Beyond these five main target areas close watch should also obviously be kept on other branches of the Soviet armed forces, such as the navy, army, and tactical air force. This was a global intelligence agenda. But Germany was literally on the Cold War front line and here the richest crop of high-grade intelligence was vital. Whatever happened politically in Germany, declared the Joint Services Intelligence Group for Germany in 1954, ‘the present requirement is for a considerable increase’.3
There was a significant additional reason for good intelligence from Germany besides reporting on the Red Army. Conflicting estimates of Soviet intentions could create dangerous disagreements between Washington and London. On the whole, the Americans were more alarmist than their transatlantic cousins. In 1951 Britain’s Director of Naval Intelligence, Vice-Admiral Eric Longley-Cooke, a veteran of numerous inter-allied intelligence meetings, visited Washington. He came to the disturbing conclusion that the Americans were convinced that all-out war with Moscow was not only inevitable but imminent, and that they were shaping their intelligence to ‘fit in’ with this prejudged conclusion. ‘There is a strong tendency in [American] military circles’, noted Longley-Cooke, ‘to “fix” the zero date for war.’4
So potentially ruinous to allied relations was his report that all copies were destroyed but one, which was kept in the Prime Minister’s office. Attlee did little with it. But when Churchill became Prime Minister he ordered it resurrected for his personal consumption.5 Critics have frequently accused Churchill of being some sort of ‘lapdog’ to Washington. An enthusiast of the special relationship he certainly was. But his visits to see Truman and Eisenhower convinced him that much of what Longley-Cooke said was true. It was all the more vital, therefore, to make sure that London and Washington shared the same clear and accurate view of Soviet intentions.
Partly under his prodding American and British evaluations had come closer together, but mutterings in Washington could still be heard about British ‘appeasement’. The Joint Intelligence Committee insisted that a combined appreciation of the Soviet threat based on ‘factual intelligence’ was badly needed. Fears lingered of dangerous allied discord. Churchill was determined to avoid it. A combined operation such as Stopwatch/Gold, producing hard intelligence that would be equally shared, could serve as a useful harmonizer of allied responses to the Red Army threat.
Stopwatch/Gold offered the promise of unearthing many of the crucial clues being sought by the West. That is why the CIA and SIS men were there that December. They had in front of them the blueprint for the Berlin tunnel. The London meeting had been called to reach preliminary agreement on the major issues, including the Anglo-American division of labour. Heading the small CIA team was Frank Rowlett, accompanied by his personal assistant, William Wheeler. Carl Nelson was there, and so was Vyrl Lichleiter from Berlin. The larger SIS team was headed by Stewart Mackenzie, a future controller of operations for western hemisphere operations, and included the head of Section Y, Tom Gimson, and George Young, an ebullient ex-journalist from the Glasgow Herald and now Broadway’s Director of Requirements. Young, who determined SIS targets, enjoyed a reputation as one of the so-called ‘robber barons’ running SIS at the height of the Cold War.
Inside George Young burned the fires of an almost missionary zeal that easily matched Allen Dulles’s robust approach to Cold War priorities. ‘It is the spy who has been called upon to remedy the situation created by the deficiencies of ministers, diplomats, generals, and priests’, he declared to fellow officers during a barnstorming inspection visit to Lunn’s Berlin station. ‘We spies live closer to the realities and hard facts of international relations than other practitioners of government … these days the spy finds himself the main guardian of intellectual integrity.’6 Backing up Young’s rhetoric were both Colonel Balmain and Dollis Hill’s John Taylor. With the Vienna tunnel securely tucked under their belts, they were present to discuss technical details with the CIA boffins. But the main issues to be decided involved the processing of the intelligence.
From experience in Vienna it was obvious to all those round the table that a huge team of experts would be needed to process the Berlin material. The three Soviet cables being targeted under the Schönefelder Chaussee contained at least 81 speech circuits, producing a total of 162 two-and-a-half hour reels of tape each day. Each circuit needed a transcriber. Along with collators, cardists, signals experts and typists, the minimum number of people involved would be 158.
