Digging for Gold | Cold War
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This is True Spies.

The podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I'm Rhianna Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios.

Digging for Gold, April 22nd, 1956. On newsstands around the world, papers are filled for the fourth day in a row with excited dispatches from London. At that time, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, and Nikolai Bolganin were visiting London. There was an effort to maybe cool down some of the tensions, and the Soviets were perhaps trying to cozy up a little bit with the government of Anthony Eden.

While the Soviet leader and his premier cozy up to the British prime minister, beaming handshakes captured on film to the delight of the global press, some 600 miles away, another Cold War story is unfolding. It had been a very uncommonly wet April in Berlin, and there'd been quite a bit of long, hard rains, and these were causing quite a bit of short circuits in the Berlin telephone system.

In East Berlin, the Red Army's telephone lines are down. Well, in the most southern corner of Berlin, which is a very large city, the neighborhood of Walklinica, there was some shorts being reported. And a crew went out to location of one of these shorts and they were trying to dig around, trying to find where this short circuit could be.

In a suburban enclave of the city, a team of East German technicians and a Red Army signal crew dig into the pavement. And after a couple hours of digging through the road pavement to get down into the ground, they came across some sort of trapdoor as if it led down into a chamber. A small chamber sitting directly alongside thick black telephone cables.

Under concrete skies, more Red Army officials arrive. Underground maps of sewers and cable tunnels are consulted. But no one has the faintest idea what this room is. Eventually, one of the crew makes a discovery. It becomes evident that it's some kind of tapping operation. Networks of cables splinter away from the trunk-like telephone lines along the floor of the chamber.

They lead towards a trap door. They didn't want to try to blow the door itself because they thought it might be booby-trapped. They weren't sure what was going on. So they dug up an opening next to the trap door. And when they looked down into this opening, they could see that there was a shaft that seemed to lead down towards another opening in the ground, a large door. And on that door, a warning. It was in German and Russian. Entry is forbidden by order of the commanding general.

The Discovery is passed up the chain of command. It appears the crew have stumbled across some top-secret subterranean chamber. The bilingual warning suggests the work of the KGB, perhaps, or some still more esoteric Soviet operation. And yet no one in the East seems to know anything about it. The crew is ordered to once again dig around the door. When they break through the wall, they are greeted by another chamber.

Large and pristine as a hospital ward. It's just so much unbelievable, clean electronic equipment. It looks like the command center on a battleship. A vast tunnel stretches into the distance. And it doesn't take a genius to figure out where it leads. This is no Russian operation. Well, this section where the digging was taking place was right near the border between Russia

the American sector and the Soviet sector. And this tunnel that seems to lead away from the tap chamber they've uncovered goes directly west towards the American sector. And there's a U.S. Army installation about a quarter mile away across the border that it seems to be heading in that direction. In that U.S. Army installation, there is panic.

They have watched this whole scene unfold from a distance. It's all been under observation, you know, 24 hours a day. And you have U.S. Army soldiers as well as

CIA officers who were out there watching and reporting back to the Berlin base headquarters and warning that the digging by these crews is getting closer and closer to the installation that they have. And there's a moment where they realize that the whole thing is up and there's going to be quite a reaction probably by the Soviets.

Berlin is the new frontier of East and West. The atmosphere is fraught, at the best of times. You know, in the context of the times, there was a great deal of fear and anxiety of inadvertently triggering a shooting war. The Americans know that the Red Army is at the other end of their tunnel, heading towards them.

So the Americans had set up a 50 caliber machine gun at the American side of the tunnel and it was aimed down the way towards the east and towards where the crews were examining what exactly they had found. If the Russians breach American territory, they will be greeted by the echoing clang of the machine gun's bolt being pulled.

The risk of a shootout weighs heavy on the nervous CIA officers stationed in the tunnel. And yet the discovery of this operation and its potential fallout

is deemed a price worth paying. The tunnel had been in operation 11 months at that point, and it was considered just a raging success. I mean, just an absolute treasure of material about both the Soviet Red Army as well as the KGB. They had learned and picked up all kinds of information over the course of nearly a year, and the amount of intelligence they had captured was

was phenomenal. And there was a feeling that this was one of the most successful intelligence operations they'd ever operated. This unprecedented tapping exercise is known as Operation Gold. It is, perhaps, the most audacious signal intelligence operation the world has ever seen. It's a shame that it has come to an end, but all things must pass.

And Gold's architects can rest easy in the knowledge that the discovery of the tunnel appears to be a genuine accident. They monitored all the recordings that were made of the workers who had discovered the tunnel, and the surprise that they had shown was genuine. They didn't know it was there. So it certainly seemed conceivable that this was, in fact, an accidental discovery that had been prompted by the heavy rains.

