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 Schönefeld 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.