Berlin Tunnel. George Mason University. From the SelectedWorks of Henry Hama. Henry Hama, American Military University. Summer July 25, 2011

Transcription

1 George Mason University From the SelectedWorks of Henry Hama Summer July 25, 2011 Berlin Tunnel Henry Hama, American Military University Available at:

2 WHY WAS THE BERLIN TUNNEL OPERATION BOTH A SUCCESS AND A FAILURE? Henry Hama Student # Interagency Operations - INTL604 Mr. Robert DeGross American Military University, February 13, 2011

3 Why was the Berlin Tunnel Operation both a success and a failure? I. INTRODUCTION During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency s (CIA) top priority was monitoring and upsetting the Soviet Union s influence worldwide. The purpose of this study is an attempt to assess why a majority of interagency operations during the Cold War were considered a failure; and more specifically, why the Berlin Tunnel Operation was both a success and a failure. Berlin, the East German capital, was on the front lines of the superpower conflict; it was also the center of a communications network connecting key European nodes and extending well into Russia. Soviet telephone and telegraph communications between Moscow, Warsaw, and Bucharest were routed through the city. By the early 1950s the Soviets had shifted from radio to land line telephones for most military traffic, transmitting both encrypted messages and non-secure voice communications. CIA assessed that tapping the underground cables could be done securely and with little notice. Following a similar success in Vienna in 1951, the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) developed a tunneling and tapping plan that Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles approved in January Work began the following month; the construction used an Air Force radar site and warehouse as a cover and proceeded undetected. The Berlin Tunnel project was almost executed to standard except for one thing, security concerns. There were too many people that should have not been made aware of the project due to its sensitivity; there is always the possibility of the existence of a mole when dealing with sensitive issues such as the operation in discussion. Unfortunately, the 1

4 KGB, the Soviet Union s premier intelligence agency, had been aware of the project from the start. George Blake, a KGB penetration of the British Secret Intelligence Service (the MI-6), knew about the operation and passed on the information to the Soviets during the planning phases of the operation. Up to this day it has not been determined that there were any known attempts by the Soviets to feed disinformation to the CIA; the Soviet military continued to use the cables for their daily communications. The operation was an interagency operation because it was led by the CIA with the support of the British Secret Intelligence Service; it included members of the US Army Corps of Engineers, US Army Intelligence, and West Germany Army as well as contracted US, UK, and German personnel. The concept with which the project was carried out was very sophisticated regarding the size and nature of signature such an operation were likely give out. More attention should have also been placed on ensuring that the different lines were always operational due to the nature of the rainy weather conditions in Germany; part of the reason why the Russians and East Germans discovered the taps, other than being possibly informed of the project by the British mole George Blake, were the problems with some of the wires, i.e. FK 150. Once the tunnel was erected and operational, the US was mainly concerned with intercepting communications that maintenance of the wires was not prioritized. This study will attempt to determine why the Berlin Tunnel project should be regard as both a covert action success and a failure. Selection of this topic was based on the fact that with the fall of the Soviet Union, which was a major threat to the United States during the Cold War, other unconventional threats have surfaced; therefore, the 2

5 study will further gauge the progress of counterintelligence operations from the Cold War era to the implementation of the National Counterintelligence Strategy (NCIS) of Literatures will be accessed from the AMU online library and the Military Intelligence Library at the US Army Intelligence Center of Excellence (USAICoE), Fort Huachuca, Arizona. II. LITERATURE REVIEW Clandestine Services historical paper (2007) provides a complete account of the developments leading to the necessity by the CIA to carry out the Berlin Tunnel project. The once classified paper, which was approved for public release in February of 2007, details the planning, implementation, and termination of the operation along with its findings and the aftermath. The Berlin Tunnel project was almost executed to standard except for a few shortcomings with regard to security measures. There were too many people who should not have been made aware of the project based on its sensitivity; there is always the possibility of the existence of a mole when dealing with covert action. It is only fair to assess that the concept with which the project was carried out was very sophisticated regarding the magnitude of the signature such a major operation would likely give out. Once the tunnel was erected and operational, the US was mainly concerned with intercepting communications between Russia and East Germany; maintenance of the lines that were tapped was never prioritized. It can also be assessed that the Berlin Tunnel project can be viewed as both a success and failure in terms of its intended objectives. The operation resulted in the acquisition of vast amounts of intelligible and targetable information by the US and the UK. 3

