Book- Spies Beneath Berlin

The Berlin spy tunnel, said CIA chief Alan Dulles, was one of the most valuable and daring projects ever undertaken.

In 1955 it ran a tunnel 800 metres under the Russian sector of Cold War Berlin, and for more than a year tuned into Red Army intelligence.

This was an almost impossible trick: apart from the technical wizardry needed, any noise or vibration could have given the game away.

When snow fell panic measures were suddenly needed to prevent it thawing in a tell-tale line leading to the target building.

Trust, even between allies, was dangerous.

Despite the Burgess and Maclean affair, the Americans had decided that co-operation was safe once more, and the tunnel was a joint CIA/MI6 project using British expertise from a prototype in Vienna.

This was a mistake: there was another mole in the British secret services, and the KGB knew about the tunnel even before it was built.

Why the KGB kept the secret to itself is one of the puzzles explored in this book.

Was it inter-service rivalry?

Was the British mole so valuable that the KGB sacrificed Red Army secrets rather than blow his cover?

Or, since the Russians in fact had no plans to attack the West, did the KGB want that information leaked to reduce the risk of surprise strikes the other way?

Spies Beneath Berlin draws on eyewitness interviews and the full range of sources.

Praise for Spies Beneath Berlin:

'A remarkable book . . . which reminds us of something we should never forget - how a few outstanding Britons and Americans helped to preserve the peace, security and freedom of the West in the harshest years of the Cold War' - Oleg Gordievsky

‘Spies Beneath Berlin delivers surprise after surprise and makes all previous accounts of this amazing story quite obsolete.

It's a real page turner too - I read it virtually at a sitting' - Len Deighton

'Impeccably convincing . . . as exciting as a good detective story'

- The Spectator

David Stafford is an historian and former diplomat who has written extensively on espionage, intelligence, Churchill, and the

Second World War.

The former Project Director at the Centre for The Study of the Two World Wars at the University of Edinburgh, he is now an Honorary Fellow of the University and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where he and his wife now live.

251 pages.