Pats on the back all round, then. After all, what you don't know can't hurt you. They don't know that George Blake has informed the KGB about this tunnel and in fact had informed them about the tunnel before a single spade full of dirt had been turned over to dig the tunnel. They had known about it from the start. The spy in question is nowhere to be seen in East Berlin on the morning of April 22nd, 1956.

But his shadow looms large over that morning's discovery. It looms large over the entire Cold War. George Blake was really one of the most consequential spies of the 20th century in terms of the amount of damage he did and the consequences for the Cold War.

You're about to get up close to a spy whose story is almost too fantastical to believe. His biography, I mean, it's part 1001 Arabian Nights, part The Great Escape, almost Grimm's Fairy Tales wrapped in. Amazing story. And yet every word is true. On that, you can stake the good reputation of the man telling this story.

I'm Steve Vogel. I'm a journalist and author. Wrote for the Washington Post for a number of years covering mostly military subjects. And I've written several books on military and intelligence history. It's in one of those books, called Betrayal in Berlin, that Steve Vogel dives deep into the peculiar tale of George Blake.

It's a story that begins on the European continent in the aftermath of a brutal war. His father was a Sephardic Jew originally from Constantinople who had ended up fighting for Great Britain during the First World War. And after the war, he was sent to Holland as part of the drawdown at the end of the war. And he met a Dutch nurse and they fell in love and were married.

In 1922, the happy couple welcomed a baby boy to the world. And they named him after King George. His father, Albert Behar, loved England and felt a great sense of patriotism towards Great Britain. George Behar was raised in Holland. His upbringing was humble and peaceful. Until his early teens, when his father fell ill and died suddenly. That death changed everything.

George's mother reluctantly agreed.

She wanted to give him the best chance possible. So George set sail at, I believe, age 13 for Cairo and fell in with this very mysterious and loving family that raised him, showing him all different aspects of life in Egypt. In Cairo, George's world expanded rapidly.

He was going to different international schools. Some of the family members, there was one cousin in particular that he felt great affection with, Henri, who would go on to become the founder of the Egyptian Communist Party. So he was seeing different aspects of life in Egypt and he was raised in a sense in a way that he would later say had him a little bit unsure about his identity. An uncertain boy born of uncertain times.

When World War II erupts in 1939, George is hastily recalled to Holland to be at his mother's side. His mother just wanted the boy at home, was concerned about having him overseas while this was happening. Though truthfully, he would have been safer staying in Egypt.

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When the love he left behind reappears, romance reignites. His career, his real identity, and his mission are pitted against his heart, hurling them both into a deadly game of international intrigue and espionage. The 10-episode spy thriller features a stellar cast, including Jeffrey Wright, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Richard Gere. ♪

New episodes of The Agency are now streaming on the Paramount Plus with Showtime plan. Visit ParamountPlus.com to get started.

By the time the Nazis invade Holland, he's visiting his grandmother. And in the meantime, his mother, who is an English citizen by virtue of her marriage to Albert Behar, is evacuated along with George's sister. They're evacuated to England. But when that evacuation takes place, George is off with his grandmother and they can't contact him. And so he's left behind. He's living there with his grandmother as the Nazi occupation settles into a long occupation.

In those days, conventional wisdom said that those in such a vulnerable position would do best to keep their heads down.

George clearly never got the memo. He begins working as a courier for the Dutch resistance. He's a young kid and they end up using him as a courier to deliver messages or to pick up messages or deliver leaflets and pamphlets trying to undercut the Nazi occupation of Holland. And he gets to be quite good at this and does this for over a year. Call it George's first foray into the business of espionage. He demonstrates true aptitude.

But he also understands that he's playing with fire. As the war progresses and he's getting older, he's becoming concerned about his safety because not only quite apart from the fact that he's working as a courier for the Dutch resistance, he's also half Jewish and he's also a citizen of England.

And so it's time to set sail for greener pastures. He uses his contacts with the Dutch resistance to request their help in getting him to England. He couldn't just sail across from Holland. The risks were too great. What was thought to be the safest way would be for him to travel into occupied France and through a network of Dutch and French resistance be more or less escorted or given directions on how to get down to Spain.

The details of that journey alone would be enough to fill the pages of a dime-store war thriller. But this is only the beginning of George's story. So we'll have to settle for the short version.

So he embarks on this very dangerous escape and along the way he meets different people in the French resistance who bring him to safety in different cities and ultimately they connect him with a guide who can bring them across the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain, which is officially a neutral country at that point, and get him to safety there. He makes this journey and does make it into Spain but he's held by Franco's government along with a number of other foreign citizens in a prison there.

A first taste of captivity. It's here that George uncovers the true depths of his resilience. He discovers that he can endure almost anything. Eventually, the Spanish government agrees to send a number of these foreign captives back to their respective countries. So George Blake is eventually put on a ship that brings him to England and to London, where he's finally reunited with his mother and sister.

At last, the ordeal is over. The strings soar and the credits roll. Or they should, anyway.

