David R. Stokes's Blog, page 11

The Spy Who Betrayed the Berlin Tunnel Has No Regrets

[This article was written for, and first appeared at, EXAMINER.COM]

There is a celebration of sorts going on in Russia these days.  The 90th birthday of a British traitor is being marked by a documentary film and personal greetings from President Vladimir Putin—a man who knows a thing or two about the spy business.

George Blake was apparently drawn to the Soviet side while working for the SIS in Korea. He was captured by the North Koreans and eventually decided to turn traitor. It’s a strange story with a Manchurian Candidate feel.

For most of the 1950s, he wreaked havoc on British and American security services.  These days he tells everyone that he’s fine with what he did.  “I am a happy person, a very lucky person, exceptionally lucky,” he told a recent interviewer.  Interestingly, there seems to be a connection between Blake’s missing moral compass and the fact that along with loyalty to his homeland, the other thing left behind in his life was any semblance of belief in ultimate accountability. “I do not believe in life after death,” says Mr. Blake. “In my childhood, I wanted to become a priest, but that passed. As soon as our brain stops receiving blood, we go, and after that there will be nothing. No punishment for the bad things you did, nor rewards for the utterly wonderful.”

George Blake in 2002

Unlike his traitorous contemporaries—Philby, Burgess, and MacLean—who all lived notably barren and frustrated lives in Russia after fleeing there to avoid accountability for their nefarious work, Blake seems to be a person at peace with himself.  Or so he says to Russian media and a world that barely remembers the dangerous dynamics of the Cold War.

George Blake is likely responsible for the deaths of many British agents—and at least one extensive and expensive joint U.S. and British intelligence initiative.

These days, the Berlin of that era is most often remembered for an airlift and a wall – the latter becoming the ultimate Cold War icon. But a few years ago, the CIA declassified a report, originally written forty years before, reminding us that when it came to Berlin and Cold War history, there was a third image – one that is often forgotten.

In between the airlift and the wall there was – a tunnel.

Nicknamed “Harvey’s Hole” after legendary Bill Harvey, head of Berlin Operations Base for the CIA during that period, the digging of a tunnel twenty feet longer (1,476 feet) than the Empire State Building was tall, was the biggest wiretap job in history. The idea was modeled after a successful British effort in Vienna, though the Austrian version was significantly smaller at mere 70 feet. The Berlin dig was dubbed Operation Gold (to insiders it was also referred to a PBJOINTLY).

The basic idea was to tunnel under a quite unappealing part of Southern Berlin, beneath the dividing line between the American and Soviet sectors. More than 650 people were employed in London and Washington, D.C. to process information gleaned from the taps. On the American side – just to show the dimensions of what they had to analyze – 4,000 feet of messages were handled daily. The mother lode was the KGB Headquarters compound located in the Karlshorst district of the city.

Digging began in August 1954 and the tunnel was completed in February 1955. The work involved displacing 3,000 tons of dirt and the installation of the actual physical taps on three cables – considered the most sensitive aspect of the project. The tunnel was ready for information to start flowing on May 11, 1955.

However, though it wasn’t known at the time, the initiative was doomed almost from its conception. The tunnel lived as an espionage conduit for 11 months and 11 days before being discovered by the East Germans on April 21, 1956. The story was that they had been looking for a problem with one of their cables, when they accidentally came upon evidence of the tunnel.

This was the widely accepted version of the events at the time as evidenced in the now declassified history. An internal CIA memo prepared two months after the tunnel was blown concluded that “the loss of this source was purely the result of unfortunate circumstances” beyond their control.

But Bill Harvey (who was known in some circles and “the American James Bond”) was never satisfied that the Soviets had just happened on the tunnel. A skeptic by nature, it would take a few years before that skepticism was vindicated. With painfully fresh memories of moles in the British intelligence community (MacLean and Burgess had defected to Moscow in May of 1951), some on the American side were understandably leery of such a massive and highly sensitive joint espionage venture. But whatever the concerns, they were dismissed in favor of the potential benefits.

But in this case, there really was a mole—George Blake. He would not be exposed as a KGB spy until 1961, but he had already been working for a few years for the Soviets by the time he was uniquely positioned to betray this project to his handlers. In fact, he attended vital meetings – always taking detailed notes – having ironically been tasked by MI-6 with preparing a written record of the discussions about the tunnel and its progress. He did so faithfully and gave copies to all involved. Of course, he kept a copy for himself – but it wouldn’t stay in his possession for very long.

