Spies Beneath Berlin
Page 17
Such benevolent talk dutifully followed the diplomatic plot. But to those in the know about SIS operations, a short phrase used by Bulganin undoubtedly raised a wry smile. Alongside the ‘sharp moments’, declared Bulganin, the talks had also encountered ‘certain underwater rocks’. This might have been a deliberately coded reference to the excavations in Berlin. But it more likely referred to the ill-fated mission just a few days before of Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, a frogman sent by SIS to examine the hull of the Ordzhonikidze in Portsmouth Harbour. After a couple of dives Crabb failed to resurface, thus setting off panic and a frantic cover-up. Even as Bulganin spoke, SIS was still ignorant of Crabb’s fate. It was not until after the Soviets had left Britain that Moscow officially protested about his exploits and that his disappearance was publicly admitted in Parliament. Crabb’s headless torso was washed up near Chichester Harbour a year later. But whether Bulganin was hinting at Stopwatch/Gold or at ‘Buster’ Crabb, or possibly both, he and Khrushchev allowed neither of these two SIS operations to spoil the diplomatic party.15
17
‘A Gangster Act’
In Washington, Alien Dulles remained tight-lipped. But behind the scenes he was jubilant at the favourable publicity the tunnel had won for the CIA. ‘Money Well Spent’, headlined the Stamford Advocate from Connecticut in noting that the news from Berlin should calm Congressional fears. ‘What the Agency ultimately got’, writes Burton Hersh in The Old Boys, his study of the American élite and the CIA, ‘was publicity, priceless publicity, the kind that paved Allen’s way to friction-free appearances before Congress.’1
As for Eisenhower, he was sorry to have lost the tunnel as a source of intelligence but had always been prepared for the inevitable. None the less, his staff secretary Andrew Goodpaster, the White House link with the CIA, recalled that discovery of the tunnel changed relations between the agency and the President. ‘I think he felt that there had been carelessness that drew the attention of the East Germans. [He] responded by tightening White House supervision of all CIA activities encroaching on foreign sovereignty.’2 No one in the American press, which was far more respectful of the White House in the 1950s than later, even suggested that Eisenhower had known about the tunnel. At his next press conference he was asked not a single question about it.
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Back in Berlin, Moscow’s rapid denunciation of the CIA was quickly picked up by its obedient East German satellite. The Ulbricht regime had said nothing at first about Stopwatch/Gold. But then it announced that a special commission had investigated the affair and proved it was an undoubted act of American espionage. The main target of Ulbricht’s campaign was West Berlin, which from now until the building of the wall in 1961 came under a sustained communist attack in an effort to break its links with the West. The main thrust of the offensive was to denounce the city as a Nato base and nest of American spies and saboteurs.
East Berlin papers described the tunnel as ‘an international scandal’ that breached all the norms of international law and violated not just international telecommunications treaties but also the sovereignty of the GDR itself. The SED (communist) party newspaper Neues Deutschland characterized it as ‘a gangster act’ of the American secret service and produced a cartoon showing a garden divided into two separate halves. One, labelled ‘Democratic Sector’, is full of flowers. The other, a barren piece of land, is marked by a molehill topped by a flag with a dollar sign. In the ‘Democratic Sector’ a strong arm is pulling out of a hole a mole wearing earphones marked ‘U.S.’, army trousers with plugs and pliers showing from the pocket, and a US Army cap bearing the words ‘Espionage’. The cartoon is captioned ‘Do Not Burrow in Other People’s Yards’. Another communist paper, the Neue Zeit, declared that there was no word strong enough to brand ‘such wickedness’. The tunnel, it claimed, was a feature of West Berlin’s misuse as a Nato base and it called for all-German talks about the future of the city, and ‘not underground trenches in the cold war’.3 The mayor of East Berlin, Fritz Ebert, invited his opposite numbers in the West to see the American spy tunnel for themselves.
