Spies Beneath Berlin

by David Stafford

  Crammed into the concealed space sweated half a dozen men. During the day only a paltry light filtered in through six thick glass bricks. At night the cellar’s denizens worked with a couple of bare light bulbs. Beyond them in the gloom stretched a short tunnel, no more than three or four metres long, which ran out from the basement under the road outside. Dug by a unit of the British Army’s Royal Engineers, it lay just a metre and a half below the cobblestones. A jungle of wires hanging down from a portion of exposed cable lying under the road led to three telephone switchboards. A row of tape recorders lined an inner wall. Men with earphones listened in carefully. The cable being tapped carried telephone lines. Whenever the eavesdroppers heard a conversation begin, they isolated the relevant line and turned on a machine which recorded the talk on old-fashioned Edison wax cylinders. Six inches long and two inches in diameter, every now and again these had to be shaved with a device like a pencil-sharpener to expose a fresh surface. Alongside was a calibrated strip of paper.

  As soon as a call came through, one of the men started a recorder and noted the telephone line, and the time, on the paper strip. Most of the conversations were in Russian. Many of the speakers had the curious habit of first blowing down the mouthpiece of the telephone, as if issuing orders from the bridge of an old ship to the engine room below. The lines being tapped carried all local Soviet military telephone calls, as well as long-distance civilian traffic to cities behind the Iron Curtain such as Budapest, Bucharest and Sofia. These, too, were occasionally used by the Red Army. Each morning the used wax cylinders were picked up in a laundry basket and taken for processing to the headquarters of Int. Org., or British Military Intelligence, which formed part of the British military headquarters complex based at the Schönbrunn barracks in the city. From here items of special interest were sent on to Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) in Britain.

  The operation had begun in the autumn of 1948, when British intelligence was contacted by a telecommunications expert in the Austrian government. Did they know, he asked, that a cable under the Aspangstrasse carried Soviet military traffic? Even more valuable was his information about a ‘blister’ on the cable, a point where cables had been soldered together, which made phone tapping easier. The British occupying forces requisitioned the shop premises shortly afterwards for ostensible use as an RTO, or railway transport office, a plausible enough cover given the close proximity of the freight marshalling yards. After digging the tunnel and removing the soil to the garden of a large house occupied by Field Security across the city, the sappers were promptly posted to the other side of the world, Singapore.

  Listening in was boring and repetitive work. It carried on, round the clock, with three men at a time working two- or three-hour shifts and the off-duty men sleeping on makeshift beds next to the telephone switchboards. Most came from the British Army’s Field Security section.

  The work was anything but glamorous. There were long, dreary periods when none of the lines was in use. Boredom in the cramped dark basement stretched everyone’s nerves. To fill in the time and to lessen the tension, the soldiers talked office gossip, sex, sport, food.

  One of them was Bob Steers. A regular in the Intelligence Corps, he had spent the previous two years interrogating refugees and running small-scale intelligence operations along the Italian and Yugoslav frontiers. It had been exciting work and he was ill equipped for the tedium that confronted him in Vienna. ‘So’, Lunn greeted him, ‘now you’re in Vienna you think it’s going to be all wine, women and song. Well, let me tell you, old boy, it’s all beer, bitches and broadcasting.’ It also meant hours of boring eavesdropping, although there were some surprising compensations under the Aspangstrasse. ‘Every night’, he recalled,

  we used to listen to what we called ‘The 2 o’clock Jump’. In those days the band led by Stan Kenton had a popular jazz record entitled ‘The One o’Clock Jump’. At this time the traffic was very light and the telephonists in the various capitals (Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia) would chat to each other. These conversations would be put over a speaker in our cellar so that everyone could enjoy them. Intimate sex lives would be discussed, especially by the ladies on the Vienna and Budapest exchanges, and it certainly broadened our youthful perspectives of life.

  In between times these callow young eavesdroppers munched chocolate and smoked the endless supply of cigarettes provided free by the army. In the unventilated and claustrophobic space the air was always thick with smoke. Mixed with the smell of bodies and the oozing basement damp, it made for an acrid and noxious climate. But this was the Cold War, and they were stationed on the front line. They called it Smoky Joe’s.

