CHAPTER FOUR
FRIENDS

On 22 February 1946, George Kennan sent an eight thousand word telegram from the U.S. embassy in Moscow to the State Department warning Washington that the Soviet Union had a warlike view of relations with the west: capitalism and communism, they said, could not peacefully coexist.  The "long telegram" is a celebrated document, one of the key texts of the cold war.  In it Kennan argued that the Soviets posed a serious, long-term threat all over the world but particularly in Europe.  Stalin, he maintained, was taking every opportunity to weaken the West, using "an underground operating directorate of world communism, a concealed comintern tightly coordinated and directed by Moscow to reach their goal of world domination."  It was thus vital, Kennan concluded, to resist communist attempts to subvert, discredit and overthrow Western institutions.0  
	In his memoirs Kennan recalled that he had been issuing such warnings for eighteen long months but that they had fallen on unreceptive ears.  This time, however, the response was different.  Just the week before Kennan sent his telegram, an extensive Soviet spy ring had been uncovered in Canada which had betrayed atomic secrets to the Russians.  This brought home to Americans that sooner or later the Soviets would have the bomb too, and the bomb was, thus far, the factor which gave the United States an insurmountable advantage over the Soviets in any military confrontation.  
	The exposure of the Canadian network was followed by a whole series of spy scandals: Elizabeth Bentley, Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs and, most sensational of all, the Burgess-Maclean-Philby affair.
	The European scene was particularly disturbing to the Truman administration.  Eastern Europe was firmly under Soviet control.  The Baltic states had been annexed by Stalin in 1940 and now Rumania, Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia and parts of Finland were added to them.  Poland, eastern Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Yugoslavia and Albania were either occupied directly by the Soviet army or controlled by communist-influenced governments. Despite Yalta and Potsdam, the Soviets ignored demands for free elections in nearly all these countries.
	In Washington, western Europe seemed on the verge of sliding under Soviet control as well.  Within nine months of V-E Day, de Gaulle had resigned in France; in Britain, Churchill had been voted out of power by an electorate which was physically and emotionally drained by the war; there was a bitter communist-instigated civil war in Greece.  Secret Soviet support was going to the communist parties in France and Italy, and to communist-controlled trade unions and newspapers, fomenting strikes and political disruption.
	In 1946 the United States was the only country capable of dealing with the Soviet threat.  The British had been crippled financially by the war and the abrupt curtailment of lend-lease (by which they received U.S. dollars to buy U.S. goods) in August 1945 had left their economy on the verge of collapse.  In July, 1946 Truman authorised a $3.7 billion loan to Britain and although this eased British problems temporarily, it was obvious that they were finding it difficult to meet military and occupation commitments to their allies around the world.
	On 21 February 1947, the first secretary at the British embassy in Washington, H M Sichell, hurried to the State Department for an urgent meeting.  He handed in two documents from his government.  The first concerned Greece and stated that unless the Greek government received $200 million immediately, the communist guerrillas would win the civil war.  The second document was no less bald and warned that a similar fate awaited Turkey.  Britain was in dire financial straits, the documents stated, and could no longer afford to support her allies in the eastern Mediterranean.  It was clear that the American government had to intervene or else accept the consequences of a British withdrawal.
	Truman agonized over whether to give aid to Greece and Turkey.  Isolationist pressure was still strong and he was distrustful of British motives.  But in the end he concluded that the U.S. must intervene.  He, George Marshall, the secretary of State, and Dean Acheson, the under secretary of State, met senior congressional leaders to secure their support.  Acheson recalled:
"I knew we were met at Armageddon ...  These congressman had no conception of what challenged them:  it was my task to bring it home ...  In the past eighteen months, I said, Soviet pressure on the Straits, on Iran and on northern Greece had brought the Balkans to the point where a highly possible Soviet breakthrough might open these continents to Soviet penetration.  Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east.  It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already threatened by the strongest domestic Communist parties in Western Europe.  The Soviet Union was playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost ...  We and we alone were in a position to break up the play."1
	Acheson's record provides a fascinating glimpse of the arrival in the U.S. of a global and long distance perspective in foreign affairs.  It was, as yet, unsophisticated.  There is little evidence to show that contamination spread: Greece going communist was no guarantee that Turkey would follow.  It was the start of the domino theory, the subtext of which was that Lenin had been right to think that there was a world revolution waiting to happen.  In fact, Lenin had been discredited by 1921 when, despite his and Trotsky's attempts, communism stayed in the Russian empire.  The failure of south east Asia to go communist after the fall of South Vietnam to communist forces in 1975, finally demonstrated Lenin's and the domino fallacy.
