Too young to fight in the war, Golitsyn had joined the SMERSH academy in September 1945. Like his British counterparts, he had been inspired by stories of heroes hunting down enemy agents. He had been trained in surveillance, the use of informers and the favourite Soviet ploy of ‘provocation’. This involved having a Soviet officer pretend to be, say, a British officer in order to meet a Soviet suspected of dangerous tendencies and see what the Soviet would say (in Berlin, the Soviets went so far as to build a replica American base at a castle with fake Americans in uniforms who could speak English to try and trap their own people).114 In October 1946, Golitsyn joined the Colony Department of the KGB. This spied on Soviet officials abroad, including ambassadors, to check their loyalty. Vienna was one of the hardest places in which to prevent unauthorised contact with the enemy, so almost everyone was asked to watch everyone else right down to the chauffeurs informing on their passengers. One senior counsellor at the Embassy was suspected of being a British spy and put under extensive surveillance.115
Golitsyn’s first job had been to run agents within the Russian émigré community, planting individuals plucked from the refugee camps within different groups. A prime target was the anti-Soviet, Russian émigré grouping, the NTS, and its local leader Valeri Tremmel. Every month or two his agents would travel by train to different provincial towns in the Soviet zone where Golitsyn would pick them up in a car for debriefing. In the spring of 1954, a senior KGB boss arrived to explain that the KGB was going to step up its work against the NTS by eliminating its leaders. One of Golitsyn’s agents was chosen to administer a drug to Tremmel, brought out from the KGB’s special laboratory. The agent and his wife were bugged in order to make sure that they were reliable. The agent managed to give two drugged sweets to Tremmel and he was bundled into a car and driven to Baden.
The KGB Residency in Vienna was divided into fourteen sections, and in September 1954 Golitsyn was reassigned to target the British. Among the notes in his predecessor’s file he found an old letter from the head of the KGB British Department requesting the kidnapping of Peter Smollett to answer charges that he had been working for MI6. Most likely this was part of a purge against agents of Jewish origins that Stalin had begun but which was abandoned after his death.116 Another report referred to an abortive attempt to recruit a young English woman who worked in British censorship in Vienna. She was having an affair with a Soviet lieutenant under KGB control. One evening they were interrupted in bed by a KGB officer threatening blackmail. She told him to get lost. Golitsyn found few other usable agents apart from one driver for Field Security in Vienna whom he kept going.
In February 1954, the KGB in Vienna was rocked by a defection. Major Pyotr Deriabin walked across the city to the Americans. In a panic, the Soviets put armed patrols in the medieval Innere Stadt to look for him. A CIA officer who carried out a quick initial debrief of Deriabin immediately appreciated his value – including the fact that both of them were running the same Chief Engineer of the Soviet military forces as their agent.117 Deriabin was placed in a coffin-like hot-water tank which some holes for air bored into it. The tank – labelled machinery – was packed on the baggage cart of the Mozart Express train which ran out of the city and through the Soviet zone and into the American zone of Austria. Guards were told to shoot if the Russians tried to force their way on to the train (they were not supposed to board, although neither was the train supposed to be used for intelligence work).118 The head of the KGB’s German – Austrian Department arrived in a fury after the defection. He warned staff that the Americans would ‘launch a massive effort to approach, blackmail, recruit or even kidnap our officers and agents’. Purges, fear and denunciations were sweeping through Soviet intelligence. No one could be trusted. MI6 decided to try and encourage more defections, even of low-level soldiers, to heighten the distrust. ‘What appears to be a scruffy malcontent may well be the executioner of one or more senior Army or MVD [intelligence] officers whose demise, or banishment, will weaken the Soviet machine by undermining its authority,’ suggested a top-secret memo which reached the Chief of MI6.119
