Spies Beneath Berlin

by David Stafford

  Summoned back to London, Blake reported to the personnel department in Petty France. Here he was greeted by Harry Shergold, an old friend and Broadway’s expert on Soviet affairs. ‘How about a stroll across the park?’ suggested Shergold. About twenty minutes later Blake found himself crossing the Mall, mounting the Duke of York steps, and back in the familiar lush surroundings of 2 Carlton Gardens. Shergold was skilful, and after three days Blake confessed. Before being formally arrested by Special Branch officers he was taken off to spend a weekend at Shergold’s country cottage in Hampshire. ‘We went for walks, only there was a Special Branch officer behind us’, recalled Blake later in Moscow, ‘I remember I made pancakes. I was really rather good at that.’5

  From Broadway Sir Dick White, Sinclair’s successor as head of the service, sent an urgent personal telegram to Peter Lunn in Bonn. A high-level traitor had been unmasked and Lunn would have to inform the West Germans, it said. The name, added White, would be sent in an immediately following message. Playing a wild guessing name about possible candidates, Lunn personally decrypted the name. It was not what he expected. He had implicitly trusted Blake and was shattered by the news. It was April 1961, five years to the month since Stopwatch/Gold had been uncovered. To his interrogators in London, Blake had already confessed that he informed his KGB control about allied plans for the tunnel before he had left for Berlin.6 Lunn now suddenly learned that his brainchild had been completely betrayed from the start. In May, Blake was tried in camera at the Old Bailey. Found guilty on all main charges, he was sentenced to forty-two years’ imprisonment, said to be one year for every agent he had betrayed to Moscow.

  A picture of George Blake issued by Scotland Yard after his dramatic escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison

  *

  Blake’s treachery immediately altered perspectives on the tunnel. If Moscow had known about it from the start, then surely it could not have been the success so widely trumpeted by Allen Dulles and the CIA? It must, instead, have offered the KGB a perfect opportunity to use it for misinformation and deception. The intelligence was not gold or even silver, but fool’s gold, false and worthless. Four years’ planning and hard work, and millions of dollars, had been uselessly poured down the drain. The KGB once again had tricked the naïve Americans and penetrated the rotten SIS. The Cold War intelligence game was being played by fools, charlatans and rogues.

  Such was the view of many critics. Blake’s dramatic escape in 1966 from Wormwood Scrubs prison in London and his subsequent reappearance in Moscow only hardened this view of a skilful KGB outwitting a bumbling west. The former CIA agent Victor Marchetti, whose ‘tell-all’ book (with John D. Marks) The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence created a firestorm of controversy in the 1970s, claimed that even the real intelligence the tunnel garnered amounted to nothing more than ‘tons of trivia and gossip’. A decade later the British journalist Chapman Pincher, author of several books claiming to expose the inadequacies and Soviet penetration of British intelligence, declared that ‘the operation … produced nothing but a mass of carefully prepared misinformation, interspersed with occasional accurate “chicken-feed” to keep the operation going’. Yet another British-based journalist, Philip Knightley, whose iconoclastic treatment of the intelligence community The Second Oldest Profession enjoyed worldwide sales, denounced the entire operation as ‘a fiasco’ and a massive propaganda victory for the KGB. Tony Le Tissier, a former British commandant of Spandau prison, supported the view. ‘The Soviets’, he wrote, ‘were able to set up their own special team to occupy and mislead western intelligence sources.’ The American Mark Perry, author of the prematurely entitled Eclipse: The Last Days of the CIA, described Stopwatch/Gold as ‘a stark defeat’ because of its manipulation by the Soviets for disinformation. A retired KGB colonel, Oleg Nechiporenko, whose chief claim to fame was meeting Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City two months before President Kennedy’s assassination, pursued a similar line in his book Passport to Assassination.7

