Operation Gold

Last updated
Soviet officer inside the tunnel Bundesarchiv Bild 183-37695-0003, Altglienicke, Sowjetischer Offizier in Spionagetunnel.jpg
Soviet officer inside the tunnel

Operation Gold (also known as Operation Stopwatch by the British) was a joint operation conducted by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British MI6 Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in the 1950s to tap into landline communication of the Soviet Army headquarters in Berlin using a tunnel into the Soviet-occupied zone. This was a much more complex variation of the earlier Operation Silver project in Vienna.

Contents

The plan was activated in 1954 because of fears that the Soviets might be launching a nuclear attack at any time, having already detonated a hydrogen bomb in August 1953 as part of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Construction of the tunnel began in September 1954 and was completed in eight months. The Americans wanted to hear any warlike intentions being discussed by their military and were able to listen to telephone conversations for nearly a year, eventually recording roughly 90,000 communications. [1] [2] The Soviet authorities were informed about Operation Gold from the very beginning by their mole George Blake but decided not to "discover" the tunnel until April 21, 1956, in order to protect Blake from exposure. [3]

Some details of the project are still classified, and whatever authoritative information could be found was scant until recently. This was primarily because the then-Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), Allen Dulles, had ordered "as little as possible" to be "reduced to writing" when the project was authorized. In 2019, additional specifics became available. [4]

Background

After the Red Army followed the Soviet diplomatic department and transferred its most secure communications from radio to telephone landlines, the post-World War II Western Allies lost a major Cold War source of information. Operation Gold, was hence, at least the third tunnel built to aid intelligence in the Cold War period after the end of World War II. From 1948 onwards, under Operation Silver, the British SIS had undertaken a number of such operations in then still occupied-Vienna, the information from which enabled the restoration of Austrian sovereignty in 1955. [ citation needed ] The KGB later commissioned the Red Army to construct a tunnel to tap into a cable that served the major US Army garrison in Berlin.

Operational agreement

In early 1951, the CIA undertook an assessment process for replacing lost Soviet radio communications intelligence. Revealing their plans to the British, the SIS, having read the report, which included the idea of tapping Soviet telephone lines, revealed the existence of Operation Silver in Vienna. [5]

On the reassignment of CIA agent Bill Harvey to Berlin to explore available options, Reinhard Gehlen, the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst , alerted the CIA to the location of a crucial telephone junction, less than 2 meters (6 ft. 7 in.) underground, where three cables came together close to the border of the American sector of West Berlin. [5] Operation Gold was planned jointly by the SIS and the CIA. Initial planning meetings were held at No. 2 Carlton Gardens, London, from which the West German government was excluded due to the "highly infiltrated nature" of their service. The resulting agreement was that the US would supply most of the financing and construct the tunnel (as the closest access point was in their sector), while the British would use their expertise from Operation Silver to tap the cables and provide the required electronic communications equipment.

One of those who attended the early meetings was George Blake, a mole in the British intelligence apparatus. Blake apparently alerted the KGB immediately, as two of Gehlen's agents were caught trying to get a potential tapping wire across a Berlin canal. The KGB decided to let Operation Gold proceed since, in order to attack the tunnel, the Soviets would have to compromise Blake, and they found it preferable to sacrifice some information rather than their valuable agent. According to the author of a 2019 book about the operation, the Soviets "valued Blake so much that they feared his exposure more than a breach of their secrets." [6]

The KGB did not inform anyone in Germany, including the East Germans or the Soviet users of the cables, about the taps. According to a CIA report, "there were no known attempts to feed disinformation to the CIA." Although the British SIS suspected the opposite, the CIA report states that "the Soviet military continued to use the cables for communications of intelligence value." [7]

Construction

In December 1953, the operation was placed under the direction of William King Harvey, a former U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official who transferred to the CIA. Captain Williamson of the United States Army Corps of Engineers was placed in charge of construction.

The first project was the construction of a "warehouse", which acted as a disguise for a US Army ELINT station. The warehouse, in the Neukölln/Rudow district of the US sector of Berlin, had an unconventionally deep basement at 7 metres (23 ft) to serve as the staging area for the tunnel. [8] Digging the initial vertical shaft for the tunnel began on September 2, 1954, [9] and was completed on February 25, the following year.

