Betrayal in Berlin Page 3

  On December 3, 1941, Rowlett walked into his office at the Munitions Building in Washington and found a single-page translation of a PURPLE intercept from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Washington waiting on his desk. He was stunned to read that Tokyo had ordered the embassy to destroy its codebooks and cipher machines. He and a colleague concluded that the order meant Japan was preparing to go to war with the United States, and they quickly reported this up the chain of command. But with no matching intelligence about any Japanese military preparations or movements, the U.S. government did not anticipate the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  A decade later, Rowlett feared the United States could face a new Pearl Harbor—this one with nuclear weapons. In 1951, he was serving as technical director of operations at the Armed Forces Security Agency, predecessor to the National Security Agency. Since VENONA, he had worked closely with Bill Harvey, a former FBI G-man who was then chief of the counterintelligence staff at the CIA. On the surface, the gruff and profane Harvey was as different from the courtly, soft-spoken Rowlett as could be imagined. Harvey, who drank martinis by the quart, referred to the coffee-eschewing Rowlett behind his back as “Our Father.” But the two quickly developed a mutual respect, as well as a shared sense of urgency on the need to fill in the gaps in American intelligence.

  In early 1951, Rowlett and Harvey commiserated over the lost intelligence due to the Soviets’ Black Friday shift from radio to landlines. Perhaps they could figure out a way and place to attack Soviet landlines on a scale not previously considered necessary, or even possible.

  Two cities were obvious targets: Vienna and Berlin. Since Soviet and Western forces jointly occupied both cities, there might be locations where the CIA could reach landlines used by the Red Army. But when the CIA began investigating Vienna in 1951, they discovered they were late to the game: British intelligence had been tapping Soviet cables through a system of small tunnels in and around Vienna for two years. Informing the Americans of this, the Brits magnanimously offered to share the take. The CIA was duly impressed with the intelligence collected about Soviet military capabilities and intentions, and rather than pursue its own project, it agreed to join the SIS operation. “There was too much at stake to risk any overlapping effort in such a narrow field,” recalled Helms. The British also suggested that “similar opportunities might be present in the Berlin area,” according to a CIA history. That possibility intrigued Harvey and Rowlett.

  Berlin held potential for an operation on a far grander scale than Vienna. It was the central circuit for communications in Eastern Europe, the hub for an enormous network of lines dating from pre–World War I imperial days, stretching to Moscow. That role had been interrupted by World War II, but long-distance telephone and telegraph lines connecting the city to the rest of Europe had been restored in 1946. Still, the Americans and British were uncertain about how much Soviet forces actually used the cables, and what the intelligence value might be.

  * * *

  In mid-1951, Staff D, the CIA’s new, highly secret office responsible for clandestine electronic surveillance targeting foreign communications, held exploratory talks in Washington about mounting an attack on Soviet landlines in East Germany, in particular Berlin.

  Based on those discussions, the CIA base in Berlin was assigned to penetrate the East Berlin office of the East German Post and Telecommunications Ministry, which operated the telephone lines in Berlin. Neither Berlin base chief Peter Sichel nor his deputy Henry Hecksher were told anything about a tap or a tunnel—all they knew was that headquarters wanted information about the telephone cables.

  Penetrating the ministry was not particularly difficult. Hecksher, a native German who had left Germany in the 1930s because of his Jewish background, had close contacts with Berlin authorities. It helped that the Berlin postal office had been one central entity before the occupation, so West Berlin postal officials had close working relationships with former colleagues on the other side, including some who supervised cables. Hecksher developed a network that brought in “reams” of material about the cable network, Sichel said.

  The Soviets used two types of landlines in Germany: overhead lines strung on telephone poles, and buried cables. On the one hand, the overhead lines seemed an attractive target, as they carried the highest-level intelligence and military communications. But these special KGB-operated lines were guarded closely by roving patrols on the lookout for taps or other problems. The underground cables were likely a better target, since they were not visually inspected. If the CIA could place a tap, it might go undetected for some time.

