The Greatest Traitor Read online

  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.’

  Plenty of extra manpower would be required and the committee did not want to restrict selection to those with a Russian or Slav background. Blake’s notes read: ‘British personnel who had acquired a knowledge of Russian in universities had proved, in practice, to be equally as good at transcribing as native Russians. This would enlarge the recruiting field and diminish security risk.’ It was agreed that the handling of encrypte
d material would be divided between the National Security Agency (NSA) in America and General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Britain.

  This would by no means be the final meeting on the subject of the tunnel. In conclusion, Blake noted: ‘The discussions were of an exploratory nature. It was agreed that a further meeting could be held on or about 1 February 1954 at which it will be necessary to come to firm conclusions on the future conduct of the operation.’

  As soon as the conference finished that afternoon, Rowlett flew back to Frankfurt, where he brought General Lucian Truscott, the CIA’s Chief of Mission in Germany, and Bill Harvey up to date with the latest developments.

  After his minutes had been typed up and were ready for limited distribution among CIA and SIS officials, Blake retained the yellow-green carbon copy of the seven-page document for himself. He then arranged for a meeting with Kondrashev. Months before even a sod of earth had been dug from the ground at Altglienicke, the Berlin tunnel was fatally compromised.

  On Monday, 18 January 1954 the duties of a cultural attaché came first for Sergei Kondrashev. It was his task to escort Soviet chess grandmasters David Bronstein, Alexander Tolush and Vladimir Alatortsev to the airport for their return flight to Moscow at the end of a politically embarrassing three-week tour of Britain, which had seen them fail to perform at the standard set by the Soviet Chess Federation. They had been vanquished, as it happens, by a British intelligence man – Irish-born Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander, chief cryptanalyst at GCHQ. Having seen off the grandmasters, Kondrashev spent some hours ensuring he was not under surveillance before boarding a double decker bus.

  A couple of stops later Blake joined Kondrashev on the top deck and, knowing he had little time, gave the Russian a brief résumé of the contents of the package he was handing over. Both men felt distinctly nervous. ‘I told him in broad outline about the Berlin project and pointed out to him the great secrecy with which the operation was surrounded, and the necessity for taking particular care that any counter-measures the Soviet authorities might take should look natural and not create the suspicion that they were aware of what was afoot,’ Blake recalled.

  Kondrashev, too, was not his usual, calm self: ‘I slipped the envelope into the inside pocket of my jacket. I was very tense. I knew how important this thing was and I felt it was burning into my chest.’

  Kondrashev alighted several stops later at a prearranged location, where he was picked up by a fellow resident spy and driven back to Kensington Palace Gardens. As soon as he began to examine Blake’s minutes, he realised he had struck gold: ‘When I read it in the Embassy I was flabbergasted. This was explosive material. I could not believe my eyes.’ He sent a coded cable to Moscow that night, reporting that the meeting with Diomid had taken place satisfactorily. Such was the importance of the material that it was despatched immediately via the diplomatic courier, sealed in a special steel case and addressed directly to the Head of the First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence).

  Three weeks later, on 12 February, Kondrashev submitted a fuller report to Moscow Centre under his codename, Rostov, summing up the importance of the information Blake had passed on about both the Vienna and proposed Berlin tunnels. His preface to the section about Berlin contained a sentence of monumental understatement: ‘The information on a planned intercept operation against internal telephone lines on GDR territory is of interest.’

  Interesting it certainly was. As a participant in further SIS and CIA meetings throughout 1954 and into 1955, Blake continued to keep his masters in the Kremlin informed about progress with the tunnel. CIA Director Dulles gave formal approval for the project just two days after the Blake/Kondrashev meeting on the London bus. The warehouse buildings – one for main operations, a kitchen-dining room for staff, and a structure to house three diesel-driven generators – were then erected in the summer. The dig commenced at the end of August.

  Bill Harvey was content that the East Germans had no clue as to what was really taking place on the site. A display of fake radar and electronic intelligence gear was mounted on top of the warehouse, helping to fool the Communists into thinking it was signals intercept equipment aimed at the Soviet airport at Schönefeld.

