The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  At the heart of this febrile and dangerously unstable and split nation was the city of Berlin, itself partitioned into four sectors. The city lay deep within the Soviet-controlled area of East Germany; but West Berlin was governed by the Americans, British and French.

  There were already two clashing economic philosophies. The Americans, understanding quite how close Europe was to further conflict and to being engulfed entirely by the ideology of Communism, knew that it had to move decisively to restore the functioning of the continent’s most productive powerhouse. West Germany would have to be put back on its feet. The US Secretary of State George C Marshall had toured the country and had left convinced that fascism could quite easily rise from its recent grave. The answer, he was certain, was vast quantities of US aid: finances far and beyond the restrictive loans that had been given to the British and the French. Europe needed a huge injection of money both for rebuilding and for firing up economies that were clinically dead.

  Conferences had been held in 1947 at which the countries hoping to receive this US beneficence registered their interest. Among those countries were Poland, Hungary and Albania. But the Soviets walked out of talks. Stalin, avers Tony Judt, was suspicious. And possibly rightly so: for when looked at from the Communist angle, was this not a form of economic colonisation? The offer of such vast sums would hardly come without strict terms and conditions attached, one of which would certainly be that the recipients would have to be liberal democracies.

  But this meant that while Western Europe would get the US cash, the small states of Eastern Europe would get nothing. Judt cites the case of Czechoslovakia, which would have been desperately grateful for any money. Even though the Soviet troops had long left that country, and even though there had been nothing in the way of hard menaces or threats from the Kremlin, the Czech government withdrew from any offer of Marshall Aid. Stalin did not have to point a gun. The Czechs – like the Bulgarians, Romanians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Albanians and Poles – understood that he was the power in their part of the continent.

  Yet the Marshall Plan and its fallout also had a most particular effect upon Berlin, the city that was to come to symbolise all the most bitter and dangerous divisions of the Cold War. In 1948, the standard unit of currency under the Nazis, the Reichsmark, was at last replaced. The new currency had been printed under conditions of ferocious secrecy in America, and then shipped over, to be revealed. This was the Deutschmark. Citizens of West Germany – and West Berlin – were allowed to trade in limited amounts of their Reichsmarks for the new Deutschmark notes. There were economic casualties: those lucky few who had savings, for instance, found that they were wiped out instantly. But this was a preparatory move towards West Germany being re-established as a functioning economy and a nation once more. However, the Deutschmark’s introduction triggered defensive action from Stalin. In response, East Germany got its own currency, from Moscow. And in Berlin, there was a city now divided more sharply than ever by two forms of currency.

  This, to Stalin, was unendurable – the idea of the American capitalist Deutschmark seeping through to East Berlin and by extension, out into the Soviet-controlled sector of Germany more generally. This proved to be the trigger for the sharpest Cold War crisis yet: the Berlin Blockade of 1948.

  This emergency – itself the trigger for fresh nuclear neurosis – unfolded some 13 years before the vast, sinister bulk of the Berlin Wall went up. Before then, the city’s borders were rather more porous. Even so, it still proved relatively simple in 1948 for the Soviets to start cutting off the Western sector of the city. To all intents, they started strangling it.

  The Blockade began when Stalin’s soldiers blocked all the railway lines going in and out of West Berlin. This blockage then extended to the canals. And then the roads. The closing up of supply lines had echoes of a medieval siege: trains and lorries and trucks – bearing supplies of fresh produce, plus other food and essential supplies – were stopped from getting through. The menace was palpable. There were insufficient Allied forces in the Western sector to challenge them. But what was it that Stalin was trying to achieve? The asphyxiation of the Western half of the city? Or something even worse?

  ‘To the Allies, this blockade seemed more than mere mischief,’ wrote historian (and contemporary observer) ES Turner. ‘It was a pretext for driving them out of Berlin, preparatory to consolidating and expanding Soviet power westward, which would have been seen as an open invitation to the Third World War. Those who lived through the months of the Berlin airlift need no reminding of what a nerve-fraying period it was. The Soviet presence in the heart of Europe was like one of those amorphous monsters that grip and immobilise the sleeper in a full-blooded nightmare. Was it conceivable that Stalin, who looked on Berlin as his by conquest, would hesitate to destroy any “air bridge” that the West might inaugurate…?’2

  The currency had been one trigger point for this sinister crisis; but in fact, there would have been some form of hostility whatever had happened: these two cities, governed by two implacably opposed ideologies, were pushing against one another with increasing friction. In the preceding months, there had been angry gestures and signs, all conducted along fractured Berlin streets; from the Soviet planes flying insolently over British RAF bases to the equally impertinent British response, spying on Soviet military build-ups from the sky.

  Perhaps the codebreakers and the interceptors should have been able to see the blockade crisis coming. (This was a little before the cryptological disaster occasioned by the Soviets overhauling their entire code system, of which more in a later chapter). In fact, some time back, the RAF and the British Army had realised that the Y Service, which had been reduced very heavily in size since the end of the war, would now have to expand in numbers once more. Professor RV Jones – the young man who had been central to so many scientific innovations throughout the war, and was later to become scientific adviser to the codebreakers – recalled this period in his book Reflections On Intelligence. His startling and rather contrary view – bearing in mind all the work that had been going on back in Eastcote – was that the cryptologists had not been sharp enough when it came to the Soviet Union.

