The Cold War (32 page)

As before, extreme security measures were scrupulously observed. The underground tap room was cleverly insulated. The wood of the tunnel's floor had
been chosen to muffle sound, which was further stifled by sandbags. Cable transmissions were monitored and recorded only in the warehouse, rather than in the tap room, from which noises might be heard above. As in submarines under depth-charge attack, total silence was essential. Aboveground, every possibly relevant field report, especially about Karlshorst communications activity, was painstakingly checked for hints of a Soviet inkling about the operation.

There were none, but American whispers, too, had to be prevented. So many tape reels were needed for recording the talk and telegrams that BOB felt it necessary to stifle the curiosity of the officer responsible for flying some of them to Washington. Let in on an invented explanation—that the packages contained uranium ore from an East German plant that BOB was trying to monitor—the flattered officer never again mentioned the vital “secret.” Every other day, the Royal Air Force flew a much heavier cargo to London for transcription and analysis. By any measure, the feat was greater than anyone might have dreamed, apart from exultant Harvey. The remarkable yield—50,000 reels of magnetic tape with recordings of 368,000 Soviet and 75,000 East German conversations—continued during the early months of 1956, aiding almost every facet of BOB's work just when ever stiffer Soviet security elsewhere was thwarting it, and inspiring new initiatives suggested by the highly confidential Soviet traffic. Harvey's Hole had cost the United States more time and money than any other intelligence operation in Germany, but no investment in nerves and resources appeared to pay off more lavishly. Nothing better demonstrated the skill and value of American espionage or undermined its detractors' arguments.

“A cold, wet spring,” goes a German saying meant to buoy the spirit in the long rainy season, “fills the peasants' barns and barrels.” That old bromide from less tense times little comforted East German communication engineers in the spring of 1956. The wetness troubled them more than the cold. So much rain fell on central Germany during the third week of April that faults affected major telephone and telegraph circuits. Some underground cables developed electrical shorts.

Both sides in the murky struggle of wits and dirty tricks tended to cheer at news of any difficulty for the other. But BOB's reaction to the distressed East German cables was quite the opposite. After reaping the precious harvest from its tapped cables for nearly a year, the prospect of even a temporary suspension caused concern.

Apart from Soviet commanders' complaints of disturbances on their lines, nothing else seemed unusual in the flow of Russian and German chatter. When the threat of serious interruptions seemed to ease, BOB personnel breathed easier—until shortly after midnight on the night of April 21–22. Armed with nightscopes, the watch at the warehouse observation post detected some fifty men on the Soviet side of the sector border, just beyond Schönefelder Chaussee. They were near the tap chamber, digging at close intervals. Leaving his dinner party the instant the BOB switchboard informed him, Harvey rushed to the warehouse. The work party discovered the chamber's top at two A
.
M.; by then the BOB cable monitors were picking up the diggers' live speech. Informed of the find, General Pitovranov urged caution in case the site had been mined. Within an hour, the Soviets spied the tap cables leading down to a trapdoor of tempered steel separating the chamber from the tunnel. As Harvey watched through night vision binoculars, the monitors also recorded the diggers' excitement over their unexpected find. “Hey!” exclaimed one. “This cable's tapped!” The work party, it appeared, had been assembled to deal with the vexing moisture problems on the lines.

If all good things must end, the termination of Operation Gold, coming just when it was in full, fruitful swing, seemed spitefully premature. Predictably, the Russians tried to turn their accidental discovery into a propaganda triumph. In a loud campaign trumpeting Socialist heroism, they claimed the work party had found the tunnel's steel door open, permitting them to surprise Americans manning the recording machines. Catching sight of the dauntless diggers, the astonished CIA culprits dropped their coffee and fled into the tunnel.