The Soviets recruited everyone they could from businessmen to barmaids. Clerical and administration staff working in the Western zones would be approached if they had a relative on the Soviet side. Even if they had no access to secrets they could help identify possible targets who had vulnerabilities in relation to money or sex. A few of these staff reported the approach back to the British or Americans who then tried to turn them back against the Soviets to feed false information.120 The KGB also ran a campaign of seduction in Vienna employing young, handsome East Europeans who spoke good English and had fancy apartments and spending money. British personnel were explicitly warned of such dangers.121 In one case a secretary to the US Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations was seduced by a man twenty years her junior. ‘What about all those officers here whose wives haven’t arrived or are still back home who have been shacking up with every woman in town?’ she said when confronted by an officer, pointing out that her boss had had an Austrian girlfriend before his wife had arrived and that she herself had not passed on any secrets. She was still sent home.122 US military intelligence also knew how to exploit human weakness. Operation Claptrap targeted Soviet soldiers who had become infected with venereal disease and persuaded them to betray secrets in return for medication and to avoid the punishment of being despatched back to the USSR.123
Although the Soviets blanketed the city with their spies, the British had one prime, unmatched source. But it was not a human agent. If you walked down Aspangstrasse in 1950 near the main railway freight line, you would have found an innocuous-looking boarded-up shop. Walk to the rear and you would find a bell, a steel door and a spyhole. Behind were three British soldiers with sten guns. Past them, stairs went down to the cellar and into the heart of one of MI6’s most secret and successful operations of the early Cold War.
The operation was the brainchild of the man who had taken over from George Kennedy Young as head of the MI6 station in Vienna. Peter Lunn had captained the British Olympic ski team in Bavaria in 1936 and his father Sir Arnold Lunn had established the Lunn Poly travel agents (occasionally put to use by MI6). A slightly built man, he was quiet and spoke in a soft voice with a lisp. Those outward qualities masked an intense, highly effective operator who was as zealous and fervent in his Catholic faith as he was in his anti-Communism. According to a colleague, somewhere in a file is a note in Lunn’s spidery handwriting reading: ‘Communists and Communism are vile. It is the duty of all members of the Service to stamp upon them at every possible opportunity.’124 When he took over, Lunn knew that much of his intelligence was low-grade chit-chat from agents and defectors. He was frustrated that MI6 had yet to penetrate the decision-making level of the Soviets in Austria. One day while reading reports from an Austrian official, he noticed that the cables through which the Red Army HQ in Vienna communicated to Eastern Austria ran through the British and French sectors of Vienna.125 Perhaps there was a technical solution to his problem. He brought a mining engineer and telephone expert from the General Post Office to discuss a plan to tunnel towards the cables and then tap them. Lunn approached the Ambassador in Vienna who gave it a quiet nod without sending the idea to the Foreign Office for approval, fearing that they would say no. ‘I couldn’t look at myself if there’d been an invasion and I denied the chance of getting the information,’ Ambassador Harold Caccia told Lunn.126
Soldiers from the Royal Engineers dug the tunnel and were then promptly posted to Singapore to prevent any loose talk. There was nearly an early disaster. A team carrying the recording equipment had been due to arrive by train in the British district. The reception party waited forlornly. A phone call came in explaining that the men appeared to have got out at the wrong station and seemed to be in the Russian zone. ‘Don’t move, don’t look at anyone, don’t talk to anyone. In the meantime don’t even breathe and we will be out in half an hour,’ said the duty officer as he raced over. The
y found the two engineers in British uniform on the platform with cases full of listening equipment.127
That equipment was taken down to the Aspangstrasse cellar. In the twilight a visitor would have found half a dozen men sitting in front of a tunnel about five feet beneath the street. Wires led to the type of switchboard you would see in an old telephone exchange with a series of sockets in which you could insert jack plugs. One of those sitting in the dank cellar with headphones clasped to his ears was a teenage private named Rodric Braithwaite.128 He had failed his officer exams but made it into the Intelligence Corps by the skin of his teeth. The fact that he had originally been heading for Cambridge to study Russian and French suggested an aptitude for languages which led to his being assigned to work on the tunnel as part of a team of thirteen men – almost all eighteen or nineteen years old. The team worked twenty-four hours a day in shifts. There was little awareness among them of whether it was day or night, and only an underpowered light illuminated the wax cylinders on which their work was recorded. One of the perks was a steady supply of chocolate and cigarettes. The use of the latter coupled with the lack of ventilation in their subterranean lair led some of the inhabitants to nickname it ‘Smokey Joe’s’.