	On 12 March Truman addressed a joint session of Congress, and set out what became known as the Truman Doctrine:  
"We must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way...  Totalitarian regimes forced upon free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States."  
He asked for $400 million in military and economic assistance for Greece and Turkey.  "Should we fail to aid Greece and Turkey in this fateful hour, the effect will be far reaching to the West as well as to the East".  Congress - Democrats and Republicans - agreed. The money was used overtly in Greece and Turkey and additional covert action was undertaken by the CIA in France and Italy to help democratic political parties, trade unions, newspapers and magazines in the propaganda and political battle against the communists.
	The Truman Doctrine was followed three months later by the Marshall Plan.  With Europe suffering from the devastation of the war, Truman, Acheson and Marshall believed that support for the non-communist European economies was a vital part of the measures to defend democratic values in the west.  Marshall appointed George Kennan as head of the State Department's policy planning staff and Kennan recommended a programme of long-term economic assistance which would eradicate the poverty and distress which were such a fertile breeding ground for the communists.

PLAYING HARDBALL WITH THE COMMUNISTS

It was against this background of fear and urgency that the CIA began to engage with the Soviets.  The Italian elections in April 1948 were the first big test for the agency.  As in France, communists had played a leading role in the wartime resistance movement and used this as a base to bid for power.  For almost two years after the end of the war, communists shared power in coalition governments in France, Belgium and Italy.  In March 1947, the Belgian socialist premier, Paul Henri Spaak, excluded the communists from his administration. In May, the governments of the socialist Paul Ramadier in France and the christian democrat Alcide de Gasperi in Italy expelled the communists from their coalitions. In Italy, the communist party, which was already receiving extensive support from the Soviets, won important victories in local elections and there were forebodings about the outcome of the general election set for the spring of 1948.  
	The CIA, through its office of special operations, helped the non-communist democratic parties, notably de Gasperi's Christian Democrats.  It paid the election expenses of various politicians; it met the printing costs of posters, leaflets and pamphlets.  The anti-communist press also received financial aid.  This was to be the pattern of CIA support in other countries, support which was given not just to parties of the right and the centre but especially to the non-communist left.
	De Gasperi was re-elected, but the following year the agency went into action again, this time in support of the non-communist trade unions in Italy.  The unions, as Tom Braden recalled, were "a particular target - that was one of the activities in which the communists spent the most money."2  In France and in Italy the communists controlled large parts of the trade union movement.  In France the communist-dominated unions were behind the waves of strikes which broke out in the winters of 1946-7 and 1947-8.  In 1947 the non-communist unions led by Leon Jouhaux formed their own organisation with help from the CIA.  In Italy the trade union movement was dominated by the communists and by the marxist-socialists led by Pietro Nenni.  In 1949, with CIA support, the non-communist unions seceded from the movement and founded a rival organisation.  In West Germany, financial support was given to unions through the offices of Walter Reuther, of the United Auto Workers Union, and his brother, Victor, who lived in Germany.  
	In the international trade union movement the CIA was equally active.  In 1949 the British and American trade unions left the World Federation of Trade Unions, founded at the instigation of the Soviets in 1945, and established a new organisation with CIA support, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.  The agency received considerable help from American union leaders in the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO) who had had many bitter struggles with communist infiltration of their own unions in the United States. 
	A major clandestine operation was launched in order to ensure that officials with pro-western sympathies secured key union positions.  This was underpinned by detailed research and assessments of the trade union movement.  Some of those involved in this operation were ex-communists, notably Jay Lovestone, who had been general secretary of the American communist party in the 1920's.  In a period when the McCarthyite hysteria was at its height, only the CIA was capable of protecting, let alone using such an agent.  Lovestone had been appalled by the excesses of Stalin's terror and had rejected communism.  During the war he took part of the OSS's campaign to build up resistance to the Germans in factories, ports, and on the railways of occupied Europe.  After the war he grew close to George Meany of the American Federation of Labor which formally merged with the Congress of Industrial Organisations to form the AFL-CIO in December 1955.  Lovestone became director of international affairs of the AFL-CIO in which post he wielded considerable influence throughout the world trade union movement.

