By 1953, eight years after the end of WWII, Berlin had become the espionage capital of the world. West Berlin, under the Allied control of France, the United States and the United Kingdom, was a highly vulnerable virtual island surrounded by East Germany and the Eastern sector of Berlin. The Eastern sector was controlled by the Soviet Union. People could, however, pass freely between the sectors with only a cursory inspection of identity papers. It would be another eight years before the Soviet Union and the East Germans built the Berlin Wall, but by then nearly three million East Germans had escaped to the West through Berlin.
For years, particularly since 1948 when the Soviet Union had blocked the rail and road routes used by the Western allies to reach West Berlin, the West’s political and military leaders had been desperate for reliable intelligence on Soviet political intentions and military strength in East Germany.† America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6) had proven unable to ascertain the strength and deployment of Soviet military power in the so-called ‘Democratic Republic’ of East Germany. This represented a serious weakness, as Berlin remained a likely flashpoint for confrontation across the Iron Curtain.
In 1951, Frank Rowlett, America’s greatest code-breaker, approached his friend Bill Harvey with the suggestion that the CIA should try to locate and tap communications cables used by the Soviet Union’s civil and military authorities. Rowlett was a highly respected, capable cryptologist who knew from wartime experience that the ability to record and analyse Soviet telephone and telegraphic traffic would reap huge dividends. He was in charge of the National Security Agency’s National Cryptographic School, while Harvey was the Chief of Staff C (counterintelligence) in the CIA’s Office of Special Operations.
William King Harvey was a striking personality and made few concessions to the expected norms of behaviour for CIA agents. Though widely respected for his dedication and success, many fellow agents found the man insufferable in person. He was rotund, unfit, uncouth and short-tempered. A heavy drinker, Harvey often downed a three martini lunch only to snooze away the afternoon at his desk. His earlier career in the FBI had come to an abrupt end owing to his drunk driving. He was prone to insubordination when he disagreed with senior officers, including Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, a man known for making snap judgements and bearing lifelong grudges. Harvey was probably best known for carrying a loaded pistol in a shoulder holster, often laying it on the table or playing with it at meetings. His darting, bulging eyes only came to rest when they stared, unblinking, at an adversary.
Astute and a fine judge of character, Harvey was the first agent to raise security concerns regarding the British traitor Kim Philby, after working alongside him at the British Embassy in Washington, while Philby served at the MI6 station. Harvey enjoyed his work as Chief of Staff C, but could not resist the challenge of a project based on Rowlett’s idea of tapping Soviet cables. He set to work on it with fierce determination.
Walter O’Brien, an accomplished recruiter, was transferred from Zurich to the CIA’s station in Berlin, known as the Berlin Operations Base (BOB), and soon had a useful group of agents, some of them inside the East German Ministry of Post and Telecommunications. He was later assisted by Hugh Montgomery, a counterintelligence expert.
Rowlett was transferred from the National Security Agency to the CIA and effectively became the Washington controller of the cable-tapping project, with responsibility for overseeing the protocols governing collection of ciphered communications by covert surveillance. He reported directly to Richard Helms, the CIA’s chief of operations.
Harvey was posted to Berlin, arriving there towards the end of 1952. Although the central reason for his posting was to lead the top-secret cable-tapping project, so few agents were aware of its existence that his appointment as chief of BOB provided both internal and external cover.
By January 1953, O’Brien and Montgomery had amassed enough comprehensive data concerning Soviet communications that Harvey was able to recommend the placement of secret permanent taps on three specific cables used by senior Soviet personnel.
Most important were the long-distance cables used by the huge Soviet military complex at Karlshorst, which housed the USSR’s Berlin garrison, the KGB’s German headquarters and some GRU units. These cables lay close to the American sector, below the busy Schönefelder Chaussee highway in the Soviet-controlled sector.
It would take a long tunnel to reach them.
The CIA’s Berlin base was subordinate to the 1,000-strong station in Frankfurt commanded by General Lucien Truscott, empowered with overall control of CIA activities throughout West Germany and Berlin. Truscott received Harvey’s assessment with enthusiasm and agreed that feasibility studies and detailed planning should proceed. Truscott appointed one of his senior officers – whom Harvey nicknamed ‘Fleetfoot’ – as his linkman with Harvey on tunnel matters. Harvey was in the habit of giving apposite or humorous nicknames to people with whom he worked. ‘Fleetfoot’ was awarded the name because of his many journeys between Frankfurt and Berlin on tunnel business.
