The Greatest Traitor (29 page)

Meanwhile, Pitovranov, together with General Andrei Grechko (Commander in Chief of Soviet forces in East Germany) and Georgy Pushkin (Soviet Ambassador in East Berlin), began to draw up the equivalent of a modern-day PR plan for Khrushchev on how best to exploit the revelation. They agreed that a strong public protest should be made to the headquarters of the American Army in Europe; their ‘German friends’ would then be briefed to comment unfavourably on the affair; reporters from West as well as East would be invited to take a good look at the tunnel; and a group of technical experts despatched to study all the equipment. Most interesting of all their recommendations was this final suggestion: ‘Regardless of the fact that the tunnel contains British equipment, all accusations in print should be addressed exclusively to the Americans’.

Their reasons were twofold. First, by pinning the blame for the tunnel completely on the Americans they could divert suspicion away from SIS and, most importantly, from Blake. Secondly, on the very day the tunnel was ‘discovered’, Khrushchev and Bulganin were halfway through a state visit to Britain. They did not want their unruffled progress undermined, or to embarrass their hosts with accusations of spying while there were negotiations over Hungary and the Middle East that might just move in their favour.

Back in Berlin, many in the CIA had assumed the Soviets would not want to advertise the fact that their communications had been so totally compromised. They were surprised when, carrying out Khrushchev’s wishes to the letter, Colonel Ivan Kotsyuba, Acting Commandant of the Berlin Garrison, called a press conference on Monday, 23 April, to inform the world of this ‘blatant act of imperialist aggression’. The Soviets accused the US of tapping ‘important underground long-distance telephone lines’ linking Berlin with other nations. They conducted official tours of the tunnel, sending carefully chosen delegations of workers from East Germany to gaze on this ‘damning evidence’ of the CIA’s use of West Berlin as an espionage base against the ‘peace-loving East’.

The Eastern side of the tunnel took on a carnival-like atmosphere. A snack bar was set up and an estimated 90,000 East Berliners toured the ‘capitalist warmongers’ expensive subterranean listening post’.

The KGB story, as told in the East German press, depicted heroic Soviet technicians surprising the hapless Americans, forcing them to abandon their earphones and recorders and flee humiliatingly down the tunnel. In reality, a senior American officer on site had a smart idea to halt the advancing Soviets: a 50-calibre machine gun was brought into the tunnel and set up on a tripod. When the Americans heard the Soviets coming, the slide was pulled back on the gun, making a very loud, unmistakable noise that echoed around the enclosed space. The intruders promptly turned on their heels and disappeared back into the East.

In the West, there was no sense of ignominy about the tunnel’s discovery; instead the operation generally amused and delighted the public. American newspapers marvelled that the CIA was capable of such a remarkable clandestine manoeuvre, and revelled in the fact that US intelligence was now competing on level terms with the Soviets, long acknowledged as masters in such matters. For
Time
magazine it was the ‘Wonderful Tunnel’. The
Boston Globe
confessed it would never have believed that American intelligence agents, thought to be stumbling neophytes, could be ‘that smart’.

Despite Khrushchev’s aims, America, and specifically the CIA, emerged as the real winner in the propaganda battle. Only eight years old, the agency was still viewed with scepticism in Washington, where not everyone had been convinced about its usefulness, or that it spent its money wisely. The obvious technical ingenuity of the project silenced the critics but what, really, was the practical benefit of this 6.7 million dollar project? For five years afterwards the CIA was utterly convinced that the Berlin tunnel had been a ‘unique source of current intelligence of a kind and quality that had not been available since 1948’. They believed it to be their best insight into Soviet intentions in Europe.

When the truth emerged about Blake’s betrayal, they were forced to question that assumption. The KGB had known about the tunnel all along, and the voluminous intelligence the CIA believed it had gathered about the Soviet Army, Soviet intelligence, the Soviet atom bomb programme, and all the personalities in the Soviet political and military hierarchy could no longer be trusted. Was it laced with deliberate disinformation? Though later analysis on both sides would suggest not, it was impossible to be sure.