THE BATTLE FOR PICASSO'S MIND

During the 1950's and 1960's the CIA gave support to a wide range of organisations, individuals, newspapers and periodicals throughout Europe in order to prevent any extension of communist influence.  This was operated by the international organizations division of the DDP which was headed first by Tom Braden and then by Cord Meyer.  Braden was particularly anxious to get the support of intellectuals: 
"We had a vast project targeted on the intellectuals - "the battle for Picasso's mind", if you will.  The communists set up fronts which effectively enticed a great many - particularly the French - intellectuals to join.  We tried to set up a counterfront."3
One of the most important anti-communist cultural organisations was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and its magazines Encounter in Britain, Die Monat in West Germany, and Preuves in France.  In one year, Braden recalled, the CIA's budget for the Congress was $800-900,000.  The purpose of the Congress was to provide a gathering point for non-communist intellectuals in an organization which could also help them publish their work, and could hold conferences and seminars which would help influence journalists and critics in support.  It was a high-class lobbying operation, in effect.  It had the great advantage that many people readily agreed with its objectives and were willing to support it.  Most of the people who worked for the Congress and its magazines, and who attended Congress functions and were published with Congress help, had no idea that they were in fact supported by the CIA.  When this was revealed in 1967, at a time when the political atmosphere in the U.S. had changed radically, it led to the resignation of the Congress's director and of Stephen Spender and Frank Kermode, two of Encounter's three editors.
	Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which started in 1950 and 1951 respectively, also received massive financial support from the CIA.  Although privately managed and owned, most of their annual $30-35 million budget came from the CIA.  Braden and Meyer insisted on the journalistic independence of the two networks and resisted various attempts to use them for overt propaganda and disinformation campaigns.  
	The purpose of Radio Liberty and RFE was to broadcast news and views from the west to the Soviet bloc in the various languages of the bloc.  They also broadcast talks by exiled writers and politicians. They were based in Germany, and on some occasions their broadcasts had considerable effect.  In 1953, for example, RFE kept its listeners informed about the anti-communist demonstrations and riots which had broken out in Berlin and spread to the rest of east Germany.  In 1956 RFE and Radio Liberty beamed the contents of Khruschev's secret speech denouncing Stalin to eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.  RFE also accurately predicted the uprisings in Hungary and Poland which took place that year.  Some of its broadcasts convinced freedom fighters in Hungary that U.S. aid was coming, which it never did.  After the uprising, many Hungarians blamed RFE for recklessly encouraging them.
	Besides the trade unions and the intellectuals, Braden and Mayer devoted particular attention to the student movement.  The International Union of Students had been founded in Prague in 1946 and was used by the Soviets in much the same way as the trade union movement was.  The first Soviet vice-president of the IUS, Aleksandr Shelepin, later became head of the KGB. The IUS, Cord Meyer discovered, was:
"...backed by virtually unlimited funds from the treasury of the Soviet Union.  Owing a supranational allegiance to the Soviet Communist Party, disciplined young party activists throughout the world provided an interlocking directorate through which to influence the decisions of national student federations on matters ranging from policy positions to the selection of delegates, to the orchestration of propaganda campaigns."4
In 1947 the National Student Association was founded as a representative American student organisation.  The following year when the IUS refused to condemn the imposition of communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia, the NSA left the IUS and in 1950 established the International Student Conference with non-communist European student unions.  Meyer gave the NSA and the ISC considerable financial support - approximately $200,000 a year - with which they organised foundations, student exchanges and conferences.  On occasion, the agency even recruited students.  Several came from the Free University of Berlin in the 1950's and 1960's.  One such agent came to grief in Russia in 1961, having unwisely boasted to friends that he was working for American intelligence.  He received an eight year sentence for espionage.

GERMANY

Germany was at the heart of the cold war in Europe.  No one wanted a reunited Germany outside their control in the 1945-55 period.
	From before the end of the war, the western allies quickly came to experience ruthless Soviet enslavements and expropriations, especially with factories and technical and industrial intelligence.  Western technical experts made a thorough analysis of Germany's wartime scientific and industrial research, and made their findings freely available to the Russians who signally failed to reciprocate.  The Soviet zone of Germany was closed to the west and the Soviet experts sent all their discoveries straight to Moscow without sharing them.  Thousands of German scientists were sent to Russia, many of whom never returned.  Exploiting the Potsdam agreement on German war reparations, the Russians dismantled all the main research centres in their zone and shipped them back to Russia.  This included the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (scientific and atom research), the rocket factories at Peenemunde and Brandenburg, and optical and precision instrument plants in Thuringia.  