There were, however, major practical and technical problems to resolve before submitting the proposal to the Director of Central Intelligence, and thence to the President, for approval.
Berlin’s sub-soil, much of it sandy, was a treacherous medium for tunnelling, and stood above a water table that could rise almost to the surface after a wet winter. Thus construction would be hazardous, and the practicalities of conducting the excavation in secret were a further complicating factor. One thousand two hundred feet (360 metres) of the tunnel would lie beneath Soviet territory, and spies were everywhere, monitoring American, British and French activity. The transportation and disposal of vast quantities of earth was likely to attract attention.
Once the tunnel was dug, there remained the issue of installing the hidden taps and providing amplification that would produce high quality recordings. The three cables carried over eighty speech circuits, each of which would have to be wired to an individual tape recorder. Placing the taps was an incredibly difficult task, even for the most skilled and experienced of technicians. A chamber had to be constructed below the cables to place the taps, house the pre-amplifier and other equipment necessary to boost the intercepted signals and transmit them to the tape recorders. The cables lay a mere 28 inches (70cm) below the surface of the Schönefelder Chaussee, so the erection of the chamber in precarious soil prone to being waterlogged presented an engineering challenge every bit as complex as the placement of the taps.
They considered many options before deciding to start the tunnel at Rudow in the American sector. They would erect three large buildings to be used ostensibly as military equipment storage and distribution warehouses. One of the warehouses would be deep and large enough to hold all of the excavations from the tunnel.
In Washington, Rowlett and Helms knew that the British would also be seeking to penetrate Soviet intelligence defences, and were the West’s greatest experts when it came to building such tap-tunnels, having constructed a network of three in Vienna. Lacking the technical expertise and experience of the British, Rowlett and Helms thus approached MI6 for assistance.
In the spring of 1953 O’Brien from Berlin and ‘Fleetfoot’ from Frankfurt flew to London to brief MI6 on the Berlin tunnel project. MI6 endorsed the idea and from then on it was a joint CIA/MI6 project.
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Peter Lunn arrived in Berlin in the early summer of 1953 to take up his duties as head of the MI6 station. He was delighted with this appointment because it enabled him to add to his reputation for effective work in Western Europe as head of the MI6 stations in Vienna (1948–50) and Berne (1950–53). Eton-educated and the grandson of the famous Sir Henry Lunn, founder of the Lunn Travel Agency, Peter Lunn appeared the epitome of the mild-mannered English gentleman, but his soft tones and slight lisp belied his determination and the mental and physical capacities of an international athlete. As captain of the British skiing team in the 1936 Winter Olympics, he had finished twelfth in the alpine combined skiing event, but castigated himself for attaining only a lowly fifteenth place in the slalom. He had not, he insisted, tried enough, as evidenced by the fact he had stayed on his skis and not fallen!
His resolve to make a success of the Berlin tap operation may well have been reinforced by the location of MI6’s offices in the very Olympic Stadium complex that played host to Hitler’s infamous 1936 summer Olympic Games. This time Lunn would not fail to do his very best. His 100-strong MI6 team shared these premises with other departments of the British Military Administration in Berlin.
While in Vienna in 1949 Lunn had pounced on intelligence findings concerning the location of Soviet Army telephone cables. He brought in tunnelling and cable-tapping experts to build three short tunnels in different parts of Vienna to install taps and the results were so successful that MI6 had to set up a new section – Section Y – to analyse the vast amount of information gathered. Section Y was housed in a mansion house at 2 Carlton Gardens, near Buckingham Palace and the gentlemen’s club district of St James.
Lunn’s posting to Berlin was, of course, a direct result of the CIA’s approach to MI6. Soon after he arrived in Berlin he reassembled all of his Vienna tunnel team, some of them coming directly to Berlin while others remained in England for specialist training and to design, sometimes by trial and error, prototypes for the taps and chamber. Although totally different by way of temperament and bearing, Harvey and Lunn, respective heads of the CIA and MI6 stations, established an effective working relationship and appear to have enjoyed each other’s company. Both were skilled, experienced and dedicated, sharing not just a common objective in the limited shape of the tunnel project, but the worldview of avowed and loyal cold warriors.