  The intelligence gathered from East German ministry sources showed that the underground cables in Berlin still followed the conduits created by the old German imperial system. Moreover, all Soviet telephone communications between Moscow, Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, and Vienna again went through Berlin. There was something else important, Sichel recalled: “Our intelligence brought to light the fact that these cables went close to the western border” in some locations.

  Back at CIA headquarters in Washington, Helms was intrigued. The proximity of the cables in Berlin “suggested a long-shot possibility” of digging a tunnel to break into communications between Moscow and its military headquarters in Germany, Austria, Poland, and Hungary.

  A long shot was more than enough for Harvey, who went to work laying the groundwork. He coordinated with Rowlett, who would soon join the CIA to take charge of Staff D. Discussion of the possible project was restricted to a very small group. Helms, despite his position high in the CIA’s hierarchy, assisted with the planning to keep the circle small. “I was, in effect, the action officer, and at times dealt with routine matters which in other operations would be the lot of an officer with a year’s experience under his belt,” he recalled.

  To learn more about the Berlin cables, Staff D stationed an officer in Germany. Alan Conway, a seasoned former Army signals intelligence officer, operated from the Frankfurt headquarters independently of the CIA base in Berlin, in order to keep knowledge tight.

  Lacking any engineering expertise, the team in Washington asked Gerald Fellon, a civil engineer in the CIA’s Office of Communications, to meet with Staff D to discuss a mysterious new project. Fellon, who had served with the Army during the war, was hardly an expert on tunnels—his entire experience was limited to several night shift visits to the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel as a student civil engineer in 1948. But he knew more than anyone else at the agency.

  It was a short meeting, Fellon recalled: “The only question they asked was whether a tunnel could be dug in secret.” He was told nothing about where this tunnel might be built, or why. Fellon replied rather vaguely that a tunnel could be built anywhere, though building one in secret would depend on the size. It would also take more time, and cost more money, he added, but it was possible.

  That was the right answer. After the meeting, Fellon was transferred to Staff D and put to work on the project. He recalled, “Thus began planning for the construction of the Berlin Tunnel.”

  Chapter 2

  To Betray, You First Have to Belong

  MANPO, NORTH KOREA

  In the fall of 1951, three Russian visitors arrived in Manpo in a large black sedan, news that the Western captives held in the nearby prisoner camps quickly learned from Korean children they had befriended. It had been about six weeks since George Blake had handed his note to his North Korean captors requesting a meeting with the Soviets.

  Vyvyan Holt, the senior British diplomat, was summoned to accompany the camp commandant into town. Holt returned hours later and reported that he had been questioned by a pleasant young Russian who asked him to sign a statement condemning the war. Holt had refused.

  The next morning, it was Blake’s turn to walk with the commandant into Manpo. The town, located at a point on the Yalu River where a railway bridge crossed into China, was a frequent target of U.S. Air Force bombs, and after more than a year of war, most of it was in ruins. Blake was escorted to one of t
he few buildings still standing.

  One of the visitors was waiting in a bare room on the first floor that contained only a table and two chairs. Addressing Blake in Russian, the man invited him to sit at the table, and took the chair opposite him. Blake’s note was on the table. In a friendly tone, the Russian gestured to the note and asked the British captive what he wished to talk about.

  Blake, by his later account, said he was a British intelligence officer, and he had a proposition: “I want to offer my services to the Soviet authorities.”

  Blake said he told the Russian he would inform the KGB of any present or future SIS operations directed against the Soviet Union, other socialist countries, or the “world Communist movement.” He said he was not seeking reward for his services and insisted he should not receive special treatment compared with the other captives.

  The Russian showed “considerable interest” in the offer, according to Blake, occasionally interrupting him to clarify a point. The Russian then asked him to write down in English everything he had just said, leaving him alone in the room. When he returned, he peppered Blake with questions about his early life and his work for British intelligence.

