Spies Beneath Berlin

by David Stafford

  Whatever his motivation, one night in the autumn of 1951 Blake managed to slip a note to a prison guard. Writing in Russian and addressing himself to the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang, he requested a meeting as he had something important to communicate. Six weeks later the prisoners were summoned, one by one, for an interview. When Blake took his turn he found a Russian officer behind the desk. A big, burly man with a pale complexion, he wore no socks and was shaven-headed. He reminded Blake of the film actor Erich von Stroheim. This was the KGB head in Manchuria, where Mao Tse-tung had granted them a base. He asked Blake what he had to tell, listened carefully, asked Blake to write it all down in English, then questioned him about his early life and work with SIS. Blake had crossed the Rubicon.

  It was a good eighteen months before he first met his first Russian control in the West. The meeting took place in April 1953 at the heavily guarded and isolated frontier post of Otpor, where the Trans-Siberian Express from Peking to Moscow crossed the Chinese—Soviet border. Despite Mao’s victory and a Soviet—Chinese friendship treaty, it was disfigured by minefields, electrified wires, strips of raked sand and watch-towers. Blake and his fellow prisoners were on their way home. One by one they were summoned from the train to show travel documents and fill in forms. When it came to Blake’s turn he was led into an inner office. A thick-set man aged about fifty, who spoke English well but with a marked Slav accent, was waiting. He did not introduce himself but said simply that in future he and Blake would be working together.

  Nikolai Borisovich Rodin, also known as Korovin, was a stereotypical and arrogant apparatchik. He was the main London KGB rezident and had made the journey across Russia specifically to meet the new recruit. Blake found him cold – ‘too much of the iron fist in the velvet glove’ – but he admired the skill and professionalism of this skilled agent-handler.3 Rodin came quickly to the point. How would they make contact once Blake was back in Britain? Blake immediately suggested the Netherlands, a place where he felt at home and where his instincts would tell him quickly if anything was amiss. They agreed on a date in July, with several alternatives if anything went wrong. Each would carry a copy of the previous day’s Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant as a sign that all was well. The KGB code-named Blake ‘Diomid’. Literally translated, the word means ‘Diamond’ but it also conveys the sense of ‘valuable’, ‘clear’ and ‘rare’, attributes that testify to the high value the KGB already placed on their British mole.

  Blake’s trip with his mother to Rotterdam that summer provided the perfect opportunity for a meeting in The Hague. The rendezvous was a small square built around a garden near the end of the Laan van Meerdervoort, the longest avenue in the city. Here, among children playing and adults taking gentle strolls in the summer air, they would meet. Blake found a pretext to slip away from his mother, drove his car to The Hague and parked. It was a fine day. Walking slowly and drawing on his SIS tradecraft, he checked he was not being followed. His copy of the newspaper was in his right hand. There on a bench, alone, was Rodin, also with his newspaper. Blake sat down. What had happened since his return to Britain, asked his control. ‘Diomid’ told him about his new appointment as Gimson’s deputy in Section Y and the two men agreed to meet next in London. Before they finished Blake drew Rodin’s attention to the headlines in their papers. Lavrenti Beria, the dreaded head of the KGB and Stalin’s former henchman, had been arrested in Moscow and denounced as a British agent. Rodin looked embarrassed. Blake should not take this literally, he said, he was safe. With a nervous laugh Blake assured Rodin that he had no doubt about that. After twenty minutes they parted. Blake again made certain he was not being tailed and drove back to Rotterdam on side roads.

  In fact, the newly recruited mole had had an extremely close shave. Rodin was being kept under close surveillance. An MI5 team of watchers had followed him from the Soviet embassy all the way to the Netherlands, where they handed over the task to their Dutch counterparts, but Rodin had given them the slip. They picked him up again only after he returned to the ferry to sail back to Britain. Both MI5 and the Dutch spent a lot of time trying to guess the reason for his trip but failed to come up with an answer.

