In 1950 the CIA secretly set up a West German intelligence service, the “Organization Gehlen,” to it help it operate more effectively on local turf. The group was named after its chief, Reinhard Gehlen, who, as noted above, had headed the Wehrmacht’s espionage operations against the Red Army. Gehlen’s agency was based in Pullach near Munich, not in West Berlin, but like its patron it used the Spree city to smuggle agents into East Germany. Shortly after the outfit was launched the London Daily Express published a story entitled “Hitler’s General Spies Again—For Dollars”—a blow both to the group’s security and its public image. Until 1956, when it was renamed the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and transferred to West German control, it remained little more than an arm of the CIA.
From the outset, Bonn had its own intelligence service in the form of the above-mentioned Office for Constitutional Protection, which carried on a bitter rivalry with the Organization Gehlen. The rivalry was fiercest at the top, for Otto John, the BfV’s chief, had sided with the anti-Hitler resistance and worked with British intelligence during the war, while Gehlen had remained loyal to the Nazi regime up to the bitter end. After the war, moreover, John had aided the British prosecution at Nuremberg, which hardly endeared him to unreconstructed nationalists like Gehlen.
“Once a traitor, always a traitor,” was Gehlen’s response when Otto John made his shocking bolt to the East in 1954. The date on which John acted, July 20, 1954, was the tenth anniversary of the ill-starred bombing of Hitler’s headquarters at Rastenburg. John had come to Berlin to participate in the annual commemoration of the event at Plötzensee Prison, where some of the conspirators had been executed. In the press conference that he held in East Berlin on the following day, John alluded to the resistance when he said that “Stauffenberg did not die for the Federal Republic.” He went on to denounce Adenauer as a tool of the Americans, who, in their “need for war against the East. . . welcome those who have not learned anything from the catastrophe and are waiting for the moment when they can effect revenge for 1945.”
Shifting quickly into damage-control mode, Bonn insisted that John had been kidnapped by the Soviets and forced to spout Red propaganda. This “provocation,” they said, was part of a desperate effort to sabotage West Germany’s legitimate efforts to bolster its defense by creating an army of its own, the Bundeswehr. John, however, went before the public to claim that his actions had all been voluntary. He then faded from the picture. The Stasi gave him a sinecure at Humboldt University and set him up in a pleasant apartment. They also surrounded him with around-the-clock bodyguards, lest the West try to snatch him back, or he try to go back on his own.
The Stasi’s fears were well founded. On December 12, 1955, seventeen months after his bolt to the East, John slipped out of a meeting at the university and, in the company of a Danish journalist, bolted back into West Berlin. Once there he insisted that he had not gone freely to the East but had been drugged and kidnapped by his friend, society gynecologist and jazz trumpeter Wolfgang (“Wo Wo”) Wolgemuth, who had turned out to be a Soviet agent. He further claimed to have made his press conference comments under duress and in the hope of deceiving his Soviet captors. He had always intended to escape back to the West, he insisted, and had done so as soon as he could. The West German government, having initially blamed the Soviets for John’s action, now refused to buy his story. He was tried for conspiracy, convicted, and sentenced to a four-year prison term, of which he served eighteen months. After his release he continued to profess his innocence and to demand rehabilitation, unsuccessfully. He died in 1997.
Was John telling the truth? Even though Soviet archival material on the John case has now become available, much remains murky in a drama that three expert commentators labeled in 1997 “the longest-running mystery play of the Cold War in Germany.” For what his testimony is worth, Mischa Wolf is inclined to believe that John never intended to defect. He credits John’s contention that his friend Wo Wo, who indeed was a Soviet spy, slipped him a drug in order to get him to East Berlin. But Wolf also believes that Wolgemuth was acting on his own initiative, not under orders from Moscow. Of course, once they had a man like John in their clutches the Soviets extracted maximum propaganda value from his “defection” and coaxed all the information from him that they could, which apparently was not much. They then, in Wolf’s words, “dumped the damaged goods on us,” allowing the Stasi to take care of John as it saw fit. Whatever the final truth in this bizarre affair, the Otto John story, reeking as it does of deception, betrayal, and political manipulation, is the perfect Cold War espionage tale. All it lacks is technological gadgetry.
There was plenty of gadgetry in the other major Berlin spy story of the 1950s—the saga of “Operation Gold,” an ambitious project to eavesdrop on Soviet communications by means of a tunnel bored under the Russian sector. More than the John affair, the now famous Berlin Tunnel operation put the former Nazi capital on the map as espionage-central in the early Cold War era.
The Berlin Tunnel was modeled on an earlier British operation in Vienna code-named “Silver,” which had yielded a load of informational ore concerning the Soviet occupation forces in the Austrian capital. Berlin was an even more attractive target than Vienna because, as a CIA man averred, “everything came to Berlin.” The Soviets, it seems, had an underground cable running between Karlshorst and their base in Wünsdorf, south of Berlin, which carried extremely sensitive data. In January 1954 CIA chief Allen Dulles gave authorization to build a tunnel between the American and Soviet sectors in Berlin that would allow Western electronic eavesdroppers to tap into the Soviet line and pick up their communications. BOB selected a promising site for the tunnel in the southeastern corner of the American sector, a stone’s throw from the Schönfelder Chausee in East Berlin, under which the cable ran. From the outset the operation was conducted jointly with the British, who, given their previous tunneling experience, were thought to be valuable partners.
Digging began in September 1954. To camouflage operations at the tunnel mouth, and to provide space for all the necessary equipment, a warehouse disguised as a radar installation was constructed. As the tunneling progressed, dirt and debris were brought up to the warehouse and packed in cartons prominently labeled “radar equipment.” Despite having to pump out ground water as they dug, U.S. Army engineers made good time, finishing the tunnel by the end of February 1955. A month later British electronics experts completed a “tap room” filled with the latest eavesdropping equipment. Anglo-American experts immediately began listening in to everything the Russians passed down their cable. It appeared to be the greatest espionage triumph since the “Ultra” decoding of Nazi naval signals in World War II.