Flawed Patriot Page 11

  Harvey moved to Berlin in December 1952. The move was the very quiet signal that the tunnel op was ready to move into a more vigorous exploratory stage. The operational outline had been OKed, and enough money had been allocated to allow further probing.

  Bob Kilroy was in on it almost from the beginning. Even though we were close friends in the early 1950s and all of his tunnel activity took place, almost literally, under my nose, I didn’t learn that he was involved and how deeply until I started to piece the story together for this book. Kilroy’s account of his participation details one aspect of the painstaking complexity of the entire operation—all of it ticklish, and all of it conducted in the deepest secrecy. Kilroy refers to his participation as “moonlighting” because he still had another, full-time Agency job as a reports officer. This is his story.

  In the early of spring of 1952, an East German post office telephone circuit expert defected, was brought to Frankfurt, and was turned over to Fleetwood, who could, however, not communicate with his new recruit. Kilroy: “Fleetwood accosted me. I was bored to tears but bilingual. He asked if I would be willing to do an interpreting job for him. Fleetwood added that the assignment had already been cleared higher up, and my office had no need to know. I was the only linguist Fleetwood could find whose parents were not recent immigrants. I had no idea who Fleetwood was. I knew only that he was involved in the most sensitive operations.”

  A day or so after the first encounter, Kilroy and Fleetwood went to an apartment to meet a German who had been a fairly high-level technician in the Reichspost during the war. The three of them huddled around a microfilm viewer on which could be seen a maze of lines with numbers attached to them. Fleetwood had specific questions about these telephone or teletype circuits. The German had all the information in his head. None of it made much sense to Kilroy, but Fleetwood seemed satisfied.

  “Within the week I was fetched to yet another evening à trois with more microfilms. From Battleground Berlin I know now that these were the circuit drawings for landlines, which O’Brien was photographing at BOB and shipping down to Frankfurt.”

  Before too long, Fleetwood was dispatching Kilroy to unchaperoned meetings with the German. Finally, Fleetwood asked if the agent would like to go to Berlin to renew some old acquaintances and added that Kilroy would accompany him to ensure his safety.

  Fleetwood was at Tempelhof when Kilroy and the agent came in on a military flight. Fleetwood, Kilroy, and the German went to a safe house where they were joined by O’Brien and two or three West Berliners who worked for the Deutsche Post. “A great time was had by all, so great that the four old Reichspost buddies went off on a pub crawl.”

  The junket to Berlin was a reward for a job well done. Fleetwood had found what he was looking for. By July 1952 he had determined that cables numbered 150, 151, and 152 probably carried Soviet traffic and ran close enough to the American sector to be reached by tunnel.14

  Kilroy was transferred to BOB. Shortly after his transfer, Fleetwood needed the most detailed possible maps of Berlin. “I came up with a list of military maps of the entire Fatherland, made in the 1930s … a cartographer’s dream, something only the Germans would do … perfectly to scale (1:25,000, as I recall), with every street, alley, highway, and byway … and best of all, with the location of all buildings carefully blacked in. The problem was finding the actual maps.

  “After some calling around, I found a firm that was struggling along in a partially burned-out building in the British sector. They said they might still have some of the maps lying around but were sure that they had no complete set (which numbered literally thousands of sheets).”

  Kilroy and a case officer posing as a diplomat went to the store. The officer announced that the U.S. government would purchase as complete a set of the maps as was available. “The owners’ joy was heartwarming because, in their eyes, the maps were flawed: not only an incomplete set, but many of the buildings shown no longer existed. The case officer showed typical American disdain for what the incomplete set would cost.”

  Back in Frankfurt, Fleetwood told Kilroy to take two or three sections of maps and have them enlarged as much as possible, securely and exactly to scale. “I was not about to question Fleetwood’s reasons or motives.” He insisted that Kilroy, a streetcar man, take taxis wherever he went and not ask for receipts.

  An art supply store told Kilroy the solution to his enlargement problem was a pantograph. Fleetwood provided another wad of Deutsch marks. Bob bought and then set about assembling the machine in a safe house. It was not easy.

