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The East Berlin Tunnel: Whose Ruse?
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According to a book co-written by Blake's KGB handler, Sergei A. Kondrashev, Soviet intelligence officials were highly concerned about the risk of exposing their source. They worried that suspicions might be aroused if they "discovered" the tunnel too quickly, so they let the operation proceed unmolested. Heavy rains that damaged one of the cables in the spring of 1956 gave them an excuse to inspect the communications lines and make it appear as if they had stumbled across the tunnel.
So it was the CIA that was snookered: According to an August 1956 internal memo, the CIA concluded that the Soviet detection of the tapping scheme had been "purely fortuitous and was not the result of a penetration of the U.S. or U.K. agencies concerned."
Blake's exposure as a double agent five years later led to a reappraisal of the wiretapping project: Had it generated any real secrets? Or had the Soviets fed disinformation through the cables?
In his book, Kondrashev said the cable traffic was genuine and that the Soviets hadn't dared transmit false material for fear of compromising Blake. But scholars remain uncertain.
"It's going to be hard to know for sure until we have more information on the Soviet side," said Christian F. Ostermann, director of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. "That story is still to be told."
Meanwhile, despite the passage of time, the tunnel keeps turning up.
In 2005, a German construction crew stumbled upon a buried section of the steel-reinforced passageway while building a highway to Berlin's Schoenefeld airport. It was excavated and taken to the Allied Museum in the former West Berlin, where a major exhibit was held a year later on the 50th anniversary of the tunnel's discovery.
Blake, who escaped from a British prison in 1966 and fled to Moscow, is still alive but has never divulged exactly what he told the KGB.
In November, in honor of his 85th birthday, he received the Order of Friendship, the highest award that can be given to a noncitizen, from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
