Nelson claimed that, studying the Vienna traffic, he realized that plaintext echoes (or ‘transients’) of the messages being transmitted to and from the Imperial Hotel could be sorted out from the encoded signals being monitored in the tunnel at Schwechat. Such a discovery made code-breaking largely redundant and was obviously a major breakthrough. ‘American intelligence’, claims Martin, ‘had scored its biggest coup since the wartime codebreak that had uncovered source HOMER’ (the British KGB mole Donald Maclean). But Nelson also claimed that the British were not let in on the echo effect. Many authors have repeated the claim, such as John Ranelagh in his major history of the CIA The Agency, which relies heavily on Martin’s account of Silver.8
If true, Nelson’s claim suggests a breathtaking lack of trust between allies. On the surface it may seem plausible, fitting in as it does with a drama being played out simultaneously on the broader intelligence stage. The year 1951 saw the infamous defection to Moscow of Maclean and another high-ranking British diplomat, Guy Burgess. Coming shortly after the cases of the British scientists Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs – both convicted of betraying atomic secrets to Moscow – the defections sparked a high-level molehunt. Suspicion quickly fell on Kim Philby, the SIS liaison man with the CIA in Washington. Although nothing could be proved, Philby was recalled from the United States and shunted off into some harmless dead end to spend most of the next decade under cover as a stringer working for the Observer in Beirut. Only in 1963 did SIS finally have firm evidence of his guilt and send one of its senior officers, Nicholas Elliott, to confront him. The head of station in the Lebanese capital by this time was none other than Peter Lunn, and it was to Lunn’s private flat that Elliott invited Philby to come and ‘chat’. Within days, realizing the game was finally over, Philby had fled to Moscow.
Curiously, the suspicion that fell on Philby in the aftermath of the Maclean and Burgess affair also clouded the career of Andrew King, who was summoned back from Vienna to London to be questioned in depth by Dick Thistlethwaite, one of MI5’s most practised interrogators. What worried MI5 was the discovery that King had been a member of the Communist Party while an undergraduate at Magdalene College, Cambridge, the university where Burgess and Maclean had been recruited. King readily admitted the charge. But he also told Thistlethwaite that he had previously revealed all this to Kenneth Cohen, the SIS controller of European operations, some four years before. Cohen, after consulting the head of the service, Sir Stewart Menzies, had told King not to worry about it’. ‘“C” says’, Cohen allegedly said, ‘that since spies are only people of foreign origin, don’t bother.’ This put King in the clear, and he returned to Vienna to continue work on the tunnels.9
Did news of King’s interrogation leak out to the CIA? And, if so, did this persuade them to hold back on Nelson’s discovery about the so-called echo effect in Vienna and not share it with their allies? Certainly, the Burgess and Maclean defections, followed by the Philby affair, persuaded many inside both the FBI and the CIA that the British services were riddled with Moscow’s men. Was the Vienna tunnel yet another victim of the Cold War paranoia that turned allies into dangerous suspects?
It seems unlikely. For one thing, Nelson’s claim about the echo effect surfaced only once, in his conversation with David Martin. No other author has made any such grandiloquent claim about American triumphs against Soviet signals during this early phase of the Cold War. Indeed, it is possible that Nelson deliberately told his tale to conceal the extent of more traditional code-breaking successes against the Russians. Those who knew him suggest that he was prone to exaggeration anyway, but also speculate that genuine confusion and misunderstanding may have arisen.
There is no doubt that the echo effect could be found in certain situations. But where it did, British intelligence, with its far longer experience of line tapping than the Americans, certainly knew about it. And Nelson noticeably failed to provide any information on how, in practice, American technicians working cheek by jowl with British colleagues could have concealed the fact that they were capturing the plaintext message from the same set of cable messages being tapped by their allies. His claim also obscures the fact that the vast bulk of the material being intercepted consisted of un-enciphered voice traffic.
