The Greatest Traitor (24 page)

Blake had left Carlton Gardens at 6 p.m. and then headed for the West End, where he walked through Soho before reaching Oxford Street. There, he stepped into one of the ubiquitous ABC teashops – that ‘sinister strand in English catering’, in the words of George Orwell – where he was comforted by the sheer ordinariness of his surroundings. ‘I had plenty of time . . . I drank a cup of tea and ate a cake. It did not taste particularly nice, but then I didn’t have much of an appetite,’ was the spy’s recollection. ‘All the time I was watching to see if I was being followed, though there was no particular reason why I should be. I felt in my inside pocket if the folded paper I was going to hand over was still there.’ Blake then left the café and walked three-quarters of a mile south to Charing Cross underground station. The precautions continued; he waited until everyone had got on before catching the train at the last minute. Then, at the next stop – Leicester Square – he jumped off just as the doors were closing, let two more trains pass, and finally caught the third, all the while searching around him for anyone who looked dubious.

At Belsize Park, as he walked away from the station and left the crowds behind, the tension eased. ‘The further I went, the quieter it became. A man came slowly out of the fog walking towards me, also carrying a newspaper in his left hand.’ Anyone seeing Blake emerge slowly from the enveloping gloom and approaching Kondrashev would have been reminded of a scene from
The Third Man.
Kondrashev greeted Blake warmly, and they then walked up the near-deserted
street a short distance before Blake handed him the folded piece of paper, which the Russian slipped into his pocket. On it were the first fruits of his betrayal. It contained a preparatory list of all the telephone tapping operations SIS was conducting in Vienna, as well as details of microphones installed in Soviet and Eastern Bloc buildings across Western Europe.

If his meeting with Rodin in The Hague three months earlier had been akin to passing an initiation ceremony, this one, for Blake, felt like the definitive moment of commitment: ‘Strangely enough, this gave me a feeling of relief very much like the experience of landing safely after my first parachute jump. An exhilarated feeling of achievement which comes whenever one has overcome fears and apprehensions.’

Blake briefly explained the contents of the paper to Kondrashev as they walked through the streets of Hampstead, before they turned around and headed back towards the main road. For the young Russian spy, there was a growing sense of relief. He had been reassured that Blake was a genuine mole, but it was still possible that his informant was a deliberate plant by SIS, and that the material was ‘chicken feed’. Blake’s attitude and words convinced the young Russian and, by the end of their encounter, he felt far less anxious. After fifteen to twenty minutes, they parted company after arranging to meet again in a month’s time, in another part of London, and also deciding on alternative dates and places in case of emergency.

Blake headed back to the flat in Charleville Mansions, close to Baron’s Court tube station, that he shared with his mother. Over a meal and a glass of wine he relaxed and felt the satisfaction of a job well done: ‘My mother is a very good cook and this supper remained in my memory, not only because I liked the food, but mostly because the room seemed particularly cosy and secure after the damp, foggy night outside and the dangers of the clandestine meeting I had just lived through.’

He and Kondrashev would continue to meet every three or four weeks, usually close to an underground station in the suburbs. At their
next meeting, the Russian provided him with a Minox camera, a bulky device that he nonetheless kept in his back pocket at all times while in the office. It enabled him to work more easily, photographing vital documents rather than attempting to smuggle sheaves of paper out of the building. He would usually wait until lunchtime, lock the door of his office, and then set to work: ‘It became automatic. I was almost reduced to a mystical state, when I was the eye and the finger.’

Every three weeks, Y section compiled a lengthy bulletin of its activities, usually amounting to thirty or forty typewritten pages. This paper was graded top security and distributed to the War Office, the Air Ministry, the Joint Intelligence Bureau, the Foreign Office and the CIA in Washington. Blake now made sure a copy also went to the KGB via Kondrashev.

In only their second or third meeting, in early December 1952, Blake handed over a hugely damaging Minox film of a ninety-page report entitled ‘Banner 54/1’, which contained a compilation of the tapped calls between Austria and Hungary, obtained via the tunnels in Vienna.

