Pitovranov was far too careful to reveal that he knew anyone was listening in. He had been briefed on the tunnel soon after Blake revealed its secrets to Kondrashev early in 1954, and immediately placed the Rudow site under observation – discreetly enough, it appears, for Harvey’s men not to pick it up. He also began some quiet investigation into the background of residents in the neighbourhood of the tap.
Then, late in 1955, when the tunnel was in full swing, KGB headquarters in Moscow sent out a team of technical specialists to Karlshorst under Vadim Goncharev. His task was twofold: first, to work with the signals directorate of Soviet forces in Berlin to tighten their communications security, and second, to provide ‘cover’ when the KGB and the Kremlin decided to move against Stopwatch/Gold. To ensure that the cover was foolproof, Goncharev was not told about the tunnel itself, and above all not about Blake. Instead, his Moscow bosses gave him just enough information about Western intercept operations to let him make an educated guess on his own that he should be looking for a tunnel. He knew about the KGB tap on the American cable in Potsdam. He could easily deduce that the opposition was doing the same with Soviet cables.
The first thing Goncharev did was to bustle around checking up on KGB telephone security. He was alarmed by what he uncovered. A random check of conversations revealed what he described as ‘violations of the most elementary norms of security’. To make his point he had several of them taped and showed the results to Marshal Grechko. The head of Soviet forces in Germany was appalled. At first he was simply incredulous, finding it hard to believe that so much information could be gleaned from telephone chatter. But after listening to a sample tape he gave the appropriate instructions to his subordinate commanders to tighten telephone security.4
Goncharev then turned his attention to his more important mission, and his team began searching for allied taps all along the Berlin sector border – anywhere where Soviet cables could be easily reached. This included the Alt-Glienicke area. Their initial explorations found nothing amiss until finally, early in 1956, closer checks using local telephone exchanges in different sectors of the city helped Goncharev pinpoint the exact location of the tunnel. Unaware that Pitovranov already knew the details, Goncharev excitedly told him of the discovery. Pitovranov could now move more overtly. He immediately went to Marshal Grechko, told him the ‘news’ and obtained his permission to create a special military signals company to locate and uncover any hostile taps on Soviet landlines in Berlin. The officers and enlisted men were carefully selected for hazardous duties, screened by the KGB and trained by Goncharev and his signals specialists. All that now remained was for the trap to be carefully sprung. For that, Pitovranov and Goncharev had patiently to await orders from the Kremlin.
*
Precisely when Khruschchev was told about the tunnel, and what precisely motivated him to pull the plug on it when he did, remain secrets still interred in the byzantine archives of the Kremlin. The Soviet leader revealed nothing himself about the decision and did not even mention the tunnel in his memoirs. But several events converged in April 1956 to explain his action. Most important was the continuing fall-out from his shattering denunciation of Stalin in his secret speech that February. To the West it sent a signal that a new and less hostile regime was in charge in Moscow. To dissident communist leaders, such as Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, it held out the chance of reconciliation and return to the communist fold. Khrushchev enhanced both these aims in April when he abolished the Cominform, the international communist agency that had expelled Tito from its ranks back in 1948. As the successor to the Comintern, Cominform had also long been seen by the West as an arm of international Soviet propaganda.
Yet even as he sent out friendly signals with one hand, Khrushchev was under fierce pressure to demonstrate toughness with the other. With his attack on Stalin he had gone out on a limb against the wishes of the majority of his Politburo. To them, and to survive politically, he had to show he had not gone soft on the West. Challenging Stalin’s legacy also seriously worried the Kremlin’s puppet allies in the Warsaw Pact. Many owed their position to Stalin’s support. Of nobody was this more true than of Walter Ulbricht, the East German dictator. The unloved German Democratic Republic was a fragile state, still unrecognized outside the Eastern bloc. Khrushchev knew it, and in September 1955 signed a treaty with Ulbricht promising to return as many powers to his regime as possible. What this meant in detail for Berlin was unclear. But against the destabilizing backdrop of his secret speech Khrushchev badly needed to assure Ulbricht of continuing support. Depicting West Berlin as a nest of American spies fitted perfectly into the game plan. Khrushchev was essentially reactive and opportunist. Exposing the tunnel would demonstrate to dubious allies, not to mention hardline factions in the Kremlin itself, that he was standing firm against the Americans. Done in the right way, exposure could deliver Khrushchev a much-needed propaganda victory. Looking back on events from almost fifty years later, Markus Wolf understood the need. ‘In 1956, at the time of the 20th Party Congress’, he recalled, ‘there was an escalation of tension.’
