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Betrayal in Berlin: George Blake, the Berlin Tunnel and the Greatest Conspiracy of the Cold War

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A true Cold War espionage thriller set around the ultra-secret Berlin Tunnel – where British officer George Blake must run a high-stakes double cross to maintain his cover.


The ultra-secret “Berlin Tunnel” was dug in the mid-1950s from the American sector in southwest Berlin and ran nearly a quarter-mile into the Soviet sector, allowing the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) to tap into critical KGB and Soviet military underground telecommunication lines.


George Blake, a trusted officer working in a highly sensitive job with SIS, was privy to every aspect of the plan. Over the course of eleven months from May 1955 to April 1956, when the Soviets discovered the tunnel, “Operation Gold” provided seemingly invaluable intelligence about Soviet capabilities and intentions. The tunnel was celebrated as an astonishing CIA coup upon its disclosure, and the agency basked in its new reputation as a bold and capable intelligence agency that had, for once, outwitted the KGB. But in 1961, a Polish defector shocked the CIA and SIS by revealing that Blake was a double agent who had disclosed plans for the tunnel to the KGB before it was even built. Blake was arrested and sentenced in 1961 to 42 years in prison, the longest term ever imposed under modern English law. In the years since, the tunnel has been labelled a failure, based on the assumption that the Soviets would never have allowed any information of importance to be transmitted through the tapped lines. Not so.


In a work of remarkable investigative reporting, Steve Vogel now reveals that the information picked up by the CIA and SIS was more valuable than even they believed. But why would the Soviets, knowing full well that the tunnel existed, have let slip many of their most valuable secrets? Or did they actually know

Author: Vogel Steve
Publisher: MURRAY JOHN
Pages: 544
ISBN: 9781473647510
Cover: Paperback
Edition Number: 1
Release Year: 2020

Steve Vogel is the author of Through The Perilous Fight and The Pentagon: A History. He is a veteran journalist who has written extensively for The Washington Post about military affairs and the treatment of veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. His reporting about the war in Afghanistan was part of a package of Washington Post stories selected as a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. Vogel covered the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the Pentagon, and the building’s subsequent reconstruction. Vogel covered the war in Iraq and the first Gulf War, as well as U.S. military operations in Rwanda, Somalia, and the Balkans. A graduate of the College of William and Mary, he received a master’s degree in international public policy from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.


Steve Vogel is the perfect person to write Betrayal in Berlin. A reporter for the Washington Post for more than two decades, Vogel reported from Cold War Germany and covered the fall of the Berlin Wall. The story also carries a personal element for Vogel, who was born in the U.S. Army hospital in West Berlin, where his father, then a young CIA case officer, served from 1957 to 1962 during some of the tensest days of the Cold War.

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