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Chasing Spies in Berlin
Travel feature about the sights, mainstream and offbeat, associated with the infamous spying in Cold War Berlin.
In Erich Mielke’s office, Minister for State Security of the former East Germany (GDR), my hand hovered over the three telephone sets - the ‘secret, the top secret, and the ultra top secret.’ Lifting the ‘ultra top secret’ handset to my ear I half-expected a voice to crackle at the other end. The telephone was dead, of course; but still, I felt like an intruder.
I peered over the blocks of dirty-beige marble facades and latticed windows of the Stasi Headquarters in Lichtenberg, former East Berlin. Sprawling over 2 blocks, Markus Wolf called this building large as a university “the vast, heavily guarded block in Normannenstrasse.” It reeks with an institutional stench, and feels every part the obese bureaucracy of inefficient governments - yet here operated the most successful of spies in the Cold War.
The Stasi – secret police, the “sword and shield” of the GDR, Stasi for short – numbered 80,000 agents plus 180,000 informers. Four thousand agents worked in the foreign intelligence department, the HVA (the rest spied on 6 million East Germans suspected as enemies of the GDR’s ideology). Renowned as the most effective spy service in Europe, observers believe that Markus Wolf, HVA chief for 34 years, knew more about the secrets of West Germany than the chancellor in Bonn. The HVA, for example, got its hands on the West’s scientific know-how that helped Moscow catch up with western technology and develop the atom bomb. And in the 1980s the HVA knew all 7 CIA agents working in the GDR. Wolf, in his autobiography Man Without A Face, wrote: “We were in the enviable position of knowing that not a single CIA agent had worked in East Germany without having been turned into a double agent or working for us from the start.”
When the GDR collapsed in 1991, the wing of the block that housed the Stasi top-guard was left intact as a museum; the rest are now ordinary offices, an employment agency, a supermarket and Ritters Sportsauna. In Erich Mielke’s quarters everything is as Mielke and his secretary left it. Only the files and personal belongings are gone. The varnished pine furniture was polished to sheen. File cabinets hinged open, metal typewriters squat on the sides of the desks, in the boardroom Lenin’s bust leers over 20 blue padded chairs arranged around the table. In the Secretary’s office a paper shredder skulked in a corner, perhaps the same one the HVA used to shred their files in 1991. A whiff of mothballs and the earthy fragrance of carpets that need an airing permeated the air (windows were sealed shut for security). I scribbled the details of Mielke’s apartment: the TV in a corner, the lace windows drawn, the bed neatly done, a blanket folded at the edge of the bed, and a tray full of clay models - banana, gnome, dog, lemon – that kindergarten children presented to Mielke. The swashing of my pen was the only sound I could hear.
Among these details, as I peeked into Mielke’s personal landscape, how could I help not feeling an intruder? It seemed as if Mielke had gone away for a long weekend and would return the following morning, swinging a briefcase in his swaggering gait, rasping orders as he passed open doorways. In my quest to retrace the steps of spies on both sides in Cold War Berlin I now stood in the proverbial lion’s den. At other places in Berlin I felt like a field spy myself, chasing furtive shadows in a moonless night.
By the 1950s espionage agents infested Berlin, a city that straddled – and would later symbolize - the Cold War fault line. As many as 80 secret service agencies operated their offices and branches masquerading as anything from jam exporters to plumbing companies to academic and research bureaus. The main two operators were the KGB and the CIA, with various operation bases; next came the British M16 and the West German BND, while the French took a backseat role. Entangled in this war without weapons, each side fought for the psychological upper hand. They meshed truth and fiction in propaganda campaigns. They kept tabs on the opponents’ scientific and technological and military developments. They discredited opponent spies and governments by leaking tarnishes in their past. They learned point-for-point the political manoeuvring of the other side so political leaders could outwit their opponents. Theirs’ was a war of wits.
