Betrayal in Berlin, page 13
“President Eisenhower did not feel that he wanted to know the specifics of all these activities,” echoed Dillon Anderson, who served as Eisenhower’s national security advisor. This included the Berlin tunnel. “I don’t think he particularly wanted to know” the elaborate details of how the CIA intended to tunnel into Soviet-held territory to tap into their communications, Anderson said. But the president was keenly interested in the end product.
On August 12, 1953, the Soviet Union successfully detonated its first hydrogen bomb, a development that left Khrushchev “bursting” with excitement, his son Sergei recalled. It was an unpleasant surprise for Eisenhower—Western intelligence had no inkling that the Soviets would achieve such destructive capability so quickly.
Briefing the president weeks later, Allen Dulles warned that “the Russians could launch an atomic attack on the United States tomorrow.” The grim news left Eisenhower wondering whether he would soon need to consider launching a first strike to preempt the Soviets. “As of now, the world is racing toward catastrophe,” he wrote gloomily in his diary. For the president, early warning from a tunnel in Berlin could make all the difference.
Similar calculations were under way in London, where Winston Churchill was impatiently demanding better intelligence about the capabilities and intentions of Soviet forces in Eastern Europe. John Sinclair, the SIS chief, briefed Churchill on the success of the Vienna tunnels, and gained the prime minister’s approval to pursue the new project in Berlin. SIS also consulted with top officials in the Foreign Office and military services. The consensus was that the tremendous amount of intelligence that could be captured was well worth the risk.
* * *
Lucian Truscott urged Dulles to allow work on the tunnel project to start as soon as possible. The general did not feel much need to show deference to Dulles; just the previous year, when then deputy director Dulles was visiting Germany and tried to laugh his way prematurely out of a meeting, Truscott barked, “Sit down!” In a note on September 16, Truscott informed the director that many preparations were needed before the first shovelful of dirt could be turned, and they needed to get cracking. “Considering the tremendous amount of time-consuming work that lies ahead of us in this undertaking, it is of the utmost importance that we begin as soon as possible,” Truscott said.
Collaboration with U.S. and British army engineers needed to be established, and an officer with tunneling experience chosen to head the project. Teams to dig the tunnel and perform the tap had to be recruited and trained. A classified contract needed to be negotiated with a private U.S. company to manufacture the liner plates and shield for the tunnel. Land for the warehouse had to be leased in Berlin. Specialized electronic and recording equipment had to be procured and assembled. Units to transcribe and translate the recordings needed to be organized. The list went on and on.
Truscott also emphasized that the project required “the highest possible degree of security” to succeed. “For this reason I am most anxious to confine knowledge of the plan to an absolute minimum,” he wrote. “In fact, it is my conviction that only those individuals who can make a specific contribution to the success of this operation should be made aware of its existence.”
Given the stakes and scale, the operation required extraordinary security, far more than the usual CIA secrecy. The agency’s own officers in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Washington, including senior officials, would be given false explanations about what was happening. “Cover stories within cover stories had to be invented to explain the presence of the specialists and the various closed doors to their fellow officers,” recalled Helms. Accordingly, Dulles ordered that “as little as possible concerning the project would be reduced to writing,” according to a later CIA history.
“It is probable,” the account added, “that few orders have been so conscientiously obeyed.”
Chapter 7
Agent Diomid
LONDON, SEPTEMBER 1953
On September 1, 1953, George Blake began work in Section Y, the secret new SIS office, housed near St. James’s Park in a gracious Georgian mansion at 2 Carlton Gardens.
Section Y had been established to exploit the promising potential of penetrating the Soviet Union by tapping its telephone landlines. Much of the material it received came from the Vienna tunnels, but there was also a hefty take from the bugging of Soviet and East European embassies, residencies, and offices across Europe.
Section Y needed a deputy who spoke good Russian, and Blake fit the bill. It was a marvelous opportunity, the SIS personnel chief told him, as Section Y was “receiving much attention from the senior members of the service.” Indeed, it was marvelous for Blake—his job would put him at the heart of many top-secret operations under way in Europe.
Section Y reflected the new importance Western spy services were giving to intelligence gathered by technical means such as electronic intercepts. SIS was investing more money in bugging and tapping operations, often working with the CIA. In the senior ranks of the service, Blake later said, there were “many who believed that the future of spying lay in the technical field and that in time the human element would become less and less important.” To some extent, Blake agreed. The remarkable output of the Vienna tunnels was testament to that. But he was confident there would always be a need for critical intelligence that could “only be obtained by the man who sits in the inner councils.”
* * *
Section Y’s location—even its existence—was a tightly held secret within SIS, to avoid tipping off the Soviets as to the vulnerability of their communications and to prevent anyone from setting up photographic surveillance of those entering the heavy green double doors at Carlton Gardens. The mansion, once home to Lord Kitchener, the British imperial military commander and colonial administrator, had a somewhat faded elegance, with its chandeliered marble entrance hall and a magnificent curving staircase with wrought-iron gilded banisters. “Nobody . . . would have guessed the skullduggery, including my own, that went on and the passions that flared up behind the stately façade of this aristocratic London town house,” Blake later said.
