Betrayal in Berlin Read online

  Vyvyan Holt and Blake’s deputy, Norman Owen, collapsed from pneumonia soon after arrival, delirious from fever and close to death. Blake and Deane gave their own food rations to the two men and nursed them back to health. But many others failed to recover, and within a few weeks, fourteen civilians had died.

  Their losses were mild in comparison to the American POWs, who were dying at a terrible rate, six a day. By the time they were split off from the civilians on February 1, more than 60 percent of the 777 American prisoners were dead. Blake ascribed this to their “lack of an inner discipline.”

  Blake’s harsh assessment ignored what his fellow captives recognized—the soldiers were given treatment “far grimmer” than that endured by the civilians, as Crosbie noted. The POWs had begun the death march already weakened by three months of poor treatment. While the civilians were sometimes allowed to briefly fall behind, Crosbie said, the POWs “were driven on without mercy . . . and none that fell were spared.” At Hanjang-Ni, they were given fewer rations and had less adequate clothing. Unlike the civilians, they were denied rice-straw mats to sleep on, and given no heating stoves or chamber pots; even the sick had to relieve themselves outside in temperatures reaching seventy degrees below. The soldiers died of pneumonia, they died of dysentery, they died of cold, they died of malnutrition, they died of thirst, and they died of exhaustion. Some died because other soldiers stole their food. A flu epidemic wiped out many who would have survived had they been given decent treatment. Some lost the will to live and stopped eating. “They drifted away by degrees, the human body being no match for the evil of humankind,” said Zellers.

  * * *

  Blake’s own resilience in the face of the brutal treatment won him the admiration of his fellow captives. On December 5, he and Deane made three trips to the well to fill a water barrel, carrying buckets on a yoke over their shoulders, an arduous task in the icy cold that left Blake without feeling in his hands. When a guard told them to make another trip, Blake refused, saying there was enough water. The guard struck him violently and ordered the two men to their knees, kicking and beating them with the butt of his rifle. “George, who got the worst of it, smiled throughout the ordeal, his left eyebrow cocked ironically at the guard, his Elizabethan beard aggressively thrust forward,” Deane later wrote. The other prisoners were called to watch as the two were forced to crouch in the snow for over an hour, their heads bowed and hands behind their backs.

  Blake was “a good man to be interned with,” Lord, the Salvation Army commissioner, later said. He cheerfully helped with cooking, cleaning, or any other chores assigned by the guards. His calm demeanor and what Deane called “his characteristic ability to shed worry” buoyed the spirits of others. As the weeks stretched into months, his stories of escaping the Nazis or his wondrous years in Cairo as a youth were always welcome. He possessed “a boyish charm,” and was a good conversationalist as well as a listener, recalled Zellers. He was curious about America, particularly the history of the Old West.

  But Zellers was occasionally disturbed by things Blake would say. Despite his status as a British diplomat, he made little effort to hide his disdain for the American government, blaming the captives’ predicament on the U.S. intervention in Korea to prop up the corrupt government of South Korean Syngman Rhee. There were flashes of arrogance as well. Blake would often chat fluently with the French diplomats in their native language. After one conversation, Zellers asked what had been discussed. Blake was snide in his reply. “Larry, don’t you know French?”

  Decades later, Zellers mused about Blake, “I wonder if anyone really knew him.”

  * * *

  MacArthur’s pursuit of the enemy toward the Yalu River turned disastrously wrong in late November 1950 when the Chinese Red Army intervened on a massive scale across all fronts, contrary to American expectations. After having pushed the North Korean army to the far north, U.S. forces were thrown back south, and Seoul once again fell to the communists. But by February 1951, the front had settled more or less along the 38th parallel dividing the two Koreas. The stability brought much-improved conditions for the prisoners. The Tiger had been replaced as commandant by a more humane officer, and the captives were given better clothing and rations. Blake’s group, including the diplomats and journalists, were separated from the rest of the prisoners and kept under improved conditions at a farmhouse in a valley north of Manpo. “Apart from the boredom, life became bearable again,” Blake recalled.

  For Blake, the quiet was a time of reflection. The wartime suffering, he later said, affected him profoundly. But it was not so much the cruel treatment his fellow captives received from the North Koreans that seemed to bother him, but rather the “equally merciless” bombing campaigns by the Americans and their allies. He had seen the devastation in Germany after the war, but believed it to be “absolutely nothing” compared to what he saw in North Korea. “When you saw these very heavy American Flying Fortresses flying very low over senseless Korean villages, I honestly did not feel very much pride being on the western side,” he said.

  In the spring, a parcel of books sent by the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang arrived at the camp. The only book in English was Treasure Island, which all the prisoners read several times over. The rest were political books in Russian, including Das Kapital by Karl Marx. Holt, the British minister, had lost his glasses during the march, and he asked Blake to read to him. As the weather warmed, Blake and Holt would wander down to the green mounds of a family graveyard behind the farmhouse, where they would read and discuss the books for hours.

