Shifting quickly into damage-control mode, Bonn insisted that John had been kidnapped by the Soviets and forced to spout Red propaganda. This “provocation,” they said, was part of a desperate effort to sabotage West Germany’s legitimate efforts to bolster its defense by creating an army of its own, the Bundeswehr. John, however, went before the public to claim that his actions had all been voluntary. He then faded from the picture. The Stasi gave him a sinecure at Humboldt University and set him up in a pleasant apartment. They also surrounded him with around-the-clock bodyguards, lest the West try to snatch him back, or he try to go back on his own.
The Stasi’s fears were well founded. On December 12, 1955, seventeen months after his bolt to the East, John slipped out of a meeting at the university and, in the company of a Danish journalist, bolted back into West Berlin. Once there he insisted that he had
Was John telling the truth? Even though Soviet archival material on the John case has now become available, much remains murky in a drama that three expert commentators labeled in 1997 “the longest-running mystery play of the Cold War in Germany.” For what his testimony is worth, Mischa Wolf is inclined to believe that John never intended to defect. He credits John’s contention that his friend Wo Wo, who indeed was a Soviet spy, slipped him a drug in order to get him to East Berlin. But Wolf also believes that Wolgemuth was acting on his own initiative, not under orders from Moscow. Of course, once they had a man like John in their clutches the Soviets extracted maximum propaganda value from his “defection” and coaxed all the information from him that they could, which apparently was not much. They then, in Wolf’s words, “dumped the damaged goods on us,” allowing the Stasi to take care of John as it saw fit. Whatever the final truth in this bizarre affair, the Otto John story, reeking as it does of deception, betrayal, and political manipulation, is the perfect Cold War espionage tale. All it lacks is technological gadgetry.
There was plenty of gadgetry in the other major Berlin spy story of the 1950s—the saga of “Operation Gold,” an ambitious project to eavesdrop on Soviet communications by means of a tunnel bored under the Russian sector. More than the John affair, the now famous Berlin Tunnel operation put the former Nazi capital on the map as espionage-central in the early Cold War era.
The Berlin Tunnel was modeled on an earlier British operation in Vienna code-named “Silver,” which had yielded a load of informational ore concerning the Soviet occupation forces in the Austrian capital. Berlin was an even more attractive target than Vienna because, as a CIA man averred, “everything came to Berlin.” The Soviets, it seems, had an underground cable running between Karlshorst and their base in Wünsdorf, south of Berlin, which carried extremely sensitive data. In January 1954 CIA chief Allen Dulles gave authorization to build a tunnel between the American and Soviet sectors in Berlin that would allow Western electronic eavesdroppers to tap into the Soviet line and pick up their communications. BOB selected a promising site for the tunnel in the southeastern corner of the American sector, a stone’s throw from the Schönfelder Chausee in East Berlin, under which the cable ran. From the outset the operation was conducted jointly with the British, who, given their previous tunneling experience, were thought to be valuable partners.
