Betrayal in Berlin Read online

  Dedication

  To the undying friendship and devoted service of three happy warriors:

  Don Vogel, Ben Pepper, and Gus Hathaway

  Maps

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  Prelude

  Part I: The Sins Inside

  Chapter 1: Black Friday

  Chapter 2: To Betray, You First Have to Belong

  Chapter 3: Bill Harvey, of All People

  Chapter 4: Ground Zero

  Chapter 5: A Hero’s Return

  Chapter 6: The Big Prize Was Going to Be Berlin

  Chapter 7: Agent Diomid

  Chapter 8: This Was Explosive Material

  Part II: The Warehouse

  Chapter 9: A Special Assignment

  Chapter 10: It Was Getting So Complicated

  Chapter 11: The Dig

  Part III: Ace in the Hole

  Chapter 12: The Baby Was Born

  Chapter 13: Striking Gold

  Chapter 14: The Penetration of the CIA into Our Midst

  Chapter 15: The One-Man Tunnel

  Chapter 16: The Hottest Intelligence Operation on the Face of the Planet

  Chapter 17: Berlin Was on the Top of the World

  Chapter 18: There’s a Fast One Coming

  Part IV: A Nest of Spies

  Chapter 19: A Sensational Story About American Espionage

  Chapter 20: The Invisible War

  Part V: Among Friends

  Chapter 21: Exit Berlin

  Chapter 22: Sniper

  Chapter 23: The Worst That Can Be Envisaged

  Chapter 24: Our James Bond

  Chapter 25: Mischief, Thou Art Afoot

  Chapter 26: A Free Man Again

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Note on Sources

  Selected Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Photo Section

  Also by Steve Vogel

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prelude

  KOREA, SUNDAY, JULY 2, 1950

  At midnight, the British, American, and French prisoners were taken from the Seoul police headquarters and bundled into the back of a North Korean army truck, guarded by soldiers holding submachine guns and bayonet-tipped rifles. The captives, including diplomats, missionaries, and businessmen, had been rounded up when the North Korean army launched a surprise attack on the south a week earlier and swept into the South Korean capital. When the British diplomats had asked to bring clothes for the journey, they were told, rather ominously, that it would not be necessary.

  The prisoners were taken through a landscape of burned villages and bomb craters, the air pungent from the smell of rotting corpses. As they drove, the North Korean officer escorting the captives practiced with his newly issued Russian weapon, firing blindly into the night and further fraying nerves. For an hour, the truck climbed a mountain road, and then continued down into a remote valley, where it came to a halt. George Blake, vice-consul for the British legation in Seoul, exchanged looks with his fellow prisoners. All had the same realization: They had been taken to this isolated spot to be summarily executed. Blake saw that the truck was carrying a spare barrel of gasoline and concluded that it would be used to burn their bodies afterwards. Herbert Lord, a British citizen who served as commissioner for the Salvation Army in Korea, thought it appropriate to lead the group in a short prayer.

  Unbeknownst to his captors, as well as to almost all of his fellow prisoners, Blake’s diplomatic title was cover for his true role as chief of station in South Korea for the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)—also known as MI6. The son of a Dutch woman and a Turkish subject who had fought for the British Empire, Blake had a cosmopolitan background, experience in hazardous situations, and a facility for languages—Russian, German, French, and Dutch, among others—that made him a natural for espionage. Just twenty-eight years old, he had already survived great dangers in Nazi-occupied Europe. After the German conquest of the Netherlands in 1940, Blake, then a schoolboy, served heroically, delivering messages for the Dutch resistance. In 1942, he made a daring escape through France and Spain before he made it to England. There, he joined the Royal Navy and was recruited by the SIS, and at war’s end was dispatched to occupied Germany to gather intelligence on the Soviet Red Army. In 1949, he was sent to South Korea, tasked with trying to establish an intelligence network to spy on the Soviets in the Far East.

  The North Korean invasion on June 25, 1950, had triggered the Cold War’s first armed conflict. The United States, with the support of the United Nations, had rushed troops to defend South Korea, but the unprepared Americans were knocked back almost to the sea by overwhelming North Korean force. Westerners based in Korea were caught up in the chaos accompanying the brutal and dangerous first days of the war.