CIA colleagues of Nelson have also strongly contested his claim. One of them, provoked by Nelson’s bizarre claim, directly broached the issue with Frank Rowlett, the Chief of Staff D and Nelson’s boss. Rowlett insisted there was no such effect in the telegraphic traffic being picked up in the tunnel operations. The only adjustment made to the signal in processing was, in Rowlett’s words, ‘a straightforward conversion of the recorded signal on the tape to a format which could be interpreted by a teleprinter’. The device that performed this demodulation for the CIA was called the ‘bumble-bee’ and had been designed by one of Nelson’s subordinates, using commercially available parts. All aspects of the telegraphic material, stressed Rowlett, were discussed fully and openly with SIS. The ‘echo effect’ as a factor in CIA-SIS relations over the Vienna and Berlin tunnels is an enduring but insupportable myth.10
*
Lunn’s phone-tapping operation in Vienna soon began to produce enormous volumes of Russian conversation on tape. To cope with translating material from the mounting pile of wax cylinders SIS provided two fluent Russian-speakers from London. But they were quickly overwhelmed. The problem was not just the volume but the often highly technical nature of the material they had to handle. The answer lay in finding native speakers of Russian, and a large number of them, quickly. Yet to station such a team in Vienna would attract unwelcome attention and pose an unacceptable security risk. So SIS decided to relocate this side of the operation to London.
The Broadway headquarters already housed a small unit, known as ‘N’, which squeezed out intelligence from the conversations of foreign diplomats whose phones were being tapped by MI5. But the section’s tiny space could not be enlarged and was staffed by elderly linguists who Were unable to cope with the heavy and constant flow of material from Vienna. SIS therefore created a new and more important section, known as ‘Y’. The Lunn operation was growing faster and larger than anyone had ever imagined.
4
Black Friday
While the eavesdroppers pursued their clandestine tasks beneath the streets of Vienna, Cold War shadows rapidly darkened the landscape above. Stalin’s blockade of Berlin sparked a major war scare. Fears of a surprise Red Army attack in Europe gripped Washington, where bitter and traumatic memories of Pearl Harbor remained fresh.
The CIA had just been created. Hurriedly cobbled together from the remnants of such wartime agencies as ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), it had not yet moved into its now famous headquarters at Langley, Virginia. That was to happen only a decade later, during the great Cold War crises over the Berlin Wall and Cuba. Instead, its burgeoning army of Cold War pioneers found themselves housed in offices scattered around in downtown Washington, many of them prefabricated huts hurriedly thrown up after Pearl Harbor along the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
Despite its later focus on covert operations, the agency’s main function was to provide early warning of enemy action. ‘I don’t care what it does’, declared George C. Marshall, the Secretary of State, ‘all I want from them is twenty-four hours notice of a Soviet attack.’ The CIA came out of the 1948 Berlin blockade with its reputation enhanced. Unlike General Lucius D. Clay, the commander of American forces in Germany, who was convinced the blockade heralded an imminent Soviet invasion, it asserted correctly that the Red Army was not ready to march.1
The end of the blockade did little to assuage fears. Throughout Eastern Europe, helped by the KGB and accompanied by purges, show trials and the mass imprisonment of dissenters, Stalin’s puppets tightened their grip. The creation of two rival German states turned Berlin, the one remaining gap in the Iron Curtain, into an El Dorado for the intelligence services of all sides. In 1949 the Sovi
ets successfully detonated an atomic bomb, while China fell to Mao Tse-tung’s communists. The next year Korea exploded into a hot war and set off a spiralling arms race.
