The smashed and dreary city presented a miserable sight. Days of artillery bombardment and heavy street fighting between desperate SS divisions and the forces of Marshal Tolbukhin’s Third Ukrainian Front had taken their toll. Rubble lay everywhere, and pedestrians had to weave their way carefully along the still littered streets. Steel rods hung like stalactites, rusty girders formed skeletons in the snow, and the Kärntnerstrasse, the once elegant main shopping street, consisted of a single-storey row of patched and battered shops. Black market restaurants were serving up little more than soup and bones. Many Viennese were collapsing on the streets from hunger. There was virtually no entertainment; most theatres had been destroyed by bombing. The Stefansdom was a virtual ruin, pockmarked from shelling.
In the Russian-controlled part of the city the Prater, the vast amusement park along the Danube whose huge Ferris wheel provides a centrepiece of The Third Man, was a scene of desolation. Weeds grew in profusion, the foundations of merry-go-rounds resembled huge abandoned millstones, rusting tanks lay where they had been abandoned, and there were shell-holes everywhere. Only the great wheel itself was intact, standing against the skyline as one of the city’s few great landmarks left untouched.6
Below ground existed an equally sinister and dangerous world. Searching for a plot, Greene discovered through SIS contacts the existence of an underground police whose job was to patrol the vast system of sewers. The entrances above ground were disguised as advertisement kiosks and remained unlocked. Below there were no zones of occupation, and agents could slip undetected from one part of the city to another. This provided Greene with the famous scene in which Harry Lime first gives the slip to his pursuers above ground and then finally, in the dark below, meets his end. The sewers, noted Greene, smelt curiously sweet, like ozone. Their policemen, it turned out, wore lint-white uniforms, like ski instructors.7
Lunn would undoubtedly have been intrigued by the comparison. Once established in Vienna, he also turned his gaze from the snow-peaked mountains to life below ground. But he was less interested in the sewers than in another target: the underground cables that carried telegram and telephone traffic in and out of the city.
*
The Berlin blockade put both British and American intelligence on full alert for any signs of a Soviet attack on Western Europe. Austria stood on the European front line, and Vienna was a vital forward listening post. Red Army troops occupied the eastern half of the country as well as the capital. To the north and east, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were both now firmly in Moscow’s grip. Tito’s communist Yugoslavia, already straining at Stalin’s tight leash, lay to the south. If and when Soviet tanks rolled, Austria would be a principal battlefield.
In Vienna, Soviet headquarters operated out of the grand old Imperial Hotel on the Ringstrasse. Here, with the hammer and sickle flag flying from its rooftop, the KGB and GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) occupied the top floor. The city, in the words of one KGB man, was ‘an operational playground for Soviet intelligence whose officers were never deterred by the Austrian Government from obtaining visas or meeting recruited and potential agents’. CIA officers called the Imperial ‘the honey pot’.8 For telegraph and telephone communications with their central group of forces in Austria, as well as with Moscow and the outside world, the Red Army and KGB relied on cable networks built in the nineteenth-century heyday of the old Habsburg empire. Squarely in the European tradition of state monopolies, the entire system was run by the Austrian Post Office.
As the KGB noted, Lunn was particularly effective at running agents: demanding, giving them set tasks, ensuring these were carried out clearly and paying out rewards only if he had to and if he was certain the intelligence could be used. Vienna in the late 1940s provided a surfeit of agents and a feast of information. Pouring into Lunn’s office in the British embassy, where he officially held the title of Second Secretary, came a stream of reports about Soviet troop movements and military installations. But nearly all of them were based on visual information and added up to an essentially superficial picture. What Lunn needed was a high-placed source inside Red Army headquarters or the Soviet high commission.9
One day he was sitting in his office leafing through a pile of reports provided by one of his agents with contacts in the central post office. Sudddenly Lunn’s eye was caught by a particularly intriguing piece of information. Several of the cables linking the Red Army to Soviet units and airfields in eastern Austria ran through the British and French sectors of the city. Lunn realized that if they could be tapped and their conversations recorded he could uncover the intelligence so urgently demanded by London and Washington about Soviet mobilization and the possible start of World War Three.
