|
BarkellWH -> British Spy George Blake Dies, Book Recommendation (Dec. 28 2020 22:14:19)
|
Some of you may have noted that the British traitor and Soviet spy George Blake died a couple of days ago in Moscow at the age of 98. He was involved in one of the biggest episodes of spying against the West during the Cold War. I mention this because there is a relatively new book out entitled “Betrayal in Berlin,” by the author Steve Vogel, that recounts the story of the Berlin Tunnel.
In the early 1950s, the CIA and MI6 devised a plan to tunnel under the border of East Berlin and tap into the massive Soviet military, classified phone system. It was audacious, and they did it without being caught, except for one thing: The MI6 officer George Blake gave the plan away to the Soviets. The Soviets, however, couldn’t stop it or expose it because to do so would expose their chief asset, George Blake in MI6.
The tunnel was built and taps put on the wiring. The Soviets fed disinformation through the classified lines, but they couldn’t make it all disinformation or we would catch on quickly that someone had tipped them off, thus, again, endangering their asset Blake. So we actually obtained some useful intelligence, but nowhere near the kind we would have obtained had Blake not tipped off the Soviets.
I read Vogel’s book a couple of months ago, which is a bit ironic in that Blake just died. He, like Philby and others, went to Moscow, although he did so by escaping from a British prison after a trial found him guilty of espionage. He was set up with an apartment, a dacha, and a Zil limousine.
I have a personal interest in this story, as I have known for decades about the Berlin Tunnel episode, and in the early 1980s I was assigned to the State Department’s Bureau for Intelligence and Research (INR). The Assistant Secretary for INR at the time was a gentleman named Hugh Montgomery who was seconded to INR by the CIA. Montgomery holds a prominent role in the Berlin Tunnel episode, as he was a young CIA officer working on the issue at the time.
I highly recommend "Betrayal in Berlin" if you have any interest in the Cold War and one of its most interesting and audacious episodes.
Bill
|
|
|
|
