THE BERLIN TUNNEL OPERATION GOLD (U.S.) OPERATION STOPWATCH (U.K.)
In the early 1950s the Red Army had 30 divisions based in Germany.
What were the Soviets up to? Did they plan to invade Western Europe?
British and American efforts to answer these questions had been stymied by their inability to crack the Russian military and diplomatic codes.
The British and Americans desperately desired information that would provide an early warning of any Soviet attack.
They devised one of the most audacious projects attempted by the West during the Cold War: a vast underground tunnel beneath the divided German city of Berlin that could be used to spy on the occupying Soviets.
Codenamed Operation Gold by the CIA and Operation Stopwatch by the British, the joint mission spun out of Britain’s Operation Silver, which had seen MI6 tapping Soviet lines in Vienna.
Ultimately, it would be a quarter-mile-long tunnel from Berlin’s American sector to the city’s Soviet sector and tap into the underground telephone cables that carried conversations to and from Soviet military headquarters.
The 1950s project might had seemed absurd, but for the US and Britain it was essential
– the Soviets had switched from radio broadcasts to telephone calls, which required a physical connection to overhear.
- The objective of the operation was to intercept communist phone conversations.
So began an immense two-year project between the CIA and Britain’s MI6 that saw agents literally being sent underground
– and was foiled by a dastardly double-agent, according to a CIA report.
But the Berlin job required some serious planning to pull off – and some serious hardware too.
In 1951 a CIA engineer, code-named ‘G’, was contacted by top CIA brass about a possible new project.
‘The only question they asked was whether a tunnel could be dug in secret,’ G later wrote in a now-declassified document was consulted on the tunnel in 1951.
‘G’ ‘s response was that one could dig a tunnel anywhere, but to build one in secret would depend on its size, take more time, and cost more money.’
G’s previous experience was limited to just ‘several’ visits to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel that was constructed under New York’s Upper Bay in 1948.
Nevertheless, G was put on the job, and was immediately posed with a near-impossible question:
how to remove 3,100 tons of soil – enough to fill 20 American living rooms – from beneath Berlin without anyone noticing.
Worse, the soil could not be moved from the dig site, for fear of altering authorities.
The solution, G realized, was to move the soil to a nearby building – ideally a warehouse – with a basement that could be slowly filled with dirt.
There were other things to consider, too, like lining the tunnel with steel so it could bear the weight of the 60-ton Soviet tanks rumbling through the streets above.
CIA Director, Allen Dulles, approved the top-secret plan in January 1954.
It would be a joint CIA and British SIS operation. Work began immediately.
Secret flights over the territory provided the architects with an idea of where to dig and
specialist machinery, including conveyor belts, was created and coated with rubber to minimize noise.
It was shipped in using unguarded passenger trains, so as not to attract attention.
Cover was provided by building a new facility next to a Berlin airport close to the dividing line between the American and Soviet sectors.
Disguised as a radar installation, it provided the starting point for the tunnel and a hidden dumping ground for all the dirt created by the excavation.
The tunnel began in a fake warehouse in Altglienicke, a US-controlled but sparsely populated area of Berlin.
The dig began in 1954, with the team slowly but near-unstoppably (a brief encounter
with a field used to drain sewage caused an understandable delay) gnawing their way through the ground.
Behind them, cables trailed off to the banks of recording machines on the ground floor of the warehouse.
Every so often high-pressure grout would have to be pumped into the two inches between the spoil and the steel plates, to stop the ground above sinking noticeably.
And as winter arrived, another problem raised its head: The heat from the tunnels left a clear line of warm, wet ground in the winter frost on the roads above.
Emergency air conditioning was fitted to keep the tunnel suitably frosty, and suspicion at bay.
It took a year to reach the cables – and then the really painful work began.
British sappers had to dig upwards to reach the cables – a painstaking process that saw them placing a ‘window blind’ shield facing upwards.
This would hold the soil above in place until one of the several blinds was opened.
