Reflecting on the Thule missions collectively, Brigadier General William Meng recalled, “They were conducted in complete radio silence. One word on the radio, and all missions for the day had to abort. But that never happened; not one mission was ever recalled. Altogether, we flew 156 missions from Thule.” Throughout the entire operation, Meng might have added, with maintenance crews working in subzero temperatures on exposed aircraft, and with aircrews operating from the ice- and fog-covered runway, not a single person or airplane was lost in an accident or to Soviet action. To this day, the SAC Thule missions remain one of the most incredible demonstrations of professional aviation skill ever seen in any military organization at any time.
In Washington, D.C., on May 28, 1956, President Eisenhower met with top administration officials to discuss, among other things, a protest of the American overflights of Soviet Arctic territories. In attendance, beside Eisenhower's military assistant, Colonel Andrew Goodpaster, were Allen Dulles, director of the CIA; Admiral Arthur M. Radford, chairman of the JCS; General Nathan F. Twining, air force chief of staff; and Undersecretary of State Herbert Hoover, Jr. The Soviet note, dated May 14, had been delivered to the American embassy in Moscow (but, for whatever reason, did not mention specifically the massed overflight of Anadyr). Twining advised that the Thule operation had been shut down a few days before the note was received. The president said he wanted to encourage the Soviet leadership to move in peaceful directions: The American response must be carefully drawn. Hoover read a proposed draft to which, apparently, all agreed. The next day, May 29, the Department of State presented to the Soviet embassy a note explaining that “navigational difficulties in the Arctic region may have caused unintentional violations of Soviet air space, which, if they in fact had occurred, the Department regretted.”
A few months later, on July 4, 1956, a U-2 took off from West Germany and flew a first mission over the western U.S.S.R. It, too, drew a sharp Soviet protest a few days later. Because the overflights threatened a rapprochement between the superpowers, the president had become increasingly uncomfortable approving American violations of Soviet airspace. But administration leaders, according to the president's science adviser, James Killian, viewed the highflying single-engine U-2 as far less menacing than a multiengine reconnaissance bomber. Eisenhower determined to continue U-2 overflights, especially after a mission on July 5 provided intelligence about the number of Soviet longrange aircraft that all but ended the “bomber gap” controversy. In the fall, a newly-appointed chairman of the JCS, former air force chief of staff General Nathan Twining, nonetheless urged the president to approve another military overflight of Soviet territory with a new reconnaissance aircraft.
This aircraft was the air-refuelable Martin RB-57D-0, a single-seat photoreconnaissance version of the RAF Canberra bomber, built under British license. The lightweight long-winged aircraft, powered by two Pratt & Whitney J57 jet engines, possessed a combat speed of 430 knots (495 mph) and could reach an altitude of some 64,000 feet. Because it flew faster than the U-2 and almost as high, Eisenhower was persuaded that the machine would escape Soviet detection. He approved a mission to fly three RB-57Ds over separate targets in the maritime region near Vladivostok.
Three RB-57D-0s deployed to Yokota Air Base in Japan in early November 1956. This detachment flew the mission on December 11, a bright, clear day. They entered the maritime region simultaneously from three different locations near Vladivostok and overflew three different targets. Contrary to air force hopes, the bombers were picked up on Soviet radar, and MiG-17s scrambled to intercept them, but the Americans were out of reach. In the exposed film returned to the intelligence community, the fighters were clearly visible, pirouetting in the thin air beneath the bombers. The resulting protest on December 14 left no doubt about the capabilities of Soviet air defenses to detect and identify aircraft:
On December 11, 1956, between 1307 and 1321 o'clock, Vladivostok time, three American jet planes, type B-57, coming from … the Sea of Japan, south of Vladivostok, violated the … air space of the Soviet Union…. Goodweather prevailed in the area violated, with good visibility, which precluded any possibility of the loss of orientation by the fliers during their flight…. The Government of the Soviet Union … insists that the Government of the U.S.A. take measures to punish the guilty parties and to prevent any future violations of the national boundaries of the U.S.S.R. by American planes.