Such material would be useful not just to SIS but also to the many other agencies eagerly shopping around for information. High on the list was army intelligence, with its myriad of officers and units scattered throughout the British zone. Its Field Security sections needed to identify Soviet spies and agents threatening their work. Field Security has been described as ‘the sharp end’ of military intelligence and its motto, veterans wryly claim, should have been ‘first in, last out’. During the Second World War Field Security agents were frequently the first to enter a captured city to secure vital buildings and arrest their opposite numbers, and when the army moved on they tidied up the loose ends of intelligence affairs.
The fighting was over but the Cold War was keeping them busy and their role had expanded. Now, as part of the occupation forces, they were working with other services, such as SIS. In Vienna, housed on two floors of a nineteenth-century apartment block on the Sebastiansplatz, they targeted industrial and military developments behind the Iron Curtain.10 They also had their hands full interrogating illegal frontier crossers, or IFCs. Plenty of the desperate were still finding their way across the ploughed fields and barbed wire entanglements along the borders with Hungary and Czechoslovakia. After weeding out the fake refugees and communist plants, Field Security milked them for military and industrial intelligence about Eastern Europe. Phone tapping was an integral part of its repertoire. Even as Lunn was dreaming up his Vienna operation, allied counter-intelligence in Trieste was running – hidden behind a door discreetly labelled ‘Cabinet Office Historical Section’ – an extensive telephone tapping operation into Yugoslavia.11
The Americans were also busy. Field Security’s American equivalent was the US Army’s Counter-intelligence Corps, or CIC, and its units in Austria, such as the 430th Detachment, played fast and loose with similar Cold War missions. ‘There were no guidelines,’ recalled one of its veterans, ‘we and the Russians just made up the rules as we went along.’12
Lunn’s army of agents had little difficulty in getting hold of blueprints of the city’s cable network. Most of the cables ran underground and so tunnels became the obvious route of attack. Lunn now began to assemble the team of experts he needed for the operation. It was to involve several separate digging operations or tunnels in the city, each of which would provide inside information about the Red Army in Austria. If Stalin gave the order to invade Western Europe, Lunn would be one of the first to know.
His immediate boss at SIS headquarters in London was Andrew King. An experienced veteran of European operations, the Cambridge-educated and wealthy son of an officer in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders had been one of the earliest recruits to the so-called ‘Z’ network of pre-war British intelligence agents. This was the inventive creation of the controversial SIS mandarin Claude Dansey, otherwise known as ‘Colonel Z’. From its base on the eighth floor of Bush House in London, the ‘Z’ network provided a parallel to the ‘mainstream’ SIS networks in case they were penetrated or rolled up by the Germans. Many of its agents operated under the commercial cover of such firms as Unilever and Royal Dutch Shell.
King knew Vienna well. Soon after Hitler’s Anschluss the Nazis had uncovered Dansey’s existing agent there, the central European correspondent of the Manchester Guardian Frederick Voight.
