route to the United States, leaving Vyrl with two children. When he recovered, the Agency sent him to the Far East to find a job that suited him. The tunnel story broke when Vyrl was in Tokyo, where he met and married his second wife, Ernie. Ernie says, “He never talked about the tunnel, except sometimes to tell funny stories … like how they disposed of the dirt.”20
When Leichliter fell ill, Clarence Berry was summoned to Berlin. “Harvey drove my wife and me to his home, where CG was waiting. She was very cordial throughout, anticipating Bill’s every want. She called him ‘Daddy.’” The Martini Ritual ensued. “Bill tended bar and we had a pleasant time, far from the Cold War. I distinctly remember him relaxing in what was obviously his favorite easy chair.
“Certainly my most unforgettable character. A doer. We don’t have them like that anymore.”
Shortly thereafter, Fleetwood told Clarence that Harvey wanted him to take over Vyrl’s job, which would have entailed separation from his wife. Fleetwood tactfully withdrew Berry’s name from consideration, upon his request.
Shortly after the actual tap was made, Harvey got in touch with Charles D. Arnold, who was stationed in Vienna during SILVER, and asked him to come to Berlin. Ted Shackley noted years later that Arnold had been in the FBI with Harvey. Arnold, said Shackley, was “very quiet, very self-contained.” Dave Murphy: “Charlie … the Great Stoneface. That was what Bill called him.”21
ROLLING
It was almost time to roll the 150 recording machines, covering the 172 circuits, each of which carried a minimum of 18 channels. The official Agency file continues:
Once everything was wired up and in place, it was time to make the actual tap. This was the most critical part of the whole operation because for one thing the heavy rubber sheathing covering the wires was pressurized with nitrogen gas. This was to help East German repair crews locate water or other damage to the cables. Therefore it was necessary to install airtight doors at the bottom of the tap chamber so as to equalize the pressure when the sheathing was cut. Otherwise an alarm would be set off. There were about 170 circuits in the 3 cables and as each pair of wires was tapped they were connected to a bank of amplifiers which protected against line loss, so as not to alert the control station. It took the technicians three long days to complete the job, but it was accomplished without mishap.
All of a sudden, we had 150 Ampex recorders spitting out magnetic tape at 15 inches per second. We were in business, big time. Recordings were made on 10 inch reels and were flown out daily. The voice tapes were transcribed immediately in London, while the teletype plain text and cipher was sent back to Washington for processing.
Nothing moved in the Russian military that we didn’t know about, and our knowledge about the Russian and East Bloc forces increased daily. Indeed, Harvey and his team were the toast of Washington and London.
This went on for 11 months and 11 days without major incident, but then our world collapsed. We were aware that these three [Russian] cables were quite old and subject to breaks during heavy rainstorms, so it wasn’t too unusual to see repairmen dig up a section along the line somewhere. However, on this particular day, following unusually heavy weather, a crew was spotted digging directly over the tap chamber. It wasn’t long before a shovel hit the concrete slab which had been poured to reinforce the area over the cables, and we had a major flap on our hands.22
GEORGE BLAKE
For years after the tunnel became public knowledge, there was vigorous debate about the value of the operation to the Americans and the British. The reason for the debate was the perfidy of George Blake, the Soviet mole in MI-6, who had been in on the tunnel op practically from the start. Blake had been captured by the Communists in Korea, recruited by the KGB in the early 1950s, and returned to Britain.23
Blake describes the first meeting on the Berlin Tunnel between British SIS and CIA officers in his 1990 book No Other Choice. “In February 1954, the CIA sent a strong team of their experts … headed by (Frank) Rowlett, who at the time was Head of the Soviet section in the CIA [sic]. Also present was Bill Harvey the Head of the CIA station in Berlin. This Texan had a Wild West approach to intelligence and, as if wishing to deliberately draw attention to this, always carried a six-shooter in an arm holster with him. Its unseemly bulge under his too-tight jacket looked somewhat incongruous in the quiet elegance of Tom Gimson’s office in the Carlton Gardens where the meetings were held.”
Blake passed information on the tunnel to his case officer in London, Sergei Kondrashev. The KGB Center decided Blake had to be protected, practically at all costs. It therefore allowed normal military communications to flow through the cables Harvey’s Hole was tapping, even though that volume yielded huge amounts of military, transportation, and industrial information. The KGB shifted its own traffic to other channels. Blake was, fortuitously or otherwise, transferred to the MI-6 station in Berlin. Years later, writing from Moscow, under KGB supervision, Blake continued,
In the Western press, the tunnel operation was generally hailed as one of the most outstanding successes of the CIA in the Cold War. Although it was noted that most of the equipment found was of British manufacture [sic], there was no suggestion by anybody that the British had in any way participated in or had known about the project. This was too much for Peter Lunn. As soon as the news broke in the press, he assembled the whole staff of the Berlin station, from the highest to the lowest, and told the whole story, from its inception to its untimely end. He made it quite clear that this had been essentially an SIS idea, and his own to boot. American participation had been limited to providing most of the money and the facilities. They were, of course, also sharing in the product.