	The Russians already had the basis of an espionage service in West Germany.  This was the Rote Kapelie (Red Orchestra), one of the most effective anti-Nazi networks during the war.  Within days of the fall of Berlin, Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, the secret police and forerunner of the KGB, established headquarters at Karlshorst in East Berlin.  Soviet military intelligence, GRU, also opened an office in Berlin.  Both services immediately began to penetrate and infiltrate the Western zones.
	The partition of Germany gave them ample opportunity to recruit agents.  Millions of Germans had served in Nazi organizations.  The records of these organizations provided documents that could be used to blackmail people starting new lives.  There were additional blackmail levers in the form of divided families and possessions.  People with a mother or a father, say, in East Germany, could be persuaded to spy for the Soviets in return for better treatment for their parents.  SS Obersturmfuhrer Heinz Felfe who became head of counterintelligence in the Gehlen organization, had a mother in Dresden in East Germany, his SS record was in Soviet hands, and he spied for the Russians.  Berlin became known as "kidnap town" in intelligence circles because of the frequency with which the Russians and the East German secret police kidnapped people and took them across the border into East Berlin.  There were assassinations as well.  
	One kidnap victim was Otto John, head of the West German Federal Internal Security Office, the Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz (BfV), who was taken to East Berlin in 1954.  John had been a member of the 20 July 1944 plot against Hitler, and had strong anti-Nazi credentials.  At the time it was believed that John had defected.  John returned to West Germany four years later and was tried and found guilty of treason - a charge he always denied. 
	The CIA's office of special operations developed a close relationship with the West German foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, headed by Reinhard Gehlen, the former Wehrmacht protege of the U.S. army, who was to remain in that post until 1968.  The BND became something of a haven for ex-senior Wehrmacht officers, and for a number of ex-SS men - many of whom it later emerged were Soviet spies. The CIA liaison officer who dealt with Gehlen, James Critchfield, had offices in the Gehlen headquarters at Pullach near Munich.  Critchfield urged Gehlen to concentrate on espionage rather than on order-of-battle intelligence since Gehlen had contacts and agents in the east dating from the war.  Gehlen, however, depended far more on signals intelligence and monitoring than on reports from agents in the field. He was bedeviled by bureaucratic intrigues involving Britain's MI-6 which supported BfV (indeed, some suspected that Otto John's "defection" to the east was arranged by members of the Gehlen organization in order to discredit both John and the BfV).  Horst Eitner, one of Gehlen's agents, was hired by MI-6 to obtain information about the Gehlen organisation and its contacts in the East and was exposed as a Soviet spy in 1961.
	Gehlen had several highly-placed agents in East Germany.  One, Hermann Kastner, was close to the East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, and subsequently became a member of the East German cabinet.  Another, Walter Gramsch, was a member of the East German intelligence service.  Yet another of Gehlen's agents managed to obtain the plans and test-flight records of Russia's first jet plane, the MiG-15.
	Despite such successes, and despite the close working relationship which Gehlen's service had with CIA, the fact remained that for decades West Germany was one of the weakest links in NATO security.  Massive penetration by the Soviets through East Germany of every area of West German society, political, military, industrial, educational, was facilitated by the large number of refugees who fled the East and by the fact that one West German in five had relatives in the East, thus providing ample opportunities for blackmail.  In April 1961 the West German minister of the interior revealed to the Budestag that there were approximately 16,000 known East German agents in West Germany. Between 1950 and 1960, 2,186 agents had been caught and convicted of treason charges; a further 19,000 had confessed to espionage missions but were not prosecuted.  In August 1968, six known East German agents fled back to the east after the defection to the waest of the Czech general, Jan Sejna, who revealed several spy nets.  The Soviets decided to secure a propaganda victory, and instead of pulling their agents out, left them in place.  They calculated that the number of spies, and their positions in West Germany, would rock NATO and West German confidence.  In October 1968, Rear Admiral Hermann Luedke was revealed as a Soviet agent.  Within days he was dead: shot in the base of his spine with a soft-nosed bullet.  He was almost certainly murdered.  His was the first of thirteen deaths of West German officials, all dying in a two week period, all revealed as Soviet spies.  They included Major General Horst Wendland, deputy chief of counterintelligence in BND; Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Grimm, responsible for war mobilization plans, and Hans Heinrich Schenk, an official in the Economics Ministry. It was presumed in intelligence circles that they had all been murdered or driven to suicide by the Soviets in pursuit of their propaganda coup.  In 1974, the chancellor, Willy Brandt, resigned after the discovery that Gunther and Christel Guillaume were East German spies: Gunther, the son of a friend of Brandt's, was his political aide in the chancellor's office.    
