Because of Black Friday American code-breakers failed to provide any advance warning of North Korea’s attack on the south in 1950. From then on President Truman lived in dread that he would receive no advance warning of a Soviet attack elsewhere. Germany, especially Berlin, seemed the most likely target.
The CIA could do little to help. As Freddie Brundrett had revealed to the meeting in Whitehall, the growing impenetrability of the Iron Curtain made the missions of human agents increasingly perilous. While Washington tried to prompt resistance inside Stalin’s European empire, these cloak-and-dagger operations threw little light on the prospects of a Soviet attack. Tightening vigilance by the communist secret police severely limited what high-placed sources could deliver. There was a terrible sense of frustration throughout the burgeoning intelligence community in the American capital. ‘Intelligence is inconclusive as to whether or not the Soviet intention is to precipitate a global war now’, confessed the CIA dispiritedly.
Frustrated and fearful, Truman demanded a vastly improved code-breaking effort to deliver high-grade intelligence. One of his final acts as president was to approve the creation of the National Security Agency. The day he signed the document that brought it into being the Democrats lost the 1952 presidential election to the Republican candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Before long the NSA’s budget and personnel were far outstripping those of the CIA.14
5
The Human Factor
‘Black Friday’ did more than just hasten the creation of the National Security Agency. By blinding allied code-breakers and leading to a Soviet shift from wireless to landlines, it forced the West to cast around for alternative ways to decipher Moscow’s intentions. Instead of aerial messages yielding rich intelligence harvests, perhaps more terrestrial efforts should be tried. For all the importance of signals intelligence (Sigint), traditional agent operations such as those being run by the CIA still had a vital role to play. Inadvertently, William Weisband had set in motion forces that led to one of the most audacious operations of the Cold War.
In Washington one of those who took Black Friday most personally was a thickset, bespectacled and fastidious Virginian in his early forties, Frank Rowlett. ‘I can see him standing in a doorway’, one of those who worked with him still recalls, ‘a pipe clamped between his teeth, scratching his back against the door and speaking with the voice of a good old southern boy.’ But his manner, along with his lazy drawl, belied his import. For Rowlett, a trained mathematician, was America’s greatest living code-breaker, ‘a wizard in making and breaking codes’ and the man who had almost single-handedly produced its greatest intelligence prize.
In the 1930s Rowlett had led the team that successfully cracked the mysteries of ‘Purple’, the Japanese diplomatic cipher machine. As a result, throughout the Second World War the allies had enjoyed a unique and invaluable inside view not just into Japanese diplomacy but also into top-level Nazi thinking. Intercepts from Magic – the well-chosen code name for this miraculous source of intelligence – included detailed reports to Tokyo by the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, Baron Hiroshi Oshima, on his discussions with such Nazi leaders as Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and even Hitler himself. Oshima had also reported in detail on a fact-finding tour he made of Germany’s Atlantic Wall defences in 1943, manna from heaven for allied planners. George C. Marshall, then chief of staff to the US Army in Europe, had described Oshima’s reports as ‘our main basis of information regarding Hitler’s intentions in Europe’. In addition to conjuring up Magic, Rowlett had also created ‘Sigaba’, the highly secure American encryption machine that defied all German and Japanese efforts to crack it.1
American code-breaking genius, the mild-mannered and pipe-smoking Frank Rowlett, at his desk in Washington, DC, in 1948
The Cold War now transformed Rowlett into a leading warrior of the invisible front. His skills were in greater demand than ever, especially after the signing of the UK-USA pact in 1948, a still top secret code-breaking pact with Britain and its leading Commonwealth partners, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. As chief of intelligence for the US Army’s Security Agency, he ran Arlington Hall’s communications and cryptanalysis operations until the creation of the National Security Agency, and was briefed on Venona from the start. He then served as special assistant to a succession of its directors and eventually became the first commandant of its National Cryptographic School. Honours were showered on him and he received many awards for distinguished national service, including the National Security Award and Legion of Merit, not to mention the OBE from Britain.2
By 1951 Rowlett was deeply frustrated by the loss of Soviet wireless traffic. One day he gave vent to this feeling while talking to a friend in the CIA. Perhaps this was where the agency could help, he badgered him. After all, its task was to carry out clandestine missions overseas. If it could locate and tap into Soviet landlines, then Rowlett and his team of code-breakers might be able to read the Kremlin’s mind as they had so brilliantly penetrated that of Berlin and Tokyo only a decade before.
