Operation Gold

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Soviet officer in the spy tunnel

The Operation Gold (for the British as Operation Stopwatch called) was a joint espionage action by the American CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service was performed in 1955 in Berlin telephone lines of the German post office of the GDR , on the headquarters of the Soviet Army talks were held by tapping a tunnel dug under the Soviet-occupied sector of the city.

planning

Building on the experience gained during the successful wiretapping Operation Silver in Vienna, Allen Dulles (the then Director of Central Intelligence ) urged that the operation be repeated in divided Berlin. Although Operation Gold was planned jointly by the SIS and the CIA, it was subsequently funded and staffed by the CIA alone. Since many details of the project are still classified, the amount of reliable information about them is limited. This is partly because Allen Dulles had ordered that "as little as possible" should be reduced to "written form" when he approved the project.

According to a report, Reinhard Gehlen , who later became the first President of the Federal Intelligence Service , would have been the first to point out to Dulles the route of an important route with telecommunications cables, which was less than two meters deep and in which three cables were in the immediate vicinity of the American sector of West Berlin passed. Information about the exact location of the cables could be obtained from an informant at the East Berlin telecommunications office.

The CIA had reliable information that these cables were used to provide telephone and telegraphic connections for the Soviet military, security services, and diplomats.

After the information became known , representatives of the British and American secret services met in London to plan the tunnel. One of those present at this early meeting was George Blake , who was a double agent for British intelligence. Blake had apparently informed the KGB immediately of the plans, which may also be the reason for the arrest of two of Gehlen's agents while attempting to transport a wiretap cable over a canal in Berlin. However, the KGB decided not to hinder the implementation of Operation Gold, as it recognized the potential for the spread of disinformation and did not want to endanger Blake as a double agent.

Course of the operation

In December 1953, Operation was placed under William King Harvey , a former FBI agent who had joined the CIA. He used the construction site of a radar system and an Air Force depot building as camouflage for the western end point of the tunnel.

The secret construction of a 450-meter-long tunnel that crossed the strictly guarded border at a depth of around six meters in order to tap a cable that ran just 47 cm below a busy road ( Schönefelder Chaussee ) was a major engineering challenge. The construction of the tunnel was made more difficult by the unexpected penetration of groundwater and the discovery of a clay lens in the course of the planned tunnel. Work began in August 1954 and was completed on February 25, 1955.

The tunnel ran between the Altglienicke district in Treptow on the East Berlin side and the Rudow district in Neukölln in the American sector. From there, the telephone connections by British and Americans were both bugged and recorded, which were conducted from the headquarters of the Group of the Soviet Armed Forces in Germany in Wünsdorf with Moscow , the Soviet embassy in East Berlin and the East German authorities, among others .

Apparently the western secret services were not able to break the encryption of the Soviet Union at that time. Instead, they used a faint electronic echo generated by the Soviet encryption devices to read the messages in clear text.

In Washington , a team of translators and analysts worked non-stop to evaluate the overwhelming amount of information that was intercepted, from the conversations of high-ranking officers to chats between ordinary soldiers. At times up to 317 employees were involved in evaluating the telephone calls and up to 350 with the telex traffic. During the short period of use of the tunnel, around half a million calls were recorded on 50,000 tapes. In total, the recordings include 40,000 hours of telephone calls and six million hours of teletype traffic. The evaluation of the information obtained through Operation Gold lasted until September 1958. 1750 reports and 90,000 translations were created.

Exposure

The exposed tap is presented to the press.

On the night of April 21st to April 22nd, 1956, eleven months after the tunnel was put into operation, the eastern end of the tunnel was exposed by Soviet and East German soldiers after heavy rains had disrupted various telephone lines the days before. This point in time was deliberately chosen by the Soviet side in order not to endanger their agent Blake.

Immediately after its discovery, the spy tunnel was presented to the press as a “breach of the norms of international law” and a “criminal act”. The photos from the tunnel under the inner-German border then went through the world press. Although the tunnel section directly below the border had already been mined by the Americans during construction for a possible blasting, contrary to the originally planned procedure, in the event that the tunnel was discovered, this option was not used when the tunnel was actually discovered.

Not only was Allen Dulles affected by the discovery of the tunnel, but also his brother John Foster Dulles (at that time Secretary of State ) and his sister Eleanor Lansing Dulles , who at the time was head of the Berlin department in what was then the Bureau of German Affairs of the State Department in charge.

It was not until 1961, after Blake had been arrested and convicted as an agent , that Western intelligence services realized that the tunnel had ceased to be kept secret long before it was built. Although Dulles has publicly stressed the success of Operation Gold, CIA analysts are divided on the value of the information gathered. One of the evaluations concludes that the Soviet Union only allowed the trivial communications to go over the tapped cables to maintain the illusion that it had no aggressive intentions against West Berlin. The cost of Operation Gold are 6.7 million US dollars given.

The facility was closed in 1971 and now there are single-family houses on the site.

swell

  • David Stafford: Spies Beneath Berlin - the Extraordinary Story of Operation Stopwatch / Gold, the CIA's Spy Tunnel Under the Russian Sector of Cold War Berlin . Overlook Press, 2002, ISBN 1-58567-361-7 .
  • William Durie: British Garrison Berlin 1945–1994: No where to go . Past Publishing, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-86408-068-5

Movies

  • Operation Gold - The Berlin Spy Tunnel , a film by Jonathan Hacker and Sam Benstead
  • Operation Gold - Battle of the Secret Services in Berlin , film by Stephan Guntli and Sibylle Gerhards, feature, WDR / ORB / ARTE, 1994, 60 min
  • ... and the sky stands still , Germany / United Kingdom, 1993: Feature film in which a fictional British communications engineer works on the operation and experiences the conditions in Berlin at the time.

Web links

Commons : Operation Gold  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d On the Front Lines of the Cold War: Documents on the Intelligence War in Berlin, 1946 to 1961 - V: The Berlin Tunnel - Documentation of Operation Gold with original documents from the Center for the Study of Intelligence of the CIA (English)
  2. ↑ a b Field Project Outline, September 16, 1953 - project description, historical document of the CIA (PDF, English; 508 kB)
  3. ^ Turning a Cold War Scheme into Reality - Engineering the Berlin Tunnel . - Report from the Center for the Study of Intelligence of the CIA on the engineering side of tunneling
  4. ↑ Progress Report - August 28 through October 17, 1954, October 18, 1954 - progress report on the construction work of October 18, 1954, historical document of the CIA (PDF, English; 933 kB)
  5. ↑ a b CSHP History of the Berlin Tunnel, V. Production - Statistical information on Operation Gold, historical document of the CIA (PDF, English; 134 kB)
  6. ^ Soviet Discovery of the Berlin Tunnel - Analysis of the tunnel discovery of August 15, 1956, historical document of the CIA (PDF, English; 823 kB)
  7. ↑ a b WDR: Operation Gold - The Berlin Spy Tunnel ( Memento from 23 August 2012 in the Internet Archive ) - TV documentary, first broadcast in September 2012
  8. ↑ Memorandum on Security Measures - Memorandum on security measures of November 29, 1954, historical document of the CIA (PDF, English; 548 kB)
  9. ↑ Equivalent to approximately $ 58,600,000 today. This figure was determined with the template: Inflation and applies to January 1959.
  10. ^ Secret service listening post in Berlin on geschichtsspuren.de

Coordinates: 52 ° 24 ′ 44 ″  N , 13 ° 31 ′ 42 ″  E