Piecemeal planning and liaison for the tunnel continued in Berlin, Frankfurt, London and Washington throughout the summer and autumn of 1953. Comprehensive proposals were prepared and submitted to Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, who approved them in October. Harvey and Lunn now had official sanction – and a budget – to move forwards. Regular meetings were scheduled to discuss and approve the process of building the tunnel and analysing intelligence garnered from the cable taps. The first such meeting was scheduled for 15 December 1953, to be held in MI6’s Section Y offices at 2 Carlton Gardens.
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Roderick Chisholm – always called by the Scottish Gaelic name ‘Ruari’ rather than Roderick – was one of Lunn’s best officers in Berlin. At 5ft 10in. (178cm) tall, Ruari looked strong and fit, with an easy, wide smile that incorporated bright and friendly eyes. His glasses were almost unnoticeable, seeming somehow to be a natural part of his face. His hair was light-ginger and slightly wavy, with a neat parting. He was not involved with the tunnel and, in the typical operation of strict MI6 security, did not even know of its existence until it was eventually ‘discovered’ by the Soviets.
Chisholm’s Scottish schoolmaster father had ensured he had a solid primary education and the excellent marks recorded in his school leaving certificate earned him a place in the Army Intelligence Corps in 1941 at the age of just sixteen. He spent much of the war interrogating German prisoners, thus acquiring fluency in the language. During the advance through north-western Europe, he served with a forward group of the Intelligence Corps, later assisting in the search for war criminals. His career in the Intelligence Corps continued for a few years, mostly in Hanover, before his invitation to join MI6.
Janet Deane, an MI6 secretary, was posted to Berlin at about the same time as Lunn: the early summer of 1953. She was typical of many of the young MI6 secretaries of those days. Her father, an officer in the Royal Engineers, was of aristocratic English stock. Janet was born in India in 1929 during her father’s service there, and was educated at the top-ranking independent boarding schools of Wycombe Abbey and Queen Anne’s, Caversham, in England.
She worked hard, taking her duties and security responsibilities incredibly seriously. It was a quality for which she became renowned, even in her later life when others allowed some secrets to emerge and several of her erstwhile colleagues even published details of their MI6 escapades.
But life in Berlin was not all work and no play for she was soon attracted to the charming Ruari Chisholm.
Chisholm was equally taken with the attractive, slim 24-year-old Janet who always dressed impeccably, smiled readily, and soon grew more self-assured after an understandably nervous first few weeks.
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Janet Deane’s early nerves were not due entirely to her recent arrival at her first overseas post, but to an event that tested the nerves of everyone in Berlin.
After Stalin’s death, the people of East Germany and East Berlin hoped there would be some relaxation of the Stalinist-Soviet policies imposed by Walter Ulbricht’s Communist Party of Germany (KPD). But the opposite transpired: soon there was still greater emphasis on state control of industry and the collectivisation of farming. Unhappiness with the regime’s policies and the depressed state of the economy saw ever-increasing numbers of East Germans and East Berliners fleeing to the West.
A new ruling imposing a wage freeze coupled with a 10 per cent increase in work norms was due to come into effect on 30 June and this caused the frustration to boil over. On 16 June, 300 East Berlin road workers went on strike in response to a pay cut attributed to ‘poor productivity’. News of the strike spread fast and a general strike was called for the next day.
Growing unrest overnight turned into strikes and protests in every major East German town and city. By 11 a.m., strikers in East Berlin had occupied some government buildings. Sixteen Soviet divisions, totalling some 20,000 troops, and a further 8,000 members of the National People’s Army were used to quell the uprising. Approximately 500 people were killed and over 100 executed or later condemned to death. There were more than 5,000 arrests.
The speedy, brutal and uncompromising Soviet intervention crushed the uprising, bringing home to West Berliners just how precarious their situation remained. Such Soviet actions became the customary approach of Ivan Serov, and, later, Yuri Andropov, towards dissent in any Soviet satellite country. Serov was deputy head of the GRU at the time of the Berlin uprising, which served him as a master class in the efficient, ruthless extinguishing of resistance to his master’s rule. It was a lesson he would not forget.
† The blockade was lifted in less than a year because the amazingly successful Berlin Airlift brought in ample supplies of food, fuel and other items to sustain the population.