Four days after the Soviet note was delivered, an exasperated president met with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to consider the embarrassing situation and decide on a course of action. Under the circumstances, Dulles had to say that it would be difficult for the country to deny the RB-57 overflights. But Eisenhower would not consent to such an admission. Instead, he instructed Colonel Goodpaster to relay an order to Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, JCS chairman General Nathan Twining, and CIA director Allen Dulles: “Effective immediately, there are to be no flights by U.S. [military] reconnaissance aircraft over Iron Curtain countries.” With the sole exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. military overflights of the U.S.S.R. and other Iron Curtain countries ceased for the remainder of the Cold War—though CIA overflights would be authorized periodically.
When President Eisenhower ended U.S. military overflights of Iron Curtain countries, this clandestine effort disappeared entirely from view and almost entirely from memory. Though few of the pertinent documents can be located now, and despite the passing of almost all those who shaped the policy, military overflights have an important place in the postwar evolution of strategic overhead reconnaissance.
By the time Eisenhower approved the building of the U-2 in late 1954, peacetime strategic overflight reconnaissance had become a firm national policy. Meanwhile, the platforms from which to conduct it moved to ever higher altitudes: from military aircraft to high-altitude balloons, from the U-2 to the SR-71—a supersonic aircraft that could fly at altitudes above eighty thousand feet—and ultimately, from airspace into outer space with robotic reconnaissance satellites. After military fighters and bombers, every one of these remarkable technical advances was evaluated, approved, and first funded for development by one American president: Dwight Eisenhower. By the time Eisenhower left office in 1961, the intelligence produced by overhead reconnaissance had eliminated the supposed gaps in weaponry between the superpowers. Once American leaders could meet a real rather than an imagined Soviet threat, they could hold the size of the military establishment to reasonable limits. The resulting defense savings amounted to billions of dollars.
In the mid-1950s, American military and political leaders worked with virtually no reliable intelligence information on Soviet military preparations and capabilities. Thanks to strategic overflight reconnaissance, their successors dealt with a surfeit of such information, almost all of it reliable. That transformation turned first on the sacrifices of American airmen who flew in the SENSINT program. They knew of the risks they took and accepted them in the interests of national security. Altogether, between 1946 and 1991, some 170 U.S. Air Force and Navy aircrew members were lost to Soviet attacks on PARPRO missions. Remarkably, among all of the American flights that intentionally overflew Soviet and Chinese territory on White House orders, none was lost until a Soviet antiaircraft rocket knocked Francis Gary Powers's U-2 out of the sky on May 1, 1960. But that is another story.
The Berlin Tunnel
GEORGE FEIFER
Berlin, as George Feifer remarks here, was “ground zero of the clash between East and West.” It was like an island washed by the unfriendly seas of Communism; but until the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the borders between the three Allied zones of the city and the Soviet remained open. The East needed the products and hard currency of the West. People moved back and forth, more from east to west: All through the 1950s well over a hundred thousand a year chose to flee East Germany, the so-called German Democratic Republic, or simply the GDR. Both sides took advantage of this relative openness in another way. E
spionage became a trade as ordinary as haberdashery or milk delivery, and almost as respectable. The divided city, said a CIA operative, was a place where “everyone was a spy, and the spies were spying for everyone.” Berlin, the historian David Clay Large adds, was “postwar Europe's capital of espionage. Some eighty spy agencies and their various front organizations, disguised as everything from jam exporters to research institutes, worked the city.” (It was a novelist's paradise, and Cold War fiction became a literary genre all its own.)
Berlin may have given Allied intelligence services one of their few windows on the East, but the panes were too often distorted and mistenshrouded. The farther from the city one traveled, the more difficult it was to pick up the information needed to gauge the potential of the Soviet threat. The U.S.S.R. was all but impenetrable to Western espionage, as were its satellites. (As has been pointed out, that impenetrability explained the need for overflights.) What was the Soviet capability for offensive action, not only against Berlin and West Germany but also against Western Europe itself? How much was the GDR contributing to the Soviet nuclear program? After the anti-government riots that had spread across East Germany in June 1953, how strong did anti-Communist sentiment remain? Could it still be exploited?