  The Russian was likely Nikolai Loenko, a KGB officer from the Vladivostok regional office, which had oversight of Manchuria and North Korea. Though only twenty-five years old, the suave and charming Loenko was already a rising star in the KGB, an effective officer with a skillful command of English and several more languages. He was so familiar with the intelligence landscape in the region that his colleagues later called him, perhaps with a touch of sarcasm, “Lawrence of the Far East.”

  Blake’s claim that he had requested the meeting notwithstanding, Loenko already knew about the Western diplomats, journalists, and missionaries being held at various camps along the Yalu, and been granted clearance from the North Koreans and Chinese to interview the prisoners. Loenko later told a KGB colleague that he had spotted Blake among the captives and marked him as a potential recruit. In this version, Loenko eventually broke the ice with Blake with gifts of bread, tinned food, and chocolate, and over time built a rapport based on a shared sense of humor. “Word by word, we quietly moved forward to the serious conversations when the Englishman made his choice,” Loenko reportedly said. But other KGB officers who worked with Blake, including his longtime handler, Sergei Kondrashev, corroborated Blake’s version.

  Whether it was Blake or Loenko who initiated the contact, there is little doubt that the British intelligence officer was a willing convert.

  * * *

  To divert suspicion from Blake’s regular meetings with Loenko, the Russians also met with the other Western civilians. “Every person in turn was called up; there were discussions about the rights and wrongs of the Korean War . . . ,” Blake later said. “They were just kept talking, as it were, to fill the day.” Instead of Loenko, the captives usually met with a tall, fair-skinned Russian with aristocratic manners whom they nicknamed Blondie. He would extol the virtues of communism, though after a few sessions he gave up talking about Marxism and brought vodka.

  Blake would frequently disappear for what his fellow prisoners assumed were similar sessions with Blondie. Blake made a point of being “more contemptuous” of the amateurish efforts than any of the captives, according to Herbert Lord. “Afterwards Blake would return to our room and tell us he was treating these conversations as a huge joke,” Lord later said. “Mind you, Blake never talked a great deal about what went on when he was alone with ‘Blondie.’”

  After several sessions with Blake, Loenko believed he was genuine, but there were doubts at Moscow Center, as the KGB headquarters in the Soviet capital was known. Could Blake be a plant by British intelligence, meant to infiltrate the KGB? “At the beginning, a few people suspected Blake,” recalled Viktor Malyavin, a senior KGB officer. “We wondered about his motives.”

  Vasily Dozhdalev, a thirty-year-old KGB officer based in London who spoke excellent English, was dispatched to North Korea by Moscow Center to help Loenko conduct an in-depth assessment of the prisoner. The KGB wanted to know: Exactly who was George Blake?

  * * *

  Already to this point, Blake had lived a remarkable, storybook life, part Grimms’ Fairy Tales, part One Thousand and One Nights, and part The Great Escape. He had been born George Behar in Rotterdam on Armistice Day in 1922, four years after the end of the Great War. His father, Albert Behar, a Turkish subject, was from an old Jewish family that found refuge in Constantinople after their expulsion from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. Behar had served in World War I with the British Army and had been seriously wounded in France on the Western Front, and he gained British citizenship.

  Stationed with the army in Holland helping to repatriate POWs after the armistice was signed, the dark and handsome Behar met Catherine Beijderwellen, a fair-haired twenty-six-year-old Dutch woman from a well-established Protestant family in Rotterdam. Albert passed himself off as a Lutheran to overcome objections from her family, and they wed in 1922. Feeling a “surge of patriotism” on his way to the birth registrar after their child was born, he named his son after the British monarch, King George V.