Should the CIA and SIS have two separate teams, or just one integrated team? Should they be based in London, Washington or Berlin itself? How should its members be chosen? In recruiting for the Vienna operation Section Y had sought out native Russian- or Slav-speakers in the belief that they could handle spoken material best: hence the recruitment of Pam Peniakoff’s small civilian army of Poles and White Russians. But experience had demonstrated that university-trained British personnel could handle spoken Russian just as well as native speakers. This broadened the pool of possible recruits. It also got round some of the security risks of employing people with families in Russia or Eastern Europe, which made them vulnerable to Soviet blackmail. It might also be possible to recruit enlisted national servicemen already working elsewhere on monitoring Soviet signals.
Telephone circuits were not the only ones at stake. The Soviet cables also carried telegraphic material. Some of this was encrypted and would have to be sent on to the code-breakers at the NSA in Washington and GCHQ in Cheltenham. But what about the non-encrypted, plaintext, messages? Should the team handling the voice material also handle this? Should the work be done by a separate group? Or should NSA and GCHQ be asked to provide experts of their own to assist?7
The men around the table at Carlton Gardens discussed the pros and cons of all these issues before referring them back to Washington. Bill Harvey and Peter Lunn also had to be consulted. Eventually, early in 1954, it was decided to set up two separate processing units, one in Washington and one in London. The Washington unit, run by the CIA and known as the Telegraphic Processing Unit, or TPU, would handle all the telegraphic material and call on the NSA for help with any decryption that was needed, although most of it was not encoded at all. The London unit, handled by SIS, would build on Section Y’s experience with the Vienna project to deal with all the telephone material and would be known as the Main Processing Unit, or MPU.
On two vital issues the CIA and SIS agreed. First, they would attack all the circuits that were likely to appear off the three Soviet cables. And, second, there would have to be a small advance processing unit in Berlin itself to handle top priority material. If the main job of the tunnel was to provide advance warning of an attack, then speed would be of the essence. There must be experts on the spot who could instantly recognize crucial indicators of some unexpected Soviet move, avoiding the inevitable delays when the material was sent to Washington or London. Ideally this should be a joint Anglo-American team. No more than ten people would be required: two signals officers, six transcribers, one Russian typist and a secretary. Recruiting should begin in January, training in May, and the team would have to be ready to go to Berlin by August 1954 at the latest. This Berlin unit was known as the Forward Processing Unit, or FPU. As for the other processing units, they would gradually be increased in size, but only as the quality and quantity of the cable intelligence became clear.
The meeting ended amicably on 18 December and Rowlett flew on to Frankfurt to brief Harvey. The CIA Berlin station chief had not been present for the Carlton Gardens meeting; nor for that matter had Lunn. But for another round table meeting at Section Y offices Harvey was present. It took place in March 1955, just as construction on the tunnel was ending and the crucial phone tapping being put into place. Harvey predictably began by emphasizing the vital importance of security, and to make his point he said he hoped no Philbys were present. At this point the Scottish George Young leaped in with a reassuring joke. Yes, he told Harvey, ‘we don’t want to be caught with our kilts up.�
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But it was already too late. Sitting quietly at the table during the December meeting was George Blake, taking copious notes. Afterwards, as instructed by Tom Gimson, he wrote up a record of the three-day meeting. Early in the new year he finished his task and circulated copies to all those involved. But he also kept an extra copy. One evening in mid-January, slipping the yellowy-green carbon paper into his pocket, he left Carlton Gardens, stepped out into the night, and followed his carefully rehearsed routine to meet up with Sergei Kondrashev.
