Beneath Berlin

What if you pulled off the boldest heist of the Cold War and the other side had your blueprint before you dug the first inch of dirt?In the summer of 1954, on the ragged southeastern edge of West Berlin, a team of young American engineers locked the doors of a decoy radar warehouse and started digging down into the sand. Their boss was Bill Harvey, a pear-shaped, martini-drinking former FBI agent who wore a pearl-handled revolver under his suit coat and hated the KGB with a passion. Together with a soft-spoken former Olympic skier from British intelligence named Peter Lunn and a trio of working-class telephone wizards from the British Post Office, they were attempting something that sounded like sheer lunacy.They were going to dig a six-foot steel tunnel a quarter of a mile across the most dangerous border on Earth, hide more than three thousand tons of dirt right under the noses of East German border guards, climb up to within twenty-seven inches of a busy Soviet highway, and tap the private telephone cables of the Red Army.And they actually pulled it off. For eleven months and eleven days, six hundred tape recorders spun day and night beneath the mud of Berlin, capturing 443,000 unguarded conversations and six million hours of teletype traffic everything from Soviet nuclear logistics and crumbling railways to generals' wives smuggling Oriental carpets back to Moscow.There was just one problem.Sitting at the very first planning meeting in a posh London townhouse, taking the official minutes with a polite smile, was an MI6 officer named George Blake. And forty-eight hours later, Blake rode a London bus to a quiet street corner and handed the entire plan to the KGB.Beneath Berlin drops you straight into the claustrophobic, twenty-foot-deep steel tube of Operation Gold (known to the British as Operation Stopwatch), where iron-shod horses clopped inches above technicians' heads, an uncharted pre-war cesspool nearly drowned the diggers, a freak snowfall threatened to draw a straight arrow across the border, and the KGB faced an agonizing choice: shut the tunnel down and burn their prize mole inside MI6, or let the Americans listen to the Red Army's deepest secrets.Told with the pace of a heist thriller and the warmth of a late-night conversation, Julian Vance brings to life the engineers, codebreakers, emigré translators, and double agents who fought the strangest underground battle of the twentieth century.Grab your copy of Beneath Berlin today, slip on the headphones, and step down into the secret tunnel where the Cold War's greatest triumph met its greatest betrayal.