Betrayal in Berlin, page 29
* * *
The Berlin tunnel presented Nikita Khrushchev with an opportunity.
Khrushchev had another big moment coming shortly—his first visit to a nation of the Western alliance. Following the invitation Prime Minister Anthony Eden had extended at the Geneva conference the previous July, Khrushchev and Bulganin would travel to Great Britain in early April. The two Soviet leaders, with unorthodox styles and publicity flourishes that were quite a contrast from the dour Stalin era, had become something of an international road show as they traveled about courting global sympathy. In addition to Geneva, they had made recent trips to India, Yugoslavia, and China, each of them a sensation. “Khrushchev—foremost of the Soviet leaders—has spared no effort in door-to-door campaign to sell Russian friendship to the Indian people,” the CIA reported to the White House during the Soviets’ visit to India in November 1955, adding, “B and K have clocked 3,000 miles by air, auto and elephant, visited 11 points, an intensive tour which has reduced them to near-exhaustion.” The New York Times dubbed them “the wandering troubadours.”
The visit to Britain would be their biggest trip yet. Khrushchev was disgruntled that the Soviet Union was still being painted as an aggressor by the West, despite having agreed the previous year both to the treaty withdrawing forces from Austria and to grant Soviet diplomatic recognition to West Germany. Khrushchev was insulted that Eisenhower and Eden issued a joint warning in February that any attack on West Berlin would be regarded as an attack on Britain or the United States. As the trip approached, recalled his son Sergei, “Father was nervous. He was particularly worried about making a fool of himself. . . . He expected all kinds of underhanded tricks from the imperialists.”
There were urgent issues to discuss. Britain and the USSR were on a collision course in the Middle East, where Gamal Abdel Nasser, the nationalist president of Egypt, was taking steps that would lead to the seizure of the Suez Canal that summer. Eden was infuriated at the challenge to long-established British interests, and determined to put a stop to it. At the same time, the Soviets were eager to stake a claim in the Middle East, wooing Nasser with agreements to sell arms to Egypt.
Beyond the tensions in Egypt, the forthcoming trip to Britain was widely seen in the West as an attempt to foster divisions between the United States and Britain. The New York Times’s influential correspondent in London, Drew Middleton, labeled it “the Soviet Union’s carefully planned attack on western unity.” Indeed, Khrushchev saw the visit as an opportunity to divide the West, in keeping with the long-standing Soviet goal “to take apart this trans-Atlantic alliance that is under the control of the United States,” said Sergei Khrushchev.
To clear the way, the KGB on February 11 staged a bizarre press conference in Moscow where Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess unexpectedly resurfaced, the first sight of the spies since their disappearance at the dock at Saint-Malo, France, five years earlier. For all that time, the Soviets had claimed they knew nothing of their whereabouts, and just two weeks earlier Khrushchev had said that the two were not in the Soviet Union. In a statement given to reporters at the press conference, Burgess and Maclean denied being spies, and said they had come to Russia to further peace, a goal they said the United States in particular was working against. The two men declared that their absence was being “exploited by the opponents of Anglo-Soviet understanding.” Khrushchev likely hoped the performance would deflect awkward questions about the pair’s whereabouts during his visit to Britain, and also advance the Soviet line that Britain was being unwillingly dragged into Cold War confrontation by the Americans.
Khrushchev also asked Ivan Serov, the KGB chief, for ideas to improve his bargaining position in London, seeking something that would make a big propaganda splash. Serov referred the matter to his foreign intelligence chief, Aleksandr Sakharovsky, who consulted with Sergei Kondrashev, now head of the German desk.
Kondrashev’s polish and resourcefulness—and most of all, his adroit handling of Agent Diomid—had earned him the respect of his superiors. His star was rising at Moscow Center. Serov wanted Kondrashev to accompany him to London ahead of the state visit to make security arrangements. “You know our problems there better than anyone else,” Serov told him. There were those who considered Kondrashev “a power-hungry courtier,” while others thought he had gone native during his stint in London. (One Soviet agent in Britain had flatly refused to work with him after he showed up for a meeting wearing flannel trousers and a blue blazer and walking a pet poodle; the agent considered Kondrashev “too bourgeois.”)