But George would not be content with happily ever after. At a very young age, he'd experienced enough adventure for most people for a lifetime. Already, by the time he arrives in England, he was quite skilled at a life underground, at a life of deception, a life of adventure. So when he arrives in England, after the joy of reuniting with his mother and his sister, he begins to feel pretty bored.

By this time, the young man has a new name for his new British life. George Behar has become George Blake, and it's under that name that he volunteers for the Royal Navy. Great Britain, still in the midst of its gargantuan war effort against Germany, happily accepts his pledge.

but his tenure in the Navy will be brief. - His commanding officer, one of them notices that he has amazing language skills. Of course, he speaks Dutch and English, but he also speaks German and French. And the officer recommends that he be considered for a position with the Secret Intelligence Service. - George Blake is vetted, without his knowledge, for a role in SIS, also known as MI6.

He's found to be an ideal candidate for the most storied intelligence office in Britain. So he's back in the game, he's back doing intelligence work based in England, and he would help agents who were being dropped in by parachute to Holland, and he would escort them to the airfield where they were being taken so that they could help the Allies report on what the Nazis were doing in Holland as the liberation begins to approach. It's important, exciting work.

And yet, George Blake can't help but feel conflicted about his new life in the UK. To some extent, he admires the British and their sense of duty and patriotism altogether against the Nazis. But he chafes at some of the aspects of British society that rubs him the wrong way. There's a very class-conscious society. He feels like sometimes as if he's treated as a foreigner.

He falls in love with one of the secretaries who works with SIS, who's from a very blue blood family. He's discouraged from pursuing that and just he has some resentments that he feels that he's not being given the full value of being a subject of the crown, being a British citizen. After Europe has been liberated and the war declared over, many of George's colleagues in SIS returned to civilian life.

But George decides to stay in the game. He's been enthralled by the work that he's doing, and he's one of the people that agrees to stay. So he's sent to Hamburg in Germany, partly to keep an eye on some of the German Navy officers there to make sure they're not fomenting some sort of rebellion, but also to try to recruit German naval officers to spy on the Soviets, who at this point are occupying the eastern half of Germany.

Already, a new conflict is beginning to take shape in the power vacuum left by the collapse of Nazi Germany. George Blake finds himself sizing up a new enemy. There's distrust and concern about the huge Red Army presence in Eastern Europe and in Germany. He's part of the intelligence effort to find out what the Soviets are up to. By the time his assignment in Hamburg ends, in March of 1947,

There is already a sense that this new conflict will define the intelligence landscape for years to come. At that point, he's offered a permanent post with SIS, but they want him to learn Russian. So they send him to a special program at Cambridge University where he essentially focuses entirely on learning the Russian language. All to better understand the new post-war enemy.

And George's first posting makes it clear just how far this new conflict will reach.

But in this new theater of war, George Blake finds himself struggling to adapt.

He feels woefully unprepared for his assignment. Part of it was that the idea of trying to spy in North Korea, you know, to find out what was going on there was nearly impossible because of the regime that's been set up. It was just impossible for Blake to penetrate North Korea or to even try to recruit people from the North. So he's sort of frustrated from that standpoint. His other target is the Russian city of Vladivostok, some 80 miles from the border of North Korea.

But Blake finds this equally impenetrable. - One of his superiors who had a very dim view of foreigners, people who weren't British blood going back centuries is pretty harsh with him and is pretty dismissive of him. And Blake begins to feel unappreciated and feels that his talents aren't really being used to their fullest. - George Blake is still in Seoul, frustrated and unhappy on the morning of June the 25th, 1950.

He's actually at church. It's a Sunday morning when North Korea launches a surprise invasion and the American officers there in the church, you know, word starts to spread that the North Korean army has come in with full force into the south and is on the way to Seoul. All around, diplomats scramble to evacuate the city before North Korean forces arrive.

But Blake is not one of them. The UK decides to keep their people in place, including Blake, because officially the idea was that they would be neutral in a war. But by the time those forces arrive, the situation has changed. America has declared its intention to enter the conflict, and Britain has expressed its support, which makes Blake an enemy of the North Korean people.

When the North Korean army enters Seoul, it's not too long before some soldiers are sent over to the British mission there and George Blake along with some other diplomats are taken prisoner. For the second time in his life, George Blake is taken captive.

though the following months will make his stint in a Spanish jail seem like the happiest of memories. He's taken along with these other diplomats, journalists, a lot of nuns, other priests who are working there in South Korea. They are brought in further up into North Korea and also joined with a number of American GIs who have been captured in the first weeks of the war. And they deal with truly horrific conditions.

As North Korean forces struggle to keep UN advances at bay, Blake and his cohort of prisoners are transported north, deeper and deeper behind enemy lines. They're put under the command of a North Korean officer who is dubbed the Tiger. And he's a very cruel, brutal officer who puts a number of these prisoners on what became known as the Death March.

where they're forced to march many, many miles through unbelievably cold conditions. By then, winter is starting to settle in and a number of people die. A lot of GIs die on this march and some of the nuns don't make it. Of the 850 prisoners who set out on the march, fewer than 300 survived. George Blake was one of them.