  Meanwhile the man who could have told them was falling into his daily routine at Carlton Gardens, joking with the secretaries, collecting material from the wearied transcribers, earnestly discussing its Vienna content with Gimson, liaising with his insatiable customers in the War Office and returning each evening to his mother’s convenient new flat in Baron’s Court. The most important part of his life lay in his clandestine meetings after hours with his Soviet contact. Adding a special frisson to this mission was the endless office gossip about treachery. The defections of Burgess and Maclean to Moscow just two years earlier had sent shock waves through Whitehall. Only a fortnight after his arrival in Carlton Gardens Blake received an urgent message from his Broadway headquarters. Melinda Maclean, left behind by her defecting husband, had disappeared from Switzerland, where she had been staying with her mother. It was suspected, correctly, that she had joined her husband in Moscow. Perhaps she had fled across the border through Soviet-occupied Austria, in which case, Blake was ordered, he should instruct the transcribers to look for evidence in the Vienna telephone material they were processing. Nothing came of it, but the episode brought it all uncomfortably close. Mention of Maclean and Burgess always sent a chill down Blake’s spine.

  By now Moscow had decided that having Rodin as his control was far too risky for such a priceless asset as ‘Diomid’. Rodin was too well known to MI5 and their surveillance of the KGB rezident might well lead to disaster. Instead they sent an officer so far unknown to British counter-intelligence, Sergei Aleksandrovich Kondrashev. He was young and had only recently joined the foreign intelligence directorate, although he had plenty of surveillance and counter-surveillance experience. ‘One day I was called in and told I would soon be posted to London to work with a very important source’, recalled Kondrashev in a newspaper interview many years later. ‘That’s all I was told. I had never been to London and was given several months to prepare. I studied maps of the city, became acquainted with British methods of surveillance, and was then handed Blake’s personal file, which I studied very carefully.’4

  In October 1953 Kondrashev arrived in London under the cover of First Secretary for Cultural Relations. Here he busied himself with such formal tasks as arranging a tour of Britain for the celebrated Russian violinist David Oistrakh and purchasing tickets for visiting Soviet VIPs to attend sports events. To mix in with his surroundings – and undoubtedly influenced by his reading about Britain – he even wore grey flannel trousers and a blue blazer. But secretly he began plotting his contact with Blake. Even within the KGB residenz he kept this knowledge to himself. Only he knew the real identity or position of ‘Diomid’. Handling him was not easy, either, because of Moscow’s close interest and interference. ‘The pressure from Moscow was enormous’, he remembered, ‘and I was pretty tense … There was no room for mistakes.’5

  Soon afterwards Blake and Kondrashev met for the first of many clandestine encounters. ‘I left my office as usual after six’, recalled Blake, ‘and walked in a leisurely way through Soho to Oxford Street.’ Here he stopped in a café for a cup of tea, to check if he was being followed. Reassured he was not, he walked back to Charing Cross underground station and boarded a Northern Line train heading north. At the next station he jumped off just as the doors were closing, waited for the next two trains to pass, then boarded the third. At Belsize Park he waited again until the doors were about to close, then leaped off. The coast was clear and he set off by foot for the rendezvous he had agreed on three months earlier with Rodin in The Hague. As a sign that all was well he carried a newspaper in his left hand. On a quiet residential street, at the spot agreed, a man suddenly loomed out of the fog. ‘In his grey, soft felt hat and smart grey raincoat he seemed almost part of the fog’, Blake recalled. The man, too, was carrying a newspaper in his left hand. It was Kondrashev.
<
br />   Later on, in his published memoirs, Blake would claim that his contact in Belsize Park was Rodin, the man he had first met on the Sino-Soviet border. But this was a deliberate deception. At the time Blake was writing his book in Moscow the Soviet Union, and more importantly the KGB, still existed and Kondrashev was a member of the Soviet delegation in talks on human rights at a conference in Madrid. The KGB told Blake they did not wish to embarrass their political masters by having Kondrashev’s role publicly revealed at such a sensitive time.6

  George Blake (bearded), next to his former KGB controller, Sergei Kondrashev (in uniform), addresses KGB officers in Moscow a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union

  *

  At this first meeting Blake handed over to Kondrashev a written list of top secret technical operations being carried out by Section Y against the Soviet Union and explained them in more detail. They involved both telephone taps and the microphone buggings of Eastern bloc embassies in London now fully under way with Peter Wright and MI5. But by far the most important, he stressed, were the Vienna tunnel operations inaugurated by Lunn. He also discussed his need for a camera to process the hundreds of files. The two men then agreed on their next meeting place and fall-back arrangements. ‘I was impressed by [Blake’s] calmness and self-possessed manner’, recalled Kondrashev, ‘I can’t ever recall seeing him under real stress.’

