Spies Beneath Berlin

by David Stafford

  In the building above, Richard Thompson was awoken at 2 a.m. by an excited voice saying, ‘the Russians have found us, get your weapons and go to your defensive positions’. ‘Bam! I was wide awake,’ he recalled, ‘and my heart was pounding. I remember having a M1 carbine with two taped banana ammunition clips inserted in the weapon and a total of four hand grenades in the pockets of my field jacket. God, I was scared! I was a 19-year-old kid.’

  At about 3 o’clock Harvey and Montgomery heard footsteps moving down through the tunnel towards them. There was a small dip in the tunnel floor obscuring Harvey’s view. He pulled back the bolt. Its noise echoed loudly along the tunnel. The footsteps stopped, then after a short pause retreated back into the darkness. Half an hour later the Soviets cut the tap cables and dismantled the microphone. ‘It’s gone, John’, muttered one of the listening American linguists. His words were the last to be captured on the transcript as the microphone went dead. After eleven months and eleven days Stopwatch/Gold had completed its work.2

  16

  Caught Red-Handed

  The moment he realized the tunnel was blown, Harvey alerted CIA headquarters in Frankfurt. By now Lucien Truscott had been replaced by the OSS veteran and wartime parachutist Tracy Barnes. ‘Every morning’, recalled his widow years later, ‘Tracy got up and went to war.’ Barnes had capped his Second World War exploits by working with Allen Dulles in Berne, where he met the grieving widow of the former Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano – hanged in 1944 by his father-in-law Mussolini – and charmed her into handing over his diaries. Since then, he had enthusiastically waged Cold War against the communists from within the CIA.

  Two versions exist of what happened after Harvey’s call reached Frankfurt. One has Barnes entertaining the CIA’s Deputy Director of Intelligence, Robert Amory, who was on a fact-finding European visit. The two men jumped into a Mercedes and rushed up the autobahn to Bonn to break the news to the American ambassador, James Conant. As decreed earlier by Dulles, Conant had not been let into the secret of Stopwatch/Gold. But by the time Barnes and Amory arrived he had already heard from Berlin of the drama unfolding at Alt-Glienicke. ‘Well, fellows’, he greeted them laughing, ‘looks like you got your hands caught in the cookie jar. Tell me all about it.’1 According to the second version, told by Barnes’s widow, Barnes was in Switzerland when the call came through. ‘Tracy was wild’, she recalled. ‘He woke me up and said “This is serious” and roared off to Bonn to tell the ambassador.’ When told the news, Conant said simply, ‘I like cops and robbers, but I don’t like getting caught.’2

  Either way, Conant was not the only one eager to hear the news. The tunnel might have gone, but its unearthing was far from the end of the story. The events of Sunday 22 April sparked an international row, unveiled an orchestrated Cold War propaganda spectacle, set off urgent internal inquests by both CIA and SIS into the possibilities of treachery and initiated a decades-long debate about the significance of Stopwatch/Gold that lasted until after the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

  The Stopwatch/Gold planners had assumed that the Soviets would keep quiet about the tunnel rather than suffer a loss of face by admitting that the West had outwitted them with such an impressive operation. So Moscow’s response took them aback. Within hours of the tunnel’s discovery the Soviet ambassador in East Berlin, Georgy Pushkin, delivered a strong official protest to General Dasher. Two days later Moscow mobilized the press. At about 7 p.m. on the evening of 24 April calls went out to journalists in Berlin inviting them to a press conference in the cinema of the Red Army officers’ club in Karlshorst.

  Such a rare flash of Soviet openness sparked immediate curiosity and stimulated a mad rush to get there. At Karlshorst the news-hungry journalists were greeted by Colonel Ivan Kotsiuba, the Soviet military commandant in the city. After warmly welcoming his guests from the West he revealed the discovery of the ‘American spy tunnel’. He then invited them all on a guided tour. Spearheaded by Soviet military police on motor bikes, a convoy of vehicles dashed at breakneck speed through the darkening Berlin evening to Alt-Glienicke. Here the scene was lit by floodlights. ‘Come, gentleman, follow me’, said the smiling Kotsiuba, disappearing down the hole. ‘Look’, he said, ‘almost German workmanship – but not done by Germans.’3 He allowed the gaping journalists to walk down the tunnel as far as the hastily improvised barbed wire barrier and Harvey’s notice marking the beginning of the American sector.

