Spies Beneath Berlin

by David Stafford

  The permanent staff consisted of between thirty-five and forty American army personnel, half a dozen British translators and a handful of American civilians, all under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Helgasted, a trim American officer, over six feet tall and sporting an impressive moustache. One of the American servicemen was Richard Thompson, a nineteen-year-old native of Detroit who had been trained in electronic intelligence at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. He had leaped at the chance of joining ‘a top secret assigment’ in Berlin rather than being exiled to an outpost in the Arizona desert. Wearing Signals Service uniform, his work mostly consisted of changing the tapes in the recorders, manning the ‘Elint’ (Electronic Station) station and guard duty. Only very rarely did he descend into the tunnel itself. ‘It was chilly, and very, very quiet’, he said. ‘We always spoke in subdued voices. The amplifier room was warm and comfortable. The tunnel was relatively clean and without odors, not even dirt or earth smell.’ He also recalled that the hours were long,

  about 60 hours a week seven days a week, with a once a week pass into downtown Berlin valid from 6 p.m. to midnight. There were also two guard dogs, named Harris and Aldo, but there was no handler or trainer and everyone used to pet them. One day they disappeared and, being Army property, were carried on the morning report as AWOL. When I was first vetted into the Project I was put to work helping to instal air-conditioning ducts from the basement to the amplifier room. A normal work detail consisted of an NCO and two enlisted men whose job required the scrutinizing of the recorders and changing the tapes when the input reel neared empty. In addition, there was a control panel with small numbered flashlight-style bulbs. If a tape ran out, an idler arm would drop and the bulb with the recorder’s number light up. It was bad form to have a bulb light up.

  By this time Hugh Montgomery was acting as the principal link between Harvey at the CIA base in Dahlem and Vyrl Lichleiter at Rudow. ‘I’d meet up with Vyrl in my car somewhere on the outskirts of the city late at night’, he recalled. ‘We’d unload the contents of the truck into the trunk of my car and I’d then take it back to the base after handing over to Vyrl some boxes of new and unused tapes.’ After a while they ran out of different places to meet and fell to regularly exchanging boxes in the Grünewald.

  In the CIA Berlin office the registry chief bitterly complained about their weight. Not being in on Stopwatch/Gold, he was told simply that the packages contained processed uranium ore smuggled out by agents from the uranium-mining operation set up in the Erzgebirge mountains by a corporation known as Wismut. After that, he shut up.6 All in all, by the time circulation of the Stopwatch/Gold halted in 1958, 90,000 translated messages or telephone conversations had been circulated, resulting in 1,750 separate intelligence reports.

  12

  Chester Terrace

  To house the small army of transcribers and analysts SIS took possession of several addresses on Chester Terrace, an exclusive street of porticoed Regency houses designed by John Nash on the edge of Regent’s Park. Adjacent was the Chester Gate home of John Profumo, who was soon to be engulfed in one of the greatest sex scandals of British history, and his glamorous wife, the former film star Valerie Hobson. Just a stone’s throw away was the White House, a fashionable apartment block on Albany Street housing a high-living businessman and seller of vending machines known as Gordon Lonsdale. In reality he was Konon Molody, one of the most gifted KGB moles ever to operate in London. From here he ran the infamous Portland spy ring until his arrest some five years later.

  Heading the on-site Chester Terrace team were Brigadier Eric Greer, who had been British military attaché in Moscow during the Second World War, an RAF squadron leader named Brinley Ryan and a CIA officer known only as ‘Fred’.1 Overseeing the entire operation was the now veteran tunnel expert Andrew King, who divided his time between SIS headquarters in Broadway and a subsidiary office in Chester Gate. The car-crazy King had long ago discarded the chauffeur-driven Jaguar of his glory days in Vienna. Now he buzzed around London in a BMW ‘bubble car’ that looked like a gigantic raindrop.

