Spies Beneath Berlin

by David Stafford

  Spies Beneath Berlin

  David Stafford

  Copyright © 2013, David Stafford

  For my sister Liz, fellow survivor

  of the Cold War

  Contents

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1. ‘The Stuff of Which Thriller Films Are Made’

  2. Our Man in Vienna

  3. Smoky Joe’s

  4. Black Friday

  5. The Human Factor

  6. 2 Carlton Gardens

  7. Agent ‘Diomid’

  8. Operation Stopwatch/Gold

  9. ‘Kilts Up, Bill!’

  10. Digging Gold

  11. Turning On the Tap

  12. Chester Terrace

  13. ‘A Bonanza’

  14. Fingers Crossed

  15. ‘It’s Gone, John’

  16. Caught Red-Handed

  17. ‘A Gangster Act’

  18. Tunnel Visions

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Picture Credits

  Acknowledgements

  I first thought of writing this book in June 1999, during a walk along the shore of the Starnberger See at Tutzing, outside Munich, during a conference on Germany and Cold War intelligence. My old friend Bill Leary, professor of history at the University of Georgia, gave a brief paper on this legendary operation. German scholars attending the conference were aware of the Berlin tunnel but, like me, knew little about it. Leary himself had no plans for such a book and so, with his encouragement and help, I began.

  In the two years that have followed I have also received indispensable help from many other people. While the documentary backbone of the book is furnished by recently declassified Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency documents, the all-important flesh was added through personal interviews with key participants in both the Vienna and Berlin operations. Hayden Peake, an invaluable friend in opening doors in the United States, very quickly put me in touch with David Murphy, whose co-authored book Battleground Berlin is an essential starting-point for any study of Cold War intelligence.1 Unreservedly generous with his help, he ensured that others who could add to the story agreed to talk to me. In addition, he kindly lent me several photographs of the operation, some of which are reproduced here. My debt to David Murphy will be apparent throughout, although he bears no responsibility for any of my views or mistakes. My thanks, too, go to Walter O’Brien and Hugh Montgomery, both of whom took time to see me and whom it was a pleasure to meet. One other CIA participant in the operation also deserves warm mention. During a regrettably brief visit on my part Joseph Evans gave very generously of his recollections as a member of the tunnel intelligence-processing team in London. This was a significant but hitherto largely unknown dimension of the operation and I am particularly grateful for his help.

  If my visit to the United States delivered rich rewards, so did that to Berlin. Here Dr Helmut Trotnow, Director of the Allied Museum, which now occupies part of the former American forces’ compound in the city, was unreservedly hospitable, showed me around the museum and led me on an unforgettable walk along the reconstructed section of the spy tunnel now on display. Here I also met Willie Durie, an indefatigable researcher and incomparable mine of information on the history of the allied presence in Berlin. His constant enthusiasm for this project, and the help he has given me particularly, but by no means exclusively, in providing photographs of the tunnel and other Cold War sites in the city, has been one of the genuine and lasting pleasures of the project.

  In addition to all the above, I wish also to thank the following friends and colleagues for the help they offered in many different ways: Matthew Aid, Richard Aldrich, Rupert Allason, William Baldwin, Gill Bennett, David Boardman, Tom Bower, Martin Clark, John Crossland, Philip Davies, Tatiana Ershova, Ralph Erskine, Anthony Glees, Michael Gow, Madeleine Haag, Jonathan Hacker, Michael Herman, Christopher Holtom, Alan Judd, David Kahn, Brian Lattell, Timothy Naftali, Ken Robertson, Allen Simpson, David Simpson, Michael Smith, Bob Steers, Donald Steury, Bayard Stockton, Richard Valcourt and Donald Watt.

  I would not have been able to write the book without travel and research assistance, and for this I am greatly indebted to both the Faculty of Arts and the Development Trust of the University of Edinburgh, which provided me with grants to visit Berlin and the United States. Both the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and The Centre for Second World War Studies, in the persons of Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang, provided institutional homes for the book. Grant McIntyre of John Murray offered encouragement throughout, as did my hard-working friend and agent, Andrew Lownie. Matthew Taylor did an excellent job copy-editing the manuscript. My wife, Jeanne Cannizzo, was an enthusiastic backer of the project from the beginning and was an enormous help in every way during my research trip to the United States.