And somehow, despite the treatment he had endured at the hands of North Korea, he emerged from the experience with a new perspective on the conflict raging around him. He's a curious fellow in a lot of ways, and I think part of it was his interest in communism. That interest was stoked by his time at Cambridge, studying the Russian language.

They give him material to study about communism with the idea being you need to know your enemy. But it has sort of a different effect on him. He becomes fascinated with communism and Marxism and the idea of a system that works for all the people. On the death march through North Korea, Blake found the opportunity to apply the principles of Marxism to the war-ravaged land around him.

A lot of it, I think, was related to the heavy American bombing of North Korea. A lot of the captives see this firsthand. And the amount of bomb tonnage that's dropped on North Korea ends up being more than what was dropped on Germany during World War II. So it's real destruction of North Korean cities and villages. He sees the B-52s flying overhead, and he begins to wonder if he's fighting on the right side.

Over his following months in captivity, Blake reflects on the places and systems he has known.

Going back to his days in Egypt, in Cairo, and seeing the great poverty that existed there, and his experience in Seoul prior to the North Korean invasion, walking around there and seeing the great divide between a wealthy few and a much larger poor mass of people. And the South Korean government under Syngman Rhee is very corrupt, really basically an autocratic government that steps on the common man.

Until finally, all of his reflections lead him to action. - Blake had been there maybe closing in on a year when he delivers a note to one of the camp guards and asks that he be put in touch with a representative of the Soviet Union.

It's November of 1951, and the British SIS officer George Blake has just volunteered his services to his communist captors. A few weeks go by and eventually some Russians come out to the camp where they're being held, which is right near the Yalu River in the far north, northern reaches of Korea.

To the captives, this appears to be a routine visit from Red Army forces. These Russians come out to the camp where Blake and these fellow diplomatic journalists, captives, are being held. They make a big show of bringing each captive one by one to come talk to these Russians. And it's the usual sort of interrogation, just asking them for their views.

Customer satisfaction survey. On a scale of one to five, how would you rate your experiences on the Tiger Death March? Very well, back to camp with you. Now, when Blake goes to meet with the Russian, they bring him back into another room where the real guy who's running the show was waiting. For the second time, Blake is vetted by one of the world's foremost intelligence agencies. And just like the SIS before them,

The KGB find the young man an exemplary candidate. He's told that, you know, you'll be contacted at some point and you'll get further instructions. After his illicit meeting with the KGB, George Blake returns to camp and waits and waits and waits. More than a year passes with no word until finally news arrives in the camp.

The formidable Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, has died. This seismic event seems likely to unlock the stalemate of the Korean War.

The war is still going on, but with Stalin out of the picture, things start advancing more quickly. And some of these British and other nationality diplomats and journalists are released in March of 1953, and among them is George Blake. Again, Blake finds himself making a circuitous and surreal journey towards England.

They take the Trans-Manchurian Express through China to the Soviet border. And they're treated like kings, you know, given all these fancy meals, lots of vodka. Blake, like his companions, is elated for much of the journey. Unlike them, he has two reasons to celebrate. First, a homecoming. Second, a new job. As soon as they arrive at the border between China and the Soviet Union,

They'd go through another one of these drills where they meet one by one with a Russian representative. Once again, there's a KGB officer there to speak to Blake and they make arrangements in private that after he's back in London at some point, they're going to make contact with him. A week later, Blake arrives in London on an RAF flight.

After three years in captivity, his return is given due fanfare. He absolutely gets a hero's welcome. His mother is there to greet him when the RAF plane lands, and very quickly he's brought back into the SIS fold. Blake is subjected to only the briefest of debriefs. The idea that he might have been turned crosses no one's mind.

There's very little digging. The basic attitude was the North Korea where he was held was viewed as a pretty primitive country and there was no possibility that they could have turned any of their officers over to the other side. So it just wasn't deemed as reasonable. And so, on his return to the UK, Blake is given a promotion.

He's given a very important position at a new office that's being created called Section Y, which is going to be dealing with foreign electronic surveillance of the Soviet Union. And he's assigned to that office. Tentatively at first, Blake begins to settle into his new life as a double agent.

He begins making copies of the classified documents that cross his desk, always thinking about his next rendezvous with the KGB. They do it a bit cautiously at first, but he does have some meetings with an officer that's been sent expressly to London to be his handler, Sergei Kondrashov. They have some meetings on buses or in parks, but it's not too long before Blake provides information about some very secret operations that are going along.

One of the choice nuggets of intelligence that Blake passes to Kondrashov pertains to a scheme known as Operation Silver, based out of Vienna.