The spy game became even more risky thanks to moles in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the West German Foreign Intelligence Service. Between 1953 and 1955, they betrayed the West's spy network in the Soviet bloc and for a time almost eliminated it. Several hundred Allied agents were rounded up, not a few of whom were executed. Meanwhile, the GDR cut telephone links between East Germany and the West, suspended bus and tram service between the two Berlins, and closed the frontier with West Germany. With its barbed wire, watchtowers, minefields, and control points, die Grenze—“the border”— became a genuine iron curtain, an uncrossable corridor 858 miles long. None of these measures stopped the flow of refugees, which included many of East Germany's youngest and best-educated citizens, a true brain drain (as well as a sizable number of Stasi, the GDR secret police organization that, per capita, was larger than the Nazi Gestapo).
If the Soviets continually outdid the West in spycraft and the brutal and distasteful exercise of counterintelligence, its adversaries had the edge in matters technological. Technology could be the equal of any number of well-placed spies: Witness the success of overflights. That brings us to the Berlin tunnel, among the most spectacular, if short-lived (eleven months and eleven days), intelligence contrivances of its time. The tunnel was the brainchild of one of the outsize (in every sense) characters of the Cold War—the CIA station chief in Berlin, William King Harvey, a hard-drinking, womanizing gun nut who had earned a deserved reputation as an imaginative case officer. Harvey recognized that there was much intelligence mileage to be had in the tapping of phone lines. As one CIA man remembered, pinpointing a notable limit of Communist technology, “When the Soviet commandant in Bucharest or Warsaw called Moscow, the call went through Berlin.” Overhead lines, which the KGB favored, were virtually inaccessible, but buried cables were another matter. The CIA discovered that signal cables ran along a road just on the other side of the border from the American sector. But how to reach them? Harvey's solution was to dig a tunnel that would be stuffed with the most advanced listening devices and would end in a tapping chamber next to the cables. Its model was a similar but far more modest tunnel that the British had dug in that other Cold War espionage capital, Vienna. Operation Silver, as it was called, had produced a great amount of useful information about Soviet arms and intentions; this tunnel would be Operation Gold. “Harvey's Hole” would work beyond the wildest imaginings of its creators. But would it, really? The argument still goes on. The project was so important that it had to be kept secret from most CIA agents. But the Soviets, as it turned out, had an even bigger secret of their own.
GEORGE FEIFER is the author of eight books on Russia, including Justice in Moscow, Moscow Farewell, and Red Files. Since his first visit in 1959, he has lived in Moscow on and off extensively. Feifer spent 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as a graduate exchange student studying Soviet criminal law at Moscow University. He is currently writing an account, from both the American and Japanese sides, of Commodore Perry's opening of Japan.
HARVEY'S HOLE, the Cold War's most daring espionage exploit, crowned the legend inspired and courted by its namesake. William Harvey, a former FBI specialist in Soviet counterintelligence operations, switched to the CIA in 1947 after failing to uphold J. Edgar Hoover's standards for his agents' personal comportment. Harvey's Hole was a tunnel dug in 1953 from a secret site near the border of Berlin's American and Soviet sectors, then boldly into Communist territory to tap communication cables there. The visionary undertaking ended in high success and abysmal failure. Although Harvey was a kind of misbegotten John Wayne, the story, like many about espionage at the highest levels, is too complex and ambiguous for that kind of movie.
Not that the setting was less than ideal. Throughout the 1950s, the Cold War was most intense in divided Berlin. After the 1948–49 Soviet blockade failed to force the United States, Great Britain, and France from their sectors, the old German capital—with the world's largest, most prestigious CIA station a stone's throw from the world's largest concentration of Soviet troops—re-mained ground zero of the clash between East and West. It was as if the proximity of the nemesis pumped both sides' adrenaline into the torn city from throughout the planet.