  In this carefully posed photograph a lieutenant-colonel in the Red Army examines some of the Western technology used in the Berlin tunnel

  ‘The chamber near the Soviet end of the tunnel’, marvelled the New York Times’ correspondent, ‘looked like the communications center of a battleship.’ Talking to an American official in Bonn, one senior British diplomat noted that the Americans were happy to play up the tunnel as an example of Cold War toughness. ‘At the moment’, he informed London, ‘they are laughing it off as a good joke on the Soviets.’4 Over the NBC radio network broadcaster Alex Dreier voiced another good joke. Why didn’t the Americans open up a tourist entrance at their end of the tunnel and cash in on the publicity? ‘Step up, one and all’, he laughed. ‘Only a quarter. See modern espionage in electronic form and all underground, and who knows? Perhaps you’ll meet an occasional foreign tourist.’5

  *

  While the American media hailed the tunnel for its ingenuity and lauded the CIA for at last outwitting the Soviets, the KGB unleashed a cascade of anti-CIA propaganda. In his guided tour Kotsiuba had pointed his finger firmly at the Americans. A few weeks later Moscow produced a widely distributed booklet entitled Caught Red-Handed. It was lavishly illustrated with photographs taken by the Soviet cameramen and contained a sketch of the site showing the path of the tunnel between the Schönefelder Chaussee and Rudow: damning evidence, it proclaimed, of the CIA’s use of West Berlin as an espionage base against the peace-loving East. Even communist China jumped on the bandwagon by posting photographs of the tunnel in shops and factories and reporting gleefully that they were provoking ‘lively discussion’ among their workers.

  But the real KGB target was the host of other ‘criminal activities’ denounced in the booklet. The list included over twenty agents caught between 1952 and 1956 inside the USSR itself. They had now, noted the text with satisfaction, been ‘rendered harmless’. It also contained details of the James Bond-style equipment they were alleged to have used: miniature radio transmitters, pencils using luminous ink for writing at night, and fountain pen pistols firing poison-filled bullets. The agents were all declared to have belonged to the Gehlen organization. For years its real and imagined links with the CIA had been providing a prime target for the KGB.

  During the Second World War General Reinhard Gehlen headed the Abwehr’s Foreign Armies East section, collecting intelligence about the Soviet Union. In 1945 he turned over his wares to the Americans, who set him up in a base at Pullach, outside Munich. From here he ran extensive operations into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Gehlen was always controversial. The value of his intelligence was disputed and his agency was inevitably tainted by its Nazi past. Particularly after the 1953 uprising this was seized on by the East Germans, who targeted his agency with an unremitting smear campaign and even offered a million Deutschmarks reward for his capture, dead or alive. They also bent all their efforts to penetrate his agency. Far too often they succeeded, which was why both the CIA and SIS kept him firmly at arm’s length. Such episodes were invariably exploited to the full for their propaganda advantage.

  One such incident had occurred in December 1953, just as the first CIA-SIS planning meeting was taking place at Carlton Gardens. Major Werner Haase was a Gehlen officer in West Berlin. One night he was reconnoitring a possible route for a secret telephone cable across a canal that ran along the sector border, a device that would enable him to maintain contact with his agents in East Berlin now that overground courier routes were becoming increasingly dangerous. ‘Under cover
of darkness’, recalled Gehlen, ‘he proposed to feed the cable along the canal using a toy steamboat, helped by an agent from East Berlin on the other side.’ What Major Haase did not know was that his agent had been turned by the Stasi. In mid-operation Ulbricht’s secret policemen swooped and arrested him. They later paraded him in a show trial and he was given life imprisonment. It was a vivid reminder to the Stopwatch/Gold planners, if one was needed, of the hazards of dealing with Gehlen’s men.6

  By the early 1950s Gehlen was effectively head of West German intelligence. The regaining of sovereignty by the Federal Republic meant that in 1956 it could finally create its own official foreign intelligence agency. On 1 April that year Gehlen’s organization formally became the BND – the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or foreign intelligence service. This was just three weeks before the tunnel was blown. Moscow’s decision to pull the plug provided Khrushchev with a potent propaganda weapon against the new Federal Republic.

