There was only one problem: the Soviets knew all about it. A KGB “mole” in MI6, George Blake, had informed his Russian controllers about the enterprise as soon as it began. This of course enabled the Soviets to precensor the conversations they passed along the tapped cable. Had they wanted to, they could have fed the eavesdroppers nothing but misinformation, but this might have aroused suspicion and compromised Blake. Therefore the Russians tossed the Anglo-Americans a few pieces of useful data from time to time. After about a year, however, they decided to put an end to this unique party line. The trick was to uncover the operation “accidentally,” so as not to endanger their mole. A series of heavy rainstorms in spring 1956, which caused some electrical shorts, gave them the pretext they needed to dig up the cable and “discover” the tunnel.
Markus Wolf was with the Soviet team that broke into the tunnel on April 22, 1956. He was amazed by the sophisticated equipment in the “tap” room, which was more advanced than anything the KGB or the Stasi had. Contrary to some contemporary reports, the Soviets did not actually catch any Western technicians red-eared. The eavesdroppers had gotten just enough advance warning of the break-in to scurry out of the tunnel (and, as a little joke, to put up a hand-lettered sign at their end, saying, “You are now entering the American sector”). Wolf found the sign amusing but he was not amused by the fact that the Soviets had told the Stasi nothing about the tunnel operation until the moment they decided to uncover it. As he complained in his memoirs, the Russians had “protected their own conversations, [but] they never told us anything, leaving us unguarded and exposed.”
Moscow expected to score a propaganda coup by exposing the Berlin Tunnel, but it did not turn out that way. Rather than writing about how devious the Anglo-Americans were, most reporters invited to inspect the tunnel praised the West’s resourcefulness and ingenuity. The Soviets therefore decided that the less said about this matter, the better. On the other hand, they could hardly put the tunnel out of their minds, for it pointed up their own vulnerability in Berlin. West Berlin might be an isolated Western outpost, but its very existence deep inside the Soviet imperium made it a threat to Russian security—not to mention a pressing challenge to the very integrity of Moscow’s East German client.
The Most Dangerous Place in the World
In the late 1950s the Soviets decided to try once again to force the West out of Berlin. On November 10, 1958, Khrushchev told a Soviet-Polish Friendship Rally in Moscow that the “time has clearly come for the Powers which signed the Potsdam Agreement to renounce the remnants of the regime of occupation in Berlin and thus make it possible to create a normal situation in the capital of the GDR.” A “normal situation” in Soviet eyes meant control over the entire city by the “sovereign state” of the GDR. Two weeks later, Khrushchev sent notes to Washington, London, and Paris proposing that the “natural solution” in Berlin would be to reunite the city and make it “part of the State on whose land it is situated.” But since the Western powers were unlikely to embrace this plan, Khrushchev said he would be willing to discuss turning West Berlin into a “free city” under United Nations protection. If the West was unprepared to accept even this alternative, Moscow would have no choice but to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany, thereby eliminating the legal justification for the continued Allied occupation of Berlin. The West was given six months to deal satisfactorily with the Soviets, or face being forced out of Berlin by East Germany. Moscow’s note also warned against any “reckless threats of force” by the Western powers: “Only madmen can go to the length of unleashing another World War over the preservation of privileges of occupiers in West Berlin.”
The Western powers, including the United States, had little inclination to fight over Berlin. No doubt it was a great place from which to spy on the East, but it was not, in the eyes of the Pentagon, of supreme strategic importance to the U.S. defense posture. Nor did the Pentagon have any illusions about being able to defend West Berlin if the Soviets decided to rub it out. On the other hand, the city had taken on great meaning as a political symbol, as a living monument to the West’s determination not to give up any more ground to the Communists. Moreover, Washington was under heavy pressure from Bonn to hold the door open in Berlin so that the West Germans would not be shut out of the former German capital. As President Eisenhower grudgingly admitted, Berlin constituted another “instance in which our political posture requires us to assume military postures that are wholly illogical.” He might have added the word “ironical,” for it would certainly have been perversely ironic if Washington had gone to war against a former ally to “save” a city that, just a few years before, both contenders had been trying to destroy.
Yet it was beginning to look as if Berlin might indeed be the cause of a new war. In his misguided assumption that Washington would abandon Berlin if Russia stepped up the pressure, Khrushchev harangued Ambassador W. Averell Harriman in June 1959:
We are determined to liquidate your rights in West Berlin. What good does it do for you to have eleven thousand troops in Berlin? If it came to war, we would swallow them in one gulp. . . . You can start a war if you like, but remember, it will be you who are starting it, not we. . . . West Germany knows that we could destroy it in ten minutes. . . . If you start a war, we may die but the rockets will fly automatically.
As a way of removing Germany and Berlin as potential Cold War flash points, Khrushchev proposed to Harriman the withdrawal of all foreign troops from German soil and the reunification of that country as a demilitarized, neutral state. To illustrate his point, the Soviet leader, who was famous for his earthy humor, passed along a “current joke in Russia,” which said “that if you look at Adenauer naked from behind, he shows Germany divided, but if you look at him from the front, he demonstrates that Germany cannot stand.”
Harriman relayed this cheerful conversation to Eisenhower, who, for all his doubts about Berlin’s strategic worth, was not about to back down there. As if to convince himself that Berlin really was worth a fight, he envisaged it as the top of a slippery political slope down which the West would surely slide if it abandoned that city, even at the threat of nuclear war. “I’d rather be atomized than communized,” he said. The Pentagon, meanwhile, readied a plan of action in case the Russians followed through on their threat to allow the East Germans to curtail Western access in and out of West Berlin. First, America would send a platoon-sized armed convoy across the GDR to Berlin (shades of Clay’s plan in 1948); if the East Germans (or Soviets) fired upon this outfit, a division-sized convoy would follow. Should even this force run into trouble, an all-out attack would result in which, as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Adenauer, “we obviously would not forego the use of nuclear weapons.”
In fact, Pentagon strategy at this juncture called for the U.S. to use its nukes first, to get in its best licks before the Russian rockets flew. The plan also envisaged extensive use of tactical atomic weapons against enemy targets in Germany. This would undoubtedly cause some “collateral damage.” Dulles admitted to the German chancellor that NATO estimates (based on earlier war games) projected 1.7 million Germans killed and another 3.5 million incapacitated. This grim scenario reduced considerably the chancellor’s enthusiasm for a fight to save Berlin, a city which he had never liked anyway. “For God’s sake, not for Berlin!” he cried.