  Behar, a charming if temperamentally difficult man, opened a small factory in Rotterdam that manufactured leather gloves for the port’s many longshoremen. Blake remembered him as a “rather remote” father whose main influence was to make sure his son respected Britain and disliked Germany. George and his two sisters spoke Dutch at home, which Albert did not understand, making communication a challenge. “I suppose my father was always something of a stranger to me,” Blake later said. By language and circumstance, young George was always closer to his mother. Albert worked long hours and was always too tired to accompany the family on Sunday walks, when George would listen to endless stories told by his mother and aunt. “I developed the habit of listening rather than talking,” he recalled. He was raised in his mother’s faith, the Remonstrant Church, attending services every Sunday, his imagination fired by Old Testament stories of Abraham, Joseph, and David.

  Albert Behar’s health had not been good since the war, when by family lore he was exposed to mustard gas. To escape the smoky air of Rotterdam, they moved in 1933 to the seaside town of Scheveningen. But Behar’s health continued to worsen, and in late 1934 he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He spent the last three months of his life in a nearby hospital in The Hague, with George visiting at his bedside after school every day, struggling to understand his father’s labored requests. One day his father asked him to close the curtain around the bed and grew angry when George could not make out what he was saying. “I felt desperate and was almost in tears,” he recalled. Fortunately, the patient in the next bed explained the request, and his father calmed down. “But I shall never forget this experience, especially as he died shortly afterwards,” Blake later said.

  Behar’s death was followed by hardship. His business went bankrupt, leaving the family in debt. George’s mother took in boarders and cooked meals to make money. Before he died, Albert told his wife she should seek assistance in raising the children from his wealthy relatives in Cairo, the Curiel family, whom George and his mother had never met. When she contacted the Curiels, the family offered to take George into their home in Cairo and see to his education. His mother was reluctant, but recognized that the offer might provide her son with better prospects than staying in Holland. She left the final decision to him. George was frightened at the thought of leaving home, but after a few days told his mother he would go. “It was this thirst for adventure and the unknown which proved the stronger,” he later said.

  In September 1936, thirteen-year-old George sailed alone on a cargo ship to Egypt. The Curiel family, originally from Tuscany, was a wealthy, eccentric, and cosmopolitan group, some carrying Italian passports, and others French, Turkish, or Egyptian. Uncle Daniel, the patriarch, a wealthy banker and a collector of antiques, was blind, always wearing dark glasses that gave him a mysterious appearance. Aunt Zephir
ah, Albert Behar’s sister, had been sent from Constantinople to Cairo at age sixteen for an arranged marriage with Daniel. She was a kindhearted and pious woman, “inclined to mysticism,” Blake recalled. Uncle Max was a playboy who spent his evenings at nightclubs with his many mistresses. Cousin Raoul was a scholarly archaeologist, while Cousin Henri was a tall and thin law student who had embraced left-wing politics at Cairo University.

  The family lived in an Italian palazzo, a hidden palace surrounded by palm trees on an island in the Nile, with seventeen rooms adorned by beautiful tapestries, oriental carpets, and rare paintings. Six-course lunches were served by Nubian servants wearing white gowns with red sashes. George attended a French lycée his first year, and the next an English school with British expatriate children preparing to attend university in England. There were summer holidays in Europe, when he traveled to Holland for reunions with his mother and other Dutch relatives and visited England for the first time. It was in some respects a dream life for a young teenager, Blake later said, but he also spoke of a sense of dislocation and confusion. “I lived through an identity crisis in those years,” he said. “Where did I belong?”

  George spent a good deal of time with Henri, his charismatic cousin eight years his elder. Henri brought George along on visits to a family estate fifty miles outside Cairo, where they walked among poor Egyptians living in miserable conditions, the younger boy’s first exposure to the vast gulf in wealth between the haves and have-nots of the world. “It was a shock for George,” said Sylvie Braibant, a cousin of Henri.

  Henri Curiel—who was later a cofounder of the Egyptian Communist Party and would be murdered by right-wing extremists in Paris in 1978—had long political discussions about communism with his younger cousin. “They were a great influence on me, but I resisted them at that time because I was a very religious boy,” Blake later said. “But, with hindsight, many of Henri’s views acted as a time-bomb.”