Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  The CIA moved rapidly to exploit Nelson’s invention before the Russians found out about the “artifacts.” “Exploratory discussions were held in Washington to plan the mounting of an attack on Soviet landlines in East Germany with special emphasis to be placed on the Berlin area,” an Agency document recorded. Second only to Moscow, Berlin was the hub of the Soviet communications system. “As a result of the 19th century imperial control of the great European nations, all cables ran from the provinces into the capitals and back out again,” a CIA officer explained. “In French colonial Africa, for instance, you couldn’t call directly between two provinces. The call would go back to Paris and out again.” In Eastern Europe, “everything came to Berlin. When the Soviet commandant in Bucharest or Warsaw called Moscow the call went through Berlin.”

  In Berlin, Nelson found that the blueprint of the city’s telephone and telegraph system resembled nothing so much as a giant pin-wheel. The lines were laid out in two concentric loops, encompassing the entire city, both East and West. At various points along the circumference of each loop, there were switching stations from which lines shot out to bring service to each district of the city. Nelson traced the cables as they arced across East Berlin from Altglienecke in the south, through Karlshorst, headquarters of the Soviet command, and on to Lichtenberg farther north. The cables continued into West Berlin, but the system had been severed with the division of the city into Soviet and Western sectors. Although the lines linking the two halves of the city remained in place, they were no longer connected to their terminals. Looking at the blueprint, Nelson could see that all that was required to tap into the East Berlin system was to reconnect the lines.

  Harvey, as CIA base chief in Berlin, arranged for an agent inside the Lichtenberg switching station to be given precise instructions for connecting the cables to a line that had its other end in West Berlin’s central post office. The reconnected lines were there for all to see, and it would only be a matter of time before East German phone men came across them. But the hookup would have to do until enough samples of the traffic could be collected to determine whether a permanent tap would be worth the effort.

  With West German assistance, a CIA technician set up banks of monitoring equipment inside the post office. For three weeks, the technician stayed locked in a stifling, closetlike room, maintaining watch over the equipment while it recorded reel upon reel of tape. The test was a success. As in Vienna, the equipment was able to pick up the clear-text echoes of enciphered messages. “At this point we knew it could be done,” a CIA paper said, “The next step was the problem of installing a permanent tap on the target lines.”

  Building a tunnel would not be as easy as it had been in Vienna. This would be no short dig from house to street. A tunnel in Berlin would have to originate in the Western sector and burrow hundreds of yards across a heavily patrolled border into the eastern half of the city. No one had ever attempted anything like it. The closest thing the CIA had to a tunnel expert was a young engineer in the Office of Communications with a degree in soil mechanics. British intelligence, at least, had some experience in the highly specialized art of vertical tunneling, and had developed a method for digging upward through soft soil without having the roof collapse. The Americans and British would have to pool their resources.

  A CIA document set forth the division of labor. The CIA would “(1) procure a site … and drive a tunnel to a point beneath the target cables … (2) be responsible for the recording of all signals produced … (3) process in Washington all of the telegraphic material received from the project.” MI6 would “(1) drive a vertical shaft from the tunnel’s end to the targets; (2) effect the cable taps and deliver a usable signal to the head of the tunnel for recording; and (3) provide for a … center … to process the voice recordings from the site.” The project was code-named GOLD, and Harvey was placed in overall command.

  Selection of the tunnel site was crucial. It had first of all to be within striking distance of the cables. Every foot in length meant another load of dirt that had to be excavated and disposed of under the noses of the Vopos, the East German border guards. Every foot in length increased the problem of ventilating the tunnel. Without proper ventilation, the electronic equipment needed for the tap would overheat. Under normal conditions, ventilation shafts could be sunk at regular intervals along the tunnel’s length to provide a source of cooling air. In a clandestine operation, fresh air had to be pumped from a hidden source at the mouth of the tunnel, and there were limits to how far the air could be pumped.