Ex-KGB officers continue telling that tale today, but BOB's tapes make nonsense of it. It took the discoverers some fourteen hours to blowtorch their way through the steel door to “their” long-empty half of the tunnel. Accompanied by a film crew, the Soviets entered its main body at 2:20 P
.
M. on April 22. Harvey sent an aide to request authorization from General Charles Dasher, the

U.S. Army's Berlin commander, to destroy the shaft with the planted charges. The general, at a yacht club reception for the visiting army chief of staff, denied the request because Harvey couldn't guarantee that no one, particularly no Russians, would be hurt. But Harvey ordered sandbags and barbed wire installed midtunnel, precisely below the border between the Soviet and American zones. you are now entering the american sector, read a handwritten cardboard sign. At three P
.
M., when the Americans heard the cautious footsteps moving through the tunnel toward them, Big Bill was fully in his element. He
cocked the bolt on a .50-caliber machine gun that had been set up behind a barbed-wire barrier. The bolt made a loud, distinctive click. The footsteps stopped; the explorers scurried back.

The Soviets' hoped-for propaganda coup would not have succeeded in any case. Western media acclaim for the operation's technical brilliance drowned out rare objections about unscrupulous eavesdropping. One newspaper praised the tunnel achievement as a “striking example of the Americans' capacity for daring undertakings.” Even the aggrieved parties inadvertently joined in the chorus of praise. In a formal protest to the U.S. Army command in Europe, the Soviet military command in Germany noted that the expensive tunnel structure and equipment were “executed thoroughly, with a view to long use.” Markus Wolf would be less coy: “It was a perfectly designed underground listening post.”

But no compliment could compensate for the rotten luck delivered by the April downpours. Or so it seemed for nearly five years.

The mysterious Sniper defected to the West after sending his vital secret messages for three years. On the tense day in January 1961 when the prized source finally appeared at BOB's headquarters, he turned out to be Lieutenant Colonel Michal Goleniewski, former deputy chief of Polish military counterintelligence. The colonel was not entirely sound of mind: His delusions included a conviction that he was heir to the imperial Russian throne. But his “business” reports were distinctly more rational. Safe in the West, he identified hundreds of Polish and Soviet agents.

One was George Blake, an unequivocally trusted officer of Great Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. In London seven years earlier, Blake—as no less than secretary of the planning committee—had attended the first CIA/SIS meeting about the project's conception. He was a KGB agent. The Soviets had code-named him “Diomid” after recruiting him in North Korea, where he was interned for three years following the Communists' 1950 capture of Seoul.

Was nothing sacred? At sixteen, brave Blake had been a courier for the anti-Nazi resistance in Holland, his homeland. After a terrifying pickup by the Gestapo, the principled, reticent teenager was smuggled to Spain and imprisoned there, on general suspicion. Eventually released, he made his way to Britain and served in the Royal Navy. Later recruited by the SIS, he was posted to South Korea under diplomatic cover. His background and service made him one of the SIS's most admired members.

As Diomid, however, Blake had passed the minutes of the CIA/SIS meeting, together with a tunnel map that he'd sketched, to his Soviet control in London. That secured his status as the best Soviet mole in the West: The KGB knew the tunnel plan before the first shovel scratched the ground!

The Soviets were actually far cleverer than their hype about their diggers' chance heroism suggested. The tunnel's faked “find” was actually part of a campaign to prevent the CIA and SIS from suspecting Blake. As soon as Karls-horst's chief learned of the super-secret project in 1955, he began preparations to stage its supposedly accidental discovery. Working with a KGB specialist in eavesdropping flown in from Moscow—a colonel who would lead the “work party”—he developed plans for the find to be made by a fictitious Red Army signals unit on a routine detail. Moscow orchestrated tactics and timing. Nikita Khrushchev himself chose a date for staging the exposé—the eve of the general secretary's first visit to London—that promised maximum diplomatic and propaganda value. He also ordered that the culprits be nabbed in the act, which may account for the Soviet boasts of catching American personnel with their earphones on.

The Soviet theater totally fooled BOB until the Sniper fingered Blake those five years later. (He had not been uncovered through an investigation by MI-6, the British counterpart to the FBI, prompted by a 1959 Sniper warning of a Soviet mole in the SIS, possibly code-named “Diamond.”) The consummate traitor had been protected with great skill.

Soviet security outdid BOB's. No member of Soviet counterintelligence in Berlin had the slightest knowledge of the tunnel. The KGB's top command instructed Blake to reveal his information to no one, including KGB officers. As late as the summer of 1955, only three people in Moscow Central's First Chief Directorate (for foreign intelligence) knew his identity and of Operation Gold's existence. More humiliating for BOB, its extraordinary measures for protecting the tunnel's secrecy had all been for nothing.