These early Cold War years were the most tense. One crisis rolled into the next like a snowball hurtling downhill: from the 1948 Berlin Blockade, to the 1953 East German workers’ uprising, to the series of ultimatums Russian leader Nikita Krushchev flogged the western powers with, to the hundreds of thousands of East Germans fleeing into West Berlin. One misstep would have unleashed nuclear war, so intelligence-gathering missions underlay every political and military manoeuvre. Spy agencies, the state watchdogs, lulled their political masters’ paranoia and covered up any public relation slips by the politicians.
In 1958, fearing a new Berlin blockade after Krushchev’s 6-month ultimatum, the USA set up a top secret organization called Live Oak to reassert the West’s right-of-access to Berlin, using military force if necessary. Nuclear war loomed. Wolf wrote: “I am not prone to panic, but Live Oak chilled me to the core. Knowing Krushchev’s stubborn pride intensified my fears. Great powers have gone to war often enough to protect the fragile prestige of their leaders.”
It all climaxed when the GDR erected the Wall in 1961. Nuclear war loomed again. US and Russian tanks crawled to Checkpoint Charlie for a showdown. For several days they growled at each other.
Today, what remains of this Iron Curtain symbol, Checkpoint Charlie, is the childish sign ‘You are now entering the American Sector’ and a guard tower. Its windows are broken, its door stringed with graffiti and around it construction workers of the American Business Center dump their building rubble.
A block south there is the Haus Am Checkpoint Charlie Museum, dedicated to a divided Berlin, the story of the 5,075 East Germans who escaped into West Germany and the 80 who died doing so in Berlin. On the morning I visited the museum was packed, though you would hardly notice it judging from the collective hush. We gaped at the paraphernalia and ingenuity employed by East Germans to escape over or under the Wall. It seemed the stuff of movies.
On display there were the cars East Germans used to smuggle their extended families to the West, and the stories behind them: the 55 people smuggled, one by one, underneath the bonnet of a Vokswagen; an Opel armored with steel plates, bullet holes poking its sides, as 5 people accelerated past the guards at Checkpoint Charlie; an Isetta car smaller than a mini minor that carted people as it slid underneath the turnpikes at Checkpoint Charlie. There is the chair lift on which a family sailed into the west from the roof of a house close to the Wall. There is the desk-sized welder machine in which 3 people were shipped into the West. There is the converted petrol tank in which a woman crouched like a snail in its shell. There is the loudspeaker in which a woman artist hid. And in another section rolling videos and framed newspaper cuttings tell the story of Berlin during the Cold War, and its present vision – “from the city in the frontline to the bridge of Europe.”
The bridge of Europe is taking shape around the corner, at Potsdamer Platz, where the Wall slashed the city in half and Hitler’s bunker once stood. In the 1930s Potsdamer Platz was Europe’s busiest square. Now it is Europe’s largest construction site. Sony and Daimler-Benz and other companies are investing $2.3 billion here. On a windy day I watched the office block, cinemas, a media library, the Hotel Grand Hyatt, apartment blocks, Sony’s European headquarters, and an underground train station rising like a phoenix. In a kiosk workmen gulped curryvursts, sipped coffee, and spoke in staccato German. Across the street tourists snapped shots of the forest of scaffolding. The clang of tools and metal, the snarls of bulldozers, the whir of cranes and the wind whipping dust enveloped Potsdamer Platz. Scheduled for completion by 2001 Potsdamer Platz is expected to attract a daily population of 100,000.
Up the road, beyond the Brandenburger Gate, the German government has rebuilt the gutted Reichstag now housing parliament’s return to Berlin. Elsewhere Berlin is undergoing the most ambitious urban renewal project ever, costing $116 billion. Two thousand construction sites litter Berlin. Construction cranes line the cityscape, and every vista, every snapshot, is tempered by the revolving limbs of a crane.
Berlin is picking momentum in its fifth reinvention this century; embracing, in this latest incarnation, its role as the ‘stepping stone’ between East and West, and a symbol of modern capitalism. Everywhere I went the city crackled with expectation, a city on the move that defies its grime.
