Spies Beneath Berlin

by David Stafford

  Beside him Dulles had the new Secretary of State, his brother John Foster Dulles, a convinced Cold War hardliner. This was useful. Far more valuable, however, was the presence of Eisenhower in the White House. Unlike Truman, Eisenhower had experienced at first hand the value of military intelligence. He was also committed in principle to covert action as an alternative to costly military action. ‘Some of our traditional ideas of international sportsmanship’, he wrote privately, ‘are scarcely applicable in the morass in which the world now founders.’5 During his eight years in the White House the scope of CIA activities increased dramatically. But the President was always careful to keep the paper trail with the White House to the absolute minimum. He preferred to give verbal approval.

  Dulles, confident of Eisenhower’s consent, quickly agreed with Truscott that the intelligence potential of the tunnel justified the inherent risk and financial cost. Crucial to its success, stressed Truscott, would be maintaining the highest possible degree of security. Only individuals who could make a direct contribution should know. The project would also require support from key Washington players beyond the CIA, especially in the Pentagon and the White House. Dulles assured him on all these points. He also emphasized that as little as possible should be written down, although for his own personal interest he would like to see a more detailed plan.6

  *

  ‘Precisely at what point the idea of a tunnel for the purpose of tapping the target cables began to come into focus cannot be pinpointed’, records the CIA’s internal history of the project. Nor does it reveal any specific date when the CIA and SIS began to work together on the operation. The Americans had begun their cable reconnaissance work in Berlin independently of the British. But after O’Brien’s successes in targeting spots, Rowlett and Helms decided they should bring in SIS. ‘We had everything about the East German cable system and we guessed they’d be doing something of the sort’, recalled O’Brien. So he and ‘Fleetfoot’ flew to London and laid out what they had got to SIS. From then on it was a joint operation. The British possessed vital expertise lacked by the CIA, as Vienna had proved. ‘It couldn’t possibly have been done without the British’, Montgomery said later. ‘We simply didn’t have the technical expertise to carry out the tap.’

  It was certainly no coincidence that in mid-1953 Peter Lunn arrived in Berlin as the SIS head of station. Based in its offices by the Olympic Stadium were about thirty officers and twice as many support staff: technicians, secretaries, signals experts and drivers. Security and counter-surveillance techniques were intense. Officers drove around the city for meetings with agents in battered old Volkswagens. Technical wizards developed a James Bond device to fool KGB watchers. After leaving the compound the driver could operate a switch on the dashboard and the licence plates would swivel round to display a completely different number.

  Such tricks had a venerable wartime pedigree. Lunn’s second-in-command was J.W. (Jimmy) Munn, an SOE veteran who had run its famous training school for agents at Beaulieu before heading its ‘Massingham’ operation in North Africa. After that he had joined the post-war exodus out of SOE into SIS, and for a while run its training school at Gosport, close to Portsmouth, a walled encampment originally built by Henry VIII.

  Lunn’s reputation had been immeasurably enhanced by his success in Vienna. His next posting, Berne, was an essential career stepping-stone as well as networking centre. It was here, at about the same time, that the novelist John Le Carré, then simply David Cornwell, cut his intelligence teeth working for the local SIS. From Berne, Allen Dulles had built his wartime networks into Germany and strategically positioned himself for his later rise to the top of the CIA. Here too, in the city’s ancient, arcaded streets, Andrew King had spent much of the war and come to know Dulles well. Once a week he and the future CIA Director exchanged items of intelligence over breakfast. This personal contact proved valuable when King later had to make regular trips to Washington to discuss progress on the tunnel. Lunn’s predecessor in Berne was a fellow high-flyer in the service, Nicholas Elliott, the officer chosen several years later to confront Kim Philby with the irrefutable evidence of his treachery. But immediately on leaving Berne, Elliott was appointed to a high-level position in the Broadway headquarters as Controller of Production Research. Here, during the crucial period of the tunnel’s life between 1953 and 1956, Andrew King served as his deputy and head of the London station.

