Betrayal in Berlin, page 19
Harvey, dubious of easterners, bonded with the Kansan. “He was Bill’s link with the site, the warehouse, the radar, and he ran the technical aspects of it, and was totally up to speed on all of that,” said David Murphy. “Since Bill obviously couldn’t be there 24 hours a day, he couldn’t have done it without Vyrl.” To preserve his anonymity, Leichliter never went to BOB headquarters and instead made regular nocturnal visits to Harvey’s home. “Vyrl came to our house every night and they would sit there and drink and talk till practically morning,” recalled CG.
Despite his easygoing nature, Leichliter ran a tight ship at Rudow, even censoring the engineers’ mail. When one of the soldiers mentioned he was in Berlin in a letter to his girlfriend back home, Leichliter alerted Staff D in Washington. At their behest, Army counterintelligence sent an agent to befriend the woman and make sure she knew nothing about any tunnel.
* * *
Leichliter was assisted by Eddie Kindell, a CIA expert in electronic intelligence who served as chief communications engineer at the site. Kindell, from Morton, Ohio, served during the war with the Army Signal Corps, and his electronics skills soon earned him a transfer to the OSS. Before he knew it, he was sent to India and then flying over “the Hump” to support OSS operations in Indochina. By war’s end, he was running wiretapping operations targeting Germans in Shanghai. He earned an engineering degree on the GI Bill and was offered jobs with telephone and oil companies, but he turned them down to join the fledgling CIA and fight in the Cold War. “I didn’t want to be on the mud end of a drill bit,” he recalled. With his expertise, Kindell was a natural selection for the Berlin assignment, and he was so eager to do it that he postponed his wedding. “I had a reputation of being able to do whatever they wanted,” he said.
While the engineers dug below, Kindell was up in the warehouse, preparing for the eventual tap. A large operations room, set up in a walled-off interior section on the first floor, would be the heart of the operation. Approximately 150 Ampex tape recorders were mounted two-high on a U-shaped wall, and the room painstakingly dustproofed to protect the electronics. Kindell and a team of technicians installed power ducts, electrical panels, and racks for the machines. They put air-conditioning in the warehouse and ran ducts to the tunnel face. In the short term, this would be a relief for the engineers, though the more important goal was to cool the electronics to be installed in the tunnel.
But the job Kindell really got into was making the warehouse appear to be a radar intercept station. The best way to make it look authentic was simple: Make it a real radar intercept station, with working antennas and equipment operated by genuine Signal Corps soldiers who would be brought in later. Kindell wanted to make the station look like a particularly sophisticated, classified operation, so he included a lot of strange-looking equipment that was strictly for the benefit of any Soviets or East Germans watching. “Just to keep ’em busy, figuring out what the hell was going on,” Kindell said.
One large dish on the roof was pointed straight up at the sky, with cables running into the building through an L-shaped vent on the roof, but these did not connect to anything inside. Kindell and his technicians constantly fiddled with them nonetheless. “If we just put an antenna up there and just left it, didn’t rotate it, they’d soon decide it wasn’t being used,” he said. “So we made sure somebody went up and adjusted things.”
Aircraft periodically flew over the warehouse, presumably sent from the East to photograph the equipment. A delegation of locals—it was unclear if they were from the East or the West—came to the gate to complain that the American antennas were creating interference in the area. “Of course, we knew we weren’t interfering with anything, because we didn’t have anything on it,” said Kindell. He got rid of them by telling them to complain to the Berlin Command.
Kindell spent so much time perfecting the radar look that Leichliter had to remind him that the tunnel was the important thing. “I kept getting pressure from Vyrl to forget the cover up there, and get down here and get the electronics thing going,” he recalled.
As far as most Altglienicke residents were concerned, the problem with the American camp was not the strange antenna dishes, but rather the infernal noise from the three diesel generators that ran twenty-four hours a day, providing independent power for all the electronic equipment at the installation. Neighbors complained the noise rattled their windows and could be heard from a mile away, disrupting sleep.
Harvey, for one, was delighted with the racket. Not only did it make it nearly impossible for the KGB or Stasi to effectively bug the installation, but the noise and vibration “assist greatly in concealing construction noise below the ground,” he told Truscott.
* * *
Paul Noack, a farmer in Altglienicke, had no choice but to get used to the noise. Through the late summer and into the fall of 1954, Noack planted an orchard with more than a thousand trees on the nine-acre plot of land his family owned directly across from the American radar installation in Rudow. The East Berlin farmer was methodical in his work, carefully planting nineteen rows each with fifty-four trees, including apples, cherries, plums, and pears.
Noack worked uncomplainingly despite the crutch he needed to move around, the result of a broken leg in his childhood that had not healed properly because his father had been unable to pay for a doctor. The leg at least had spared him from going to war and had given him a chance to raise a family.
The planting of the trees was a big step toward fulfilling a dream the forty-two-year-old Noack had long held to live on the plot of land. He would move the family from their tiny home on Grünauer Strasse in Altglienicke, and they would make a living selling fruits from the orchard, vegetables from the field, and flowers from a garden he would plant. Noack had already applied for permission from local authorities to build a house on the site and planned to get started in the coming months.
