Betrayal in Berlin, page 48
In the years following, many journalists, authors, and historians dismissed the tunnel’s value, assuming that the KGB would never have allowed Western intelligence to listen to any information of importance on tapped lines.
The tunnel, the noted British intelligence writer Chapman Pincher wrote in a typical verdict in 1984, “produced nothing but a mass of carefully prepared misinformation.” The distinguished intelligence journalist and author Phillip Knightley called the tunnel “a worthless disaster” that left the CIA and MI6 “in somewhat exaggerated terms . . . under the effective control of the KGB.” Richard Bennett, in Espionage: An Encyclopedia of Spies and Secrets, published in 2002, declares that the CIA and SIS were “victims of a massive and very successful KGB disinformation scam.” The tunnel “harvested little information of value,” David Wise, one of the preeminent American intelligence writers, wrote in 1992. In Eclipse: The Last Days of the CIA, American author Mark Perry called the tunnel “a stark defeat” for the agency, which was “forced to discard many of the secrets it had deciphered because they were useless.”
A few authors were more complimentary, including David Martin, who wrote in Wilderness of Mirrors in 1980 that the tunnel “had kept a finger on the Soviet pulse.” But in general, the Berlin tunnel became a punch line, a symbol of CIA and SIS futility, proof of how the KGB always won in the end. Even at the CIA, memories of the tunnel faded. Hugh Montgomery, whose legendary career at the agency would continue sixty years until his retirement in 2014, would often get only “blank stares” when he mentioned the tunnel to young colleagues. “Of such things are historical verities composed,” he noted.
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Bill Harvey, once among the best American intelligence officers and the man most responsible for the Berlin tunnel, was largely also forgotten. Berlin had been the peak of Harvey’s career. After his return to headquarters in 1966 from his ill-fated Rome tour, he had been put under the supervision of Lawrence “Red” White, the CIA’s executive director, who told him that he was starting with a clean slate but needed to get his drinking under control. “It wouldn’t be long before Bill would show up at some meeting just crocked,” White recalled. “I sent for him. He’d come to the door apologizing every time.” After three or four times, Harvey told White, “If I ever embarrass you or this agency again, I’ll retire.”
A month later, following another episode, Harvey reported to White’s office. “I made a promise to you and I’m here to live up to it,” he told him. On January 6, 1968, he turned in his badge.
Harvey fell back on his law degree, doing some legal work in Washington, but in 1970 he pulled up stakes and moved home to Indiana with CG, his son, Jimmy, and his daughter, Sally, the cardboard box baby. He took a job editing legal interpretations of Indiana Supreme Court decisions for the Bobbs-Merrill Publishing Company. It was sheer drudgery, but it paid the bills. He cut back on his drinking, joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and, according to CG, eventually stopped altogether.
In keeping with a promise to Sally’s East German birth mother to raise the child as a Lutheran, Harvey regularly took his daughter to Pleasant View Lutheran Church in Indianapolis, although he made it clear to Reverend David Kahlenberg that he thought “religion to be a bunch of fairy tale stories.” But over time, he was baptized in the church and became a deacon. Still, that only went so far. Once, when Kahlenberg roped off the back rows for a service to encourage people to sit up front, Harvey abruptly pulled the ropes down and sat in the last pew, with his back to the brick wall. Afterwards he stormed up to the pastor and flashed open his jacket to reveal the gun in his shoulder holster. “Don’t you know the KGB has a price on my head, and I have to sit with my back to the wall in any building?” he declared.
Indeed, the past was never far behind him. “He was always on his guard,” Sally recalled. “He felt he was being watched.” Harvey lived in relative anonymity in Indianapolis until he was subpoenaed in 1975 to testify about the CIA’s assassination program before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Senator Frank Church.