It was a bold idea which instantly appealed to Rowlett’s friend. His name was William (Bill) King Harvey, and he worked in the agency’s Office of Special Operations, the ‘command bunker’ of America’s secret war. Harvey remains a legendary and bizarre figure in the rich and colourful gallery of CIA Cold War heroes. ‘Harvey was odd-looking,’ remembered the FBI’s Robert Lamphere, one of those who worked with him most closely, ‘with protruding eyes and a pear-shaped body. His voice was like that of a bullfrog; once you’d heard it – and the intellect behind it – you never forgot it.’ An overweight, hard-drinking ex-lawyer from small-town Indiana, Harvey had spent several years in the FBI before leaving under a cloud after crashing his car one night on Washington’s Rock Creek Drive following a drunken party. Every day, he liked to boast, he had a different woman.
Bill Harvey, CIA chief in Berlin who oversaw the tunnel, affectionately known as ‘Harvey’s Hole’. Here he is being presented with the Distinguished Intelligence Medal for Operation Stopwatch/Gold by his boss, CIA Director Allen Dulles
It was an image both real and carefully cultivated. Harvey described himself as a ‘three-martini man’ at lunch and often fell asleep at his desk. Colleagues remembered him as the only CIA officer who always carried a gun. He often left the pearl-handled revolver conspicuously on his desk, as if he expected to be assassinated, and would frequently load it or work the action in front of startled visitors. He refused to check it in at restaurants or embassies. ‘Look,’ he would say, brandishing it in his sweat-stained armpit, ‘when you need ’em, you need ’em in a hurry.’3
But Harvey’s outward crudity masked a shrewd and penetrating mind and a highly developed sense of security. A CIA personal evaluation once described him as being ‘less than outgoing on information about operational matters in which he is engaged’. It was a quality that stood him in good stead at the time of the assessment. For by that time – in 1962 – he was heading the ultra-top secret CIA programme code-named ZR/RIFLE, for the planning of ‘executive action’ (otherwise known as assassination) against targets such as Fidel Castro and the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba.4
As the FBI’s counter-intelligence expert on the Soviet agents identified by Venona, Harvey had been among the first Americans to finger Kim Philby as a Soviet mole. He had come to know Rowlett through the Venona project and he responded eagerly to his friend’s latest challenge of another clandestine attack on the Soviets.
Within weeks the CIA had ordered a special study of Soviet landlines in Europe. The task was given to the agency’s Office of Special Operations (OSO), the division in charge of running clandestine operations in the field. This in turn gave the mission to its Staff D section, charged with targeting foreign communications overseas. With Harvey providing the driving force inside the agency, behind the scenes Frank Rowlett masterminded the project as head of Staff D. To keep a personal eye on things he moved from his office at the NSA over to the CIA, where h
e reported to Richard Helms, then the CIA’s Chief of Operations and later the agency’s head. When Allen Dulles became the agency’s new Director in 1953, Rowlett became his ‘special assistant’ and briefed him frequently on the tunnel. In effect, he was overall director of the operation, one of the small handful of people in CIA headquarters who even knew of its existence. Security-conscious to a fault, Rowlett died in 1998 with most of his extraordinary successes still unknown to the outside world.
