Flawed Patriot Read online

  Much of Harvey’s and the Bureau’s success against the KGB immediately after World War II had been a result of the Venona intercepts supplied by the Army Security Agency (ASA), the home of a legendary figure named Frank Rowlett.1 When Harvey moved to the CIA, Venona was still running, but it was accessible to only a very few and was used mostly to track KGB activity in the United States. In other words, the United States lacked a window into Soviet activities abroad that would provide positive intelligence on military and economic, perhaps even political, matters. Harvey’s eye fastened on Germany and the anachronistic island in the Soviet zone of occupation that was West Berlin. Harvey and Rowlett had a meeting of minds, and the concept of the Berlin Tunnel was born.

  Harvey’s Berlin Tunnel was a bold idea: to drive deep under an exposed wasteland of southern Berlin to tap a sheaf of transmission lines that carried a huge amount of traffic between all of Soviet-occupied East Germany, Moscow, and other parts of the Soviet Union. At its peak, the tunnel operation actively involved more than a hundred people, yet it never leaked, except in one very significant way: a shadow was cast over it, years later, with the realization that the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) had again been penetrated by the Soviets and that the officer concerned, George Blake, a Brit born in the Netherlands who had been imprisoned and turned in North Korea, had sat in on early CIA–MI-6 tunnel meetings in London. Blake told his KGB case officer what was up. That case officer was Gen. Sergei Kondrashev, who later teamed up with David Murphy and George Bailey to write Battleground Berlin. Kondrashev is the authority for the assurance, decades after the fact, that the KGB knew of the tunnel but decided to allow the operation to proceed in order to protect Blake. Kondrashev’s statement negates assertions of writers who alleged that the tunnel was primarily a source of Soviet disinformation; some of those assertions were, indeed, aimed more at Harvey than at the tunnel operation itself. A sidenote: if this version were true, think of the complexity of seeding disinformation in the enormous flow of electronic traffic the Americans monitored. It is possible, yes, but it would have been an enormous enterprise for the KGB, if they even contemplated it.

  The tunnel cannot really be compared to other secret enterprises—the U-2s, for instance. The U-2s’ high-altitude flights over the Soviet Union were more expensive and just as daring and as important, and they certainly involved risk to the pilots, viz. Gary Powers. But the tunnel was a massive undertaking that involved drilling right into a main artery of the Soviet Empire from a location that was under constant hostile surveillance. The success of the tunnel depended on humans operating under ticklish conditions, made, in this case, the more tricky because those involved knew that even their overt activities were under constant hostile surveillance. Unless someone comes up with a stunning, heretofore-untold story of huge Soviet espionage success in the years from 1945 to 1989, the Berlin Tunnel must rank as the most dramatic and important human intelligence-gathering operation of the Cold War.

  Just the concept of boring through wet clay for the length of five football fields, under the very feet of hostile forces, is enough to fire the imagination and to hint at the tension of the task. Then there was the installation of the three taps themselves by a British technician working a few feet below the surface of enemy territory. Finally, there was the kick of eavesdropping on the first actual Soviet military traffic, as it was being transmitted. All these factors make the Berlin Tunnel a credit to its main protagonist.

  The official record, amplified by the memories of several participants, provides some inkling of the enormity of the task and of the conditions under which Harvey and his men worked. Today, of course, the time, manpower, effort, money, and nervous tension that went into it would be largely unnecessary; we have robotic machines that grab out of the ether communications traffic that may tell us what we want and need to know about our friends and enemies.

  Unfortunately, much of the drama of the Berlin Tunnel op is lost because so many of those involved are dead. The official files—those that have been declassified and are available—are written in government prose and record none of the actual sweat, the nervous tension, the exhaustion, the interminable waiting during the dig while Soviet and East German patrols passed overhead. They give no hint of elation when the taps worked, nor of the grinding but highly secret routine of processing the miles of recorded tape and interpreting/translating, disseminating, and analyzing the thousands of messages the taps produced.