  Lunn enjoyed himself in Berne, and Switzerland was his second home. During one of his many skiing outings into the mountains a friend high up in City of London financial circles came out to visit, bringing his ten-year-old son. Early one morning the three of them took a lift to a snow-covered peak to watch the rising sun. As its rays poetically turned the snow to pink, the boy turned to his father. ‘Look, daddy,’ he cried, ‘it’s the colour of the Financial Times.’ It was a story that Lunn relished, a happy memento of almost carefree times.

  Berlin offered a radically different challenge. British intelligence remained desperate for front-line information about the Red Army. Fanning out from Potsdam to all quarters of the Soviet zone, specialist units of Brixmis – officially, the British Commander-in-Chief’s Mission to the Soviet Forces of Occupation in Germany – strenuously recorded whatever they could see about the Soviet order of battle. Harried by the Soviets and frequently threatened by the East German police, they drove thousands of miles in their search for evidence about Soviet military dispositions. Efforts peaked at about the time Lunn arrived in Berlin, when a Brixmis team managed to reconstruct an entire Soviet battle exercise held in East Germany. The mission worked closely with its American equivalent and its targets were closely co-ordinated with SIS.7

  But however successful, Brixmis by definition could only record what they could see, namely military hardware. Soviet intentions were intangible and required other means, such as the tunnel. Lunn immediately established a special technical section to repeat the Vienna success. To run it, he brought in the dapper John Wyke and housed him in a unit some way away from the Olympic Stadium offices, from which he kept his distance. Some of his time he spent out at Gatow airfield, practising digging techniques in the sandy Berlin soil.

  Inevitably, Lunn was soon in talks with Bill Harvey. Poles apart in personality, they none the less respected each other’s talents and they had one thing in common: a fierce determination to outwit the Soviets. Lunn’s own investigations led independently to the conclusion that the Rudow site was the best. But as it lay inside the American sector he and Harvey would have to work together. The CIA would bear most of the cost – always an advantage in joint Anglo-American intelligence operations – and Harvey would find the bulk of the labour for the warehouse and tunnel construction and take care of the host of logistical and security problems.

  On the strict ‘need-to-know’ security basis laid down for the project, SIS would not be involved for most of this phase, although its advice would be sought on engineering aspects of the operation. But only Lunn and SIS could provide the crucial item for the final phase of the plan: the expertise needed for placing the tap itself. This was the most critical part of the operation. It was a particularly acute hazard because the cables that had been targeted lay only 28 inches beneath the surface. To make matters worse, they ran directly beneath a major and heavily travelled highway, the Schönefelder Chaussee. A vertical shaft would have to be dug from the tunnel up to the cables without causing the sandy ground to collapse or the tap itself to be detected.

  The only man with the proven skill to do this was Wyke, assisted again by John Taylor and his post office phone-tapping team from London. ‘Experience from similar operations elsewhere’, noted Harvey in his brief for Truscott, indicated that the job, despite all its technical and engineering problems, could be done. For SIS the Vienna tunnels had paid off. They not only delivered valuable intelligence on the Soviets but also presented an irresistible claim for the Berlin tunnel to be a joint Anglo-American operation. Without Vienna there would n
ever have been a Berlin tunnel.

  SIS code-named it Stopwatch; the CIA called it Gold. Ideally, code names should be chosen randomly to conceal, not reveal, the target and value of the operation. (The Soviets were hardly more careful: they had, after all, given Blake the code name ‘Diamond’.) But perhaps the temptation was impossible to avoid. If successful, the tunnel would produce prime intelligence, analagous to the Magic delivered by Rowlett’s brilliant code-breaking offensive against the Japanese during the Second World War. For SIS, closer to the Cold War front line in Europe, the tunnel might deliver precious warning of Soviet attack, a countdown to Armageddon that could be measured with stopwatch precision.

