Spies Beneath Berlin

by David Stafford

  Alarm bells rang. It seemed to Harvey’s team that there were three possible courses of action: they could abandon the project altogether; they could construct the tunnel at a shallower depth; or they could cut through the clay into the sand below and then build the tunnel at a depth that would still be above the real water table. The problem with this idea was twofold. First, nobody could know when the perched clay table ended, and they ran the risk of finding water suddenly and catastrophically cascading into the tunnel from above. And second, if the table extended all the way to the spot where the tap was to take place, they would have to dig vertically up through the clay. Again they would face the problem of water rushing into the excavation.

  To abandon the project was inconceivable. First of all, it simply wasn’t Harvey’s style. ‘He wouldn’t have allowed a little thing like that to stop him’, stressed Montgomery. Besides, the stakes were far too high and the political pressure on the CIA was now intense. In the White House the outwardly placid Eisenhower was clamouring for every shred of intelligence about Soviet intentions and complained bitterly at American failure to deliver it. The Soviet testing of a hydrogen bomb the year before had taken Washington by surprise and deeply dismayed the President. The May Day parade in Moscow just months before unveiled a new heavy Soviet bomber, the Bison, in numbers not predicted by the CIA. ‘Our relative position in intelligence’, complained the President, ‘could scarcely have been worse.’

  Even as bulldozers were clearing the tunnel site at Rudow, Eisenhower appointed James Killian, the head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to chair a top secret commission tasked with increasing American capacity ‘to get more positive intelligence about the enemy’s intentions and capabilities’ – otherwise known as the Surprise Attack Panel. Then, in the same month that the tunnel engineers hit the water table, Lieutenant-General James Doolittle submitted a hard-hitting report to the President.

  Its background lay in a duel between Dulles and the rabble-rousing anti-communist witch-hunter Senator Joseph McCarthy. After targeting the State Department for hidden communists he now had his eyes on the CIA. Victory had gone to Dulles in the first round, when he refused to allow his officers to appear before Congress and threatened to resign unless McCarthy was called off. But to head off more attacks Eisenhower had agreed to the Doolittle inquiry. Its conclusion was blunt.

  The acquisition and proper evaluation of adequate and reliable intelligence on the capabilities and intentions of Soviet Russia is today’s most important military and political requirement … We are facing an implacable enemy … There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us.

  Every possible scientific and technical approach to intelligence must be adopted, Doolittle concluded, since the Iron Curtain states made old-fashioned espionage prohibitive in terms of dollars and human lives.

  Eisenhower agreed. Soon afterwards the National Security Council issued a directive, NSC 5412, authorizing Dulles and the CIA to proceed as recommended. Dulles knew he could count on Eisenhower’s support, but only so long as he delivered.3 ‘The President’, writes his biographer, ‘intended to fight the Communists just as he had fought the Nazis, on every battle-front, with every available weapon.’4 One of the most important was the CIA. Its future, and that of Allen Dulles, depended on just such projects as Stopwatch/Gold. Backing down because of an unexpected technical hitch just was not possible.

  In London, SIS was coming under similar pressure. Churchill was his usual impatient self in demanding instant information from his Minister of Defence about Soviet strength. And as the tunnel engineers were scratching their heads over the water problem, the Joint Intelligence Committee, sitting in its third floor office in the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, was debating the likelihood of a ‘bolt from the blue’, as they called it. Although they eventually dismissed the prospect, British intelligence chiefs stressed how vital early warning intelligence still remained. Miscalculation by one side or another during a period of heightened political tension provided the most likely scenario for war. For that reason, they urged, ‘we must be able to watch and analyse military moves and to relate them to the political temperature’.5

  With Berlin still firmly at the epicentre of the Cold War standoff, the signal was clear to SIS in general and Lunn in particular. The tunnel must be driven forward at any cost.

