The Cold War (30 page)

In the mid-1950s, American military and political leaders worked with virtually no reliable intelligence information on Soviet military preparations and capabilities. Thanks to strategic overflight reconnaissance, their successors dealt with a surfeit of such information, almost all of it reliable. That transformation turned first on the sacrifices of American airmen who flew in the SENSINT program. They knew of the risks they took and accepted them in the interests of national security. Altogether, between 1946 and 1991, some 170 U.S. Air Force and Navy aircrew members were lost to Soviet attacks on PARPRO missions. Remarkably, among all of the American flights that intentionally overflew Soviet and Chinese territory on White House orders, none was lost until a Soviet antiaircraft rocket knocked Francis Gary Powers's U-2 out of the sky on May 1, 1960. But that is another story.

GEORGE FEIFER

Berlin, as George Feifer remarks here, was “ground zero of the clash between East and West.” It was like an island washed by the unfriendly seas of Communism; but until the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the borders between the three Allied zones of the city and the Soviet remained open. The East needed the products and hard currency of the West. People moved back and forth, more from east to west: All through the 1950s well over a hundred thousand a year chose to flee East Germany, the so-called German Democratic Republic, or simply the GDR. Both sides took advantage of this relative openness in another way. Espionage became a trade as ordinary as haberdashery or milk delivery, and almost as respectable. The divided city, said a CIA operative, was a place where “everyone was a spy, and the spies were spying for everyone.” Berlin, the historian David Clay Large adds, was “postwar Europe's capital of espionage. Some eighty spy agencies and their various front organizations, disguised as everything from jam exporters to research institutes, worked the city.” (It was a novelist's paradise, and Cold War fiction became a literary genre all its own.)

Berlin may have given Allied intelligence services one of their few windows on the East, but the panes were too often distorted and mistenshrouded. The farther from the city one traveled, the more difficult it was to pick up the information needed to gauge the potential of the Soviet threat. The U.S.S.R. was all but impenetrable to Western espionage, as were its satellites. (As has been pointed out, that impenetrability explained the need for overflights.) What was the Soviet capability for offensive action, not only against Berlin and West Germany but also against Western Europe itself? How much was the GDR contributing
to the Soviet nuclear program? After the anti-government riots that had spread across East Germany in June 1953, how strong did anti-Communist sentiment remain? Could it still be exploited?

The spy game became even more risky thanks to moles in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the West German Foreign Intelligence Service. Between 1953 and 1955, they betrayed the West's spy network in the Soviet bloc and for a time almost eliminated it. Several hundred Allied agents were rounded up, not a few of whom were executed. Meanwhile, the GDR cut telephone links between East Germany and the West, suspended bus and tram service between the two Berlins, and closed the frontier with West Germany. With its barbed wire, watchtowers, minefields, and control points,
die Grenze
—“the border”— became a genuine iron curtain, an uncrossable corridor 858 miles long. None of these measures stopped the flow of refugees, which included many of East Germany's youngest and best-educated citizens, a true brain drain (as well as a sizable number of Stasi, the GDR secret police organization that, per capita, was larger than the Nazi Gestapo).

If the Soviets continually outdid the West in spycraft and the brutal and distasteful exercise of counterintelligence, its adversaries had the edge in matters technological. Technology could be the equal of any number of well-placed spies: Witness the success of overflights. That brings us to the Berlin tunnel, among the most spectacular, if short-lived (eleven months and eleven days), intelligence contrivances of its time. The tunnel was the brainchild of one of the outsize (in every sense) characters of the Cold War—the CIA station chief in Berlin, William King Harvey, a hard-drinking, womanizing gun nut who had earned a deserved reputation as an imaginative case officer. Harvey recognized that there was much intelligence mileage to be had in the tapping of phone lines. As one CIA man remembered, pinpointing a notable limit of Communist technology, “When the Soviet commandant in Bucharest or Warsaw called Moscow, the call went through Berlin.” Overhead lines, which the KGB favored, were virtually inaccessible, but buried cables were another matter. The CIA discovered that signal cables ran along a road just on the other side of the border from the American sector. But how to reach them? Harvey's solution was to dig a tunnel that would be stuffed with the most advanced listening devices and would end in a tapping chamber next to the cables. Its model was a similar but far more modest
tunnel that the British had dug in that other Cold War espionage capital, Vienna. Operation Silver, as it was called, had produced a great amount of useful information about Soviet arms and intentions; this tunnel would be Operation Gold. “Harvey's Hole” would work beyond the wildest imaginings of its creators. But would it, really? The argument still goes on. The project was so important that it had to be kept secret from most CIA agents. But the Soviets, as it turned out, had an even bigger secret of their own.