Blake’s Soviet masters were delighted. He had settled comfortably into the routine of treachery, passing on every document of interest that came across his desk, and though the secrets of the Vienna tunnels were an impressive breakthrough for Moscow Centre,
Agent Diomid
was soon to deliver a far bigger prize.

11

Secrets of the Tunnel

I
n December 1953, Tom Gimson’s office at No. 2 Carlton Gardens was the venue for a four-day conference hosted by SIS with the joint participation of the CIA. Gimson’s deputy, George Blake, was the secretary and minute-taker, as intelligence officers and their technical advisers – nine from SIS, five from the CIA – sought to put the finishing touches to an audacious eavesdropping scheme, which surely embodied the spirit of those SOE operations Churchill had so relished in World War Two.

It was codenamed Operation Stopwatch or Gold (the British gave it the former title, the Americans the latter). Its purpose was nothing less than to dig a secret tunnel in a Berlin suburb that would run from the American sector into the Soviet Zone, enabling the Western intelligence agencies to tap the underground cables through which the Soviet military command in Germany communicated with Moscow and all points east. It would clearly build on the work done and lessons learned in Vienna, but this subterranean passage was on an altogether different scale to the short digs from house to street in the Austrian capital.

Ever since 1951 when Peter Lunn and his colleagues decided to share the secrets of their tunnelling exploits, the CIA had been working flat
out to develop a scheme that would emulate, and hopefully surpass, that success. The man tasked with overseeing their technical operations was the one who did most of the talking that Friday afternoon in December.

Forty-five-year-old Virginian Frank Byron Rowlett was one of the outstanding code breakers of his generation, spoken of in the same breath as Britain’s Alan Turing. A mathematician and chemist by training, in 1930, aged twenty-one, he became the first junior cryptanalyst in the US Army Signal Intelligence Department in Washington. Rowlett was a key member of the team that cracked the Japanese diplomatic code and cipher communications known as ‘Purple’ in the Second World War, and CIA Director Allen Dulles had eagerly poached him from the rival National Security Agency in 1952 to become chief of Staff D (intelligence intercepts). Rowlett was quiet and softly spoken, a southern country boy at heart, who preferred to work in the background. His calm authority and air of serenity earned him the sobriquet ‘Our Father’, although the head of CIA station in Berlin, the wisecracking Bill Harvey, would also refer to him teasingly as ‘Mountain Boy’.

Among the papers Rowlett had in his possession that day, to which he regularly referred, was one dated 16 September, headlined ‘Field Project Outline’ and labelled ‘TOP SECRET – Security Information Classification’. It was for the eyes of Allen Dulles and a very few others. Essentially it was Rowlett’s blueprint for the Berlin tunnel. It did not mention the location by name, but that had already been decided. It would start in Rudow, a rural area of the US Sector southwest of Berlin. The three target cables ran under a ditch on the west side of Schönefelder Chausee in the Soviet Sector in Altglienicke. In his memo, Rowlett explained that the tunnel would need to be some 1,800 feet long, burrowing underneath a heavily patrolled border so that nearly half the length of it would be in Soviet territory. The rewards would be worth the effort: ‘It has been established that these cables carry Soviet military, Security Service and diplomatic telephone and
telegraph traffic to and from various Soviet headquarters in Germany and in certain instances between those headquarters and Moscow.’

At a jittery moment in the Cold War when the people of Berlin, and the rest of the world, feared a sudden, massive attack by Red Army forces, this was music to Dulles’ ears. Now, there would be the opportunity to learn full details of the deployment and strength of the Soviet ground forces, information about their air forces in East Germany and Poland, and perhaps even intelligence of the use of East German uranium for the Soviet atomic bomb. Much, too, might be gleaned on a more personal level by hearing the chatter between the Soviet military elite and their political controllers. Who was up and who was down in the Kremlin hierarchy after the death of Stalin, nine months earlier? Who should the Western leaders really be talking to?