Blake’s control had spent the day foiling his British surveillance. First, true to his cover as cultural attaché, he accompanied a departing delegation of Soviet chess players to Heathrow airport. After returning to central London he then spent the day shopping and going to the cinema while a fellow KGB officer checked to see if he was being followed. When the coast was clear he boarded a bus and there, on the top deck, met up with Blake. The SIS officer slipped the Russian the minutes on Stopwatch/Gold, as well as notes on British intercept operations elsewhere. Several stops later Kondrashev got off the bus and was picked up by a car from the Soviet embassy. He immediately reported on the meeting to his KGB superiors. But it took him until mid-February to file a full written report and send on the carbon copy given him by Blake, which was too faded to photocopy. ‘The information on a planned intercept operation against internal telephone lines on GDR territory to a radar station is of interest’, he noted.9 This turned out to be one of the most modest understatements of the entire Cold War.
10
Digging Gold
Back in Washington a blissfully unaware Allen Dulles gave his formal approval to the tunnel operation on 20 January 1954, just two days after Blake handed over details to Kondrashev. In Berlin, Harvey took a lease for the land in Rudow and signed a contract with a German builder for the compound. Roughly the size of an average American city block, it was surrounded by high-security chain fencing. Inside was the main operations building with its extra deep basement, a combined barracks and kitchen-dining facility for the staff, and a third building to house the three diesel-driven power generators. On top of the main operations building sat a parabolic antenna. To the outside world this was nothing more than a conventional radar or Electronics Intelligence (ELINT) Station.
For the German contractor it was just a routine job for the American occupation forces. By the end of August he had finished work and handed the site over to the Americans. That same day Harvey put in place a super strict security regime. Using 12 × 60 Leitz night infra-red binoculars, twenty-four hour observation of the area between the base and the Schönefelder Chaussee began, with all movements of personnel and vehicles, including the ‘Vopos’ (the Volkspolizei, or East German police guards), being carefully logged. The log was reviewed periodically for any gradual but significant changes in traffic pattern that might indicate the tunnel had been spotted by the Russians or East Germans. Idle Vopos spent a lot of time gazing at the warehouse and the other buildings. But nothing suggested any intensified interest or special surveillance.
Nothing here to suggest the presence of one of the Western allies’ most powerful underground weapons against the Red Army. The tunnel began here, at Rudow, from the basement of the left-hand building, disguised as part of a more conventional radar site
Harvey was particularly relieved to hear that the residents of Rudow had swallowed the cover story. Hidden microphones were installed on the chain link fence in the hope of picking up Vopo conversations that might reveal what they thought or knew about the site. Before tunnelling began the entire area was swept for microphones or telephone taps. CIA and SIS officers coming in and out travelled in closed three-quarter ton US Army trucks to conceal their presence.
The tunnel itself required special handling. For this Dulles turned to the US Army Corps of Engineers, which was uniquely equipped for the task. Since the American Revolution it had worked on some of America’s boldest engineering enterprises, civilian as well as military: building flood control levees along the Mississippi, designing and constructing the Lincoln Memorial, and erecting massive hydro-electric dams on major rivers such as the Tennessee, Missouri and Columbia. In two world wars and again in Korea it constructed air bases and built bridges and railways immediately behind the battle fronts. Steel-lined tunnels were a speciality because they featured in hydro-electric dams. The corps’ chief was Lieutenant-General Samuel D. Sturgis Jr, a man who knew Germany well from his previous post as commanding general of the communications zone supporting the United States Army in Europe.
