Spies Beneath Berlin

by David Stafford

  Stopwatch/Gold also provided key intelligence on the fall-out from Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Soviet Party Congress in February 1956. In calling for reforms and a new collective leadership for the Soviet Union he released forces inside the Soviet Union and the satellite states that he found it hard to control. The most dramatic impact was felt in Hungary, where later that year a popular mass uprising briefly threw off the Soviet shackles. The thrust of the speech was too rich and extraordinary for the delegates to keep to themselves. One of the triumphs of Stopwatch/Gold came in capturing a telephone conversation between the wife of Marshal Andrei Grechko, the Soviet commander in East Germany, who had flown to Moscow for the Congress with his wife, and their adult daughter back in Berlin.

  In London, Joe Evans patched together evidence of the dramatic fall-out from Khrushchev’s shocking denunciation of Stalin, which he remembered as easily the most important and exciting piece of intelligence ever processed in Chester Terrace.

  It was all in bits and pieces and wasn’t extracted from a single ‘piece of intelligence’. Rather the story emerged as we translated and collated relevant items from a substantial number of conversations – all credit to the linguists and analysts. At one end were influential Soviets in East Germany, at the other their relatives and friends who either attended or gossiped with those who did. Although the speech was ostensibly secret hundreds attended the congress and a lot of them instantly got on the phone back to Zossen-Wünsdorf … so that’s how we got it. I remember that Grechko’s wife was with him and their daughter remained behind. Madame Grechko spoke daily to her over the tapped phone. She was always complaining about not being able to get her rose garden properly pruned. Once she got on the phone and told her daughter: ‘Daddy was invited to dinner by Voroshilov’. ‘What did he do?’ asked the daughter. ‘He shat in his pants’, replied Madame Grechko.1

  As Evans slowly assembled the puzzle and sent it on to Washington, someone had the bright idea of speeding up the process by sending a regular ‘highlight’ cable containing the most important items. ‘I well remember the headline I wrote’, he recalled. Given the worship of Stalin, it was astonishing: ‘Khrushchev denigrates Stalin.’ The new Soviet leader had done the unthinkable and in front of the communist vanguard had taken a sledgehammer to their icon. Eventually the story dribbled through the Iron Curtain and the Americans obtained and released the full text. But for a brief while Stopwatch/Gold had been sitting on a scoop. Major changes were clearly in store. What they meant in practice was unclear, and Stopwatch/Gold would have to help decipher the puzzle.

  The ripples were quickly felt in the Soviet Union. One impact was on its nuclear programme. Nuclear scientists had long chafed under tight political control and they seized on Khrushchev’s denunciation to win more intellectual and professional freedom. This led to a backlash by hardliners, who desperately attempted to rein in the scientists. Tunnel material provided a detailed account of the crisis and helped identify several hundred personalities involved with the Soviet atomic energy programme.

  On the face of it, Berlin and Stopwatch/Gold may seem to have opened a curious window from which to gaze on the Soviet nuclear programme. But East Germany was the most important source of uranium for Stalin’s atomic bomb project, and the Soviet dictator had ruthlessly exploited these German resources. Combined with his general policy of using German industry as well as captured German scientists to help rebuild and develop the post-war Soviet Union, this meant that Germany provided one of the most important sources for American and British intelligence on the Soviet nuclear build-up.

  The Wismut mining operations quickly became a key target for SIS and the CIA. As early as 1948 General Lucius D. Clay, the American commander in Berlin, had reported that a Soviet corporation known as Wismut had been formed to mine uranium ore (using forced labour) from the rich deposits found in the Erzgebirge mountains near Zwickau in south-west Saxony, along the border with Czechoslovakia. Nominally a joint venture with the East Germans, in reality it was controlled by Moscow. Every ounce of its uranium was shipped to the Soviet Union.2 SIS and CIA also targeted other East German sites involved with the Soviet bomb production. One was a former IG Farben plant at Bitterfeld, and another was the Tewa plant at Neustadt, both of them now turned into Soviet joint stock companies administered by the directorate of Soviet property in Germany. By recruiting agents in the directorate as well as the companies involved, SIS and CIA made some crucial breakthroughs. The most important was that the Soviets were aiming for a plutonium bomb and that progress was far more advanced than hitherto expected. The interrogation of returning prisoners of war from the Soviet Union and the defection of a key Soviet official at Wismut further enriched the picture. So did the interception of radio signals carrying information about shipments of material from East Germany to the Soviet atomic facility at Yelektrostal, near Moscow, where Uranium-235 was under production. All this gave Berlin a vital part in tracking the Soviet bomb.3