  Once the machine was set up, “the enlarging took about two days. At the end of each day, Fleetwood rolled up everything in a large tube and took it back to his office. When I was finished, he pronounced himself satisfied with the results, and back I went to Berlin.

  “I never spoke of my moonlighting to anyone. Nor did I discuss or allude to it with Bill Harvey, who probably knew about it, except the day the discovery of the tunnel was broadcast by the East Germans. I took the need-to-know caveat seriously, as I think we all did.”

  FINAL PREPARATIONS

  By now, Fleetwood knew exactly where the various major landlines in the East were. Next he had to determine which circuits carried traffic of major interest.

  In Berlin, Walter O’Brien was replaced by Henry Woodburn, who recruited yet more post office types, presumably to ascertain which cables were worth the effort. Finally, the extremely risky patch operation, described in both Wilderness of Mirrors and Battleground Berlin, verified the lines of most operational interest.

  Once the lines had been verified, Harvey called Neill Prew into his office. Harvey told Prew to deliver a tape to Gordon Stewart, who was then chief of the German Mission. It was probably one of the first tapes made in the fraught patch operation by O’Brien’s East German Post recruit to test the traffic on the lines in which Harvey and Fleetwood were interested—one of the lines in the Soviet zone accessible to tunneling. Prew was considerably frustrated by weather delays, but he eventually got an Air France plane to Frankfurt and presented himself, with the tape, at Stewart’s apartment at one o’clock in the morning.15

  By August 1953 the tunnel group was able to present a detailed plan of operation to Allen Dulles, who took it under advisement. The tunnel planners were ready to put the project together. Harvey attended a December 1953 conference with the Brits in London, during which plans for Anglo-American cooperation were finalized, and finally, on January 20, 1954, thanks mainly to Bill’s staunch advocacy of the operation, Dulles gave his approval. In February l954 the technical details were ironed out at another conference in London.

  Bob Kilroy adds, “Thereupon, work on construction of the ‘ELINT [electronic intelligence] warehouse,’ and then the tunnel itself, began.” Once the decision was finally made to dig, the tunnel op became Operation GOLD.

  SUPPORT

  It’s time to backtrack, to follow another skein that led to the Berlin interface between the American sector and the Russian zone.

  By mid- to late 1952, Harvey knew there was no easy way simply to siphon key Soviet communications into West Berlin, so he had to push the envelope—to dig a tunnel, as the Brits had in Vienna to get at the most important cables they could reach.

  Even the concept—tunneling a remarkable distance into denied territory—took daring. Questions must have arisen. Who could be trusted in the Agency procurement offices? How much did they need to know? What were the specs for the six-foot diameter steel tubing needed to prevent tunnel cave-in? How in hell do we dig a tunnel under the feet of patrols and under a heavily traveled highway? How do we keep it from caving in? Who’s going to dig it? What kind of equipment do we need? How do we order the equipment so it’s not traceable back to us? How many tape recorders do we need? Where do we buy the miles of recording tape and the transmission cables without arousing suspicion? How do we translate the take and disseminate it fast, if needed? How can we possibly keep the whole thing secure?

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p; The CIA couldn’t just go to Home Depot or Halliburton, nor even commission a jobber. Much of the purchasing and shipping for the undertaking must have gone through the Army, concealed in routine supply requisitions. Security had to be the paramount concern.

  With the intelligence provided by the Berlin post office recruits, a technical staff under Frank Rowlett probably started to draw blueprints for the tunnel itself. Then Rowlett had to find someone who had the expertise to ramrod the dig, met all the security requirements, and could command the respect of the diggers, who would be working under miserable physical conditions, as well as under psychological stress. The Army produced Lt. Col. Leslie Gross, reportedly the only man capable of leading such an expedition. The actual grunts were combat engineers, GIs who could pass rigorous security screening and who might reasonably be projected not to go out on the town and talk boisterously or to flip out under the pressure and isolation.