King was sent out to replace him. His cover was provided by Alexander Korda, the film producer, who was also Dansey’s closest collaborator and whose company, London Film Productions, received secret service money. But the ruthless grip of the Gestapo ensured that Vienna was largely hostile terrain, and after the outbreak of the war King moved to Zurich and Geneva, and eventually Berne.13
Now King was in charge of all operations in Austria, Switzerland and Germany, and was to be intimately involved with both the Vienna and Berlin tunnels. When Lunn eventually left Vienna, King replaced him as head of station. He made a colourful impression on those who met him. One of them was the then novice MI6 officer Anthony Cavendish, who in 1989 successfully defeated a government effort to suppress his highly controversial memoirs Inside Intelligence. In 1951. Cavendish was stationed in Vienna, ostensibly as a member of the Austrian Control Commission but in reality as liaison officer between military intelligence and the SIS contingent in the embassy. In his memoirs he talks unfavourably of King, whom he disguises as ‘Philip’, a man, he writes, ‘who gave the impression of being homosexual’. King was a man of peccadilloes, claimed Cavendish, not the least of which was taking ‘an unhousetrained little Pekinese’ around with him. Another colleague still vividly remembers that in the drab and still impoverished Vienna of the early 1950s King cut a remarkable figure by ostentatiously riding around in a large, chauffeur-driven Jaguar car.14
But for Lunn, mobilizing Andrew King and SIS headquarters was not enough. He knew that he needed to clear his plan with the Foreign Office as well. As luck would have it, the former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, the London apex of the system, had recently been transferred to Vienna as British high commissioner. This was the robust and forthright Harold Caccia, later to become a highly effective and popular British ambassador in Washington. A keen shot and good sportsman, Caccia had taken the measure of the Foreign Office and guessed it would veto such a daring coup. So he decided not to tell them. Instead, he gave Lunn the go-ahead on his own initiative. ‘I couldn’t look at myself if there’d been an invasion and I denied the chance of getting the information’, he confessed later.15
The largest and most renowned of Lunn’s Vienna tunnel efforts was undoubtedly the one dug in the suburb of Schwechat. It lay in one of the British sectors to the south of the city and just beyond the terminal of one of the main tram lines. Here ran one of the underground cables linking the Imperial Hotel with the nearby city airport and Soviet military headquarters for Austria in St Pölten.
Andrew King, SIS chief in Vienna during Operation Classification and London SIS point man for the Berlin tunnel, was always noted for his love of fast cars. Here he is seen at the wheel with a friend in Munich in the 1930s
But how to dig a tunnel and install a tap without anyone finding out? Lunn took a look around the neighbourhood and decided the safest way would be to purchase a house close by. From there, out of public view, SIS could burrow away.
A large and comfortable villa with an extensive garden and big trees, the house had a lengthy driveway leading down to the main road. The neighbours undoubtedly noticed when a young married couple who obviously worked for the British military government moved in some time later that year. They were sociable and lively, and threw lots of parties that often went on until the early hours of the morning. Nor would their Austrian neighbours have missed the gang of workmen who arrived soon afterwards to resurface the driveway. What they could not have guessed was that the cheery young major who had taken possession of the villa was the right-hand man to Peter Lunn for his daring scheme. Nor that the driveway resurfacing was vital preparation for the digging of a tunnel from the villa out to the cable that ran along the roadway outside.
The major’s name was John Edward Wyke. Those who knew him remember him as a dapper ballroom dancer with an eye for the ladies who in later life turned his hand to writing radio plays for the BBC. But the reality of his life was even richer in drama. Wyke was a veteran of the wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE), created by Winston Churchill in 1940 to ‘set Europe ablaze’ by carrying out sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines. Wyke, commissioned as a captain in The Queen’s Regiment, spent most of the war in the Middle East working on SOE operations in the Balkans, if his official file is to be believed. At least one person who later knew him claimed that in early 1945 Wyke, who was part Dutch, had also been involved in dangerous SIS intelligence operations conducted from the liberated part of the Netherlands into the northern, German-occupied zone.16
But special operations were still needed after the war and SIS took over the job, along with many of SOE’s staff, including Wyke. During the transition period, early in 1946, SOE’s thousands of files were either kept, weeded or simply tossed out. Wyke was one of those in its Central Archives Section who decided their fate. He approached the task with a dashing verve that bordered on recklessness. In the half-deserted old Baker Street headquarters of SOE, sitting with his chair tipped at an angle and his feet on the desk, he would pore over the mountains of files. Behind him was a large waste-paper basket. He would pick up a file, nonchalantly glance at the title, rapidly reach a decision and then, with the flick of a practised wrist, consign the condemned documents over his shoulder to bureaucratic oblivion.17
But within the devil-may-care Major Wyke was a cool professional. Since joining SIS he had become the in-house expert on the delicate art of phone tapping. At the end of the 1950s he was to distinguish himself by braving terrorists in Cyprus to climb a telephone pole in pitch darkness and place a tap on the telephone line of Archbishop Makarios in an effort to trace the EOKA guerrilla leader George Grivas.18 Later, in the 1960s, he successfully installed an intercept on the telephone lines of the ill-fated King Idris of Libya. But for now, smartly turned out in his uniform and with a swagger stick under his arm, his efforts were focused firmly beneath Vienna.
