Berlin was important to Serov. He had spent two fruitful years there, leading his SMERSH team, at the end of WWII. He had, among many other things, established the East German secret police: the Stasi. Now, in the mid-1950s, Berlin was the hub of the espionage world and a politico–military gunpowder keg in East–West relations. It was natural for him to consult regularly there with Lieutenant-General Yevgeny Pitovaranov, the head of the large KGB unit at Karlshorst. He also needed to liaise with the Stasi’s brilliant Markus Wolf.
The existence of the Berlin tunnel must have perplexed Serov. The thought of all those secrets about Soviet military strength, disposition and strategies being picked up by the West was ideologically repellent to him. His Stalinist inclination was to destroy the tunnel at the earliest possible moment and use its existence as an excuse to take some kind of revenge on the Americans. (Although the Soviets knew about the British involvement in the tunnel they chose to ignore it.) He knew, also, that Khrushchev wanted the tunnel to be discovered and a big song-and-dance made about it. The ‘Secret Speech’ had weakened Khrushchev in the eyes of the satellite countries and he needed a moral or political victory over the West, or at least the perception of one.
At the same time, Serov was well aware of the need to protect Blake. He had demonstrated this from the very beginning when, in September 1953, he purposefully withheld from the Soviet Defence Minister details about the Vienna tunnels that Blake had given to Kondrashev. But Blake was now in West Berlin, where his work was not even remotely connected with the tunnel. It was highly unlikely, therefore, that its ‘discovery’ would light a path to Blake’s doorstep.
Sergei Kondrashev – Blake’s controller in London – had returned to Moscow and was now serving as head of the German section of the Counterintelligence Department of the KGB, which gave him responsibility for the tunnel. He urged Serov to be patient until they could concoct a suitable circumstance that would not cause suspicion.
That moment came in the spring of 1956. The end of the winter had been particularly wet and the rising water table was damaging some of the telephone cables, underground junction boxes and repeater stations.
A few months earlier, Serov had sent a team of communications technical specialists to Karlshorst with the underlying purpose of ‘finding’ the tunnel and dealing with its contents when the time was ripe. They were under the leadership of Vadim Goncharev who gave orders to tighten the communications security of Soviet forces in Berlin, including the inspection of cables. He was not told specifically about the tunnel, but part of his brief was to check for possible tapping of cables. Goncharev and his team worked diligently throughout the late winter and eventually discovered the existence of the tunnel. He told the KGB’s General Pitovaranov – who already knew about the tunnel, the taps and the need to protect Blake – and Pitovaranov instructed him not to take any action without direct orders from Moscow.
‡
The store complex that housed the beginning of the tunnel incorporated an observation room from which there were continuous day and night watches along the busy Schönefelder Chaussee to the spot directly above the tap chamber.
Shortly after midnight on the night of 21/22 April 1956 the duty officer saw some trucks stopping near the tap area, and disgorging nearly fifty men. It was Goncharev’s team, though only Goncharev knew what they would find. It would look much better if the team, led by Captain Bartash, showed natural incredulity over the discovery.
Bill Harvey was the first to be called. He pulled on some clothes, called Hugh Montgomery – who would be needed as an interpreter – and rushed to Rudow to take control of the unfolding events.
Montgomery listened in to telephone conversations on the tapped lines to detect any evidence that the taps had been discovered. He also listened to the noises, and eventually the voices, picked up by the microphone in the tap chamber.
For a variety of reasons, it took an eternity for the Soviet team – now helped by East German engineers – to understand the enormity of what they had found. At first they thought they were simply looking for a fault caused by flooded cables. The cables, assumed at first to be standard equipment reaching down to relay equipment, aroused no initial suspicion. When it became clear that the cables were tapped, work ceased as engineers awaited orders based on this discovery. When orders were sent to remove the taps, it was natural to assume they might have been booby-trapped, thus work proceeded gingerly as the crew made the first hole in the frame of the tap chamber, uncovering the door leading to the pre-amplification chamber. So strong was this door that it necessitated an attack on the neighbouring wall with drills and pickaxes to break into the room. Only when that hole was large enough to allow a person through did they discover the tunnel that led all the way to the American sector.
In all, Captain Bartash and his men took fourteen hours to get to the tunnel from the time the trucks originally arrived in Schönefelder Chaussee. As they progressed to the tap chamber, into the pre-amplifier chamber and eventually into the tunnel, Harvey and Montgomery listened to the exclamations of astonishment picked up by the microphone which, surprisingly, the Soviets failed to disconnect until the exercise was all but complete.