  This was the first of the Vienna tunnels. To arrange and supervise the tap SIS sent the telephone tapping expert John Taylor and two assistants out from London. Their arrival almost caused the operation to come to grief before it began. They travelled by train wearing military uniform and disguised as members of the British occupying forces. With them, in packing cases, they carried all the sophisticated technical equipment they needed for the task. It had been arranged that the railway transport officer at the Aspangstrasse would meet them and escort them to the site. ‘For some reason he did not’, recalled Steers, ‘and the travellers phoned the Sebastiansplatz to say they had alighted in Wien-Meidling, which was in the Russian sector.’ The station was crawling with Soviet military police, the last place a team about to install a top secret tap on Red Army communications should be. Quick-footed work by Field Security extricated the Post Office team, which they found standing forlornly on the platform in unfamiliar battledress and surrounded by packing cases containing their top secret technical equipment. Beside them Russian military policemen patrolled the platform. It was a tricky situation and could have blown the operation from the beginning.

  Field Security was all too aware of the security aspects. ‘The operation was TOPSEC’, recalled Steers.

  Politically speaking it was arguably one of the most sensitive plans ever carried out by the Int. Corps … one tiny slip could have resulted in massive international reverberations. All discussion on the tapping was forbidden outside the cellar and even the other personnel on the City Detachment were ignorant of the work of their confreres. All details of one’s civilian friends had to be submitted for vetting.

  Even when it was up and running Smoky Joe’s came close to disaster. The Aspangstrasse was a main thoroughfare for heavy goods vehicles bound for the freight station. The gradual pounding of the trucks caused the roadway above the tunnel to sag. Some sharp-eyed Austrian Post Office maintenance worker noticed this. One quiet Sunday morning, when the traffic was light, a three-man investigation team arrived unannounced on the scene. Bob Steers can still remember the high state of alarm below ground as the workers sniffed around on the street above.

  Looking out, I saw to my horror three Austrian workmen with pickaxes attacking the area in the road above our tunnel. We had a ‘panic’ telephone on which one did not speak. I lifted it up and replaced it on the bridge. This alerted the security officer on duty at Sebastiansplatz and he automatically knew what action to take. Within the hour, and with the workmen getting closer to our tunnel, the GOC [General Officer Commanding] Austria arrived with the Austrian equivalent of the Postmaster General. I know what he said because I interpreted for him. ‘You see what we are doing here’, he said, showing him our setup, ‘now, call your men off and if you ever breathe a word about this, I promise you, you will be dead within the hour.’

  The repair team vanished as quickly as it had arrived.1

  A nosy Viennese Miss Marple also came close to sniffing out the secret. In 1952 a young Royal Marines subaltern attached to SIS in Klagenfurt, in the British zone of Austria, was sent up to Vienna to help out with some digging and roadworks connected with one of Lunn’s underground enterprises. He and a young SIS officer assisting him were temporarily boarded out with an eccentric landlady in the south of the city. To explain his mud-caked shoes, the SIS ma
n hastily explained he played football. Each night, as the two men returned home caked in mud, she would ask, with rising incredulity as the week went on: ‘Wieder Fussball spielen, Herr Oberleutnant? Wieder Fussball?’ (‘Playing football again, lieutenant? Football again?’).2

  Smoky Joe’s was officially code-named Conflict and ran until 1951, when it was suddenly closed down. The reason was simple. The Soviets stopped using the cable for military traffic and switched to alternative lines. With the drying up of any useful intelligence Smoky Joe’s had outlived its usefulness. But was the Soviet decision to discontinue its use fortuitous, or the result of something more disturbing? Had they got wind of its operation? Had someone betrayed it? One of the Vienna tunnels was eventually blown by the British traitor George Blake, but not, apparently, this one.