None of this escaped the attention of the West. Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a meeting of the National Security Council chaired by Vice-President Richard Nixon at the end of 1955 that Berlin remained ‘one area of the world where we can expect trouble in the near future’. Sitting at the table, Allen Dulles shared his anxiety. Tension was again rising in the Soviet zone of Germany, he told his colleagues, and ‘further harassment and restrictions were likely to be imposed on West Berlin’. Two months later, in February 1956, Prime Minister Eden and President Eisenhower issued a joint public warning that any attack on West Berlin would be regarded as an attack on both Britain and the United States. In the spring of 1956 Khrushchev wished to demonstrate that he could still be tough. Berlin was the place to do it. So he gave the signal to the KGB to expose Stopwatch/Gold.5
Pitovranov choreographed a detailed plan for the ‘accidental’ discovery of the tunnel including ‘spontaneous’ statements of outrage by Marshal Grechko, Georgy Pushkin, the Soviet ambassador in East Berlin, and Pitovranov himself. All this was kept secret from the lower echelons of KGB. Other Soviet agencies in Berlin were also kept in the dark, as were the East Germans. They, too, were to believe that the tunnel’s discovery was accidental.
Yet fate almost decreed otherwise. The first snowfall of winter revealed a fatal flaw in tunnel planning. It was the one story about Stopwatch/Gold that Allen Dulles was later prepared to tell in public, offering it as a warning about what can happen to even the most carefully laid plans. As the snow fell, a routine visual inspection above ground showed that it was melting because of the heat coming up from beneath. ‘In no time at all a beautiful path was going to appear in the snow from West to East Berlin which any watchful Vopo couldn’t help but notice’, recalled Dulles. ‘The heat was turned off and in short order refrigeration devices were installed in the tunnel. Fortunately it continued to snow and the path was quickly covered over …’6 The crisis even led to Les Sparks being flown in from Dollis Hill to lay special cables, the only time he ever returned to the tunnel after his successful placing of the tap.
The heavy rains that deluged Berlin in the spring handed Moscow the opportunity it needed to ‘discover’ the tunnel. They had caused severe flooding and many of the Soviet cables serving Karlshorst and Wünsdorf were short-circuiting. One of the cables being tapped, known to the Stopwatch/Gold team as FK 151, was so badly affected that on 17 April the Soviets had to cut out a defective stretch and replace it with a 3,000 metre length of temporary cable. FK 151 was a vital part of the Soviet early warning system, carrying the air warning link between Moscow and Marshal Grechko’s headquarters at Wünsdorf. Its traffic was so important that while it was being repaired messages were diverted on to another of the cables being tapped, FK 150. But then this, too, began to have problems. Exasperated, the head of the Wünsdorf signal centre, Lieutenant-Colonel Vy
unik, placed an urgent call to his opposite number at KGB Karlshorst, insisting that the line be fixed by the next morning, Sunday 22 April.
Listening in, the CIA and SIS eavesdroppers overheard the Soviets trying to cope with the crisis. Independently their agents inside the East German telephone office confirmed the story. The crisis obviously posed a serious risk to the tunnel, so Lunn sent an urgent warning message to Broadway. Joe Evans rememberd the alert. ‘We received a warning from Berlin that flooding threatened the tunnel’, he recalled. ‘From flooding could come faults on phone lines we tapped and if this occurred – as it did – East German phone workers could find the chamber while searching for faults.’7
In Berlin, Harvey decided to reassure himself that all was well and that the emergency Soviet work on the cables was not disguising an attack on the tunnel. While the press was headlining the fairy-tale wedding of actress Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco, Harvey’s men inspected the tap chamber on 19 April. All was in order. Harvey passed on the news to Lunn. Neither had any reason to suspect that anything was out of the ordinary. None the less they remained vigilant. All precautions had been taken, Harvey reported to Truscott in Frankfurt on 20 April, ‘including the primary one of crossing fingers’.8
But superstition was not enough. Though neither Lunn nor Harvey knew it, everything was about to change. Stopwatch/Gold was set to emerge into the harsh, bright light of worldwide publicity.