  Even as Dulles was reviewing the plan in Washington, Churchill was again pressing hard for intelligence on Soviet strength. ‘What’, he impatiently asked his Minister of Defence in October 1953, ‘is the latest statement of the relative strengths in Europe of the Russian and satellite forces compared to the Nato forces?’ Demands such as these acted as a constant spur to action. SIS, as always, was keen to demonstrate that it could deliver the goods.8

  9

  ‘Kilts Up, Bill!’

  Known to Berliners as ‘The Sleeping Beauty Castle’, the four-power Allied Control Council Headquarters was a vast deserted building of over 500 rooms that had stood empty since the Soviet commander in Germany, Marshal Sokolovsky, stormed out of it on the eve of the Berlin blockade. Under Hitler it had housed the Nazis’ notorious ‘People’s Court’, where the presiding judge, Roland Freisler, had sentenced hundreds of victims to death. Shortly after the Bermuda summit between Churchill and Eisenhower in late 1953, an army of painters, electricians and carpenters descended on the building to spruce it up for a foreign ministers’ summit. The meeting was widely seen as crucial to European and world peace. Its agenda was the future of Germany.

  Moscow, Washington and London still officially regarded the division of the country as temporary. As 1954 opened, talk of reunification was in the air. Gestures from Moscow hinted at a softer and more conciliatory line. Stalin’s death the year before had raised hopes of détente. The Soviets had even agreed to repatriate thousands of German prisoners of war held in the gulags of Siberia since their capture on the Eastern Front. ‘They came’, wrote Alistair Horne, the Daily Telegraph correspondent in the city, who watched some 10,000 survivors straggle over the interzonal border, ‘in bedraggled batches of about a thousand a time.’ Many were survivors of Stalingrad, pathetic creatures enfeebled by a decade of forced labour. They were instantly besieged by thousands of distraught women hoping against hope to find their men still alive.1

  But the majority quickly learned they were widows. Hopes for the summit also died. East and West spoke of reunification, but each on terms that were unacceptable to the other. The post-Stalin thaw was but a brief interlude. Three weeks after its opening the summit limped to its end. Outside the temperature was –30°C. Confrontation within was just as frigid. On his flight back to Washington the American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, touched down outside Bonn to confer with Konrad Adenauer. Now, Dulles told him, Washington would double the pace of rearmament of West Germany. Nineteen fifty-four, which the CIA had predicted ever since Korea would be the year of ‘maximum danger’ for global war, had started on an ominous note.

  It continued that way. Within weeks the Americans exploded their first hydrogen bomb, dropped by plane 10,000 feet above Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, creating a fireball four miles wide. The explosion, reported the Daily Telegraph, ‘was the most stupendous ever released on earth’. Before the year was out the United States and Canada had also put in place the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line, a chain of radar stations across the Arctic to scan the skies for incoming Soviet bombers. Across America a campaign was launched to build fall-out shelters in all major cities.

  In London, Churchill also feared Armageddon. Even before the Berlin summit collapsed he was bombarding his Minister of Defence and wartime friend, Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis, with anxious queries. ‘Could you let me have the best layout your Intelligence permits of the Soviet dispositions and deployment in relation to the Western Front (a) now (b) one year ago (c) two years ago?’, he demanded early in February. ‘I have seen it stated that there have been large-scale movements of their forces both eastward and northward. I am thinking about the chances of an Alert for ground attack caused by necessary hostile concentration.’ Alexander was long used to Churchill’s alarms. After consulting the Joint Intelligence Committee he reassured him there had been no significant changes in Red Army strength or dispositions.