Vienna, like Berlin, is a divided city in the years after the war. All of Austria, in fact, is divided between the Soviets, the Americans, the British and the French. And there was a very capable British SIS officer named Peter Lund who began to wonder about the possibilities of tapping into the Red Army headquarters lines that were in Vienna. He managed to get some of the plans for the Vienna telephone system and

They figure out that it would be quite easy to dig some small tunnels just from one house leading across the street to be able to reach Red Army telephone lines. And they do this with quite a bit of success. They pick up a lot of information about what the Red Army is up to in Vienna and in Austria in general. The whole thing, a triumph of ingenuity and secrecy, at least until George Blake arrives on the scene.

George Blake learns about this operation and passes that on to the KGB and they had no idea that the West had been able to penetrate their telephone lines. So this immediately showed the great value that George Blake held for them. Although Operation Silver would soon look rather quaint when compared to its successor, Operation Gold.

This collaboration between SIS and the newly formed CIA was born out of one of the defining intelligence disasters of the 20th century. The Americans had, from 1943 through 1948, great access to Soviet radio communication.

that gave them great insight to what was happening inside the Red Army. And then in 1948, in this event that became known as Black Friday, they had suddenly lost that access, partly because of Kim Philby and also a second spy named George Weisband, who told the Soviets about what was going on. And almost overnight, the Soviets changed their communication methods. First, they changed their code system. And the second thing is,

They stopped using radio communication for most of their important communications. They turned instead to landlines, telephone lines. So almost overnight, the American intelligence community were cut off from that. And so, in the years after Black Friday, the CIA desperately sought a new source for the intelligence they had lost. They eventually come up with this idea of trying to tap into Soviet communication lines in Berlin.

And Berlin is the ideal place for this because Berlin was the communication hub of Central Europe. And this goes back to pre-World War I days. It was just all the telephone communication lines. Everything was routed through Berlin. And also Berlin was close to the Red Army headquarters.

for all their forces in Eastern Europe, which numbered over 400,000. So there's this huge Red Army presence in East Germany and Poland and Czechoslovakia. The great fear was that that Red Army could be set loose in a moment to cross over into the West. Which made keeping tabs on the movement of that army a top priority for intelligence agencies in the West. Given the sensitivity of the operation, the utmost secrecy was baked in from its very inception.

The Berlin Tunnel was amazingly close-hold operation. So very few people at the CIA knew anything about this operation. And the plan is to do this in conjunction with SIS because SIS had the expertise based on their operation in Vienna. The United States had the money and they had the resources to finance an operation like this and the British had the expertise.

So, same way as with the CIA, almost no one at SIS knows anything about this operation. A top secret meeting between the two agencies was set in London for December of 1953 to discuss the logistics of Operation Gold. It's a joint meeting between some of the senior Americans involved and some of the senior British officers involved. Only the most trusted figures from each agency are invited.

One, from the British side of things, is a recently returned war hero, his dedication to the anti-communist mission proven a thousand times over by his resilience in a North Korean prison camp.

Blake is there as the guy taking notes. So he's sitting there as this meeting unfolds. He's learning about this secret plan that would involve building a tunnel stretching a quarter of a mile into the Soviet sector. And the fact that CIA in Berlin has identified three major trunk cables

that carry the most important Red Army communications from Berlin to all across Europe and that there's an expectation that this could produce a mountain of intelligence for the West that would provide a real window into what the Red Army and the Soviet Union were planning. So he takes very good notes. Well, naturally he does.

He also keeps a carbon copy of those notes. About a month later, when he meets with Sergei Kondrashov, his handler, they meet on a double-decker bus and Blake hands him this envelope.

and gives him a brief rundown on what it holds. And Kondrashov later said that he could feel like this paper was almost burning a hole in his chest. Just the magnitude of the information that he was being given was pretty dramatic. And while this explosive material makes its way up the chain of Soviet intelligence, the CIA and SIS continue with their plans for Operation Gold at pace.

It is an astoundingly complex project to pull off. The CIA needs to bring in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to dig this tunnel because this is not something that the CIA can do on its own. And so a secret team is assembled and trained. They train out in the American West.

and they create the equipment and special tunnel material they're going to need for this operation. All of which will need to be transported to Berlin by way of ship and train. Which involves crossing through East Germany, and that is in itself quite a feat. They box it up to look like normal industrial-type goods, and they have to undergo Soviet inspection at the border, but it all gets through.

Still more challenging would be putting that equipment to use and digging a quarter-mile-long tunnel below the streets of perhaps the most closely watched city in the entire world. The excavation itself involves removing an enormous amount of soil, and this being dug from...

The west side, the American sector, across to the Soviet side, the place that they had chosen to build this tunnel was where the Soviet communication lines came closest to the American sector. But it was mostly part of Berlin that was pretty undeveloped, some small villages down there, mostly farmland, and with Soviets having a very clear vision across the border. All of this is taking place before the Berlin Wall has been built.