  Now it had come to this. Sitting in the back of the truck awaiting execution, Blake was forcibly struck with a bitter realization of “how perfectly useless” his death would be. After an excruciating wait of twenty minutes, a jeep carrying two North Korean army officers arrived. But instead of overseeing an execution, the officers ordered the vehicles to resume driving north. The prisoners were alive, but their ordeal was only beginning.

  * * *

  Blake and his fellow captives were taken to the northern town of Manpo, nestled on the banks of the Yalu River on the frontier with Manchuria. Over several months, their group grew to include Turkish and White Russian businessmen and their families who had been detained in Seoul. More Western clergy, including elderly French priests and nuns, were also rounded up from across Korea, as well as several journalists, among them Philip Deane, the dashing and cocky correspondent covering the war for the London Observer.

  The civilian prisoners, now numbering about 70, were being held near a camp holding 777 American prisoners of war—soldiers from the 24th Infantry Division units overrun by the North Koreans at the start of the war. The POWs were in dreadful condition, still wearing the summer fatigues in which they had been captured during the initial weeks of the war, and many now without shoes. These were not battle-hardened veterans of World War II; most were poorly trained and badly equipped conscripts who had been on cushy occupation duty in Japan before being sent into the fight. “They had been taken out of this paradise and thrown into the hell of the Korean War,” Blake observed. The civilian prisoners were shocked by the haggard and emaciated appearance of the POWs, many of them infested with lice. “These ragged, dirty, hollow-eyed men did not look like any American soldiers that I had ever seen,” recalled Larry Zellers, a lanky Methodist missionary from Texas who had served as an airman in World War II.

  But in mid-September, the prospects for all the Western captives suddenly soared. One morning while Zellers was drawing water at a well, a brave Korean schoolboy surreptitiously handed him a note reporting that General Douglas MacArthur, commander of UN forces, had turned the war around with a landing behind enemy lines at Inchon, triggering a massive North Korean retreat with American and UN troops in pursuit. Two weeks later, the prisoners were overjoyed by news that MacArthur had recaptured Seoul and was driving north.

  Blake, like the others, believed liberation was at hand, and the captives debated how many days or weeks remained until they were freed. All were deflated when they learned in early October that they were being moved to more secure locations farther from the front. After two weeks at an interim camp, the prisoners marched up a mountain trail to Jui-am-nee, a derelict old mining town. But even at the new location, the sounds of approaching artillery and the disorderly bands of retreating North Korean soldiers who came over the hills pointed to a quick end to the
war. “It became clear to us that the North Korean regime was collapsing and the army disintegrating,” Blake recalled. The front remained near—American lines were reported to be only fifty miles away, and freedom was tantalizingly close.

  * * *

  Escape came naturally to Blake. During his thousand-mile journey across Europe in World War II, he had jumped off a moving train in Belgium to evade German soldiers and trekked across the snowy Pyrenees on a mule trail. So it was no surprise that he was among a band of eight prisoners who planned to make a break. The group persuaded two nervous North Korean guards to help them reach American lines, where they could organize a rescue attempt to free the rest of the prisoners. They set out south on the morning of October 25, taking narrow mountain paths to avoid villages, and slept that night in a small valley. The next day, they encountered three North Korean soldiers moving in the opposite direction who stopped to confer with the two guards accompanying the westerners. The soldiers had stunning news of another turn in the war—Chinese forces had intervened to aid North Korea and had pushed back the Americans. The prisoners concluded that “it was now too dangerous, indeed impossible, to get through to the American lines,” Blake recalled. They returned to the camp.

  But back at Jui-am-nee, Blake despaired. “I do not want to die in North Korea,” he told Jean Meadmore, a French diplomat who had become a close friend. By October 30, he had resolved to make another break for freedom. “I’m going to try to escape tonight—do you come with me?” Blake asked.