Did that futility apply to the operation as a whole? Was the huge effort to record, transcribe, translate, categorize, cross-reference, and evaluate the sea of tapped material also for nothing? Or worse than nothing: Did the Soviets, as several agents later claimed, feed the taps with massive disinformation? Operation Gold seems cut to the current fashion of dismissing most espionage as a scandalously exorbitant con. Writing after examining the archives on their respective sides, many experts—from Markus Wolf to John le Carré to Phillip Knightley—concluded that the tunnel's practical value in the Cold War was
extremely limited. In that view, the massive tunnel adventure can be seen as a telling display of the futility of espionage in general and the CIA's efforts in particular.

Former BOB officers disagree, as might be expected. Recovering from the Sniper's seemingly crushing revelations, they continued to sing the tunnel's praises. Denying that they were duped by disinformation fed through it, they cited selected Soviet evidence to bolster their rebuttal. In general, they say, the tunnel treasury—1,750 intelligence reports by September 1958, based on 90,000 translated messages or conversations—was a huge asset even two years after the taps were shut down. In 1957, for example, an East German BOB operative fired from her housekeeping job for General Pitovranov (during a Soviet security campaign to eliminate German employees) managed to land another job in Karlshorst, this one for East Germany's counterintelligence chief, General Karl Linke. The production of “Frau K,” as she was called, swelled because Linke was much less meticulous about not taking home official documents than the extremely security-minded Pitovranov. Tunnel material contained the necessary elaboration and corroboration for the files Frau K managed to copy. The same applied to the offerings of BOB's star source, Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Popov of Soviet Military Intelligence. Popov supplied invaluable information, especially after his fortuitous transfer to Karlshorst, also in 1957. Without the explanation, enhancement, and interpretation made possible by the tunnel material, his reports on the Soviet compound would have been far less valuable. (Caught in the act, Popov would be executed for treason in 1960, despite a KGB plea to spare his life.)

Operation Gold also braced the defense against the Soviet crusade to force the Western Three from Berlin. Unless the Allies accepted East German control over access to the Western sectors, warned Nikita Khrushchev in a 1958 ultimatum, he would sign a separate peace treaty with the GDR, ceding it control of that access as a sovereign nation. That move would have gravely jeopardized the Western presence in Berlin. The tunnel material's rich details of Soviet undercover operations in West Berlin were critical to Washington's winning counterattack.

American enthusiasts are convinced that the cables continued transmitting massive quantities of sensitive material even after the First Chief Directorate knew it was being tapped. Baffling as that might seem to laypeople, the reason makes impeccable sense to spies. Changing communication practices and procedures to negate the taps would have required orders to hundreds of Soviet
personnel: an operation of a size that would have tipped off BOB, whose search for the leak may have uncovered Blake. To protect its secret that it knew the American secret—thus shielding Blake as an intelligence source—the First Directorate willingly compromised other KGB departments, together with fellow intelligence services and the Soviet army in Germany. Not even General Pitovranov was told about the tunnel until Blake's reassignment, in a normal rotation, from London to Berlin's SIS station.

Whether some disinformation was leaked into the torrent of genuine stuff coursing the cables may never be known. Whether it's true, as Markus Wolf believes, that his side never would have discovered the tunnel without Blake's tip-off is also a moot question. But Operation Gold does reveal some of espionage warfare's ironies. George Blake would not have been prosecuted without a confession; too little hard evidence against him could be found. “Come on, George,” a skilled British interrogator kept baiting the arrested traitor. “We know why you did it. It was for the money.” Finally, Blake was provoked. “No, not for money. I never got a penny! I did it for the ethics.” What ethics? Imprisoned in North Korea, Blake had taken the initiative in serving Moscow by asking to speak to a Russian officer. Before his posting to Seoul under British diplomatic cover, he'd been assigned to take a Cambridge professor's course on the menace of Communism, which attracted the introverted young man instead of repelling him. Communist sermons—all for one and one for all; a need for the people to own the means of production because they are more important than property—echoed the moral lessons his devoutly Lutheran mother had taught him as a boy. Thus a course on Communism's dangers triggered his conversion.