The committee heard the story about Harvey being described to John Kennedy as America’s James Bond. “Given his appearance, demeanor and especially that distinctive voice and the yellow shooter’s glasses, he seemed everything but ‘007,’” recalled former senator Gary Hart, a member of the panel. In a closed hearing, Harvey spoke frankly about his role in the attempts to assassinate Castro, telling the committee that nothing he had done was “unauthorized, freewheeling or in any way outside the framework of my responsibilities and duties as an officer of the agency.”
The committee was intrigued by Harvey’s continued friendship with mobster Johnny Rosselli. Harvey resisted agency pressure both before and after he left the CIA to cut ties with Rosselli. “We were all struck by the friendship he developed with Rosselli,” recalled Hart. “Highly improbable. But then, everything about our investigation, especially involving Cuba, turned out to be highly improbable.”
Rosselli’s dismembered body would be found in a fifty-five-gallon oil drum in Biscayne Bay in 1976, a year after he gave his own testimony to the Church Committee, naming mobsters Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante Jr. as also being involved in the Castro assassination attempts.
In later years, as speculation rose over a CIA role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Harvey’s name would be floated in JFK conspiracy circles as someone possibly involved. His contempt for the Kennedys, his contacts with assassins and mobsters, and his tough-guy persona made him a “natural suspect,” in the view of some. Bay Stockton, the former BOB officer who wrote a biography of Harvey, investigated the morass of murky information and insinuations and found it impossible to make any definitive conclusions. Yet, he added, “No one in the CIA who knew Harvey at his prime believes, or believed, that he possibly could have been involved in the JFK assassination. No one. Not even those who had reason to dislike him.” Hugh Montgomery, for one, called the suggestions “absurd and implausible.” Yet with many CIA records from the period held from public view, the speculation lingers.
* * *
Charlie Bray may have been the last of the tunnel veterans to see Harvey, during a visit to Indiana in 1976. “He was still fuming about George Blake, that dirty, no good sack of human debris,” Bray recalled.
On June 8, 1976, Harvey woke CG up at 5 a.m. and told her to call the doctor. An ambulance rushed him to the emergency room at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, where doctors found that he had suffered a serious heart attack. The cardiologist, Dr. James Hall, told Harvey that surgery to insert a pump gave him a one-in-ten chance of survival. “I’ve beaten worse odds than that,” Harvey replied. “Go ahead.” But after thirteen hours of surgery, it was clear that his heart was too badly damaged. CG and Sally were called into the room. “I’ll always love you,” he told them. Shortly after noon on June 9, Harvey was dead at age sixty-one.
“Bill was simply too honest, too straightforward, and too intelligent for the large collection of bureaucratic hacks who control our destinies,” Hugh Montgomery wrote to CG from Rome, where he was then station chief. “The shabby treatment he received from his government was certainly unjust and unfair in every respect.”
During its fiftieth anniversary in 1997, the CIA published a list of fifty “trailblazers” who had distinguished themselves over the agency’s history. Bray nominated Harvey for the award, but he was left off the list.
* * *
By contrast, Frank Rowlett, who died in 1998, is a revered figure at the NSA, where he returned in 1958 as special assistant to the director after more than five years with the CIA. He was awarded both the National Security Medal and the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service by President Lyndon Johnson, and had a building at NSA headquarters in Maryland named in his honor following his retirement in 1965.
The tunnel he had helped create had been intended to give the CIA its own communications intelligence. The NSA’s anger at being excluded from even knowing about the tunnel until its help was needed worsened the already bad relations between the agencies for years. But, ironically, in the long run, the NSA “benefitted immeasurably” from the tunnel, according to an agency history of REGAL. The reliance on the NSA to decrypt coded material gave the fledgling spy agency what it needed above all else—“its acceptance by U.S. intelligence community members as a viable and equal contributor to the intelligence effort.”
* * *
Peter Lunn, the Berlin SIS chief who partnered with Harvey and Rowlett on the tunnel, enjoyed a long and illustrious career with SIS until his retirement in 1986. He never spoke publicly about the tunnel until 2010. “Of course the whole thing was blown by George Blake from the start,” Lunn said then. But the KGB decision to stay silent about the tunnel meant “we got plenty of valuable information.”
