Spies Beneath Berlin

by David Stafford

  It has been a wet spring. For weeks heavy rain has been falling on the city, pouring through unrepaired roofs, seeping into cellars and basements still crammed with refugees and the homeless, short-circuiting underground cables and sending repair crews shuttling around the city. Nothing seems out of the ordinary, then, when, at one o’clock in the morning of Sunday 22 April, a team of men arrives at a point on the Schönefelder Chaussee just opposite the radar station and furiously begins to dig at two or three points along the surface.

  But the diggers are no ordinary workmen. They come from a special unit of the Red Army, a signals detachment, and they are digging with a purpose. An hour into the dig, and just a few metres below the road surface, they suddenly break through into what appears to be an underground room or chamber. They peer curiously but cautiously down into the dark.

  Most of Berlin is still asleep. One of the slumberers is Markus Wolf, head of the HVA, East Germany’s foreign intelligence service, later to become one of the twentieth century’s most ruthless and brilliant spymasters. To Western intelligence services he is known as ‘the man without a face’, for his ability to avoid the camera. Only twenty-nine when he took over the service four years ago, he is thought by some to be far too young and reckless. But he comes from good communist stock, has lived in Moscow, is fluent in Russian and is trusted by the Soviets. In reality his fledgling service is little more than a satellite of the KGB.

  Markus Wolf, head of the HVA, East Germany’s foreign intelligence service, and later to become one of the twentieth century’s most ruthless and brilliant spymasters

  Towards dawn he is wakened by his housekeeper. She tells him that the Minister for State Security, Ernst Wollweber, is waiting for him at the garden gate. Wolf has survived enough communist purges to be immediately suspicious of unexpected visitors at night. He grabs the loaded pistol on his bedside table and peers through the curtains. Outside is the minister and an ageing Volkswagen. Mystified, Wolf opens the front door. An emergency summons from the Russians, explains Wollweber: he’s had no time to summon his official driver, so has borrowed a neighbour’s car. They rattle off towards Alt-Glienicke. There, in the grey dawn light, they see the digging party on the Schönefelder Chaussee. Standing watching them are men whom Wolf instantly recognizes as the top brass of Soviet military intelligence in Berlin.

  Using pickaxes to hack through concrete, the soldiers have penetrated the underground chamber. Wolf joins the others in clambering down. The room is the size of a large study, with two chairs and a table in the middle. Bundles of cables, each carefully divided from the others, run along the wall. Each bundle has an amplifier attached to it. Here signals are being picked up, magnified and diverted along cables that disappear down through a trapdoor in the floor. Not until after midday, and endless phone calls to higher authority, do technicians finally remove the door and reveal a shaft leading to a steel-lined tunnel that disappears in the direction of the American radar station.

  But Wolf has already seen enough to know he is in the presence of a brilliant intelligence coup. The cables being tapped carry some of the Red Army’s most secret and most sensitive communications. Among them are messages between Moscow and Wünsdorf, south of the city, the headquarters of all Soviet forces in Germany. It is, he admits with the grudging admiration of a professional, an intelligence man’s dream and a technical marvel.4

  The American press, quick to seize on the drama of it all, thinks likewise. The Soviets are eager to make propaganda out of the affair and within forty-eight hours hold a press conference at the tunnel for the hungry Western media, an unprecedented display of openness in this secretive city. The tunnel, declares a Red Army spokesman, is a blatant act of imperialist aggression and international gangsterism. He points the finger directly at Washington. Journalists and cameramen clamber eagerly down the shaft for a guided tour led by Colonel Ivan Kotsiuba, the Soviet military commandant of the city. He takes them along the tunnel as far as a makeshift barrier made of piled-up sandbags. On top is a notice scrawled crudely in Russian and German: ‘You are now entering the American sector.’ Flashlights pop, and the picture appears in newspapers around the world.

