About - Betrayal In Berlin
In Betrayal in Berlin, he tells the astonishing true story of the Berlin Tunnel, one of the West’s greatest espionage operations of the Cold War. Vogel also provides the most vivid account to date of George Blake, the dangerous Soviet mole who betrayed the operation, including information from rare interviews the author conducted with Blake himself. This is a narrative so intricate that only now, after more than a half-century, is it possible to piece together the whole story.
Read More
Vogel’s definitive book is filled with so many layers of deception and double-cross that it’s as thrilling to read as the great spy novels of John le Carré and Len Deighton. Its code name was “Operation Gold,” a wildly audacious CIA plan to construct a clandestine tunnel into East Berlin to tap into critical Soviet telecommunication lines. The tunnel, crossing the border between the American and Soviet sectors, would have to be 1,500 feet (the length of the Empire State Building) with state-of-the-art equipment, built and operated literally under the feet of the Cold War adversaries. If successful, the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) would have live access to a vast treasure of Soviet military and intelligence communications. Exposure might spark a dangerous confrontation with the Soviets. Yet as the Allies were burrowing into the German soil, a traitor, George Blake (code-named Agent Diamond by his Soviet handlers), was burrowing into the operation itself.
Betrayal in Berlin is a heart-pounding account of the operation and its disastrous betrayal. After U.S. Army engineers and British telephone specialists succeeded against long odds in secretly digging the tunnel and placing the taps in May 1955, the West captured a flood of Soviet military and intelligence communications. Upon its discovery nearly a year later, the tunnel was celebrated as an astonishing CIA coup, and the agency basked in its new reputation as a bold and capable intelligence agency that had outwitted the KGB. But that celebration ended when Blake’s treachery was revealed by a Polish defector in 1961, and Western intelligence learned to its shock that the KGB had known about the tunnel from the beginning.
Afterwards, it was widely believed that the Soviets had fed the CIA and SIS disinformation. But as Vogel shows, the KGB left Soviet military and intelligence secrets exposed in order to protect Blake—and the intelligence deemed worthless was actually enormously valuable. Vogel’s dogged research unearthed recently declassified documents in U.S., British and German archives, many of them secret for half a century. He interviewed dozens of key participants in Operation Gold in the U.S., England, Germany and Russia, many of whom had never spoken before about their roles.
Vogel interviewed Blake, who is now 96 years old and has been living in Russia since his dramatic escape from prison in 1966, and the book includes fascinating new details about the spy’s life of deception and betrayal.
Read the Reviews
It's spy vs. spy in Khrushchev-era Berlin, and countless lives are in the balance. As the Cold War began to grind its way through the 1950s, notes former Washington Post military reporter Vogel (Through the Perilous Fight: Six Weeks That Saved the Nation, 2013, etc.), British and American intelligence agencies began to look for ways to intercept Soviet signals. The telephone was obvious, and British agents had already used the tunnel network of Vienna to tap into Soviet lines....Read More
Kirkus
"Betrayal in Berlin has everything a great spy story needs: fascinating characters, plenty of dramatic action, atmospheric backdrops, and world-changing consequences. Yet it has quite a lot more than that, too. Through fresh interviews with principal participants and extensive archival research, Steve Vogel has made the story of the Berlin Tunnel new again. I was riveted to the narrative from start to finish."
Monte Reel, author of A Brotherhood of Spies: The U-2 and the CIA’s Secret War
"It’s a spy thriller that kept me up all night – and it’s all true! Magnificent story-telling, always clear, every episode meticulously researched. It’s also a fascinating commentary on the height of the Cold War with Eisenhower, Kennedy and Khrushchev intimately involved in the skullduggery in Berlin."
Peter Snow, author of When Britain Burned the White House
"A crackling Cold War espionage story, Betrayal in Berlin takes you to the peaks of spying ambition and the depths of betrayal. Vogel takes you deep into the wilderness of mirrors."
David E. Hoffman, author of The Billion Dollar Spy
"One of the most dramatic spy stories of the Cold War, superbly told by a real authority on the subject. Steve Vogel draws on his family background and reportorial expertise to recreate the paranoid atmosphere of divided Berlin and the wall that symbolized the superpower standoff. With a cast of characters that could have come straight out of a John le Carre novel, this is a “mole versus mole” espionage tale like no other."
Michael Dobbs - Author of One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War.
"This is the best spy book I have ever read. It is the true story of the most daring Allied operation of the Cold War - the successful construction in the early 1950s of a tunnel into East Berlin to tap and record KGB and Soviet military communications and the compromise of that operation by British traitor George Blake. Steve Vogel is a talented and gifted writer who brings the personalities and idiosyncrasies of every participant in this operation to life. His research is vast, varied, and full of detail. It is truly one of those rare books you can't put down."
Sandra "Sandy" Grimes, retired twenty six year veteran of CIA's Clandestine Service and co-author of Circle of Treason - A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed.
Buy Betrayal in Berlin