In Washington, London and Moscow intelligence chiefs were briefed urgently to make warning of a surprise attack their top priority. ‘Preventing the worst was the most important job for us’, recalled Markus Wolf, head of East Germany’s foreign intelligence army during most of the Cold War. He described his task many years later as being ‘to prevent surprises, above all military surprises. That was the main job.’ To motivate his forces he even personally wrote the German lyrics of one of the Stasi’s inspirational songs – a Russian import – ‘The Soldiers of the Invisible Front’.2
Germany was the main battleground of this new war. Here British intelligence officers also felt the heat. At this time the largest SIS base in Europe was at Bad Salzuflen, a spa town in the British-occupied zone of Germany roughly half-way between Osnabrück and Hanover. Anthony Cavendish began his intelligence career there. ‘We lived with an ever-present threat that the Red Army could overrun us within forty-eight hours if the rumours of war became a reality’, he recalled. The Bad Salzuflen base controlled networks of agents throughout the garrison towns of East Germany, with orders to report any signs of a Soviet build-up. Watchers on the East German railway system recorded the numbers of flatbed railcars they spotted, which might be used for transporting tanks. Agents on the Polish and Russian borders noted the movements of Soviet military vehicles, wrote down the numbers painted on the sides of tanks, and transmitted the information back to SIS on bulky Second World War vintage wireless sets.3
All was grist to the mill of analysts in London struggling to sketch a picture of Soviet military capabilities in Eastern Europe. But they were floundering. This was made graphically clear to a young navy scientist attached to the Marconi Company, named Peter Wright. One dismal spring day in 1949, as the rain drummed down on the tin roof of his prefabricated laboratory in Essex, he was summoned to an urgent meeting in Whitehall. Waiting for him, along with scientists from the laboratories of other services, was Freddie Brundrett, the chief scientist at the Ministry of Defence.
‘Gentlemen,’ declared Brundrett when they were all seated, ‘it is quite clear that we are now in the midst of war.’ Events in Berlin had made a profound impact on defence thinking. But the war they faced, stressed Brundrett, would not be fought by soldiers – at least not in the short term – but by spies. Yet here the situation was far from promising. It had become virtually impossible to run agents successfully behind the Iron Curtain and there was a serious lack of intelligence about Soviet intentions. To fill the gap, technical and scientific initiatives were urgently needed.
Thus was Peter Wright – later to become infamous for his best-selling memoir Spycatcher – recruited into MI5 as its first research scientist. His top priority was to develop ‘new techniques of eavesdropping that did not require entry to premises’. As he left the meeting, another government scientist came up and introduced himself. It was John Taylor, the telephone-tapping expert from Dollis Hill, who was already deeply involved in the Vienna tunnel operations. ‘We’ll be working together on this’, he said, ‘I’ll be in touch next week.’4
*
The same Cold War pressure led to President Harry Truman’s decision early in 1950 to order a wide-ranging review by the National Security Council (NSC) of American strategy and the world scene. The result was an apocalyptic report numbered NSC–68, which declared that America was ‘mortally challenged’ by a Soviet Union that was animated by a fanatical faith which would impose itself on the world unless deterred by a massive build-up of American arms. In addition, the enemy should be weakened from within by an intensified campaign of covert economic, political and pyschological warfare.
This was a key document in the Cold War. Adopted by Truman, it provided the guiding light for American policy towards Moscow for the next decade. Soon afterwards, Field Marshal Sir William Slim, the renowned wartime commander of Britain’s Fourteenth (and ‘forgotten’) Army in Burma, and now Chief of the Imperial General Staff, returned in a sombre mood from a visit to Washington. The United States, he confessed to colleagues, was ‘convinced that war was inevitable [within] the next eighteen months’.5
NSC-68 also called for ‘the improvement and intensification of intelligence activities’ to provide warning of Soviet attack. This understatement barely masked a quiet desperation in Washington. Just five years before, American and British code-breakers had been cracking top-grade enemy ciphers and providing prime intelligence about Germany and Japan. Now they were failing abysmally to crack Soviet ciphers.