GEORGE FEIFER is the author of eight books on Russia, including
Justice in Moscow, Moscow Farewell,
and
Red Files
. Since his first visit in 1959, he has lived in Moscow on and off extensively. Feifer spent 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as a graduate exchange student studying Soviet criminal law at Moscow University. He is currently writing an account, from both the American and Japanese sides, of Commodore Perry's opening of Japan.

H
ARVEY'S HOLE
, the Cold War's most daring espionage exploit, crowned the legend inspired and courted by its namesake. William Harvey, a former FBI specialist in Soviet counterintelligence operations, switched to the CIA in 1947 after failing to uphold J. Edgar Hoover's standards for his agents' personal comportment. Harvey's Hole was a tunnel dug in 1953 from a secret site near the border of Berlin's American and Soviet sectors, then boldly into Communist territory to tap communication cables there. The visionary undertaking ended in high success and abysmal failure. Although Harvey was a kind of misbegotten John Wayne, the story, like many about espionage at the highest levels, is too complex and ambiguous for that kind of movie.

Not that the setting was less than ideal. Throughout the 1950s, the Cold War was most intense in divided Berlin. After the 1948–49 Soviet blockade failed to force the United States, Great Britain, and France from their sectors, the old German capital—with the world's largest, most prestigious CIA station a stone's throw from the world's largest concentration of Soviet troops—re-mained ground zero of the clash between East and West. It was as if the proximity of the nemesis pumped both sides' adrenaline into the torn city from throughout the planet.

Berlin's KGB station was so critical that its chief was one of the huge agency's deputy chairmen. General Yevgeny Pitovranov, who occupied the position during the tunnel's conception and construction, happened to be a model officer. The well-educated, low-key professional had served as the chief of Soviet foreign intelligence. He had few vices, not even an interest in acquiring coveted German consumer goods, an activity that preoccupied some of his subordinates. While the general lived very modestly in the Soviet compound, his opposite number, William King Harvey, followed his 1952 appointment as
the CIA station chief by choosing a magnificent, heavily fortified villa. The flamboyant Harvey and the temperate Pitovranov made a curious contrast.

Like all legends, “Big Bill” prompted exaggeration. The outsize thirty-seven-year-old drank up to five martinis before raising a fork to his lunch, and he seemed immune to criticism for sometimes making an afternoon spectacle of himself. The staff at BOB (Berlin Operations Base), as the station was called, held him in half-admiring, half-nervous awe. He always kept loaded revolvers there: three or four in his desk and two on his person, rotated daily from among his collection. Racks of firearms lined the walls, and thermite bombs atop the safes would instantly destroy the files within if the Soviets invaded, as expected. During his Berlin heyday, a beer-hall waitress politely handed Harvey a pistol that had fallen from his pocket. He never checked his heaters in restaurants because “When you need 'em, you need 'em in a hurry.” Actually, he had no such need in Berlin, thanks to a scrupulously observed understanding that KGB and CIA officers didn't shoot one another. Still, Harvey required all new BOB personnel to draw a weapon.

To some extent, the man merely reflected the times; CIA Cold Warriors were hardly alone in fearing the Communist peril. The Doolittle Report commissioned by President Eisenhower would warn in 1954, during the tunnel's construction, that America confronted “an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost.” No rules mattered in such a struggle, the authors contended. “Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, longstanding American concepts of ‘fair-play’ must be reconsidered.” Harvey himself might have written the report's appeal for more espionage to “subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies.” As it was, ranking American visitors to BOB headquarters were buoyed by a rousing delivery of his signature speech about “protecting the United States against its enemies.” Startled Europeans tended to see the passionate lover of pearl handles and battle hyperbole as dangerously half-cocked himself: the archetypal anti-Communist cowboy.