  The KGB would always claim that Gehlen had been deeply involved in the planning and execution of the Berlin tunnel. The suggestion has been widely repeated in many other sources, including biographies of Gehlen and histories of the CIA. But no evidence exists to back it up and those most closely in the know in the CIA have strenuously denied it. Most revealingly of all, Gehlen himself noticeably refrained from making any claim of involvement in Stopwatch/Gold in his published 1972 memoirs. Never a modest man, he would surely have bid for some of the credit had he been in any way involved. In fact, he does not even refer to it.7

  Denouncing the Gehlen connection was not the only object of Soviet propaganda. Praising KGB skill was another. Soon a vivid account began to circulate in the world’s press of the Soviets descending on the tunnel as the hapless Americans fled the scene. ‘On a table in the recreation chamber [sic] a coffee percolator was still bubbling’, wrote the popular historian E.H. Cookridge in his vividly coloured biography of Gehlen.8 Versions of this story have circulated ever since, but it is a myth. Harvey’s men spotted the Soviet search party on the Schönefelder Chaussee even before it began digging up the road, and Goncharev’s team took a full fourteen hours fully to uncover the taps. No one working in the tunnel was so surprised that they fled leaving the coffee pot on. There was not even a coffee pot in the tunnel: refreshments were always taken in the warehouse building.

  Equally misleading were sketches of the tunnel that appeared in the East German press within days of the tunnel’s discovery. These showed it originating in the motor pool garage or power generating plant and not, as was actually the case, in the ‘radar station’ itself. This was either a genuine mistake or, more likely, a deliberate error to conceal the fact that the KGB had an inside source on the tunnel plans, in the shape of George Blake.9

  Here, too, another myth has taken hold – that it was intelligence gleaned from Stopwatch/Gold itself that first alerted SIS to Blake’s treachery.10 But the notion that the KGB would have discussed Blake, however indirectly, over lines that they knew were being tapped by SIS stretches credulity. Furthermore, those in the CIA who examined the tunnel material for counter-intelligence material never saw any evidence of this kind.

  *

  Nowhere in Soviet propaganda about the Berlin tunnel was there any reference to the British. Yet SIS involvement was glaringly apparent to anyone who went into it. One of those taken on Colonel Kotsiuba’s underground tour in Alt-Glienicke was the Berlin-based Charles Hargrove, of The Times of London. ‘Your correspondent was given the opportunity today to climb down a ladder into the tunnel’, he reported to British readers the next day. ‘The roadside on the way to East Berlin airport this afternoon resembled an archaeological site after exciting new finds… The vital part is a short section near the East Berlin end in which is housed a complete telephone switchboard of a current British manufacture … fluorescent lighting, fire extinguishers, and other equipment in the switchboard section all bear familiar British trade marks.’ But, he added, the Soviets had not yet accused the British authorities of complicity and maintained that the whole tunnel was recognizably American work.11 The newspaper then fell remarkably silent about the British fingerprints at the scene. Apart from this initial report and one or two subsequent small snippets about Soviet protests to the Americans, Britain’s premier national broadsheet abruptly dropped the story.

