For the first time since operations had begun, John Taylor personally arrived on the scene from Dollis Hill to witness the historic event. His code name was MAG 1, standing for Magician 1, with the other Dollis Hill team members following on in number. As soon as they had accomplished the task, the jointers’ job was over and they were flown back to London.
While the jointers were laying the cables and making the tap, the other British technicians were busy, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, working on the amplifiers. For the whole of the previous year Dollis Hill had been a hive of activity, with Blake Rymer’s team planning and designing the equipment that was needed. One day a large Pickford’s removal truck had drawn up carrying two large wooden crates containing sample sections of the tunnel. ‘We knocked them together,’ recalled one of his team, ‘so that we could work out exactly the size of the racks for the amplifiers that would fit.’
The need for a high-impedance tap imposed a special challenge. To be comprehensible to those listening in, the signal had to be amplified. Yet the longer the distance between the point of the tap and the amplifier – in other words, the further the signal had to travel – the more noise or interference it picked up along the cable. As the signal was weak to begin with, the amplification chamber had to be built as close as possible to the tap chamber. Here the signals were isolated before being amplified and sent on to the warehouse for recording. It meant that the chamber had to be constructed almost literally under the boots of the Vopos patrolling above, and all the heavy gear transported along the length of the tunnel.
‘The lead-away cables’, notes the CIA history, ‘were constructed of the best available materials, sheathed in lead, and handled in accordance with the highest company standards.’ This account carefully omits any reference to the vital British role. In reality, two or three days before the jointers were flown out to construct these very cables, Dollis Hill experts were already down in the tunnel installing their equipment, which had previously been crated up in London and flown out to Berlin by the American Air Force. ‘When we arrived,’recalled one, ‘the Royal Engineers had just finished the vertical shaft, and it was still pretty muddy. Our first job was to build the bulkhead door. There was a concrete mixer at the warehouse end, and it was concrete that secured the bulkheads. It was all very mucky work. We had to spend about a week laying concrete on the floor of the amp chamber.’ After that, the chamber was lined with plywood, fluorescent lighting installed and the amplifiers fitted. There then followed extensive tests to see if the messages were getting through to the banks of expensive American-manufactured Ampex recording machines in the basement. Finally, after about eight weeks, everything was ready.
If it had been hard and dirty work, however, it also proved lucrative for those concerned. ‘It was a real money-spinner for us’, one of the Post Office crew remembered. ‘We got huge amounts of overtime, and afterwards a big bonus of notes that was handed over in a brown paper envelope. I couldn’t spend any of it in Berlin anyway, as we weren’t allowed out, so it all went to make the down payment on my first house.’ The Royal Engineers were also showered with money, at least the junior members of the team. After being flown from Berlin to Manston airfield, they were driven into central London. Here, on the second floor of a large building, they were met by a brigadier who thanked them profusely for their work. Then, recalled one of the astonished recipients, ‘he handed out £20 notes to each of us. I’d never even seen one before, it was rare as gold and worth about a month’s pay.’
Completion of the tap came none too soon. On the same day the engineers began work on the tap chamber, the Joint Intelligence Committee met again in London. Both Sir John Sinclair, the SIS chief, and Sir Dick White, the head of MI 5, were present to hear Brigadier Way of the Joint Intelligence Board highlight the discrepancy between American and British intelligence estimates on the amount of military equipment passing from Russia to East Germany. Some discrepancy was inevitable, he admitted, given that the Americans had better cover and more sources than SIS. But it was desirable they work hard to get agreement. Still, and once again, the allies were slightly out of step. Stopwatch/Gold held the promise of settling their differences.9
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‘We knew from the very beginning that the tunnel had a finite life’, confessed Allen Dulles much later. While construction inched forward, Harvey and Lunn had worked together on hammering out an agreement both on what more should be done to protect the tunnel from discovery and on how to respond if the Soviets discovered it. One way or another, Harvey argued, they certainly would. But like everyone else, he had no idea that they already had. In November he flew out to Washington for a meeting with Dulles to go over the project almost literally inch by inch. As a result they decided to put several extra security measures in place.
