Operation Gold
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- For the other use of Operation Gold, see Operation Gold (disambiguation).
Operation Gold (also known as Operation Stopwatch by the British) was a joint operation conducted by the American CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service to tap into landline communication of the Soviet Army headquarters in Berlin using a tunnel into the Soviet-occupied zone. This was a much more complex variation of the earlier Operation Silver project.
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[edit] Overview
Although it was planned by the SIS and the CIA, it was CIA money and manpower that carried it out. Details of the project are still classified, and whatever authoritative information can be found is scant. This is primarily because the then-Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles ordered "as little as possible" be "reduced to writing" when the project was authorized.
According to one account, Reinhard Gehlen, the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, first alerted Dulles to the location of a crucial telephone junction, less than two meters (six feet) underground, where three cables came together close to the border of the American sector of West Berlin.
British and U.S. intelligence officials met in London to plan the tunnel. One of those who attended those early meetings was George Blake, a mole in the British intelligence apparatus. Blake apparently alerted the KGB immediately, for two of Gehlen's agents were caught trying to get a potential tapping wire across a Berlin canal.
The KGB decided to let Operation Gold go on, seeing its potential for disinformation. In December 1953 the operation was placed under the direction of William K. Harvey, a former FBI official who transferred to the CIA. He used a former U.S. Army depot as the West German terminal of the tunnel. The covert construction of a 450-metre (1,476-foot) tunnel 6 metres (~20 feet) under the world’s most heavily patrolled border to intersect a series of cable less than 47 cm (18") below a busy street was an exceptional engineering challenge. Work began in August, 1954 and was completed on 25 February the following year. The tunnel ran from Treptow/Altglienike in the Soviet Sector and ended at an electronic box for the tapping of the wires in Neukölln/Rudow in the American Sector. There Germans and Americans listened and recorded messages flowing to and from Soviet military headquarters in Zossen, near Berlin; conversations between Moscow and the Soviet embassy in East Berlin; and converations between East German and Soviet officials.
It appears the West was unable to break the Soviet encipherment at this time. Instead they took advantage of a faint electronic echo produced by the Soviet communications equipment to read the traffic in plain text.
In Washington, DC, a team of CIA translators and analysts worked constantly on the vast amount of intercepts, ranging from high-level talk to barracks gossip. During the tunnel's brief lifespan, about half a million calls were recorded in 50,000 tapes. To evaluate this deluge the work of mining Operation Gold continued until September 1958.
On 21 April 1956, eleven months after the tunnel went into operation, Soviet and East German soldiers broke into the eastern end of the tunnel; calling it a "breach of the norms of international law" and "a gangster act." Newspapers around the world ran photographs of the underground partition of the tunnel directly under the inter-German frontier. The wall had a sign in English, German and Russian reading "Entry is Forbidden by the American Commander."
Not only was Allen Dulles affected by the tunnel raid, but also his brother John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State, and his sister Eleanore Dulles, the State Department's desk officer for Berlin.
Only in 1961, when Blake was arrested tried and convicted, did Western officials realize that the tunnel had been compromised long before construction had begun. Although Allen Dulles has publicly celebrated the success of Operation Gold, CIA analysts have argued about the overall worth of the intelligence that they had gathered. By one assessment, the Soviets had allowed ordinary military communications to flow through the cables to project the illusion[citation needed] that the Soviets had no aggressive intent against West Berlin.
Operation Gold forms the background to the novel The Innocent by Ian McEwan.
[edit] See also
- Operation Silver
- the CIA (U.S.A. counterpart to the UK SIS)
- Secret Intelligence Service (British counterpart to the CIA)
[edit] Reference
Stafford, David. 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