6 Nicoll (1997) highlighted that even with the end of the Second World War, the victors were forming themselves up for another one. The focal point for the new confrontation was Berlin, the capital of the defeated country, which was divided up for administration by the four powers, the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain and France, but deep within the Soviet zone of Germany. On July 4, 1945, an American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) team flew in to set up what became the Berlin Operations Base (BOB). Nicoll elaborated that in the earliest confrontations over Berlin, the US could be sure based on its intelligence that the Russians, whatever their belligerent statements, were not in fact preparing for war. There can be little doubt that the CIA's Berlin Operations Base continued to provide valuable support to its political masters during the extremely tense and dangerous years which led to the Berlin wall. The story, which was told through the CIA s accounts by Murphy and KGB s accounts by Kondrashev, represents an extraordinary collaboration between former adversaries. Although Murphy and Kondrashev were not directly pitted against each other in Berlin, their activities were at times closely related. Kondrashev, when on assignment to London, was the case officer handling George Blake, a Soviet spy inside the British intelligence (MI-6). Blake told the Russians about plans for a tunnel which was dug underneath the Soviet sector of Berlin in order to tap Soviet communications, an operation in which Murphy was closely involved. It can be inferred that as the CIA elevated its spying initiative, the KGB was doing the same. One could argue that the information that was acquired through the secret tunnel collection was flawed as the Soviets were quite aware of the US efforts to collect on their communications; however, that statement could also be disqualified by the fact that most of the information collected during the tenure of the 4

7 project turned out to be authentic and painted a realistic picture of the Soviet Union s posture during the said period. Bernstein (1997) described the CIA s initiative to gain access to the Soviets operational planning in East Germany in 1954; they searched for an organization that could make contact with Russians in East Berlin and try to persuade them to defect. The CIA recruited Igor Grigorievich Orlov into a Russian expatriate group based in Munich. Orlov, a.k.a. Sasha Kopazky, did not last long in Munich, but he was to play an ambiguous role as a CIA operative, one of whose tasks was to recruit women who could lure Soviet officers across the border to the West for interrogation. Strangely, however, his operations seemed to produce Russian officials who, in retrospect, seem to have remained under Soviet control from the beginning. It can be assessed that the particular failure to establish other means to collect information of value on the Soviets led the CIA to the idea of tapping into the Soviets communications lines. The CIA and the MI-6 had to figure out an alternative approach; hence the birth of the Berlin Tunnel Project. The project was well-planed and orchestrated; however, there were still shortcomings with the screening and identification of those with the need-to-know prior to the commencement of the tunnel construction. Courses of action dealing with compartmentalization were never fully exhausted; the fact that there were too many agencies and individuals previewed to the operation created most of the challenges experienced. Feifer (2002) describes the Berlin Tunnel Project as the Cold War s most daring espionage exploit that was led by William King Harvey, a former specialist in Soviet counterintelligence operations for the FBI who had switched to the CIA in Throughout the 1950s, the Cold War raged in divided Berlin; after the Soviet 5

8 blockade failed to force the United States, Great Britain and France from their sectors, the old German capital was in the center of the East-West clash. The world's most important CIA station was only a few yards away from a huge concentration of Soviet troops. Berlin's KGB station chief was an agency deputy chairman, General Yevgeny Pitovranov; he had served as the chief of Soviet foreign intelligence. The CIA operatives were not alone in fearing the communist danger. In 1954, during the tunnel's construction, the Doolittle Report warned that America confronted an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. Harvey hired a communications specialist fluent in German and he recruited East Germans with access to the cable network. Berlin Operation Base (BOB) officers did not visit the city of East Berlin; therefore most of the undertakings were through BOB's covert agents when they visited West Berlin. An official of an East Berlin post office procured bulky books with details of cable traffic. An operative who was known the "numbers girl" provided comprehensive data from the cards maintained in her classified post office switching room, where orders were executed designating cables for specific Soviet traffic. Once the tunnel was operational, materials rich in facts, hints and gossip about KGB personnel, helped corroborate reports acquired by BOB s agents and were extraordinarily useful when cross-referenced with reports from covert agents. The tunnel s communications and signals monitoring confirmed and or denied some of the HUMINT collections through CIA s covert operators. In addition, this confirms that even though the Soviets were to some extent aware of the tunnel, there is a reason to believe that they may not have been convinced of its capabilities. 6