  In the documentation and the recollections I have used, there is no hint of the ferocious bureaucratic infighting that so often characterizes major projects, in or outside of government. Indeed, and perhaps partially because it was cleared at presidential-NSC and Joint Chiefs of Staff level, the tunnel op seems to have been a rare model of government efficiency on a project that had to flow flawlessly.

  One of the main participants says, flatly, the tunnel “would never have gotten off the ground without Bill constantly pushing it.” The tunnel certified Harvey’s inspiration, his drive, and his stamina, perhaps, indeed, at some lasting physical and mental cost to himself.

  GOADED BY BRITISH SUCCESS?

  In 1951 the Soviets conveniently shifted the bulk of their military communication from wireless radio to landline. At the same time, CIA technical staff, probably working on information gathered primarily by a notable Berlin case officer, Sig Hoxter,2 from German scientists returning from the USSR, “became aware of a principle which, when applied to target communications, offered certain possibilities…. Exploratory discussions were held in Washington.”3

  Bob Kilroy, who played a background role in the early days of tunnel planning, comments, “Harvey and Frank Rowlett,” of whom more later, “probably knew the kind of job they were contemplating was possible, because the Brits had done it in Schwechat, Vienna. Thus, MI-6/SIS [Secret Intelligence Service] had acquired the technical expertise in Austria…. Additionally, MI-6 had shared some of their stuff with us, too, and we’re all gentlemen, aren’t we?”4

  The Vienna op may well, in turn, have been an outgrowth of the occasional successes intrepid British prisoners of war had in tunneling out of several prison camps during World War II. One of the problems the POWs faced (and solved ingeniously) was secretly disposing of the dirt they accumulated digging their exit route. The same problem faced the Brits in Vienna, and Harvey in Berlin.

  In his memoir, Dick Helms skips over the maneuvers necessary to get the Berlin Tunnel op into gear, but he makes some interesting observations: “Within the Agency, cover stories within cover stories had to be invented…. We were well along with our research in Austria when our Vienna office learned that the British independently had … made considerable progress in tapping into the underground cables…. There was too much at stake to risk any overlapping effort…. The British agreed, and we each cooperated to the hilt at all times.”5

  The Berlin Tunnel inevitably became a joint operation. Apart from the early consultations in London, and after the tunnel had been dug, when all else was in place, the actual taps were made by John Wyke, a British expert. Since the British Vienna Tunnel had been called SILVER, Berlin became GOLD, a name that was subsequently used in public.6 The official cryptonym used inside the CIA for GOLD remains classified. Clarence Berry, a soft-spoken Virginian who these days plays bridge and sings in a barbershop quartet, speculates that the moniker “maybe derived from the dirt they dug up and brought out from the tunnel itself.”7

  The extreme security in all aspects of GOLD worked. From the first culling of necessary infrastructure information on through the construction and exploitation phases, no one at Berlin Operations Base, except those who absolutely had to know, had a clue about the elaborate operation down there at the American sector–Soviet zone border on the southernmost rim of the city.

  FRANK B. ROWLETT

  Sometime, perhaps even in the late 1940s, the legend goes, Frank B. Rowlett and Bill Harvey—who was then still head of Staff C, Counterintelligence—were commiser
ating over the dearth of the kind of communications intercept material Rowlett’s people had produced during World War II and the British Enigma machine had also delivered. Rowlett—described by James Bamford in Body of Secrets as “beefy and round-faced with rimless glasses … a high school teacher from southern Virginia [who] received a degree in math”—has sainthood in the intelligence world, even today. According to a military website, Rowlett, who had been hired for the Army’s Signal Intelligence Service in 1930, was the central figure and the last surviving member of a team that solved Japanese code and cipher communications before and during World War II.8

  Clarence Berry suspects that Harvey organized Rowlett’s transfer to the CIA from the NSA in 1952. If this is true, it means Harvey already swung enough weight in the Agency to push for such a major personnel move. Rowlett became chief of Staff D, which was elevated to division status during the tunnel op, so he could backstop Berlin with the weight of his knowledge and prestige. It was a slick Harvey move.