The covert construction of the 450-meter (1,480 ft.) tunnel under the world's most heavily patrolled border to intersect a series of cables less than 47 centimeters (19 in.) below a busy street was an exceptional engineering challenge. Using the shield method of construction, which pushed forward on hydraulic rams, the resultant space was lined with sand and 1,700 cast-iron lining plates. A wooden railway track acted as a guide for the rubber-wheeled construction vehicles, which by the end of construction had removed 3,000 tons (3,000 long tons and 3,300 short tons) of material. This included a number of evacuations, including when the diggers broke through into an undocumented pre-World War II cesspool and flooded the tunnel. Throughout all stages of construction and in operational use, the entire tunnel was rigged with explosives, designed to ensure its complete destruction. Once complete, the tunnel ran into the Altglienicke area of Treptow borough, where British Army Captain Peter Lunn—a former alpine skier, who was actually the head of the SIS in Berlin—personally undertook the tapping of the three cables. The British also installed most of the electronic handling equipment in the tunnel, which was manufactured and badged as British made.

The final cost of the completed tunnel was over US$6.5M, or equivalent to the final procurement cost of two Lockheed U-2 spy planes.

Operations

Wiretap/recording equipment consisting of British-made products Bundesarchiv Bild 183-37695-0005, Altglienicke, USA-Spionagetunnel unter DDR-Gebiet.jpg
Wiretap/recording equipment consisting of British-made products

The tunnel ran 1,476 feet and was six feet in diameter and operated for 11 months and 11 days [10] according to a 2019 book by Washington Post journalist Steve Vogel, who reviewed all of the available documents and interviewed 40 of the project's participants. Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation includes a "virtually month-by-month account of the tunnel's excavation and operation", according to one review. As well, after that book was published, the CIA released a less redacted version of their documents about the tunnel. [11]

Inside, the British and the Americans listened and recorded the messages flowing to and from Soviet military headquarters in Zossen, near Berlin: conversations between Moscow and the Soviet embassy in East Berlin and conversations between East German and Soviet officials.

The West was unable to break Soviet encryption at this time. Instead they took advantage of valuable intelligence gained "from unguarded telephone conversations over official channels." "Sixty-seven thousand hours of Russian and German conversations, were sent to London for transcription by a special section staffed by 317 Russian emigres and German linguists. Teleprinter signals, many of them multiplexed, were also collected on magnetic tape and forwarded to Frank Rowlett's Staff D for processing." [12]

To protect Blake, the KGB was forced to keep the flow of information as normal as possible with the result that the tunnel was a bonanza of intelligence collection for the US and Britain in a world that had yet to witness the U-2 or satellite imagery.

According to Stephen Budiansky, "The KGB's own high-level communications went on a separate system of overhead lines that could not be tapped without its being obvious, and, concerned above all with protecting Blake as a valuable source inside SIS and unwilling to share its secrets with rival agencies, the KGB had simply left both the GRU and the Stasi in the dark about the tunnel's existence." [12]

Discovery by the Soviets

The tapped telephone wires are presented to the press. Bundesarchiv Bild 183-37695-0020, Altglienicke, USA-Spionagetunnel unter DDR-Gebiet.jpg
The tapped telephone wires are presented to the press.

When Blake received a transfer in 1955, the Soviets were free to "discover" the tunnel. On 21 April 1956, months after the tunnel went into operation, Soviet and East German soldiers broke into the eastern end of the tunnel. One source indicates that the wiretap had been in service for roughly 18 months. [13] The Soviets announced the discovery to the press and called it a "breach of the norms of international law" and "a gangster act". Newspapers around the world ran photographs of the underground partition of the tunnel directly under the inter-German frontier. The wall had a sign in German and Russian reading "Entry is Forbidden by the Commanding General." [14]

By 24 April 1956, the remains of the tunnel were being toured extensively by the Soviet and East German authorities Bundesarchiv Bild 183-37695-0038, Altglienicke, Sowjetische Offiziere und Vertreter der westlichen Presse.jpg
By 24 April 1956, the remains of the tunnel were being toured extensively by the Soviet and East German authorities

In the planning phase, the CIA and SIS had estimated that the Soviets would cover up any discovery of the tunnel, through embarrassment and any potential repercussions. However, most world media portrayed the tunnel project as a brilliant piece of engineering. The CIA may have gained more than the Soviets did from the "discovery" of the tunnel. [15] In part, this was because the tunnel was discovered during Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev's state visit to the United Kingdom, and specifically the day before a state banquet with HM Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle. It is suspected that the Soviets and the British agreed to mute media coverage of British participation in the project even though the equipment shown in most photographs was British-built and clearly labelled as such. [16]

Only in 1961, when Blake was arrested, tried and convicted, did Western officials realize that the tunnel had been compromised long before construction had begun. Although DCI Allen Dulles has publicly celebrated the success of Operation Gold in providing order of battle and other information about Soviet and East Bloc activities behind the Iron Curtain, a declassified NSA history implied that NSA may have thought less of the value of the tunnel collection than did the CIA. [17]

In 1996 the Berlin city government contracted a local construction company to excavate approximately 83 meters (270 ft) from the former American Berlin sector of the tunnel to make way for a new housing development. In 1997 a 12-meter (40 ft) section was excavated under the guidance of William Durie from what had been the Soviet Berlin sector. This section of tunnel is displayed at the Allied Museum. The museum's claim that this section was retrieved from the American sector is false. [18] The CIA museum received outer tunnel shell elements in 1999 and the International Spy Museum in Washington thereafter.[ citation needed ]

In fiction

Operation Gold forms the background to the novels The Innocent by Ian McEwan, Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary by T.H.E. Hill and to the film The Innocent by John Schlesinger.