In the meantime, he spent long hours tending his field of potatoes, which were planted between the rows of trees. His twelve-year-old daughter, Dagmar, would help her father pick the bugs off the potato plants; Paul Noack, who did not hold much of a candle for communism, chortled at reports in the East Berlin newspaper that the bugs had been sent over from the West.
For months, Noack had watched with interest as the warehouse rose on the farmland across the border, and then the bustle of activity with the arrival of the Americans and all the antennas they put on the roof. Sometimes as he worked the land, he could hear something over the racket of the generators, a faint noise that sounded to him like a water pump. “He wasn’t suspicious,” said Dagmar. “He thought it was part of the radar station.”
There was one odd thing, though: “What was funny was that in certain spots, the trees did not develop well,” she recalled. Farmer Noack went back to work and replanted those trees.
* * *
In a small, dark room on the second-floor loft in the warehouse that served as the installation observation post, GIs peered out a rectangular window. They kept their binoculars trained on Farmer Noack and anyone else who strayed close to the tunnel’s path, be it Soviet MPs or East German Volkspolizei who regularly patrolled the border, or civilians wandering by on foot or bicycles.
The observation post was connected by an Army field telephone strung close to the front of the tunnel. If the observer spotted any danger, he flipped a switch, which triggered red lights strung along the tunnel’s ceiling. The engineers would cease their digging and wait until the lights turned off, signaling the all clear. “Everything stopped until they moved away, and then everything would start up again,” said Kindell.
The observation post, manned around the clock, had black walls and was entered via a series of curtains, keeping it dark inside and difficult to see from outside. The guards had a clear view of the entire targeted area: over the double fence surrounding the installation, past a smaller wire fence marking the border, across Farmer Noack’s fields to the Schönefelder Chaussee a quarter mile away. A tall wall to the right of the fields marked the border with the Altglienicke cemetery. To the left was a quiet wooded neighborhood with a few scattered homes. Straight ahead on the far side of the highway the guards could see a few nondescript buildings and a bus stop.
The observers kept a daily log of all pedestrian and vehicle movements, including the military convoys that regularly rolled down the highway, looking for any changes of patterns. Farmer Noack appeared most days, and whenever he approached the tunnel path, the guards flashed the red light, though no one was overly concerned; the GIs, some of them farm boys themselves, chuckled at his primitive equipment.
A bigger concern was when the East German and Soviet guards stopped directly across from the warehouse to scrutinize the American operation. But they always looked up, not down. “The sight of the Soviets and East Germans standing on top of the tunnel with binoculars focused . . . on the roof of the installation provided considerable amusement to personnel at the site,” Leichliter said.
The radar station cover seemed to be fooling not only the Germans and Soviets, but also the U.S. military staff in Berlin, Harvey reported to Truscott. “We have every indication that the cover story used has been effective,” he added. It was “even better than we had hoped.”
MOSCOW, SEPTEMBER 20, 1954
KGB chief Ivan Serov was not one to feel guilty about much of anything. Still, it did seem that it might be time to warn the top Soviet military command—in general terms—about the danger to some of their sensitive communication lines.
The progress the Americans and British were making on the tunnel was worrisome. “When we understood that the tunnel was being built, of course we had a big task ahead of us,” Sergei Kondrashev later said. “What should we do? Who should we inform about the existence of the tunnel?”
The answers, the KGB leadership decided, were almost nothing and virtually no one. Western intelligence had not yet succeeded in tapping the Soviet lines. Perhaps the outlandish project would fail. The hope was that Blake could continue to keep them informed about the tunnel’s progress.
Now that excavation had started, the risk to Blake if the KGB blocked the tunnel was lower. “To be sure they would have blown him sky-high if they had shut the operation down before the digging started,” CIA officer John Osborne later said. “But once the digging began, there were any number of ways the Sovs could have become aware of what was going on.” They could have attributed the discovery to a talkative GI, for example, or to Vopos observing suspicious activities at Rudow.
But the KGB leadership did not want to take that chance. The tunnel had been carried off so secretly that the KGB at Karlshorst had not picked up any clues that it was being dug, Blake later said, and neither had the East Germans. Taking action against the tunnel could still lead to Blake—particularly given his pending assignment to Berlin. Even telling the Red Army to stop using telephone lines in Berlin for sensitive communications would likely raise a red flag to Western intelligence; indeed, the CANDARE agents almost certainly would have learned of this and warned their CIA handlers.
Rather than say anything about Berlin, Serov decided it would be permissible to warn Defense Minister Nikolai Bulganin that the Red Army’s communication lines in Vienna had been tapped. A full year had passed since George Blake had informed the KGB about the Vienna taps, but only now that Operation Silver had ended was the top Soviet military leadership informed about the penetration.
