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May 22, 2013, 5:09am

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nictoe
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Berlin Spy Tunnel FOUND !
« Thread Started on Aug 20, 2012, 9:29am »

An exterior view of a spy tunnel built by British and American intelligence agents in Berlin during the Cold War. The tunnel was exposed by the Soviet authorities in 1956, then excavated and its whereabouts was unknown until a part was recently discovered in a forest 150 kilometers away from the original site.

Cold War Spy Tunnel Under Berlin Found After 56 Years

By Catherine Hickley - Aug 20, 2012

A section of an ingenious tunnel built by U.S. and British spies to intercept Russian phone conversations in Cold War Berlin has been found after 56 years in a forest 150 kilometers from the German capital.

The 450-meter-long tunnel, built in 1955, led from Rudow in West Berlin to Alt-Glienicke in Soviet-occupied East Berlin. By tapping into the enemy’s underground cables, Allied intelligence agents recorded 440,000 phone calls, gaining a clearer picture of Red Army maneuvers in eastern Germany at a time when nuclear war seemed an imminent threat.

The western part of the tunnel was excavated in 1997 and part of it is preserved at the Allied Museum in the former American sector of Berlin. The Soviet authorities dug up the eastern part in 1956 and until now, its fate was unknown.

“It seemed to have vanished without a trace,” said Bernd von Kostka, a historian at the Allied Museum. “I looked through the East German Stasi files, and there was nothing to be found about its whereabouts. We assumed it had been melted down because it was made of valuable metal.”

The find is one missing piece of a puzzle that will take decades to solve completely, as access to intelligence files about the construction and discovery of the tunnel -- a tale worthy of a John le Carre novel -- is still restricted.
Chopping Wood

The man who discovered the buried segment is Werner Sobolewski, 62, formerly employed in a civilian capacity by the East German army. He was chopping wood in his local forest in Pasewalk, near the Polish border north of Berlin, when he stumbled across the wide metal pipe. He remembered it being used for military exercises at the local barracks, where he had worked before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

He recalled too that it was then rumored to have been a part of the Allied spy tunnel, infamous throughout eastern Germany after the Soviets exposed it in a major propaganda campaign in 1956. He contacted the Allied Museum and Kostka traveled to Pasewalk to identify it last week.

“We would like to have it in the museum so that we have a part of the eastern tunnel,” Kostka said in an interview at the Allied Museum. “The sections we have are from the western side. It shouldn’t stay buried underground.”

The western tunnel segment is a prize exhibit at the Allied Museum, which is also home to the original Checkpoint Charlie guard-hut and a Royal Air Force Hastings plane used in the Berlin airlift of 1948 and 1949.
‘Stopwatch’ or ‘Gold’

Displays describe the complexity of building the tunnel and tapping the wires. The British had already constructed similar underground listening-posts in Vienna and brought the idea, manpower and know-how to the project, Kostka said. Codenamed “Stopwatch” by the British and “Gold” by the Americans, it was funded by the U.S. at a cost of $6.7 million (then a vast sum) and operated jointly by the CIA and the British SIS.

Yet the KGB learned about the tunnel when it was still in the planning stages -- thanks to intelligence from George Blake, the notorious British double agent who was later imprisoned, then escaped to the Soviet Union. Strangely, the KGB concealed its existence from the Soviet military because they wanted to protect their valuable mole.

The tunnel operated for 11 months and 11 days, intercepting some of the Red Army’s most secret communications, including those between Moscow and the military headquarters in East Berlin. Historians do not know why the Soviet authorities chose to expose it when they did, on April 22, 1956. The reason is still buried in the Kremlin’s files.

“It was clear that the tunnel had a finite lifespan and would be discovered one day,” Kostka said. “But the Allies expected the Soviet authorities to sweep it under the carpet.”

Instead, they held their first international press conference in 11 years of occupation and bussed in as many as 50,000 East German citizens so that they could see first-hand the treachery of the west.

Yet it was also a propaganda coup for the U.S. intelligence services as the tunnel’s ingenuity impressed American observers.

“It’s a great Cold War story,” said Kostka. “Each side could say they won.”

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karl
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Re: Berlin Spy Tunnel FOUND !
« Reply #1 on Aug 22, 2012, 3:59pm »

Nictoe

Those were strange years in past of the cold war years. Perhaps though the strangeness is to the Brits of past years, and the Amies as similar. For each were to expend preponderate of money on such projects for the sole purpose of spying on the Soviets for information accessed much cheap on the street...

Secrets are what they are, short lived information that is too soon none revelent and useless.

But, who are we useless Germans to speak out to our masters that beat us in the last war, for we are only to them, as the population of a land they beat and won, then to share from the East of Berlin, Soviet Russians.

The Stasie is only a name, they were to the Soviet Russians, a tool of control, and very effective in relations to expense. For in the Soviet Sytem, each expense, is controlled by the state, and the state owned all things. In this respect, each cost was accounted against central, and central accounting then was to post as an asset against state debits. This inturn was then reverted against assets to then equal assets to debits.

It worked, but only in the Soviet system where all things are owned by the state.

What was not in the equation was: Statsie were people, and the people were German, not Russian. When the tide turned against the Soviet Russians, the East was then returned to the West and with this. Their was vast unemployed former Statsie looking for employment, and,,,,they were for the most part, re-employed by us: The Wesies.

Many were already employed with us, but not to our knowledge. It was then a simple change out of employment recording. For these people were already trained and educated in manners of their employment. Some were of course removed for reasons of unsuitability. Most were retained. For if they had succeeded in out smarting us in working for the Soviet Russians, then let us have them....They then have the education/resources to then work against their former masters.

The Americans? Had not a clue..

Karl

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elizabethkern
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Re: Berlin Spy Tunnel FOUND !
« Reply #2 on Aug 23, 2012, 5:23pm »

Fascinating.This COULD be the subject of a spy novel. How deep was he tunnel? Could a man stand up inside? Where there air vents throughout? How did their technical equipment capture the messages? So many questions.

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