Great for ease of movement, terrible for privacy. It's a divided city, but there's no wall. So they would have to do something with all this soil that they're digging. And the idea they come up with is to build a warehouse above the hole on the American side, and they would just store all the soil in there. Which solves the material disposal problem.

But still, the construction team would need to tread extremely lightly. They can't use any kind of heavy equipment to dig this because the Soviets would hear the noise. So it has to be hand dug by teams of Army Corps who are working 24 hours a day. They could fit about six or eight of them in at a time. They're using little shovels to dig and then they build a little tiny railroad down at the bottom of this tunnel that they can load sandbags and haul the soil back to the warehouse.

painstaking bag by painstaking bag, the Berlin tunnel was converted from espionage fantasy to Cold War reality. This operation was enormous in its scale and it took about six or eight months to finish the digging. And yet even with the completion of the tunnel, the hardest work was still to come.

The tunnel that the Army Corps of Engineers has dug goes underneath the street where the cables are running. But it's up to the British to dig a shaft that gets up to the cables themselves, which are only

27 inches under the road, so very close to where Russian soldiers are walking and patrolling. But they devise special equipment so they can do this, and it's being done in total quiet because if you drop a wrench or something like that, it's going to make a clanging sound that could easily be heard up above. But they managed to pull it off.

In near silence, the British construct a chamber that provides them direct access to three trunk lines that carry vast swathes of Soviet communications. And the tapping itself is just a masterpiece of tapping work. They had to...

do it in such a way that the Soviets wouldn't notice any change in the current on these lines. That's the sort of thing that they could pick up pretty easily. This isn't like tapping into a telephone line in an office. Each one of these cables is carrying hundreds of circuits. So it's very intricate, but the British team pulls it off and they're able to tap the first of these three cables in May of 1955.

Back in the warehouse, at the other end of the tunnel, an army of intelligence workers sit at the ready. They've created this huge listening room with 150 Ampex recorders that can record all these conversations. And they've assembled teams there of interpreters and technicians. And they're listening carefully with their headphones. When the tap finally goes through and the first telephone call, the intercept involves a Red Army colonel speaking to one of his underlings.

At that point, they know they've connected, they've succeeded. After years of fiercely guarded planning, Operation Gold is live. And that's just the start of what becomes like a gusher of information. Within a very short time, they're getting dozens, then hundreds, and ultimately more than a thousand conversations a day are being recorded, which is an enormous amount of material to deal with.

The scale of this triumph sends ripples through the upper echelons of SIS and the CIA.

But this time, George Blake isn't party to the celebrations. He's transferred, ironically, to Berlin just a few weeks before the tunnel becomes operational. And one of the ironies is that Blake is in a worse position in Berlin to find out what's going on with the tunnel than he would be if he was still at Section Y, because the tunnel is Section Y's baby. They're going to know what's going on with it.

But once he's in Berlin, he doesn't have any reason to know or ask about the tunnel. But even from his new position, outside the fold of Section Y, Blake catches wind of Operation Gold's progress. He's an observant fellow and he picks up some signs that he's able to give the KGB a warning that he thinks the tunnel, this tapping operation, has succeeded.

Which begs a question: if the KGB had known about gold from the start, why had they allowed it to become operational? A couple of things are at play here. One is that George Blake is already proving himself to be an invaluable spy. They've lost primarily the services of Kim Philby and Donald Maclean, and so the KGB is really pleased with the work that George Blake is doing.

Protecting him becomes really almost their most important goal. So few people knew of the operation that acting on Blake's intelligence would likely expose their new star agent. And so the KGB instead decided to sit back and watch.

I think part of it, they were hoping that maybe the tunnel wouldn't succeed or we'll let the Americans waste all this money on this project and we'll just see what happens. So that's sort of the operating principle. Now, once they learn that it's succeeded, the question becomes, well, part of their reasoning is these weren't KGB lines primarily that were being tapped. These were Red Army lines. In other words, not our problem. Or so they think.

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KGB's most important sensitive calls don't travel through the underground cables. They travel through overhead telephone lines that are guarded by special KGB troops. But the KGB officers have to talk to offices elsewhere in Germany that are not on those lines. So some of the KGB traffic

with some of their satellite offices or their KGB conversations with Red Army. Those are being intercepted. Eventually, the KGB decides enough is enough. They can't let this operation go indefinitely. And they're trying to figure out how they can discover information

the tunnel without blowing Blake's cover. And eventually they realized that something like a rain event that causes a lot of shorts in the telephone lines could be an excuse to send teams out to look for the shorts in the line. So there's a special team that's put together to prepare for this moment where they would use the genuine East German crews that go and repair telephone lines to be sent out.

Which brings us back to where we began, with a team of East German telephone technicians digging up the road in a quiet corner of Berlin, while the world's gaze is directed towards Khrushchev's state visit to London.