  Blake was somewhat in awe of the eccentric Holt, a tall birdlike man with skin the color and consistency of wrinkled brown leather from a lifetime of postings in the Arab world. Though from a conservative background, Holt held unorthodox views for a British diplomat, sympathizing with socialist principles, and, as the British Empire declined, coming to accept a continued rise of communism as inevitable. Holt’s opinions had “a strong effect on my mind,” Blake later confessed.

  Blake, who as a young man considered becoming a priest, no longer thought of himself as a believing Christian. “So there was a vacuum in my mind,” he said. “I viewed communism as an attempt to create the kingdom of God in this world. The communists were trying to do by action what the church had tried to achieve by prayer and precept. And the upshot of that [is] . . . I came to the conclusion that I was no longer fighting on the right side.”

  Blake came to believe he was ideally positioned to make a difference in this struggle, and the idea appealed to him. “As an SIS officer it was my task to do everything in my power to undermine the communist system,” he later explained. “And I felt that not only should it not be undermined, but on the contrary, it should be assisted.”

  One night in November 1951, after his fellow prisoners were asleep, Blake later related, he opened the door of the guardroom, where a North Korean officer and several soldiers were sitting. Putting his finger on his lips, he handed a note to the officer, who looked surprised but took the paper without saying a word. The note, written in Russian and addressed to the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang, requested a meeting with Soviet officials. Blake wrote that he had “something important to communicate which they might find of interest.”

  Part I

  The Sins Inside

  Chapter 1

  Black Friday

  It was known in intelligence lore as “Black Friday.”

  Since 1943, the United States had been intercepting and decrypting secret Soviet radio communications, compiling a surprisingly comprehensive view of the USSR’s military capabilities and intentions. Painstaking work by codebreakers at the U.S. Army Security Agency headquarters at Arlington Hall in Virginia near the Pentagon was producing uniquely valuable intelligence. The secret program, code-named VENONA, would eventually help expose some of the Soviets’ most dangerous spies, including the physicist Klaus Fuchs, who was passing American atomic secrets to Moscow, and the British diplomat Donald Maclean, the f
irst member of the later notorious Cambridge spy ring to fall under suspicion.

  But in late October 1948, almost overnight and without warning, the Soviets began changing their cryptographic systems, leaving the U.S. codebreakers in the cold. One by one, in rapid succession, each of the cipher systems went dark. At the same time, just as mysteriously, Soviet military, intelligence, and diplomatic headquarters in Germany and Austria stopped using ultrahigh frequency (UHF) radio to communicate with Moscow, shifting instead to landlines, depriving the West of a valuable stream of intercepts.

  U.S. intelligence spent months trying to learn what had gone wrong. Navy investigators decided it was simply a routine systems upgrade by the Soviets, but others were not so sure. Only later would the Americans learn that VENONA had been betrayed by two Soviet spies. The first was William Weisband, a gregarious and well-liked Russian-language linguist at Arlington Hall. Born in Egypt to Russian parents, Weisband had emigrated to the United States in the 1920s and was recruited by the KGB in 1934. Making the office rounds and chatting with coworkers, he had learned of the Western success in breaking the codes. And Harold “Kim” Philby, the SIS liaison in Washington, had likewise been recruited by the KGB while a student at Cambridge in the 1930s. Conveniently for the Soviets, he’d been assigned to work with the Americans on VENONA. Based on the warnings of one or likely both spies, Moscow changed its ciphers and radio operating procedures.

  By some estimates, Black Friday was the worst intelligence loss in U.S. history, leaving the West almost entirely in the dark about Moscow’s military capabilities and intentions.

  The United States paid the most immediate consequences in Korea. The North Korean invasion of the south in June 1950 had been an intelligence disaster, with the failure to pick up even a hint of a war launched with the approval of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin setting off alarms in Washington and London. And not only had the Central Intelligence Agency missed the start of the war, but it had been wrong about the possibility of Chinese intervention, and wrong about North Korean capabilities.

  The communist aggression in Korea was seen in Western capitals as a possible prelude to a similar attack on Western Europe by the enormous Red Army force that had not been withdrawn at the conclusion of World War II and still occupied eastern Germany and Poland. The brutality of the fighting in Asia and the surprising power shown by communist forces during the first year of the conflict only added to the fear that the United States and its allies were unprepared. Unsurprisingly, with Cold War tensions escalating and Washington deprived of the flow of valuable intelligence, pressure on the CIA to supply early warning of a Soviet attack “skyrocketed,” recalled Richard Helms, the future director of the agency, then serving as chief of operations for its clandestine service.

  Thus far in its young history, the CIA was proving itself thoroughly outmatched by the formidable KGB. Since the creation of the Cheka during the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Soviet secret police and intelligence organization had been known by many different names, but still relied on what founder Felix Dzerzhinsky called “organized terror” in pursuit of its aims.* The strengthening of the police state under Stalin made it next to impossible to recruit any spies in Russia. Getting an agent to report from inside the Kremlin “was as improbable as placing resident spies on the planet Mars,” complained Helms, a razor-sharp former wire service reporter who had served in Germany with the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II military intelligence agency that was a forerunner to the CIA.