The West Berlin response was exceptionally robust. The two halves of the city had long been bitter ideological enemies. Neither the mayor of West Berlin nor other West German officials had had any inkling of the tunnel and they were all as surprised as the international press by its discovery. But Willy Brandt, the most powerful figure in the city’s Social Democratic Party, and soon to become world-famous as its embattled mayor when the wall went up, seized the opportunity to make propaganda of his own. He would happily visit the tunnel, he said, provided he could do so in the company of four political prisoners in the Soviet zone, whom he named.
Most were Social Democrats. But one, Lieutenant-General Robert Bialek, was an important East German defector from 1953 who had once run the East German state security service. Housed by SIS in the British sector in a flat fitted with automatic locks and steel window shutters, he had been kidnapped back to the East just a few weeks before. Since then the British had made repeated protests to the Soviet authorities in the East. They denied all knowledge of him.4
On Saturday 28 April at 11 a.m. Brandt ostentatiously arrived by car at the Brandenburg Gate. Not surprisingly, the four political prisoners were not there. After some fruitless discussions with East German officials Brandt returned to his office in the West of the city, declaring that he hoped they would be delivered to him there at some later date. The whole spectacle was witnessed by a crowd of camera-popping West German journalists. Most gave Brandt’s stage-managed performance massive and favourable publicity. The one notable exception was the Frankfurter Allgemeine, which at the time was pushing for a united and neutral Germany. It published an angry editorial on the tunnel demanding that Germans should no longer tolerate the waging of a Russian—American Cold War on German soil.5
Meanwhile, the Ulbricht regime rapidly organized propaganda tours of the site at Alt-Glienicke, which quickly became the most popular tourist destination in the city. ‘It has been turned into a major tourist attraction’, noted British observers stationed at the Olympic Stadium, ‘and scarcely a day passes without delegations of some sort or another being conducted through it.’6 In the first week alone more than 2,000 visitors descended the shaft on the Schönefelder Chaussee. A mobile snack bar serving beer and sausages did a thriving business. Factory delegations arrived daily by bus to see the work of ‘the American imperialists’. Afterwards they wrote comments in a visitors’ book to record their indignation. American reporters in particular were welcomed and fêted.
Wilhelm Pieck, East German President (centre), gazes down at the targeted cables and the tap chamber beneath
So were trade unionists from the West. One of them, John Forster, of the British Metal Workers Union, was reported as saying that he was very hurt to find British products in the tunnel. He was convinced, according to the report, that if the British metal workers knew what had happened to their products they would have been as angry as he was. ‘The British working class’, he was quoted as saying, ‘did not allow itself to be misused to cause damage to the workers in the Soviet Union and the DDR.’7 This was one of the very few references to British involvement in Stopwatch/Gold. Even then, East German papers echoed the Soviet line. References to British equipment, they argued, were probably attempts by the Americans to conceal their own responsibility.
By the end of June 1956 the tunnel had served its propaganda purpose. The tours were stopped, the entrance blocked up, the Schönefelder Chaussee resurfaced. Life in Alt-Glienicke returned to normal. Harvey’s men emptied the tunnel of its equipment and at that end too it was bricked off. The warehouse and other buildings remained in place, however, and were used by the American army until the 1980s. Then they, too, fell into disuse.
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With both the communist and American press alike accepting the tunnel as a CIA operation, Peter Lunn found it hard to keep quiet. In London some of those at SIS headquarters most deepl
y involved in Stopwatch/Gold, such as Andrew King, urged strongly that the British role should be made public. But this was firmly vetoed by the Foreign Office, anxious to keep relations with Moscow on an even keel.