The eavesdroppers, who did not speak the language, had to listen out for what sounded like Russian voices and then begin recording on the cylinders. ‘Most of us didn’t know what was Russian and what was Czech. God knows how many mistakes we made, as nobody told us,’ recalls Braithwaite. They were led by a captain whom Braithwaite thought drank too much. Meanwhile, the Captain thought Braithwaite posed a security risk because he insisted on reading the leftish New Statesman magazine – although Braithwaite also wondered if some of the animosity between the two men might originate in the Captain having once played in an orchestra conducted by Braithwaite’s father. After six months, Braithwaite shifted to interview refugees, occasionally brushing up against the spies. That experience left him with a distrust of the betrayals intrinsic to the secret world, so when he was approached at Cambridge, he declined a career in MI6, preferring the Foreign Office. He would carry with him from Vienna a scepticism of spies that would last all the way through the Cold War to its dying days when he was ambassador to Moscow and then Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
The Vienna Tunnel was a success. The headphoned men could hear all Soviet military calls and long-distance civilian calls going out to Bucharest, Sofia, Prague and Budapest. It provided a wealth of material on Soviet military activity. One crucial conversation it picked up was between two Russian soldiers talking about which troops were going to be demobilised. This meant that a war was not on the cards. The tunnel in the cellar lasted until 1951 when the Soviets moved their lines, but more tunnels were built and would survive through to the end of occupation in 1955; one was underneath a bogus jeweller’s shop, another located in the suburban house of a British official.
The Americans were not informed at first of this British success, but they had begun to work on their own plan. So Lunn’s successor from 1950, Andrew King, brought them into the secret. King had known Vienna from the 1930s when he had travelled around looking for locations as part of Korda’s London Film Productions, cover for his role in MI6. He retained an air of flamboyance which might have suited the film industry well but made him rather conspicuous as a spy. He drove around in a fancy green Jaguar, often accompanied by his Pekingese dog.129 He was both gay and a former Communist. Neither feature had been impediments to Secret Service work in the past, although they would eventually cause trouble for him.
Every morning the product of the tunnel team was picked up in a laundry basket and taken over to the MI6 station at the Schönbrunn barracks. So much material was produced by this operation that the two Russian-speakers based there were soon swamped and a backlog of months’ worth of tapes grew. It was decided to send the tapes to London to be processed. The tapes were flown back three times a week by a special RAF plane and then taken to the new Section Y. The translation was undertaken in the grand setting of an MI6 office at 2 Carlton Gardens off Pall Mall by a curious mix of the children of English merchants who had worked in St Petersburg and émigré Russians, as well as some Polish army officers left over from the war. ‘There was plenty of Slav temperament and moodiness about and it required a great deal of tact and careful handling to keep the peace and the machine running smoothly,’ remembers the MI6 officer who became deputy head of the team from September 1953. That officer was handsome and his rather exotic background, mixing Jewish, Turkish and Dutch, not to mention a recent experience as a hostage in Korea, led to his being seen as a ‘pet’ by the secretaries in the office. He was anything but tame.