9 US Fed News Service (2009) highlighted the events leading to the discovery of the secret tunnel by a team of Soviet and East German soldiers while digging at the municipal cemetery in Altglienicke in East Berlin to unearth a buried telephone cable and check for damage. When they reached the cable, they discovered that the cable was tapped and rerouted into a tunnel; the Berlin Tunnel (a.k.a. Operation Gold) was exposed. The need for intelligence during the Cold War, in an effort to monitor and thwart the Soviet Union's influence worldwide was the top priority of the CIA. Berlin stood on the front lines of the superpower conflict; the East German capital was the center of a communications network connecting key European nodes and extending well into Russia. Soviet telephone and telegraph communications between Moscow, Warsaw, and Bucharest were routed through the city. It is quite evident that the Berlin Tunnel Project illustrates how elements of success and failure could be found in the same intelligence operation. The cable taps yielded enormous amounts of intelligence on a hard target and answered important strategic questions for US policymakers and warfighters. The success in numbers included 50,000 reels of tape; 443,000 fully transcribed conversations (368,000 Soviet and 75,000 East German); 40,000 hours of telephone conversations; 6,000,000 hours of teletype traffic; and some1, 750 intelligence reports. There is nowhere in any of the findings of the mention of the Soviets injecting false or misleading reports into the wires; most of the taps confirmed the Soviet Union s order of battle and impending operations. Trahair (1997) recounted that from the beginning the Russians knew of the operation because inside the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) a British spy serving Russia took minutes of the meetings of the committee that ran the operation. George 7

10 Blake kept the minutes for meetings of the project, which he called Operation Stopwatch/Gold. According to Blake s minutes, Operation Gold was inaugurated in February 1954, and aimed to build a 600-yard tunnel at Altglienicke, on the border of the Russian and American zones in Berlin, so as to tap Soviet communication cables. According to Trahair s account, the KGB did surprisingly little about the use of the tunnel, and let it be used because the information that the West was collecting was of little value to the CIA/ SIS, because there were bureaucratic errors made in communicating between KGB departments and because it was necessary not to give out Blake s position as a double agent for the KGB. Sensitive Soviet material was sent routinely by overhead lines. The question that remains would be the risk the Soviets were willing to undertake in an effort to protect Blake; it is almost nonsensical for the Soviets to have been willing to give out immense order of battle and war operations in order to protect their mole George Blake. III. ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS Before examining the successes and failures of the Berlin Tunnel project, it is important to examine the nature in which the operation was perceived by the CIA and the British MI-6prior to its execution. The Berlin Tunnel project was almost executed to standard except for one aspect, security concerns. There were too many people that should have not been made aware of the project due to its sensitivity; there is always the possibility of the existence of a mole when dealing with sensitive issues such as this covert operation. The concept with which the project was carried out was very sophisticated regarding the size and nature of signature such an operation were likely to give out. 8

