How We Spied on You

• Share

Hugh Montgomery couldn't resist the instincts born of a lifetime spent in the service of the Central Intelligence Agency. Finding himself in the inner sanctum of his former nemesis, Erich Mielke, the Minister of State Security in the defunct East German government, Montgomery covertly flipped up the lid of Mielke's typewriter with practiced expertise and gave the ribbon a quick once-over for latent images. No wonder they called him the spy's spy. A veteran of the CIA's Berlin operations base, Montgomery deftly vaulted over a guard rope, spun around in Mielke's chair with schoolboy glee and ransacked the bar-ren safe. "It's nice to find the seat empty," he said.

It was a triumphal moment for Montgomery, a jowly 75-year-old who was surrounded by fellow veterans of the cold war for a sightseeing tour of Stasi, East Germany's spy agency. The unusual trip through the espionage landmarks of Berlin was part of a conference, "On the Front Lines of the Cold War," sponsored by the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence and the Allied Museum in Berlin. "You can't tell the history of the past 50 years in Berlin without the help of intelligence agencies," says Helmut Trotnow, director of the museum.

While the CIA agreed to help declassify documents and gave permission for former agents to speak at the meeting, the main Russian contribution came from Oleg Kalugin, a former major general of the KGB, the Soviet Union's intelligence service, who, because he has broken ranks with his former bosses, brought only his memories. Adding a patina of covert authenticity, the bulk of the conference took place at Teufelsberg, a once secret complex built on an artificial mountain in a forest near the outskirts of West Berlin. Surmounted by the eerie globes of eavesdropping radio antennas, Teufelsberg was a huge cold war spy station. (These days it's in the hands of local developers, who are hoping to build a spy-themed hotel on the site.)

The old spies gathered with little malice and, if one looked closely, a hint of warmth. Montgomery recalled the early 1950s as the "golden age of human espionage in Berlin." Peter Sichel, a CIA station chief, noted that the more information the spies produced, the more their bosses wanted. "Demand just kept growing," Sichel said. One of the early CIA exploits was Operation Gold, an ingenious tunnel under East Berlin that was used to tap Soviet telephone lines. Unknown to the CIA at the time, however, George Blake, a Russian mole in the British secret service, revealed plans for the tunnel to Moscow Center even before it was built. Blithely, the Soviets waited a year to fill it in, to help protect Blake's identity.

The Americans emphasized the superiority of their technical-intelligence gathering, from both U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union and early satellite surveillance disguised as a weather-monitoring program. The Russians asserted a huge advantage in human intelligence, with Kalugin claiming that 200 Russian agents had penetrated virtually all branches of the U.S. government by 1948. As one ex-CIA agent joked, all those conspiracy theories of the 1950s turned out to be true after all.