Naturally, the synchronicity of these two events is no simple coincidence. Khrushchev and Bulganin visit to London was going to be happening, and Khrushchev and Sarah want some kind of propaganda coup, something that they can use to basically put pressure on

on the Americans. They're trying to see if they can force the West out of Berlin. And the idea occurs that they could use the discovery of this tunnel as a hammer to call the Americans hypocrites because the Americans were constantly sort of decrying the Soviet presence in East Berlin.

And this would show that while the Americans are just using Berlin to hide their nest of spies, it was seen as a great propaganda weapon that they could use. And they could also use that to sort of build a wedge between the Americans and the British diplomatically. The architects of Operation Gold had always assumed that if the Russians discovered the tunnel, they'd seek to sweep it under the carpet out of embarrassment.

Instead, they do the opposite. They want to make a big PR splash to advance this narrative that the Americans are using Berlin as a nest of spies and that they're violating East German sovereignty and so on and so forth. So they hold this big press conference and then that night they lead this convoy of journalists, reporters, cameramen, everybody out to the tunnel site, which is in this remote part of Berlin. And they have ladders set up and floodlights set up

And they bring, you know, reporters down into the tunnel itself. The next morning, reports of Khrushchev's visit to London are relegated from front pages around the world. Instead, the headlines marvel at the discovery of the audacious Berlin tunnel. For the KGB, the plans come off without a hitch.

Or nearly, anyway. It doesn't completely work out the way that they were hoping. A lot of the press coverage was pretty admiring. It was, my gosh, the CIA finally was able to pull something off here. Good job. But the main objective of this staged discovery was to protect the asset who'd made it possible. And on that front, the KGB had delivered. George Blake managed to lay low throughout the entire tunnel furore.

without raising so much as an eyebrow. After a few months, it seems evident he's not been uncovered. By this point, he and his wife are expecting their second child. He is beginning to feel more like a father or family man than he is as a secret agent. And he says that the life of deception is starting to wear a bit thin with him. Blake is recalled to London, where he requests a new placement in Lebanon.

an area where he knows he will be of almost no use to the KGB. When his transfer is granted, he begins his graceful exit from the life of a double agent. He's gotten away with it, for now. In truth, very few in George Blake's line of work are permitted to stroll into the sunset. There's a Polish intelligence officer who reveals to the CIA that

information that shows or indicates that British intelligence has been penetrated. And he shows them some documents that very few people would have had access to. And so the British begin examining this and George Blake is one of the few people who would have had access to some of these documents. Even so, Blake is ruled out as a suspect.

A man with as accomplished an intelligence career as he is considered beyond reproach.

It must have been something else. And for a while, they work on this theory that it was a burglary of a SIS safe in Brussels that led to these documents being handed over to the Soviets. But particularly, the Americans pressed the case that, no, there's something going on here because they're getting more intelligence from this Polish officer. So they reopened the investigation. And eventually, when some new people are brought on the case, there are more and more indications that Blake could, in fact, be an agent working for the Soviets.

Eventually, SIS concede that they should at least interview their star officer. They ask him to return to London for a routine check-in.

Blake is naturally suspicious, but he is assured by his KGB handlers that he has nothing to fear. He shows up at the headquarters and immediately he's confronted with different questions, different strange quincas that are difficult to explain. But he holds out. He's like, this is absolute rubbish. You know, in no way am I a spy.

And they really don't have anything on him, any kind of smoking gun or anything that really proves that he's a spy. Blake must know that the case against him is circumstantial at best.

If he can just endure these interviews, then he will survive. On the third day of these interrogations, one of the interrogating officers says something that really gets under Blake's skin. He says, "We know this isn't your fault. You were probably tortured and forced to reveal these secrets."

And Blake, who has this great image of himself, a spy with principle, someone who would never do this for money or anything dishonorable, that forces him to explode. He said, no, no, that's not true. I'm doing this on principle. I'm doing this to aid the poor people of the world. And he goes on. Basically, he confesses everything he's done. Once the dam is broken, the truth comes flooding out.

George Blake confesses everything, from his recruitment in the North Korean prison camp to his betrayal of the Berlin tunnel. The revelation detonates a bomb at the center of SIS. Blake had been one of their most trusted and well-liked officers,

And yet, for those who truly knew him, there had been signs. His wife, when she was told after Blake was brought back from Lebanon, on the one hand, she was shocked. She had no idea that he was working for the Soviets. But on the other hand, she immediately could believe it because there was so much about him that it would make sense in retrospect. You know, the way he would talk about Marxism and just his general personality, that he

that she didn't have any trouble believing it. The exposure of Blake sparked fierce debate in both the SIS and the government. Just how should a traitor of this magnitude be dealt with? A lot of people wanted this brushed under the rug, that, you know, this is an embarrassment, we should just allow him to be sent off into exile, which is somewhat what had happened with Philby. But...