  The cables made their closest approach to Western territory at the city’s extreme southern edge, a sparsely settled expanse of farmland and refugee shacks known as Altglienecke. Still a thousand feet away from the border, they lay just eighteen inches beneath a drainage ditch on the far side of Schoenefelder Chaussee, a heavily traveled highway linking the main Soviet air base in Germany with East Berlin. Geological maps showed the terrain to be uniformly flat and composed of a soft, almost sandy soil that would yield easily to pick and shovel, but aerial reconnaissance revealed disparities in the drainage of the soil. Wet, poorly drained areas showed up as dark, while dry, well-drained areas appeared light. Water had to be avoided. It would complicate the digging and damage the electronic equipment. One area, its most prominent landmark a graveyard on the eastern side of the border, showed up white in the aerial photos. There, said the CIA’s soil mechanic, would be the best place to dig a tunnel. Digging directly under the graveyard was “ruled out for aesthetic reasons,” he recalled. “We didn’t want the Russians accusing us of desecrating German graves.” So the line of attack was laid slightly to the north of the graveyard.

  Harvey flew back to Washington to brief Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, Richard Helms, and other senior Agency officials on the plan. “There were those who manifested reservations,” a CIA document noted dryly, but those reservations paled in the face of Harvey’s fervor. “Without Harvey there would have been no tunnel,” the soil mechanic said. “The easy thing was to say ‘No’ and be on the safe side and not take a chance, but Harvey would keep badgering the chiefs, stripping away their objections.” A senior officer who listened to Harvey’s briefing agreed. “I don’t think the Director or Frank Wisner or Dick Helms would have gone ahead with it if they hadn’t had a guy like Harvey in West Berlin.” Dulles approved the operation, directing that “in the interest of security, as little as possible concerning the project would be reduced to writing.” A CIA officer reviewing the project years later commented that “it is probable that few orders have been so conscientiously obeyed.”

  Early in 1954 two teams of Army engineers began work on the tunnel at sites six thousand miles apart. In Berlin a Corps of Engineers unit started construction of a warehouse directly over the spot chosen for the mouth of the tunnel. In New Mexico, at the White Sands Missile Proving Ground, sixteen handpicked Army sergeants working under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Gross, a combat engineer recently returned from Korea, sank a test tunnel beneath the desert.

  The commander of the engineers in Berlin could not understand why a warehouse had to have a basement with a 12-foot ceiling. That was not the way the Army built warehouses. For one thing, it meant that an enormous amount of earth had to excavated and hauled away in dump trucks. The commander refused to proceed until a direct order from Washington changed his mind. In the strictest of confidence, Washington explained that he was not really building a warehouse but a radar intercept station designed to look like a warehouse. Washington did not explain that no sooner would the basement be finished than another crew of engineers would start to fill it in again with the 3,100 tons of dirt that would be produced by a tunnel 1,476 feet long and 6½ feet in diameter.

  In New Mexico, the crew of sixteen sergeants successfully completed a 450-foot test tunnel through soil of approximately the same composition as in Berlin. The major concern had been that the tunneling would cause the soft earth to settle, leaving a telltale furrow abovegrou
nd. The deeper the tunnel, the less chance that settling, or “slump,” would occur. But the deeper the tunnel, the more dirt would have to be excavated from the vertical shafts at either end, and the more weight would press down from above. The engineers chose 20 feet as the optimum depth of the tunnel floor, leaving 13½ feet of undisturbed earth between its roof and the surface.

  The crew of sixteen abandoned the New Mexico tunnel and flew to Richmond, Virginia, where the material needed for Operation GOLD was being assembled in a real Army warehouse. One hundred and twenty-five tons of steel liner plates that would be bolted together to form the tunnel walls were sprayed with a rubberized coating to prevent them from clanging during construction. All the equipment was packed in crates labeled “spare parts” and “office supplies,” shipped by sea to the German port of Bremerhaven, placed aboard the regularly scheduled supply train for Berlin, and finally trucked to the new warehouse near Altglienecke.