  *

  Harvey and his team explored all the options while British engineers flew in to give their own advice. In early October they decided to go with the second option: to dig the tunnel immediately above the clay level and the perched water table. The tunnel would only be about 9 feet below ground, so they would have to ensure no construction noise reached the surface. They would also install extra water pumps and raise the crucial communications cables well above the tunnel floor. If at any point along the line of construction the clay level fell, they would follow it down. If it rose to the point that construction was becoming too shallow, they would cut through the clay and use heavy pumping equipment to deal with the drainage problems.

  The team began digging again on 11 October and the next day manoeuvred the steel shield into place at a depth of 16 feet. After all the pessimism, an ebullient Harvey reported to CIA headquarters in Frankfurt that the horizontal section of the tunnel should be completed by the end of January 1955. He was only a month too optimistic. The job was actually finished on 28 February. By this time the army engineers had been tunnelling for exactly 1,476 feet, roughly the length of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool in Washington DC. Over 3,000 tons of soil had been excavated, every pound of which was carefully piled up in the warehouse basement.

  As the engineers proceeded, they lined the tunnel with sandbags to help muffle the noise, increase insulation and provide a shelf for the power and signal cables as well as air-conditioning ducts. The bags also had the side benefit of cutting down on the amount of sand that had to be hauled back to the warehouse basement. To help in this tedious task a converted electric forklift truck which ran along a wooden track was brought in to pull a string of rubber-tyred trailers backwards and forwards. Wood for the floor and track came from the disassembled containers used to transport the steel rings to Berlin. To the toiling men sweating at the tunnel face, ducts delivered cool air from an air conditioning unit in the warehouse.

  A converted forklift truck in action. Sandbags down the sides of the tunnel helped

  The beaming SIS officer John Wyke (right) takes a welcome break with Royal Engineers during the digging of the vertical shaft

  Harvey visited the site regularly. But as a known CIA officer he always did so at night, after taking all the usual security measures to ensure he was not followed. One evening he took along Major-General Ben Harrell, the Army’s chief of staff in Berlin. ‘Harvey and I drove way across Berlin and went into a parking area and changed cars’, recalled Harrell. ‘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 smelling of alcohol, Harrell lamely replied that he’d been out with Bill Harvey on business.6

  Digging was indeed dirty business. To the outside world the engineers were signals specialists and so they could not afford to be seen in dirty fatigues. Harvey therefore had a washer and dryer installed on site. This proved an extra bonus during one memorably nasty moment. Soon after digging began the engineers uncovered an old cesspit. ‘We were almost literally up to our knees in the stuff,’ recalled Montgomery, ‘it stank and almost gassed the engineers.’7

  Completion of the tunnel early in 1955 di
d not mean the job was finished. The tap chamber itself now had to be built. This meant digging vertically upwards into the soft and sandy soil. What would keep everything from collapsing on top of them? Here the British took over. The task was assigned to a special Royal Engineers’ unit known as No. 1 Specialist Team RE, formed under the general direction of SIS’s John Wyke and commanded by a major who had been commissioned into the army in 1943. They first met up as a group at Aldershot in the late summer of 1953. As he met the others, one of them was puzzled at why he had been suddenly summoned back from leave. Four of them were tunnellers flown in from Gibraltar, two were carpenters, and there were a couple of sheet metalworkers as well. Mystery surrounded the enterprise, and none of them was told what it was all about.

  Down the rough wooden track in the centre of the tunnel ran a converted electric forklift truck on rubber tyres that removed the soil and brought in heavy equipment

  Only two feet below the surface of the Schönefelder Chaussee, the tap chamber is being dug; horizontal removable slats hold back the sandy soil which hampered the excavation. Here the camera is looking vertically up ‘The Mole’

  For over a year, concealed inside a fenced-off compound within a cratered demolition pit at Longmoor Camp in England, and then briefly at the Invicta barracks at Maidstone in Kent, the ten-man team practised how to excavate upwards to within two feet of the surface, in sandy soil, without either disturbing the surface or suffering a collapse. It was all trial and error. They had little to go on, except for Wyke’s infectious optimism and enthusiasm and a military pamphlet from 1920 explaining tunnelling techniques used along the Western Front during the First World War.