At one point Harvey sent a message to General Charles Dasher, the US commander in Berlin, asking for permission to detonate charges that had been laid in the tunnel. The answer was negative, on the grounds that if any Soviets were killed ‘it could start World War III’. Instead, a three-quarter height wall of sandbags was built at the border point between the American and Soviet sectors and a handwritten notice placed on it saying – in German and Russian – ‘You are now entering the American Sector’. Harvey sat behind this wall with an unloaded heavy machine gun (again, to reduce the risk of casualties and retribution). When the first of the Soviets ventured along the tunnel, Harvey pulled the bolt noisily and the Soviets retreated.
‡
Although the team working under Captain Bartash did not know what to expect when they started to investigate the ‘flooded cables’, KGB leader General Pitovaranov back in Karlshorst did know and had made appropriate preparations. Shortly after the operation got under way he sent a photographer to record everything as it happened.
The CIA assumed the Soviets would not wish to publicise the West’s espionage prowess as manifested by the tunnel. They were quite mistaken. A few hours after the discovery of the tunnel, the Soviet Ambassador in East Berlin delivered a strongly worded protest to the Americans.
Two days later, the Soviets invited the world press to inspect and photograph the site so that they could report on the devious treachery of the Americans. In spite of ample evidence – such as the manufacturers’ name plates – that most of the equipment in the tunnel was British, the Soviets never once mentioned British involvement. This was, in all probability, because Khrushchev and Bulganin were on an enjoyable and successful visit to the United Kingdom at the time the tunnel was discovered.
Unfortunately for the Soviet and East German authorities, the Western media did not see the tunnel as an insulting act of espionage but hailed it as an outrageously brilliant and successful US project. The British government was happy to keep a low profile, allowing the Americans to handle the propaganda aspects and to take all of the glory and any brickbats that came out of it. Peter Lunn did, however, call the whole of his MI6 West Berlin station staff together, told them about the part the British had played, and said how proud he was about this successful joint venture with the Americans.
There was massive television coverage and front page headlines throughout the world, as East and West exchanged claim and counterclaim in a noisy propaganda battle.
Behind the scenes there was considerable embarrassment and annoyance on the Allied side that the tunnel had been discovered. Bill Harvey was beside himself with anger for weeks.
After the best joint efforts of the world’s pre-eminent Western intelligence agencies, the tapping of Soviet communications had remained operative for eleven months and eleven days. Impressive as the technical ‘triumphs’ involved must have seemed, they had not proven durable.
The KGB had been clever with their timing of the ‘discovery’ (and were also fortunate that there had been so much rain at the time). The Americans and the British set up a commission to study why the cable had been discovered and concluded, unanimously, that it was a technical fault in the line caused by the heavy rain. Sabotage – and thus Blake – was never suspected.
Blake passed all of this and much more to Kondrashev in Moscow through dead-letter drops and direct contact with several agents during his now frequent trips into East Berlin. Throughout his four years in Berlin he passed so many secrets to the KGB that he virtually destroyed the effectiveness of MI6’s activities in Eastern Europe during that time.
It was he who, in 1959, exposed Pyotr Semyonovich Popov as a CIA informant from within the GRU. Popov was executed by the Soviets in 1960.
For all the pros and cons of the Western Allies successfully tapping the communications lines, and of the calculated Soviets response not to prevent it, it is perhaps fitting that neither side appears to have benefited or suffered unduly by the existence of the tunnel. Most of the 40,000 hours of recorded voice transmissions were composed mostly of dreary office gossip with occasional juicy allegations of infidelity among the army officer classes. The 6 million hours of telegraphic and coded signals were certainly classified confidential or secret. They contained some useful but limited information about Soviet orders of battle, force dispositions and the latest developments in Soviet atomic research. Ultimately, however, none of this turned out to be of great strategic importance, in part because of the delays inherent to processing such an immense volume of information. The processing, indeed, was not completed until two years after the tunnel’s exposure. There was no evidence of any serious attempt by the Soviets to plant disinformation through the taps.
However, the existence and planned discovery of the tunnel undoubtedly brought espionage to the front line of the Cold War battlefield. In the end, it would be the outcome of the espionage battles that proved decisive in preventing nuclear war and ending the Cold War.
It is likely that both Khrushchev and Serov were frustrated by the outcome of the ‘discovery’ of the tunnel. It had not been the out-and-out propaganda success for which they had hoped. Khrushchev chose not to mention it in his memoirs. Serov was hurt by the CIA’s gloating over their success in tapping secret Soviet communications for nearly a year. It was another step along the way to his hatred of America as the warmongering, capitalist enemy of the people.