  ‘In the post-war maelstrom,’ he wrote, ‘signals intelligence had paid little if any attention to Russian radar and almost the only interceptions that were being made came from the unit that I had established in 1946 with Eric Ackermann near Obernkirchen… In the meantime, GCHQ had prepared a new charter for itself and this charter included responsibility for intercepting all Russian signals, both communications and radar. Then, armed with this charter for which they had obtained approval, without my predecessor as Director of Scientific Intelligence having the chance to comment, they proposed to take Ackermann and his unit over. I was very much concerned to be presented with the fait accompli, for I was sure that GCHQ, for all their ability in communications intelligence and cryptography… had neither the interest… nor the expertise to study the technical transmission associated with radar and radio navigation (ELINT) [or “electronic intelligence”]. As a quid pro quo for losing my direct control of Ackerman’s unit in Germany,’ Professor Jones concluded, ‘an uneasy compromise was reached in which I was to be the scientific adviser to GCHQ.’3

  And yet in West Berlin the army and the RAF and GCHQ would most certainly have been acutely aware that constant monitoring was required. Dr Jones must have exaggerated a little. Only a little later, even the rawest National Service recruits to the Y Service were routinely instructed in the basics of the Russian language. For those personnel already based in West Berlin, the city had been clearly seething with espionage and danger ever since the Nazis fell.

  And for secret listeners, with their uncomfortable, almost intimate proximity to the Soviets, the events of the Blockade were only to sharpen the fervid atmosphere. Before those months, the eerie ruined night-time streets of Berlin had echoed with the footsteps of East German women, touting for business among the young British men venturing out from beh
ind their barbed-wire fences. Self-evidently, all such encounters were sharply discouraged by the authorities, fearing all manner of espionage honey-traps. There was a clandestine black market too: civilians from the Eastern sector hoping to do trade with British personnel in return for valued Deutschmarks; quiet deals done in the shadows of hollowed, eyeless buildings deep into the night – the British coming away with Russian vodka and sometimes Russian gramophone records.

  But the Berlin Blockade now saw the Western Allies’ sector isolated. With roads and railway lines steadfastly obstructed by East German and Soviet troops, there was the danger of the Western side of the city swiftly being starved. Given the recent desperate conditions of the fall of Berlin in 1945, the stress this would have placed upon the local population could have provoked unstoppable unrest and violence, a trigger point for more aggression from the Soviets, and then a dreadful escalation of hostility between the Soviets and the Western Allies. The people of West Berlin had to be fed by any conceivable means. As a result, there began an enormous operation to send in supplies by air. In other words, foodstuffs would be dropped in by parachute.

  This is what then unfolded: those parachutes of essentials floating down from grey Berlin skies, an image of resistance to malicious Soviet tyranny transmitted to the wider world. The population of West Berlin did not starve; and the Soviet Air Force did not dare to shoot down aircraft bearing food.

  Even to this day, there is some confusion and speculation about what exactly Stalin’s intentions were in the Berlin Blockade. At the time, there were some in the US military who had little doubt that this was the opening salvo of the Third World War. Others sensed that he was extemporising; that he had to react to what he would have seen as the contamination of East Berlin, not just economically but culturally as well.

  Was it the first step to a larger objective? The swallowing of Berlin in its entirety? Or indeed the subsuming of the whole of Germany into the Soviet system? The exact signals intelligence that was being relayed from West Berlin back through to Eastcote, and thence to the Joint Intelligence Committee and the desk of foreign secretary Ernest Bevin is not yet available; yet it must have been enough to cement a firm view in Bevin’s mind, because this proud left-wing politician was determined that the Americans should show their nuclear hand by ‘sending B-29s over’. The B-29s were the craft that delivered atomic payloads; this was a moment when the Americans had overwhelming superiority. (Indeed, it was a global superiority that drove some in the British government mad; it was Ernest Bevin who insisted to cabinet that the UK simply had to have the atomic bomb itself ‘with a Union Jack on the top of it’ if it was ever to show its face at world security meetings.)

  Yet here was also the first Cold War international crisis that highlighted the need for the chess player’s mentality on both sides. In 1948, neither the Allies nor Stalin’s forces were in any condition to fight a protracted land war. The exhaustion was psychological as well as physical. Equally, though, if the Soviets had made a determined push, then it would have been possible, feasible even, for them to capture the whole of Berlin; after all, as noted, the city was an island in the middle of a vast red Communist ocean. And having secured Berlin, they could have gradually inched Soviet-controlled Germany’s border westwards. They wanted to browbeat the tired British into leaving; they had no reason to believe that the Americans would stay in Germany any longer than they had to. In other words, the Soviet calculation might have been that Germany could be made theirs – the nation reunited under Soviet control – without a shot being fired. But the Americans were more than implacable: such an invasion would have been an outright declaration of warfare between the globe’s new superpowers. And the question is: at what point would the Americans have dropped the atomic bomb on Moscow?