  Eventually, after several false starts, they found the solution by creating a device they nicknamed ‘The Mole’. This was a 6 feet × 2 feet bottomless steel box 3 feet high, the top of which was made up of a series of lateral cutters interspersed with closable vanes. ‘It combined some of the features of a barbecue grill with those of a Venetian blind’, explained one of them. ‘Soil was loosened an inch or two at a time above the Mole by scraping through the grill and the Mole was then jacked up hydraulically until the grill again came to bear. The process was then repeated … Finally, one side of the Mole could be detached from inside and slid down so that the tap chamber could be developed from within the Mole once it had reached the required height.’ Meanwhile, John Wyke and the major in charge flew out to New Mexico to compare notes with the American tunnellers, who in turn sent people to Longmoor ‘to see’, explained one of the British team, ‘if we could really do what we said we could’.

  Experiments in Britain continued until the summer of 1954. Then the team flew out to Berlin’s Gatow airfield. Here, hidden deep at the bottom of a bunker, they perfected their technique in the treacherously sandy soil of the divided German capital. After several more months the decisive moment arrived. Only then, on the eve of the operation, did they learn what it was all about. In early March 1955, under cover of darkness, the team and the Mole were transported in closed American army trucks from Gatow to the warehouse at Rudow.

  Here they adopted the cover of being Americans. ‘We were given crew cuts, wore American army uniforms, and everything, food and beer and so on, was all American,’ recalled one of them. The cover was so effective that when Les Sparks, the Dollis Hill jointer, arrived to do his work on the cables he believed that all the tunnel work including the shaft had been done by Americans. Occasionally the Engineers were given leave to go out into the city, but only in civilian clothes. This led to at least one potentially serious security breach, when a junior member of the team became seriously involved with a German woman. Afraid that the liaison might jeopardize the secret, Wyke had the man sent immediately back to Britain.

  On 10 March 1955 the team started digging the vertical shaft up towards the Soviet cables. Everyone took turns, two at a time, sitting in the Mole and scraping away at the sandy soil. Every few inches, as the gap above it grew larger, the Mole would be jacked up flush to the surface. Accomplishing this had proved easier in theory than it did in practice. It had taken them weeks of experimenting with ways of quietly and gently raising the Mole, none of which had quite worked out. Frustration was reaching boiling-point when ‘Taffy’ Lewis, the unit’s Volkswagen driver, suddenly hit on the solution. ‘How about using the jack in the boot of the car?’ he asked, ‘let’s try that.’ The Volkswagen jack – or four of them, to be exact, one for each corner of the Mole – turned out to be the most important tool for the job, a small but crucial German contribution to the operation.

  After the long months of preparation, reaching the cables proved anti-climactic. ‘Things went unnervingly to plan,’ recalled the team’s leader, ‘and no unexpected problems were encountered.’ The greatest anxiety came during the final phase as they constructed the tap chamber, scraping their way forward inch by inch to find their target. How good had the calculations been? Was the tunnel on target? In the end, all they had had to help them locate the cables was an old 1938 Berlin Post Office map. The final step took them three days, scraping gently forwards through the soft earth, until the three Soviet cables emerged at almost exactly the expected depth below the roof of the chamber. ‘Well’, whispered the major quietly, with triumph in his voice, ‘this is it.’ They could not have done it better.

  The Forward Operations Chamber with its pre-amplifiers. The Russians were flabbergasted at the sight when they descended the tunnel

  By now the Engineers were toiling away so close to the surface that anyone walking overhead with hobnailed boots was clearly audible, and whenever an East German patrol passed overhead they had to stop work. The whole job had taken them about three weeks. ‘It may not have been a very elegant performance,’ said the major proudly, ‘but it worked.’