In January of 1954 Blake met his KGB contact on the top deck of a London bus, handing over a copy of the minutes of the meetings between the CIA and SIS (Secret Intelligence Service – a.k.a. MI-6). So, the Soviets were in the loop all along.

George Blake may describe himself as happy man, but his life and work on the wrong side of history tell a different story.

Mr. Putin–Denounce This Vile Russian Hoax

[This article was written for and published in AMERICAN THINKER--Nov. 11. 2012]

There is a new tourist attraction in Moscow.  The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened a few days ago.  It cost 50 million dollars to build, with the funds mostly coming from Russian oligarchs.  Israeli President Simon Peres attended the opening.  It’s all part of a larger campaign on the part of the Vladimir Putin regime to invite Jews back to Russia.

The very term “pogrom” is uniquely Russian.  Over the past 125 years, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled sequential and systemic persecution under the Tsars, under the Bolsheviks, and even after the demise of the Soviet Union.  Russia has a deeply engrained culture of anti-Semitism.  In fact, since 1989, that nation’s Jewish population has dwindled by more than 350,000.  According to the New York Times, as of 2010, the Jewish percentage of the total Russian population was 0.11 percent (approximately 150,000).

Lost in all the PR hype about how Russia is now so welcoming to Jews is the failure to take historic blame for one of the great crimes of the past century — Russia’s role in the creation of a spurious document called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  This Russian forgery has fueled everything from that nation’s pogroms to the Holocaust (Hitler loved the Protocols and believed every word), and it even feeds the current-day hatred of the Jews by Islamists in the Middle East and anti-Semites worldwide.

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has long encouraged the distribution of the notorious publication.  And these days, talking heads on Egyptian television, now controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood in the sad wake of the ill-named Arab Spring, regularly refer to the Protocols as undisputed fact.

Mr. Putin’s regime consistently refuses to denounce the infamous forgery as a Russian creation.  As recently as March 2011, Russian prosecutors determined that the “early 19th-century document depicting a Jewish bid for global supremacy does not contain xenophobic content.”

If the Russian president is really interested in creating a kinder, gentler Russia when it comes to the Jewish people, then he should man up and acknowledge the Russian roots of this sinister lie.  He should also let the world know that such a document cannot and should not be trusted.

Not holding my breath.

The year is 1898, and Nicholas II rules a Russia that’s beginning to experience revolutionary stirrings.  The tsar is not the sharpest knife in the drawer and tends to be easily led by strong people around him.  He takes incremental steps away from his nation’s feudal past, but some in his court are alarmed.  Evil men began to seek a way to short-circuit these liberalizing influences.

If only they could convince the tsar that the voices of change he’s listening to are motivated by something other than the best interests of Russia…but how?  It was in this environment that the greatest of all anti-Semitic lies was born.  A threatening conspiracy would be manufactured — one that would bring Nicholas to his senses — and the Jews to their knees.

Mathieu Golovinski was living in Parisian exile at the time.  Though he was Russian, having been born in the Simbirsk region in 1865, he was forced to flee after repeated clashes with Russian authorities, usually having to do with his tendency to fabricate documents and evidence in legal matters.  He was a master of spin, innuendo, and dirty tricks.  He was also very skilled in the arts of forgery and plagiarism.

Oh, and he had once worked for the Okhrana — the tsar’s secret police.

Golovinski was approached by representatives from the tsar’s inner circle about creating a convincing anti-Jewish legend.  They needed a narrative — one that would be seen as proof of a sinister plot behind the winds of change beginning to blow in Russia.  He was commissioned to fabricate the evidence.

He came across an old book, written in 1864 by an anti-monarchist named Maurice Joly.  It was entitled Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu and was written as a thinly disguised attack on Napoleon III’s rule in France.  The French government suppressed the book, and the writer was imprisoned.  He committed suicide in 1878.

Golovinski decided to “borrow” from this obscure book, changing some of its cosmetics and phrasing.  It would be recast, using Joly’s fictional dialogue for a model, as the actual deliberations of a secret cabal of Jews bent on taking over the world.  When the fake was finished, it was spirited back to St. Petersburg.  Now the only thing needed was a way to get it before the ruler of the realm.

Enter the other religious zealot in and around the court of the tsar.