11 More attention should have also been placed on ensuring that the different lines were always operational due to the nature of weather conditions in Germany; part of the reason why the Soviets and East Germans discovered the taps, other than being possibly informed of the project by the British mole George Blake, were the problems associated with some of the lines, i.e. the FK 150. Once the tunnel was erected and operational, the US and UK were mainly concerned with intercepting communications to the point where they disregarded the maintenance of those line; a failure to prioritize. The project had full support from congress; the CIA had was always received full support from congress even though not most of the congressional decision makers were purview to the developments of any of the operations. Throughout history, the CIA had always operated autonomously and never had full accountability for its actions; however, that Berlin Tunnel project can be regarded as success among a myriad of other covert action failures. According to the US Fed News Service report, the success in numbers included 50,000 reels of tape; 443,000 fully transcribed conversations (368,000 Soviet and 75,000 East German); 40,000 hours of telephone conversations; 6,000,000 hours of teletype traffic; and some1, 750 intelligence reports. There is nowhere in any of the findings of the mention of the Soviets injecting false or misleading reports into the wires; most of the taps confirmed the Soviet Union s order of battle and impending operations. Issues of accountability have since been corrected with the implementation of the National Counterintelligence Strategy of 2008 to deal with the emerging non-state threats of the 21 st Century. IV. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 9

12 Covert action seeks to influence political events directly and has the characteristic of anonymity, namely that the role of the government is not readily or overtly acknowledged. Deniability is the single distinguishing feature of covert action if there is to be useful discussion of the action or events leading to such action. There are only two legitimate reasons for carrying out an operation covertly rather than overtly. One is when open knowledge of US responsibility would make an operation infeasible. Covert action failure and or compromise could result in significant damage to the US policy and prestige. Covert action should be the very last resort undertaken by the President of the US due to multiple reasons; one of the most obvious ones is that politicians and law makers might be inclined to use covert action as a substitute to effective planning and critically thinking through policy development. The Berlin Tunnel project yielded enormous amounts of intelligence on the Soviet Union and answered important strategic questions for US policymakers and warfighters. The project can be viewed as a success based on the quantity of collected recordings, fully transcribed telephone conversations, teletype traffic, and intelligence reports. The Berlin Tunnel project was a successful operation regardless its discovery and exposure to the rest of the world. The discovery and the worldwide publicity of the Berlin Tunnel project contributed to the amendment and overhaul of the US counterintelligence program. For the US counterintelligence program to be both effective and in line with traditional American freedoms, it must steer a middle course between blanket, illegal, frivolous and unsubstantiated inquiries into the private lives of US citizens and excessive restrictions which will render the Government's counterintelligence arms impotent to protect the nation from foreign penetration and covert manipulation (Johnson 2007). The National 10

13 Counterintelligence Strategy of 2008 was implemented to deal with the emerging nonstate threats of the 21 st Century; it s key priorities are: to secure the nation against foreign espionage and electronic penetration; to protect the integrity of the US intelligence system (people, structure, information systems, information); to support national policy and decisions; to protect US economic advantage, trade secrets and know-how; to support the US armed forces; to improve training and education of the counterintelligence community; to manage the counterintelligence community to achieve efficient coordination; and to expand national awareness of counterintelligence risk in the private as well as public sector. V. REFERENCE LIST Bernstein, Richard Tale of Cold War Spying, Told by Men Who Did It. The New York Times. Oct 1. (accessed January 30, 2011). Clandestine Services History The Berlin Tunnel Operation CS Historical Paper No 150.FI/Division D. (accessed January 30, 2010). Feifer, George The Berlin Tunnel. Military History. Herndon. (accessed January 29, 2011). Hulnick, Arthur S Fixing the Spy Machine: Preparing American Intelligence for the Twenty-First Century. Praeger Publishers, CT. (accessed February 10, 2011). Johnson, Loch K CIA Counterintelligence: An Excerpt from the Church Committee Report. Strategic Intelligence: Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism: Defending The Nation Against Hostile Forces, Vol 4. Praeger Publishers, CA. Nicoll, Alexander Deadly games in Berlin: The Spies' Story of Cold War Intelligence. Financial Times. Oct (accessed February 10, 2011). 11

14 O Connor, John J A Plot to Breach the Berlin Wall. The New York Times. Mar (accessed February 10, 2011). Reina, Peter Grouting Fails in Berlin Tunnel. Engineering News Record. (accessed February 10, 2011). Trahair, Richard C.S Operation Stopwatch ( ). Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage, Spies, and Secret Operation. (accessed February 10, 2011). US Fed News Service A Look Back...The Berlin Tunnel: Exposed. US Fed News Service, Including US State News. Jun (accessed February 10, 2011). 12