The Cold War (31 page)

The intricate undertaking was made yet more difficult by Harvey's determination to hide it from all but three top CIA officers in Germany. A handful of selected BOB officers worked on matters related to Operation Gold, but without knowing the purpose of their assignments and unable to give them their full
time because emergencies kept sidetracking them. The just-founded Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, or Main Intelligence Directorate, of the GDR (German Democratic Republic)—which would become notorious under Markus Wolf, the “man without a face”—had recruited an important agent who had been providing BOB information from his position in an East German foreign exchange bank. The BOB officer running that case was also in charge of developing agents in East German telecommunications, so his time and attention were split. Another major distraction came when Soviet and East German intelligence kidnapped Walter Linse, a leader of a CIA-supported “Free Jurists' Committee” that attempted to defend East Germans from Soviet and East German oppression.

Those and other urgent new tasks did not dent Harvey's iron resolve to preserve the project's secrecy. He did not mention Operation Gold to David Murphy when the latter was appointed BOB's deputy base chief in 1954. (Murphy is coauthor of
Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War
.) Murphy's briefing, which came only after he arrived in Berlin, was further delayed while he worked to recruit Boris Nalivaiko, a highly knowledgeable veteran of the KGB's Berlin station. That compound was known as Karlshorst, for the district where it was located.

Some three thousand people, including Soviet military guards and signals personnel, inhabited Karlshorst's tightly fenced square mile. In BOB's cramped Target Room, a dozen miles away, the “targets” were KGB officers, such as Nalivaiko, who occupied or had occupied critical positions in the Soviet compound. Paucity of information about possible candidates made exhausting work of choosing which ones might be worthy of a campaign to turn them. Collating scraps of meticulously gathered information about the Soviets' duties and habits, BOB officers tried to connect their names and ranks with faces on photographs, some taken from a disguised truck parked just outside Karlshorst. Other photos came from a nearby retail photo shop whose proprietor made BOB an extra set of prints when the Soviets came in to develop their family snapshots. The fond aim in the Target Room was to identify, select, and finally recruit Karlshorst personnel by uncovering and exploiting their vulnerabilities.

It was a daunting task. Intense professionalism, reinforced by the extreme wariness of officers who knew the penalty for slips, rendered futile BOB's recruitment efforts with Nalivaiko and every other KGB officer in Berlin. Endlessly coached to avoid both East and West Germans as possible “imperialist”
agents, KGB officers were also ceaselessly watched by the security specialists of various Soviet agencies, buttressed by swarms of colleague-informers. Over 95 percent of the social contacts between Soviets and East Germans reported to BOB were for quick commercial sex. GDR counterintelligence investigated meetings of longer duration, of which there were few.

The KGB's powerful defenses heightened Harvey's zeal for the tunnel gamble. He and the handful of senior officials who knew about the plan were able to shape it more precisely after a BOB source in the GDR's Ministry of Post and Telecommunications provided copies of maps showing the locations of Berlin's cable traces. In the spring of 1953 an intrepid BOB agent in an East Berlin telephone office, working in the dead of night, patched Soviet lines to a West Berlin circuit long enough for BOB to record them. The tapes confirmed that the Soviets were making ample use of the underground cables, and that the material being transmitted was of great interest.

The overwhelming majority of BOB officers, who knew nothing about the tunnel, kept to their normal duties, which included a ceaseless hunt for information from new volunteers or targets. Soon one of the best of the former would be an anonymous man never seen by anyone in BOB. The mysterious benefactor would use a West Berlin letter drop for secret written notes, some warning of KGB penetrations of Western intelligence services. He would sign his messages “Sniper.” Valued as the notes were, Harvey could not have imagined the Sniper's eventual effect on Operation Gold.

The big questions for Harvey in late 1952 and early 1953 were where to start and end the tunnel, and how to disguise the digging. More tests and precious additional information from East German telecommunications files and technicians' reports indicated that the most promising cables—numbers 150, 151, and 152—lay along a highway called Schönefelder Chaussee, which led to Karlshorst. They included a high-frequency line that linked Moscow with Soviet military headquarters in Wunsdorf, twenty miles south. With Harvey often traveling to other European cities for technical consultation about construction, designs were drawn to gouge a shaft fully six feet in diameter to the cables. Big Bill posed as a diplomat so that he would have immunity if something happened, by accident or intent, to bring down his plane during his frequent flights over East Germany. All other BOB personnel were supposedly members of Berlin's American military garrison.

Harvey supervised the writing of a report to CIA director Allen Dulles, who loved the project and formally approved it. In October 1952, Harvey flew to London for highly secret meetings with specialists from the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Thanks to their greater expertise and experience, British technicians would plant the actual taps at the tunnel's end. After experiments in England and New Mexico to test soil conditions, ground was broken in August 1953.

No quick summary can do justice to the imaginative solutions and ardent exertions that went into the construction. The tunnel began below a massive semiunderground warehouse near the southern end of the border between the American and Soviet sectors. That was another Harvey brainchild: a structure specially built to hide the 3,100 tons of earth that would be excavated—and to provide cover, since the cupola-topped warehouse was disguised as a radar intercept station, the logical need for which would not arouse Soviet suspicions. The impostor radar facility had ramps along which trucks laden with earth could roll to the cavernous basement. From five yards below it, the tunnel would burrow nine hundred yards to the border, then another nine hundred to the cables.

