by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I eventually watched a TV show PBS had recently
aired as a filler after the big special on “D-Day’s Sunken Secrets”: Spies
Beneath Berlin, a 2011 special, originally
produced for the Discovery Channel by something called ORTV, about a daring
operation launched by U.S. and British intelligence in the mid-1950’s to dig a
tunnel from a building in West Berlin under East Berlin so they could tap the
phone lines of a Soviet military facility in East Berlin and get advance news
of what the Russians were planning — and, in particular, warning in case they
were about to launch a nuclear attack. The CIA and its British equivalent, MI6,
planned this — though the British still regard it as classified and therefore no British officials were
allowed to be at the event at which the project and the people who worked on it
were acknowledged. The tunnel worked through most of 1955 and was built after two
people who worked for the East German phone company alerted Western
intelligence to the existence of this Soviet communications center — and it was
compromised even before it was built because the minutes of the meeting at
which its construction was planned were taken by George Blake, a Soviet double
agent within MI6 who believed in the ideological superiority of Soviet-style
socialism and apparently was willing to betray his country without pay in the
service of this higher cause. The most fascinating part of the story was that
the KGB allowed the tunnel to exist for nearly a year — until heavy rains in
East Berlin led to its “accidental” discovery in November 1955 — and neither
exposed it nor fed disinformation through it because protecting George Blake as
an intelligence asset was more important than any potential compromise to their
intelligence position (not that different from the way the Brits had let
Coventry be bombed during World War II rather than risk letting the Germans
know they had broken their Enigma code). Blake was finally caught and arrested
in 1961 but daringly escaped five years later, then made it to the Soviet
Union, where he was granted asylum, wrote his memoirs (extensively quoted on
this program) and lives to this day; his story was the subject of Alfred
Hitchcock’s last script, The Short Night, a project Hitch worked on sporadically from 1977 to 1979 (a year
before his death) until he realized he was not going to be in physical shape to
direct another film.