Just after six o’clock one evening in October 1953, that officer took a leisurely walk through Soho to Oxford Street. He had a cup of tea and some cake and then caught the Underground at Charing Cross. When the Northern Line train came in he boarded at the last moment. At the next station he jumped off just as the doors were closing. He let two trains pass and got on the third. He alighted at Belsize Park and walked towards the exit clutching a newspaper nervously in his left hand. The streets were quiet. ‘A man came slowly out of the fog walking towards me,’ he wrote many years later, ‘also carrying a newspaper in his left hand. In his grey, soft felt hat and smart grey raincoat he seemed almost part of the fog.’ The man, a Russian, had had few problems evading MI5 surveillance in London. The KGB knew from its sources in MI5 exactly what procedures were used to monitor the Embassy. It even listened to MI5’s radio communications and knew when its watchers had their breakfast.130 Even so, a Russian intelligence officer was trained to spend five hours on foot and public transport to evade surveillance. The MI6 man handed over a folded piece of paper. It contained, he said, the precise details of the telephone tapping and microphone operations in Vienna, as well as other microphone operations undertaken elsewhere. The two men agreed to meet in a month’s time. An hour later, George Blake was home having dinner with his mother. His overwhelming feeling was of relief. He had passed the point of no return. He would later claim that during his time in Korea his own religious faith had been supplanted by a new faith in Communism. ‘I came to the conclusion that I was no longer fighting on the right side,’ he would say. There was another, more human reason that Blake never mentioned. He had been dating a secretary from the office. Her father, a traditional type, made a remark along the lines that he would never have a daughter of his marrying some foreign Jew. Later in Seoul when another officer paid a visit to the station, Blake again encountered the casual anti-Semitism that was endemic in much of the English establishment at the time. He never felt particularly British, perhaps because he was not particularly British, and with his capture in Korea a combination of alienation, idealism and sheer pragmatism had led to his offer to switch sides. And when MI6 and the CIA held a joint meeting to plan a far more ambitious tunnel in Berlin, Blake took the minutes. The British would bring their experience from Vienna, the Americans would bring the money, and, thanks to Blake, the KGB would know all about it.131
The KGB top brass decided to allow extensive communications from their colleagues in the Russian military to continue in Berlin, for a while at least, without telling them that they were being intercepted. This was because it was considered more important to preserve the secret of Blake’s treachery – even if that meant allowing the CIA and MI6 to collect valuable intelligence – rather than risk his exposure by issuing a warning. When Blake was eventually transferred to a position where the trail would be harder to follow, the KGB decided to ‘discover’ the Berlin tunnel, making out that this had happened by chance. In Vienna too, belated warnings were given by Moscow to colleagues on the ground. In the spring of 1955 a letter from Moscow explained that British intelligence had been intercepting Soviet military telephone communications. Enclosed was a document of ninety to a hundred pages giving details of conversations between Soviet generals and other officers. The KGB Resident, or head of station, was t
old to show it to the chief of Soviet military counter-intelligence under strict conditions.132 By that time, the tunnel’s work had largely been done. Vienna’s time at the frontline of the intelligence war was about to pass, although it would remain a playground for spies of all sides.
The Viennese had not expected a ten-year occupation in 1945. But the Russians blocked moves towards independence until Stalin’s death in 1953. His successor Nikita Khrushchev accepted the notion of Austrian neutrality, a policy aimed at winning over Third World countries, and this opened the way for a treaty reviving an independent Austria signed in May 1955. The Cold War’s final demarcation lines between East and West in Europe were being drawn.
The signing led to a final, frenetic burst of activity for the spies. Most had operated under cover of the occupation and knew they would have to depart. The CIA managed to pay off an estate agent helping a senior KGB officer find a house and had the property promptly wired for sound.133 The KGB tried to place agents in positions of strategic influence in Austrian public life and buried ‘burst’ radio transmitters which could send compressed messages around the suburbs in plastic containers.134 The departing powers all deposited their wares in preparation for the next war, which they still thought would be fought like the last. The KGB trained its men in surveillance, small arms and ju-jitsu before placing them deep under cover to prepare for ‘partisan’ activity.135 It left caches of arms in villages across the Soviet zone as well as in a monastery and two ruined castles.136 Britain and America buried modern weapons, explosives and money in underground caves as part of Operation Gladio, which co-ordinated activity across all of Western Europe. MI6 sent out officers to prepare caches and recruit agent networks to lead the resistance. ‘It doesn’t take much imagination to work out that the Russian army would have hunted us from pillar to post,’ one of those MI6 men said decades later. ‘It would have been a short but interesting life I suspect.’137
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