Not only did Lunn survive the devastating Blake confession in April 1961, but less than two years later he played a key role in the Kim Philby saga. Lunn had succeeded Nicholas Elliott as station chief in Beirut. Philby, still living in Beirut, only learned about Blake and his espionage following his arrest, and was badly shaken by the lengthy sentence given his fellow spy. Damning new evidence of Philby’s guilt from a KGB defector was so incontrovertible that even Elliott, Philby’s staunchest defender at SIS, recognized it. At Dick White’s behest, Elliott traveled to Beirut in January 1963 to confront Philby and, according to some accounts, offer him immunity from prosecution in exchange for his cooperation. Philby agreed in principle, and after Elliott returned to London, Lunn was to take over Philby’s debriefing.
Lunn had asked Philby to report to the British embassy for further questioning. On the night of January 23, after coordinating with the KGB’s Pavel Nedosekin—who had also been Blake’s handler in Beirut—Philby apparently boarded a Soviet freighter bound for Odessa. By some accounts, Lunn panicked when he learned that Philby was missing and rushed to the spy’s apartment. Philby himself later suggested that he was able to escape thanks to Lunn’s incompetence, claiming that a fresh snowfall had blanketed Lebanon’s mountains, and Lunn could not resist leaving Beirut to go skiing. But another school of thought holds that SIS wanted Philby to flee to Moscow to avoid another embarrassing espionage trial, which would be hugely damaging to the government coming so soon after Blake’s exposure. In this version, Lunn was expecting the news of Philby’s flight. Whatever the truth, Lunn’s career did not seem to suffer.
Lunn stayed a loyal friend to Harvey until the latter’s death. After retirement, Lunn spent every winter skiing in Mürren, Switzerland, where he had first gone down the mountains as a child. When a visitor asked a lift operator where to find him, he was advised to “look for crazy tracks in the deep snow.” Lunn was still skiing there a year before his death in 2011 at age ninety-seven.
* * *
The secrecy that surrounded the tunnel project continued until after the end of the Cold War, leaving many participants in awkward positions.
Keith Comstock, one of the three Army Corps of Engineers captains who oversaw the tunnel construction, learned only in 2007 that the project had been declassified. “All these years, fifty-three years, I’d never said a word to anybody,” said Comstock, who retired from the Army as a colonel in 1969. “My kids had always asked me, once in a while, ‘What did you do that year that you weren’t home?’ God, what a relief and a joy to find out that it had been declassified. I sat down and wrote a letter to my kids and gave them the whole thing.”
For Eugene Kregg, the Army linguist, the consequences of the secrecy were severe. After leaving Berlin, Kregg earned advanced engineering science degrees and worked as a nuclear materials research scientist. But after he confided to an associate about what he had done in Berlin, he found that work colleagues and even family members doubted his veracity. “Family relationships were shattered and my professional status permanently compromised,” he later said.
In 1967, Kregg contacted retired Army colonel James Helgestad, the Rudow installation commander, asking him to vouch for “the credibility of my Berlin activities.” Helgestad was sympathetic and wrote a “to whom it may concern” letter attesting that Kregg had been assigned “duties of a highly specialized and important nature” in Berlin, and that his performance had been “of inestimable value to the Government of the United States.”
But Helgestad told Kregg he could not go into any details. “I advise you to let sleeping dogs lie,” the colonel told him. “I am sure you recall the de-briefing statement you signed before leaving the unit and the penalties described therein for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. I need not say more.”
For Kregg—who after leaving the Army changed his last name to Kovalenko, his father’s original name, to honor his Russian roots—the freedom to talk about his experiences in Berlin has been emotional and cathartic. “It has taken a lifetime to rebuild new personal and professional relationships,” he said.
* * *
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, followed soon by the reunification of Germany and the collapse of the Soviet Union, gave, for a time, a sense of triumph to those on the Western side. When BOB was deactivated in a 1994 ceremony attended by former base chiefs, there was confidence that Western liberal values had prevailed and hope that Russia was on a path toward democracy.