  The Foreign Office also reminded Churchill that they would almost certainly obtain advance warning of any attack. Their explanation was simple. Moscow was vastly inferior to the United States in atomic weapons and would only launch a sudden attack alongside a rapid advance of its massive ground forces into Western Europe. No such attack could happen without Western intelligence being aware. Churchill believed this period would give a breathing-space for the West both to deter the Soviets and to place its own forces on the alert. The Foreign Office also took care to play a card they knew would impress the Prime Minister. ‘The friends’, they told him, using the Whitehall euphemism for SIS, ‘concur in it.’2

  ‘The friends’ indeed had every reason for confidence about an early warning. For even as the Berlin summit came and went they were deeply involved in detailed planning discussions with the CIA in London about the tunnel.

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  Britain was at last emerging from the long drab years of post-war austerity. The national mood was buoyant. The Korean armistice was signed. England under Len Hutton won back the Ashes from Australia. The footballing ‘Wizard of Dribble’ Stanley Matthews won his first cup winner’s medal at the age of thirty-eight. The new royal yacht, Britannia, was launched on Clydebank, and for the first time since 1940 white bread returned for sale in the shops. Six months earlier the British climbing team led by John Hunt had been the first to conquer Mount Everest. Photographs of the Union Jack fluttering from its summit had been splashed across newspapers and television screens, an event that happily coincided with the largest outpouring of national celebration since Victory in Europe, the coronation of Britain’s new young monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. Watched by millions on their new black and white television sets, it provided a pageant of splendour and ritual that brought optimism after years of depression and war: the dawn, newspapers declared, of a new Elizabethan age. Ironically, the year also saw the début of James Bond with the publication of Ian Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale. Even the newly released George Blake shared in the mood. In the garden of Carlton Gardens a special stand had been erected and he was invited to join the upper echelons of SIS for a front seat view of the coronation procession down the Mall. Afterwards he joined the SIS top brass in a cheerful champagne celebration.

  Bolstering national morale was the knowledge that Churchill was once again flying the flag for Great Britain on the world stage. He had also been made a Knight of the Garter and to cap it had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His top-level summit in Bermuda with his old wartime companion-in-arms Eisenhower reassured the nation that the ‘special relationship’ between London and Washington, forged in the fire of Hitler’s war, was again secure.

  Certainly, this is what a small group of men sitting around a table hardly a stone’s throw from Churchill’s official residence at 10 Downing Street took for granted. In fact, they embodied the core of the London—Washington intelligence link. Five of them were from the CIA. The other nine represented Britain’s SIS. Their meeting place was 2 Carlton Gardens, the offices of Tom Gimson’s Section Y.

  The date was 15 December 1953. The Berlin summit had yet to open, but these were men already preparing for its failure. Like most intelligence professionals they were insurance salesmen at heart, preparing for the worst. Churchill may have been pinning his hopes for peace on the summit’s outcome, but the thoughts of those around the table at Carlton Garden
s were dominated by his nightmare of war. Thirty Red Army divisions were based in Germany. Why were they there? What did the Kremlin have in mind? What exactly was the shape and state of Soviet forces, and where and how would they move? The Iron Curtain was now virtually impenetrable. Both the CIA and SIS were finding it virtually impossible to run agents behind enemy lines.

  Yet there were crucial clues. In 1954 British intelligence experts were broadly confident that Moscow did not wish deliberately to start a war. The West enjoyed enormous superiority in atomic bombs and – in the pre-missile era – the aircraft needed to deliver them. Moreover, Soviet air defences were noticeably weak. Only when it had eliminated these shortcomings would the Soviet Union think of starting a war. This meant that Western intelligence should target five main areas, or ‘indicators’, to determine if and when the balance had shifted. These were: Soviet heavy bomber production, where at least 200 aircraft capable of carrying out inter-continental atomic strikes against the United States would be needed; Soviet medium bomber production; the possession by Moscow of at least 1,000 all-weather fighters for defence (‘At present’, noted a Top Secret intelligence report of the time, ‘there is no such evidence that such an aircraft has flown’); advances in Soviet radar technology; and the standards of training for Soviet heavy and medium bomber crew which, the same report noted, was presently low.