  But Stopwatch/Gold added even more. It pinpointed certain locations inside the Soviet Union hitherto unsuspected of being connected with atomic research and development and added greatly to knowledge about the workings of Wismut. This was not surprising. The KGB unit with Wismut reported directly to headquarters in Karlshorst on one of the lines being tapped. It had a further value, too, as David Murphy later noted. ‘This information could not have come at a better time. Hundreds of German scientists who had participated in the Soviet atomic program and related weapons development were being released.’ Among them was a key group of atomic scientists known as the ‘1037 (P) group’ – so-called from their postal address in the Soviet Union. British and American intelligence immediately targeted them for possible defection. Many were tempted by lucrative offers of work and housing, and those who co-operated were interrogated by SIS or CIA over the summer of 1955. Intelligence services need sources to cross-check information. With its stream of hard intelligence on the Soviet nuclear programme, Stopwatch/Gold, wrote Murphy, ‘provided a way to crosscheck their statements during debriefing’.4

  Another fall-out from Khrushchev’s destruction of Stalin’s reputation was the effort by Marshal Zhukov to curtail the influence of the political commissars in the Red Army. Zhukov had been the outstanding Red Army leader of the Second World War and commander of the forces that stormed Berlin in 1945. Pushed aside by Stalin, who feared his power, he re-emerged under Khrushchev as Minister of Defence. The war hero immediately began a major restructuring and modernization of Soviet forces that involved a powerful assault on political influence in the Red Army. Along with a devastating attack on Stalin’s war leadership, these efforts by Zhukov alienated Politburo hardliners, who fought back bitterly. Significant traces of this battle were picked up by Stopwatch/Gold. So was intelligence about a major reorganization of the Soviet Ministry of Defence, the internal organization of the Warsaw Pact, the Eastern bloc riposte to West Germany’s admission into Nato and the implementation of Khrushchev’s public promise to reduce the size of the Soviet armed forces. It also helped identify by name several thousand officers in the Red Army and fixed details of Soviet ground forces in the Soviet Union. All this, David Murphy remembered, proved ‘a goldmine for order-of-battle analysts’.5

  One significant effect of the Khrushchev—Zhukov reforms was to strengthen the Soviets’ nuclear capabilities. This, too, was tracked by the Stopwatch/Gold analysts, who soon began noting improvements in the nuclear delivery capability in the Soviet Air Force in East Germany, its re-equipment with new bombers and twin-jet interceptors with airborne radar capability, the doubling of its bomber strength in Poland, the location of about 100 previously unknown Soviet air force installations and details about Soviet training plans for early 1956 in Poland and East Germany. They also recorded a reduction in the status and personnel of Soviet naval forces and details of the organization and administrative procedures of the Soviet Baltic Fleet and Soviet naval bases along the Baltic coast.

&nbs
p; In London, Joe Evans recorded other intelligence nuggets. Stopwatch/Gold revealed that the Red Army’s new T-52 tanks based in East Germany were prone to disabling equipment failures and that ‘poor public education and military training, low morale, and barely acceptable discipline’ prevailed among low-ranking Soviet conscripts. Soviet officers were reluctant to take initiatives and constantly referred to Moscow for the most elementary decisions. Rampant duplicity and lying infected both the Red Army in Germany and the defence ministry in Moscow. By extrapolation, noted Evans, this provided ‘a broad view of the Soviet military and one more major plus for the tunnel’.6 One small but significant coup achieved by the Chester Terrace team was to solve the code used in radio communications to identify blocks of air space protected by the Soviet Air Defence Command. Not even NSA or GCHQ had managed to decipher it; the RAF officers at Regent’s Park did it by careful plaintext analysis.

