The tap was the riskiest moment of the entire venture. The East Germans regularly monitored the integrity of the circuits with a “fault finder,” a device that transmitted a pulse along the line that would come bouncing back the moment it discovered a break. The trick was to draw off such an infinitesimal portion of the signal that the loss would go undetected. With the rubber sheath removed and the back pressure keeping the nitrogen from escaping, the British technicians painstakingly clipped wires to the rainbow of color-coded circuits at their fingertips. The wires carried the signal down to banks of amplifiers in the tunnel and back up to rejoin the circuit. The amplifiers boosted the captured mites of sound and shot them through the tunnel along lead-sheathed cables that rested atop the sandbags to rows of sound-activated Ampex tape recorders in the warehouse. Visitors to the warehouse were struck by the eerie sound of 150 recorders hissing and whirring as they started and stopped in response to the stolen signals.
Processing the take was a task of staggering proportions. The three cables contained a total of 172 circuits carrying a minimum of 18 channels each. The CIA was in danger of becoming a victim of its own success. Having plugged into the Soviet command network, the Agency had to devise a method of sifting through the miles and miles of tape before the intelligence died of old age. What if the tapes recorded Soviet preparations for an attack on West Berlin but were not processed in time to sound the alarm?
A few circuits could be monitored at the site and items of particular interest immediately cabled to Washington or London. The most closely monitored circuits were not those of the Soviet high command but the East German engineering and police circuits. By listening to these, the CIA could tell where East German repair crews were at work and what plans the Vopos had for patrolling the area. The first hint that the tunnel had been discovered was likely to come over these circuits. Everything else was shipped home under armed guard aboard military aircraft. Recordings of the telegraph circuits were flown to Washington, where Carl Nelson’s invention could sort out the plain-text artifacts from the encoded signals. Tapes of phone conversations went to London, where a team of White Russian émigrés waited to translate them. In Washington the tapes were delivered to building T-32, one of the World War II “Tempos” that disfigured the Mall between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The floors of T-32, known as “the Hosiery Mill” because of the many strands of communications intelligence that came together there, sagged under the weight of the machinery assembled to process the tapes. The entire building was sheathed in steel in order to prevent the electronic pulses that ricocheted about the premises from escaping into the atmosphere, possibly to alert the other side.
The heart of the system was “the bumblebee,” so called because, like the real bumblebee, all the laws of physics decreed that it would never get off the ground. “The bumblebee” played the tapes at 60 inches per second, four times the speed at which the captured signals had originally been transmitted, breaking down the 18 channels of each circuit into separate recordings—“demuxing,” in the communicators’ jargon. The 18 separate recordings were then placed on slow-speed recorders linked to teletype machines that printed out the message in clear text at 100 words per minute. The printed messages, still in their original Russian or German, were ripped from the teletypes and hand-carried to teams of translators and analysts on the floors above. To keep pace with “the bumblebee,” the translators and analysts worked a schedule of two weeks on and one day off.
Inevitably, some of the circuits produced unintelligible signals, and a special five-man team of communications experts stationed at Nuremberg was called on to tackle the problem. On one occasion, the Russians were found to be using a two-channel teletype in which letters were transmitted alternately, to be divided into separate messages at the receiving end. If, for instance, one channel transmitted the word m-i-s-s-i-l-e and the other the word r-o-c-k-e-t, the tape would record m-r-i-o-s-c-s-k-i-e-l-t-e. No sooner had the two-channel mystery been solved than the Soviets switched to a three-channel teletype.
Sometimes circuits disappeared from the landlines for no apparent reason. The call signs of the missing circuits were cabled to Nuremberg, where the CIA team searched the airwaves for them, more often than not finding that the Russians had simply switched from landline to radio. When a circuit disappeared from the air, a check with T-32 in Washington frequently determined that the circuit had been moved underground.