There's also some people in the government who feel that we have to make an example out of him, and they end up going that route instead. And he's put on trial and given what ends up being the longest prison sentence in modern British history of 42 years. In May of 1961, for the third time in his life, George Blake found himself facing captivity.

And this time, there was little chance that he'd ever know freedom again. Still, he tried not to let the prospect of a long, slow decline behind bars get him down.

One of the things that made George Blake such an effective spy was his knack for getting along with people. He could be a very good friend to people. He could be the shoulder to cry on, you know. So prisoners from all walks of life would come share their problems with him and his very sympathetic ear. Even some of the guards would come to him for advice because his personality was very calm. He sort of decorated his cell with a nice carpet. They would listen to the

the BBC programs and have book club meetings and music club and all that. He built up a real network of friends that way. People on all sides of the political spectrum, you know, everything from murderers to just white collar criminals. They all liked old George and so he had a lot of people he could turn to when he decided that he wanted to escape. If you really believed that George Blake would simply give up, then you haven't been paying attention.

The next phase of Blake's odyssey is perhaps the most spectacular of all. There was one prisoner named Sean Burke, an Irishman who was in prison for trying to kill a police officer. He had a literary side to him and Blake would sometimes write articles for the prison magazine and they sort of bonded over some of this. And when Burke's sentence was almost complete, Blake approached him one day and said,

Sean, I think it's time for me to get out of here. Can you help me? And that's the sort of thing that Burke would have loved to have done because he was very anti-authoritarian. He wanted to pay back the British authorities somehow. With his unlikely co-conspirator, Blake hatches his final epic plan.

Burke is able to smuggle a walkie-talkie in for Blake to use, and then with the help of some of the fellow prisoners who had been released from the music class who were also sympathetic to Blake, they were anti-nuclear activists and they had some sympathy for someone that they felt was given an unjustly long sentence. And none of them are really capable criminals in any sense, but

They still come up with this kind of Keystone Cops type scheme that involves throwing a rope ladder over the wall and then they would spirit him away. And it amazingly works. On the 22nd of October 1966, the master spy George Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in West London and disappeared into the night.

It would be nearly two months before he surfaced again, at an East German checkpoint 600 miles away. He identifies himself to the officers there, saying that he wants to speak to some Soviet representative, and eventually...

They get through to the KGB and it turns out by chance Sergey Kondrashov, his old handler, is in Berlin at this time and they race out to this border station and, you know, it's unbelievable. Blake is kind of haggard looking, he's got a beard and wearing old clothes, but of course they know who he is and the KGB of course was over the moon that he was back and within a week or so he's brought back to Moscow and starts a new life there. Here, once again,

I must warn you away from a hunt for happy endings.

As it turns out, life behind the Iron Curtain is not quite the utopia that Blake believed he was fighting for. He's very disappointed. It's not what he had hoped or expected. And he believes the fault is with the Soviets themselves. He remains an adherent of Marxism. He believes that they just didn't practice it correctly. But dealing with an authoritarian state there and the shortages of all different types of food and goods, it's pretty evident that this isn't going to be a

a life of roses and milk and so forth. And yet it is the only life that is left available to him. Blake lives to the ripe old age of 98. He outlasts the project of Soviet communism, to which he devoted everything by some 30 years. Finally, in 2020,

He lets go. He dies perhaps disappointed with the way certain things ran out, but I think by most standards he was happy enough in Russia and had a dacha outside of Moscow where he really enjoyed taking walks and living out in the country. As for his legacy, for better or for worse, Blake will always be remembered first and foremost

as the man who betrayed the Berlin tunnel. The ironic thing is that the tunnel may have accomplished what Blake would later say what his goal was, which was to keep the peace.

because the real fear that the Americans had was of being caught unawares. And the tunnel in that period, 1955-56, was at a time when the CIA, when the United States was operating blind because they had no spies really to speak of in the Soviet Union. That was a critical period there when

There was a fear that a nuclear war could be set off very quickly if one side misread what the other was doing. And so the feeling was that the tunnel, by giving the United States assurance that in fact the Soviets were not planning an invasion, they weren't planning to launch a nuclear strike, that cooled the temperature a bit. For a full account of Blake's incredible life, you can turn to Steve Vogel's Betrayal in Berlin.

In his final analysis of one of the most compelling characters in the history of espionage, Vogel finds himself ambivalent as to Blake's motivations. A lot of it, I think, could be said to be ideology, but I don't think that's the only thing at play. I think he had a

I'm Rhiannon Needs.

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There was even incendiary explosive devices found on a DHL cargo flight coming out of Stuttgart, Germany, that were linked back to Russian government operatives. Now you think about that for a second, that one incident. If you change that from Russian operatives to the Islamic State or Al-Qaeda, how much more of a splash would it have been on the headlines? And yet we have a regime doing that.

and it kind of flies underneath the radar. We need to wake up to the fact that Russia is engaging in potentially lethal operations in Europe in support of their war in the Ukraine. True Spies, The Debrief from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.