*
One of the earliest heralds in Europe of Rowlett’s master plan was a lean, athletic and tough-talking lawyer and ex-baseball player from Chicago named Walter O’Brien. A law graduate from Wisconsin, O’Brien had spent the Second World War in the infantry before shifting over to military intelligence after American forces crossed the Rhine, interrogating suspected Nazis and becoming fluent in German. Now in the CIA, where his first post had been in Zurich posing as a lawyer, he arrived in Berlin ostensibly as head of the base’s counter-espionage division. With his wartime background he seemed a natural choice to his office colleagues in Dahlem.
But they were wrong. O’Brien’s position was only a cover for his real mission, which was to scout out the scene for a determined attack on Soviet communications. No decision had yet been made to dig a tunnel, and Harvey was as interested in the possibilities presented by overhead lines as underground cables. He rapidly decided to rely on O’Brien as a trusted and secure officer.
‘After we’d done one or two things together’, remembered O’Brien, ‘Bill suddenly said to me one day that I was “Landsmann”. He liked giving people nicknames and with German soldiers Landsmann means compatriot, the guy you’d like to ride shotgun with, the fellow you’d trust with your life, your buddy. So I guess I passed the test.’ O’Brien knew next to nothing about communications. But what he loved and excelled at was recruiting agents. ‘It’s a sales job, really’, he mused later. ‘My father was a sales manager and it wasn’t much different. The challenge comes in hooking a guy to work for the American government.’
One of O’Brien’s first recruits was an agent who lived in Schwerin, in the Soviet-occupied zone of East Germany. ‘He came regularly to see me in Berlin’, recalled O’Brien, ‘and I was explaining about the overhead lines when he suddenly said there was one right under the window of his apartment. So he had a go and hooked something up to the line. We got loads of material. But they couldn’t decipher it, and that was that.’5
O’Brien had better luck with agents he recruited inside the West Berlin post office, who were in charge of operating long-distance telephone lines. Most had worked in the once unified German telephone system and kept in touch with former colleagues now working in the East. They could help him identify and recruit agents in the Eastern half of the city who knew how the Soviets were using the system. Not even his boss, the head of the Berlin base, knew of O’Brien’s mission. This high-level secrecy even within the CIA was to characterize the operation for the whole of its life.
Berlin was the nexus of Europe’s communications systems. On the eve of war in 1939 almost a hundred international lines crossed German territory, and despite the ravages of war all long-distance telegraph and telephone services in Berlin to each of the country’s occupation zones resumed in 1946. But ultimate authority lay with the Allied Control Council and the 1948 blockade of the city led here, as elsewhere, to a division. The city’s main telegraph office already lay in the Soviet sector. In April 1949 the Soviets also took control of all telephone trunk lines into East Germany – some 93 of them – by opening their own telephone exchange in Berlin-Lichtenberg.
The Lichtenberg exchange offered a prime target for O’Brien. The recruitment of local agents in East Berlin became essential. One of them worked in the long-distance department at Lichtenberg and provided record books that revealed which subscribers were using which underground cables in its area. O’Brien would meet him just across the sector border, drive off with the books to the CIA office in the Western half of the city, have them quickly copied in a photo lab set up in the attic and then return them to his contact before anyone noticed they were missing.
One of his most significant agents was known simply as the Nummer Mädchen, or ‘Numbers Girl’. She too worked in the East Berlin post office, where her job was the highly classified one of keeping the circuit occupancy cards that identified the individual users of specific circuits on a given cable. From these the CIA learned where to focus their efforts. These cards, carefully numbered, eventually found their temporary way to O’Brien’s attic laboratory. Despite strenuous efforts by historians and others to find her, the identity of this Cold War heroine remains unknown. When asked by the author if he remembered her name, O’Brien pointed out that it had been unknown even to him, as she was recruited through a cut-out (or intermediary) to preserve her anonymity.
