Declassified East German Report Reveals KGB Knew About 1955 Berlin Spy Tunnel From the Start

A senior East German police officer found a report on a Cold War spy tunnel in the chaos after the fall of the Berlin Wall, took it home and kept it for decades before donating it to the Berliner Unterwelten museum. The museum specialises in the city’s extensive warrens of underground facilities. The document has now been published for the first time.

In 1955 the British and American intelligence services dug a 550m tunnel into the Soviet sector of Berlin. The tunnel was used to tap into USSR communications cables for 11 months before the operation was revealed to the world in April 1956. The British Secret Intelligence Service called the operation Operation Stopwatch while the CIA called it Operation Gold.

The wiretap delivered about 40,000 hours of taped conversations and 90,000 messages. The intercepted material revealed Nikita Khrushchev’s secret denunciation of Stalin and made it clear that the USSR had no serious intention of invading western Europe.

It purportedly enabled the identification of a hundred Warsaw Pact military bases, 350 spies from the Soviet GRU and several thousand Red Army officers.

Helmut Müller-Enbergs, a German intelligence historian and co-author of the book Operation Gold: the Berlin Spy Tunnel, said the operation was comparable to the achievements of Bletchley Park. “The source was extremely important,” he said. ” The CIA eventually published a handful of cursory reports on Operation Gold but kept most files heavily classified.

Researchers later found several other papers on the tunnel in the archives of the Stasi. MI6 and the Russian secret services have remained completely silent on the subject. The newly released document is the only surviving copy of a damage assessment compiled for the GDR’s interior minister in the weeks after the tunnel was exposed.

It was co-released by Helmut Müller-Enbergs, a former head of counterespionage at the Berlin domestic intelligence agency, and Dietmar Arnold, head of Berliner Unterwelten. The document includes more than a hundred black and white photographs of the tunnel and the wiretapping equipment. The exact length of the tunnel remains uncertain, with reports of 550m and others of 400m.

The East Germans had already known about the tunnel for quite some time before its public exposure. The Soviet KGB was aware of the tunnel project from its conception at SIS headquarters at 2 Carlton Gardens because of the double agent George Blake. George Blake took notes in the SIS meetings on the tunnel and passed them to Moscow.

The KGB allowed the operation to run for almost a year despite full awareness. Müller-Enbergs said its true value could be read between the lines, showing that public accounts of the tunnel’s discovery from senior Stasi spymasters were inaccurate. 7 million.

Müller-Enbergs has urged MI6 to disclose its side of the story, arguing that while the Americans provided funding it had been a triumph of British tradecraft. “In my view, the Americans were just along for the ride,” he said. ” The Times reported that the typewritten manuscript itself was strikingly shallow and inept, littered with spelling mistakes and even giving the wrong date of the 1953 popular uprising against the GDR regime in East Berlin.

Müller-Enbergs said the Soviet-GDR commission set up to investigate the tunnel involved so many disparate ministries that it could only have been convened over weeks or months before the official announcement. The historian’s theory is that the KGB prized Blake so highly it did not want to risk compromising him by ending the operation too soon.