  Regrettably, I have not been able to trace Colonel Gross or any of the combat engineers who were the actual diggers to gain their accounts of the actual tunneling or their version of Harvey’s oversight of the operation. That in itself is a mark of the security surrounding the operation, even fifty years after the fact!

  After the diggers finished, technically qualified GIs from the various military communications/cryptological services had to be selected and revetted.

  With the preparations well in train, Harvey moved to Berlin to be on scene. Unable to use his Staff D bully pulpit from that distance, he had to rely on Rowlett and others at home. For a guy of Bill’s energy and ambition, the slow-moving development process must have been agonizing, but he used the time to establish himself as chief of BOB and probably to size up the difficulties he would face when the digging and, later, the operation of the tunnel were in full swing.

  An official account of the operation, probably written years later by Vyrl Leichliter (of whom more later), amplifies drily, “A group of U.S. Army personnel set about building what they thought was a fairly large warehouse about 300 feet from the East Zone in southern Berlin. Among other specifications, the plans called for an unfinished basement with a 12 foot high ceiling. The officer in charge questioned this specification, but what he didn’t know was that this basement later would be used to store about 3,100 tons of dirt.”

  An array of phony radar and electronic intelligence gear mounted on the warehouse looked “real sexy” to one participant. This gear was intended to catch attention, to dupe the Communists into believing it was signals intercept/ELINT equipment aimed at the Soviet (later East German civilian) airport at Schoenefeld. The Russians and East Germans may even have laughed condescendingly at the Amis because they had just switched their main transmissions from radio to landline.

  OPS SUPPORT

  Clarence Berry was spotted and recruited in mid-1948, while still in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), by Harvey, who even then was thinking communications intelligence. Over the next five years Harvey farmed Berry out to several cryptological agencies for seasoning. For the last years of his indenture, Clarence was assigned to the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), primarily to “procure certain ‘dated’ intelligence material in support of on-going CIA clandestine operations and to help flesh out the files of CIA’s Central Reference Section.” In blunter words, the CIA was building its knowledge on the accumulated wisdom of other outfits. When Clarence returned to the home fold, Frank Rowlett wrote him a letter of commendation.

  Berry arrived in Frankfurt in July 1954 and quickly became involved in tunnel support activities. “Fleetwood was pretty close-mouthed at first … not the talkative type. But I soon learned what was going on from our own cable traffic. And I kept my ear to the ground whenever Harvey came down to visit with Fleetwood.15

  The members of the Frankfurt Staff D element knew how to operate CIA cipher machines so they could encode and decode Staff D messages buried in the normal flow of encrypted CIA traffic. This supersecret channel allowed Harvey and Fleetwood to keep their correspondence even more sacrosanct than the usual flow of CIA messages.

  Material for the tunnel came to Bremerhaven, the U.S.-controlled seaport enclave, in American military ships. It was offloaded onto freight cars to be attached to the American military supply train to Berlin. Berry recalls much of the plate and the rails necessary for tunnel construction came from the Norfolk, Virginia, area. The sensitive cargo also included 150 Ampex tape recorders “and jillions of miles of wire…. We even shipped in refrigeration equipment to keep the tunnel cool while they were digging.”

  Once, those in the know hit the panic button. “The heavy, curved steel plates … the sheathing for the tunnel … were loaded into two boxcars, which got lost somewhere between Bremerhaven and Berlin. There was a hell of a scramble, as you can imagine,” until the cars were found and shunted to the right train. “But the equipment in the tap chamber itself, the stuff that was installed by John Wyke, that was British.”

  Berry continues, “If it was discovered, Bill wanted to blow the tunnel up, so we needed to rig dynamite in it. Fleetwood put the stuff in a suitcase and flew with it up to Berlin” in diametric violation of every regulation known to air transportation.

  DIGGING

  Soil analysts studied geological maps of southern Berlin carefully to check for water at the projected twenty-foot depth. They found a favorable-looking area next to a graveyard, which the maps showed was well drained.