  With even Ernest Bevin calling out for nuclear intervention (if not actual bombing), there were others in Washington DC’s military establishment who felt that a pre-emptive strike on Moscow might be the way to defuse future Communist threats. Their voices, while never prevailing, grew sharper. Quite apart from the inconceivable scale of the mass murders that he perpetrated, Stalin is today also associated with twitching paranoia; yet perhaps he was paranoid with good reason.

  In the case of the Berlin Blockade, it never even came to threats: the combined aviation skills of the American, British, French and Canadian air forces succeeded in making thousands of flights over Soviet territory to drop supplies not only of food, but of fuel too. For some pilots, there were concerns that the ubiquitous coal dust above the city could get into their instruments and bring planes down; and as it happened, this was perhaps the most serious threat that the aeroplanes faced. Wisely, the Soviets forbore from making any attacks on these aerial convoys; any such move really might have been the trigger for nuclear Armageddon.

  One Y service veteran remembered bitterly that even with supplies getting through, the winter of 1948 was atrocious, and life in West Berlin was uncomfortable; the freezing weather only served to heighten the sense of crisis in the besieged city. But the blockade was also an indication that signals intelligence needed a recruitment drive. It was from this point onwards that the army and air force Y services funnelled ever more young men through into the business of secret interception. And more units – not just in Berlin but throughout West Germany – sprang up. The Soviet miscalculation was that the Allies would not have the will to defend their sector of Germany. In fact, certainly in some corners of Whitehall, there were two urgent objectives. Not merely attempting to halt the progress of Communism but also – secretly – making it as difficult as possible for the two halves of Germany to reunite. Despite all the fine efforts to ‘de-Nazify’ an entire population, the calculation in Britain was that a reunited Germany would inevitably once more become a threat to the entire world. Frankly rather better to keep the country in two fragments: it suited the British very well to remain right where they were throughout West Germany.

  Ironically, the airlift in fact turned out to be even more effective than road, rail and canal when it came to keeping West Berlin in essential supplies; far from starvation, excited schoolchildren looked to the skies to see where the next bountiful supplies of food and treats would be coming in. By the spring of 1949, the Soviets lifted the blockade. But this shaming withdrawal brought no relaxation in international relations. Indeed, it did a great deal to harden hearts; now the scale of Soviet ambitions and dreams had been exposed. As the later Labour Chancellor Denis Healey was to observe, it was clear that Soviet boots could, if Stalin so willed it, march all the way to the coast of the North Sea.

  Plans for a new North Atlantic military treaty began to coalesce in talks between America and Western allies about the organisation that would become known as NATO. And as they did so, the efforts and activities of the London Signals Intelligence Centre at Eastcote were stepped up, not just in Germany but in other strategic territories in Western Europe that abutted an Eastern bloc ever more tightly drawn into the Soviet orbit.

  Prague had succumbed in 1948: the post-war Czech government had been overthrown in a meticulously organised Communist Party coup and Czechoslovakia was now very firmly a Soviet serf state – one that was also in a parlous economic condition thanks to its refusal of Marshall Aid.

  And these, curiously, were the economic roots of the Cold War; in a very short time, (West) Germany had gone from being an aggressor country that had to be occupied in order to quell its conquering, murdering impulses, to a nation that instead had to be protected from Soviet advances. Even more curiously, this move from taking economic aid from America to the seeking of military aid was being pushed by Britain’s foreign secretary Ernest Bevin. It was he who was the first to suggest that American forces not only take up permanent residence in Europe, but they should sign an official treaty with other Allied countries in order, as he saw it, to stand firm against the Soviet threat. This would incidentally mean the siting of American weapons and missiles on permanent bases on British soil. As far
as Bevin saw it, the necessity was great. It was in everyone’s interests to be able to take cover behind America’s protective cloak.

  There was also quite an astonishing industrial phenomenon taking place at the heart of Western Europe in this period: even amid the rubble and the water-filled craters where once had been houses and shops, and even before the Americans’ financial aid actually materialised, the economies of West Germany, France and Britain were humming along ever faster, and actually beginning to exceed pre-war productivity. The Marshall Plan money was certainly vital to West Germany – but not, as so many now assume, for simply keeping the lights on and getting bread into the shops. Instead, German industrialists – for there was still a very serious industrial core, even after all those RAF thousand-bomber raids – were using the money, via the government, to invest heavily in their own concerns, funding expansion and new technology.

  The result was that by the time of the Berlin Blockade, the German economy, boosted by this steady and stable new currency, the Deutschmark, was taking off into the stratosphere. Obviously there were extremely productive coal- and steel-producing regions like the Ruhr – which itself was under international control – but it was more than that. Across Western Europe (even in dreary, pinched Britain), there was a post-war stirring of a furious desire for material goods. The 1950s consumer boom was a little way off, but it fizzed in the ashes of all that carnage.