GERMANY:A Berlin tunnel is still yielding up the secrets of tables turned in the intelligence war of illusions, writes Craig Whitlockin Berlin
On a rainy day 52 years ago, the cover was blown on one of the biggest espionage plots of the Cold War. Soviet and East German forces announced that they had found a quarter-mile- long tunnel that the CIA had burrowed into East Berlin as part of a massive wiretapping operation.
Though the audacious project had come to an end, news of the discovery generated glee across the Atlantic at CIA headquarters. US spymasters were thrilled by the world's response: admiration for the CIA's daring and technical prowess, and a general assumption that the agency had roundly snookered the Soviets.
"Worldwide reaction was outstandingly favourable in terms of enhancement of US prestige," the CIA wrote in an internal history of the Berlin Tunnel project that was declassified last year.
In terms of telephonic engineering and sheer skulduggery, the CIA's tunnel was a marvellous accomplishment. Begun in August 1954 under a makeshift warehouse in the Rudow sector of West Berlin, near a field of hovels built amid wartime rubble by refugees, the mole hole was secretly dug over a period of 18 months. It extended 300 yards into the Soviet sector.
Aided by British intelligence, the tunnellers tapped for a year into three large cables that carried most of the telephone and telegraph traffic between East Berlin and points farther afield, including Moscow. More than 25 tons of magnetic tape were studied by hundreds of translators and processors in Washington and London.
More than half a century later, however, scholars are still arguing over which side really succeeded in pulling the wool over the other's eyes.
"It was all part of the bigger game between the Americans and the Soviets during the Cold War," said Bernd Stöver, a historian at the University of Potsdam who studies the conflict. "Spying was something like a contest, in which they showed each other who was better at playing the game. They were happy to show the public that they were professionals in this secret spy war, in which normally they can't talk about anything."
After exposing the tunnel on April 22nd, 1956, the Soviets and East Germans immediately tried to create a propaganda victory. They held a news conference - something the Soviet military almost never did - and invited reporters from both sides of the border to attend. In the ensuing weeks, as Washington remained silent about its complicity, the communist authorities paraded 50,000 East Berliners through the tunnel to give them a first-hand glimpse of the enemy's "filthy trick," as one East German official put it.
At the CIA, however, the "spooks" were elated that they had gone public. Planners had assumed they would find the tunnel eventually but hush it up.
"It was felt that for the Soviets to admit that the US had been reading their high-level communications circuits would cause the Soviets to lose face," according to the CIA's internal account of the episode, which was written in 1967 and 1968. "Perhaps fortunately, fate intervened, and as a possible consequence, the Soviet course of action was exactly contrary to expectation."
The truth was much more complicated, however. Unbeknownst to the CIA, the Soviets had known about the tunnel all along. The CIA had made the mistake of discussing its plans with George Blake, the British intelligence official who, in 1961, was exposed as a KGB mole.
He had betrayed the identities of hundreds of British agents, as well as plans for the tunnel project. According to a book co-written by Blake's KGB handler, Sergei Kondrashev, Soviet intelligence officials were highly concerned about the risk of exposing their source. They worried that suspicions might be aroused if they "discovered" the tunnel too quickly, so they let the operation proceed unmolested.
Heavy rains that damaged one of the cables in the spring of 1956 gave them an excuse to inspect the communications lines and make it appear as if they had stumbled across the tunnel.
So it was the CIA that was snookered. According to an August 1956 internal memo, the CIA concluded that the Soviet detection of the tapping scheme had been "purely fortuitous and was not the result of a penetration of the US or UK agencies concerned."
Blake's exposure as a double agent five years later led to a reappraisal of the wiretapping project. Had it generated any real secrets? Or had the Soviets fed disinformation through the cables? In his book, Kondrashev said the cable traffic was genuine and that the Soviets hadn't dared transmit false material for fear of compromising Blake. But scholars remain uncertain.
Blake, who escaped from a British prison in 1966 and fled to Moscow, is still alive but has never divulged exactly what he told the KGB.