Notes

  1. ↑ Vogel, Steve (20 September 2020). "Dwight Eisenhower Built up American Intelligence at a Crucial Moment". History News Network. Retrieved 26 February 2021.
  2. ↑ "Betrayal in Berlin Reviewed by Gary Keeley" (PDF). CIA. 15 June 2020. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 16, 2020. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
  3. ↑ "In 'The Spy and the Traitor,' a tale of Cold War espionage that's both thrilling and true". Washington Post. 8 November 2019. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
  4. ↑ "Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation". Washington Independent Review. 18 November 2019. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
  5. 1 2 Battleground Berlin, p. 208
  6. ↑ "Cold War Double Spy George Blake Dies At 98". NPR. 28 December 2020. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
  7. ↑ "A Look Back ... The Berlin Tunnel: Exposed". CIA. 26 June 2009. Archived from the original on July 15, 2009. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
  8. ↑ Caryn E. Neumann, Berlin Tunnel, Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, and Security, retrieved 29 August 2009
  9. ↑ Battleground Berlin, p. 220
  10. ↑ "Betrayal in Berlin Reviewed by Gary Keeley" (PDF). CIA. 15 June 2020. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 16, 2020. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
  11. ↑ "Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation". Washington Independent Review. 18 November 2019. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
  12. 1 2 Budiansky, Stephen (2016). Code Warriors. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 194–199. ISBN   978-0385352666.
  13. ↑ "BMarch Book Review- 'Betrayal in Berlin' by Steve Vogel". KPCW. 10 March 2020. Retrieved 31 December 2020. The Americans and the British were able to listen into the Russian conversations for 18 months
  14. ↑ Spies Beneath Berlin, p. 112
  15. ↑ Martin, David C. (1980). Wilderness of Mirrors. Harper & Row. pp. 87–88.
  16. ↑ Spies Beneath Berlin, p. 12
  17. ↑ Operation REGAL: The Berlin Tunnel. National Security Agency (NSA Historical Monograph). 1988. pp. 22–24.
  18. ↑ William Durie, The United States Garrison Berlin, 1945–1994, Mission Accomplished, 2014 ISBN   978-1-63068-540-9 (English).

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kim Philby</span> British intelligence officer and Soviet double agent (1912–1988)

Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby was a British intelligence officer and a spy for the Soviet Union. In 1963, he was revealed to be a member of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring which had divulged British secrets to the Soviets during World War II and in the early stages of the Cold War. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been the most successful in providing secret information to the Soviets.

Spy fiction is a genre of literature involving espionage as an important context or plot device. It emerged in the early twentieth century, inspired by rivalries and intrigues between the major powers, and the establishment of modern intelligence agencies. It was given new impetus by the development of fascism and communism in the lead-up to World War II, continued to develop during the Cold War, and received a fresh impetus from the emergence of rogue states, international criminal organizations, global terrorist networks, maritime piracy and technological sabotage and espionage as potent threats to Western societies. As a genre, spy fiction is thematically related to the novel of adventure, the thriller and the politico-military thriller.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cold War espionage</span> Aspect of the Cold War

Cold War espionage describes the intelligence gathering activities during the Cold War between the Western allies and the Eastern Bloc. Both relied on a wide variety of military and civilian agencies in this pursuit.

The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service and later absorbed by the National Security Agency (NSA), that ran from February 1, 1943, until October 1, 1980. It was intended to decrypt messages transmitted by the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union. Initiated when the Soviet Union was an ally of the US, the program continued during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was considered an enemy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Hanssen</span> American double agent spy (1944–2023)

Robert Philip Hanssen was an American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001. His espionage was described by the Department of Justice as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aldrich Ames</span> CIA analyst and Soviet spy (born 1941)

Aldrich Hazen Ames is an American former CIA counterintelligence officer who was convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union and Russia in 1994. He is serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, in the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana. Ames was known to have compromised more highly classified CIA assets than any other officer until Robert Hanssen, who was arrested seven years later in 2001.