  But the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and a flood of revelations about KGB operations have produced a startling and unexpected twist to this interpretation. The most extraordinary consequence occurred in Berlin in 1999, ten years after the collapse of the wall. Here, at a round table conference planned jointly by ex-CIA and ex-KGB officers, a large group of practitioners and experts from both sides of the former Cold War divide sat down to exchange reminiscences and opinions about some of its most spectacular and controversial operations. The conference site itself spoke volumes about Berlin’s pivotal place in the story. The Teufelsberg, or ‘Devil’s Mountain’, more frequently known to insiders as ‘The Hill’, formed a complex of buildings in the British sector standing atop a huge mound of rubble built from the bombed-out debris of Hitler’s capital. For years it had served as a hi-tech allied radar and electronic listening post beamed over the wall behind the Iron Curtain. The end of the Cold War had made it redundant. But it was an ideal spot for a conference of ex-spooks. Many also seized the chance to visit other nearby landmarks. Hugh Montgomery, for one, particularly enjoyed his visit to the old Stasi headquarters. Vaulting the guard rope in the old office of the East German Minister of State Security, Erich Mielke, and spinning around in the desk chair, he chuckled ‘It’s nice to find it empty’ before expertly flicking up the lid of the Stasi boss’s old typewriter and giving the ribbon a quick once-over for latent images.8

  The Teufelsberg meeting had been conceived six years before during a visit to Moscow in 1993 by David Murphy to make contact with his former Cold War opponents. It was Easter, and after enjoying Russian Orthodox ceremonies Murphy and George Bailey, a former director of Radio Liberty in Munich, were picked up at their hotel by the head of the public affairs bureau of the SVR (successor to the KGB). ‘Well, Mr Murphy’, boomed the Russian, ‘how did you like spending the weekend in Moscow without surveillance?’ One of Murphy’s main missions was to contact Sergei Kondrashev, Blake’s control in London and former head of the KGB’s German division. Together with Bailey the three then agreed to co-operate in writing a book entitled Battleground Berlin, an extensive, gripping and groundbreaking account of the CIA v. KGB struggles during the decades-long Cold War battle over Berlin. Along with a set of previously classified CIA documents about Berlin handed out to every participant, it provided the essential background to the historic Teufelsberg events.

  It was a doubly extraordinary occasion. Painfully noticeable by their absence were any participants from Britain’s SIS. This was especially true of the fit and active Peter Lunn, still skiing regularly in Switzerland and the true originator of Stopwatch/Gold. The agency had held firmly to its blanket rule that there should be no discussion or acknowledgment of its operations after 1945, even if this meant that credit for the Berlin tunnel fell entirely by default to the CIA and the Americans. Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB defector to Britain whose assessments of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost had been so crucial to the Thatcher government in the 1980s, took part in the Teufelsberg discussions. He made the obvious point. ‘The impression was given’, he noted angrily, ‘that the intelligence war was fought and won by the Americans alone. It was very humiliating for Britain.’9

  If the vital British role in Stopwatch/Gold remained concealed, the other evidence that was now placed on the table revealed an astonishing truth. The critics had been entirely wrong about the KGB response to Blake’s treachery. Far from using the tunnel for misinformation and deception, the KGB’s First Chief Directorate had taken a deliberate decision to conceal its existence from the Red Army and GRU, the main users of the cables being tapped. The reason for this extraordinary decision was to protect ‘Diomid’, their rare and brilliant source George Blake.

  Blake’s revelation about the tunnel had placed the KGB in an all too familiar ‘Catch-22’ situation. On the one hand, knowing that the West was listening in, they could use the cables to send misleading messages for some carefully calculated disinformation or deception campaig
n to fool their opponents. But if they did, they might be found out. It was not hard for Moscow to guess that the West might have other intelligence sources against which they could measure the accuracy of the intelligence being collected by the tunnel. If the West once guessed that a deception campaign was afoot, they would immediately realize that the Soviets knew about the tunnel. This would instantly spark a mole hunt, which would inevitably lead to George Blake, one of the small handful of their operatives to know about it. But Blake was still in place in the West, a jewel in their crown who might in the future lead them to even more glittering intelligence information. Did they dare risk him? On the other hand, if they did nothing, they would be allowing the West to listen in to real and untarnished secrets from the front line of the Cold War.