  Finally, to all those on the British side of this Anglo-American success who wish to remain anonymous, but who will know how invaluable their help has been in providing the missing Secret Intelligence Service dimension to the story, I express my warmest thanks.

  David Stafford

  Centre for Second World War Studies

  Department of History

  The University of Edinburgh

  June 2001

  Introduction

  As a school boy growing up in the 1950s my first vivid memory of the Cold War was a headline announcing the death of Josef Stalin. It felt as though a shadow had been lifted from my world. Yet all too quickly I became aware of another. The world’s first thermonuclear explosion, only a few months earlier, had vapourized an atoll in the Pacific. The mushroom cloud was 25 miles high and 100 miles wide. Then the Soviets exploded their first hydrogen bomb in Siberia and the British detonated one at Woomera, in Australia. The nuclear arms race had begun. Millions were gripped by the fear that they might see the end of the world in their lifetime. Britain, I learned, would have only four minutes’ warning of a surprise attack.

  Our local newspaper published a map showing the ever-widening circles of damage likely to be inflicted by a nuclear bomb on Newcastle, my home town, from instant vapourization at the centre through a fire zone of incineration to fatal irradiation in my suburb. I pored over it at night in my bedroom. How far and how quickly, I wondered, could my father drive us to safety in our gallant Morris Minor? Assuming we survived the initial blast, what would our death by irradiation be like? Adults resolutely avoided dealing with such questions, perhaps wisely. But weekly shelter drills in the United States were routine. ‘Bring a woolly hat’, suggested one hopeful leaflet. The American Director of Civil Defence offered no such comforting illusions. Thirty-six million Americans would die on the first day, he estimated, and for survivors life was going to be ‘stark, elemental, brutal, filthy, and miserable’.1 My vivid adolescent imagination grimly filled in the blanks.

  Such apocalyptic visions of nuclear war and surprise attack were also mesmerizing governments and setting the agenda for their intelligence agencies. Tracking the enemy’s nuclear and conventional armouries and scanning the horizons for the slightest hint of danger consumed the energies and budgets of spymasters and their agents, both East and West. They competed to devise operations of greater and greater daring that would yield intelligence to provide the vital safety net. Of these, Operation Stopwatch/Gold, the Berlin spy tunnel, was one of the most remarkable.

  A bold and imaginative coup that made headlines around the world, Stopwatch/Gold was a joint operation between the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. It involved digging a clandestine tunnel, about half a mile long, across the sector border from West to East Berlin
to tap into some of the Soviet Union’s most closely guarded secrets. Allen Dulles, then head of the CIA, described it as ‘one of the most valuable and daring projects ever undertaken’. An engineering triumph, it was preceded and inspired by similar but by now mostly forgotten operations in Vienna.

  It was also highly controversial. The KGB had known about the project from its beginning, when its details were passed on by a traitor to his masters in Moscow. The British intelligence officer George Blake was later sentenced to forty-two years’ imprisonment for betraying a raft of secrets to the Soviet Union. When he was unmasked in 1961 it was widely assumed that the spy tunnel had been transformed into a vehicle for Soviet deception and misinformation, a complex and ingenious weapon turned against its creators. But the end of the Cold War and subsequent revelations about KGB operations have startlingly challenged this view. It now appears that Stopwatch/Gold did, after all, merit the praise from Allen Dulles.