  Behind the dignified Regency façade of these houses on Chester Terrace was hidden one of the greatest secrets of the Cold War – the army of SIS and CIA workers extracting the latest intelligence from the Berlin Tunnel

  The whole operation was given top security. Entry to the buildings was controlled by unarmed guards, and special alarms provided night-time protection. Only the chief CIA officer, ‘Fred’, was allowed to go anywhere near the CIA offices in London, and then after taking extreme measures to conceal the true nature of the operation. This embarrassingly backfired when British civil servants working in nearby offices of the Ministry of Agriculture reported that American spies were gaining entry to adjacent buildings; they were quietly assured that all was in order.

  Working under military cover, CIA officer Joe Evans arrived in London in December 1954 with a couple of other Americans to organize procedures dealing with the tunnel material. His own main task was to analyse the GRU conversations. A graduate of Bucknell University, he had joined the CIA after working as a journalist in his home state of Pennsylvania. He was assigned to Staff D working with Frank Rowlett and before long was analysing bi-weekly SIS reports from the Vienna operation. Rumour had it that these were flown into Washington by the British state-owned BOAC airline under the pilot’s seat. One of his earliest small triumphs involved the Red Army’s Central Group of Forces. ‘We got the volume of flour consumed within a specific period. We also got the rations of the Red Army. From that I helped extrapolate the manpower of the Central Group. Later information confirmed I was right’, he remembered.

  Evans found SIS frantically recruiting transcribers and linguists. Some of them shifted over from Section Y’s work on the Vienna tunnels but this was not enough. So SIS began to trawl through the army and air force lists for retired officers who could speak Russian, handle intelligence material or otherwise lend a hand. They recruited retired Indian Army colonels and even veterans from the Boer War. British code-breakers at GCHQ also played a part by providing some of their own trained analysts and linguists to help out. ‘There was such a flood of material that everyone was called in to help’, recalled one GCHQ veteran. The situation looked ripe for the outbreak of a turf war between SIS and the code-breakers over ownership of the material. In fact the urgency and volume of material overwhelmed such instincts.

  There were lots of émigré Poles. One of the most memorable was a cavalry officer with a sabre cut and eyepatch. ‘All the women swooned’, said Evans. ‘He was extremely gallant and there were some pretty good parties.’ Another had been a minister in the pre-war Polish government and was almost deaf. Then there was the chief linguist, a Russian named Mike, who was rumoured to be the last graduate of the Tsarist naval academy and who had badly injured a leg parachuting into Yugoslavia during the war. He married one of his subordinates, a White Russian named Nina from Harbin who sported a boa and brandished a cigarette holder. ‘She was the widow of a British officer killed in Korea’, recalled Evans, ‘a real spark plug at parties. A lot of us were invited to the wedding down in Catford. It was pretty boisterous and ended up in a fistfight.’

  For many of the Polish émigrés, stranded in Britain by the communist takeover of their homeland, the pittance they were paid for the hours of tedious transcription threw them a vital financial lifeline. Evans remembered that few of the women had much more than a single change of dress. They toiled exceptionally hard for little material reward and he admired their commitment and diligence. ‘They were paid peanuts’, he recalled. The eventual closure of the unit in 1958 caused a lot of them severe hardship. Although there still remained about half a million hours of unprocessed conversations on the tapes, by then the Stopwatch/Gold material was outdated and useless. The Polish ex-minister, remembered Evans, ended up as a dishwasher in a London hotel.

  Rubbing shoulders with this exotic mix were a handful of British linguists who had studied Russian in Britain. Some of them
had been sent by SIS to live with Russian émigrés in Paris to perfect the language. But others arrived fresh out of school. This caused a problem. Red Army telephone conversations were not just idiomatic but liberally peppered with obscenities that not everyone understood. To spare blushes all round it was decided to produce a glossary of terms, which could be privately consulted. ‘Two copies arrived from Washington’, remembered Evans, ‘labelled TOP SECRET OBSCENE.’