  The pros and cons were carefully weighed within the First Chief Directorate of the KGB before Arseny Vasilievich Tishkov, deputy chief of the directorate in charge of operational—technical matters, finally issued a directive to KGB departmental chiefs on 9 April 1954. Any disinformation operations designed to exploit the tunnel, he declared, had to be based on foolproof cover so as not to compromise the real source (Blake), and all proposals had to be submitted to him for approval. In other words, it was up to Tishkov to decide what, if anything, should be done to exploit the tunnel for disinformation purposes. But, as Kondrashev well knew, Tishkov would turn down any proposal that held out even the slightest risk of betraying Blake.

  Thirty-nine years later Kondrashev finally revealed the secret to Murphy in Moscow. ‘The communications lines being tapped’, he assured the former CIA Soviet head, ‘were not used for disinformation. To do so would have involved too many people and would have risked Blake’s security.’ An example of the care taken by the KGB to protect Blake is provided by the way it handled his information about the Vienna tunnel operations. Although he handed the ninety-page file over to the KGB as early as September 1953, it was not until a full year later that KGB Chairman Serov forwarded it to the Soviet Defence Minister; and by then SIS had actually terminated the operation. Obviously, to protect Blake, the KGB was ultimately ready to let the West listen in on the Red Army. Such bureaucratic rivalry, or turf wars, are not unusual. ‘The picture of the KGB coolly sacrificing GRU and Soviet Army secrets to preserve its own mole’, noted CIA historian Donald Steury at Teufelsberg, ‘is one that resonates with Western perceptions and Soviet ruthlessness in military and intelligence matters.’10

  Joe Evans, like David Murphy, was also keen to discuss the whole affair with his former Cold War opponents. Through an intermediary, he recorded later,

  Kondrashev categorically denied that a single item of disinformation or deception was ever disseminated through the Berlin tunnel. Not that the idea didn’t occur to the KGB, he added – suggestions were solicited from the few officers at the KGB center in Moscow who knew about the CIA—MI6 operation. All proposals were rejected as being too risky, i.e. too vulnerable to confirmation and detection, and too complicated; at best, the Center decided, disinformation could supply only small and questionable benefits of short-range impact.11

  It would not be true, however, to say that the KGB did nothing. Kondrashev told Evans that twice the KGB issued a general warning to Marshal Grechko and the Red Army command in Germany to increase their telephone security. The alert was cast in vague and general terms so as not to suggest that the KGB actually knew the Red Army cables were being tapped; that would have dangerously extended knowledge of the operation even within the Soviet Union, and thus broadened the risk to Blake. But here lay the problem. A too specific alert was out of the question, but a general one, such as was actually issued, failed to set off any urgent alarms and was ignored. Joe Evans claimed on the basis of his own experience in analysing the conversations that Red Army generals were among the last people to obey instructions from anyone about how to behave on the telephone. NCOs attached to the KGB’s Third Directorate, which supervised counter-intelligence and security in the Red Army, randomly tuned into conversations and would occasionally berate the speakers for violating telephone security. But, noted Evans, ‘the higher the speaker’s rank, the lower seemed a KGB non-com’s nerve to dress him down.’ The higher the rank, concluded Evans, the less secure the conversation.12

  That the KGB had chosen to protect Blake at the expense of letting Stopwatch/Gold develop as a successful operation had been implicitly suggested early on by Allen Dulles himself in his book The Craft of Intelligence. It was published two years after Blake’s trial, when he had described the tunnel as ‘one of the most valuable and daring projects ever undertaken’ by the CIA. Others had followed, mostly those with sources close to the CIA. Among them were Harry Rositzke, a former Munich-based CIA officer who had run operations into the Soviet Union, David Martin, author of Wilderness of Mirrors, a best-seller about the controversial CIA counter-intelligence expert James Jesus Angleton, and John Ranelagh, author of The Agency.13

  George Blake himself also confirmed the analysis. Ironically, of course, having first betrayed the tunnel, he had then became the inadvertent guardian of its integrity. Still living in Moscow at the time of the Teufelsberg discussions, he gave his own version of events in an interview for television. ‘I was secretary at the meeting [of December 1953]’, he confirmed,

  and so I was able to draw a very simple sketch which showed how the tunnel was going to run and what cables it was intended to attack. I was able to give [Kondrashev] this sketch … the next time we met he told me that he’d been to Moscow, that they were very impressed by this scheme as such, but that they were going to let it go on, in order to protect me, and that is what was done … I’m sure 99.9% of the information obtained by the SIS and CIA from the tunnel was genuine.14

  Until and unless further evidence emerges it seems safe to conclude that Stopwatch/Gold was, as Allen Dulles and other Western sources so triumphantly proclaimed at the time, an outstanding and brilliant intelligence success.

