The physical work of digging the Berlin tunnel started in February 1954 with the construction of a building complex designated as military equipment storage and distribution warehouses, a large part of which would be filled in with the tunnel diggings. The work was completed just over a year later, in March 1955.
But building the tunnel was only part of the espionage activities in the Berlin of 1954. It would be another six years before the East Germans and the Soviets built the Berlin Wall, so movement between East and West Berlin was still relatively easy. The migration of East Germans to West Berlin continued apace, eventually reaching a total of 3.5 million – nearly 20 per cent of the East German population – before the erection of the Wall. Thus it was simplicity itself for Soviet and East German secret agents to infiltrate West Berlin.
The intellectually brilliant spymaster Markus Wolf – tall, handsome and ruthless – was in charge of the Stasi side of these operations. His Jewish-Communist parents had fled from Hitler’s Germany in 1932 when Markus was just nine years old. They eventually settled in Moscow and Markus became a notable young Communist while still at school. After the war they moved back to what had become East Berlin, and Markus found a job with Berlin Radio. His main task was to report on the trials at Nuremburg of Nazi war criminals and this strengthened his hatred of fascism and his dedication to Communism. In the early 1950s he joined the Stasi, working in the new foreign intelligence section known as the HVA (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, or General Reconnaissance Administration). In 1954, still only thirty-one, he was head of the HVA and well on the way to establishing what ultimately became an impressive and successful network of 4,000 spies.
The HVA worked within the Stasi’s operational framework, originally set out by Serov. Wolf perfected some of Serov’s concepts and became one of the greatest exponents of the use of orthodox and deviant sexual activities to ensnare and blackmail the enemy. This, together with torture and killing, made him a truly formidable opponent.
The CIA and MI6 saw and suffered the results of Wolf’s strong leadership of the HVA, yet they were unable to identify him.† They had no idea what he looked like, making it virtually impossible to target him in any kind of undercover operation. He became known in Western intelligence circles by the unimaginative label of ‘the man with no face’.
The Western agencies had to work much harder to plant agents in the Eastern sector. MI6 made their own job in this respect much harder by observing a self-imposed rule that effectively kept one hand tied behind their backs. British forces personnel and government civilian staff were allowed to enter East Berlin, where there were a few attractions surpassing those of West Berlin, such as orchestral concerts, ballet and opera, and inexpensive gramophone records of classical music. MI6 officers, on the other hand, were forbidden by their own internal regulations from entering East Berlin for fear of being discovered by the KGB or Stasi. This caused some awkward and embarrassing situations in general conversations with non-MI6 friends when they had to manufacture excuses for not crossing the border. More importantly, this internal regulation meant that virtually all of MI6’s espionage work in East Berlin had to be carried out through locally recruited agents in both East and West Berlin.
MI6 still keeps details of the work performed by its agents strictly secret. We do not know, therefore, what duties occupied Ruari Chisholm during his time in Berlin, but he or one of his colleagues would, for example, almost certainly have been trying to identify the elusive head of the HVA.
One can imagine Chisholm cultivating a young man – let us call him Dominik Stecher – who worked for the HVA.‡ Perhaps Stecher offered his services to the West for money to help support his wife and young child. Maybe he or his wife had elderly parents who refused to defect, but still needed support.
Espionage, especially where deep-cover, high-risk operations are concerned, is never a restful or simple profession. Many covert operatives live and work in circumstances that pose constant threats not only to their own lives and safety, but often those of their families. Some agents thrive in this environment, their metabolisms becoming dependent, like a cocaine or amphetamine addict’s, on the accompanying surges of adrenalin. Others, perhaps equipped with a lesser love of danger and more powerful survival instincts, must be pushed to their limits by handlers, a difficult and unenviable task.
At this time Markus Wolf’s identity would have been kept secret, even from his own low- and middle-level staff within the HVA, and Chisholm would have had to push Stecher to take considerable risks to discover the identity of the man with no face. If Stecher were caught asking too many questions, or found in corridors where he had no business, the consequences would have been dire for him.
Stecher would probably have had to meet Chisholm in West Berlin, maybe on a Saturday afternoon after he (Stecher) had finished work, increasing the danger of being caught. Chisholm would have been embarrassed about the meagre amount of money he could offer Stecher, as Lunn (the head of MI6) was renowned for being tight-fisted with the public funds at his disposal.
Janet Deane’s relationship with Ruari Chisholm flourished in the six short months since she had arrived in Berlin and they agreed to marry. It would not have been an easy decision: he was from a working-class Roman Catholic family and she was from a traditional upper-class Church of England (Protestant) family.
Nevertheless, they married at Corpus Christi Roman Catholic Church, Wokingham, Berkshire, England, on 19 June 1954. He was twenty-eight and she was twenty-five. There was a good turnout of family, friends and colleagues. The witnesses were Chisholm’s father (William Andrew Chisholm), and Deane’s father (Geoffrey Ronald Hawtrey Deane) and sister (Sylvia Deane).
Chisholm recorded his profession on the marriage certificate as ‘Foreign Office Clerical Officer’, which was either intended as a joke, or an overeager attempt to cover up his true profession. Family and friends who did not know he worked for MI6 – and the secret services strongly discourage agents from revealing their identities to even close relatives – could not possibly have believed a man of his calibre was in the most junior grade in the Foreign Office. Perhaps they had their suspicions, but thought better of giving voice to them.
† Markus Johannes ‘Mischa’ Wolf was head of the HVA for thirty-four years, spanning most of the Cold War and beyond it. He was not identified as such to Western intelligence agencies until 1978 when he was photographed by Sweden’s National Security Service during a visit to Sweden and was later identified from the photograph by Werner Stiller, an East German defector.
‡ This is an entirely hypothetical case. Dominik Stecher did not exist nor is his name a substitute for the name of any other person who did exist.