<i>Red Rabbit</i> 2002 novel by Tom Clancy

Red Rabbit is a spy thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and released on August 5, 2002. The plot occurs a few months after the events of Patriot Games (1987), and incorporates the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. Main character Jack Ryan, now an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, takes part in the extraction of a Soviet defector who knows of a KGB plot to kill the pontiff. The book debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oleg Gordievsky</span> Former colonel of the KGB (born 1938)

Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, CMG is a former colonel of the KGB who became KGB resident-designate (rezident) and bureau chief in London. He was a double agent, providing information to the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 1974 to 1985. After being recalled to Moscow under suspicion, he was exfiltrated from the Soviet Union in July 1985 under a plan code-named Operation Pimlico. The Soviet Union subsequently sentenced him to death in absentia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Blake</span> British/Soviet espionage agent (1922–2020)

George Blake was a spy with Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union. He became a communist and decided to work for the MGB while a prisoner during the Korean War. Discovered in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years in prison, he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London in 1966 and fled to the Soviet Union, where he resided until his death in 2020. He was not one of the Cambridge Five spies, although he associated with Donald Maclean and Kim Philby after reaching the Soviet Union.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oleg Penkovsky</span> British spy in the USSR (1919–1963)

Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, codenamed Hero and Yoga was a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) colonel during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Penkovsky informed the United States and the United Kingdom about Soviet military secrets, including the appearance and footprint of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile installations and the weakness of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile program. This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. It also gave US President John F. Kennedy, during the Cuban Missile Crisis that followed, valuable information about Soviet weakness that allowed him to face down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and resolve the crisis without a nuclear war.

Operation Ivy Bells was a joint United States Navy, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and National Security Agency (NSA) mission whose objective was to place wire taps on Soviet underwater communication lines during the Cold War.

As early as the 1920s, the Soviet Union, through its GRU, OGPU, NKVD, and KGB intelligence agencies, used Russian and foreign-born nationals, as well as Communists of American origin, to perform espionage activities in the United States, forming various spy rings. Particularly during the 1940s, some of these espionage networks had contact with various U.S. government agencies. These Soviet espionage networks illegally transmitted confidential information to Moscow, such as information on the development of the atomic bomb. Soviet spies also participated in propaganda and disinformation operations, known as active measures, and attempted to sabotage diplomatic relationships between the U.S. and its allies.

Adolf Georgiyevich Tolkachev was a Soviet electronics engineer. He provided vital documents to the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) between 1979 and 1985. Working at the Soviet radar design bureau Phazotron as one of the chief designers, Adolf Tolkachev gave the CIA complete detailed information about projects such as the R-23, R-24, R-33, R-27, and R-60, S-300 missile systems; fighter-interceptor aircraft radars used on the MiG-29, MiG-31, and Su-27; and other avionics. KGB Police executed him in Moscow for being a spy in 1986.

Peter Northcote Lunn was a British alpine skier who competed in the 1936 Winter Olympics. As a spymaster in the early Cold War, he was noted for his resourceful use of telephone tapping.

Pyotr Semyonovich Popov was a colonel in the Soviet military intelligence apparatus (GRU). He was the first GRU officer to offer his services to the Central Intelligence Agency after World War II. Between 1953 and 1958, he provided the United States government with large amounts of information concerning military capabilities and espionage operations. He was codenamed ATTIC for most of his time with the CIA, and his case officer was George Kisevalter.

Operation Silver was a British intelligence operation in Allied-occupied Austria which ran from 1949 to 1955 that covertly tapped into the landline communications of the Soviet Army headquarters in Vienna. Although the operation was considered a success, the details of it were passed on to the KGB in October 1953 by George Blake, a British double agent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KGB</span> Main Soviet security agency from 1954 to 1991

The Committee for State Security was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 13 March 1954 until 3 December 1991. As a direct successor of preceding agencies such as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD and MGB, it was attached to the Council of Ministers. It was the chief government agency of "union-republican jurisdiction", carrying out internal security, foreign intelligence, counter-intelligence and secret police functions. Similar agencies operated in each of the republics of the Soviet Union aside from the Russian SFSR, where the KGB was headquartered, with many associated ministries, state committees and state commissions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of espionage</span>

Spying, as well as other intelligence assessment, has existed since ancient history. In the 1980s scholars characterized foreign intelligence as "the missing dimension" of historical scholarship." Since then a largely popular and scholarly literature has emerged. Special attention has been paid to World War II, as well as the Cold War era (1947–1989) that was a favorite for novelists and filmmakers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MI6</span> British intelligence agency

The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6, is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligence on foreign nationals in support of its Five Eyes partners. SIS is one of the British intelligence agencies and the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service ("C") is directly accountable to the Foreign Secretary.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Operation Monopoly</span> FBI covert surveillance plan

Operation Monopoly was a covert plan by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to build a tunnel underneath the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., to gather secret intelligence in effect from 1977 until its public discovery in 2001.

References

52°24′44″N13°31′42″E / 52.41222°N 13.52833°E / 52.41222; 13.52833

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.