Joe Evans, a CIA officer based in London who analysed a lot of the tunnel material, noted: ‘In a disinformation campaign, literally thousands of Soviets in East Germany would have had to know
something
about this operation, and to know the KGB had an inside source. That would have left George Blake’s security in tatters.’ Some years
later, Blake’s handler, Sergei Kondrashev, endorsed Evans’s view and officially dismissed the disinformation theory: ‘It would have been impossible. Why? Because with such huge amounts of material going through different lines – diplomatic, military, GDR lines and others – to insert a page or two of disinformation into such a huge amount of material, well, just a simple analysis using simple methods would show that the disinformation contradicts the huge bulk of real material. So it wasn’t done.’

With this, Kondrashev revealed another startling piece of information – that the KGB had even kept the secret of the tunnel from its
own side,
its military counterparts the GRU and the Red Army, the main users of the cables being tapped. This extraordinary piece of subterfuge in the Lubyanka was intended to protect their precious asset. ‘We didn’t tell the military about the existence of George Blake. We simply couldn’t betray our secret to anyone,’ said Kondrashev. ‘He was too important for us. You realise that at the time, George Blake was of course one of the most important sources at the heart of the British Secret Service. He was crucial for us.’ Unless and until the Soviet archives throw up fresh information, the astounding conclusion must remain that the KGB were ready to let the West listen into Red Army communications in order to protect Blake. Nothing better illustrates his importance to the KGB than this remarkable action – or inaction.

There is one other, completely speculative yet fascinating theory about why the KGB did not exploit their knowledge about the tunnel: could it have been because they
wanted
the listeners-in to know what the Soviet policymakers were thinking and doing? Did the KGB actually want the West to realise
no
attack was planned on them? Could it have been one of the very first calculated acts of
détente
? Post-Stalin, this was a period when policymakers in the Kremlin were thinking far more of accommodation with the West. It’s an unlikely scenario, perhaps, but the Berlin tunnel has thrown up so many surprises over the years that this theory is not beyond the realms of possibility.

As to the value of the 443,000 fully transcribed conversations, which led to 1,740 intelligence reports, Joe Evans and David Murphy had no doubt. Examples from both officers illustrate the major advantages the tunnel information could offer to their political masters.

At the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow in February 1956, Khrushchev denounced Stalin and the cult of personality, and discussed the regime’s previous crimes and misdeeds in his famous ‘secret speech’. It was an extraordinary turn of events. ‘Delegates to the Congress were buzzing about the speech for days afterwards. We heard some of that on the tapped cables, and so thanks to the Berlin tunnel we were the very first to report news of the speech to Western intelligence – and then to the Western world,’ recalled Joe Evans.

Further scoops were put to use in May 1959 when Christian Herter, Eisenhower’s new Secretary of State, sat down for face-to-face talks in Geneva with his Soviet counterpart, Andrei Gromkyo. They were attending a Foreign Ministers’ conference on the status of Berlin and the future of Germany. One of the themes in the run-up to the conference was – yet again – the accusation by the Soviets that the West was misusing West Berlin for intelligence and subversion purposes. It was a diplomatic card the Russians played very strongly. Herter came equipped for the meeting with Gromkyo with a comprehensive memorandum, courtesy of the CIA and the long-closed Berlin tunnel. Murphy described their encounter: ‘Gromyko was invited to the villa, and he sat there for two hours while the Secretary of State read him, word by word, every single thing from this memorandum about East German and Soviet intelligence operations in East Berlin. We had completely turned the tables on the Soviets. It was the first time we had used counter-intelligence material in this way, and we were able to do it because the tunnel had provided it to us.’

In the aftermath of the discovery of the tunnel, all attention naturally focused on the CIA’s role. There was no suggestion that the British had even known about it, let alone participated. SIS’s Head of Station, Peter Lunn, was a consummate spy who was loathe to discuss his work except
when absolutely necessary, but he felt piqued that SIS’s contribution was going unnoticed, especially now that the plaudits were starting to roll in for the Americans. The least he could do was make sure his own staff were aware of the part the British had played in this great Cold War episode. ‘As soon as the news broke in the press, he assembled the whole staff of the Berlin station, from the highest to the lowest, and told the whole story from its inception to its untimely end,’ recalled Blake. ‘He made it quite clear that this had been essentially an SIS idea and his own to boot. American participation had been limited to providing most of the money and facilities.’