One was to install on the near side of the pre-amp chamber (the side closest to the Western entrance to the tunnel) a heavy torch-proof steel door set in substantial concrete slabs with a lock and bar that would be wired with an alarm system to prevent tampering. The door would be kept locked at all times except when individuals were actually in the chamber itself, and a telephone system would be installed to connect the area with the rest of the tunnel. Once the door was in place, Harvey audaciously had the following inscription written on the tap chamber side in both German and Cyrillic: ENTRY IS FORBIDDEN BY ORDER OF THE COMMANDING GENERAL. It was a warning that he thought might give pause to hierarchy-conscious Soviet and East German officials and gain time for his team to evacuate the tunnel.
He and Dulles also agreed that steel doors would seal off the tunnel at the near end, where it crossed the building line of the warehouse, as well as on the ramp that led from the ground floor of the warehouse down to the basement and construction area. At the point where the tunnel actually crossed from the American into the Soviet sector (about 100 yards from the warehouse), a 40 foot length would be mined using C-3 plastic explosive inserted into a sealed garden hose threaded behind the liner plate. The hose would contain enough explosive to collapse the tunnel without causing a major surface eruption. But the explosive would be laid only at the last minute, when an emergency was imminent.
What if an emergency did occur – if, for example, the watchers above ground detected Soviet or East German activity that suggested they were poised to discover the tunnel? The plan hatched out in Washington laid down that all personnel working in the tunnel itself would be immediately evacuated back to the Rudow end and the steel doors shut behind them. Meanwhile Harvey would be notified at his CIA office in Clayallee, by two-way radio if for any reason the telephone system was down. Depending on the time available, as much of the equipment as possible in the tunnel would be removed. But if discovery was imminent and it seemed likely that Soviet or East German troops would venture along the tunnel, then the mined area would be blown. Both Dulles and Harvey agreed that the commanding officer at the site should have orders to resist unwanted entry into the tunnel ‘with all means at his disposal’.
And if the worst happened and Moscow discovered the tunnel? Dulles decided, after considerable discussion, not to brief the American ambassador in Germany, James Conant, on the operation. Genuine ignorance of Stopwatch/Gold would give his inevitable public reaction to its discovery a fully authentic flavour. Dulles firmly laid down the line to be followed. The official American reaction was to be ‘flat, indignant denial ascribing any such protest to a baseless enemy provocation’.10
11
Turning On the Tap
Early in 1955, as the engineers approached the end of their task, George Blake arrived to take up a new position with SIS in Berlin. With Stopwatch/Gold now under way, his position as deputy to Tom Gimson at Section Y in Carlton Gardens had been taken by an officer from the CIA. By now Blake was married, and he and his wife settled into a top floor flat on Platanenallee in Charlottenburg, a smart residential part of the city that had escaped the worst of allied bombing, about ten minutes walk away from the SIS compound
.
Lunn was firmly in place as the station’s dynamic head, his team very different from the one he had captained during the 1936 Olympics. It was well financed, with its bills paid out of the occupation costs, which in turn were absorbed by the German taxpayer; and it operated at the cutting edge of British Cold War intelligence. In such conditions Lunn was in his element. Some of those working for him thought he appeared ‘a bit of a go-getter’, impatient of detail. But they admired and respected his vision and energy.