  Clarence recalls, “Frank was a southern gentleman, a country-boy type, well respected…. Quiet, soft-spoken, never mad, a very smart mathematician … a behind-the-scenes kind of guy…. Harvey and Fleetwood [see below] referred to Rowlett as ‘Our Father.’ I always called him ‘Mr. Rowlett.’ … He had an aura.”

  Because of the extent and depth of his very sensitive knowledge, it is unlikely that Rowlett ever went to Germany, although he did meet the British in less-exposed London. Berry: “I was at a meeting on the tunnel in Frankfurt, between Allen Dulles and Harvey. But [I was] never in Frankfurt with Rowlett…. I doubt seriously Rowlett was the prime mover in the tunnel operation. I give Harvey a lot more credit.”9

  SELLING THE OPERATION

  Once Rowlett and Harvey had cooked up the concept, they had to produce an operational plan, which must have been a fairly elaborate document, going into manpower requirements, the need for no-questions-asked support from the Army, training of the tunnel diggers, provision of construction and electronics supplies, recruitment of support personnel in Germany—on and on. The wealth of planning over several years had to be accomplished in far more than the usual CIA secrecy. One relatively huge item was for a large corps of transcribers and linguists to handle the enormous volume of intercept traffic. It was no easy task to find (and then clear) not just native Russian speakers but people who knew Russian dialects and the jargon that is always part of military communication. The back end of the operation in Washington (and London) was, however, not Harvey’s worry once he got the tunnel op approved.

  Peter Sichel was in on it from the very beginning, without, at first, being briefed on what was up. One of BOB’s Washington-imposed targets in 1951–early 1952 was to recruit post office officials who knew the telecommunications wiring, both local and long distance, in all Berlin.

  “We were extremely successful. Henry Hecksher [then Peter’s deputy and BOB chief of operations] was the main supervisor on the effort.” Henry was a close friend of the West Berlin Police president, Dr. Johannes Stumm, who had stood up to the Communists in 1948, then set up the separate West Berlin force and who in turn introduced Hecksher to high-ranking postal officials. “Remember, there was no wall at the time and still only one German postal system. The network established through Hecksher and Stumm brought in reams of material on the whole telephone and other wiring under the streets of Berlin.”

  Sichel deduced that the idea was ultimately to put a listening device onto one or more of the lines whose diagrams Hecksher’s sources had purloined. “I had no idea, however, that it involved us trying to put a major listening post into the Soviet sector, and I doubt that that idea had germinated at the time.”

  In early 1952 Walter O’Brien, a former infantry captain and lawyer, arrived at BOB and took over the preparatory work from Hecksher. Sichel also soon departed, to be replaced temporarily by Lester Houck. Harvey, then working out of Staff D, needed the Eastern Europe Division (EE), in whose bailiwick Berlin fell, to sign off on his project. So, says Sichel, “When I became ops chief of EE in Washington, I was finally brought in on the tunnel.” Sichel thinks Harvey preferred to deal with him rather than with John Bross, since Harvey and Bross did not get along.

  Still Harvey-Sichel was an odd alliance. Peter notes, “I am foreign-born, about as strange an animal as he could ever think of…. I was everything he seemed to disapprove of, yet somehow, he made up his mind that he was going to be my best friend … probably from the minute that he decided he wanted to go to Berlin and that I could probably do something to prevent it.

  “Harvey was very clever about it. But if somebody likes you, what are you going to do? I knew he had four dry martinis at lunch. I knew he was strange…. But he was very perceptive. Later, when he was in Berlin and I was on the desk in Washington, I never had a fight with him, and that was extraordinary!”