  The Berlin tunnel is exposed as ‘an imperialist plot’ while Soviet leaders Bulganin (at the microphone) and Khrushchev are on an official visit to the UK Here, Prime Minister Anthony Eden (arms crossed) greets them at Victoria Station just four days before the Soviets ‘stumble’ on the tunnel

  The explanation was simple. Even as Captain Bartash’s men in Berlin were discovering the British-made padlock on the tap chamber trapdoor, Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, and Marshal Nikolai Bulganin, the Soviet Prime Minister, were asleep in their beds at Chequers as guests of the British Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden. There was a heavy political investment at stake and no one was prepared to rock the diplomatic boat.

  The Soviet leaders had arrived at Portsmouth four days before on the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze for an official state visit first proposed by Eden at the Geneva conference the year before. It was trumpeted in the British press as heralding the beginning of a new and more hopeful era of détente following the death of Stalin. By contrast with the grim and brooding Georgian, the jovial Khrushchev and his smiling prime minister showed to the world a more human face of the Soviet Union. They stayed at Claridge’s Hotel, made sightseeing tours of such tourist spots as Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower of London and the Royal Festival Hall, and solemnly laid a wreath on the cenotaph in Whitehall in memory of the soldiers of both nations who had died in ‘common struggles for peace and security’ in the two world wars. They also laid a wreath on the grave of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery. There were formal dinners at 10 Downing Street and lunches in the magnificent Painted Hall of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich and the City of London’s Mansion House. They flew to Birmingham and to Edinburgh, where they toured Holyrood House and Edinburgh Castle.

  The only hitch came at a dinner hosted by the Labour Party, when the party leader, Hugh Gaitskell, presented the Soviet leaders with a list of Social Democrats imprisoned in Eastern Europe. Truculently, Khrushchev asked why he should care what happened to enemies of the working class. ‘God forgive you’, shouted an emotional George Brown, Gaitskell’s chief lieutenant. Unused to the robust exchanges of British socialists, the offended Soviet leader remarked the next day that if he lived in Britain he would be a Tory.12

  But this was just a hiccup in an otherwise harmonious visit. The highlight, which symbolized the hopes for peace in the steely Cold War world, was the visit by these heirs of Stalin to Her Majesty the Queen. After leaving Chequers on the afternoon of 22 April they were driven by car to Windsor. Here, in warm spring sunshine, they were greeted by a chorus of cheers from the waiting crowd before disappearing inside for an hour’s royal audience. They then presented gifts to all the royal family: a sable fur wrap for the Queen herself, a horse for the Duke of Edinburgh, a pony for Prince Charles, and a bear cub, Nikki, for Princess Anne – later to be cared for at London Zoo.

  Even as they were on their way Bill Harvey was pulling back the bolt on his machine-gun, the taps were being cut, the microphone was disconnected, and the Stopwatch/Gold secret was well and truly out of the bag. A full-scale diplomatic disaster loomed. But the Kremlin decreed otherwise. Khrushchev was fully briefed on the tunnel by the KGB and had already given his orders. The diplomatic and propaganda responses were firmly in place. Within hours of the tunnel’s discovery Moscow issued detailed instructions to Berlin for the handling of the press. They included the unambiguous order: ‘Despite the fact that the tunnel contains English equipment, direct all accusations in the press against the Americans only.’13

  Bulganin and Khrushchev remained in Britain for five days after the unmasking of Stopwatch/Gold, plenty o
f time to embarrass their hosts had they wished to do so. They did not. Before leaving London the two Soviet leaders held a press conference at the Central Hall in Westminster attended by more than 400 British and foreign journalists. There was no hint of anything untoward; in fact the mood was distinctly upbeat. A smiling Bulganin announced that Eden had accepted an invitation to visit the Soviet Union as soon as he could. Certainly, admitted the Soviet Prime Minister, there had been differences and ‘sharp moments’ during the talks. East—West relations contained many difficult issues. But, he assured them, he and Mr Khrushchev were returning to Moscow full of friendly feelings towards the British people and government. ‘The main thing we have achieved’, he said, ‘is greater confidence between the Soviet Union and Britain … Neither the British people nor the British Government want war.’14 By implication, of course, others did. Bulganin was trying hard to drive a wedge between London and Washington.