  Berry: “Lieutenant Colonel Gross and sixteen combat engineers went to the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico to test the techniques they would use because the soil there was similar to Berlin’s. It was a pretty secure installation.”

  An official document confirms the digging team was to be sent to Berlin “in the normal manner as members of the 9539 TSU, [U.S. Army] Signal Corps…. These personnel will at no point appear as KUBARK personnel.” The combat engineers arrived in Berlin in two groups in early 1954.17

  Elsewhere there appear brief accounts of the actual dig, decribing hauling the dirt back from the tunnel face to the warehouse along a rubber-covered rail line; bolting the steel plates together; making slow, sweaty progress in extremely damp, uncomfortable conditions; and continuing, intense security precautions.

  The Agency’s file report continues matter-of-factly, “Without getting into detail about the multitude of security considerations and actual techniques used in the excavation, I will just say that during the next 5 months or so, those 16 GIs worked around the clock in 8 hour shifts. Starting in the basement floor, they dug down 20 feet, and then proceeded to dig a tunnel 6 1/2 feet high and 1,500 feet long—all by hand—and with the East Germany Police walking patrol overhead.”

  The engineers “lined [the tunnel] with circular steel plating, bolted together every 12 inches and pumped in concrete grout in the outside voids to prevent telltale settlement…. Very heavy air-conditioning equipment was installed to prevent giving away the location when it snowed.

  “The Lt. Col. in charge did what could only be described as a magnificent job in all respects—engineering and command—and the 16 Sergeants could not have been a better group. They were terrific.

  “When they reached what was judged to be the end of the tunnel and it was time to dig a vertical shaft up from the 20 foot level to within 18 inches of the surface where the cables were located, they hit the spot the first time. The three cables were right there where Harvey’s sources said they would be.”18

  Berry adds, “I think it took John Wyke of MI-6 three days, on his back in the confined space of the tunnel, to make the taps on the three large target cables with over 150 pair, and complete the installation.”

  The GIs dug from August 1954 until February 25, 1955. When it was completed Harvey walked the length of the tunnel right below the main highway that skirted West Berlin and carried traffic from Soviet headquarters to Potsdam to East Berlin and East Germany. On the heavy steel door Harvey ordered be installed to block hostile entry into the tunnel on the day the ope
ration would, inevitably, blow was a carefully worded sign that, in both German and Russian, said, “American Sector. Entry Forbidden by Order of the Commanding General.”

  Berry: “Colonel Gross and his crew came to Berlin in the dark, so to speak, and left the same way.” ASA technicians quickly replaced the combat engineer sergeants to get the op under way. All were under tight wraps and were billeted on site.

  VYRL LEICHLITER

  References to Vyrl Leichliter, the “outside case officer,” abound throughout the tale of the Berlin Tunnel. He must have been in Berlin when I was there, but I never knew of his existence, and I doubt very much whether anyone except those cleared for the tunnel did.

  Leichliter was Harvey’s day-to-day link with the tunnel. He operated as a loner and kept crazy hours. He accompanied Harvey on frequent, nocturnal visits to the dig. When necessary, he also met BOB’s inside case officers—O’Brien, Woodburn, and one or two others—in a safe house. After the meetings, Vyrl continued his lonesome rounds.

  Conventional BOBers could at least blow off steam with colleagues. Vyrl, the loner, had few chances to decompress. CG Harvey used to see a lot of him: “He came to our house every night, and they would sit there and drink and talk till practically morning.”

  CG, a motherly soul, recalled that the sergeants who did the digging had only three sets of clothing, which got filthy while they worked. “So Vyrl went out and bought a washer and dryer, and they washed and dried their clothes before they went out the door…. They were so careful about every single detail!”

  Vyrl even censored the GIs’ mail. Once he spotted a reference to Berlin in a letter from a combat engineer to his girlfriend on the U.S. West Coast. Staff D turned the possible security breach over to Army Counterintelligence, which assigned an agent to date the young lady. The young CIC man learned enough to erase Leichliter’s and Harvey’s unease.