  Sichel was under the impression that he was brought into the secret in order to get Allen Dulles’s approval. He had known Dulles “rather well and saw quite a bit of him when he was a lawyer, after leaving OSS [Office of Strategic Services], and before he came back as director. I was in touch with him and Wisner in New York on my periodic trips back to the United States and used to lunch with both of them on Wall Street.”

  Sichel also “knew Dick Helms, Wisner’s second in command, very well, from a long time back. So I was part of the inner circle. It was very easy to find my way around back in headquarters … very easy to get things done.” Sichel and Wisner had been colleagues in OSS; Peter had a closer bond with Dulles because both served in Berlin after the end of hostilities.

  Harvey briefed the new head of operations for EE on the plan. Then, with Dick Helms’s blessing, he and Sichel went to see Allen Dulles in the red-stone building at 2430 E Street to ask for his approval. Sichel comments flatly, “Bedell Smith was nowhere around when the tunnel matter came up. Bill had pretty well worked out the whole project with the people who had done the groundwork. Approval was quickly given. It was just the kind of thing that Dulles went for. I have no idea if he checked it out with the president or anyone else.

  “I, for one, took it all as just another operation. Only when I saw the enormous recruiting of translators, etc., did I realize that this was indeed a different sort of project.”10

  The question of who knew about the tunnel and who didn’t may seem academic today, but it was not irrelevant then. Harvey needed the active support of Gen. Lucian Truscott because the Army would inevitably be involved in the tunnel op in a number of supporting roles, and Truscott had the stars on his shoulder to ensure military cooperation. Tom Polgar comments that Harvey had a number of meetings in Frankfurt with General Truscott, often on Friday mornings; this gave Harvey the chance to dally over the weekend.

  The exclusion of Polgar was a departure from normal. Polgar found himself being invited to leave the room on a number of occasions, not just during the Harvey meetings. “It was obvious to me that something was going on in Berlin because of these incidents and the big build-up of personnel in Berlin base, which was not warranted on basis of ops developments known to me.”11

  FLEETWOOD

  Once they had the go-ahead from on high, Harvey and Rowlett had to find the specialists they needed. Their first priority was a telecommunications man who had experience in clandestine operations. The choice was a man who was forever after called Fleetwood. He was an Army major who came to the CIA in the spring of 1951, on direct field transfer from an ASA (Army Security Agency) unit in Germany. He was papered as an Air Force colonel to give him the rank he needed to deal with the military. Fleetwood was Bill Harvey’s soul mate. They worked almost literally hand in glove. Clarence Berry, who watched both from his perch in Frankfurt, says, “I don’t believe Bill felt as easy with anyone else in Washington, London, or Frankfurt.”12

  When Dave Murphy approached Fleetwood’s family while researching Battleground Berlin, they requested that his identity be concealed. “Fleetwood was Cadillac’s top-of-the-line brand, the
American Rolls Royce. Harvey thought it was a suitable nickname for his main partner on the tunnel,” notes Clarence Berry, thus Fleetwood he remains.

  After the CIA’s German headquarters moved from Karlsruhe to Frankfurt, Fleetwood became chief of Staff D, Germany, a four-person unit. As time went on, he delegated most routine Division D tasks to Berry. “He was a nonconformist in many ways, but he took his job very seriously and was very close-mouthed about it. He was a very private person … very circumspect in his dealings with other German Mission people. But he could also be very outgoing with those he came to trust.

  “During Harvey’s visits to Frankfurt, when they worked out a multitude of details relating to tunnel support, they were like a couple of young colts kicking up their heels together. They were quite a team!”13

  INCEPTION

  Walter O’Brien caught Fleetwood’s eye because he spoke serviceable German. O’Brien was detailed to Berlin as head of a nonexistent counterespionage section; his real mission was to take over from Hecksher the recruitment of agents in the West Berlin post office, thereafter in East Berlin, to collect information on Soviet communications landlines. He was under the tight direction of Fleetwood in Frankfurt and Harvey, still in Washington. In May 1952 Peter Sichel was replaced by Lester Houck, who was kept in the dark about O’Brien’s primary mission.