Kondrashev had a ready suggestion to Khrushchev’s demand for a PR coup: If possible, why not time the discovery of the Berlin tunnel to coincide with the Soviet visit to London? In Berlin, the special military signals company created by Pitovranov and Grechko was ready to go. If the Soviets exposed the tunnel to the world before or during the visit, they could denounce the Western espionage with great umbrage and gain needed leverage.
Sakharovsky and Serov liked the idea, but first the KGB needed to consult with George Blake. “We had a discussion with him and he didn’t oppose the uncovering of the tunnel,” Kondrashev said.
Blake was not queried for his opinion, however. “I wasn’t asked about whether it should be discovered or not discovered, but I was told that it would be discovered within the near future,” he said. While he raised no objections, he was worried. “I was apprehensive, naturally,” he said. “Because the first question when the tunnel is discovered will be, ‘How did the Soviets discover it? Why?’”
* * *
Serov brought the proposal to Khrushchev. News of the tunnel did not come as a surprise to the first secretary, according to Kondrashev and Blake. At some unknown point, the KGB, likely Serov himself, briefed Khrushchev about the tunnel. “I have no doubt that he was informed,” said Sergei Khrushchev—the matter was simply too important for the KGB not to share with the Soviet leadership. Ironically, Khrushchev had even driven directly atop the tunnel when he and Bulganin stopped in Berlin on their way back from Geneva. The route to and from the East Berlin airport at Schönefeld went along the Schönefelder Chaussee, atop the tunnel, though what the Soviet leaders knew at the time is unclear.
Khrushchev understood that knowledge of the tunnel had to be kept quiet to avoid revealing the KGB’s high-level source. With no plans to launch a surprise attack on the West, he did not see the harm in letting the tunnel continue for a while, his son said. “He didn’t look at this information as very important,” explained Sergei Khrushchev. “He thought, if they want to listen, let them listen.” But Khrushchev, like the KGB, had little idea how much intelligence was actually being lost.
* * *
Depicting West Berlin as a nest of spies fit Khrushchev’s needs perfectly. It would weaken the West’s claims to be protecting the enclave as a bastion of democracy. It would deflect criticism over the Maclean and Burgess affair. The Soviets and East Germans would be seen as victims. How could the West accuse the Soviets of being aggressors when it was the West that had penetrated the Soviet sector and violated East German territory?
But Khrushchev wanted blame for the tunnel to be pinned solely on the Americans, seeing it as an opportunity to drive a wedge between the United States and Britain. It would support the Soviet narrative of the United States being the real obstacle to peace. “They wanted to leave the Americans in an embarrassing position,” said Blake.
Besides, Khrushchev was eager for a diplomatic breakthrough with the British on his trip. The looming standoff in the Middle East was of particular concern to Khrushchev. “It was very important at the time to have propaganda cards in our hands, because the situation around the Suez Canal was getting quite tense,” Kondrashev said. Perhaps leaving the British out of the line of fire when the tunnel was discovered would encourage Eden to cooperate. Observed Sergei Khrushchev, “You are just starting negotiations, and you go to talk with the British leadership, and then at the same time you’re accusing them of spying, of course it affects the spirit of the negotiations.”
Khrushchev approved the discovery of the tunnel. The decision made, Moscow sent instructions to Karlshorst and the Soviet embassy in Berlin in preparation. “These show very clearly that the decisions, how the diplomatic and political steps were to be taken, were made on the highest level,” said Kondrashev. “That means with Khrushchev himself, and Serov, and other members of the Politburo. All those were informed of what had happened there, and what steps were going to be taken.”
The tunnel had served American and British purposes long enough. It was time for it to serve Soviet purposes.