John Kennedy approved. The young president and Ian Fleming fan would speak of the pear-shaped Harvey, with his bulging eyes and froglike voice, as a kind of American James Bond. Actually, the “memorably bizarre figure”—as described by Evan Thomas's account of CIA all-stars,
The Very Best Men
— occupied the opposite end of the manly-beauty spectrum from braw Bond. That aside, the comparison was not outrageous. Harvey took pains to broadcast his relish for whiskey and guns. The son of a small-town Indiana lawyer cultivated
his macho Texan image because he believed it helped him get results. Something clearly did. He was known as a superb case officer who combined astute hunches with careful legwork in running his cases—usually potential new sources of information. More street-smart than academically analytical, he had a sure sense of the human frailties that often led people to involve themselves in spying. Uncommon ability to identify and mesh every relevant detail bolstered his excellence in operations.

The anti-elitist Harvey was chosen to head BOB—the CIA's most critical station—fresh from sniffing out Kim Philby as an arch KGB spy in Washington, while other Americans were still inviting the upper-crust British traitor to their clubs. But he'd had so little administrative preparation for a post of BOB's importance, and he so differed from his Ivy League predecessors, that his case officers saw their new boss as “a creature from another planet.”

The stakes were huge. Would Moscow succeed in dominating Europe by dislodging the bone in its throat called West Berlin? Would there be war? Would the information filched by the other side give it a decisive advantage? The espionage players were certain that Europe's fate hung in the balance, especially after a series of Berlin confrontations, including the blockade, that were more suggestive of real war than any cold variety. Post-Communism studies have established that both sides were convinced the other was itching to invade. The Americans particularly feared that the Soviet onslaught would fall on NATO's embryonic European defenses. To counter the vastly superior Communist forces, information about them, and about Moscow's intentions, became more vital than ever.

Berlin's unique features put it on the front line of Cold War espionage. It was an island surrounded by Soviet-bloc territory. The only land access to its Western sectors was through a hundred miles of East Germany, which often harassed Berlin-bound traffic, under Moscow's direction. Still, East and West could mix on the island as nowhere else. Before the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, freedom of movement throughout the city created a gap in the Iron Curtain. The city was a rare operational asset for both sides because all Germans, and their respective Cold War allies, could make normal social contact with one another there. Among them, squads of spies, “illegals,” informers, double agents, and accomplices crossed back and forth between the hostile sectors, controlling agents who were spying, lying, stealing, secretly photographing, deceiving, and working to thwart their opposite numbers who were doing the same.

Big Bill envisioned something better. Interception of the enemy's radio traffic had recently all but ceased because Soviet communications had switched to more secure means. The lost source of information had to be replaced—but almost certainly not by raiding the scrupulously patrolled Soviet lines strung on telephone poles. However, Harvey knew about Operation Silver, in which British intelligence had tapped underground lines at the Soviet army's Vienna headquarters. He wanted to try something similar but far more ambitious in Berlin. It would be called Operation Gold.

Among the plentiful myths that would spring up about the tunnel were those suggesting that the idea first came from Reinhard Gehlen, the famous founder of West Germany's Intelligence Service, or from the U.S. Army's intelligence section (G-2). In fact, the project's father was Harvey, even before he took up his Berlin post. Indeed, it was his inspiration to tap underground Soviet cables that explained the appointment, startling to CIA veterans, of the then obscure, non-German-speaking staff officer as BOB's chief.

Harvey directed the first step while still in Washington: learning where the enemy cables were, and what traffic each one carried. He brought in a communications specialist fluent in German and supervised a powerful effort to recruit East Germans who had access to the cable network's routings. Since no BOB officer personally ventured into East Berlin, that had to be done by instructing BOB's covert agents when they visited West Berlin. An official of an East Berlin post office procured bulky books with details of cable traffic. An operative dubbed the
Nummer Mädchen,
or “numbers girl,” provided comprehensive data from the cards maintained in her classified post office switching room, where orders were executed designating cables for specific Soviet traffic. A prominent East German lawyer specializing in international postal usage would arrive impeccably dressed for an elaborate dinner in his honor at a West Berlin safe house. The highly conservative guest would then begin by lowering his trousers and ripping adhesive tape from his buttocks to remove cards onto which the operations of communications switching offices had been copied. Slowly, laboriously, with time-consuming checks to ensure that the information from various sources agreed, new and old East German operatives helped BOB form a picture of the Soviet network.