Processing the tapes increased the chances of a leak by geometric proportions. Trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible, the fifty Russian- and German-speaking officers assigned to the Hosiery Mill were crammed into a windowless room with only 45 square feet of working space per person. The deputy chief of the processing section briefed them on the need for security. “It is greatly in your interest not to know where any of the material you are processing is coming from,” he began. Even so, “for the opposition to stop the flow, all they would have to know is that we have this many Russian and German speakers together.”
“From the beginning, it was realized that the duration of this operation was finite,” a CIA report on GOLD said. Sooner or later a mistake would give the operation away, or the East Germans would come across it in the course of routine maintenance. The British had made one mistake early on, but it had been caught in time. They had miscalculated the amount of heat given off by the amplifiers that lined the final fifty feet of the tunnel between the antipersonnel door and the tap chamber. Despite the best efforts of the air conditioning, the space was growing noticeably warmer. In the summer of 1955 a CIA officer flew to Berlin to study the problem. Uncapping the plugs in the steel liner plates through which the mortar had earlier been pumped, he drilled ten holes of varying depth into the surrounding earth. Into the holes he inserted thermometers connected by wire to a chart in the recording room. The thermometers confirmed that the earth was becoming warmer. On the first cold day of fall, the heat radiating from the equipment room, which was located directly under the Schoenefelder Chaussee, would melt the glaze of frost on the highway, leaving a dark, wet rectangle that would surely arouse suspicion. A chilled water-circulating system was hastily installed in the tunnel, using up Sears, Roebuck’s entire East Coast inventory of plastic pipe, and the temperature of the earth began to fall.
There were other, more transitory scares. One morning a microphone positioned in the tap chamber picked up a series of alarming thuds. The lookout in the peak of the warehouse couldn’t see what was happening. A dense fog obscured his view. “After the sun burned away the fog, visual observation showed that the East German police had set up a temporary automobile checkpoint directly over the chamber,” a CIA report said. “The ‘thuds’ the microphone picked up were caused by the police officer in charge stomping his feet on the road surface to keep warm.”
On April 21, 1956, eleven months and eleven days after the first Ampex tape recorder had whirred to the sound of the Soviet military command, the microphone in the tap chamber picked up a sound even more alarming than the thuds—voices exclaiming at what they had found. There had been no patch of melted frost on the highway nor, as far as anyone could tell, any other clue to alert the Soviets to the tunnel. “Analysis of all available evidence— traffic passing on the target cables, conversations recorded from a microphone installed in the tap chamber, and visual observations from the site—indicates that the Soviet discovery … was purely fortuitous,” a CIA postmortem concluded. Another document attributed the discovery to “unfortunate circumstances beyond our control—a combination of the fact that one of the cables was in very poor physical condition … and a long period of unusually heavy rainfall. It appeared that water entered the cable in sufficient quantity to make it inoperative, thus necessitating digging up sections of the cable and causing discovery of the tap.”
If discovery was inevitable, the Soviet reaction was not. “Among those most actively concerned with the project’s management, a consensus developed that the Soviets would pro
bably suppress knowledge of the tunnel’s existence,” a CIA analysis said. “It was felt that for the Soviets to admit that the U.S. had been reading their high-level communications circuits would cause the Soviets to lose face.” But “fate intervened,” the analysis continued. “The Commandant of the Soviet Berlin Garrison, who would normally have controlled the handling of the situation when the tunnel was discovered, was absent from Berlin, and the acting Commandant, Colonel Ivan A. Kotsyuba, was in charge…. His reaction was unexpected in that he invited the entire Berlin press corps to a briefing and tour of the tunnel and its facilities. As a result, the tunnel was undoubtedly the most highly publicized peacetime espionage enterprise in modern times prior to the U-2 incident.” The Soviet end of the tunnel quickly became the major tourist attraction in Berlin, complete with snack bar. Although the United States remained silent, there was no doubt who was behind the tunnel. As a Western correspondent who took the tour reported, “It is clear that if the visitor could continue westward … he would emerge soon at a low but prominent American building with radar equipment on the roof.”