15
‘It’s Gone, John’
‘Most intelligence operations have a limited span of usefulness’, declared Allen Dulles. ‘The difficult decision is when to taper off and when to stop.’1 This assumes the master spy is in control. But for Stopwatch/Gold the decision was in the hands of the enemy. Shortly before one o’clock on the morning of 22 April, a Sunday, a team of between forty and fifty men from Goncharev’s special signal unit under the command of a Captain Bartash arrived at the exact point on the east side of the Schönefelder Chaussee traversed by the tunnel. They were directly above the tap chamber just inches below the surface. Piling out of their trucks and wielding picks and shovels, they began to dig up the road.
Over at the Rudow warehouse the CIA watchers immediately spotted them through their night-vision binoculars. Following the pre-arranged security procedures they promptly alerted Bill Harvey via the switchboard in the CIA office on the Clayallee. Hurriedly throwing on his clothes, Harvey dashed out to Rudow. But first he telephoned Hugh Montgomery. ‘I was at home fast asleep when his call woke me up’, recalled Montgomery. ‘All he said was “We’ve got a problem” so I flung on my clothes and went over.’ When he got out to Rudow, Harvey told him to help the duty linguists monitor the conversations being intercepted on the engineering circuits as well as anything being picked up by the microphone still installed in the tap chamber. ‘I was sitting there,’ said Montgomery, ‘listening in on the headphones’.
By this time Harvey was already standing by a tape machine. Every now and again he ordered it to be stopped so that the linguists could interpret for him. The conversations were in both German and Russian. This was not just front-seat curiosity on Harvey’s part. He was straining to catch any evidence from the idle chatter of the diggers that the Soviets already knew about the tunnel, and hence to establish whether or not it had been betrayed. Even as Stopwatch/Gold was unravelling, Harvey’s counter-intelligence instincts were fully on the alert. In the background, through the static, he heard shovelling, the noise of falling debris, passing traffic, a barking dog, even a rooster crowing.
After about fifty minutes coughing and panting the Soviet team uncovered the top of the tap chamber. None of them had been told by the KGB about the tunnel and they still thought they were searching for a flood-damaged cable, so they failed to realize what they had found and assumed it was a manhole covering a repeater point (an automatic re-transmitting device) in the cable system. They continued digging. After another hour they uncovered the tap cables and could see them leading down through a trapdoor in the floor of the chamber. Still they were unconcerned and, even as they worked, the taps continued. Over in the warehouse Harvey continued his vigil. Majors Alpatov and Vyunik, in the signals centres at Karlshorst and Wünsdorf respectively, continued to talk about the air warning communications system with Moscow and the troubles they were having with cable FK 150. Harvey detected nothing to show they were aware of the tap.
By now the hidden microphone was beginning to pick up fragments of conversation. The Soviet specialists had been joined by East German telephone repair men. Harvey’s eavesdroppers heard one of them suggest that the chamber might have something to do with the Berlin city sewer system. Should they obtain a plan of the system, he asked. He was brusquely snubbed by a Soviet officer. They already had the sewer map, he replied curtly, and it was obvious that this was something different.
Still, however, the digging team had no idea what they had uncovered. Was it something built by the Nazis during the war, wondered one of them. Then, at about 3.30 a.m., the Soviet contingent abruptly withdrew. Through their night-vision binoculars the CIA watchers saw them pile into their vehicles and disappear down the Schönefelder Chaussee, leaving behind a handful of East Germans, one or two guard dogs and improvised barricades around the site. It had finally sunk in to the Soviet diggers that they had unearthed something major. They needed higher authority before proceeding any further.
Soon after they left, Vyunik in Wünsdorf telephoned Alpatov at his KGB apartment in Karlshorst. Had he spoken to the head of GSFG signals, General Dudakov, asked Vyunik. Yes, replied Alpatov, adding that he was actually in the middle of getting dressed to make it back to his office. ‘Telephone me when you get there’, requested Vyunik. ‘When we speak we must do so carefully. We know what the matter is, so we will speak carefully.’ Listening in, Harvey realized this was the first sign that the Soviets had begun to guess what they had found.