As Berlin changes, many sites that were landmarks in Cold War espionage are now crumbling ruins or footnotes in history books. In Treptow bulldozers have recently ripped the remains of the Berlin Tunnel, perhaps the most celebrated espionage operation ever. Operation Gold caught the public imagination like a Hollywood blockbuster.
When I visited the site I found a building site. Had I chased another ghost? I tracked an intact section of the tunnel in the Allierten Museum in Clayallee, which is where, ironically, BOB (the CIA’s Berlin Operations Base) was based when the Russians ‘discovered’ the tunnel in 1956.
Popped as an off-the-head idea, Operation Gold soon became a challenge: Why not dig a tunnel to eavesdrop on the telephone and telegraph cables over which the Russian military command communicated with Moscow and points east? It took the CIA and M16 seven months to dig the 2-meter-wide, 450-meters-long tunnel at a depth of 4 meters. It was an engineering and technological feat, as British technicians managed to bug the Russian lines highly sensitive to tapping. During the tunnel’s life span of 11 months and 11 days half a million calls were recorded on 50,000 tapes. To evaluate this deluge of conversations it took the CIA until 1958.
What seemed like an intelligent coup, Operation Gold, had a flaw no one anticipated. George Blake, a double agent in M16, alerted the Russians about the tunnel from its conception. To turn the operation to their advantage and protect Blake the Russians allowed the project to go ahead until in 1956 they staged an ‘accidental discovery’ of the tunnel. They pre-meditated a propaganda campaign to sway public opinion at the US provocation of digging into Soviet-controlled territory.
At Allierten Museum the $25 million Operation Gold is now a rusty 10-meter section of the tunnel. It looks like a sewer tunnel. To walk in one must stoop. Sandbags heap both sides, cables with tens of strands of wire run along its length, and light bulbs sprinkle a dusty glow.
Although the Russians fed the lines tapped by the CIA a deluge of false leads, the CIA did learn about some Russian military plans and much-needed information about the KGB compound in Karlshorst. On a basking July afternoon I paced along the street where the KGB had their largest center outside Moscow, Karlshorst. On one side the compound peeped from behind its walled-fort; on the other squatted the postcard-perfect houses of the Russian officials in Berlin.
The Russians left Karlshorst in 1994. Now some of the compound’s windows are broken, others thrown open to reveal dark interior. Behind the main gate a man in a blue collared shirt paced back and forth. He spoke no English and, mopping sweat from his forehead, gazed at me through tired eyes. Behind him weeds emerged from cracks in the cement driveway. Standing in the pool of shade of a chestnut tree, I took in the houses across the street, their doors barred, the slate chipping off their roofs, their gardens choked with weeds.
Snooping around, I felt a prankster’s sense of thrill. So tight was security here that the CIA faced blind ends in almost every attempt to penetrate the compound. Now, in historical irony, I could roam with impunity.
Karlshorst served as the port of call of every KGB “illegal” posted around the globe (“illegals” were intelligence officers documented as foreign citizens and sent abroad.) To gain insight into Karlshorst and the operations within, BOB courted and recruited East Germans employed in the compound. In 1956 an East German worker on a CIA assignment hid a camera in a lunchbox and, sitting outside the main gate munching sandwiches, photographed KGB officers entering and leaving the compound. This led to a catalogue on 1,331 KGB agents. Another case involved an electrician on BOB’s payroll whose firm installed a wooden chandelier in the office of KGB Karlshorst chief Aleksandr Korotkov. BOB inserted a listening device and a transmitter in a hole gouged in one of the chandelier’s arms. KGB technicians discovered the bug and, piecing together BOB’s game, the KGB fired most East German employees or scaled down their access to intelligence information. The KGB also tightened security.