Kotsyuba’s aim was to expose, for all the world to see, the treachery of American imperialists, but he misjudged his audience. His exhibition of American perfidy was soon proclaimed a monument to Yankee ingenuity. “A venture of extraordinary audacity— the stuff of which thriller films are made,” the New York Herald Tribune said. “If it was dug by American intelligence forces—and that is the general assumption—it is a striking example of their capacity for daring undertakings. Seldom has an intelligence organization executed a more skillful and difficult operation than that accomplished by the tunnel’s diggers.” Time magazine called it the “Wonderful Tunnel,” and a Washington Post editorial was headlined THE TUNNEL OF LOVE. “People would come up to you just because you were American and say, ‘Great op,’ ” an officer in the Berlin base recalled. “You’d have to say you didn’t know anything about it, but they’d wink and say, ‘Aw, come on.’ ”
The tunnel produced much more than rave reviews. It produced mountains upon mountains of intelligence, so much in fact that the processing of backlogged material was not completed until September of 1958, more than two years after the flow had stopped. What was the intelligence worth? “The tunnel was a terribly good hard source of OB [Order of Battle],” the deputy chief of the processing section said, “and OB—which Russian troops were where— was important in those days. It also made it possible to confirm the performance of all other agent assets and to identify those that were diddling you…. It enhanced the confidence of every position we had.” Among other things, the tunnel revealed that East German railroad tracks and rolling stock were in a chaotic state of disrepair. Since the Russians would have to rely on the trains for any large-scale troop movements, the United States and Britain could take a considerably more relaxed view of the prospect of a sudden blitzkrieg against West Berlin.
Some officers were less enthusiastic about the tunnel. “It made the OB boys happy, but other than that the take was extremely marginal. The psychological impact when it was blown was far, far greater than the take.” Much of the intelligence did indeed seem of marginal utility. The monitors learned, for instance, that the Russians planned to detain Major General Charles Dasher, the American commander in Berlin, during a scheduled visit to a trade fair in Leipzig. Should Dasher walk into the trap or should he stay away and risk alerting the Russians to a communications leak? The dilemma solved itself when Dasher came down with pneumonia. The tunnel also revealed that the wife of the commander in chief of the Soviet land forces in East Germany was dealing in rugs on the black market. She could be heard on the tapes complaining to her husband about the laggard Berlin taxi driver who would not tote the rugs up to her apartment. When the Russians set up a roadblock on the autobahn leading to Berlin, the tunnel confounded all the laborious exegeses of the Kremlinologists in Washington and London who attempted to analyze precisely which Western action had triggered the Soviet provocation. It turned out that a Russian sergeant had just learned that his commanding officer was cuckolding him, and he was venting his rage by harassing the Americans. The tunnel’s $25- to $30-million price tag seemed a bit steep for intelligence like that.
Nevertheless, for eleven months and eleven days, the tunnel had kept a finger on the Soviet pulse. The Russian Army could not have made a military move anywhere in Europe without tipping its hand via the tunnel. When the CIA was set up in 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall was reported to have said, “I don’t care what the CIA does. All I want from them is twenty-four hours’ notice of a Soviet attack.” “Harvey’s Hole,” as the tunnel became known, had put the CIA in a position to do just that, and had done it at a time when the Agency had virtually no other assets behind the Iron Curtain.
The CIA was eager to try again, this time with a tunnel—code name BRONZE—beneath an East Berlin telephone exchange, but the proposal was rejected by the White House. Although he had approved GOLD in general terms, President Eisenhower seemed taken aback by the realization that it had entailed a physical invasion of East German soil. Until the tunnel’s discovery, he understood that the CIA had succeeded in intercepting Soviet military communications, but he remained deliberately ignorant of the means employed. “The essence of the information was made available to the President,” Dillon Anderson, Eisenhower’s National Security adviser, said, “but I don’t think he wanted particularly to know that an elaborate tunneling device had been constructed.”
In the future the CIA would have to content itself with less spectacular, though no less imaginative, means of monitoring communications in East Berlin. Agents were outfitted with hidden recorders to stand beneath overhead telephone lines and pick up the signals radiated by the wires. A section of plastic telephone pole was developed that an agent disguised as a lineman could place atop a real telephone pole. Inside the plastic section was a recorder to pick up the radiated signals and a transmitter to flash them back to a listening post in West Berlin.