  Three weeks later the KGB officer slipped Blake a Minox camera, which from now on he took into Carlton Gardens concealed in the back pocket of his trousers. He was not a natural photographer and, given his natural haste for fear of being caught, it was quite a while before he delivered anything of much use to Kondrashev. But gradually he improved his technique. The two men met every three or four weeks from now on, close to some underground stop and only after carefully following counter-surveillance techniques. At his third or fourth meeting Blake gave Kondrashev a copy of the most recent Carlton Gardens intelligence bulletin on Soviet forces in Austria. This was based on the Vienna operation. Some thirty or forty pages long, and classified ‘Most Secret’, it went regularly to the main SIS customers in Whitehall as well as to the Americans in Washington. From now on, Blake made sure that it also went to Moscow.

  Then, just before Christmas, he stumbled on a goldmine of new and dramatic information to pass on to the KGB.

  8

  Operation Stopwatch/Gold

  By now the CIA’s cable-tapping plans were in top gear. Bill Harvey arrived in Berlin in the autumn of 1952 to take personal charge. He was nominally head of the Berlin base but his real assignment, known only to himself, Rowlett and one or two others in Washington, was to spearhead the tunnel operation; from now on the tiny handful of those Americans in the know would nickname the project ‘Harvey’s Hole’. Already Walter O’Brien’s work running his agents in East Berlin and the GDR had grown considerably. To help him, Harvey brought in Hugh Montgomery, a former Office of Strategic Services counter-intelligence expert.

  Working in Austria and Germany with Richard Helms, Montgomery was a linguist who had returned to Harvard after the war to finish his degree and take up teaching. Bored by academic life, he joined the CIA in 1952 but knew nothing about the tunnel when he arrived in Berlin. Instead, Harvey asked him to work with O’Brien on expanding coverage of the East German cable system by debriefing refugees, who were arriving daily. He also learned about the ‘Numbers Girl’. He remembered that she wrote the crucial information down on small old-fashioned cards. ‘Our asset – her former boss who’d come over to the West – smuggled them out in his underwear’, he recalled later. ‘They arrived a bit crumpled and dirty and we had to smooth them out. But he never gave us her name. We worked it out from an organizational chart. “There’s one name I’ll make sure I forget” I said. And I have …’1 It was Montgomery, too, who recruited the lawyer and Russian interpreter from the East German Ministry of Post and Telecommunications.

  Eventually Harvey briefed both Montgomery and O’Brien on the tunnel, although by then O’Brien’s work was mainly done and he soon moved on. Joining Montgomery in Berlin as part of the core tunnel team were the laconic Charlie Arnold, a taciturn veteran of the Vienna operations whom Harvey instantly nicknamed ‘The Great Stoneface’, another technical expert, named Vyrl Lichleiter, and F. E. (Eddie) Kindell as the on-site chief of communications. Together with Truscott and ‘Fleetfoot’ in Frankfurt these were the only CIA men in Germany who knew about the tunnel. Harvey drilled the need for security firmly into Montgomery. ‘Bill didn’t want me going to Rudow more than necessary,’ he recalled, ‘so I used to go at night in someone else’s car or in an army jeep.’

  Security was just as tight in Washington, with everything kept on a strict need-to-know basis. Frank Rowlett moved into CIA headquarters to give overall direction. To keep in touch he frequently flew across the Atlantic for verbal briefings at the CIA offices in Frankfurt. His years of working on cipher machines had made him an incredibly fast typist. Now, bending over his typewriter, he would rattle out extensive notes as the team described their progress.2

  The taps could be done, that was clear. But what next? Harvey’s team narrowed the choice to two possible sites in Berlin. Both lay in the American sector. Eventually they opted for Rudow. Here the water table was relatively low, which meant that the tunnel could be constructed without the complication and expense of watertight construction and locks. The site was also conveniently close to the Soviet sector border, and plenty of vacant land was available. The Rudow taps also held out the promise of a rich and exciting harvest of intelligence. Here lay three cables, all carrying top-grade intelligence material.