  Among the hardest-hit targets of Stopwatch/Gold were Soviet military intelligence and counter-intelligence units in East Germany. ‘Because these services represented the single largest counter-intelligence problem faced by Nato’, recalled Murphy, ‘the detailed information the tunnel provided on them was of special significance.’ Of the telephone lines being tapped, twenty-five carried conversations between the GRU and intelligence units of the Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army in Germany (RU). As a result, Stopwatch/Gold identified more than 350 GRU and RU officers in East Germany, along with details on their organizations and agent operations. This proved invaluable for cross-checking and analysing information being provided by double agents being run by Lunn and Harvey. The lines also contained conversations between Red Army intelligence in Germany based at Wünsdorf and the General Staff of the Ministry of Defence in Moscow. Some of this provided surprising and welcome intelligence about GRU units in such far-flung places as the Tbilisi-based Transcaucasian district, covering the borders with Iran and Turkey.

  The KGB’s military counter-intelligence directorate in Germany, which was based in Potsdam, also produced rich material. From here its Director, Major-General Georgy Tsinev, ran networks of agents against Western intelligence units in West Berlin and West Germany. The work involved considerable liaison with both the KGB in Karlshorst and the East German Stasi, and generated hundreds of telephone calls. The tunnel taps revealed that the operations were ‘a large, scattergun effort in which many low-level agents concentrated on exposing western agents’. The telephone also carried interesting conversations when the deputy chairman of the KGB and the chief of the KGB’s Third Military Counter-intelligence arrived from Moscow to conduct a personal investigation in Berlin of the running of the agent networks in the West. As David Murphy noted, the intelligence was used by Harvey and his counter-intelligence experts to check information provided by a Soviet defector from Potsdam.7

  An additional bonus of Stopwatch/Gold was the wealth of material it provided on Soviet intercept operations. The tapping of lines between KGB Karlshorst and the Red Army signals directorate at Wünsdorf uncovered Soviet intercept operations specifically targeted on the radio transmissions of allied occupation forces in Berlin and West Germany, as well as the clandestine radio traffic of GRU agents at work in West Germany and other Nato countries. It included details on Soviet agent training techniques and facilities, the models and specifications of Soviet agents’ radio sets, and information about the main radio station that directed the Soviet agent traffic involving the names of directing officers, the cover names of Soviet agents and co-operation between the GRU and KGB.

  Each side was busy tapping into the other’s communications, spies spying on spies, who in turn were playing the same game against their opponents. In this wilderness of mirrors, and amid the clutter of conversations being picked up on one of the target cables, Stopwatch/Gold got wind that the KGB was tapping an American cable near Potsdam. The evidence was oblique – a fragment of conversation here, an elliptical comment there – and the KGB officers using the line were highly security-conscious, but not quite aware enough to outwit the Stopwatch/Gold listeners. When the tunnel evidence was put alongside other CIA intelligence about the Karlshorst base, it provided enough hard intelligence about the KGB group at work, and the vehicles it was using, to pinpoint the cable involved and put an end to its use. This, along with the rest of Stopwatch/Gold’s harvest, was, in David Murphy’s words, ‘a bonanza to Western counter-intelligence specialists’.8

  14

  Fingers Crossed

  ‘Biographic files are the heart of any intelligence service’, writes the former CIA operative William Hood, ‘and personal data on any possible target is eagerly collected by every intelligence agency.’ But because intelligence officers themselves keep casual acquaintances at arm’s length and are good at dissembling and role playing, they are among the toughest targets.1 To any spy agency this is particularly true for the leader of the opposition. For the Stopwatch/Gold team this meant the head of the local KGB in Karlshorst, Lieutenant-General Yevgeny Petrovich Pitovranov.