	In the 1970s, as the war generation retired, seduction became a major element in the Soviet spy game.  In March 1979 six secretaries - all working for senior politicians and in government ministries -defected: they had been seduced and turned into spies by agents from the Soviet Union and East Germany. Every year a number of German women working in government, military establishments, and industry were compromised in this way.  Germany was totally penetrated by both sides.  It was a lesson in ambiguity that acted to mature the CIA.
	By the early 1950's the situation in Germany could be described as one of standoff and brinkmanship as the threat of war receded.  This was vividly demonstrated in June 1953 when anti-communist demonstrations and riots erupted in East Berlin and then spread to the rest of East Germany.  The CIA station immediately cabled Washington for permission to give arms to the demonstrators.  John A Bross, chief of the division dealing with eastern and central Europe, consulted his boss Frank Wisner, the deputy director of plans.  The Berlin station was told that while it should encourage expressions of sympathy and praise for the demonstrators and circulate offers of asylum in West Berlin, it was not to distribute weapons.  The Bross-Wisner telegram caused considerable dissatisfaction among some Washington officials who felt that the CIA should have seized the chance to make trouble for the Soviets and promote disorder in East Germany.  Wisner and Bross believed that since the U.S. had no intention of going to war to protect the demonstrators, giving arms to them would only have led to useless bloodshed.


ASSASSINS

Bloodshed was a feature of the early cold war years in Germany.  Agents on both sides were killed in Berlin, and CIA officers were often armed.  The Soviets had developed assassination techniques and had trained killers since 1917.  At Kuchino, just outside Moscow, two secret laboratories were devoted to developing poisons and murder weapons.  Until the cold war began, Soviet assassins were used principally against domestic opponents and defectors.  In 1954 one of the assassins, Nikolai Khoklov, gave himself up to the CIA.
	Khoklov had been sent to Frankfurt to kill a leader of the anti-communist Russian emigre group NTS, Georgi Sergeevich Okolovich.  But instead of completing his mission, he warned Okolovich that he was on a death list and showed him the death warrant issued by the central committee of the communist party of the Soviet Union.  Okolovich contacted the CIA, and the next day they took Khoklov into custody.  Khoklov's two accomplices were arrested, and the assassination weapon - a miniature electric gun disguised as a packet of cigarettes that noiselessly fired soft-nosed bullets coated in potassium cyanide - was found.  Khoklov and Okolovich gave a press conference revealing the whole story and showing the cigarette packet gun. 
	Three years later, a Soviet assassin managed to poison Khoklov in Frankfurt.  He had cramps, then his skin turned blotchy and developed brown stripes.  Blood started to seep through his skin, and doctors were baffled as to what was wrong.  U.S. army doctors treated Khoklov with constant blood transfusions, massive doses of cortisone and a number of experimental drugs.  Gradually he began to recover: toxicologists discovered that he had been poisoned with radioactive thallium that destroyed white blood cells and body fluids.
	Bogdan Stashinsky was another Soviet assassin.  In 1957 in Munich he killed Lev Rebet, a Ukrainian exile leader.  In 1959, again in Munich, he killed Stefan Bandera, another Ukrainian exile.  In both cases he had used a specially developed gas gun that fired a glass ampoule filled with prussic acid that exploded in his victims' faces.  Stashinsky was given the Order of the Red Banner in Moscow for his work.  On 12 August 1961 -a day before the Berlin wall went up - he defected to West Berlin, confessed to the murders, and was tried. Found guilty, he was sentenced to eight years in gaol as an accomplice to murder: the court held that the principal guilt lay with unnamed men in Moscow and the Soviet system that saw political murder as a state necessity.
	The CIA, naturally, was influenced by such experiences and sought to develop an assassination -"executive action" it was euphemistically termed -capability of its own.  Some freelance agents were trained and toxins and weapons were developed in an attempt to match the Soviets.  Assassination plots were hatched, and plans were actually made (almost certainly with Presidential authority) against Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Fidel Castro in Cuba.  In 1975 Castro himself reckoned that there had been over thirty CIA-inspired attempts on his life.  No CIA assassination, however, has ever been found out.  This may be because they have been successfully disguised (a heart attack can be mistaken for a prussic acid death, as happened in the case of Stefan Bandera), or because none have succeeded.  William Colby, who investigated such activities inside the agency in the 1970s, indicated that the executive action capacity had been there, but had been unsuccessful: there were no assassinations, he said, but "it wasn't for want of trying."