There was only one noteworthy success. The Venona project broke ciphers used by the KGB with its agents inside the United States and elsewhere during the war. The almost 3,000 messages intercepted by Venona were to reveal startling details about Soviet espionage and led to the unmasking of several communist agents. The most notorious of these were the atomic spy Julius Rosenberg and his wife, Ethel, who were sent to the electric chair in 1953 amid a chorus of worldwide condemnation.6
Venona has been described as ‘the greatest secret of the Cold War’. Yet it was a retrospective project, begun in 1944, which threw light on past rather than current Soviet activities – although it provided a vital touchstone for Western counter-intelligence in evaluating the accuracy of current intelligence acquired from Soviet defectors and other sources. ‘Unlike Ultra,’ confessed Sir Dick White, who uniquely headed both MI5 and SIS during the Cold War, ‘where we knew the inside of the German High Command, we never got inside the Russians through Venona.’7
But so far as Cold War traffic was concerned, advances were small. Ciphers used by the Soviet armed forces, police and industry yielded some results, and by 1948 American and British code-breakers were between them reading six Red Army ciphers and a number of diplomatic and naval and police ciphers.8 Much of this story remains secret even today. But documents released in September 2000 by the National Security Agency – since 1952 the principal American code-breaking service – claim that this effort was building ‘a remarkably complete picture of the Soviet national security posture’.9 If so, it still fell drastically short of what was needed. High-grade Soviet ciphers remained unbreakable. In addition, American code-breakers were plagued by frustrating inter-service rivalries between each of the armed services’ separate code-breaking agencies, a lack of resources and a serious sapping of morale.10
Then, in October 1948, catastrophe happened. A Soviet mole was working at the very heart of America’s code-breaking campaign in the army’s security agency at Arlington Hall, Virginia, a former girls’ high school just across the Potomac. His name was William Weisband. The son of Russian immigrants, he had joined the army code-breakers during the Second World War as a Russian linguist. But he had been working secretly for the KGB, where he enjoyed the code name Zhora (‘Link’). The friendly and gregarious Weisband made it his business to roam around the agency’s offices learning everything he could of its work. ‘He cultivated people who had access to sensitive information’, said one of his colleagues. ‘He used to sit near the boss’s secretary who typed everything we did of any importance.’11
Weisband met his KGB handler at a restaurant just outside Washington. On meeting days he smuggled documents out of Arlington Hall under his shirt, first during his lunch break and again at the end of the day, and hid them in the boot of his car. After a while he asked for a camera so that he did not have to carry documents. The KGB refused on the grounds that this made it more likely he would be caught. Soon after, Weisband did indeed fall under suspicion and the KGB paid him off with $1,694.00 and a permanent password for use if they ever contacted him again. They never did. Nor did Weisband confess to his treachery when confronted by the FBI. He dropped dead of a heart attack a few years later, still under suspicion.
One of the first secrets Weisband betrayed was Venona. Then he revealed allied successes against other Soviet
codes. KGB files in Moscow acknowledge that from Weisband the Soviets learned that ‘important data concerning the stationing of the USSR’s armed forces, the productive capacity of various branches of industry, and work in the field of atomic energy’ was now compromised.12 Kim Philby, Moscow’s high-placed mole in Britain’s SIS, who was briefed on Venona, did likewise. The result was that on 29 October, a Friday, the Russians executed a massive shift of their cryptographic systems. Newly released NSA documents reveal that all high-level Soviet radio networks, including mainline military nets, were changed to the unbreakable onetime pad system. All Soviet ciphers being read by the Americans and British were taken off-air. They also changed their standard radio-operating procedures to make Western interception far more difficult.
Then, over the next few months, Moscow carried out another major change that blinded the West even further. They shifted as many of their signals as they could from wireless to landlines, both above and below ground, which were considered far more secure. Dismayed, allied code-breakers on both sides of the Atlantic lumped these disasters together under the designation ‘Black Friday’. In the words of a National Security Agency history, it was ‘perhaps the most significant intelligence loss in U. S. History’.13 The same could be said for Britain. NSA and GCHQ worked in tandem. Throughout this period an American Venona expert, Joan Callahan, was working alongside British colleagues at Government Communications Headquarters, the peacetime successor to Bletchley Park. Meredith Gardner, the guiding genius of the Venona project, succeeded her.
Spies Beneath Berlin Page 5
