By some kind of perverse justice – or injustice – George Blake was removed from his job with Section Y and posted in West Berlin, arriving on 14 April 1955. In a historically delicious irony, his new appointment carried the priority task of recruiting Soviet military and civilian personnel as double agents, and, with it, license to pose as a double agent himself. Blake was officially empowered to pass low-level information and misinformation to his Soviet recruitment targets, in order to bolster his credibility. This licence both served as perfect cover for his own treachery, and brought with it the danger of a slip-up that could result in his unmasking. The double agent known to both his paymasters as a double agent: but only in his fullness by one of them. Truly, this was the stuff of spy fiction. Blake concentrated his efforts on KGB and GRU officers based in the Soviet Karlshorst Headquarters, source of the communication cables tapped through the Berlin tunnel project. One imagines he had little by way of spare time.
In Berlin, Blake continued to collect and pass secrets to his designated KGB contact. These secrets would no longer include reports on the progress of the tunnel, for he was not one of the few who were privy to such information. Blake relentlessly sought out and photographed other intelligence from within the MI6 station, using a Minox ‘spy’ camera. This was particularly dangerous because he shared an office with a colleague. He later confessed that he tried to take great care over this but on occasion took risks that could have been disastrous for him.
Blake, unlike most of the staff at MI6’s West Berlin station, was allowed to cross the border into East Berlin. He and his wife, Gillian, were regular shoppers at the large East Berlin branch of the Kaufhaus store, where he would hand over the film cassettes from his Minox camera to a member of staff who doubled as his Soviet contact.
The secrets passed over included details of German agents who had been recruited by MI6 as well as information about everyone working at MI6’s West Berlin station. This, of course, included the Chisholms.
It was Blake who first betrayed Lieutenant-Colonel Pyotr Popov, a GRU officer who had been spying for the CIA for several years before he was posted to East Berlin from Vienna. His CIA case officer in Vienna had been George Kisevalter, who was later one of the four case officers for Oleg Penkovsky.
Popov had no CIA contact when he arrived in East Berlin, so he wrote a letter to Kisevalter and gave it to a member of a British military mission visiting East Berlin, asking him to see that it got to the CIA station in Vienna. The letter arrived on Blake’s desk. Blake photographed it before passing it to an acquaintance at the CIA’s West Berlin station for onward transmission.
In all, Blake was to betray more than 400 undercover agents, forty-two of whom were killed by the KGB, the Stasi, or other Soviet or satellite country agencies.
Thinking of Dominik Stecher, our hypothetical agent run by Chisholm: he would have been betrayed by Blake and, in all likelihood, killed either by the KGB or Wolf’s HVA arm of the Stasi. There was no thought or compassion for Stecher’s young family or elderly parents. That was one of the risks of becoming involved in espionage.
In spite of all of Blake’s dangerous and time-consuming work for his Soviet masters he performed his legitimate work to a standard that prompted Peter Lunn, the head of the station, to tell a visiting colleague that Blake was one of his best officers.
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Bill Harvey, as head of the CIA’s Berlin base, took an overall interest in Berlin’s maelstrom of espionage activity, as did Peter Lunn, his opposite number in the MI6 station. But both were preoccupied with the building of the tunnel as it moved into its final and most critical stage.
On 11 May 1955, John Wyke, MI6’s chief technical communications engineer, led his small team of British technicians along the completed tunnel to where the three Soviet telephone and signals communications cables stood exposed. A neat and impressive array of coloured wires, connectors and signal boosters had been installed in the chamber during the previous three weeks, along with a microphone to detect any sounds of possible human interference. The team conducted a final examination of this facility before reaching up to remove the bottom and one side of the boxed area that housed the Soviet cables.
They knew the cables would be pressurised with nitrogen to keep them dry and that a cable monitoring system would detect any loss of pressure. A short blip on the monitor would probably go unnoticed or be ignored, but accidental damage to the circuits would be a disaster. The taps onto the cables had to be made and the joins resealed with the precision of a surgeon and the speed of a grand prix pit team changing the wheels of a racing car. The team had practised this operation repeatedly in England in a mocked-up version of the chamber.
A room in the bogus store at the beginning of the tunnel contained hundreds of signal-activated tape recorders. David Stafford records that ‘the three cables being tapped carried some 1,200 communications channels, with the maximum number of channels being used at any one time amounting to 500. On average, twenty-eight telegraphic and 121 telephone circuits were continuously recorded on Ampex tape recorders, using about 50,000 reels of magnetic tape.’†
There were cheers from everyone in the tape-recorder room when each bank of recorders burst into life as the experts connected the taps at the other end of the tunnel.
The technical success of the taps exceeded expectations, soon amassing a staggering amount of material in need of analysis. Over the next eleven months, more than 30,000 two-hour reels of voice recordings – two-thirds of them in Russian and the rest in German – were sent to London where a team of more than 200 exiles – mostly Russian-speaking Poles from the Polish Resettlement Corps – transcribed and translated them. MI6’s Section Y were busy enough with the Vienna tapes, so a new operation was set up in a similar Georgian building, this time in Chester Terrace overlooking Regent’s Park. This arrangement also satisfied security worries about too many people having knowledge of the operations in both Vienna and Berlin.
Telegraphic and coded signals were sent to Washington for deciphering and analysis. The CIA’s team of 350 people were secretly housed in a prefabricated building in Washington Mall. They worked in shifts around the clock. In all, they transcribed 20,000 six-hour teletype reels, most of them in Russian and the rest in German. A surprisingly large number of the conversations recorded were not coded. The cyphered signals were sent to the National Security Agency for deciphering.
‡
Shortly after the tunnel became operational the Chisholms returned to London. Ruari was assigned to the East European and Soviet section in MI6’s headquarters office in Broadway Buildings, near to St James’s Park Underground Station.
† David Stafford, ‘Chapter 11’, Spies Beneath Berlin (London: John Murray, 2003).