  This is the first full-length study of the Berlin tunnel, which has made appearances as an episode or footnote in general histories of intelligence agencies or of the Cold War, and occasionally in brief articles, but never as a story in its own right. Nor has any other Cold War spy tunnel received detailed attention. Even as I was interviewing my CIA informants about their exploits in the 1950s, news broke of an American spy tunnel built two decades later under the Soviet embassy in Washington DC. Allegedly run by the FBI and the National Security Agency, its mission was to monitor conversations within the Soviet and later Russian diplomatic compound. Robert Hanssen, the FBI officer arrested on espionage charges early in 2001, is believed to have revealed its existence to Moscow. Unwittingly, it is rumoured, the FBI had proudly escorted top brass visitors through the tunnel to show off its electronic wizardry. Once they knew about it, one Washington ‘intelligence source’ was quoted as saying, the Soviets obviously used it to feed disinformation back to the FBI and the entire operation had been nothing but a gigantic and expensive white elephant and embarrassment to the United States. As for the Russians, they predictably declared that if the reports were true then the operation represented a blatant violation of international law. Yet in Moscow there was a distinct lack of surprise and even a weary sense of déjà vu. ‘It is well known’, declared Tatyana Samolis, a spokeswoman for the SVR (the KGB’s foreign intelligence successor), ‘that U.S. intelligence services harbour a passion for tunnelling.’2 ‘Even the hardest of Cold War veterans’, reported The Times of London, ‘may have shivered at the thrill of it all.’

  The Berlin tunnel occupies a historic and honoured place in the story of the Cold War. It was a joint British—American operation, in which the CIA and SIS worked closely together. Unfortunately, in each country a national perspective has tended to prevail, obscuring a central element of Stopwatch/Gold.

  While the CIA has been relatively open about its Cold War Berlin exploits, SIS, true to British tradition, has remained firmly tight-lipped. The result, inevitably, has been that the tunnel is widely seen as a purely American operation. One aim of this book is to redress the balance and highlight the essential role of SIS in the tunnel’s conception, planning and operation. The ‘special relationship’ between London and Washington is at its most enduring and powerful in the realm of intelligence and, as a masterly recent study has shown, the Cold War intelligence war waged by the West was largely an Anglo-American team effort.3 Another reason for writing about the tunnel is to address what is likely to become an increasingly common and puzzled question: what was the Cold War all about? The story of Stopwatch/Gold and its Vienna counterparts may, I hope, help answer the question.

  NOTE

  The Soviet secret service was known by many acronyms throughout its life. For simplicity’s sake, I refer to it by its most familiar designation, the KGB.

  1

  ‘The Stuff of Which Thriller Films Are Made’

  It is April 1956, eleven years since Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker in the garden of his Chancellery. Berlin remains a city of rubble and refugees. The once proud capital of Bismarck’s Germany, the metropolis dreamed of by Hitler as the capital of his thousand-year Reich, has had its heart ripped out by allied bombing. Buildings are still scarred from the heavy artillery assaults and bitter last-ditch fighting between Nazi troops and Red Army forces. Acres of bomb sites and mountains of brick and stone disfigure the city centre: at the end of the war Berlin contained one seventh of all the rubble in Germany, some 70 million cubic metres of it.

  The Brandenburg Gate, the symbolic heart of the city, stands in a no man’s land at the end of the once magnificent tree-lined Unter den Linden, now little more than a desolate street of improvised offices and disconsolate shops. The Reichstag is still a burned-out shell. Hitler’s Chancellery, just a few hundred metres away, has long been dismantled to make way for the Soviet War Memorial dedicated to the Red Army soldiers killed in the battle for the city. Every day carefully laid explosives bring another roofless and precarious ruin to the ground.

  Physically devastated, the city is also politically stricken, its future unclear. It lies some hundred miles behind the ‘iron curtain’ that now divides the democracies of the West from the Soviet satellites of the East. Later in the year boiling discontent in Hungary is to culminate in a popular uprising that brings Soviet tanks into the streets of Budapest and sends tens and thousands of Hungarians fleeing to the West.

  Bonn, a small town on the Rhine, has for seven years been the capital of the rapidly recovering western Federal Republic, and Berlin is now claimed as the seat of the Soviet puppet regime, the German Democratic Republic. However, the city is still officially occupied by the armed forces of the victorious powers of 1945: Britain, the United States, France and the Soviet Union. Each controls a separate sector but the Cold War has effectively divided Berlin into two distinct halves, East and West.

