Recently, CIA documents were declassified that talked in detail about the CIA's Berlin Tunnel. This was a tunnel than ran from the U.S. Sector in West Berlin, under the Berlin Wall, terminating near telephone cables in the East German/Russian side. Its purpose was to tap phones in East Berlin. Only now, with the declassification, do I feel I can tell this story.

I was then serving as a Criminal Investigator, U.S. Treasury Department, Alcohol & Tobacco Tax Division (now known as BATF or ATF). I had passed the screening and background checks for a job with the CIA, which I knew had something to do with technical operations. I knew this only because when I told the CIA recruiter in Philadelphia that I was the sole agent in the Philadelphia office of A&TTD who had been trained in lock picking, clandestine photography, wiretapping, covert opening of mail, and so on, he put me on a fast-track. It was obvious that I was not going to sit in a guard shack at HQ in Langley, Virginia.

The technical ops division of CIA recruited a wide variety of people, from electrical engineers, to people skilled with electronics gadgets, and so forth. When the boss of the section brought a person in for an interview, he usually was very circumspect about exactly the nature of the job they were being hired for. It was only after he and others were convinced that the person would fit in, was he or she (we had one woman in my immediate group) were they told that they would be picking locks, tapping phones, planting bugs, doing secret writing - and all that good stuff.

I was to meet the world-wide head of the technical ops section for an interview. We met in a dingy windowless room in the basement of a CIA building that was known to outsiders as housing some innocuous government department in the D.C. area. My future boss, who was known by CIA people worldwide simply as "H.T.," sat down. I showed him my gilt-edged Treasury credentials and my gold badge - as a formality. He was quick to the point. Normally, he said, they would dance around with a potential recruit and keep him at arm's length for a while. But he said that I was only the second guy ever to apply to the division who had the kind of actual field experience they were looking for. The first one was a former cop who "didn't turn out so well."

Then, somewhat casually, he said that he had just come from working on a wire-tap tunnel in Europe. I can't remember if he said in Berlin. Was that the sort of thing I would want to get involved in? Sure, I said. I pretty much figured from the fast-tracking of my application that the work would be basically a continuation of some of my work in Philadelphia, particularly technical things aimed at the Mafia - but with much more at stake. I had gone to a Treasury school in D.C. called "Technical Investigative Aids." and actually got a sort of diploma when I graduated. Bobby Kennedy was Attorney General, and those who remember much about him knew he had two important targets, the Mafia and Fidel Castro. He sent a representative to our technical school with a basic message "to get those Mafia bastards any way you can. But don't get caught." I met Bobby Kennedy only once when he attended a seminar in Philadelphia.

So, without much fanfare, H.T. said, "Welcome aboard." One of the engineer candidates was given a song and dance about the job. At one point, he was asked how fast could he climb a fence? How high could he jump? Eventually, that engineer and I became best friends and worked on, for example, making master keys for some of the big hotels in Europe. He had a natural knack for it. Rather than piss off the Agency, I guess I will have to pass on telling stories of some of our escapades. He ended up marrying an East-German girl and was asked to leave the Agency. Years later, I found him working as an electrical engineer at an electronics giant in California and we had lunch.

H.T. was killed in an automobile accident near his stateside home, while I was still in the division, with no hint of foul play.

Back to the list of Topics in this Section

Back to Richard's Home Page

Richard Rhodes