A decade into the Cold War Berlin remained the epicentre of international espionage and offered the best opportunity for establishing direct contact with Soviet personnel. The sector boundary between the Eastern and Western halves of the city was not yet sealed off: the wall still lay six years in the future. Checkpoints existed on all the main streets crossing the border but none on minor crossings or on the U-Bahn, the city’s still unified underground system, and people could cross freely in both directions. Blake, with his appreciation of big city transport finely honed through his frequent clandestine meetings with Kondrashev in London, marvelled that ‘it was as easy to travel from West to East Berlin and back as from Hammersmith to Piccadilly’.1
Blake had nothing officially to do with Stopwatch/Gold while he was in Berlin, where only Lunn, his station deputy, Jimmy Munn, and John Wyke were briefed on it. What Blake knew derived exclusively from his former position in Section Y, plus anything passed on to him by his KGB control, with whom he immediately made contact. Instead, ironically, as a member of the station’s section attempting to penetrate Soviet headquarters in Karlshorst, he found himself cultivating members of the KGB and attempting to recruit them as double agents. Here he continued his trade in treachery, handing over to the KGB as much material as he could about SIS (and CIA) operations.
In one sense Blake’s position was now easier because his contacts with known KGB officers could be explained away by his official duties. On the other it was much more precarious. Unlike during his time at Section Y, he now shared an office at the Olympic Stadium with a colleague, and photographing documents proved risky: he was more afraid than ever of being unexpectedly interrupted while at work with his Minox camera. ‘Nevertheless,’ he recalled, ‘as I was always on the look out for an opportunity to photograph, I usually found one, though sometimes, in cases of great ugency, I had to take a deliberate risk and just hope for the best.’
Despite the risks, Blake carefully disguised any tension he felt. Lunn considered him the best agent runner he had. In the summer of 1955 an old wartime SIS officer and Unionist Member of Parliament from Northern Ireland, Harford Montgomery Hyde, visited Berlin and made a courtesy call on Lunn. Blake came into the room and Lunn introduced him. After he had left, Lunn remarked to the MP ‘what a good agent’ Blake was turning out to be.2 Soon afterwards Wyke completed the tap on the Soviet cables beneath the Schönefelder Chaussee. Stopwatch/Gold, one of the most audacious Cold War operations ever launched jointly by SIS and CIA, was finally under way.
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Yet even as it began, critics might have wondered if it were already obsolete. The icy political climate appeared to be finally melting after Stalin’s death. It was not just that a carefree peacetime mood has taken hold in the West, with Disneyland opening its doors in California, Davy Crockett coonskin hats all the rage, Bill Haley’s Rock around the Clock sweeping the hit parade and Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita causing outrage on both sides of the Atlantic. More serious milestones were being established. The same month the tunnel taps began the Federal Republic of Germany at last regained its sovereignty and was admitted to Nato. Occupation troops of all four wartime allies finally quit Austria, as well as their various tunnel operations there. Simultaneously Moscow created the Warsaw Pact, with the German Democratic Republic as a full and founding member. This appeared to cement the division of Europe, signal Soviet acceptance of the status quo, and lift the threat of Red Army incursion into the West.
But as the ice cracked it released powerful and unpredictable currents. Nikita Khrushchev, the emerging new Soviet leader, was volatile and unpredictable. In July he offered a powerful reminder to Western spy chiefs of why Stopwatch/Gold was still needed. The occasion was the long-awaited Geneva Summit Conference at the United Nations’ Palais des Nations, attended by leaders of all the four great powers: Eisenhower, Eden, Edgar Faure of France, and Khrushchev and Bulganin for the Soviet Union.
Ten years after Hitler’s death the conference was intended to relax Cold War tensions and set a benchmark for peace. Unexpectedly, Eisenhower unveiled a dramatic proposal suggesting that the United States and the Soviet Union exchange a complete blueprint of their military establishments and open their skies to allow reconnaissance planes to take all the pictures they wanted. Both superpowers, he admitted frankly, possessed new and terrible weapons and his plan – immediately nicknamed ‘Open Skies’ – would, he suggested, significantly reduce the possibility of surprise attack and thus reduce tensions. Khrushchev quickly and bluntly denounced the idea as ‘a bald espionage plot’ and the proposal died on the table.3
With it faded easy hopes of relaxation in world tension, and soon the volume of threatening rhetoric was escalating ominously again. In Moscow, Khrushchev famously promised to bury the West, while John Foster Dulles chillingly laid out his philosophy of brinkmanship. ‘The ability to get on the verge without getting into war is the necessary art’, he declared. ‘If you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.’ J. Robert Oppenheimer, the distinguished American nuclear scientist, compared the United States and Russia to two scorpions in a bottle. The atomic clock, he warned, was ticking ‘faster and faster’.
