Wonderful Tunnel

Berlin, city of rubble, refugees, and occasional patches of glitter, is an Alfred Hitchcock dream of subterfuge and suspicion. In back streets, darkly mysterious houses lurk behind high wire fences suggestive of darker and more mysterious doings within. Newsmen recently counted 27 separate agencies of Western intelligence known to be at work in Berlin. Their operatives--some fashionably clothed in the grey flannel of New York's Madison Avenue, some with armpit holsters bulging under blue serge--report to different headquarters, and rarely know what their colleagues are up to.

In all Berlin there is no spot better suited to the Hitchcock scheme of things than a rustic, semi-deserted corner known on the U.S. side as Rudow and in the Russian zone, just over the way, as Alt-Glienicke. Self-important ducks and chickens strut like commissars in Alt-Glienicke's cobbled streets. Berlin's only working windmill turns lazily in the breeze near by, and close to the boundary separating East and West stands a U.S. radar station, bending its reticular ear to the operations at East Berlin's busy Schoenefeld Airport. Two rings of barbed wire guard the lonely radar post, and behind them a detachment of uniformed Signal Corps men live a life as secret and isolated as monks.

The Big Cellar. For many a month, the supersecrecy surrounding the construction and operation of Rudow's radar station had fed the gossip of bored Americans in the occupied city. There were those who remembered a civilian engineer hired to supervise the job; he had quit in disgust because the blueprints seemed so crazy. "Why build a cellar big enough to drive through with a dump truck?" he asked, and was told to mind his own business. Others recalled seeing friends whom they knew to be engineers suddenly appearing at the station wearing the insignia of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Why? An amused shrug was the only answer questioners ever got--but last week the Russians thought they had found a better one.

One night at 7 o'clock, an angry, chunky Soviet colonel named Ivan Kotsiuba called a press conference in East Berlin. Purpose: to protest the building by "American organizations" of a secret tunnel under East German territory, "with the criminal intent of spying." Offered a chance to see for themselves, the Western newsmen were taken to a site some 500 yards from the radar station at Rudow.

A Lot of Money. Truckloads of Red army troops and squad cars crowded with Volkspolizei stood by. Mobile generators were humming to provide lights for the occasion, and at the entrance to a hole dug in the ground, a colonel of the Russian signal corps was on hand to explain it all. Ten feet below, its entrance a hole cut in the roof by the Russians, lay the tunnel itself: a cast-iron tube about six feet in diameter and 500-600 yards long, crammed with electronic equipment, cables, tape recorders, ventilating apparatus and pumps of both British and American make. At the East German end, cables led out of the main body of the tunnel to a separate chamber where they were linked to two East German cables and a third used by the Russians. What was at the American end? The newsmen were not permitted to know. As they crawled westward, a sandbag barrier barred the way, its purpose emphasized by a sign reading in English and German: "You are now entering the American sector."

"This tunnel," said the Russian expert, with a note of admiration, "was built to last years. The party responsible must have had a lot of money."

Who was responsible? Nobody, neither the Pentagon, the State Department, nor the Central Intelligence Agency, was saying. But as Berlin's papers erupted gleefully with the news, one Berlin editor told a ranking U.S. official: "I don't know whether your people dug that wonderful tunnel or not, but whoever it was, let me say I think it was too bad it was found. It's the best publicity the U.S. has had in Berlin for a long time."

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