There is no hint of this claim anywhere else that I am aware of. The exaggeration was presumably dictated by the KGB as part of its continuing effort to sow discord among the Western partners. Blake continues: “Only in 1961 did SIS discover, as a result of my arrest, that the full details of the tunnel operation had been known to the Soviet authorities before even the first spade had been put in the ground.”24
Harvey did not live to read Blake’s book. His reaction to it would have been interesting to record.
What interests us here are two matters: How much did Blake really know? Did Blake deal directly or indirectly with Harvey?
Dave Murphy comments on No Other Choice: “I think Blake was asked by Kim Philby to include those comments on Bill as a gesture of personal revenge for Harvey’s denunciation of Philby…. When I tried to get more from Blake, I got nowhere because Blake would admit to nothing that was not in his own KGB-cleared book!”25
I asked George Bailey, the third of the coauthors of Battleground Berlin, to query Gen. Sergei Kondrashev, who still, I knew, often saw Blake in Moscow. Kondrashev had earlier told Bailey that Blake was very difficult to handle, even though they were good friends.
Eventually, Kondrashev told Bailey he had talked to Blake about Bill “at least ten times. Blake says ‘he knows nothing about Bill Harvey.’ Harvey was at ‘that big conference in London’… He saw Harvey there…. Other than that Blake has absolutely no impression of Harvey. He draws a blank.” When Bob Kilroy learned of Blake’s assertion, he exploded, “Blake has no impression of the Pear? What kind of a spook is he anyway? Who could ever have seen Harvey a
nd forgotten him?”
Bailey commented, “Blake is a truly religious nut.” Every report I have ever heard about George Blake describes him as being somewhat out of touch.26
JIGSAW, BY-PRODUCT, AND POWER PLAY
Bill’s chief interest in the tunnel was to exploit its production. He had originally decided not to involve Murphy, but Dave was needed because BOB had amassed a pretty formidable registry of information on its prime counterespionage target, the KGB compound in Karlshorst. When the tapes began to roll in the summer of 1955, Murphy’s people provided intelligence backup to the immediate-action transcribers who read the material for early warning of Soviet intentions. And then Lieutenant Colonel Popov, the former Vienna agent reporting on Soviet intelligence, resurfaced in East Germany after an agonizing silence.
There came next one of those exquisite Harvey moments. Bill, absolutely convinced he was right, charged into the Washington china shop. Murphy recalls, “In February 1956 … with the tunnel producing an unexpectedly large quantity of KGB personality identifications, much of it confirmable through our BOB information, and with Popov reporting as well … Bill recommended, in an eyes-only cable to Helms and Angleton, a new approach to counterintelligence responsibilities within the DDP [deputy director of plans, i.e., the Clandestine Service].”
On the surface, Harvey’s proposal was eminently reasonable. Murphy: “Since BOB had by far the largest concentration of technical and human source reporting on Soviet intelligence in Western Europe, Berlin should assume headquarters responsibility,” acting as controller and a clearing house for all RIS (Russian intelligence service, generic for both KGB and GRU) cases in the area.”
Murphy continues: “We were all very excited about the prospect!” But the grandiose dream was foredoomed, if by no one else, then certainly by Jim Angleton, who couldn’t possibly allow the locus of Soviet counterespionage knowledge to slip from his redoubt in Washington to Berlin. Quite apart from the base’s exposed position in case the Russians decided to play rough, Dick Helms often turned to his old OSS friend Angleton to handle tricky assignments. Now, the upstart ex-FBI guy was making a power play from Berlin.
The gesture was more evidence of Harvey’s faith in himself, his operators, and, sotto voce, his disagreements with the system. Murphy concludes, sadly, “Insofar as I can recall, the cable never even received a reply.”27
THE TUNNEL BLOWS
Bill and CG were at the Murphy’s house for dinner, along with Stan Gaines, who was up from Frankfurt, the night the tunnel blew. When the first disquieting calls came through, Harvey and Murphy raced out, leaving the ladies and Gaines to coffee and wonderment.
Henry Woodburn adds, “We learned of trouble about two or three in the morning.”28 In fact, the first alert must have come around, or soon after, midnight; it’s doubtful the Harveys, Gaines, and the Murphys would have been dining and wining much later.
Harvey immediately thought of (a) damage control and (b) response. Clarence Berry was in Frankfurt. “I got a late-night call from Big Bill at my home. He simply said, ‘BLACKIE (that’s right, in capitals), you’d better get down there. There’s a fast one coming.’” Berry said, “I’m on my way.” He decoded the message from the Staff D cipher. He was the man on the spot because Fleetwood had returned to the United States, and his replacement had not yet been cleared by Washington to handle supersensitive material.
Berry recalls, “I vividly recall feeling like I had been hit in the belly with a sledgehammer…. Next thing I knew they were breaking through into the tap chamber.”29
Continuing messages from Harvey reported that the microphones in the tunnel, still operating, indicated that the East German PTT (Post, Telegraph, and Telephone, the state-owned communications agency) officials were stunned by the sophistication of the chamber equipment. They expressed the loyal opinion it was a Russian tap on the American ELINT site, allegedly aimed at Schoenefeld Airfield.