  Yet another problem now threatened the project. A build-up of moisture endangered the sophisticated electronic tapping equipment that had to be installed. To guard against it, the engineers insulated the section of the tunnel immediately adjacent to the tap chamber with marine-type plywood to form a closed room and erected vapour barriers. In addition, they erected a heavy anti-personnel door of steel and concrete to seal off the tunnel some 15 yards from its terminal end.8

  Now the final and most sensitive part of the operation had to be installed: the tap itself. This was a physical tap, which meant first exposing the Soviet cables by stripping them of their covering and then attaching wires to draw off the signals. SIS’s moment had finally arrived. The Dollis Hill experts, drawing on the experience and skill they had honed in Vienna, triumphantly brought it off without a hitch.

  Tapping a line is a task that always teeters on the edge of disaster. It involves drawing off some degree of power from the target cable, but this can easily alert the cable users to the fact that something is wrong. The trick is to carry out what experts call a ‘high-impedance’ tap. This means drawing off as small and as unnoticeable a signal as possible, and it requires a skilled and steady hand. Difficult at the best of times, it was an almost impossible task in the dark and cramped conditions of the tunnel, where noise had to be kept to an absolute minimum.

  It was the Dollis Hill jointers Les Sparks and Arthur Loomes who cut the cables. Specially flown out in a military aircraft from Northolt airfield outside London, they were picked up at Gatow by John Wyke and driven in the back of a lorry to Rudow. Here they spent the next three to four weeks at the site, sleeping in the dormitory in the project building above and never being allowed out to visit the city.

  By the time they arrived, the tunnel had been completed and the amplifier chamber constructed. The jointers’ first job was to lay cables along the length of the tunnel, and the work was carried out by a couple of other Dollis Hill workmen. It all seemed pretty straightforward, until someone told them that the Americans had already hidden the explosives they would detonate if the tunnel was discovered. At this point they drew lots to see who would work on the cables at that spot.

  Les Sparks
was impressed by the whole scene. Often they would ride along on the converted forklift truck. ‘When we were motoring down the tunnel,’ he recalled, ‘if the Vopos got close, red lights went on and we stopped.’ The lights, strung along a wire on the roof of the tunnel, were controlled from the observation post in the project building above. This was a small, darkened room with a table, a chair, a high-powered pair of binoculars mounted on a tripod, and a battery-operated field telephone. From here, during daylight hours, a duty guard would scan the sector border keeping a daily log. Whenever he spotted East German police with their dogs approaching the tunnel, he would instantly throw an electrical switch that turned on the red lights. When this happened, anyone in the tunnel had to ‘freeze’, which meant the chance to sit down, rest and have a cigarette. Sparks was also impressed by the security. The Americans wore four different coloured armbands, he recalled, which identified exactly where each person could go once they were inside the compound.

  Finally, after the cables were laid along the tunnel, Sparks and Loomes carried out the cable taps under the personal supervision of the team leader, Blake Rymer. ‘We did the whole job in one go’, Sparks recalled, referring to each of the three separate cables in turn. ‘It took about four hours, at night.’ As there was a risk that the cables were pressurized, the jointers had to be specially careful, because any drop in pressure could be instantly detected by the Soviets. Fortunately, it turned out that they were not pressurized at all.

  But it was still a tricky operation. The jointers had to cut off the lead sheeting protecting the Soviet cables, strip them and then make and seal a new joint for the lead-away cable to the amplifiers, all without causing the slightest interruption in current that could give the game away to the Soviets. ‘The most difficult part was the plumbing’, recalled Les Sparks. ‘Because we were only just below the surface, we couldn’t use a blowlamp because of the noise it made. So some of our mates had to melt the metal used for the seal further away down the tunnel – it was okay to use blowlamps there – then hand it on to us to seal the joint.’ The work had to be done quickly, before the metal began to harden, making its shaping impossible. But even without their familiar blowlamp Sparks and Loomes triumphantly completed the job, and the taps were secured.