  The Berlin Wall is still five years in the future. Berliners living in one part of the city still cross over to work in the other, and still visit friends and family there. Yet they do so only at special checkpoints and after showing identity documents. Telephone links have been severed. Only a generating plant provided by the Americans keeps the Western half of the city fuelled with electricity after the East German regime cuts off supplies. The city lives in a half-light of fear, apprehension and suspense.

  In camps, in temporary housing flung up around the city or crammed together in overcrowded tenements, thousands of refugees flood into West Berlin from behind the Iron Curtain. Many come from East Berlin and other devastated cities such as Leipzig, Dresden and Chemnitz, now renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt. In 1953 anger against Walter Ulbricht and his regime had exploded in a popular revolt that was crushed by Soviet tanks. Hundreds of demonstrators were killed and thousands more arrested, and East German gaols are still full of political prisoners. Since then the daily count of those fleeing to West Berlin has inexorably risen, but among them are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of spies.

  ‘Go search for people who are hurt by fate or nature’, advised the Soviet General Pavel Sudoplatov, commander of the KGB’s Special Bureau (Spetsburo) no. 1, when discussing the recruitment of agents.1 The human debris thrown up by the war has produced regiments of recruits for both East and West. This city, capital of the Cold War, is their natural home. Here they can easily move across sector boundaries in search of information to be traded to the highest bidder. Ian Fleming, already famous for his fictional creation James Bond, explores Berlin for his newspaper, the Sunday Times. His informant is an amused and ironical figure who shows him around the city’s spy haunts. Fleming identifies him merely as ‘O’, for he is a notorious middleman selling his information to the highest bidder among the competing Western intelligence services. The living is obviously good, notes Fleming. Herr O is plump and well fed, lives in a ‘Hansel and Gretel’ villa in the suburbs and chain-smokes expensive Muratti filter-tip cigarettes.2

  Trade is brisk. Intelligence agencies abound: the United States Central Intelli
gence Agency (CIA), the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), the Soviet KGB, the East German Stasi, the French SDECE and many others. The KGB alone, based at the former St Antonius Hospital in the eastern suburb of Karlshorst, has a staff of almost a thousand. The British SIS is housed in offices attached to the showcase Olympic Stadium constructed by Hitler for the 1936 Olympics. The complex now forms the headquarters of British military administration in the city and a useful, if fairly transparent, cover for the SIS staff of about a hundred. The CIA has recently moved. For years it occupied the former headquarters of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, head of Hitler’s General High Command, a quaintly traditional building designed by Hitler’s architect Albert Speer in the leafy suburb of Dahlem. But expansion has forced a move to the sprawling United States’ military compound on the Clayallee, the broad long highway that forms the backbone of the American sector.3

  To the south, in a semi-deserted and almost rural part of the sector known as Rudow, the East—West frontier is marked by white-painted wooden posts stuck in the ground. A shanty town of shacks and hovels constructed from rubble and inhabited by refugees has grown up close by. Now and again a patrol of East German border guards makes a cursory appearance. Running just behind the boundary is the highway linking East Berlin city centre to Schönefeld Airport and flights to Moscow, Warsaw, Prague and other capitals of the Eastern bloc.

  Between the highway and the barbed wire on the Eastern side lie an open field and a cemetery. Beyond is Alt-Glienicke, a village within the city still paved with cobbled streets. To the west, about 800 metres into the American sector, stand three low modern buildings in the middle of a field, encircled by two rings of barbed wire. Word on the street is that it is a disguised radar station monitoring Soviet flights in and out of Schönefeld or the nearby military airfield of Johannisthal. Building began two years ago and was quickly completed. American service trucks and jeeps constantly roar in and out. Uniformed soldiers wearing the insignia of the United States’ Signals Corps have been spotted on the site. East German border guards sometimes stare at it through binoculars, but the novelty has long worn off. It is just another part of the city’s growing stock of Cold War furniture. Nearby, the sails of the city’s only functioning windmill turn slowly in the wind.