  Epilogue

  By the late 1980s local memories of the tunnel had faded or disappeared, and the site itself had been transformed by the steady growth of Berlin. The ambience was best captured by the British novelist Ian McEwan, who reconnoitred the site for his 1987 novel The Innocent, which is based on Stopwatch/Gold. Thirty years after the tunnel’s closure his protagonist, the callow young British post office technician Leonard Marnham, returns to the Rudow site. He finds that the refugee shacks and the allotment sheds so beloved by Berliners have been replaced by modern concrete flats. Suburban villas are springing up all around. The site of the ‘radar station’ is encircled by a double perimeter fence, but the buildings have been levelled and a sign proclaims that the site now belongs to a market garden company. To one side a thick wooden cross marks the spot where two young men had been shot while attempting to cross the wall. The only above-ground evidence that remains of the tunnel are a couple of wrecked sentry huts, some crumbling concrete floors with weeds bursting through and a large pit where the basement used to be.1

  Six years later the American author Peter Grose, following the Allen Dulles trail for his biography of the CIA Director, also explored the site. By now everything, yet nothing, had changed. The wall had suddenly collapsed, as had the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet Union and even the KGB itself. But in Rudow and Alt-Glienicke the passage of time itself was still obliterating the past. A local amateur historian showed Grose around. They crossed the line where the hated wall had once stood, and walked along the Schönefelder Chaussee. A super new highway had been constructed to Schönefeld Airport and the Chaussee, now bypassed, was being repaired as a pleasant and quiet residential street. ‘His daughter laughed as we climbed through little garden plots’, recorded Grose, ‘saying “There is not a single other person in this village who could have told you about all this old stuff”.’2

  The long-abandoned tunnel is rediscovered in 1997 as redevelopment of the reunited city proceeds apace

  Tunnel section exposed to the light after lyi
ng forgotten for four decades under the soil of Berlin

  One person who could, however, was already on the trail. Soon afterwards a photographer was prowling around Rudow. His name was Willie Durie, a Scotsman who had worked as a photographer for the British forces until their withdrawal from the city. Now, as a freelancer, he was making a visual record of the allied Cold War presence in Berlin before massive post-unification rebuilding in the new German capital obliterated its remnants. Armed with his camera, Durie was exploring Rudow, where bulldozers were clearing the ground for construction work, looking for evidence of the tunnel. So in 1997, when a mechanical digger unexpectedly unearthed a section of metallic tube from the sandy earth, Durie knew instantly what it was. Strenuous and successful efforts followed, led by Helmut Trotnow, Director of the Allied Museum in Berlin, to save at least one section of the physical remnants of Stopwatch/Gold for history. When David Murphy and his co-authors launched their book, they were able to hold a press conference at the site. ‘After 41 years’, headlined the Berliner Zeitung beside a photograph showing Murphy and Kondrashev crouching in front of a salvaged section of tunnel, ‘the former CIA chief and his KGB colleague meet again in an historic spot.’3 By the time of the Teufelsberg conference, a 15 metre length, including its lining of sandbags and intricate spider’s web of piping and wires, was fully restored to form the centrepiece and highlight of the Allied Museum.

  This, now, is all that physically remains of Stopwatch/Gold. Yet even after the end of the Cold War it has retained some potency. Before former President George Bush visited the museum to inspect the tunnel in 1999, FBI sniffer dogs went wild. Fearing a bomb, secret service men desperately searched the tunnel. What they uncovered would undoubtedly have warmed the heart of Bill Harvey. Still clinging to the steel tubing were residues of the explosive his team had planted to stop a Soviet incursion.