  But there was a problem. The tunnel, more than two-thirds of which would lie beneath the Soviet sector of the city, would be 1,800 feet long and produce about 3,000 tons of the sandy soil on which Berlin was built. ‘Where do we put it?’ was a question that haunted the team for weeks. Eventually, exhausted by endless discussions, one of them facetiously suggested they dig a hole and put the soil in it.

  Mad though it sounded, the idea was perfect. Three large warehouses would be built at the site of the tunnel’s entrance. They would be disguised as emergency equipment dispersal units for the American occupation forces in the city. Plenty such buildings had sprung up since 1945. While the Soviets would doubtless be interested, they would have no idea of what was happening underground. One of the warehouses would be built with an exceptionally deep basement to store the soil from the tunnel. In each of the buildings a highly trained and hand-picked team of two officers and sixteen enlisted men would work on digging the tunnel and handling the necessary equipment.

  Harvey’s team estimated that from the beginning of construction to the placing of the first tap would take nine months. The cost, not including the building of the warehouses, would be in the region of $500,000. This proved hopelessly optimistic. In the end the bill came to over $6 million. It might have seemed possible to include this in occupation costs, which were picked up by the West German taxpayers. But if the idea ever occurred to anyone it was promptly quashed as far too risky. The amounts were huge and not easily hidden. Besides, West Germany was deeply penetrated by Soviet and Stasi intelligence. The entire operation from top to bottom had to be hermetically sealed from the Germans.

  The target date for completion was the late summer of 1954. At every stage and every level the success of the plan would rest on maximum security. Knowledge of the operation would be kept watertight. Only those specially initiated into its secret would know about it. And a special system would be put in place to deal with all communications about the project.

  Operation Stopwatch/Gold: aerial diagram of the Berlin tunnel operation;

  Operation Stopwatch/Gold: map showing Red Army dispositions in East Germany;

  Operation Stopwatch/Gold: cross-section plan of the tunnel

  By August 1953 the outline plan was in place. Rowlett flew out to the CIA base in Frankfurt for a last review with Harvey. Truscott and his top aides were
present and, after giving it his blessing, the head of CIA Germany decided that the time had finally come to take it to the very top for final approval: to the Director of the CIA himself.

  With his briar pipe, rimless glasses and white moustache, the dumpy Allen Dulles was an avuncular figure. Kenneth Strong, Eisenhower’s British wartime intelligence chief and now chairman of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Bureau, recalled that he had an ‘infectious, gusty laugh, which always seemed to enter a room with him’. He had a ready smile and relaxed, informal, manner, but the appearance was deceptive. Behind the charm lay a tough, decisive and often devious mind fascinated by what he himself termed ‘the craft of intelligence’. ‘He was a hale fellow’, recalled the novelist Louis Auchinloss, who had once worked with Dulles as a young lawyer, ‘but his laugh was humourless.’ Although he had sat in the Director’s chair only since Eisenhower’s inauguration that January, to many it seemed he had long been running things behind the scenes as the agency’s deputy director.

  Dulles was a hardened veteran of America’s intelligence wars. Chief of the OSS mission in wartime Switzerland, he made his name running a network of spies throughout Europe. Berne was a hothouse for espionage. ‘We all ate at the Bellevue Hotel’, recalled one of his staff. ‘At one table would be all the Polish agents, at another the Nazi agents, another would have all the British, another all the Americans.’3 Afterwards Dulles had flown into the ruins of post-war Berlin to establish its base there before rapidly climbing the CIA ladder. He had little time for bureaucracy and loved covert action. He was, said Strong, ‘the last of the great Intelligence officers whose stock-in-trade consisted of secrets and mysteries … [and] … the last great Romantic of Intelligence’. Dulles delighted in his reputation as a master spy and insisted that proposals for operations be submitted to him on a single sheet of paper. ‘Okay, let’s give it a try’, he would say to those which met his approval.4