GOLD AND SILVER

Vienna and Berlin were the paradigm western cold war cities whose extraordinary atmosphere of menace and intrigue inspired a generation of films and novels, ranging from Graham Greene's Harry Lime in The Third Man to John Le Carre's George Smiley.  Like Berlin, Vienna was occupied by the four wartime allies -France, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union - and was to remain so until 1955 when the Austrian State Treaty was signed making Austria a neutral state, leading to the end of the allied occupation.  This cheek-by-jowl proximity inspired some of the most daring and innovative operations of the cold war in Europe.
	The headquarters of the Soviet occupation forces in Austria was at the Imperial Hotel on the Ringstrasse, the main Viennese thoroughfare.  What went on in the Imperial Hotel became the prime object of the agency's Vienna station as well as MI-6.  The British had realised that since administrative centralisation had been one of the chief characteristics of the old European empires, all major roads and telephone lines tended to converge on their capitals.  Thus in order to make a telephone call from one city in Austria to another, the chances were that the call would be routed through Vienna.  By linking into the main telephone land lines near a private house in a Vienna suburb, the British found thast they could tap into Soviet communications.  
	This operation, codenamed "Silver", had been in progress since 1949 unknown to the CIA.  It was only when Carl Nelson, an officer in the CIA's office of communications, started his own investigation into Vienna's underground cable routes that MI-6 disclosed "Silver" to him.
	Nelson's involvement with "Silver" led to an important discovery which increased its value enormously.  He found out that Sigtot, a cipher machine used by the CIA, gave off electronic echoes of the clear text as it was typed in to the encoder, at a distance of up to twenty miles down the line.  Sigtot was quickly jettisoned by the agency.  Nelson, however, discovered that Soviet communications had the same fault.  The CIA kept this information to itself.  When the British agreed to share "Silver" with the agency, Nelson's discovery enabled the office of communications to break a whole range of Soviet codes and to gather a mass of vital information, the most important of which was that the Soviets did not intend to invade Tito's Yugoslavia, enabling the United States to show support for Tito knowing that its words would not be tested. After the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, this intelligence was particularly useful in determining American troop deployments in Europe and the Far East.
	The success of "Silver" led directly to a similar operation in Berlin - operation "Gold" - the tapping of Soviet landlines from Karlshorst in East Berlin.  This was done in collaboration with the British who had the original idea.  MI-6 and the CIA drew up a plan for the construction of a tunnel to be drilled from the southern West Berlin suburb of Altglienecke five hundred yards from the Soviet headquarters' landlines. It was an amazing complexity which tested the ingenuity of the Americans and the British to the limit.  The tunnelling had to be done under the very feet of Soviet and East German guards.  The soil had to be removed without attracting attention and the site entrance had to be similarly unobtrusive.  The tunnel itself had to be built in such a way that there was no sign of it on the surface: the heat from the equipment inside the tunnel threatened to melt frost and snow on the ground above, so the tunnel had to be air-conditioned.  Above all, the work had to be done with an absolute minimum of noise.
	The Soviets learned about the Berlin tunnel in its planning stage: one of the British team, George Blake, was a Soviet agent.  But they knew nothing of Carl Nelson's echo-effect discovery because of the CIA's decision not to tell the British.  The prime Soviet concern was the security of their codes and they believed them to be safe.  So they took the view that it would be better to protect their spy than to stop the tunnel.  The tunnel was finished in February 1955. Three landlines were tapped, each one carrying one telegraph and four telephone lines, each of which could carry up to four communications at a time.  Six hundred tape recorders then collected the tapped communications.  The volume of the material was staggering and at times threatened to swamp the operation.  Up to 1200 hours of material a day was recorded, using 800 reels of tape.  Planeloads of tapes were flown out of Berlin every week for examination in London and in Washington by fifty CIA officers fluent in Russian and German.  The translators and analysts had to work two weeks on and one day off to keep up with the accumulating material.
	The tunnel was discovered by the East Germans in April, 1956.  Heavy rain had seeped into the landlines, requiring maintenance work.  When the East German telephone engineers dug up the cable to repair it they found the tap.  
