Voices Under Berlin was somewhat of a sleeper when it was first printed, but word is getting around now, which necessitated a second printing.
This is the story of the Berlin Tunnel and the people who listened in on the conversations and tapped into the teletype messages of both the East Germans and the Soviets, who occupied East Germany from 1945 until 1989. Digging for Operation Gold, or Operation Stopwatch, as it was called by the British, began in September 1954 and was completed in February 1955. The tunnel was opened on February 25th, and lasted only 11 months, 11 days, before it was penetrated by the Soviets.
Although the operation was compromised while it was still in the planning stages by a British double agent, George Blake, the Soviet KGB decided to allow the project to go on, seeing it as a golden opportunity for disinformation. A warehouse with an especially deep tunnel was built specifically as a staging area for the tunnel. The 1,476-foot tunnel sat about 20 feet under the most heavily patrolled border in existence, and only 18-inches under a busy street. It was an engineering marvel.
It was impossible, of course, to alert all the East Germans and Soviets in the Occupied Zone of the tap, and the CIA eventually collected and recorded over a half-million calls, which were recorded onto some 50,000 magnetic tapes. It was only in 1961 that the U.S. learned of the KGB compromise, when Blake was arrested, tried, and convicted, but since the haul was full of valuable intelligence, it was deemed a success. The tapes were recorded and translated by hundreds of U.S. Army linguists on site in the Berlin Tunnel, as well as by those in CIA headquarters in the U.S. Although Voices Under Berlin is a novel, most of the operational data is real, with mainly the people and situations depicted being fiction.
.jpg?t=20120209092158)
Article comments