On September 20, 1954, Serov sent Bulganin a memo reporting of “an English intelligence document . . . obtained clandestinely” with detailed information on the activities of Soviet occupation forces. He included the Russian translation of the ninety-page SIS document from the fall of 1953 purloined by Blake. Serov told Bulganin that it had been compiled by British intelligence from “monitored telephone conversations of Soviet officers and enlisted personnel stationed in Austria and Hungary.”
The hope was the report would shock Red Army commanders into improving telephone security everywhere. Bulganin and the senior Soviet military leadership were indeed surprised by the amount and the quality of the information that Western intelligence had compiled. Serov asked Bulganin “to take measures to ensure that the officers talked less about state secrets on the communication lines,” Kondrashev said. Accordingly, Bulganin issued a general order for officers across the force to exercise caution when using telephones.
But Serov gave the Red Army no hint that another operation, much larger than Vienna, was under way. It was nothing personal—the KGB in Berlin, which also used the lines, was still told nothing. Even Pitovranov, the KGB chief at Karlshorst and himself a former head of counterintelligence, was not yet informed.
Markus Wolf, head of East German foreign intelligence, was also in the dark, as was the entire East German government. “They never told us anything, leaving us unguarded and exposed,” Wolf later complained. “This was lamentably not out of character for the Soviets: For them, intelligence generally flowed in one direction only.”
The KGB likely saw some benefits to allowing the tunnel to continue. The operation would tie up CIA and SIS manpower and assets and cost a fortune. And the KGB stood to learn a great deal about the capabilities of Western intelligence. “The Soviets wanted to let the Americans finish their masterwork so as to evaluate their technological expertise,” Wolf said. Indeed, Kondrashev later acknowledged, “certain KGB operations in later years had their roots in our knowledge of the tunnel.”
WASHINGTON, DC, NOVEMBER 18, 1954
With the excavation approaching the Soviet border, it was time for Bill Harvey to get approval for emergency procedures if the tunnel was discovered—to include blowing it up if need be. Harvey traveled to Washington and together with Frank Rowlett went to the CIA director’s office to brief the top leadership, including Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Frank Wisner.
The fear was that Soviet or East German troops could rush down the tunnel and take control of the U.S. installation, capturing sensitive equipment, not to mention the tunnel team. Harvey reported that a forty-foot-long stretch of the tunnel directly below the border would be mined with enough C-3 plastic explosive to collapse the passage, hopefully “without causing a major surface explosion.”
When the tunnel was completed, two heavy, torchproof steel doors would be installed and kept shut with locks and bar. Helgestad, the Rudow installation commander, had authority to resist any attempt to enter the compound “with all means at his disposal.”
They also needed a plan of what to say in the event the Soviets publicly protested the tunnel. That was simple—they would lie. “The official American reaction is to be flat, indignant denial ascribing any such protest to a baseless enemy provocation,” according to the meeting summary prepared by Harvey.
Someone raised the issue of whether James Conant, the U.S. high commissioner for Germany, should be briefed on the plans. Dulles thought this over carefully. What if Conant protested to his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, or even President Eisenhower, both of whom had already blessed the tunnel? After considerable discussion, the CIA director ruled that Conant should not be briefed. Dulles “did not see any reason to re-raise this issue with the highest policy levels with whom it had been previously discussed.”
Eisenhower, still desperate for better intelligence, certainly had not reconsidered his support for the tunnel. The same month that Dulles received the tunnel briefing, the CIA director went to the president seeking authorization for a program to develop a special high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft—what would become known as the U-2. Eisenhower did not hesitate to approve. “Our relative position in intelligence, compared to the Soviets, could scarcely have been worse,” he later said. Bigger and better fleets of bombers and improved guided missile capability had given the Soviets an “ever-growing capacity for launching surprise attacks against the United States,” Eisenhower believed. He admitted to being “haunted” by the threat of a nuclear Pearl Harbor, and he created two commissions in 1954 to examine the ability of U.S. intelligence to protect the nation against such an attack. On October 19, the president received the first report, a review of CIA covert operations from Lieutenant General James Doolittle, hero of the raid on Tokyo, who described the United States as losing an intelligence battle that could have apocalyptic consequences. “If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered,” Doolittle wrote. “We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us.”
The report of the second commission, headed by MIT president James Killian, was more sober-minded but equally chilling in its conclusions. “The advantage of surprise attack has never been so great as now,” the Killian report said. The lack of human intelligence sources inside the Soviet Union demanded that the United States develop new scientific and technical means of espionage. “In order to find out what the USSR is planning, we must depend almost entirely on physical manifestations of activity,” the report added.
This was precisely the intelligence the tunnel would have the capacity to deliver. Any Soviet attack would almost certainly involve the Group of Soviet Forces Germany. Readying the forces to strike would require communications on the landlines to be monitored through the tunnel—not just from higher levels of command, but from low levels making the logistical preparations. “The surest indicators were expected to emerge from chatter about the transfer of landline service from stationary GSFG barracks throughout East Germany to temporary locations closer to the West German border,” Joe Evans, an officer on Rowlett’s staff assigned to the project, later said.