Section Y chief Tom Gimson, a retired Army colonel who had commanded the Irish Guards, a storied British Army regiment, was a ramrod-straight gentleman, always impeccably dressed in discreet dark pinstripes. He was known for his role at the British evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940, when he brought order to a mob of officers and men milling aimlessly on a beach under attack by German planes. With quiet authority, Gimson had commanded the men to get into parade formation and had run drills, allowing for an orderly retreat.
Now Gimson needed his skills to bring order to Section Y’s unruly band of foreign-language transcribers, which included many Russian aristocrats who had fled after the 1917 revolution as well as a contingent of former army officers from Poland—a dashing if stiff bunch. All the émigrés were prickly about their respective social rank, and any violation of etiquette could be explosive. “It was really rather wonderful to watch these old princes and princesses in action,” recalled signals officer Peter Montagnon, one of Blake’s colleagues at Section Y. “Tom was very good at keeping them soothed.”
* * *
In an office full of eccentrics, Blake fit in well. He was still suffering from the effects of his three-year captivity in Korea, and padded about the office in his socks, finding shoes too confining. Collars were similarly uncomfortable. After years of cabbage and turnips, the rich food he enjoyed during long lunches in nearby Soho restaurants made it difficult to stay awake. Back in the office, Blake would doze in a storeroom, using stationery as a pillow. The accommodating Section Y secretaries awoke him from his naps when needed and presented him with a pair of slippers.
Blake was “an amusing character” with a droll sense of humor, said Montagnon, a frequent lunch companion. “Everybody went a bit easy on George because he’d had a rough ride when he was a prisoner of war, so he didn’t do an awful lot, really,” he recalled. “But everybody liked him.” They knew about his history with the Dutch resistance and as a North Korean captive, and it put him “in good stead,” Montagnon added.
Blake was “in a quite wild and wooly state,” recalled Gillian Allan, a tall and attractive Section Y secretary. Allan, twenty, sweet-natured, and possessing a mocking wit, found him charming and darkly handsome, with his hazel-brown eyes. “I was attracted to him because he was more mature [and] interesting than any man I had met,” she later said. Blake was surprisingly carefree for someone who had endured three years of captivity in North Korea. “He took life very easily,” she said.
He made friends easily, though rarely did anyone become very close. Allan was an exception, and it was not long before their relationship bloomed into a romance. Blake became a frequent visitor at her family home in Weybridge, southwest of London, gaining the approval of Gillian’s father, Colonel Arthur Allan, an SIS Soviet expert impressed with Blake’s knowledge of Russian.
As the Section Y liaison with the military, Blake was responsible for sending reports with intelligence of interest to the War Office and the Air Ministry. His colleagues considered him very intelligent, with a bright future ahead at SIS, though they realized he had little head for the nuts and bolts of communications and intercepts. “The technical stuff wasn’t his forte at all,” said Montagon.
Blake had been at Section Y less than two weeks when he received an urgent call from the SIS counterespionage office. Melinda Maclean, the wife of Donald Maclean, the KGB spy who had fled to Moscow with Guy Burgess two years earlier, had just disappeared herself while on a visit to Switzerland. It was suspected that she had gone to Russia to join her husband. Blake was asked to look for any suspicious conversations indicating that the Soviet military had flown her to Moscow.
To Blake’s discomfort, the Burgess and Maclean affair became a frequent topic of conversation in the office. The talk of treason chilled him, he said: “It was too near the bone.”
* * *
As Blake settled into Section Y, a new face appeared at the Soviet embassy in London. Sergei Aleksandrovich Kondrashev seemed a natural for the job as first secretary for cultural relations. Unusually jovial for a Soviet diplomat, Kondrashev hobnobbed with prominent figures in the British cultural world, moving easily in diplomatic circles and attending events at prestigious clubs along with his wife, Rosa. Since arriving in London in September, Kondrashev had been busy arranging visits to England by Russian academics, scientists, ballet troupes, and musicians. When important Soviets were visiting London, he hustled about getting tickets for them to attend sporting events, concerts, and the like.
But his real assignment was something entirely different. Kondrashev was a KGB officer, sent to London to take over a promising new spy. Moscow Center had decided it was too risky to have Nikolai Rodin continue meeting with Agent Diomid, given that he had handled Maclean and Burgess and was known to MI5. It was a wise decision, considering how narrowly Blake escaped exposure when he’d met with Rodin at The Hague.
Kondrashev proved to be a good choice. The child of two clerks, he grew up in modest circumstances in Moscow. Life grew harsher after his father, serving with the Red Army in the trenches outside the capital after the Nazi invasion, died of pneumonia in 1942, when Sergei was nineteen. He showed an early affinity for foreign languages, nurtured by German-speaking neighbors in the Moscow apartment building where he lived with his mother and grandmother. His excellent German, French, and English earned him a job in 1944 with the Soviet ministry responsible for overseas cultural relations, a position that exposed him to a new world of the arts. His talent for foreign languages soon came to the attention of the KGB. Kondrashev prudently agreed to keep the service informed about his encounters with foreigners.