  In addition to Smoky Joe’s, British intelligence in Vienna initiated at least three other spy tunnels, which remained at work until Russian and British forces left the city in 1955, when Austria regained its sovereignty. One, code-named Sugar, operated under the cover of a British firm dealing in imitation jewellery and trading under the name of Gablons.3 Another was the Lord tunnel, which ran from John Wyke’s house. According to Anthony Cavendish, then working at the Schönbrunn barracks as liaison officer with Lunn’s SIS team in the embassy, this carried on successfully reporting on the Soviet order of battle in Austria until it was abruptly terminated as the result of an accident. ‘A tram passing over the tunnel’, recalled Cavendish, ‘suddenly caused [it] to collapse and the tram to sink into the resulting deep depression. The whole matter was hushed up but that was the end of the operation.’4

  The cover story for ‘Lord’ was that the house was a post for the Military Police, which would explain the number of visitors it had. To make the deception credible, whenever the British European Airways bus passed by on its way from the city centre to Schwechat, a Military Policeman in full uniform would clamber on board, accompany it to the airport and then join it on its return journey, duly disembarking outside the house. The tunnel here was about seventy yards long and ran out under the road from the garage. Whenever the noise of digging got too loud, Wyke would rev up the engine from a motor bike he kept stored there, as though he were testing it.

  After Les Sparks and the Dollis Hill jointers had completed their work of tapping into the cable, a main distribution frame had to be constructed that would connect particular circuits to specific tape recorders, as in some old-fashioned telephone exchange. In three separate visits to Vienna over a period of about six weeks another of the Dollis Hill experts completed the work. The cables carried telephone conversations that were scrupulously recorded on tape. ‘One of the most important circuits went to the Soviet bakery’, he recalled. ‘Once a week each of the Soviet barracks in the city sent in their order. From these, we could figure out how many troops there were and whether there’d been any significant change.’

  The entrance to yet another British spy tunnel was disguised as a Harris Tweed shop. This was in the centre of the city, in the first district just off the Ringstrasse. ‘It wasn’t a shop per se’, recalled Bob Steers. ‘There was no shop window and one went to a room on the first floor and there were just bolts of tweed stacked around and one was attended by a buxom English woman.’ Here the tunnel was little more than six or seven yards long, burrowing out under the road outside in much the same fashion as Smoky Joe’s. Again Les Sparks and Arthur Loomes cut into the Soviet cable. It appears that SIS thought up the cover idea, convinced that such quintessentially British goods would not attract enough customers in Vienna to interfere with the real business at hand. To its dismay, however, Harris Tweeds proved inexplicably popular among the post-war Viennese, and SIS found itself buried beneath an avalanche of import licences as its harrassed agents struggled to keep pace with consumer demand.

  According to one much repeated and embellished claim, SIS decided that the first set of tapes recorded by the intercept team should be collected by a British officer from a schoolgirl who would be carrying them in a bookbag while strolling in the Schönbrunn Park. Unfortunately, when the British officer approached the young girl a Viennese policeman arrested him on suspicion of child molesting. Only the intervention of higher authority saved him from further embarrassment.

  An amusing story if true, and well worthy of some Graham Greene spy novel. But it immediately raises suspicion. Would SIS really have trusted such secret and sensitive material to the wayward habits of a schoolgirl, when there were far more simple ways of collecting the material? On reflection, it sounds like some bar-room tale gleefully told to highlight the curious ways of the eccentric British. And indeed, the source of the story turns out to be an American – and one, moreover, who was demonstrably unreliable.

  *

  The Americans were as deeply involved as the British in the game of espionage and counter-espionage in Vienna. They, too, focused wary eyes on the 100,000 men of the Red Army’s Central Group of Forces poised for possible attack against the West from their own zone of Austria. For the CIA, Red Army headquarters at Baden bei Wien offered an obvious target. Eventually, in 1952, they recruited a significant mole there in the shape of Lieutenant-Colonel Pyotr Popov, who gave them valuable material on the Soviet order of battle.

  But until then Austria and Vienna were barren territory. ‘At the time’, writes the former CIA operative William Hood in his study of the Popov defection, ‘firsthand information on the USSR was so hard to come by that the lowest, dog-faced private deserting from the Red Army was considered a valuable source and immediately flown out of Austria to a defector centre in Germany.’ Pressure on the CIA to deliver early warning of Soviet attack was as intense as that on SIS in Britain. The day a new CIA deputy head of station was being sent out to Vienna he was summoned into the Washington office of Richard Helms. ‘Our basic job is to penetrate the Soviet establishment’, declared Helms, ‘that’s the only way to get the answers the White House is screaming for. One penetration agent will be worth a ton of the scraps we’re getting from those so-called spies – the guys on the outside looking in.’5

  But there were other ways of penetrating the Soviet establishment, and cable tapping could provide vital data on Soviet intentions. Information about the role of the Americans in the Vienna tunnel operation, so far as it has publicly surfaced, rests almost exclusively on the account of a man named Carl Nelson, who worked for the CIA’s Office of Communications, the section specializing in phone tapping and other technical tricks.