  In 1949, the CIA began parachuting Russians who had fled the USSR back into the country with the idea of establishing a network of agents to spy on military installations and the like. Almost all of the agents were arrested as soon as they landed, and of the few who did not disappear, most if not all were forced to serve as double agents by Soviet intelligence, meaning any information they sent was compromised.

  Western intelligence therefore had to rely on outdated World War II information, details garnered from the censored Soviet press, and reports from occasional defectors. A small amount of signals intelligence—the collection and analysis of communications and electronic emissions—was trickling in from the first U.S. intercept stations being constructed around the Soviet Union’s perimeter. Other than rare overflights along the periphery of Soviet territory by U.S. and British military aircraft, there was none of the overhead imagery that the U-2 and satellites would later provide. “We were simply blind,” said David Murphy, a CIA officer who would serve in Berlin.

  WASHINGTON, LONDON, AND BERLIN, 1951

  The Berlin tunnel was born of this desperation.

  The CIA, created by the National Security Act of 1947 signed by President Harry Truman, had been given the task of centralizing and coordinating American intelligence. But its true mission was even more simply stated: “I don’t care what it does, all I want from them is twenty-four hours’ notice of a Soviet attack,” Secretary of State George C. Marshall famously declared. Given its performance, the chances of getting that warning did not seem promising.

  Even before Korea, fear of Soviet aggression against the West had been escalating. Following the successful Soviet testing of atomic weapons in August 1949, a secret National Security Council report issued in April 1950, NSC-68, declared that the United States was “mortally challenged” by the Soviet Union and must intensify intelligence operations to get early warning of an attack.

  If war came, Germany would be the main battleground and Berlin the likely flashpoint. The divided former German capital, deep in East German territory, was on the front line of the Cold War with the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union each controlling their own zone in the city. It was the place where the Soviets and the Western Allies met most intimately—and uneasily.

  Tensions in Berlin reached new heights in June 1948, when the Soviets blocked roads and rail lines leading to the Western sectors, expecting that they could force the United States and its allies to abandon the divided city. Instead, the West overcame the blockade with a magnificent airlift, flying in four thousand tons of coal, food, and other supplies daily for almost eleven months. Throughout the crisis, Washington feared that the Soviets might launch a war, but in the end, Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949.

  The North Korean invasion one year later was halfway around the globe, but it was seen by the CIA as an even more serious threat to Berlin than the blockade. “We considered it much more likely this time that the Soviets might move west,” said Peter Sichel, then chief of the CIA’s Berlin base.

  Some three hundred thousand Red Army troops were positioned in eastern Germany. The United States, which had fewer than a hundred thousand troops in West Germany when the Korean War started, rushed over more forces and soon had a quarter million. But the Soviet bloc retained an overwhelming advantage among conventional forces. British intelligence calculated that the Soviets and their allies had 216 active divisions available for use in Europe, compared with 51 for NATO, the new Western alliance. Moreover, there was a danger that the Soviets would resort to a first nuclear strike because they assumed that the United States would use atomic weapons to stop the Red Army from overrunning Western Europe.

  A CIA estimate in February 1951 concluded that the Soviets’ “ultimate aim” was to gain control over all of Germany and eliminate the presence of the Western powers in Berlin. If they were unable to meet these goals with political pressure, the agency reported, the Soviets might risk starting another world war. Knowing what the Soviets were up to in Berlin was thus a matter of the utmost importance, with millions of lives potentially at stake.

  * * *

  Perhaps no one was more frustrated by the loss of Soviet radio traffic than a pipe-smoking and genteel Virginian named Frank Rowlett. Though unknown to the American public, Rowlett was an unsung hero of World War II and one of the nation’s top codebreakers. Mild-mannered and unpretentious, with rimless glasses on his round face, he looked like the high school math teacher he had once been ba
ck home in southwest Virginia. He had arrived in Washington in 1930 as one of the original three cryptanalysts hired for the newly created Army Signal Intelligence Service by the father of modern American cryptology, William Friedman. Rowlett had confessed to his wife that he did not have the slightest idea what a cryptanalyst did. But he proved to be an inspired choice, rising to help lead the VENONA project and playing a key role in designing SIGABA, the cipher machine credited with saving thousands of American lives during World War II by protecting U.S. military communications. He also led the team trying to crack the Japanese diplomatic code, dubbed PURPLE by the Americans. With tensions in the Pacific rising sharply, Japan had in 1939 introduced a highly sophisticated cipher machine for cable traffic between Tokyo and its embassies around the world. In September 1940, after eighteen months and untold hours of analysis, Rowlett’s team discovered a critical pattern of letters that led to breaking the code. “That’s it! That’s it!” the normally unflappable Rowlett cried, jumping up and down in excitement. He sent out for bottles of Coca-Cola for the whole team. Then they got back to work. Within two days, they were deciphering their first messages. It was a triumph of grinding work and true genius.

  The intelligence derived from the decrypted Japanese cables was code-named MAGIC, and Rowlett and his team were considered magicians. The United States was able to read Tokyo’s messages to and from the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, providing crucial intelligence on both Japanese and German intentions. But the United States failed to mount a big enough effort to break the codes used by the Japanese army and navy—at heavy cost.