Next door to the Karlshorst compound I visited the Museum Berlin Karlshorst, dedicated to this century’s thorny Russian-German relations. The exhibits show Russian military paraphernalia, photos, posters, and newspaper cuttings. The ground floor boardroom where Germany signed the “unconditional surrender” during World War II is lit by crystal chandeliers, with tables and chairs neatly arranged, and flags of the four victorious powers dangling from a wall.
I bumped into an American in his sixties, who said he had been last here in 1976, and now came back to see how everything had changed after reunification. What was he doing here in 1976? He was a CIA spy, he said, based in Frankfurt. I bought him a coffee and pressed him for details. He told me he spoke Russian, Arabic and German, then rapped out a few phrases in each language. Yet he dodged my specific questions. Tilting his head, crossing his feet, he let out short laughs and boasted he was an ex-CIA agent. Our conversation ended when the museum curator announced that the “gentleman’s taxi is waiting outside.” I stared at the half-full coffee. I had not even got his name.
His bragging echoes our view, boosted by Ian Fleming’s James Bond, that spying is a high-adrenaline, high-flying career underscored by the spies’ intelligence and wit. Both sides would also tell you they were morally right: the KGB fought fascism, the CIA communism. But in real life agents are winners one day, losers the next.
In the Berlin-Hohenschonhausen Memorial I witnessed how a fallen agent, an uncalculating defector driven by the vision of a better life on the other side, could end up in a cell small as a bathroom. In this Stasi prison political prisoners and spies were ‘remanded’ – kept here awaiting trial. To gain confessions the Stasi’s modus operandi sought to psychologically undress the prisoners’ defenses. Prisoners never knew their prison’s location or name, contact with the outside world and other prisoners was non-existent, and they were escorted outside for a 20-minute exercise session a day to a shaft with wire netting overhead, a cage with concrete walls on 4 sides.
In their cells prisoners could pace between a bed and a bucket of water. Solitary weariness and a sense of helplessness broke them down. For the uncooperative prisoners the Stasi employed another medicine: sessions of interrogation lasting up to 20 hours, then kept awake all night before another session of interrogation. So guarded was the prison’s location, the area around it so restricted, that residents who lived around the corner never suspected that a prison existed.
For convicted spies a ray of light dawned as cooperation increased between the superpowers in the 1960s and 1970s, and bartering enemy spies became increasingly common. I followed the convicted agents’ drive to freedom across Berlin to Glienicker Bruecke. This bridge linking Berlin to Potsdam is the most famous spy-exchange site. Here were exchanged the Russian Colonel Rudolph Abel and the US Francis Gary Powers. As he piloted the newly developed CIA’s U2 reconnaissance plane high in the Soviet skies in 1961, Gary Powers was shot down, captured, convicted and imprisoned. Colonel Rudolph Abel was one of the most senior and accomplished Russian “illegals” – agents settled in a foreign country – until he was caught and convicted in 1957.
The metal bridge with its web of metalwork, painted a faded green, slightly arcs over a funnel of water connecting two lakes. Woodlands line the horizon, and medieval castles nestle in clearings of turf. I leaned on the bridge balustrade savoring the sweet smell of water. Couples strolled hand in hand, middle-aged tourists cycled and snapped pictures, a group of schoolchildren frolicked, gulls and herons sailed overhead.
In this open country, tasting of pollen and warm sun, how could I imagine the tense spy-swapping moments? As in many other spy landmarks in Berlin I felt the history of espionage as slippery as a hallucination. But as I chased spies I found myself thinking, now that the Cold War is over, what did Cold War spying accomplish? What have the spy agencies on both sides, by digging up so much about the enemy, achieved for the World? Echoing the thoughts of many spy agents, Wolf wrote: “We can look back on our work with satisfaction not because we overturned the other side with some bold and unexpected stroke, but for precisely the opposite reason. The intelligence services contributed to a half century of peace – the longest Europe has ever known – by giving statesmen some security that they would not be surprised by the other side.”
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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