To help him, and to round out the tunnel team, Lunn brought in two other experts from London. One was a private mining consultant of considerable experience known as Colonel Balmain. He agreed to take charge of building the tunnel and construct the tap chamber, where the delicate final stage of connecting up with the cables would take place. The other expert was John Taylor, a small sharp-faced man with a pencil moustache who had served as a communications officer with Montgomery’s Eighth Army in North Africa. Taylor ran technical research operations for SIS and MI5 from a cramped laboratory inside the top secret Special Investigations Unit of the Post Office. This workshop of tricks and devices was located in an ugly redbrick Victorian building at Dollis Hill in north London. Taylor’s task was to bring in Post Office personnel to assist with all the detailed technical aspects of the operation. His own personal energy was largely concentrated on what turned out to be one of the most difficult problems of all: the penetration of moisture into the multitude of circuits being tapped.19
Taylor’s Post Office crew consisted of half a dozen hand-picked men under Blake Rymer, a Dollis Hill veteran. One of them was Les Sparks, a 27-year-old jointer from Chiswick whose specialist skill lay in handling underground cables. It was not to be his first trip to Berlin. Six years earlier he had landed on Omaha beach just twenty-four hours after D-Day to install overhead telephone lines for the allied armies in Normandy before accompanying them as far as the Brandenburg Gate, at the heart of Hitler’s Third Reich. He was happy that his mate Arthur Loomes, a fellow jointer who had worked with him on several other special jobs, was included. The two of them, working side by side, would take care of the actual cable cutting. Another of the crew, who had completed a youth apprenticeship scheme at Dollis Hill and national service with the Royal Signals and the Intelligence Corps, had the task of wiring up the tape recorders, checking the amplifiers and making sure that the recordings went smoothly. The first he knew about the job came one morning at work when he was suddenly told by his boss, ‘We’d like you to go out to Vienna.’ A few days later he was flown out to the Austrian capital in civilian clothes and
was installed with other members of the team in the Schönbrunn barracks.
With Wyke, Balmain and Taylor’s Dollis Hill Crew on board, Lunn was ready. The overall code name given to the Vienna tunnel operations was ‘Classification’. The one out at Schwechat was also christened – in honour of Wyke’s expansive lifestyle – ‘Lord’. None of those involved suspected at this stage that Vienna was only the start of something very much larger, which would eventually take them all to Berlin.
3
Smoky Joe’s
It looked like any of the other rows of boarded-up old shops that littered post-war Vienna. Perhaps their owners had died, or been transported, or had simply given up in despair in the impoverished city. The three single-storey buildings stood forlornly on the Aspangstrasse, a short cobbled street practically opposite the main railway freight station in a British district of the city. No one gave them a second glance.
Yet for deserted shops they had a curious number of visitors. These would arrive singly and glance cautiously around before entering the front door of the middle shop. At the rear of the shop the visitors pressed a bell beside another door made of bulletproof steel. This door had a spyhole and behind it wooden stairs descended steeply to a cellar, with three uniformed soldiers on duty with Sten guns. One of them climbed the stairs, peered through the spyhole and, when he was satisfied by what he saw, swung the door inward so it opened across his body. Down below, the other two had strict orders to fire in case of any doubt: the visitor might be being followed. At the bottom of the stairs was a small room lined with packing cases which disguised yet another door, which also opened inwards. Behind it lay a different world.
Spies Beneath Berlin Page 3