But then uniformed Russians appeared on the scene. Everyone expressed amazement at what they beheld. The conversations picked up by the hot mikes still showed no indication that the break-in had been deliberate; rather the discovery appeared to have been the result of the heavy rains.
Henry Woodburn was there. “Bill was down there, sitting in the American end of the tunnel. We had set up a .50-caliber machine gun, and as time went by, the Soviets became somewhat bolder. Sitting back at our end, you could see their helmets with a large Red Star on the front, rather cautiously coming around the curve.” And right at the border, the Soviets came up against Harvey’s sign: ‘Warning: You are now entering the U.S. Sector.’
“Bill said, ‘I think it’s about time to show these guys they’re not welcome in this part of Berlin,’ and he pulled back the bolt of the machine gun and let it slap forward. If you have ever heard the bolt of a .50-caliber machine gun slide forward in a confined space…. It’s a noise you’re not likely to mistake.”30
Harvey was itching to blow the tunnel up with the prepositioned explosives. He sent Woodburn off to get permission from the commanding general in Berlin. USCOB, as he was called, “had no stomach for the proposal and nixed it” once he learned that some Soviets might also be blown up. Simultaneously, the Russian commandant was blowing a fuse, threatening dire consequence.
Berry learned that “officially, the U.S. commandant pleaded ignorance, asked, ‘What tunnel?’ and said no more about it.”
Dave Murphy adds drily that, as the morning and day wore on, Bill got himself deeply involved in technical aspects of the tunnel’s destruction. Remarkably, he kept his cool as he dominated “discussions with senior commanders whose only wish was to avoid a flap which might endanger their careers.”31
As icy-cold furious as he ever permitted himself to be, Harvey returned to his office and once again went out of channels with a dramatic appeal to CIA headquarters for permission to override the commanding general and detonate the tunnel. Berry was still monitoring the cable traffic in Frankfurt. “The decision went all the way up to Eisenhower who vetoed it because we might kill a Russian in the explosion, and that would be serious. There was nothing anyone could do except stand around and wait for developments.”
After a day or two, the microphones that had been so useful went dead. Harvey had the tunnel’s opening concreted with available rubble and debris at the sector border.32
Woodburn: “All that was left was to retreat and block. Allen Dulles, called it one of the most daring and valuable operations ever.”33
The inner circle at BOB gave much thought to why the tunnel had been discovered. A Russian, East German, even an American agent? Bill never bought the explanation that the break-in to the tunnel had been an accident. Dave Murphy recalls, “I never heard that he had any specific suspicions, but he was never satisfied, blaming it purely on luck.”34 The skepticism was pure Harvey.
Bill’s suspicion was vindicated several years later when the Polish lieutenant colonel Michael Goleniewski defected and fingered George Blake.
TUNNEL PRODUCT PROCESSING
Even after the tunnel break-in, the CIA and the British still had an enormous amount of raw intelligence to sort through and disseminate. Processing the take was, in itself, a major undertaking. When the operation was running, the product was quickly scanned by linguists/technicians in Berlin for early warning danger signals and perishable items. The screeners paid particular attention to material from circuits of the Soviet High Command, the East German PTT, and the police. Harvey personally cabled hot material through the special Staff D channel.
Otherwise, parcels of tapes were brought into the BOB registry for shipment out on the regular courier runs to Frankfurt and Washington. To forestall curiosity about the large, heavy packages, the chief of registry, Norman G., was told they were samples of uranium from East German mines being sent to headquarters for analysis.
Voice traffic was air pouched to London, where it was translated by dozens of white Russians and German-speaking émigrés. Nonvoice traffic, e
.g., teletype messages, went to Building T-32 along the Potomac in Washington, where dozens of people printed transcriptions out on hard copy and sent them on for analysis. Enciphered messages went directly to NSA.35
BOB REACTION
BOB could have reacted to the Russians’ discovery of the Berlin Tunnel with either jubilation or dismay. The actual reaction was total silence—for good reason.
Bob Kilroy heard the story breaking on East German radio. He raced into the office to see Harvey. “I said I knew it was our operation, but a lot of the others on the base did not…. The whole place would soon be buzzing. The sooner the lid was put on this, the better.”
Bill held a base-wide meeting later that morning. It was one of the few times he issued a direct order to the troops: “Don’t speculate! Clam up!” It worked. At BOB (if nowhere else in Berlin), it was as if the tunnel discovery had never been reported. Harvey’s order was followed scrupulously by all despite the temptation to gossip and even to share some vicarious pride in what had been accomplished.
Harvey didn’t know it then, nor did anyone else, but the peak moment of his life came then in April 1956, when, at the age of forty-one, he pulled back the bolt of that .50-caliber machine gun. It was Ultimate Harvey, a dramatic gesture of defiance and determination. He would have loved to have buried some Soviets in the demolition of the site, and the temptation must have been strong but discipline held. At the end, as always, Harvey took full responsibility for all that he did, even if he didn’t entirely get his way.
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