None of these gadgets could ever match the magnitude of the communications break provided by the tunnel which Allen Dulles called “one of the most valuable and daring projects ever undertaken.” At a secret ceremony, Dulles singled out Harvey for special praise and awarded him the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. It was a moment to savor as Dulles heartily slapped him on the back for a job well done. In the ten years since Harvey had been cashiered from the FBI, he had earned a reputation as America’s top spy, the man who had both uncovered Kim Philby, the KGB’s most valued penetration of the West, and overseen Operation GOLD, the CIA’s most valued penetration of the Iron Curtain.
If Harvey had any rival for clandestine supremacy, it was Angleton, who had pulled off a considerable coup of his own by obtaining through his Israeli sources a copy of Nikita Khrushchev’s secret 1956 denunciation of Stalin at the Soviet Twentieth Party Congress. By Angleton’s own account, however, his coup resulted in a major human tragedy when over his objections Dulles released a copy of the precious document to The New York Times. Angleton contended that the uproar touched off by publication of the speech led directly to the Hungarian revolt that was so ruthlessly crushed by Soviet tanks. According to Angleton, the CIA had been training Hungarian exiles at a secret base in Germany for just such an uprising, but the appearance of the Khrushchev speech in the Times prematurely ignited the revolution before the Agency-trained forces were ready to enter the fray.
Angleton’s analysis made a number of questionable assumptions about cause and effect, but it aptly captured the tendency of even the most clear-cut intelligence successes to backfire—as Harvey was soon to find out about Operation GOLD.
A Surfeit of Spies
5
“Oh shit, oh damn,” Harvey exclaimed to George Kisvalter, a man who looked more like his nickname “Teddy Bear” than the handler of the CIA’s prize agents. What he had just told Harvey could mean the end for Colonel Popov of the GRU, the Agency’s lone penetration agent inside th
e Soviet military intelligence apparatus. Kisvalter had been meeting secretly with Popov for the past six years, ever since 1953, when the Russian had first volunteered his services to the CIA in Vienna by dropping a note on the front seat of an American diplomat’s car.
Popov had been a stroke of incredible good fortune. By one measure, that of return on investment, he was an intelligence source of even greater worth than the tunnel. “Harvey’s Hole” had cost between $25 and $30 million, while Popov was being paid $100 a month. Even that paltry sum remained in CIA hands in an escrow account to be signed over to Popov or his heirs should they ever escape to the West. Despite years of planning and labor, the tunnel had been in operation for less than one year. Popov had recruited himself and was still in service six years later. During those six years, his most unreasonable demand had been for a collapsible rowboat that he could take on outings with his mistress. The CIA had denied the request on the grounds that he would never be able to explain where he had got it.
For his $100 fee, Popov delivered such items as a list of cryptonyms for 370 Soviet “illegals” who had been infiltrated into the West. The CIA thought for a moment that it would be able to crack the true identities of all 370 when an officer recognized one of the cryptonyms from an earlier case. The cryptonym was composed of the agent’s real name spelled backward. Unfortunately, the formula did not hold true for the other 369. Popov was, however, able to reveal the true identities of the agents he was handling, and it was one of these who now threatened his safety and prompted Harvey’s exclamation.
Popov had arrived for his regular meeting with Kisvalter carrying a suitcase. Inside was a standard assortment of women’s clothing and cosmetics, all of American make. There was a vanity mirror and behind the mirror was $20,000 in assorted Western currencies, operating funds for Popov’s newest agent, a “hairdresser” named Tairova, who was to take up residence in New York City as the “wife” of another Soviet illegal. Kisvalter noted that the denominations were too large for a woman who bought her underwear at Macy’s. From his pocket, Popov took an American passport, which he said had once belonged to a young woman living in Chicago. She had “lost” it while visiting her native Poland and would not be returning to the United States, he explained ominously. Her picture had been replaced with that of Tairova.
Wilderness of Mirrors Page 11