  The Vopos, watching through their binoculars less than a hundred yards away, were not easily fooled. They could see that the Americans had come to spy. Warehouses were not surrounded by double rings of barbed wire, powered by expensive diesel generators, and manned by troops wearing the insignia of the Army Signal Corps. What really gave the game away was the parabolic antenna, an AN/APR9, the most sophisticated electronic receiver in the United States inventory, which was perched atop the warehouse roof. Clearly, the warehouse was to be used as a radar intercept station that would scour the airwaves for pulses emitted by the nearby Soviet air base at Schoenefeld. The Vopos would have been dumbstruck to learn that the AN/APR9 had been selected not by an electronics wizard but by the CIA’s soil mechanic because “I thought the antenna cluster looked real sexy.”

  By August of 1954 the warehouse was ready. The ground floor was stocked to capacity with crates of “spare parts” and “office supplies.” Below, the cavernous basement stood empty, waiting to be filled again with dirt. All that remained before the sixteen sergeants could start digging was—a softball game.

  The closest calculation of the entire operation would be to determine the precise point at which to stop burrowing eastward and start digging upward toward the cables. The engineers needed an object of known size in the Soviet sector upon which to base their measurements. None existed, so they tried to infiltrate one in the form of a softball. But each time a long fly ball sailed across the border, the Vopos picked it up and good-naturedly heaved it back before a technician stationed at a peephole in the warehouse could take his readings.

  Abandoning their bat and ball, the engineers dispatched two CIA agents to have a flat tire on Schoenefelder Chaussee. While changing the tire, one of the agents placed a tiny reflector next to the road. An electronic surveyor’s transit hidden behind the peephole sent out a beam that struck the reflector and bounced back, giving the precise distance between the two points. The engineers were confident they could hit the target within 6 inches either way.

  Starting from a point in the easternmost corner of the warehouse basement, they sank a vertical shaft 18 feet in diameter to a depth of 20 feet, then drove pilings halfway into the floor of the shaft. Next, a steel ring 6½ feet in diameter and fitted with hydraulic jacks around its circumference was lowered into place. Braced against the exposed section of the pilings, the ring, or “shield,” was fitted flush against the tunnel’s face. Everything was now ready for the long subterranean journey eastward toward Schoenefelder Chaussee.

  Three men attacked the tunnel face with pick and shovel. After excavating the face to a depth of 2 inches, they shoved the shield forward by jacking it against the pilings. Over and over again, the process was repeated: excavate, jack forward, excavate, jack forward. After advancing a foot, the diggers were able to bolt the first ring of steel liner plate into place. After another foot of progress, a second ring of liner plate. Plugs in the face of each plate were uncapped and mortar pumped under pressure to fill any voids between the tunnel walls and the surrounding earth, leaving no room for “slump.” One thousand cubic yards of mortar would be consumed before the tunnel was completed. When the tunnel reached 6 feet in length, the shield’s hydraulic jacks no longer needed to be braced against the pilings. The crush of the “overburden” held the completed portion of the tunnel so firmly in place that it could now serve as the brace against which the shield was jacked forward.

  Divided into eight-hour shifts, the sergeants worked round the clock—three men at the face with pick and shovel, two loading the “spoil” into a box that was picked up by a forklift and hauled back to the mouth of the tunnel, where a winch raised it to the basement for dumping. Not all the spoil had to be brought up to the basement. Some was packed in sandbags and stacked along the sides of the tunnel. Ventilation ducts were placed on top of the sandbags, bringing a stream of chilled air to the sweating men at the tunnel face. As steel liner plates were needed, they were brought by forklift from the ground floor of the warehouse, down a ramp to the basement, and over to the shaft to be lowered to the waiting forklift below. The engineers took constant sightings from a peephole directly above the shaft to make sure that the tunnel did not wander off course. Minute changes in direction were made by jacking one side of the shield farther forward than the other.

  About 50 feet out, the diggers struck water. At first the soil mechanic thought he had encountered a perched water table—a pocket of water prevented from percolating downward by an impervious stratum of soil. The smell suggested a different answer. In steering clear of the graveyard, the engineers had struck a course straight through the drainage field of the warehouse’s own septic tank. The aesthetic drawbacks of the graveyard were nothing by comparison. There was no choice but to forge ahead.