The sappers would then remove just one inch of soil at a time, a process that, G said, ‘required extreme patience and skill.’
By May 1955 the tunnel was completed and the Russian cables containing an estimated 1200 telephone lines were tapped.
It was a mother-lode of information that kept 650 translators and analysts based in Washington and London busy around the clock for the next three years.
Finally, after three years of preparation, the team were ready. It was a perfect plan, provided the Soviets didn’t find out.
But unbeknownst to MI6 and the CIA, they already had.
In the spring of 1956 heavy rains inundated Berlin saturating the earth and interrupting the service of a number of cables.
In the early morning hours of April 22, 1956 the American spies watching from their disguised location were horrified
to see a team of German workers digging directly above their tunnel.
Within hours the tap was discovered and the listening devices shut down.
But, was the discovery the result of a freak accident of Nature? What the CIA and SIS didn’t know,
or even suspect, was that their plan had been compromised from its very beginning.
A “mole” had infiltrated the SIS. His name was George Blake and he had been recruited
as a Soviet spy while he was being held prisoner during the Korean War.
- Blake returning from Korea in 1953
After his repatriation, Blake joined the SIS and assigned to the team developing the tunnel.
He reported the plan to his KGB masters even before ground was broken.
However, the murky world of international espionage often works in strange ways.
It was discovered after the collapse of the Soviet Union that the KGB never revealed the existence of the tunnel to their military comrades
for fear that closing down the operation might alert their American and British adversaries to the existence of a mole within their ranks.
But on April 21, 1956, after Blake had received a promotion that would put him in the clear, Soviet and East German soldiers broke into the eastern end of the tunnel.
The espionage was called a ‘breach of the norms of international law’ and ‘a gangster act’
by the Soviets, but the CIA says that the ingenuity of the operation, which was acclaimed around the world, did them more good than harm.
Blake continued to work as a mole until 1961, when defectors named him as a double agent.
He was taken in and made a full confession, eventually being given 42 years in prison – then the longest sentence ever handed out by a British court –
but he escaped in 1966 and fled to Russia.
He was helped, not by the KGB, but by other former prisoners.
Michael Randle was an anti-nuclear protester who took a major part in the escape.
October 1966, after serving 5 years of a 42-year sentence, George Blake, former MI6 officer and Soviet spy,
scaled the wall of Wormwood Scrubs prison on a ladder made from knitting needles.
Blake was helped over the wall by Irishman, Sean Bourke, and his onward journey was organised by two radical anti-nuclear campaigners, Michael Randle and Pat Pottle.
- Sean Bourke – Dublin High Court
For almost two months, Blake hid in homes of people who agreed to help him. Then in late December 1966, Randle and his family concealed Burke in their car and drove him across the Channel to an East German border checkpoint where he then made his way to Moscow.
Blake’s treachery destroyed most of MI6’s operations in Europe, including Operation Stopwatch (US, Gold) – the Berlin spy tunnel.
He was also instrumental in exposing P S Popov, the first GRU officer to offer his services to the CIA after World War II.
Popov was executed in 1960.
His 42-year prison term was said to correspond to one year for each of the agents betrayed by his treachery.
Six of them were MI6 agents imprisoned for up to 17 years inside East Germany, serving time in jails notorious for torture and psychological intimidation of inmates. One is now believed to have been taken to Moscow and executed.
- Hans Mohring, an official on the GDR state planning commission and an agent for MI6, spent 17 years in a Stasi prison after he was betrayed by George Blake
Interviewed recently, Randle said, “I have no regrets.” Pottle died in 2000.
Bourke died in 1982.
“What a filthy trick!”
In 1968 the CIA wrote an “after action” report of the Berlin Tunnel operation code-named PBJOINTLY. We join the CIA report as American agents listen to a microphone hidden in the “tap chamber” where the underground Soviet cables have been spliced into:
“At approximately 0050 hours on 22 April, 40 or 50 men were seen on the east side of Scboenefelder Allee, deployed along the entire area observable from our installation, digging at three to five foot intervals over the location of the cable and, incidentally, the tap chamber.
