When I saw a 1990s Public Broadcasting special on a CIA cave in Berlin where England’s Office of Strategic Services had used before our monitoring program in the region, I knew it would be OK to tell my story about tapping the East German phone lines. The PBS special showed the NSA’s Devil’s Mountain (Teufelsberg) listening post but did not mention that the US Army Security Agency ran it.
Berlin courier–Frankfurt to Berlin–was a routine assigned to ASA Spc-5s and above. We went in full uniform on the permitted train with an armed escort. We also carried a sidearm and our courier bag was handcuffed to our left wrist. I did not have ‘need to know’ for what was in the bag, so it could have been just blank paper, and the courier mission was just a decoy task.1I had some thoughts about that when I started my book Nescient Decoy. Special interest targeting (SIT) wasn’t my normal job in the Army Security Agency. I was an intercept equipment repair specialist but that did put me in everyone’s room.
My second trip to Teufelsberg was initially in the guise of courier. When I got a night call to report for courier duty, I thought I was a last-minute replacement. When my escort and I got to Potsdam where East German and US train engines were exchanged, a Second Lieutenant met us with a change of orders. I’d say someone knew all along what was happening but just kept me out of the loop for security reasons. The LT had authorized keys for the handcuffs on me and the bag, so I figured everything was OK.
He and the escort exited the train as if he was the courier and the sergeant that was with him and I left as if we were just passengers.
That sergeant had little to say, and I was too tired to start a conversation. After a snack, he had me put tape on my dog tags and exchange my dress uniform for German civilian work clothing. He instructed me to not discuss anything, including not introducing myself, and took me to a room where several others were seated. There were five of them, six if the man in charge is included.
I didn’t know any of them before that day and never had contact again. I believe to this day that the former was by design and the latter is just coincidence. In fact, all including me were in similar civilian clothing, so I don’t know if I was the only one in the Army.
The mission was not given to us until we were transported to an entrance to an U-bahn (subway) tunnel that opened in West Berlin, ran under East Berlin, and opened at the other end in West Berlin. Four of us were given tools, and small battery powered microwave transmitter-receivers with mounted parabolic dish antennae.
If one looks at the internet, the tunnels that we went into, but were blocked at the surface are clearly identified, but I had no idea then and don’t know today which one we entered. We were instructed to just follow the guy in charge in single file.
One man was dropped at the tunnel entrance with a set of equipment. The rest of us stopped at a slightly wider place in the tunnel about fifty meters from the entrance (obviously pre-determined) and set up a line-of-sight mini-parabolic receiving/transmitting antenna. Slightly wider was a true description–the place was just one-half meter deep and a meter wide. And the train cars ran just outside rocking distance (about ¼ meter from the tunnel walls). We were cautioned that trains were scheduled every fifteen minutes and inattention to that schedule would be disastrous to the mission and even more to one who would have less than ten inches between the train and the wall.
The next ‘wide place’ was about three hundred meters from the second and the third was about three hundred meters more. The first train thundered past with three of us squeezed into the third indentation. One man and a setup were left there then the last two of us and the supervisor went to the fourth place and took the hinges off a metal cabinet hanging on the wall.
We used a special signal finding device to find which lines were live then connected them to a device that would transmit each live line at a different frequency. We got a pulse letting us know the system was working, then started the 1200-meter (3/4-mile) run to the tunnel entrance.
Each of us was picked up individually. I don’t know where any of the others went, but the taxi I’d been escorted to dropped me off at one of our smaller Berlin housing compounds as if I’d been on an overnight pass. My return trip to Frankfurt was on station transfer orders.
I never knew whether the operation was fruitful or not. That was not part of our mission, but we did get our part done.
I was back in Berlin for a special job less than a month after the tunnel job. I expected to be training some men on tuning special equipment I had advanced training on.
OK! I didn’t see the incident on the Glienicke Bridge, which connected East and West Berlin across Lake Wannsee.
On February 10, 1962, American spy pilot Francis Gary Powers was released by the Soviets in exchange for Soviet Colonel Rudolf Abel, a senior KGB spy.
Powers flew the CIA U-2 spy plane which was shot down on 1 May 1960 by the Soviet Air Defense Forces while conducting photographic aerial reconnaissance deep inside Soviet territory. He became a prisoner of the Soviet Union.
Abel had been found guilty on October 25, 1957, by an American jury on three counts of spying for the Soviet Union.
Newspapers and radio broadcasts reported on the exchange, and only then did I know what I’d been part of. About midnight, the day before the exchange, I from the Frankfurt shop met with three from other stations2Again, I neither knew any of them, nor had contact after the fact. to set up parabolic microphones on our side of the bridge and studio mics inside abandoned bird nests on the bridge structure. Allegedly, the mics in the nests were discovered and disabled, but hopefully the parabolics captured what was wanted. I could only guess the intent, and the mission results were outside my need-to-know.
It would not surprise me if a team from the other side did the same thing. Remember Mad magazine and its comic strip, “Spy vs. Spy?
I was hungry when rousted before morning light to get my ride to the train. After dressing, an escort told me all that was available before the mess hall opened was coffee and local bockwurst.
When I was offered it cooked, I expected it to be boiled in water on a hot-plate or something similar. My escort obviously knowing I wasn’t a radar tech took me and bockwurst on a stick to one of the domes on the site. The warning signs were posted within sight from every location in the geodesic space.
He extended the sausage on a long stick next to the parabolic transmitter pickup and said, “Key,” on his walkie-talkie. The sausage sizzled almost instantly. Then he explained that they normally cooked them on a grill. I ate it on a rolled slice of bread with German mustard.
It’s probably safe to say that nearly everyone in America and indeed most parts of the world know about microwave cooking. I’m sure I’d never heard of the ‘radar range’ in the mid-1960s. But operators at Teufelsberg knew the technology, its dangers, and microwave application to cooking.