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If the skies were closed then the reconnaissance underground would have to begin. Wyke and his team inserted the first successful tap of Stopwatch/Gold on 11 May 1955, switching on a vast stream of intelligence that over the next eleven months was to be fed into Western intelligence reports, identified only as ‘a clandestine source of established authenticity’. The bare statistics alone are impressive. The three cables being tapped carried some 1,200 communications channels, with the maximum number of channels being used at any one time amounting to 500. On average, 28 telegraphic and 121 telephone circuits were continuously recorded on Ampex tape recorders, using about 50,000 reels of magnetic tape. In all, they eventually weighed some 25 tons.
Such a quantity of raw material required enormous investments of space and personnel to process and analyse it into a usable form for consumers. In London alone, at the Main Processing Unit, SIS employed at its peak over 300 people, who transcribed and translated some 20,000 Soviet two-hour voice reels containing some 368,000 conversations. In addition, they received 13,500 German two-hour voice reels, processing some 5,500 of them, containing 75,000 conversations, of which 17,000 were fully transcribed.
John Foster Dulles, apostle of Cold War brinkmanship and American Secretary of State during Stopwatch/Gold. His brother Allen headed the CIA
The overground complex at Rudow which provided cover for the tunnel, whose route is marked by the dotted line leading to Alt-Glienicke and the Schönefelder Chaussee in the distance. This photograph was taken in 1964, after construction of the Berlin Wall, which can be clearly seen with its accompanying watch-towers
Hidden in the warehouse basement at Rudow, rows of amplifiers and voltage stabilizers maintain a steady flow of messages from the cable taps to the transcribers and translators
Work on the teletype traffic was carried out in Washington. Here, in a CIA unit housed in one of the buildings run by the agency’s clandestine services division known as T-32, a team of 350 people fluent in Russian or German toiled, fifty at a shift, in a windowless room known as the ‘Hosiery Mill’. Situated in a prefabricated building along the Washington Mall, it got its name from the ribbons of communications wire that festooned its interior. The floor sagged under the weight of the machinery and the building was clad in steel to prevent the escape of electronic emissions th
at might just be picked up by the Russians. ‘It is greatly in your interest to know’, announced the deputy chief of the section, ‘where any of this material is coming from. For the opposition to stop the flow all they would need to know is that we have this many Russian and German speakers together.’4
The Washington team completely transcribed 18,000 six-hour teletype Soviet reels and 11,000 six-hour German teletype reels. Many of these contained as many as 18 separate circuits, so that the potential of any single six-hour reel was approximately 216 hours of teletype messages. Some were in plaintext, others in cipher, and these were passed on to the National Security Agency for treatment. The daily output measured about 4,000 feet and printed in book form would have filled a space 10 feet wide, 15 feet long and 8 feet high.
In Berlin itself, housed at the Rudow site, a small advance processing unit of two to four linguists carried out on-the-spot monitoring of the cables for any signs of detection as well as scanning the more productive circuits for ‘hot’ intelligence. The machine for monitoring the relevant circuits was known as ‘the egg-beater’. Immediate and important items were sent electronically to Washington and London.
But the bulk of the intercepts, the voice and teletype reels, were first packaged up in carefully camouflaged boxes, taken from the Rudow site in an army truck and then flown by special military flights to the United States and Britain.5 Tight security rules remained in place and the fiction firmly maintained that Rudow was a purely army base with no connection at all with the CIA.
Spies Beneath Berlin Page 12