Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

BERNE CLUB• 45

Gardens. On this occasion, the minutes of the discussion were taken

byGeorge Blake, who the previous April had been released from

captivity in Korea and had joined the section in September 1953.

Blake passed a copy of the minutes to his Soviet contact on 18 Janu-

ary 1954.

The processing was to be shared between Washington, D.C., where

a windowless building off the Mall was prepared for the teletype, and

a compartmented unit in Clarence Terrace, Regent’s Park, with room

for a staff of 300 linguists for the Russian and German voice traffic,

working in shifts. By August 1954 the surface building, ostensibly a

radar station, warehouse, and barracks had been completed by a Ger-

man contractor, and work began from the basement level to sink a

shaft 30 feet and then dig a tunnel six feet in diameter. The U.S.

Corps of Engineers completed the horizontal work on 10 March

1955, and within three weeks had broken into the junction box hous-

ing the cables. At this point British telephone engineers were brought

in to install 25 tons of preamplification equipment, voltage stabiliz-

ers, and banks of tape recorders, together with the relay cables link-

ing a specially fabricated tap chamber to the sophisticated hardware

under the warehouse building capable of handling up to 500 separate

channels. The connections were made and on 11 May 1955 the first

of many thousands of reels of tape were processed, revealing the

‘‘take’’ to be a veritable intelligence bonanza. The raw material

ranged from indiscreet conversations among officers and complaints

about the frequent mechanical breakdowns that plagued the T-52

tank to data that helpedGCHQsolve some of the codes found in

Soviet tactical wireless traffic. There were even sufficient references

to aKGBoperation to tap an American communications cable in

Potsdam for the CIA to take the appropriate countermeasures.

The hemorrhage of Soviet traffic continued for 11 months and 11

days, until 1:00a.m., Sunday, 22 April 1955, when a team of Russian

and German engineers, apparently repairing flood damage to cable

conduits across the city, uncovered the tap chamber and sounded the

alarm.

BERNE CLUB.The international antiterrorist intelligence exchange
within the European Union, established in 1971 at which all security
agencies are represented, is known as the Berne Club. It meets regu-