  In the 1970s Nelson was interviewed by the Washington-based journalist David Martin for his book The Wilderness of Mirrors, about the self-destructive suspicions and personal rivalries about Soviet penetration that almost destroyed the CIA. Here Nelson claimed to have arrived in Vienna in 1951 to explore how Soviet landlines could be tapped. Lunn and SIS had kept the CIA completely in the dark about their operations, and Nelson independently began to investigate the location of Soviet landlines. He started outside the Red Army’s headquarters in the Imperial Hotel, noting a couple of cables linking it to the Soviet command in Moscow. ‘He strolled through the streets’, wrote Martin, ‘following the path of the cables overhead to the outskirts of the city, where they snaked underground to connect with the long-distance lines leading to Moscow.’ On a map he had acquired of the city’s cable system Nelson then traced their underground route as they ran parallel to the main highway connecting the Vienna airport to the city centre. This task accomplished, he then searched for a suitable site to make a phone tap. But before he had succeeded SIS found out. They took him aside and informed him of their own operation at Schwechat. At that point, according to Martin’s account, the CIA joined forces with Lunn’s team in a joint Anglo-American operation which the Americans code-named Silver.6

  Yet Nelson’s account has been vigorously contested by other CIA operatives. Some claim that he was not even in Vienna at the time. Others describe him as ‘brilliant but erratic’, a man they would not trust to tell any story strai
ght. And indeed, the stories themselves appear highly implausible. But Nelson went on in his interview with Martin to make two further bold and extraordinary claims.

  The first is that it was his discovery of the cables in Vienna that forced SIS to share their hard-earned intelligence with the Americans. This is highly misleading. Intelligence gleaned from Vienna was already being passed on to the Americans at higher levels. What did happen was that at some point after Lunn’s operations began, and after he had left for another posting, the CIA was brought into the scene. The details of how exactly this happened still remain obscure, hidden away in files not yet open. But the general outline can now be revealed.

  Under Lunn the local CIA station in Vienna had been kept strictly out of the picture. As a result it had begun its own independent operations to identify Soviet cables, as claimed by Nelson, although Nelson himself was not part of them. Then, somewhere, there was a high-level leak, probably accidental, to the CIA, and SIS had little choice but to bring in the Americans. Soon after, Lunn’s successor Andrew King arrived ‘in a sweat’ at the Vienna CIA station headquarters to let them into the secret. By some extraordinary coincidence the American he had come to brief, a man named Bronson Tweedy, turned out to have been at the same British preparatory school as King. This schoolboy friendship eased what might otherwise have been a frosty reception. As a result, King took the CIA station’s two most senior officers out in the back of a British army truck to look at one of the SIS tunnels in action. From then on, recalled one CIA veteran, ‘we were on board’.

  The broad gist of Nelson’s claim that SIS initiated the Vienna tunnel operations and that the CIA joined them later is correct. But another far more startling claim is not. According to Nelson, while the Russians were carefully enciphering their cable messages, an echo of the original, non-enciphered plaintext could be picked up using special equipment – provided the intercept was made no more than twenty miles or so from its point of origin. Nelson described this as the ‘echo effect’ and claimed to have discovered it while testing the security of an American cipher machine known as the SIGTOT, manufactured by Bell. ‘No code-breaking was required’, reported Martin, based on his conversation with Nelson. ‘Once he had hooked up the proper combination of capacitors, amplifiers, and assorted gadgets, Nelson could sit back and watch the clear text clatter forth at sixty words per minute onto an ordinary teletype machine.’7 The discovery immediately forced a prompt modification of the SIGTOT system and adoption by the Americans of a far more secure machine.