	The CIA thought that when the tunnel was discovered, the Soviets would not dare reveal the fact that western intelligence had been reading their high level communications circuits.  In fact, the commandant of the Soviet garrison in East Berlin was absent at the time and his deputy invited the entire Berlin press corps to a tour of the tunnel and its facilities, pointing them out as examples of western perfidy.  The press reaction was not what he expected.  The tunnel was hailed as a wonderful example of American ingenuity and, in the words of one Berlin editor, was "the best publicity the U.S. has had in Berlin for a long time."5  It took the agency another two and a half years to get through the backlog of tapes.

BETRAYAL

Although the CIA had worked closely with their MI-6 colleagues in Vienna and Berlin, both operations had undercurrents of strain in their collaboration.  The CIA was not sure that British intelligence was free of Soviet spies.  This was just one of the ripple effects of the Burgess-Maclean-Philby scandal which had such momentous consequences for British-American intelligence relations.
	In July, 1947 Bill Harvey, a senior FBI officer who had been investigating Soviet spy rings within the U.S., joined the CIA's office of special operations. With his experience in counterespionage and knowledge of FBI operations, Harvey was a very valuable recruit for the new agency and he spent two years building up a counterintelligence group, Staff C.  In 1949 Harvey went over the Soviet codes which Donovan and the OSS had obtained from the Finns in November 1944.  It was only then that a 1945 message sent by a Soviet agent in New York to Moscow was deciphered.  It contained the complete text of a telegram from Churchill to Truman, sent from London via the British embassy in Washington and containing various embassy reference numbers.  It was very strong evidence that there had been a spy working at a senior level in the embassy.  Who was he? And where was he now?
	At the time these revelations were emerging, Kim Philby was British intelligence's liaison officer with the CIA.  In 1938 and again in 1945 two Soviet defectors, Krivitsky and Volkov, had mentioned the presence of high-level moles in British intelligence, but Krivitsky died (probably murdered by Soviet agents) before he could give details, and Kim Philby alerted the Soviets to Volkov who kidnapped and murdered him. Bill Harvey, however, pursued the codebreaking leads and early in 1951 identified the British diplomat, Donald Maclean, as the Soviet spy in the British embassy in 1945.  By that time, MacLean was on the American desk in the Foreign Office in London.  
	In Washington, Philby learned of Bill Harvey's suspicions and evidence.  He told another Soviet spy in the Foreign Office, Anthony Burgess, who was staying with him in Washington.  Burgess, MacLean and Philby had all been at Cambridge together in the mid-1930s, and had become secret members of the communist party there.  Burgess returned to London and warned Maclean that arrest was imminent, and the two fled to Moscow in May, 1951.  Burgess' flight was not planned - it seems to have been a spontaneous decision - and it immediately cast suspicion on his friend, Philby.  Bill Harvey categorically stated that Philby was a Soviet spy three weeks after Burgess and Maclean absconded.
	The reaction of the CIA was immediate.  Bedell Smith told Sir Stewart Menzies of SIS, "Fire Philby or we break off the intelligence relationship."  Philby was recalled to London.  He managed to bluff his way out of being arrested, but he had to leave SIS.  It was to be another twelve years before the scale of Philby's treachery was fully appreciated when he finally defected to Russia.  
	There was considerable speculation then and since about the extent of the damage which Maclean and Philby wreaked on American intelligence.  Maclean was aware of economic and political plans for postwar Europe: he knew the details of Anglo-American intelligence agreements with NATO; he knew about uranium requirements for atomic-energy schemes; he had access to several diplomatic codes.  But nothing caused the agency greater anguish than Maclean's knowledge of Anglo-American policy at a sensitive stage in the Korean War.  It was suspected that Maclean had told the Chinese, through their Russian contacts, that the United Nations had decided that they would not retaliate against China if Chinese troops entered the Korean war.  Maclean was in a position to know that in October, 1950, Truman had ordered General Douglas MacArthur, commander of UN forces in Korea, not to attack Chinese territory without prior authority from Washington.