Two hours after Captain Bartash’s team withdrew, they were back again, this time accompanied by the deputy chief of the lines department from Wünsdorf, Lieutenant-Colonel Zolochko. Soon after they arrived, Bill Harvey heard the words ‘the cable is tapped’ picked up on the microphone. By now several more high-ranking Soviet officials had arrived, alerted to the fact that something extraordinary was going on. They even brought a motion picture camera team along. From now on every stage of the operation’s exposure was carefully recorded on film. It was at about this time, too, that Markus Wolf and Ernst Wollweber rolled up in their battered old Volkswagen.
The diggers had still not penetrated beyond the tap chamber. They were being careful. It might be booby-trapped. Yet, remarkably, the full scale of the discovery had still not dawned on them. Some thought they had uncovered an abandoned tap, and even though they spotted it, none of them recognized the microphone for what it was. Harvey continued to follow their talk as they speculated wildly about what they had found. How could the cuts have been made in the cables to attach the tap lines without anyone noticing, wondered one of the Soviets. ‘Everyone must have been drunk’, suggested one of the Germans familiar with the habits of his vodka-prone comrades. Another demonstrated how deeply in the dark the diggers were. ‘They themselves must have some means of entering this place, but naturally it’s highly improbable that they have constructed a passage for getting from here to there,’ he remarked.
By now it was 11.30 a.m. on 22 April. Digging had been under way for ten hours. Captain Bartash’s men still did not know they were dealing with a tunnel. Then, at quarter to twelve, one of the Germans shouted, ‘The box is an entry to a shaft.’ They had finally hacked a small hole near the still intact trapdoor and were peering through into the lower part of the chamber. Reassured by now that there was no booby trap, they removed the hinges of the door and clambered down. One of the first things they saw was the padlock that secured the trapdoor from below. It was of British origin. The next thing they encountered was the massive steel door sealing the tap chamber off from the pre-amplification chamber
. They were unable to open it. Instead, they broke through the wall with their picks and drills to reveal an impressive array of technology.
They were stunned. ‘Fantastic! Look at that! It goes all the way under the highway’, exclaimed one. ‘I am speechless’, declared another. Yet another cried out, ‘It’s a complete installation, a telephone exchange.’ One of them marvelled at the sophisticated equipment and the careful planning involved. ‘It must have cost a pretty penny’, he remarked. One of the Germans observed, ‘How neatly and tidily they have done it’, but another colleague was less impressed. ‘What a filthy trick’, he spluttered, ‘and where you would least expect it’. Meanwhile the Soviet film kept rolling.
An East German border guard points at Harvey’s hurriedly written note marking the sector border
Harvey was still listening in as the microphone picked up these exclamations of shock and amazement. So far he had listened fascinated but fairly detached. But as the Soviet team began to break its way into the pre-amplification chamber he suddenly sprang into action. ‘Find Dasher’, he shouted to Montgomery, referring to General Charles L. Dasher, the American commander in Berlin. Montgomery was to ask the general’s permission to prime and if necessary detonate the explosive charges in the tunnel.
After a hectic search Montgomery finally located Dasher at a reception being given at the Wannsee Yacht Club for General Maxwell Taylor, the US Army’s Chief of Staff, who was on an official visit to Berlin. ‘He wasn’t at all pleased to be interrupted’, remembered Montgomery, ‘but I insisted.’ The irate general gradually calmed down as Montgomery explained the problem. ‘Might any of the Russians get killed’, asked Dasher when he had finished. ‘Possibly’, responded Montgomery. ‘Then the answer’s No’, replied Dasher, ‘I don’t want to start World War Three.’ Montgomery relayed Dasher’s veto back to Harvey by telephone. ‘I think Harvey expected that’, surmised Montgomery. Instead, the CIA Berlin chief ordered sandbags and barbed wire to be placed in the tunnel where it crossed the sector border. On top of the improvised barrier he put up a crude hand-lettered sign. ‘You are now entering the American sector’, it read. A few yards further on he ordered his men to set up a .30 calibre heavy machine gun. It was not loaded, merely a deterrent. Harvey menacingly crouched down behind it.
Spies Beneath Berlin Page 15