  The demands of security forced delays at every step. Ordinarily, a sharp blow with a sledgehammer could be counted on to free the hydraulic jacks, which frequently jammed, but that made too much noise, so each time the jacks had to be disassembled and reassembled. Aboveground, a twenty-four-hour watch was kept with a Questar astronomic telescope from an observation post in the warehouse attic. The lookout was linked to the tunnel face by field telephone, and he ordered digging stopped each time the East German guards passed over the tunnel on patrol. The boredom of lookout duty “was relieved once in a while when the Vopos would entice one of the farm girls behind a haystack,” a CIA officer said.

  As the most visible CIA officer in Berlin, Harvey could safely visit the site only at night, taking a circuitous route that involved at least one change of cars. Major General Ben Harrell, chief of staff for the Army command in Berlin, recalled a nighttime tour of the tunnel with Harvey. “Harvey and I drove way across Berlin and went into a parking area and changed cars. It was real cloak and dagger as far as I was concerned…. Coming back, Bill asked me to come up and have a drink. He poured me a full glass of scotch without anything else in it. When I finally got home, my wife asked me where I’d been.” Covered with mud and reeking of alcohol, Harrell could only offer the lame response, “I’ve been out with Bill Harvey on business.”

  On another nocturnal visit to the tunnel, Harvey sat quietly in the backseat of his car and listened to the driver and another G.I. carry on the soldier’s eternal dialogue. “I’m getting horny as hell,” one said. “Me, too,” the other replied. “George is the only one who’s had a piece of ass lately.” When Harvey arrived at the tunnel, he ordered the duty officer to find out who George was and “get him the hell out of here.” George’s pillow talk could blow the entire operation. Investigation revealed that George was a dog, the warehouse mascot.

  The tunnel was completed on February 25, 1955, a long, thin catheter ready to draw off the secrets of the Soviet military command in Berlin. Harvey walked along its length until he stood directly beneath the Schoenefelder Chaussee. The final 50 feet were separated from the rest of the tunnel by a heavy door of steel and concrete designed against the inevitable day the operation would be blown and the Vopos would come storming through. At Harvey’s instruction
, the door bore a neatly lettered inscription that warned in both German and Russian: “Entry is forbidden by order of the Commanding General.”

  Now it was up to the British to install the taps. A second shield was brought in to dig the vertical shaft up to the cables. The technique was the same as before except that the face of the shield was fitted with slats to keep the ceiling of the shaft from crashing down on the workmen. A single slat was removed to expose a small portion of the earth above, the earth was scraped out, the slat replaced, another slat removed, and another section of ceiling scraped out. When the earth behind each slat had been excavated, the entire shield was jacked upward and the process repeated, inching slowly, slowly toward the cables. Finally, three black rubbersheathed cables, each one as thick as a man’s arm, emerged from the ceiling. With the help of a hydraulic jack, they were pulled downward into the tap chamber so that the technicians could have some headroom in which to work. A reinforced-concrete roof was erected to support the weight of the traffic overhead, but the rumble of each approaching lorry was an unnerving experience. Even though the chamber was insulated so as not to reverberate like a huge drum, “it was a weird sensation to be in the chamber when an iron-shod horse trotted across it,” one CIA officer reported.

  Even the air pressed heavier in this claustrophobic chamber. A double steel door at the entrance kept the space pressurized in order to prevent nitrogen gas sealed within the cables from escaping when the wires were laid bare. The nitrogen was a standard technique used to ward off moisture and to monitor the integrity of the cables. A leak anywhere along the line would cause the pressure of the nitrogen to drop and set off an alarm. The back pressure in the chamber prevented any leaks, but the breathing and perspiration of the technicians working in the dense atmosphere created such a moisture problem that they were frequently forced to evacuate the chamber so that the air-conditioning equipment could dehumidify it.