Book Review | Spies Beneath Berlin

CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence

Studies in Intelligence, 2003

Spies Beneath Berlin

By David Stafford. London: John Murray Ltd., 2002. 211 pages.

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

When former Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles called the Berlin Tunnel operation “one of the most valuable and daring projects ever undertaken,” he knew that George Blake, one of the British MI6 planners had betrayed the secret to the KGB before the tunnel was built. After this became public knowledge, several journalists concluded that the entire operation had been a failure and that Dulles’s remarks were meant to deflect or lessen the embarrassment. They argued that the KGB would not have missed such an opportunity to feed the West disinformation. In 1997, David Murphy, S. A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey settled the issue in their book Battleground Berlin. Kondrashev, who had been Blake’s case officer, explained that, in order to protect Blake, the users of the tapped telephone lines had not been told that the British and Americans were listening.

In Spies Beneath Berlin, David Stafford has used these and many other sources to present the most complete story of this amazing operation in one volume. He adds new details and puts down some of the myths, such as the claim by CIA’s Carl Nelson to David Martin that he could read Soviet clear text because of the “echo effect.” He also explains that the origins of the tunnel project were in postwar Vienna where the Soviets and the Allies made tapping each other’s communications a cottage industry.

The Americans apparently conceived the Berlin operation independently, and Stafford explains how the joint operation with the British came together. He names the players involved, and often gives new details provided by the participants. We learn, for example, something of Hugh Montgomery’s role in transporting heavy magnetic tapes in Berlin. And from former case officer Joe Evans, we hear about efforts at the London end to piece together fragments of the Soviet forces mosaic in East Germany. Although reluctant to talk officially, Peter Lunn and some other British participants also cooperated and are mentioned.

Perhaps most important, Stafford does a good job of explaining why the tunnel operation was indeed a success even though the KGB knew about it. He gives examples of the materials obtained and shows how they fit in with other sources to provide a picture of Soviet order-of-battle not previously known. The operation also netted important political intelligence—the first details about Khrushchev’s secret speech defaming Stalin in 1956, to give one example—that allowed Western governments to better assess what was going on behind the Iron Curtain.

The Berlin Tunnel operation—called STOPWATCH by the British, and GOLD by the Americans—was eventually “discovered” by the East Germans and KGB and shut down. How and when this occurred remains a mystery. But the allies even managed to turn the discovery into a propaganda victory. The author tells how the processing of the collected data continued long afterward.

Stafford ends his tale with a description of a meeting between historians and former Soviet and American participants in the tunnel project in Berlin. By this time, the last surviving portion of the tunnel had been found and preserved in a German museum, where the meeting took place. Even the Soviets conceded that it had been a Western success, but they had protected their agent.