Berlin's KGB station was so critical that its chief was one of the huge agency's deputy chairmen. General Yevgeny Pitovranov, who occupied the position during the tunnel's conception and construction, happened to be a model officer. The well-educated, low-key professional had served as the chief of Soviet foreign intelligence. He had few vices, not even an interest in acquiring coveted German consumer goods, an activity that preoccupied some of his subordinates. While the general lived very modestly in the Soviet compound, his opposite number, William King Harvey, followed his 1952 appointment as the CIA station chief by choosing a magnificent, heavily fortified villa. The flamboyant Harvey and the temperate Pitovranov made a curious contrast.
Like all legends, “Big Bill” prompted exaggeration. The outsize thirty-seven-year-old drank up to five martinis before raising a fork to his lunch, and he seemed immune to criticism for sometimes making an afternoon spectacle of himself. The staff at BOB (Berlin Operations Base), as the station was called, held him in half-admiring, half-nervous awe. He always kept loaded revolvers there: three or four in his desk and two on his person, rotated daily from among his collection. Racks of firearms lined the walls, and thermite bombs atop the safes would instantly destroy the files within if the Soviets invaded, as expected. During his Berlin heyday, a beer-hall waitress politely handed Harvey a pistol that had fallen from his pocket. He never checked his heaters in restaurants because “When you need 'em, you need 'em in a hurry.” Actually, he had no such need in Berlin, thanks to a scrupulously observed understanding that KGB and CIA officers didn't shoot one another. Still, Harvey required all new BOB personnel to draw a weapon.
To some extent, the man merely reflected the times; CIA Cold Warriors were hardly alone in fearing the Communist peril. The Doolittle Report commissioned by President Eisenhower would warn in 1954, during the tunnel's construction, that America confronted “an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost.” No rules mattered in such a struggle, the authors contended. “Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, longstanding American concepts of ‘fair-play’ must be reconsidered.” Harvey himself might have written the report's appeal for more espionage to “subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies.” As it was, ranking American visitors to BOB headquarters were buoyed by a rousing delivery of his signature speech about “protecting the United States against its enemies.” Startled Europeans tended to see the passionate lover of pearl handles and battle hyperbole as dan
gerously half-cocked himself: the archetypal anti-Communist cowboy.
John Kennedy approved. The young president and Ian Fleming fan would speak of the pear-shaped Harvey, with his bulging eyes and froglike voice, as a kind of American James Bond. Actually, the “memorably bizarre figure”—as described by Evan Thomas's account of CIA all-stars, The Very Best Men— occupied the opposite end of the manly-beauty spectrum from braw Bond. That aside, the comparison was not outrageous. Harvey took pains to broadcast his relish for whiskey and guns. The son of a small-town Indiana lawyer cultivated his macho Texan image because he believed it helped him get results. Something clearly did. He was known as a superb case officer who combined astute hunches with careful legwork in running his cases—usually potential new sources of information. More street-smart than academically analytical, he had a sure sense of the human frailties that often led people to involve themselves in spying. Uncommon ability to identify and mesh every relevant detail bolstered his excellence in operations.
The anti-elitist Harvey was chosen to head BOB—the CIA's most critical station—fresh from sniffing out Kim Philby as an arch KGB spy in Washington, while other Americans were still inviting the upper-crust British traitor to their clubs. But he'd had so little administrative preparation for a post of BOB's importance, and he so differed from his Ivy League predecessors, that his case officers saw their new boss as “a creature from another planet.”
The stakes were huge. Would Moscow succeed in dominating Europe by dislodging the bone in its throat called West Berlin? Would there be war? Would the information filched by the other side give it a decisive advantage? The espionage players were certain that Europe's fate hung in the balance, especially after a series of Berlin confrontations, including the blockade, that were more suggestive of real war than any cold variety. Post-Communism studies have established that both sides were convinced the other was itching to invade. The Americans particularly feared that the Soviet onslaught would fall on NATO's embryonic European defenses. To counter the vastly superior Communist forces, information about them, and about Moscow's intentions, became more vital than ever.
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