Spies Beneath Berlin by David Stafford

Author:David Stafford [Stafford, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 071956560X
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2013-03-19T04:00:00+00:00

Every possible scientific and technical approach to intelligence must be adopted, Doolittle concluded, since the Iron Curtain states made old-fashioned espionage prohibitive in terms of dollars and human lives.

Eisenhower agreed. Soon afterwards the National Security Council issued a directive, NSC 5412, authorizing Dulles and the CIA to proceed as recommended. Dulles knew he could count on Eisenhower’s support, but only so long as he delivered.3 ‘The President’, writes his biographer, ‘intended to fight the Communists just as he had fought the Nazis, on every battle-front, with every available weapon.’4 One of the most important was the CIA. Its future, and that of Allen Dulles, depended on just such projects as Stopwatch/Gold. Backing down because of an unexpected technical hitch just was not possible.

In London, SIS was coming under similar pressure. Churchill was his usual impatient self in demanding instant information from his Minister of Defence about Soviet strength. And as the tunnel engineers were scratching their heads over the water problem, the Joint Intelligence Committee, sitting in its third floor office in the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, was debating the likelihood of a ‘bolt from the blue’, as they called it. Although they eventually dismissed the prospect, British intelligence chiefs stressed how vital early warning intelligence still remained. Miscalculation by one side or another during a period of heightened political tension provided the most likely scenario for war. For that reason, they urged, ‘we must be able to watch and analyse military moves and to relate them to the political temperature’.5

With Berlin still firmly at the epicentre of the Cold War standoff, the signal was clear to SIS in general and Lunn in particular. The tunnel must be driven forward at any cost.

*

Harvey and his team explored all the options while British engineers flew in to give their own advice. In early October they decided to go with the second option: to dig the tunnel immediately above the clay level and the perched water table. The tunnel would only be about 9 feet below ground, so they would have to ensure no construction noise reached the surface. They would also install extra water pumps and raise the crucial communications cables well above the tunnel floor. If at any point along the line of construction the clay level fell, they would follow it down. If it rose to the point that construction was becoming too shallow, they would cut through the clay and use heavy pumping equipment to deal with the drainage problems.

The team began digging again on 11 October and the next day manoeuvred the steel shield into place at a depth of 16 feet. After all the pessimism, an ebullient Harvey reported to CIA headquarters in Frankfurt that the horizontal section of the tunnel should be completed by the end of January 1955. He was only a month too optimistic. The job was actually finished on 28 February. By this time the army engineers had been tunnelling for exactly 1,476 feet, roughly the length of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool in Washington DC.

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