  The joke goes down well with the American journalists. No one is admitting anything in Washington – not at the Pentagon, nor at the State Department, nor at the CIA. But it is easy to put two and two together. Far from being shocked or horrified, the press is delighted. American prestige in Germany has suffered since the failure to help the East Germans during their revolt in 1953. The KGB has carried out a succession of kidnaps. The most dramatic was two years earlier, on the tenth anniversary of the famous bomb plot against Hitler, when Otto John, head of West Germany’s new security service and a former anti-Hitler resister, disappeared from West Berlin and resurfaced in the East, denouncing the West and seeking political asylum. Espionage is a game the Soviets seem to be winning. The CIA, after all, is only eight years old. By contrast the KGB traces its lineage directly back to Lenin’s Cheka, formed immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Soviet spies have been turning up far too frequently in Washington.

  With relief and exuberance the American newspapers bring news of the tunnel to the American people. ‘Yankee resourcefulness and ingenuity is not a myth after all’, declares the Washington Post in unabashed glee under the headline ‘The Tunnel of Love’. ‘Frankly’, writes a leader writer for the Boston Post, ‘we didn’t know that American intelligence agents were that smart.’ A Time magazine feature article describes it, simply, as the ‘Wonderful Tunnel’. But it is left to the New York Herald Tribune to sum it all up. Alongside a detailed description of the tunnel and all its technical gadgetry, it declares proudly that the tunnel represents a venture of extraordinary audacity, ‘the stuff of which thriller films are made’.

  There is no more avid reader of all this coverage than the Director of the CIA himself, the dumpy, bespectacled, pipe-smoking veteran of the intelligence game Allen Dulles. Berlin is close to his heart. Here, as a junior diplomat in the State Department, he enjoyed his first posting, to the Weimar Republic after the First World War. As a high-ranking official in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), he spent the Second World War in Switzerland running agents in and out of the Third Reich. When American forces finally reached Berlin in July 1945, it was Dulles who immediately flew in and established its Berlin operations base in Dahlem, subsequently inherited by the CIA. He has been Director for three years. Officially he and the agency are saying nothing. But behind the scenes he relishes the credit.

  The publicity is excellent for the agency. Many critics in Congress and the country regard it with suspicion, dubious about the value of its covert operations. Or their morality. Or their expense (for its budgets are secret). When Dulles next visits Berlin, he goes out to Rudow followed by a posse of pressmen. ‘What about the tunnel?’ they ask. ‘Tunnel? What tunnel? I don’t see any tunnel’, he replies, poker-faced.5

  Some of the equipment uncovered by the Soviets is clearly marked British. But in London the headlines are focused on something far more newsworthy. The new leaders of the Soviet Union, President Nikolai Bulganin, and the jovial First Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, the successors to Josef Stalin, are on an official state visit to Britain. It is the first trip by Soviet leaders to London since the Bolshevik Revolution. Hopes are high that it will mark the beginning of a serious thaw in the frigid political climate. The climax of the celebrations comes on 22 April, with a visit to Windsor Castle and a reception by Her Majesty the Queen.

  But the discovery of the tunnel is less than twenty-four hours old and the press conference in Berlin is still to be held. Word comes down rapidly from the Kremlin to the KGB in Berlin that no mention is to be made of any British involvement. Sir Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister, issues a similar instruction to SIS. Nothing should disturb the game of high stakes diplomacy being played out in Whitehall. British diplomats reporting on reactions to the tunnel in Germany and Eastern Eu
rope are kept securely in the dark about their own country’s role. So are the British public. The London press remains oddly incurious and discreet. Soon after, the East Germans close up their end of the tunnel and the American buildings in Rudow are eventually abandoned. Before long the tunnel is forgotten.

  Yet it deserves to be remembered. As the New York Herald Tribune claimed, its story possesses all the excitement of a first-rate thriller. And like all good Cold War thrillers, the story begins in another place and at another time. For this, in reality, is a tale of two cities.