  In his mid-forties and with cover as senior counsellor at the Soviet embassy, Pitovranov had arrived in Berlin in August 1953 in the aftermath of the East German uprising. He had to rebuild the discredited Stasi, which had signally failed to predict the revolt. ‘Things need fixing’, he was told in no uncertain terms in Moscow. Pitovranov knew all about fixing. A hardened veteran of the Soviet system, he had been briefly imprisoned by Stalin before suddenly being promoted to head of foreign intelligence shortly before the dictator’s death. Afterwards, he had miraculously survived the turmoil that swept the Kremlin and culminated in the death of the dreaded KGB head, Lavrenti Beria. Being a brother-in-law to Georgi Malenkov, Stalin’s interim successor, undoubtedly helped.2

  Pitovranov was not a man to require intricate lessons in telephone security. But like everyone else he had to make calls, however discreet. Besides, he was in no position to control what others said about him on lines being used in Berlin and elsewhere. Almost as soon as it began, Stopwatch/Gold was collating a file on him. Combined with other sources, such as personal surveillance, it still exists and was released by the CIA in 1995.3 It provides a fascinating mix of personal and professional information on the local KGB chief gleaned from the intercepted telephone conversations of many people. This included Pitovranov himself. He and his wife, Elizaveta Pitovranova, talked to each other frequently by telephone, and from these conversations the Stopwatch/Gold eavesdroppers decided that the KGB chief was married to a person of ‘listless and apathetic manner’. In October 1955, for example, after she flew to Moscow following the death of her mother, she showed little enthusiasm for returning to Berlin, despite endless telephone calls from her husband urging her to do so. She was also noticeably apathetic when a staff officer from Marshal Grechko’s headquarters telephoned her about helping with some domestic transactions for Mrs Grechko. The dutiful wife Mrs Pitovranova certainly was not. All in all, concluded the listeners, she was ‘either a sick person or one of negative personality’. Today, perhaps, she would be seen as a person of independent mind.

  Allied listeners-in delighted in collecting intelligence about Yevgeny Pitovranov, the KGB station chief in Berlin. Rather than expose Blake, the Soviets continued to use the lines

  By contrast the analysts were impressed by Pitovranov himself. In December 1955 a Colonel Belov of the Red Army intelligence directorate in Berlin telephoned the KGB in Karlshorst to ask for Pitovranov’s help with some agent. The Stopwatch/Gold team was once again listening in, carefully recording Belov’s calls on the non-stop tape machines housed in the basement of the Rudow warehouse. It was clear that he was highly pleased with the KGB chief. He had made his decisions quickly, Belov told a colleague, and the operation concerned had gone off ‘as quick as lightning’. In Karlshorst itself a subordinate of Pitovranov told a friend that the pressure of working in Berlin was like sitting on a powder barrel but was made easier by the fact that his boss was a fighter who backed up his staff. His seniors al
so held him in high regard and respect.

  On only one occasion did the Stopwatch/Gold team pick up any criticism. This came from Major-General Dibrova, the commandant of the Soviet garrison in Berlin, and arose when he made the startling discovery that Pitovranov was planning a nightime wild boar hunting expedition using rifles with infra-red telescopic sights. Pitovranov, declared Dibrova to Lieutenant-General Kalyagin, Red Army liaison officer with the East German government, was ‘a fool to introduce a system that reflected on his hunting ability’. Besides, he added almost as an afterthought, he might accidentally get some of the local population killed in the process.

  The Pitovranov file contains detailed information on all his known movements, mostly the dates of flights to and from Moscow, but also trips made within the GDR to such cities as Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz) and the occasional visit to the KGB radio intercept station at Stahnsdorf, a village half-way between Berlin and Potsdam. It also lists his most important friends and colleagues, such as Marshal Grechko, with comments on their relationship. In all, the six typed pages of the CIA Pitovranov file add up to a mixed compendium of fact, gossip and speculation. This could easily be dismissed as at times amusing, sometimes interesting and frequently trivial, and certainly insignificant on the greater scale of the Cold War intelligence front, and probably a waste of time. Yet this would be a mistake. In the first place, every nugget of intelligence, however trivial, provided a piece of the jigsaw that eventually established the larger picture of Soviet intelligence in Berlin and elsewhere.

  But equally important was its value as a check on information from other sources that could have enormous intelligence spin-off. The file, for example, records that Pitovranov paid an urgent visit to Stahnsdorf in January 1956, shortly after one of its radio intercept officers had defected to the West. Such defectors were often a valuable source of vital intelligence. But the CIA and SIS would need quickly to establish whether the defector was genuine: false defectors deliberately planted by the KGB, and fraudulent ones seeking to make money by claiming to be what they were not, were common in this urban swamp. The often mundane but accurate information provided by Stopwatch/Gold provided a rich databank of information against which to check their claims.