My Berlin, Part One- Arrival

A recent post on Metafilter got me thinking a lot about my past and increasingly, how my time in Berlin (1977-1980) has defined my life since then. I’ve decided to write it down while I still can. This will be split up into several parts, to keep it from being unwieldy.

I arrived in Germany on a Pan Am flight into Frankfurt-am-Main from New York, and the first thing I saw as I got off the plane was “Dr. Müllers Sex Shop”. Clearly, the zoning laws were different here. I also found it strange that I didn’t need a passport: my military ID was all that was necessary to enter and leave the country. A short hop on a 727 put me into Berlin-Tegel and a military shuttle bus took me to Andrews Kaserne.

I soon learned that my security clearance had not preceded me, so the powers-that-be, like all others, found something for me to do. They put me on a train to Bavaria, to a little resort town called Bad Tölz, where I was scheduled into an electronics class to basically pass the time while they waited for my clearance to arrive in Berlin.

This led to the interesting experience of traveling by train across a country where the only language I had was knowing the Chorus from Beethoven’s 9th symphony. I didn’t know exactly how far “Töchter aus Elysiam” or “Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?” was going to get me. I took the duty train right back out of Berlin the second night I was there.

It’s perhaps germane to explain the duty train system a little bit: Berlin remained an occupied city for many years after World War Two. It was divided at the end of the war into four zones, one for each of the Occupying Powers- The French, British, United States, and the Soviet Union all maintained military forces in the city. Since Berlin ended up as an enclave within communist East Germany, it was necessary for the other powers to establish and maintain travel routes for the 118-mile journey through the “Iron Curtain” to the West. Each Power ran its own schedule of trains, so there were several routes and trains to choose from. I almost exclusively used the US train to Frankfurt while I was there. Duty train stories could fill another post.

Arriving in Frankfurt, I had to immediately decipher the German rail system- I went to a ticket booth and said simply “Bad Tölz”, bought a ticket out of the German Marks I had acquired before leaving Berlin, and paid attention to the ticket agent as he pointed out the ticket where it said “Schiene 21″. I figured out that “Schiene” must mean track and nodded my thanks and headed off to find the train. A few hours later, I found myself in Augsburg, needing to change trains. I found a friendly ticket agent, who directed me to the right place. Bad Tölz turned out to be a spa town not far from the Austrian border.

My initial impression of Bad Tölz was that it was very picturesque, reminding me a little of a Swiss village I had seen on a postcard my grandmother had when I was little. I settled in, and the school, taught by two ex-German Army instructors, passed the two weeks by quickly.

School over, I found myself back in Berlin, getting a room assigned in the barracks and getting a briefing on the classified aspects of our mission up on the Hill.

Teufelsberg (Devil’s Mountain), is the highest place in Berlin; ideal for a listening post. It was built after World War two from the rubble of 400,000 bombed buildings piled on top a a Nazi-era military technical college that was built by Albert Speer, Hitler’s principal architect. The college, being Nazi architecture, had been intended to be knocked down after the war, but was too sturdily constructed, so in a sense, Speer dictated where the Field station was eventually built. It was accessed via a winding, climbing road from the Grünewald in the British sector of West Berlin, steep enough so that the trick buses groaned in low gear while climbing to the top. I used to sit on the bus and stare into the vegetation, occasionally getting a glimpse of a piece of masonry or shattered column where the dirt covering it had eroded away, a somber reminder of how much destruction had occurred in this place 40 years before.

What we did on “the Hill” or “T-berg” was quite simply industrialized spying on a massive scale. T-Berg was one of the Cold War’s premier ELINT (Electronic Intelligence) stations. Inside, hundreds of technicians and operators maintained a 24-hour-a-day watch on almost every facet of East German and Soviet communications in Eastern Europe- telephone, fax, data, you name it. Personnel rosters for the other side were maintained and annotated, linguists in almost every Eastern European language resided on the Hill, listening to and transcribing tapes that the operators had captured. Techs, such as myself, maintained all the equipment used for this huge effort. A large communication center and Operational communications center (OPSCOMM) was maintained there as well. Teletype machines with adjustable-speed drives could be hooked up to radios to print out message traffic in the encrypted coded groups, which would then go to NSA reps for decryption. Morse-code specialists listened to Dits and Dahs until some of them quite literally went mad.

On the Hill were hundreds of radio receivers, huge adjustable satellite dishes on equatorial and azimuthal mounts, antenna systems galore, and enough RF cable to cross the Atlantic Ocean and come back. I tried to count just the Teletype machines once, and stopped somewhere after 500.

It was all super-secret then, although anyone with half a brain knew what was going on up there with all the obvious antennae and the American soldiers from the Intelligence and Security Command, and the large proportion of Russian and German-speaking GI’s assigned there. Nowadays it’s all done by computer, I’m sure, but I don’t think that I’ll ever consider that half as romantic as actually going somewhere and doing it the old fashioned way. We had constant alerts and drills to go out and stand guard, even though the reality was that the opposition knew what we did there as well, and there was an entire Soviet division four miles away tasked to removing us first if the the balloon ever ‘went up’ in Europe. Our first physical indication of the arrival of hostilities would be accurate, heavy artillery fire or a tactical nuke landing on us, and we knew it.

It gave us something to think about on mid-tricks.