  That autumn, the US Army Corps of Engineers began their construction work from under the main operations building. Essentially, the tunnel they were putting together was constructed as a long tube, using hundreds of circular sections of heavy steel plates specifically cast back home in America and tested rigorously in the desert in New Mexico. Only six days into the excavation, however, potential disaster loomed when it was discovered that the water table was much higher than first thought. There was now serious doubt about whether the tunnel could be built at all as it would lie too close to the surface for safety. Harvey and Rowlett were advised a shallower tunnel could be dug, just nine feet below ground rather than sixteen. Work resumed, and the horizontal section of the tunnel was eventually completed on 28 February 1955. It was 1,476 feet in length; 3,100 tons of soil was removed, 125 tons of steel plate and 1,000 cubic yards of grout were used.

  Now it was the turn of the British. It was the job of the Royal Engineers to build a vertical shaft from the end of the tunnel to the target cables. This was a tricky task, given the nature of the sandy soil of Berlin, which threatened to collapse everything on top of the diggers. An inventive solution came in the form of a contraption called ‘The Mole’ – a bottomless steel box, the top of which was made up of a series of sideways cutters interspersed with closable rotating blades. When placed vertically in the tunnel, the soil could then be removed slot by slot before the whole device was levered upwards. That work began on 10 March, and it took eighteen days to reach and expose the cables. Then the British continued with the final, most sensitive part of the whole operation – the tap itself.

  The biggest worry now was that the Soviets might notice a slight reduction in power as the tap took place but two jointers from Dollis Hill fashioned what was known in the trade as a ‘high-impedance’ tap – drawing off as little of the signal as possible – without a hitch in a delicate, painstaking four-hour operation.

  The first working tap took place on 11 May; intelligence would flow copiously and continuously for the following eleven months.

  Thanks to Blake, of course, the KGB had always known the tunnel was coming. They knew almost exactly to the day when the enemy would start eavesdropping. This gave the chiefs at Moscow Centre a dilemma: if they altered or manipulated the nature of the traffic going through cables 150, 151 and 152, the Americans and British would surely realise before long that something was amiss. Did they want to risk compromising the mole who had brought them the secrets of the tunnel – their eyes and ears at the heart of British intelligence?

  In the early months of 1954 there had been much talk of treachery in the corridors and offices of Broadway and Carlton Gardens. With his own traitorous activities now underway, Blake was increasingly anxious. His new unease was first prompted in early April by a high-profile Soviet defection.

  Vladimir Petrov was a KGB employee based at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, Australia, who feared he was about to be recalled to the Soviet Union, where, in all likelihood, he would be ‘purged’ and shot as an ally of the late but not lamented Security Chief, Lavrentiy Beria. When Petrov’s wife, Evdokia, tried to join him, two KGB officials seized her, bundling her onto a plane at Sydney with the intention of taking her back to Moscow. The striking picture of the rough handling of this clearly distressed woman by two Communist ‘heavies’ travelled all round the world. When the aircraft landed for refuelling at Darwin, officers from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) were on hand to intercept the kidnapping attempt, and freed Evdokia from the clutches of her KGB abductors.

  The problem for Blake – and for Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby, those other KGB moles still in position in England – was that the Petrovs had worked in the Lubyanka for years before moving to Australia. They were familiar with the working
s of the KGB in France, Germany and England, and they knew, even if they did not have the codenames or any other specific details, that there had been a network of agents in place in London since the early days of the war.

  SIS quickly began to liaise with their counterparts in ASIO, sensing that the Petrovs might have valuable information about Burgess and Maclean, and even Kim Philby, then still under suspicion of being ‘The Third Man’.

  Soon, fresh questions were being asked in the House of Commons. Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd was understandably cautious in his response: ‘The interrogation is at present in progress, but such information about Messrs Burgess and Maclean which has so far been elicited is of a limited and general character, and it is not yet certain whether it is based on Petrov’s personal knowledge or on heresay. I will consider making a further statement in due course.’

  Blake had only entered the fray relatively recently, but could the Petrovs have something on him? ‘The Burgess and Maclean affair, not unnaturally, formed a frequent subject of conversation in SIS and Foreign Office circles and, frankly speaking, it was a subject I did not enjoy,’ he recalled. ‘It was too near the bone and made me feel very uncomfortable. I tried to avoid it as much as possible.’

  Writing in his diary, Housing Minister Harold Macmillan revelled in the discomfiture of the Soviet Union, but calculated that the episode might have mixed consequences. The entry for Wednesday, 21 April read: ‘The newspapers are full of the Petrov drama. The account of how the Russian thugs tried to terrorise her and were disarmed at the airport by the Australian police is more like a piece of popular fiction than real life . . . It won’t make the Soviet Government any more tractable at Geneva. I think it will have a good effect at home, where people tend to forget how horrible Communism really is.’