Chapter 18
There’s a Fast One Coming
ABOARD THE ORDZHONIKIDZE IN THE BALTIC SEA, SUNDAY, APRIL 15, 1956
Escorted by two Soviet destroyers, the cruiser Ordzhonikidze sailed from the Baltic port of Kaliningrad on April 15, carrying Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin for their state visit to Great Britain. The Ordzhonikidze was the most advanced of its class of Soviet cruisers, able to sail faster than its counterparts through the rough waters of the North Atlantic thanks to a new hull shape and propellers.
But coming by ship was a consolation prize for Khrushchev, who had wanted to fly to London aboard an experimental aircraft, the Tupolev TU-104, the first Soviet passenger turbojet. “Father couldn’t wait to surprise the English,” recalled his son Sergei Khrushchev, then a university student accompanying the delegation. But Soviet security had been aghast, arguing that Khrushchev would be risking his life flying on a jet that had not been fully tested.
As a compromise, the TU-104 flew to London on March 22 with the advance party, including KGB chief Ivan Serov and Sergei Kondrashev, who were to inspect security prior to the visit. The plane was well received, but Serov was not. His presence caused an uproar in Britain, where his role in the mass deportations in the Baltics, Poland, and Crimea was well remembered by Eastern European and other refugees who had resettled in England. The British newspapers dubbed him “Ivan the Terrible” and described him as “a butcher” and an “odious thug.” The outcry was so loud that Serov departed London early, and Khrushchev ordered him to remain in Moscow to avoid a repeat.
It was a harbinger of what was shaping up to be a tense trip. The British public was “rather upset” about the pending visit, Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary, and he fretted about a detailed schedule for the Soviet visit published by the newspapers. “This is a gift to the would-be assassin!” he fumed.
The Soviet ships refueled while sailing through the Danish straits rather than waiting until they reached England. “No consideration was given to refueling at our destination—not because we begrudged the foreign currency, but because we were wary,” recalled Sergei Khrushchev. “After all, we were not visiting friends and had to expect the worst.”
BERLIN, MONDAY, APRIL 16
It had been an unusually wet spring in Berlin. Heavy rains soaked the city for days in April. The ground was saturated, and all around the city, water was seeping into cable channels, causing short circuits on the long-distance cables.
For the Soviets, the weather was perfectly timed. The KGB had been waiting for actual electrical faults to develop in the tunnel cables as cover for discovering the tap, and the problems were coinciding with the Soviet visit to Britain. At Karlshorst, KGB rezident Yevgeny Pitovranov gained permission to seize the opportunity. The special Red Army signals unit created to find the tunnel was mobilized. “Probably Khrushchev himself gave the last signal,” said Kondrashev, who remained in London despite Serov’s departure. “Our group of technical officers had started searching for leaking cables in various places all around Berlin.”
The repair activity did not raise any alarms at the Rudow site, or at BOB and SIS headquarters in Berlin. “We knew from our sources in the East German Ministry of Telecommunications, and we knew from the tunnel itself, from the engineering circuits, that there were faults in the lines caused by seepage of water affecting the cables,” said David Murphy.
In the meantime, the stream of intelligence from the tunnel showed no signs of diminishing. The tapped lines were abuzz in April with conversations about several inspections of KGB and GRU intelligence in East Germany by senior officials visiting from Moscow. Colonel Mikhail Smirnov, chief of a commission from the Red Army intelligence directorate, was full of interesting news from Moscow, including that bureaucrats at headquarters planned “an orgy of reductions” in the directorate. A concurrent inspection of KGB counterintelligence operations was causing much angst. “This shake-up is finished and my mood is frightful,” Lieutenant Colonel A. I. Akimov, the officer in charge of the cadre office at the Wünsdorf headquarters, told his wife on April 14.
Reviewing the conversations in retrospect, there was still no indication that any of the senior intelligence officials suspected their lines were tapped.
* * *
Initially, the three tapped cables—FK 150, FK 151, and FK 152—were spared the problems caused by the rain. But on the night of April 16, a strong and steady downpour, accompanied by thunder and lightning, soaked Altglienicke and the surrounding neighborhoods of southeast Berlin. A number of telephone and telegraph cables were flooded and began to fault between Karlshorst and Schönefeld and points beyond.
