Free A Brief History of the Spy by Paul Simpson Page B

tunnel was dug from a house seventy feet away from the lines, and to provide cover for the project, MI6 opened a store selling Harris Tweed – which proved to be almost too successful!
    The CIA were also interested in gaining access to the Soviet’s landlines, particularly after they realized that Moscow’sencoding machines had a flaw which sent a faint echo of the uncoded message along with the encrypted version. When the CIA’s Carl Nelson visited Vienna, he came across the MI6 operation, and the two sides joined forces – although it seems that Nelson didn’t share the information about the clear versions with his allies.
    The Vienna project was the inspiration for a similar operation in Berlin, which would in the end produce over forty thousand hours of telephone conversations and six million hours of teletype traffic. Ironically Operation Gold is best known because of the nature of its discovery by the Soviets.
    The Berlin Tunnel would be deemed ‘one of the most valuable and daring projects ever undertaken’ by then-DCI Allen Dulles who gave the go-ahead for the digging in conjunction with the British in December 1953. The tunnel was a major engineering feat, travelling nearly 1,500 feet beneath the ground to reach a cable that was only 27 inches from the surface. The cable’s location had been provided by an agent inside the East Berlin post office, and the construction of an Air Force radar site and warehouse was used as a cover for the work which began in February 1954. The tunnel itself was completed in February 1955, and taps were in operation until April the following year when it was discovered, with the Soviets trying to make a great propaganda coup from it. (This backfired:
Time
magazine commented that ‘It’s the best publicity the US has had in Berlin for a long time.’)
    As far as the CIA were concerned at the time, ‘Analysis of all available evidence . . . indicates that the Soviet discovery of the Tunnel was particularly fortuitous and was not the result of a penetration of the agencies involved, a security violation, or testing of the lines by Soviets or East Germans.’ It seemed as if the Soviets had got lucky – but in fact, they were aware of the tunnel all the time, thanks to yet another KGB spy within MI6’s ranks, this time George Blake (see chapter 5 ),who had been present at the initial briefing in October 1953, two months before Dulles had approved the project. It seemed, though, that the KGB was more concerned with protecting Blake than keeping the secrets that would be revealed via the wiretaps, so didn’t act sooner.
    The CIA’s successful involvement in the Italian election of 1948 was just the start of their intervention in the affairs of other countries. Sometimes this was by invitation of some of the parties involved – such as in China, where the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek welcomed the CIA assistance – but by no means was this always the case.
    Operation Ajax was a case in point. The CIA’s actions in Iran helped keep the Shah in power until the coup of 1979, but as its instigator, Kermit Roosevelt, would later note: ‘If we, the CIA, are ever going to try something like this again, we must be absolutely sure that the people and the army want what we want. If not, you had better call in the marines.’ The problem was: the CIA was acting against what a democratically elected government had decided.
    The problem arose when the concession that granted oil rights in Iran to the British-run Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) came up for review in 1950. The Iranian parliament, the Majlis, called for the terms to be renegotiated so they weren’t so favourable to the AIOC. One member of the Majlis, Mohammed Mossadegh, a Europe-educated lawyer in his early seventies, became the focal point for the opposition, and in March 1951, the AIOC’s holdings were nationalized. Mossadegh was then elected prime minister on 29 April. The British didn’t take kindly to