BERLIN: Wonderful Tunnel

(2 of 2)

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."