  The Anglo-American team shared beers round the corner in the Chester Arms, where they earnestly debated the merits of war movies such as Ice Cold in Alex and Bridge on the River Kwai. Occasionally there were staff parties. A huge ground-floor room was cleared, drinks flowed freely and the cosmopolitan army of listeners-in let down their hair and discharged their pent-up energies dancing to the strains of favourites such as Glen Miller’s ‘Kalamazoo’ and ‘Chattanooga Choo-choo’ or jiving to the shocking new beat of rock ’n’ roll. It was also the year of Rex Harrison and My Fair Lady; before the show even opened in the West End the Americans were able to snap up the record in the local US Army stores.

  Only one event cast any shadow across these sunny uplands of inter-allied harmony: the Suez crisis of 1956. Britain’s attack on Egypt split the Chester Terrace team along national lines. ‘The one really bad spot’, remembered Evans, ‘was when the Royal Navy was ordered to interdict American ships trying to get close to the action. Unfortunately this also coincided with the Hungarian uprising. Tempers got pretty hot and I was pretty annoyed myself and debates took up so much time that an official notice came round telling us to desist.’ But none of this stopped the joint work. It was by no means the only occasion when a political storm between London and Washington barely rippled the surface of transatlantic intelligence co-operation. Even then, however, each partner shared only what it needed to. Alongside the CIA team worked an SIS counter-intelligence expert. While carefully poring over the tunnel material, he kept his opinions to himself and never gave the Americans any feedback of his own.

  Otherwise the work was dismayingly routine. The small army of transcribers, listening to the tapes on Ampex tape recorders, wrote down in Russian what they heard. They had to stop and restart the tape to catch single words. Sometimes they came to recognize individual speakers by their voices. At other times they would simply note inconsequential sequences of talk without actually writing them down, concentrating instead on the highlights. They would then show these to someone higher up the chain of command for a decision about whether a full or summary translation was needed. Eventually the GRU material landed on Joe Evans’s desk for detailed analysis.

  The main offices of the Chester Terrace operation overlooking Regent’s Park. Here the cosmopolitan army of eavesdroppers would occasionally let their hair down to the rhythms of Glenn Miller

  About the top priority Evans remains emphatic. ‘The grimmest scenario was of a surprise attack, a “cold start” without the call-up of reserves or the transfer of units to a forward area’, he recorded.

  The likeliest attackers would be the seven armies of the Group of Soviet Forces Germany … readying [ them ] to strike would, of course, necessitate communication on the GSFG landlines monitored by CIA and MI6 … The surest indicators were expected to emerge from chatter about the transfer of landline service from stationery GSFG barracks throughout East Germany to temporary locations closer to the West German border, closer to Nato forces … Early warning … was the most compelling justification for the operation.2

  Evans’s ‘cold start’ was what British intelligence chiefs described as the ‘bolt from the blue’. It explained why the Stopwatch/Gold leaders had insisted on the need for a Forward Processing Unit at the tunnel site itself. It was here that the first warning of a possible attack would come as the Red Army began shuffling its telephone lines for the use of its forward units. Even before he left Washington, Evans had this drilled into him by an episode that occurred shortly after he began working with Rowlett’s team:

  For the huge commitment of dollars early warning was the vital item. I knew this. A call came down from on high from some Deputy Director in the CIA asking the reason for the commitment. Would someone please explain he demanded. I was the only one around. I was really nervous. I took a map of East Germany and laid out where the military units were placed and why we needed the operation. That did the job.

  *

  Doing his job on the front line itself, in Berlin, was another CIA officer named David Murphy. Eventually head of the CIA’s Soviet bloc division, he had trained and dispatched agents into Russia from Bavaria in the 1940s and was fluent in both German and Russian. In the summer of 1954 he was chosen as deputy to Bill Harvey, whom he succeeded. The tempestuous Berlin station chief had already discarded other candidates. So the hardened and experienced Murphy decided to take a special approach.