A reappraisal of the tunnel became slowly possible after the end of the Cold War. The CIA has gradually declassified records related to the tunnel, including many in recent years. The SIS, on the other hand, has never formally acknowledged its enormous role in the tunnel. For a time, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the successor to the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, cooperated with researchers. Sergei Kondrashev, George Blake’s longtime handler, who rose to high ranks in the Soviet intelligence service as deputy chief of clandestine operations worldwide, collaborated after his retirement on a history of the intelligence struggle in Berlin during the Cold War with retired CIA officer David Murphy, who had succeeded Harvey as BOB chief. The SVR gave Kondrashev ready access to his old operational files, including those involving the Berlin tunnel, and he remained close friends with Blake. The resulting 1997 book, Battleground Berlin, written with journalist George Bailey, included a wealth of information making the case that the tunnel intelligence was genuine. British intelligence historian David Stafford subsequently reached the same conclusion in his 2002 book, Spies Beneath Berlin.
Kondrashev worked on a memoir with the assistance of another retired CIA officer, Tennent “Pete” Bagley. But in 2007, with security tightening and Western relations worsening under Vladimir Putin, the SVR withdrew its clearances, forbidding publication of the material. Kondrashev died of heart disease later that year. But with the permission of his family, Bagley returned to the project. Spymaster, published in 2013, included further disclosures about the KGB’s decision to protect Blake rather than Soviet communications. As Kondrashev told Bagley, “the value of the source outweighed the value of the secrets.”
Together with other revelations in recent years, including declassified papers from the CIA, the NSA, and the Eisenhower and Kennedy presidential libraries, records from Blake’s espionage trial in London, letters and papers related to Bill Harvey and the Berlin Operations Base compiled by Stockton, and interviews with key participants, the conclusion is inescapable that the vast majority of the intelligence was both genuine and taken as a whole, extremely valuable.
East German spy chief Markus Wolf, who had been shocked at the scene of the tunnel on the morning of its discovery in 1956, was stunned once more after the fall of the wall to learn how much the West received from the tunnel. The claims of disinformation, he said, are “a myth.”
The common wisdom about the tunnel is “patently false,” Hugh Montgomery declared not long before his death in 2017 at age ninety-three. The KGB held knowledge of the tunnel so tightly, and the amount of traffic flowing over the tapped lines was so enormous, that “it would have been impossible to use that as a channel for disinformation,” he said.
Notably, to date, not a single example of disinformation connected to the tunnel intelligence has been unearthed.
* * *
At his dacha in the pinewoods in Kratovo, twenty-five miles southeast of Moscow, George Blake faces his own reappraisal. The vision of a utopian Soviet communist state for which he risked everything is long gone.
The other infamous British Cold War spies of the era who escaped to Russia—Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean among them—have long since died, leaving only Blake. He adjusted to life in Russia better than any of them, speaking the language and starting a new family. “Philby had second thoughts, so did Maclean,” said Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB officer who oversaw Blake and other British spies in Moscow. “But not George Blake.”
Still, after his arrival in Moscow in January 1967, Blake did not take long to recognize that communism in the Soviet Union was an utter failure. “One must be blind or willfully close one’s eyes . . . not to see that the noble experiment of building such a society has failed,” he later said. He was reunited with Portland spy Gordon Lonsdale in time to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1967, as Lonsdale had predicted while they were at Wormwood Scrubs. But both were disillusioned by what they found. Khrushchev, the last of the true Bolshevik believers in the Soviet leadership, had been expelled from office in October 1964, and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, who presided over a long Soviet economic stagnation and a system run for the benefit of party elites.
As in prison, Blake did his best to fit into Russian society. The deprivations of Scrubs, he wryly noted, prepared him well for the long lines and endless shortages of life in communist Russia, making “the transition easier and the rough edges less painful.” But it was impossible to adjust to everything. His barber smelled of vodka and herring, a combination that “was not only unpleasant but slightly frightening.”