  2

  Our Man in Vienna

  In 1948 A new SIS head of station arrived in the Austrian capital, Vienna. His name was Peter Lunn and he was destined to become a central character in the story of the Berlin Tunnel. A trim, soft-spoken man, slightly built and with piercing blue eyes, he was still in his mid-thirties. Later, after years of observing him at work, the KGB would describe him as a cautious and experienced operative who placed a high priority on security with his agent contacts. Lunn was described by his Soviet counterparts as ‘demanding’; he ‘strives to give his agents set tasks and to ensure they are carried out clearly. He is very economical when paying rewards …’1 He also brought a wealth of experience and contacts to his new position.

  Lunn had already made a name for himself as a championship skier. ‘Talkative, argumentative, sociable, a man who slipped down a slalom with ease’, was how one fellow skier fondly remembered him. Lunn first put on skis at the age of two and the mountains were his natural terrain; as a boy of eight he poised proudly to be photographed standing next to the famous mountaineer Andrew Irvine.

  In 1936, the year of the Berlin summer Olympics, Lunn was named captain of the British ski team. The winter games that year offered the first real chance for the Third Reich to show off its athletic and organizational prowess to the world at large. Held at Germany’s principal alpine resort, Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, events took place in a purpose-built stadium for 150,000 spectators positioned dramatically beneath the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain peak. In a driving blizzard regiments of singing Hitler Youth, Nazi labour battalions and sports organizations marched through the streets. In the stadium Hitler, hatless in the snow, received a tumultuous welcome as he presided over the opening ceremonies and march past of national teams.2

  Peter Lunn, the charming and sociable SIS chief in Vienna and Berlin who masterminded the tunnel operations seen here in Bonn in 1957

  Peter Lunn’s risk-taking and competitive edge were honed as captain of the British Olympic ski team – seen here in Mürren, Switzerland, in 1936. Lunn is third from the left

  Ostentatiously, Lunn absented himself from the proceedings. ‘I got a lot of credit for this, which was totally undeserved’, he recalled later, ‘I happen not to like marching about.’ Skiing remained his passion. In the year that he took over the SIS station in Vienna he also coached the British team for the 1948 winter Olympics in St Moritz. To toughen himself up he even put on his ski boots and clumped around the narrow maze of streets outside SIS headquarters in London, situated in an office block on Broadway across from St James’s Park underground station, in the heart of Westminster.

  Skiing was a family affair. His grandfather Sir Henry Lunn had single-handedly developed the sport of winter skiing, turning the Swiss resort of Mürren into a British enclave and founding the travel agency that bore his name. (Mürren, ironically, was later to provide the location for the filming of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the most forgettable of the James Bond films.) Sir Henry’s son Sir Arnold Lunn, Peter’s father, continued the tradition and in addition became a high-profile convert to Roman Catholicism and Christian controversialist in the 1930s. Lunn himself, the elder of Sir Arnold’s two sons, joined the family firm a few years after leaving Eton, learned German, and then spent much of the Second World War in Malta.

  Ostensibly he was working for the British Council. But it is difficult to imagine what this cultural agency, best known for organizing speaking tours of visiting authors and artists, was doing on this besieged Mediterranean island, and his position was almost certainly a cover for SIS. Indeed, Lunn’s own Who’s Who entry claims he entered the SIS in 1941. In 1945 he was posted to Italy, where he passed a parachute course. ‘I shall always remember parachuting as the activity which provides maximum fright with minimal risk’, he recalled. After the war he worked in Germany running the all-important Hamburg station. He returned to London in 1946 and as ‘P [ Production ]3’ he supervised the SIS stations in Austria and Germany, now on the front line of the rapidly developing Cold War battle with Moscow.

  Lunn was a complex man, for whom physical exertion and danger possessed an almost spiritual dimension. The author of several handbooks on skiing, he once listed the pleasures of the sport as precise technical execution, the thrill of speed, and self-mastery. In the triumph of mind over body, argued Lunn, the skier could catch a fleeting glimpse of ‘that paradise that was our ancestors’ in the Garden of Eden’. Yet fighting Nazism and witnessing its results in Germany taught him that such worship of the body and its physical prowess could too easily be perverted.