  ‘I met Bill for lunch in the summer of ’54 in Washington. I knew that he didn’t really want a deputy and had already chewed out some other candidates’, he recalled, ‘so I suggested that my special job should be to review all the material we were getting in about the KGB base in Karlshorst – in other words be his chief of Soviet operations and run the “target room” in our Berlin base. So that’s what I did while the tunnel was in operation.’3

  Murphy was briefed about the tunnel by Harvey only after he had arrived in the city. ‘I arrived and there were no flags flying and no music so I got myself organised and found a house and didn’t even know the tunnel was being dug. But when the taps were about to appear Bill said “you need to know about this”.’ The instant they began to come through Murphy realized their worth. Comparing them with other material collected by the target room he knew they were authentic. One of the comparative sources was Brixmis, along with its American counterpart, the US military liaison mission. Another was the high-level Soviet military officer Lieutenant-Colonel Pyotr Popov. Since being recruited by the CIA in Vienna, Popov had been transferred by Moscow to Schwerin in East Germany and was Harvey’s most important inside source on Soviet military intelligence. ‘We could look at his stuff, mostly about GRU Schwerin operations into the West, and compare it with the other stuff we had’, Murphy recalled.

  There was only one problem. Because of the tight security surrounding the tunnel virtually no one else in the target room knew of it. So Murphy could not disclose the source and had to keep everything on a completely separate card file. ‘This was a bitch’, he recalled, ‘but I’d bring it to Harvey and he loved it. This is where we really got to know each other.’4 Murphy, no mean operator himself, regarded Harvey as the best he had ever met. ‘Bill was as smart as a whip’, he remembered.

  Their camaraderie was at its most intense working within arm’s length of the enemy down at the tunnel itself. Here, sitting side by side with the army of technicians listening in to the Russians talking between Karlshorst, Zossen-Wünsdorf and Moscow, the two men strained to detect any clues of impending attack. When not doing that, they basked in the plentiful harvest of material that was manna for the counter-intelligence experts.

  The British also had their men at the site doing the same. For security reasons Lunn usually stayed well away, just as he did from the CIA base on Clayallee. Instead he left the work to John Wyke. Here, as in London, the allies worked as a team, scanning the Cold War front line for any hint of danger.

  13

  ‘A Bonanza’

  As opportunities arose, the tunnel’s targets rapidly expanded to include an astonishing range of political, military and operational intelligence. Despite Stalin’s death, the West was still largely in the dark about conditions in the Soviet Union and its satellites. Berlin itself was the focus of some of the richest data. A major source of British and American anxiety was that Moscow would hand over control of the city to the East Germans. The German Democratic Republic was fully recognized by Moscow and there was a Soviet embassy on the Unter den Linden. Moscow agreed that the German Democratic Republic could, at last, have its own official army
. Until then it had masqueraded simply as a paramilitary police force. News of this decision first reached the West by means of tunnel intelligence in time for a foreign ministers’ meeting in Geneva in October 1955.

  But the Ulbricht regime wanted more: Soviet recognition of the GDR’s claim to full sovereignty over the city. This opened up a nightmare scenario for the West. If Moscow gave up its occupying rights in the city, would this affect the rights of the Western powers? Would the GDR dictator move to starve or seize West Berlin by closing off access routes in a replay of Stalin’s earlier blockade? Public pronouncements by Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders were not reassuring.

  Fortunately Stopwatch/Gold told another story. It revealed that Moscow did not intend to abandon its occupying rights and hand over control to the East Germans. Relations with its German satellite were far from harmonious on this precarious issue. The tunnel provided a vivid picture of the confusion and indecision among Soviet and East German officials whenever an incident occurred in East Berlin involving citizens of the Western powers. Who should deal with them? The East Germans or the Soviets? The inability of the two communist allies to agree provided a signal that Moscow was not yet ready to hand over full control of Berlin to Ulbricht, intelligence that was immensely reassuring. Only in November 1958, long after Stopwatch/Gold had ended, did Khrushchev make a sudden about-turn by demanding that the Western powers renounce their rights in the city. That was the opening shot of the crisis that reached a climax with the building of the wall in August 1961.