But Rowlett’s September memo had thrown up a couple of significant problems. First, how were they to hide such a massive engineering job requiring large amounts of equipment and labour? Several thousand tons of soil would have to be removed and disposed of without alerting suspicion. ‘It is reasonable and possible for the US forces in Berlin to construct a number of warehouses within the bounds of the US Sector. Although such constructions will attract attention, the fact remains that knowledge of what transpires within these buildings is a matter not beyond control,’ Rowlett had reassured Dulles. One story the CIA was working on to tell the suspicious East Germans was that the warehouses constituted a new US radar station.

Secondly, there was a physical and technical challenge right at the heart of the scheme. ‘Upon completion of the passageway,’ wrote Rowlett, ‘specialists will begin work on the critical and hazardous task of constructing the tap chamber and the opening of the cables. The element of hazard is particularly acute due to the fact that the target cables lie only twenty-eight inches from the surface of the earth.’

Rowlett’s right-hand man at the table in Tom Gimson’s office that day was Carl Nelson, the CIA’s chief communications officer in Germany, and a highly capable electrical engineer. Nelson had
previously been stationed in Vienna and was familiar with the work there of Peter Lunn and his team.

On the British side, the three senior officers round the table were George Kennedy Young, Director of Requirements, later to be Vice Chief of the Service; Ian Innes ‘Tim’ Milne, former head of Section V (counter-espionage); and Stewart Mackenzie, a future Controller of Western Hemisphere operations. Young was SIS’s leader at the meeting and the tunnel was a project that entirely suited his adventurous instincts.

He had started his working life as a journalist on
The Glasgow Herald,
but by the end of the Second World War, the Scotsman had switched careers and become an experienced and resourceful military intelligence officer. After a brief return to journalism in Berlin after the war, Young was lured back permanently to intelligence, and SIS. His rise was meteoric. He preceded Peter Lunn as head of the Vienna station before returning to Broadway in 1949 to become head of SIS’s economic requirements section (R6). In 1951, he was on the move again, appointed controller of operations in the ‘Middle East area’. Here, he was a key figure in the successful Anglo-American plot to instigate a coup to overthrow the Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadeq, who had nationalised the Anglo-Iranian oil company and subsequently severed all diplomatic relations with Britain.

Young felt spies could and should be proactive, and he was in a group of so-called ‘robber barons’ whose swashbuckling instinct was to take the Cold War to the enemy. As Director of Requirements, however, he accepted that elaborate and expensive attempts to put agents into Soviet territory – places like the Baltic States and Poland – had failed dismally. Moscow Centre knew about all these operations and had wrapped up the vast majority. In his efforts to find high-grade intelligence on Russian intentions and policy-making, the tunnel appealed to his practical, as well as enterprising, side.

Although they had participated in previous meetings, the two main drivers of the whole project were not present, being in Berlin that
day, preoccupied with the task of running their large bases there. After his triumphs in Vienna, Peter Lunn had a brief posting to Berne before his move to Berlin in the summer of 1953. His arrival, just as preparations for the tunnel were gathering pace, was far from coincidental. William King Harvey, his opposite number, had moved in as Chief of the CIA’s Berlin Base six months earlier. He and his operatives had done much of the early intelligence spadework for the tunnel, including recruiting agents in the
Ostpost
, the East Berlin post office, who provided information on the most sensitive cables.

Harvey, who had started his intelligence career at the FBI before falling foul of the mercurial J. Edgar Hoover, was coarse in manner and appearance and rather over-dedicated to Martini. He was nonetheless a brilliant field operator and had thrown himself into the tunnel project with customary gusto – so much so that colleagues would come to christen it ‘Harvey’s Hole’.

Blake’s minutes of that meeting revealed the potential scale of the intelligence that the committee believed might accrue from the Berlin tunnel – and the huge resources needed to process it. ‘Cables 151 and 152 are believed to contain 81 Russian speech circuits, of which 19 are voice-frequency telegraph circuits,’ he wrote. ‘Using present British experience as a basis it was estimated that 81 circuits would produce 162 reels a day, each lasting 2.5 hours. The processing of these reels would require 81 transcribers, 30 collators, 27 cardists, 10 people in the Signals Section, and 10 Russian typists, making a total of 158.’