. . . At approximately 0200 hours the top of the tap chamber was discovered, and at 0210 Russian speech was heard from the microphone in the tap chamber. The first fragments of speech indicated that the discovery of the tap chamber aroused no suspicion among those present.
A small hole was broken in the tap chamber roof permitting limited visual observation of the chamber, and a Soviet captain was brought to the spot. After some discussion all agreed that the discovery was a manhole covering a repeater point, and the working crew began enlarging the hole to gain access to the ‘repeater point.’
. . . The work of excavation continued, and fragments of conversation connected with it were picked up by the tap chamber microphone. . . .A German remarked that the chamber might be connected with sewage work and proposed that plans of the sewage system be obtained. . .
The Russian answered that they already had this information and the plans showed ‘that chamber’ to be 120 meters away from this point.
At about 0320 hours, when still more of the tap chamber was revealed and a better view of the interior obtained, those present began to speculate vaguely about its exact nature and the time of its construction . . . Shortly after 0330 hours, the Soviets left the site by motor vehicle, presumably to report their findings.
At approximately 0415 hours Vyunik [Colonel Vyunik, Chief of the Soviet signal center in Berlin] telephoned Alpatov’s apartment [Major Alpatov, a KGB officer] and asked Alpatov if he had spoken with General Dudakov [Chief signal Officer of the GSFG].
Alpatov said that he had, that he was getting dressed, and that he would go to his signal center as soon as possible. Vyunik told Alpatov to telephone him at the GSFG frame room as soon as possible. Adding, ‘When we speak we must do so carefully.
We know what the matter is, so will speak carefully.’ This indicated clearly that by 0415 hours the GSFG Signal Directorate and General Dudakov, the Chief Signal Officer, had been informed of the discovery of the PBJOINTLY chamber, viewed it with extreme suspicion, and planned to re-route circuits passing over the target cables.
. . . Between 0700 and 0800 hours a number of additional Soviet officers arrived at the excavation, including Colonel Gusev of the KGB Signals Regiment.
A Russian-speaking German was heard to remark that a ‘commission’ was expected, and a Soviet officer said that they would await the arrival of this commission before making a decision as to what the next step would be.
. . . At approximately 1145 hours one of the German crew was heard to exclaim, ‘The box is an entry to a shaft!’
. . . the Germans. . .broke a hole ‘through the wall and gained visual access to the equipment chamber, which they described as a long passage.’ By 1300 they evidently had enlarged the access hole and described ‘a complete installation – a telephone exchange. . . An installation for listening in.’
Conversations reflected that all present realized that the planning of the tunnel approach to the cables must have necessitated a very detailed study of relevant maps and plans.
. . . One of the Germans rather indignantly exclaimed, ‘What a filthy trick. And where you would least expect it.’ To which another relied, ‘Unless one had seen it for himself, nobody would believe it.’
Between 1515 and 1530 hours the tap wires were cut, and at about 1545 the attention of the Germans began to concentrate on the microphone itself. .
.At 1550 hours work began on dismantling the microphone. Shortly afterward the microphone went dead and, after 11 months and 11 days, the operational phase of PBJOINTLY was completed.”
- George Blake with fellow British double agent Kim Philby and their wives Rufina Ivanovna Pukhova and Ida Blake at Blake’s home in Russia in 1975 (Rex)
In 2007, on his 85th birthday, George Blake was given the Order of Friendship by Vladimir Putin
- Double agent George Blake celebrates 90th birthday
References:
This account appears in CIA Historical Paper no. 150, Clandestine Services History, The Berlin Tunnel Operation 1952 – 1956 (1968, declassified Feb., 2007); Martin, David C., Wilderness of Mirrors (1980); Stafford, David, Spies Beneath Berlin (2002).