  Meadmore refused. “It’s absolutely doomed to failure,” he told Blake. “We haven’t got a chance.” Deane had agreed to join the escape, but at 11 p.m., when Blake crawled to the correspondent’s hole, Deane had changed his mind, calling it too dangerous.

  Alone, Blake crawled from the unfenced camp. When he had made it a safe distance, he moved quickly, climbing for two hours to reach the top of a mountain leading to the south. He had been descending in the dark for an hour when a North Korean soldier stepped from behind a bush and barred the path with his rifle. Blake was taken to a nearby farmhouse serving as a headquarters for a North Korean troop encampment. With his rudimentary Korean, he claimed to be a Russian who had lost his way, but the North Koreans were not fooled. In the morning, soldiers accused him of being an American spy and shouted that he would be shot.

  Blake was then escorted back to the camp by a North Korean army major who was taking command of the detainees. In front of an assembly of prisoners, the officer berated him for twenty minutes before releasing him with a warning that he would be summarily shot if he again tried to escape.

  That afternoon, October 31, the new commanding officer addressed the prisoners. The major was tall and lithe, wearing knee breeches and a tight-fitting jacket, and he moved nervously, his mouth in a perpetual grimace. He announced that the civilian detainees, together with the American POWs, were about to begin “a long march” to stay ahead of the advancing front line. No transport was available because of the critical situation in the field. Everyone—elderly missionaries, nuns, mothers with children, weak and sick POWs in bare feet—would have to walk.

  “But they will die if they have to march,” protested Herbert Lord, the Salvation Army commissioner, who spoke fluent Korean.

  “Then let them march till they die,” replied the major.

  The prisoners were ordered to toss aside any item the major deemed a weapon, including walking sticks and even rolled-up sleeping mats. Father Paul Villemot, an eighty-two-year-old French priest, had to surrender his cane. The prisoners passed word among each other—the vicious new commander would be called the Tiger.

  Late that afternoon, the long and wretched line of more than eight hundred prisoners began marching northeast along the Yalu River. The POWs were in front, divided into sections, each with a U.S. officer held responsible for their progress. North Korean guards trotted alongside, screaming in the prisoners’ ears: “Bali! Bali! Quickly! Quickly!”

  It was midnight before the column stopped to rest. After several sleepless hours on the cold, wet ground, the prisoners resumed the march. The brutal pace demanded by the Tiger was too much for many GIs, already weakened by their meager daily ration of half-cooked corn, and soon the columns were falling apart. Weaker prisoners unable to keep pace fell along the road. The Tiger assembled the group leaders and demanded that the commander of the section with the most stragglers identify himself.

  Lieutenant Cordus H. Thornton of Longview, Texas, calmly stepped forward. The Tiger demanded to know why he had allowed his men to drop out. “Because, sir, they were dying,” Thornton replied.

  The Tiger called to some nearby North Korean soldiers: “What should be done to a man who disobeys the People’s Army?”

  “Shoot him,” they shouted back.

  The Tiger turned to Thornton. “There, you have had your trial,” the major said.

  “In Texas, sir, we would call that a lynching,” Thornton replied.

  Thornton was blindfolded and escorted to the top of a small knoll. The major placed his pistol to the back of Thornton’s head, tipped up the back of the American’s cap with the muzzle, and pulled the trigger. Stunned GIs carried Thornton’s lifeless body to the side of the road, dug a shallow grave, and covered it with rocks.

  Conditions worsened but the brutal pace continued. The weather had turned punishingly cold, leaving the prisoners exposed in their summer clothes. They covered twenty miles of rugged terrain before stopping for the night. While the civilian captives were allowed to sleep in a farmhouse, the GIs were left in a field. POWs who crawled to the guards’ fires for warmth were beaten away. When the sun rose, the huddled forms of ten frozen American soldiers lay dead on the ground. Some men who managed to doze off awoke to find themselves hugging corpses. Another eight were too weak to continue and were left behind, to be shot by the guards.