When most think of religious influences around Nicholas II, the focus is usually on Grigori Rasputin, the mad monk who haunted that scene beginning about 1905.  But often overlooked, and certainly more ominous as far as long-term impact on the world is concerned, is the influence of his cultic contemporary, Sergei Alexandrovich Nilus.  He was a writer on religious matters and a self-styled spiritual mystic.

He is also the man who first published Golovinski’s sinister forgery.

Initially placing the Protocols as a chapter in one of his books, Dr. Nilus saw to it that the potentate was fully briefed and convinced about the purported Jewish threat.  And like Rasputin, he also had the ear of the ruler’s wife — so the tsar, never a man to have his own firm opinions, fell prey to the lie.  And in the days following his nation’s defeat at the hands of the Japanese, circumstances were ripe for the rotten fruit of a compelling scapegoat.

On January 9, 1905, the tsar’s troops opened fire on protesters who peacefully marched near the palace in St. Petersburg.  This would become known as Bloody Sunday.  The tsar and his inner circle saw in the Protocols the real reason for the unrest — it was a big Jewish plot to overthrow the monarchy.

So it began — the gargantuan conspiratorial lie that has reared its hideous head time and time again over the past one hundred-plus years.  Jewish plotters were blamed for The Great War (1914-1918).  Then in its aftermath, when Germany was struggling to recover from defeat, the big lie was discovered by the greatest demagogue of the day, Adolf Hitler.   By the time the future German dictator was sent to prison in 1923, he was well-versed in the Protocols and drew significantly from the forgery as he wrote his own delusional tome, Mein Kampf.

And the biggest publishing hoax of the past one hundred years is not going away.  Islamists are using it to fan contemporary flames of hatred.  It’s arguable that there are more copies of the lie-laden text available today than ever before.  Hamas, the group now ruling Gaza, owes article 32 of its charter to these long ago discredited writings when it says things like: “Zionist scheming has no end[.] … Their scheme has been laid out in The Protocols of Zion.”

If Vladimir Putin and Russia are serious about stemming the tide of anti-Semitism, they should take historic national blame for The Protocols and dedicate a big section of the new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center to exposing the big lie and denouncing any person or nation that actually believes it.

Putin, Russia, Yalta, and Whispered Assurances

It hasn’t taken long for the Russians to noise it about that they are ready to cash in on an ill-advised promise made when two presidents thought no one was listening. You may recall President Obama’s whispered assurance to then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev: “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”

Of course, there is a new—yet ever old—Russian president these days. Vladimir Putin is back. He’s a mix of Joseph Stalin and Lavrenty Beria. Putin is an experienced strongman and intelligence officer. Hardly someone to be impressed by flexibility. I just read Michael Dobbs account of what happened when the “Big Three”—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—met at Yalta to carve up what was left of Europe. The book is called, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War. I heartily recommend it to you.

Dobbs gives a wonderfully detailed account of what happened when a weak and ineffectual president—blinded by unrealistic optimism (and in ill-heath) and determined to approach the Soviet dictator with his own brand of flexibility—gave history away to a ruthless tyrant.

In newspapers across America today, there are stories coming out of Russia with headlines such is this one in the Miami Herald: Russian Hopes for U.S. Flexibility on Missile Shield. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said this a day after the U.S. election: “We hope that President Obama after his re-election will be more flexible on the issue of taking into the account the opinions of Russia and others regarding a future configuration of NATO’s missile defense.”

I went back and reviewed two of my past articles—one earlier this year, the other from 2009—and they both read sadly prophetic:



Russia Rejects Our Reset Button in Favor of Theirs (October 18, 2009)

The President Whisperer (March 30, 2012)

Soviet Spy Who Betrayed the Berlin Tunnel Says He Has “No Regrets”

George Blake is back in the news. George who, you may ask?

Blake, a former MI-6 officer in Great Britain, was “turned” by the Soviets while he was in North Korean captivity during the Korean War—a sort of real-life Manchurian candidate. He spied for the communists for many years, passing secrets along to his handlers.

In fact, George Blake was very much responsible for the failure of one of the most ambitious espionage initiatives by the West during the Cold War—the Berlin Tunnel. I have written about this—an article that appeared at the Nixon Foundation site a few years back and that was subsequently published The Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies. You can read that fascinating story HERE.

The other day, Blake—who current resides in Russia (of course he does!)—said in a rare interview: “I’ve no regrets and have enjoyed the happiest years of my life in Russia.”

He betrayed up to 40 British agents en route to this “happy” life.

Read about it in the Daily Mail—HERE.