The KGB was so impressed with his reports that in 1947 Kondrashev was recruited to serve in the counterintelligence directorate. He was part of a team that targeted the American embassy in Moscow, and he scored a major success by recruiting a U.S. military code clerk in Moscow, allowing the Soviets to read U.S. embassy cable traffic.
But Kondrashev’s initial pride in his service turned into discomfort when he found that much of his work involved repressing Soviet writers, musicians, and artists the regime deemed unsuitable. Then, in 1949, respected colleagues and close friends began being arrested on spurious charges, part of a series of purges encouraged by Stalin to create a culture of fear and intimidation. Kondrashev was shocked when counterintelligence chief Yevgeny Pitovranov was arrested on Beria’s orders in October 1951. A few nights later, KGB security officers burst into Kondrashev’s office and arrested the chief of his section, Major General Georgy Utekhin, on bogus criminal charges. A shaken Kondrashev feared he could easily be next. “I thought at that very moment that the time has come for me to quit the service altogether,” he later said.
Kondrashev submitted a request in March 1952 to leave the service to pursue academic studies, but he was curtly turned down—the KGB was not about to let someone with his language skills out the door. Instead, he was transferred to foreign intelligence, known as the First Chief Directorate, where he continued to excel.
In the early summer of 1953, Kondrashev was summoned to his chief’s office in Moscow. “I was called in and told I would soon be posted to London to work with a very important source,” he recalled. “That’s all I was told.” Moscow needed someone who spoke good English and was entirely unknown to British intelligence. On top of that, Kondrashev was expert in counterintelligence. It was a rare combination.
* * *
Kondrashev was given several months to prepare. He had never been to London and carefully studied maps of the city. He examined KGB files describing British methods of surveillance, which the Soviets considered formidable. These included establishing fixed observation posts around the city as well as using cabdrivers and traffic policemen as observers. If Kondrashev found himself under routine MI5 surveillance, the worst thing he could do would be to try to evade the watchers. Even if he succeeded in shaking the tail, his expertise would mark him as an espionage professional, and would ensure that he would find himself under permanent MI5 surveillance—possibly leading straight into a trap.
Eventually, he was given the Diomid file, which he studied carefully. He reviewed the history of Blake’s recruitment in North Korea, trying to get a grasp of the spy’s motivation and personality. He was disturbed to learn about Rodin’s recent meeting with Blake in Holland, which struck him—correctly—as risky, since MI5 could be following Rodin. He also figured that British intelligence might be keeping a special watch on Blake given his imprisonment in North Korea. Certainly, the KGB would do that with any Soviet official held in Western captivity. But in this case, Kondrashev was giving the British too much credit.
After arriving in London, Kondrashev spent weeks establishing a normal diplomatic pattern, and learning how to navigate the city’s confounding jumble of streets. The pompous and bombastic Rodin was of little help, resenting Kondrashev’s selection to handle Blake and offering no guidance on how to operate locally. Rodin’s departure for Moscow soon afterwards left Kondrashev as the sole KGB man in London with knowledge of Blake.
Moscow Center made it clear that he had no other task more important than the proper handling of Agent Diomid. “The pressure from Moscow was enormous, and I was pretty tense,” Kondrashev recalled. “There was no room for mistakes.”
* * *
One evening in late October, George Blake left his office shortly after 6 p.m. as usual, ambling through Soho to Oxford Street. His leisurely pace masked tight nerves. He checked constantly to see if he was being followed, and reached into the inside pocket of his jacket for reassurance that it still held a folded piece of paper. He stopped in a café for tea and cake, though he had little appetite, and he scanned his surroundings for signs of trouble. Seeing none, he entered the London Underground at Charing Cross, hopping onto a subway car just before the doors closed, then at the next station jumping off at the last second. He rode a subsequent train several stops to the Belsize Park station and exited, still watching for surveillance.
Through a gloomy mist, Blake walked away from the station in the direction of Hampstead, carrying a newspaper in his left hand as a recognition signal. “The further I went, the quieter it became,” he recalled. Before long, a figure emerged from the fog, walking slowly toward him, also with a newspaper in his left hand. “In his grey, soft felt hat and smart grey raincoat he seemed almost part of the fog,” Blake said. It was Kondrashev.
The two walked together along the nearly deserted street, and Blake handed the Russian the paper he was carrying. Without waiting for questions, Blake explained that it held details about a highly prized and top-secret SIS telephone tapping operation: the Vienna tunnels, Operation Silver, until that moment utterly unknown to the Soviets. The document also listed various bugging operations targeting Soviet buildings around Europe. As Kondrashev recognized the value of the information, Blake felt the Russian’s suspicions vanishing and an “almost physical change towards me.”
Before ending the brief meeting, they arranged to rendezvous a month later in another London suburb, setting alternative dates and sites in the event of problems. Blake headed to the flat he shared with his mother near the Barons Court station, where she had a nice home-cooked meal waiting. After the clandestine meeting on the damp London streets, he felt “particularly cosy and secure” as he enjoyed his dinner with a glass of wine.