Dulles made the first contact personally. It also helped that Major-General Arthur Trudeau, the head of Army intelligence, was an engineer by training. Knowing the wealth of data the Vienna lines had produced on Soviet forces in Austria and Hungary, he enthusiastically supported the project. By the time the site was ready that summer Sturgis’s men had firmed up the engineering plans, selected a crew and even constructed a mock-up tunnel some 150 yards long at the White Sands Missile Proving Ground in New Mexico. SIS was also busy. Its agreement with the CIA spoke of consultation, and a team of Royal Engineers experimented in digging a vertical shaft at Longmoor Camp, home of the Royal Engineers’ railway transportation centre, in Hampshire, England.1
These various experiments confirmed that a tunnel of the projected length would require very special techniques. The Berlin soil was extremely sandy and the risk of collapse was high. So it was decided that the tunnel should be lined for its entire length with steel, making it effectively a long steel tube constructed underground. The danger would be particularly extreme at its face, so for this part of the operation the corps devised a special shield with horizontal ‘blinds’. The diggers, working with shovels and picks to hack out the soil, would work under the shield and thus be protected from cave-ins.
The tunnel liner itself was to consist of hundreds of sections of heavy steel plate, each 6 feet in diameter but only 3 inches deep. After the diggers had excavated enough soil, the shield would be forced forward into place using hydraulic jacks, and then a single steel section bolted into place. As the shield was fractionally larger than the steel rings, it meant that there was a gap of about 1½ inches around the liner. To fill this in, screw-type removal plugs were built into every third section of the liner. Then grouting material was forced through under high pressure to fill the gap in order to prevent the earth above from settling and revealing the tunnel from the surface.
Assembling the basic supplies, equipment and personnel took longer than planned, largely because special orders had to be made for the steel liners. Cast in the United States, they were first assembled in a huge army warehouse in Richmond, Virginia, before being shipped out from Norfolk to Bremer-haven for onward transport to Berlin on allied trains travelling through East Germany. This was the first high-risk phase of the entire operation. The East Germans frequently insisted on spot checks of goods travelling through their zone. So all the steel liners were double-crated and banded in heavy wooden containers. They were also subject to severe drop tests before departure to check they were secure. Loaded on to one-and-a-half freight trains, and weighing 125 tons, they arrived safely in the city without any unwelcome East German attention. To maintain the pretence that the site was a radar station, the team of sixteen engineers adopted the uniform of members of the 9539th TSU of the US Army Signal Corps.
Early in September 1954 all was ready. Only one thing remained before digging could begin. This was to determine the exact point, down to the nearest inch, where the horizontal burrowing would have to stop and the engineers should start digging upwards towards the cables. To calculate this, the surveyors needed to place an object of known size as close as possible to the Schönefelder Chaussee. As none existed, they devised the bright idea of throwing a softball over the border. But every time they did, helpful East German border guards threw it back before readings could be taken. In the end, Harvey was forced to decide on another, potentially far more dangerous, trick. He arranged
for a US Army vehicle to have a flat tyre at the right spot on the Schönefelder Chaussee. While changing it, one of the men placed a tiny reflector next to the road. From the warehouse, the surveyors sent a small beam of light that struck the reflector and bounced back. This gave the precise distance between the two points. Knowing this, the engineers were Confident they could hit the target within a matter of inches.2
That sorted out, the engineers began their work. Their next task was to sink a 20 foot vertical shaft beneath the basement floor of the warehouse. This was relatively easy. But only six days into the excavation potential disaster struck. For a while it cast the entire project into serious doubt.
The feasibility study had predicted that the water table in this part of Berlin was at 32 feet: deep enough not to cause the diggers any problems as the tunnel would be built at a depth of approximately 23 feet. This, with a 6 foot diameter tunnel, would provide a top cover of some 16 feet of earth, enough to smother any construction noise reaching the surface. But after only a few days the engineers suddenly encountered water at 16 feet. Beneath it they discovered a layer of heavy clay 6 feet thick lying above the ‘true’ water table. A test bore sunk at the other end of the warehouse showed the heavy clay there, too, but at 16½ feet. They had struck what is known as a ‘perched’ water table. These are hard to predict and frequently fail to show up on geological surveys. Often they are relatively small. Usually test drillings can quickly solve the problem, but it was obviously impossible for the team to conduct drillings outside under the eyes of the border guards.
Spies Beneath Berlin Page 10