	Maclean was bad enough but what was the extent of Philby's betrayal?  It could be argued that Maclean's base of operations concerned diplomacy, a more "open" area of national strategy where a secret did not remain a secret for very long because a country's intentions soon became clear.  Philby's milieu, on the other hand, consisted of informal, high-level contacts with the FBI and the CIA, briefings with the most powerful people in Washington.  It was an informal, fluid world and as a result it proved extremely difficult to gauge the extent of the damage Philby did.  Where Philby was known to have caused harm were in Anglo-American intelligence operations in Albania, the Baltic states, and the Ukraine.  In Albania, it was an attempt to overthrow the communist regime of Enver Hoxha. Albanian exiles were trained and then dropped on the Albanian coast to move inland and organize resistance. Every single one was captured and most were killed: the operation had been betrayed from within by Philby.  In the Baltic and the Ukraine, military and material support for nationalist movements, and agents, were sent in.  In both cases most of those involved in the operations were also captured and executed.  William Sloan Coffin, in the early 1950s a CIA officer responsible for training emigres to parachute into the Soviet Union as agents, recalled that not one of the operations in which he had been involved had been successful.  
	In the aftermath of the Maclean-Burgess-Philby treachery, there were scores of such painful post-mortems.  Worst of all was the depths of bitterness and distrust which had such a corrosive effect on the Anglo-American intelligence relationship.  For many in the CIA who had been in the wartime OSS, and who respected the British, the scale of Philby's treason in particular was devastating.  He had been considered a friend by many of them, and had been trusted with the most sensitive information.  How had he disguised his true allegiance for so long?  How could he have betrayed friends and allies in such a cold-blooded fashion?  There was a lurking belief that the old boy network of the British establishment had protected their own.  Ten years later Philby's successor was British intelligence Liaison in Washington, Maurice Oldfield, was still finding resounding echoes of the scandal.  Within two weeks of his arrival in Washington he was shown a memorandum by the Joint Chiefs of Staff which claimed that the British had done little or nothing to prevent a repetition of those events and that Burgess and Maclean "were apparently protected by others in high places, some allegedly in high places".6
	Ray Cline, who was one of the CIA's estimates liaison officers in London from October 1951 to November 1953 - the period in the immediate aftermath of the scandal - noted realistically:
"There was no other major service in the world with which to collaborate.  The Germans were penetrated more badly.  The Israelis had a limited service of high quality.  If we were to have any serious collaboration, we had to have it with the British.  We had early on split the world with the Brits on code-breaking and monitoring ...  We had a lot of benefits from the operation and I would argue it was well worth taking the risks we took ... The people who criticised only had one major argument in their favour: the unique case of the Cambridge cell ...  It could happen in America too: feelings of utopianism, alienation, depression in the 1930's.  It was an historical accident ...  We had [Alger] Hiss - not as bad as the Philby case, but there ... I don't think our system worked any better except for the one damning thing of the Cambridge spies."7
	Cline's assessment proved accurate: American intelligence was not immune to treason.  At the very time of the Burgess-Maclean defection, the FBI had tracked down a traitor in the Armed Forces Security Agency who sold the Russians the information that the CIA possessed their 1944 code book.  In 1960 two homosexual cryptologists employed by the National Security Agency defected to Russia having joined the communist party two years before, a fact of which the NSA was unaware.
	Nevertheless, to many in the American military and intelligence establishment, the Cambridge spies were a potent symbol of British political and moral decline, of a country living beyond its means and cracking apart.  The Profumo scandal of 1963 (when the secretary for War was found to have had an affair with a party girl who also had a relationship with a Soviet military attache in London) and the Jellicoe-Lambton scandal ten years later (when two government ministers were found to have had relationships with prostitutes, opening them to potential blackmail) did nothing to lessen that belief.  CIA officers were frankly contemptuous of the official reports which were issued in the wake of both scandals.  The imperial lion had become motheaten and was in retreat in all fronts.  
	In 1947 Truman had regarded the British messages about Greece and Turkey as another Munich, with the British once again taking the line of least resistance. He, and the American governing elite were determined that the United States would not be a weary titan. They accepted that the United States had extraordinary power and was the one country that could withstand the Soviets.  The question that they wrestled with was what kind of great power America should be.
0 George F Kennan, Memoirs 1925-50 (New York, Pantheon, 1967), pp. 547-59.
1 Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (New York, W W Norton, 1969), p. 219.
2 Interview Tom Braden, 14 November 1983.
3 Interview, Tom Braden, Granada Television, The Rise and Fall of the CIA (1975), part 1.
4 Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (New York, Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 99-101.
5 Time, 7 May 1956.
6 Quoted in Richard Deacon, "C" - A Biography of Sir Maurice Oldfield (London, 1985), p.
7 Interview, 25 July, 1983.