The coldest place in the Cold War
Divided Berlin was a playground for spies
It was New Year's Eve 1962 when Margarete's conscience got the best of her. A devout Roman Catholic, the young woman working as an interpreter at NATO's command center was having an affair with a man she thought was a Danish intelligence officer. To boot, she was feeding him classified information gleaned from her job. It wasn't treason, her lover, "Kai Petersen," assured her. She was simply helping a small nation normally excluded from the information loop by NATO's great powers. Yet Margarete still felt a stab of guilt: She wanted to confess to a priest.
At the drab, imposing East Berlin headquarters of the HVA, the foreign intelligence branch of East Germany's secret service (Stasi), spymasters puzzled about how to maintain the cover of Petersen, also known as Roland G., one of their top spies. "We badly needed to find a priest for this woman," recalls Markus Wolf, head of the HVA from 1952 to 1986. In Berlin, there was little that the Stasi couldn't get its hands on. So weeks later, in a tiny church along Denmark's Jutland coast, Margarete was absolved of sin. The "priest," an East German agent given a crash course in Danish, told her to continue spying with the Lord's blessing.
At the height of the Cold War, Berlin was the coldest place on Earth. Carved up by the conquering powers in the wake of World War II, the city became an espionage capital once the United States and Soviet Union turned on each other, with over 8,000 spies skulking about its streets. The novelist John le Carre called Berlin "a cabinet full of useless, liquid secrets . . . a playground for every alchemist, miracle-worker, and rat-piper that ever took up the cloak." It was a place where history and identity, like Margarete's sins, could be created and wiped away in an instant.
Spying in Berlin reached its apex during the 1950s, the decade before the Berlin Wall was erected. The CIA's legendary Berlin Operations Base could smuggle agents into East Berlin with relative ease, and the KGB and HVA used the cover of thousands of refugees flowing into West Berlin to escape Soviet reach to plant agents in the West. In the days before spy satellites loitering high above enemy territory, the spooks of Berlin used every trick to deliver what mattered most: human intelligence. There were car chases across sector boundaries and spies planted in brothels, where the world's two oldest professions mixed freely.
In this playground, nobody played the game better than Markus Wolf. The inspiration for le Carre's fictional spymaster Karla, the former head of the HVA was communism's most successful intelligence chief and the CIA's bête noire. "As a loyal American, you have to say he did things that tremendously damaged this country," says espionage expert H. Keith Melton. "But as a historian, you have to admire his amazing skill at his work." Known as "the man without a face," Wolf was such a mystery to the West that the CIA didn't know his name and had no pictures of him until one of his proteges defected to West Berlin in 1979.
Romeos. In espionage, the spoils often go to those who best exploit human desires and frailties, something Wolf knew all too well. From his office at HVA headquarters, Wolf hatched his schemes for planting "Romeo spies" throughout Western Europe. They were men, like Roland G., who would seduce women in sensitive jobs to gain access to classified information. These agents produced some of the East's greatest intelligence windfalls. These days, however, Wolf tries to debunk the popular perception that he "invented" the breed. "If a man came into contact with a female agent, of course love or sex played a role in recruiting her," says the retired spymaster by phone from his Berlin apartment. "But in every time, in every country, this kind of strategy has been used."
Yet at no other time were the stakes higher. With the world's two superpowers poised to annihilate each other with the push of a button, the spies' job was to gather enough intelligence to keep tensions from escalating beyond the tipping point. The most valuable intelligence was detailed information about how NATO and Warsaw Pact military forces were deployed and about the location of each side's nuclear arsenal.
In part to obtain this critical information, the CIA undertook its most daring Cold War operation in Berlin: construction of a tunnel beneath the city to tap Soviet military communications. In 1954, from a squat, nondescript building in the American sector disguised as a radar station, the United States and Britain began digging what would become a quarter-mile-long tunnel into the Soviet sector. When work was completed a year later, the allies started tapping a cluster of underground cables connecting Soviet military headquarters in Berlin with Moscow.
Catch-22. CIA's Berlin base may have been pleased with its work, but what they didn't realize was that the KGB knew about the tunnel from the beginning. The tip-off came from George Blake, a highly placed KGB mole working in Britain's MI-6. Yet fortunately for the West, even after Blake passed the information on to the KGB, news of the tunnel never reached the Soviet military.
The Blake revelations had put the KGB in a Catch-22: Either expose the tunnel underneath Berlin and risk blowing Blake's cover, or allow the West to continue intercepting military communications and risk compromising state secrets. The KGB chose to protect Blake. Eventually, the Soviets staged an "accidental" discovery of the tunnel, but not before U.S. and British subterranean spies had intercepted a total of 443,000 Soviet and East German conversations, many of them about the inner workings of the Eastern Bloc military.
The Berlin spy games produced both heroes and villains, yet the work done in the shadows of Central Europe was often critical for keeping Washington and Moscow from blundering into World War III. In a war that lasted four decades yet saw no major battles, the spies were put to use so the militaries didn't have to be. For instance, according to recently declassified documents, the CIA's Berlin Operations Base was able to report to Harry Truman in 1948 that Soviet forces were not poised to attack the West during the Berlin blockade of that year, allowing Truman to deliver a measured response.
As for men like Markus Wolf, the more intelligence they gathered about the West, the less they were confident about their own system's survival. Yet, like soldiers, they continued to man their posts along what Wolf calls the "invisible front." "The risks were very high," he remembers. "And if spies were discovered, they could lose their freedom for a long time. Or, they could lose their lives like soldiers."
This story appears in the January 27, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.