Yet another of the CIA’s recruits was a lawyer in the East German Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, the ministry in charge of the entire East German telephone network, an expert on how the Soviets used the international telephone service in East Germany. Two major Soviet bases heavily depended on it. One was Karlshorst, the KGB headquarters. The other was Zossen-Wünsdorf, a sprawling military complex of offices, barracks, and underground concrete bunkers to the south of the city begun under the Kaiser and transformed into the wartime headquarters of Hitler’s Army High Command. In 1936 it had been connected to a complex state-of-the-art underground cable system linking all the military installations that ringed the capital. Although heavily bombed by USAAF and RAF planes during the battle for Berlin, by 1953 it had been sufficiently rebuilt to act as headquarters for the group of Soviet forces in Germany.
Another person willing to help was the same ministry’s principal Russian-language interpreter, who was involved in high-level technical dealings with the Soviets. O’Brien also made recruits in telephone offices in East German cities such as Dresden, Erfurt and Magdeburg. To identify potential sources he also relied on interrogating refugees, who were daily flooding into the big detention centre at Marienfelde in West Berlin. Combined with purloined maps showing the exact location of underground cables, all this intelligence eventually gave O’Brien a comprehensive picture of the Soviet communication system in Germany and how it worked. It was clear that it could yield high-grade intelligence. He knew this for certain because yet another of his agents in the East Berlin telephone office agreed to carry out a dangerous experiment.
One night in January 1953, some time between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m., when the office was almost deserted and he could operate without being detected, the agent switched Soviet telephone traffic on to a cable attached to a West Berlin circuit. This gave the CIA a precious fifteen-minute sample of prime target circuit, which was recorded by one of O’Brien’s technical experts posing as an employee of the West Berlin post office. They carried out several more similar experiments over the next few weeks. The longest continuous sample was twenty-nine minutes. But most were two- or three-minute snatches. None the less, after analysing the material the Berlin CIA office declared that it was ‘unique material of high interest’.6
Harvey immediately informed CIA German headquarters in Frankfurt, his principal channel and line of command to Dulles. Staffed with well over a thousand operatives, it was the biggest and most important CIA station outside Washington. Heading it was the ‘tintype handsome’ and polo-playing General Lucien King Truscott, a battle-hardened Texan who had stormed ashore at Anzio, commanded the American landings in southern France and driven an armoured division across the Rhine into Germany. ‘I’m going to go out there and find out what those weirdos are up to’, he promised when Allen Dulles’s predecessor, Walter Bedell-Smith, sent him to Frankfurt to rein in some of the more gung-ho CIA operations being run out of Germany.
But Truscott was impressed by the tunnel after being briefed by one of his senior officers, nicknamed ‘Fleetfoot’ by Harvey after his frequent habit of speeding up the autobahn to Berlin.7 Truscott officia
lly notified Washington that the cables carried Soviet military, KGB and diplomatic telephone and telegraph traffic to and from various Soviet headquarters in Germany. ‘In certain instances’, he declared, ‘it also carried messages between Karlshort and Wünsdorf and Moscow.’ It was the spring of 1953. The scene was set for the Americans to repeat and even to surpass Peter Lunn’s success in Vienna.
6
2 Carlton Gardens
Meanwhile in London the changing political scene had put Winston Churchill back into 10 Downing Street. At seventy-seven his powers had waned but he remained formidable, visibly rejuvenated by the adrenalin rush of office. His predecessor, Clement Attlee, an anti-communist hawk, had been just as ready to co-operate with Washington on the Cold War intelligence front. After serving as Churchill’s trusted deputy throughout the war he knew almost as many Anglo-American intelligence secrets. It was Attlee and his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, who had given the green light to the UK-USA code-breaking pact.
But Churchill brought new edge to the quest for intelligence about the Kremlin. He had saved his nation once before. Driving him now was a fierce will to preserve it from nuclear destruction. War, he told the British people during the election campaign, was no longer a romance but would mean nothing less than the massacre of human beings by ‘the hideous force of perverted science’.
Spies Beneath Berlin Page 6