  At the end of the war Lunn wrote a novel of love, passion, blackmail and murder, entitled Evil in High Places. Set in the Swiss Alps on the eve of war, it features a villain who climbs mountains to escape from his feelings of inferiority, at first literally and then symbolically as he comes eventually to look down on his fellow men and to decide who should live and who should die. The analogy with Hitler gazing down at the world from his Eagle’s Nest above Berchtesgaden is clear. But Lunn’s novel also echoed G.K.Chesterton’s short story The Hammer of God, about a man who says his prayers from the top of a church tower and then begins to look down on the world rather than up to God. A devout and committed Catholic, like his father, Lunn readily embraced SIS’s post-war mission of fighting the Soviet Union and communism. In Vienna his energy and commitment to technical skill found a new and intriguing outlet.3

  *

  If there was a serious competitor to Berlin in the post-war spy stakes it was Vienna. Since the end of the First World War the city had suffered turbulent times. Stripped of its status as grand imperial metropolis by the collapse of the Habsburg empire, by the 1930s its streets provided a bloody battleground for bitter fighting between left and right. Then, in 1938, it witnessed the wildly cheering crowds that embraced Adolf Hitler as he arrived to annex the land of his birth.

  Seven catastrophic years later Vienna fell to the Red Army and was placed under four-power occupation. The historic centre of the city inside the Ringstrasse, the great inner boulevard that encircles the main government buildings, was placed under joint four-power control. Once a month each of the occupying powers took charge of security and sent out patrols consisting of four military policemen from each power: an incongruous and volatile mix ripe for linguistic misunderstanding. Beyond this inner core the city’s remaining districts were apportioned into American, Soviet, French and British zones, marked only by notice-boards and separately policed by each of the powers. The Soviet districts soon became dangerous no-go areas of arbitrary arrests and kidnappings. To add to the perils, zones were not always contiguous, so that moving from one British district to another could involve crossing Soviet-controlled territory. This mosaic created bizarre absurdities, such as the order to all British personnel to proceed immediately to British headquarters in the city at the first sign of Soviet attack – a route that would have taken many of them right through the Soviet sector.

  Like Berlin, the city was peopled by spies and wrapped in intrigue. When Red Army commissars held sole control of the city in 1945 they took the opportunity to pack the police with communists. Soviet agents had been slipped into political parties and the postal and telegraphic offices had been deeply penetrated. ‘A sinister feeling of menace hung over the city’, recorded Suzanne Fesq, an Englishwoman working for the Allied Control Mission, ‘stalking the streets and pervading the air so that
you didn’t even feel secure in your own home. At any time of the day or night a great battering on the door could bring doom and disaster. People, once kidnapped, were never heard of again … and the very few who did escape, never dared tell.’ Richard Helms, a future CIA Director and at this time director of plans in Washington, once briefed an agent on his Vienna mission. ‘The KGB is looking right down our throats’, he said, ‘and they’re playing for keeps – you can bet your hat and breakfast that they will double or kidnap any agent they spot.’4

  By the time Lunn arrived in Vienna the climate had only marginally improved. Many of the communist police had been fired but others remained in place, especially in the Soviet-controlled districts, where they formed a dangerous fifth column in the restored Austrian republic. Nationwide elections in 1945 had decisively rejected the communists. This merely fuelled their efforts to gain power by subversive means. Early in 1948 Czechoslovakia fell to the communists after a sustained campaign of internal attack. This was no faraway country but a next-door neighbour whose fate was all too visible. Events in Prague sent a chill through Austria. Weeks later the opening skirmishes of the Berlin blockade cast a further ominous shadow. Vienna, like the German capital, lay deep within the Soviet-occupied zone. Its citizens braced themselves for a communist coup.5

  The landscape was ideal terrain for high-tension Cold War drama. Lunn’s Vienna was captured for ever on screen by The Third Man, the classic film based on the novel by Graham Greene and starring Orson Welles. The author himself had spent the war working for SIS in Sierra Leone and London. Early in 1948 he flew to Vienna to seek background detail for his tale of Harry Lime and the sordid black market trade in diluted penicillin.