Instead, Lunn assembled all his staff at the Olympic Stadium and told the entire story of the tunnel from its inception to its end. It was an emotional affair. One of those present was George Blake. Lunn made it clear, recalled Blake, ‘that this had been essentially an SIS idea and his own to boot. American participation had been limited to providing most of the money and the facilities. They were, of course, also sharing in the product.’8
After this Lunn began to lose interest in Berlin and made it known he would like a transfer. That summer SIS obliged by moving him to Bonn as head of station. But he never forgot Stopwatch/Gold and his lectures on the operation became the staple diet of new recruits to the service for many years afterwards. His place in Berlin was taken by Robert Dawson, who had headed one of its sub-stations. Blake, happily ensconced in his SIS office at the Olympic Stadium, and still betraying his colleagues to the KGB, remained in post.
But one secret unknown to Blake remained undisclosed until now. There was a plan for a second Berlin tunnel. It was, as might be predicted, the brainchild of the inventive John Wyke. Even as the first tunnel was beginning to deliver its potent harvest of intelligence, Wyke raised the question that others were already asking. What if the Soviets discovered it and cut short its product? Was it worthwhile putting another in place, both to fill the gap and to exploit other lines? Lunn approved the plan and it went to Broadway for discussion. In the meantime Wyke scouted out the ground in Berlin. To spread the risk, this one would be in the British sector, and the site would depend on the very limited areas of the city where the border ran close to known cables being used by the opposition.
In the end a suitable site was found on the Stresemannstrasse, close to the Potsdamer Platz. Here, in a small alleyway just yards inside the British sector off the Wilhelmstrasse, Lunn and his agents located a small scrapyard. From here only a short tunnel was needed to reach the closest Soviet cable, a remnant of the old Wehrmacht system that had serviced Göring’s Air Ministry building and now functioned as the headquarters for all East German government ministers. Tentatively the project was given the code name Bronze.
But in the end this second Berlin tunnel never got beyond the drawing board. Even though the scrapyard, with its coming and going of vehicles, offered excellent cover, the problem of where to put the excavated earth could not be solved. The exposure of the first tunnel finally killed it off when it was realized that the Soviets would almost certainly take special measures to protect other cables. In the aftermath of the Crabb affair Eden wanted no more embarrassments with Moscow. Nor did Eisenhower welcome the idea of dealing with yet further allegations about the violation of Soviet territory.9
18
Tunnel Visions
Soviet discovery of Stopwatch/Gold sparked an immediate inquiry by the CIA and SIS into the possibility of betrayal. But a three-month analysis both of the cable traffic and of conversations picked up by the microphone in the tap chamber, as well as a review of the visual surveillance carried out from the warehouse at Rudow, concluded that the forcible closure of the operation was not the result of penetration, or of a security violation, or of the testing of the lines by the Soviets or the East Germans. In Berlin the Stopwatch/Gold team came to the same conclusion. ‘We didn’t dream it had been betrayed’, Hugh Montgomery recalled. ‘All the evidence suggested it was random. There’d been flooding and short-circuiting on the lines and they’d dug at several points along the way. Also the Soviets took care to send in the East Germans. So far as we were concerned, it was all an accident.’1
With that, the normal processing of the intelligence was given the go-ahead. The tunnel was no longer producing taps. But an enormous backlog of tapes had piled up in London and Washington awaiting analysis. It took another two years to sift until the work was formally closed down at the end of September 1958. By that time whatever had been captured on tape was largely out of date and no longer of much value.
The loss of the tunnel was a blow, but not the catastrophe it might have been even two years earlier. Although détente was in the air, this was not the reason. The nuclear arms race was fully under way and Washington and London were still demanding advance warning of Soviet attack. More relevant was that a new source of intelligence had just come on stream.
Barely a week after Colonel Kotsiuba gleefully led the press through the tunnel in Berlin, a United States Air Force transport plane touched down at Lakenheath airfield, a Second World War RAF base in Suffolk being used by the Americans. Its cargo was hurriedly unloaded into a remote hangar on the edge of the airfield. Here American technicians specially flown in two days before assembled what looked like a long-nosed glider with a razor-like tail. Painted black, with no identification marks, its wing span twice the length of its fuselage, and built out of lightweight titanium, this was the famous U-2 spy plane. Built in California by Lockheed at the CIA’s request, it was equipped with state-of-the-art high-resolution cameras and designed for high-speed, high-level reconnaissance flights at more than 70,000 feet over the Soviet Union. The cover story claimed the plane was to be used for meteorological research. In charge of the operation was one of Allen Dulles’s most trusted lieutenants, Richard Bissell.