The ceaseless war of espionage aboveground continued to serve as a spur. Following the kidnapping of Walter Linse, the GDR began arresting other members of the Free Jurists' Committee. That, together with generally tightened Soviet security, made BOB's communications with its agents in the East even more difficult, inspiring the tunnel staff to solve their design and construction problems.

When the diggers, from a carefully chosen unit of the U.S. Army's Corps of Engineers, broke though a wall beneath an old house, the contents of a cesspool drenched them. To avoid the attention likely to be aroused if foul-smelling clothing were sent to local laundries, an underground washer and dryer were installed. At the same time, the listening and recording devices—such as demodulation equipment to separate carrier channels in the Soviet cables and amplifiers for each line—were chosen or specially designed, then coordinated. Only personnel aware of the tunnel were admitted to the warehouse. Harvey and his closest colleagues avoided observation by visiting in closed trucks. Daily logs registering all movement of personnel and vehicle traffic near the site were scrutinized for pattern changes. Microphones for detecting intruders were placed along the border fence. Overlooking the tunnel's line to its target,
a concealed observation post in the warehouse was manned around the clock. Following a trip to Washington by Harvey to obtain approval, plastic explosives were planted for collapsing the tunnel in an emergency without causing a surface explosion.

The tunnel's construction, like its conception, was a dazzling display of CIA creativity and enterprise, technological expertise, and resourcefulness in overcoming myriad problems. It also seemed to exhibit superb ability to maintain the highest degree of security in the world's most difficult environment for it, where armies of spies and double agents reported every rumor to debriefers of the eighty-odd secret service agencies. Normally, Berlin was an intelligence sieve where “everyone was a spy, and the spies were spying for everyone,” as a colleague of Harvey's described the city those seven years before the building of the Wall. Preserving the secrecy of so large and complex a project in those conditions seemed a demonstration of operational brilliance. Despite East Ger-many's vigilant police state, despite ardent surveillance by the KGB and Stasi, its near-paranoiac, Gestapo-like East German offspring, the digging proceeded undetected.

The caricature of the hard-drinking, gun-toting “Pear,” as Harvey's agents had nicknamed him, held true in its narrow way. Colleagues called luncheon at his suburban villa “trial by firewater”: Dry martinis were poured and sipped from noon to the serving of the meal four hours later. But his labors to give birth to the tunnel while heading Europe's largest, most active CIA station were remarkable. The project quivered with his huge energy and ability to inspire his subordinates. His work discipline and nose for potential trouble had never been more impressive. His creative single-mindedness fused with his passion and talent for thinking of every detail.

Construction was completed in February 1955. The great “hole” ran beneath Schönefelder Chaussee and ended at its far shoulder. During the following month, the British experts dug a vertical shaft up to near ground level, then built a small tap chamber for the equipment that had to operate near the cables. The first of three taps was in place in May.

An ingenious new KGB technique of placing wires filled with pressurized air inside their cables had convinced the Soviets that their high-frequency lines were virtually immune to tapping. Those devices registered the most minute sag in the current, inevitable when the most sophisticated device bugs a line.
But they were defeated by an even cleverer SIS installation of minute, specially designed amplifiers on each of the several hundred telephone wires inside the three cables: a critical contribution of British expertise.

Recording began as soon as the first tap was installed, while taps on the remaining two cables were safely placed during the following three months. Eureka! Triumph!

BOB now slaked its thirst on a continuous flow of information from one of the juiciest outposts of Soviet intelligence. Some 500 communications channels were active at a given time, enabling continuous recording of an average of 28 telegraphic and 121 voice circuits, the former producing some 4,000 feet of Teletype messages daily. Hour after hour, hundreds of machines in the warehouse recorded every scrap of conversation and every telegram—about troop dispositions, personnel changes, tactical and strategic plans. Sorted and analyzed, much of it was considered immensely valuable. Much later, Markus Wolf, often called the greatest modern spymaster, would marvel at this “intelligence man's dream,” which was no less a delight for military planners.

The wide-ranging usefulness of the taps was unintentionally confirmed when an army cook at the warehouse misread a road sign and drove toward East Germany's Frankfurt an der Oder instead of his intended destination, Frankfurt am Main in West Germany. BOB had decided not to prohibit car travel by the operation's nonsensitive personnel, believing that to do so while other American servicemen were free to use their cars might prompt suspicion. Although the cook knew nothing about the tunnel, clever interrogation might reveal helpful, albeit unwittingly given, information.

East German border guards indeed took the lost driver into custody, prompting an American alert. But tunnel monitors captured live East German reports about the incident, allowing BOB a sigh of relief when it became apparent that the secret of secrets wasn't suspected.

West Berlin (American Sector of Occupation)

The mass of new intelligence simplified BOB's hitherto daunting task of cross-checking information provided by its Soviet and East German agents. Analysis of the cables' river of Soviet orders and chatter made it easier to determine who were false defectors and double agents—a maddeningly difficult task in the pre-tunnel days. Before the taps were placed, BOB had recruited a KGB plant posing as a Soviet code clerk; the KGB had gone so far as to invent a special military unit where “the clerk” supposedly worked. It was now much harder to fool BOB, and easier to spot clues about planned KGB and East German operations.

With the Target Room's files much expanded by a new wealth of professional and personal details on potential KGB recruits, it was also much easier to craft campaigns against them. Tunnel material, rich in facts, hints, and gossip about KGB personnel, then meshed with reports from covert agents in the field, was especially helpful for corroborating the bona fides of BOB's Soviet and East German agents.