On April 17, a major fault was discovered on FK 151 at Wassmannsdorf, about four miles southwest of the tap site. Crews cut out a ten-thousand-foot defective stretch and replaced it with a temporary cable, restoring service. But they were getting uncomfortably close to the tunnel.
PORTSMOUTH, ENGLAND, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18
The seafaring books that Sergei Khrushchev remembered reading as a child always said the sight of birds was a sure sign of approaching land. As the Ordzhonikidze neared Portsmouth, he did not see any birds, but a squadron of small airplanes rented by the British press circled overhead, seeking pictures and footage of the Soviet leaders—or “Bulge and Krush,” as newspapers dubbed the two.
Heads aboard the ship were a bit foggy. The previous evening, the Soviet delegation had celebrated Khrushchev’s sixty-second birthday with dinner and plenty of champagne and vodka. They had included the British military attaché who was accompanying them on the journey, despite suspicions that he was a spy. “Naturally there was some drinking, and the Englishman showed that he had a well-developed taste for spirits,” Nikita Khrushchev recalled. “In fact, he drank so much that he was barely able to get back to his cabin, much less go snooping around the ship looking for military secrets.”
As the cruiser glided up Spithead on the sunny day toward the Royal Navy dockyard in Portsmouth, it was met with a regulation salute fired from ship and shore batteries. But the reception was cool and formal. Not a ship or boat in the crowded harbor whistled a greeting, and the small crowd was silent as Bulganin and Khrushchev descended the red-carpeted gangplank to the dockyard jetty.
Aboard a special train that carried them to London, the Soviets picked suspiciously at the turtle soup they were served for lunch in the salon car. At Victoria Station, they were greeted politely by Anthony Eden, but the atmosphere was again chilly. The prime minister pointedly commented on the “many events” that had taken place since their July meeting at Geneva. Though they were not mentioned, the growing tensions in the Middle East, the failure to make any progress on German unity or nuclear disarmament, and the reappearance of Burgess and Maclean hung in the air.
A cavalcade of cars took the delegation around London for a brief tour of Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Tower of London. But the Soviets were more interested in the everyday prosperity they saw on the streets of the city. “It was like the discovery of the New World,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. “We lived in a closed world. Stalin’s propaganda presented this very different image of the West. Then you came here and find they’re not starving. The level of life was much higher than I expected. I was shocked by the windows of the shops in London.” Nikita Khrushchev was less impressed, though no less curious than his son. “All this was very new to us,” he later wrote. “We had never had much contact with foreigners before.”
The Soviet delegation was staying at Claridge’s, the finest hotel in London. Khrushchev, his senses on high alert for any slight, had demanded to know why they were not staying at a special government residence, as was the Soviet custom. Assured that all guests of the British government stayed in hotels, “Father was pacified,” recalled Sergei. Even Nikita Khrushchev was impressed by the “superb” service at the hotel.
But Khrushchev had no illusions about how far the hospitality extended. When Sergei visited his father’s room and began discussing sensitive material, the elder Khrushchev cut him off. “He grimaced and pointed to the ceiling,” said Sergei. “He had no doubt that his room was bugged.”
He was right. John Taylor and the Dollis Hill crew had wired Khrushchev’s suite with a new, high-tech listening device that was virtually undetectable, but to their disappointment, they picked up no real intelligence. “Khrushchev was far too canny a bird to discuss anything of value in a hotel room,” recalled Peter Wright, principal scientist for MI5.
BERLIN, THURSDAY, APRIL 19
Red Army communications were in crisis. No sooner was FK 151 repaired than more major faults appeared on other cables, including FK 150, another of the tunnel taps. The faults were creating major problems for the Soviets, leaving them vulnerable. The ones on FK 150 put the main Soviet signal center and the Soviet air warning control center in East Germany out of communication with Moscow. “During this period Soviet signal troops and East German Post and Telegraph technicians worked frantically to reestablish and maintain communications,” according to a CIA history. On the other hand, Pitovranov now had all the cover he could possibly want to discover the tunnel.