  The march continued northward, past destroyed villages into ever-wilder territory. It seemed to Blake that the whole country was a battlefield, with a level of destruction surpassing anything he had seen in Germany. Though he was younger and fitter than most of the civilians, he struggled as well. He gave his tunic to a nun and faced the cold in light flannels and a sports coat. Like many of the prisoners, he suffered from dysentery, “a most demoralizing illness,” he said. He and Deane helped the more vulnerable civilians continue moving, including Sir Vyvyan Holt, the elderly British minister, who was fading.

  That night, November 2, the civilians and some GIs were allowed to sleep in a schoolhouse, but it was far too small to accommodate them all. Many excluded soldiers tried to push their way in to escape the terrible cold. Those inside were crushed against walls and pressed against each other, unable to move, with dysentery adding to the misery. Some men passed out, while others screamed uncontrollably; those who wouldn’t stop were thrown outside.

  In the morning, several GIs were dead; some, it was said, died on their feet. Blake was oddly unsympathetic when it came to the Americans, appalled not at the deaths but at their lack of discipline. “They refused to obey their own officers and degenerated into a cursing, fighting group of rabble,” he later said.

  * * *

  Each day brought new horrors. Mother Beatrix, a seventy-six-year-old nun who had dedicated her life to caring for Korean orphans, lost strength and was assisted by a younger nun, Sister Eugenie. But when Beatrix fell to the ground on November 3, the guards tore Eugenie away and forced her to continue; soon a shot rang out.

  On November 4, the column crossed the Kosan Mountain pass in a blizzard. Despite the punishing cold, some prisoners tossed aside blankets and clothing they no longer had the strength to carry. More and more GIs dropped out and lay on the roadside, awaiting execution. Philip Crosbie, a thirty-five-year-old Catholic priest from Australia, walked by the soldiers as closely and slowly as he dared, and whispered words about “God’s love and mercy.” One GI, barely more than a boy, waited on the roadside, tears streaming down his face, singing “God Bless America”
as loudly as his soft voice could muster, until a guard’s bullet stilled the sound. Another begged to be hit in the head with a rock. Deane saw a redheaded GI sobbing, being kicked forward by a guard who forced him to abandon a dying friend. Another soldier carried a buddy as far as he could until the friend collapsed on the ground, unable to rise. Before leaving him, the stronger soldier took his friend’s boots to put on his own bare feet.

  The Tiger roamed at the back of the column, gripping a handgun. “He was just anxious to shoot somebody,” Ed Sheffield, a soldier in Thornton’s unit, recalled more than six decades later. Sheffield and other POWs carried sick and starved comrades as far as they could, but when they fell to the back of the column, the Tiger would motion for the soldiers to put down their comrades and move on. “Our buddies would beg us not to leave them but there was nothing we could do,” said Sheffield. “As soon as we got thirty feet away, you’d hear the gun shoot. He would kick them over the side of the mountain road.”

  For men such as Sheffield, Zellers, and Crosbie, the death march would remain seared in their memories as the most painful and bitter days of their lives. Blake, though, saw it differently. Shooting stragglers, he would later say, was an “act of mercy,” saving them from “a slow but certain death from cold and hunger.” He also felt increasing contempt for the American soldiers. “I could not but be dismayed at the thought that the ultimate defence of the Western world was in the hands of a nation whose soldiers showed so little mental and physical resilience in the face of adversity,” he later wrote.

  * * *

  On November 8, 1950, after nine excruciating days, the prisoner column reached its destination of Chunggangjin, and a week later marched another five miles to the deserted village of Hanjang-Ni, where they would spend the winter. They had walked some 110 miles through rugged terrain in the most bitter cold, leaving almost a hundred dead men and women behind.

  Though the death march was over, the dying was not. Many of the approximately seven hundred who survived the march were so debilitated that the continued poor diet, lack of medicine, and extreme cold at the winter camp proved too much. The Gombert brothers, two French clerics in their mid-seventies who had ministered their entire adult lives in Korea, faded fast. Father Antoine died first, on the afternoon of November 12. “When you are with God, call me,” his brother, Father Julien, told Antoine in his last moments. Julien died the next day. The ground was too frozen to bury the clerics, so Blake and the others covered their bodies with snow and stones.