Known to colleagues as ‘the smartest man in Washington’, Bissell had flown to Britain a few weeks before. Here he inspected and approved the Lakenheath base and personally won the permission of the Prime Minister, Eden, for the flights. In London the top secret operation was known as Aquatone. Dulles had already personally briefed the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, on the project in Washington. U-2 intelligence, he promised, would be fully shared with the British. But Eden was nervous. He had set considerable store on improving East—West relations and delayed permission until after the visit of Bulganin and Khrushchev. Then with the Buster Crabb affair he lost his nerve. Turning down a powerful plea by Selwyn Lloyd, Eden flatly forbade the operation from being based on British soil. Bissell and his CIA team promptly moved to Wiesbaden in Germany and began U-2 flights from there, as well as from bases in Turkey.
Eden resigned later that year following the Suez fiasco. His successor, Harold Macmillan, lifted the ban after meeting Eisenhower at their summit in Bermuda in March 1957. Here, too, the two leaders agreed that their intelligence experts should meet along with Canadian colleagues in Washington to establish an effective machinery for the rapid tripartite exchange of intelligence ‘on any sudden threat of Soviet aggression against the Nato area’.2
The U-2 inaugurated a new era of technical intelligence geared at giving precise advance knowledge of Soviet preparations for attack. By 1959 Bissell even claimed that it was delivering ‘ninety per cent of our hard intelligence about the Soviet Union’. Allen Dulles, true to form, boasted that he was able to get a look at ‘every blade of grass in the Soviet Union’. The U-2 could capture licence plate numbers and, more important, by capturing images of Soviet bomber and missile bases, it convinced the West that Soviet claims of a massive arms build-up were mostly empty braggadocio on Khrushchev’s part.3
Soon after that, satellite reconnaissance took over, rendering even the Lockheed plane redundant. Suddenly the glory days of clandestine cloak and dagger seemed over. Inside the CIA and SIS the tunnel quickly became a part of institutional history, a legend burnished by constant retelling into an almost mythical episode of Cold War glory and derring-do. The MI 5 spycatcher maverick Peter Wright later claimed that SIS remained fixated on the tunnel. ‘They were always looking for a successor,’ he wrote, ‘something on the epic scale which would have the Americans thirsting to share in the product. But they never found it.’ By contrast, however, another intelligence insider remembered that very quickly even veterans of the tunnel were recalling it nostalgically as firmly ensconced in the good old days of the past.4
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But by now the net was closing in. While Blake was still in Berlin the CIA office there received a mysterious approach volunteering high-grade intelligence about the Soviets. David Murphy, who by now had taken over the Berlin base from Bill Harvey, carefully cultivated the source, whom he code-named ‘Sniper’. The information arrived by letter written in German, but it revealed considerable knowledge of Polish and KGB operations. Some of it, although obscure, was sensational, not least the hint that the KGB was running a high-level spy in SIS. ‘Sniper’ code-named this source ‘Lambda 2’.
In London a CIA officer passed on the lead to MI 5 and SIS, who began an urgent internal inquiry. Several SIS officers had had access to the reports that ‘Sniper’ claimed to have seen. One of them was Blake. Although he was temporarily exonerated, investigations continued. Then, in January 1961, ‘Sniper’ physically defected to Murphy’s base in Berlin and identified himself as Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Goleniewski, a former deputy head of Polish counter-intelligence. His debriefings, combined with the continuing queries inside SIS, pointed decisively to Blake as ‘Lambda 2’.