A few months later when the report of the joint SIS/CIA investigation into the discovery of the tunnel was published internally Blake breathed a sigh of relief. The verdict it reached was that the cause had been purely technical, and there had been no leak from within the services.

In the summer of 1955, while holidaying on the shores of Lake Garda, Blake struck up a curious conversation with his wife. ‘George showed me a London newspaper reporting Mrs Maclean’s flight to Russia to join her husband Donald, who had absconded from the Foreign Office with Guy Burgess the year before,’ Gillian recalled. ‘And George then asked me, “How would you feel, darling, if I went to Russia? What would you do?”’ She did not dwell on it at the time, regarding it as no more than a question put in jest. Years later, it took on a whole new meaning, and she then remembered other conversations she had had with her husband about his political views: ‘I knew at the time he was a communist, from the forceful way he would talk about it, and he would show the full cause of communism, not the way it was put into practice, but the idea of it. He liked that idea. I knew that very well, but I never dreamed he would put it into practice.’

Blake often toyed with his wife in political discussions, amused at what her reactions might be. Perhaps it was a way of relieving the strain of his double life, obliquely confessing his treachery in the
sure knowledge that Gillian would never join all the dots together. ‘Sometimes he would talk of Khrushchev with admiration. He would say what an astute man he thought he was, usually over some diplomatic point. “How clever of him to put the West into such a position,” George would say. He would say this to me, not to anybody else. Then he would watch my reaction.’

Blake’s reading tastes were unashamedly highbrow, without affectation. Once he had finished perusing his daily copy of the
Manchester Guardian
he would dip into his growing collection of mainly Russian and French language books. Philosophy, history and theology were his principal interests, with Baruch Spinoza and Edward Gibbon among his favourite writers. He rarely ventured into fiction but, if he did, it would usually be to revisit writers such as Dostoyevsky from his time at Cambridge. Another rare exception was
Not By Bread Alone
by Vladimir Dudintsev, the story of an engineer whose invention to produce pipes more efficiently is opposed every step of the way by narrow-minded, Stalinist bureaucrats, which seemed to capture the mood of change in Khrushchev’s Russia.

For much of his time in Berlin, Blake’s other life, of the normal family variety, ticked along happily enough. His flat at 26 Platanenallee in Charlottenburg, just a five-minute Volkswagen drive from the Olympic Stadium, was certainly spacious, if a little staid-looking with its austere, institutional furniture. The Blakes brightened it up with new covers and curtains, adorning the walls with pictures and prints collected from galleries in Berlin. Wedding presents of china, glass and silver helped them entertain properly from time to time, and they gave one big party a year, for sixty people.

They also liked to go out in the evening and explore the lively West Berlin nightlife. Berlin had become a centre for jazz, especially in the American Zone, where the likes of Miles Davis and Chet Baker would perform. Money was no real object and expensive establishments like the Ritz, Maison de France, Kopflers and Rollenhagen were regular haunts. Just as often a table on the pavement at Hotel
Kempinski, whiling away the evening with a bottle of wine, would suit them perfectly well.

Gillian built a busy social life around the army and intelligence ‘community’. She would go to the Officers’ Club quite often to play tennis, and went riding and sailing with the other wives. Blake himself learned to ride, but his real passion was swimming, which he was able to indulge in one of several magnificent pools at the Olympic Stadium.

The Blakes were a handsome couple, sociable and well liked by their contemporaries. One Army officer recalled: ‘Blake was a delightful, charming man who turned up at all the parties, used the Officers’ Club – which was a social centre – and everybody knew him.’

Both George and Gillian loved to travel. Lake Garda was a favourite spot, where they would water-ski. They drove their Ford Anglia through Italy, finishing up at Venice, went skiing at St Anton in Austria, and also visited Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia. ‘We had tremendous “leaves” and didn’t save any money at all, which didn’t worry me,’ said Gillian. ‘George would organise it all – he had much more initiative in everything.’