Spies Beneath Berlin

Publishers Weekly

A leading writer on military intelligence and project director at the Center for Second World War Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Stafford (Churchill and Secret Service) details the political backdrop and events surrounding Operation Stopwatch/Gold-the CIA's clandestine spy tunnel under the Russian sector of Cold War Berlin during the mid-1950s, when Eisenhower complained bitterly about the lack of intelligence regarding Soviet intentions. Although Stopwatch/Gold was the subject of Ian McEwan's 1990 novel The Innocent, adapted into John Schlesinger's 1993 film with Campbell Scott as a telephone technician tapping secret Soviet phone lines, Stafford says his is "the first full-length study of the Berlin tunnel," documenting covert operations and intrigue as complex and dramatic as espionage fiction. Because the British Secret Intelligence Service possessed vital expertise not found in the CIA, the Berlin tunnel became a joint operation, code-named "Gold" by the CIA and "Stopwatch" by the SIS. Originally projected at $500,000, costs soared to $6 million as three large warehouses were constructed to conceal excavations and 3,000 tons of soil were replaced by high-tech eavesdropping equipment. Beginning with the first tap in May 1955, a "vast stream of intelligence" flowed to Washington and London for the next 11 months. In this account of "spies spying on spies," Stafford writes with clarity, and his cool, methodical style adds to the suspense, which peaks in the closing chapters with the April 1956 discovery of the tunnel by the stunned Russians. 29 b&w photos, 3 maps. (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Since the collapse of the Soviet empire, books dealing with Cold War spying have come out fast and furious. Stafford (project director, Ctr. for Second World War Studies, Univ. of Edinburgh) has done his part by authoring such impressive recent works as Churchill and Secret Service and Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets. This time Stafford shares with us the fascinating story of the secret tunnel beneath the Russian sector of Berlin that existed for more than a year in the mid-1950s and enabled the British and Americans to tap into all area Russian telephone conversations. But this amazing intelligence achievement was complicated by another development: the KGB knew about the tunnel through the traitorous activities of its undercover agent, George Blake, but could not reveal that they knew for fear that they might compromise the invaluable Blake. Moreover, existing Soviet interagency competition resulted in the KGB's sacrificing Soviet military secrets to the West in order to protect their other ongoing espionage activities. Debate goes on about the tunnel operation's final significance. What a great story! And Stafford tells it exceedingly well in sprightly prose. This book belongs in all collections that cover Cold War espionage.-Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

British historian Stafford (Roosevelt and Churchill, 2000, etc.) casts a revealing torchlight on an obscure and odd episode in the Cold War espionage game. It’s not much comfort to know, as the author recalls, that British schoolchildren in the 1950s feared nuclear annihilation as much as their American (and, presumably, Soviet) contemporaries. Neither is it much comfort to read of the astonishing incompetence that seems to have marked Allied efforts to spy on the Reds. Stafford provides a meaty case in point: a daring project in which American and British intelligence agents tunneled half a mile into the Soviet sector of Berlin to set up a listening post by which they could intercept Russian and East German transmissions. Allen Dulles, then head of the CIA, called the Stopwatch/Gold tunnel "one of the most valuable and daring projects ever undertaken," and by all rights it should have worked, to judge by the success of similar capers in Vienna. Trouble was, the Soviets knew about the tunnel before an ounce of dirt was removed from the construction site, thanks to the diligent work of a British double agent named George Blake, one of many Secret Intelligence Service employees in the employ of the KGB. Strangely, the Soviets did not take full advantage of this opportunity to disseminate disinformation; instead, while they gave out enough mixed signals to keep the West on its toes—as one CIA report had it, "Intelligence is inconclusive as to whether or not the Soviet intention is to precipitate a global war now"—they also used transmissions into the tunnel to assure the Allies that they weren’t about to launch a first-strike nuclear attack. The Soviets finally dug up the tunnel in 1961, notlong before Allied agents figured out what Blake had been up to; a 15-meter section is now preserved in a Berlin museum. To judge by Stafford’s account, it’s amazing the Cold War turned out the way it did. Good stuff for le Carré fans.