[Frequent readers of Rick On Theater will know that I was a Military Intelligence Special Agent in the army and was stationed in Berlin from July 1971 to February 1974. I was a nine-triple-six (my Military Occupation Specialty was 9666, Counterintelligence Officer; the enlisted agents were 97B’s), and assigned to Berlin Station of the 66th Military Intelligence Group, a unit of the U.S. Army, Europe.
[Our offices were in the main Berlin Brigade compound on Clayallee in Zehlendorf, the same compound where the U.S. Commander, Berlin, a two-star general, and the Commanding Officer of the Berlin Brigade, a one-star general, both had their headquarters. Also in the former Luftwaffe headquarters complex was the U.S. Mission to Berlin, the post of the highest-ranking American diplomat in the occupied city.
[On the first day I reported to Berlin Station, I noticed two black Russian sedans, Volgas or Moskviches, parked, one by each exit from the compound. Aside from being black, the Soviet vehicles were very recognizable because they looked like stylistic throw-backs to the early ’50s.
[I asked about them, and the agent who was assigned to help me get acclimated told me that the cars with their GRU-agent occupants (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye – Главное Разведывательное Управление; Main Intelligence Directorate, the Soviet Union’s military intelligence agency) were almost always there, just watching, taking notes, and probably photos—and that within an hour of my arrival, the Soviets knew my name, rank, and assignment.
[Berlin Station’s offices, low profile but not covert, were right at the front of the main building. Next to us, in an unmarked office, was the positive intelligence unit, the agents who ran intelligence-gathering operations. It was staffed by officers with the MOS of 9668, Area Intelligence Officer, and the enlisted counterpart, 97C. They were covert; we could communicate, when we had to talk face-to-face, via a locked iron gate between the two 66 MI sections located in the basement.
[We were both spooks, trip-sixes and six-eights. That’s what we and others called those of us in the intelligence racket.
[Berlin was also home to another facility of the military intelligence field. This post is about that strange and super-spooky place. It was not a facility about which much was known, even to other intel personnel like me, but pretty much everyone knew of its existence because . . . well, it was impossible not to. I’ll let you read why that was so.
[And remember: everything you’re about to read is the emes, the truth—to the best of my knowledge. I’m not joking and I’m not trying to spoof you.
[Now, a quick précis of pertinent history. World War II in Europe ended with Germany’s surrender on 8 May 1945 (Victory in Europe, or VE, Day). Combat changed to occupation and the three wartime allies, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, became the administrators of what had been the Third Reich.
[Agreements made among the three national leaders at the Yalta Conference (4-11 February 1945), attended by Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965), President Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945), and General Secretary Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), and at the Potsdam Conference (17 July-2 August 1945), with Churchill, Stalin, and President Harry Truman (1884-1972), who succeeded Roosevelt upon the latter’s sudden death in April, divided Germany into three occupation zones and made special provisions for Berlin (geographically inside the Soviet Zone of Occupied Germany) to be administered separately by the three victors.
[At the conferences, the Soviets had rejected an equal share in the Occupation for France, so the U.S. and Britain agreed that French zones of Germany and Berlin would be ceded from their zones. Berlin was therefore divided into four occupation sectors: the Soviet Sector, commonly known as East Berlin, was approximately one-third of the former German capital city, with about a million inhabitants, and the British, U.S., and French Sectors, consolidated as West Berlin, together were about two-thirds of the city with approximately 2½ million people.
[Because there hadn’t been a peace treaty to end World War II, Berlin was still under occupation until 1990, when a formal peace was finally negotiated. While the Western Allies had relinquished political responsibility for what became the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, in 1949, Berlin remained occupied territory.
[The Federal Republic was declared on 23 May 1949 and the Soviets followed with the declaration of the German Democratic Republic on 7 October. The East Germans established East Berlin as their capital (West Germany made Bonn its provisional capital, pending the return of Berlin to freedom), but the city remained occupied territory for 45 years.
[The British, American, and French forces turned the civil administration of the city over to the Berliners and there was a functioning elected municipal government, but the three sector commanders—a major general in the case of the U.S. Commander, Berlin (USCOB)—still had almost unchecked authority of not only the military and official civilian personnel under their control, but the ordinary civilians who lived in or visited Berlin. When push came to shove, what the generals wanted, they got.
[The Berlin Wall that divided the city for 28 years appeared early on 13 August 1961 when the GDR threw up a temporary barrier of barbed wire and trenches along the boundary between the Soviet Sector and the three Western sectors and around the western border with East Germany. For about a year from 18 August, the GDR constructed a permanent wall of concrete blocks, topped with barbed wire. The Wall was pulled down by energized Berliners starting on 9 November 1989 (see “Berlin Wall,” 29 November 2009).
[I’ve written frequently on ROT about my life in MI and West Berlin, Spy Central in Europe during the Cold War. Among the posts touching on or derived from that experience are “Berlin Station,” 19 and 22 July 2009; “Berlin Wall,” 29 November 2009, “Top Secret America,” 17 September 2010; “Berlin Memoir,” 16 December 2016, 20 January, 9 and 19 February, 11 and 29 March, and 13 April 2017; “Who’s Who in CIA: A Cold War Relic,” 8 May 2018, “‘Ritchie Boys: The Secret U.S. Unit Bolstered by German-Born Jews that Helped the Allies Beat Hitler’” reported by Jon Wertheim, 19 May 2021, and “Open source intelligence combats disinformation on Russia’s war against Ukraine” by Miles O'Brien and Will Toubman, 17 April 2022.]
In the 1950 Twentieth Century-Fox movie The Big Lift (see my post on Rick On Theater, 31 August 2017), there are several scenes of Berliners shoveling debris into wheelbarrows. The movie was made on location in Berlin starting in May 1949, just after the end of the Soviet blockade (June 1948 to May 1949) and only five years after the end of World War II in Europe.
The wartime destruction had to be cleared by hand because the deprivations of Germany after the war, especially in Berlin due to the blockade, made gasoline-powered machinery unavailable. In addition, the post-war unemployment was so great that hiring out-of-work Berliners to clear the rubble served a benefit.
With the male population decimated by the war, it was Berlin’s women (such as the war widow in The Big Lift played by Cornell Borchers with whom Montgomery Clift’s character falls in love) who cleaned up the rubble. These debris-collectors were called Trümmerfrauen or ‘rubble women.’
What the movie doesn’t show is that most of that debris was
taken to a site in the borough of Wilmersdorf in the southwest of the city,
near the Grunewald (‘greenwood’), Berlin’s forested “Central Park.” The debris was piled into a mountain named
Teufelsberg (‘devil’s mountain’), the highest spot in the city at about 365
feet above sea level (and 265 feet above the surrounding terrain).
Undated photograph (ca. 1950s) of trucks dumping wartime rubble on the growing Teufelsberg in Wilmersdorf, West Berlin. Ullstein Bild
Teufelsberg—the name was taken from the mound’s proximity (about a half mile south) to a small lake in the Grunewald called Teufelssee (‘devil’s lake’), a place of legend and folklore since ancient times—was used as a dump site for debris through the 1950s and was finally landscaped in 1972. Some 98 million cubic yards of debris from West Berlin—the Soviets disposed of the rubble in their sector in their own way, much of it deposited outside the city—was collected to create the artificial mountain. That’s the approximate equivalent of the remains of 400,000 bombed buildings.
In February 1955, a 79-foot-long ski jump opened on the mound, then a larger one opened in March 1962, with room for 5,000 spectators. Ski jumping stopped in 1969 because the civilian recreation was incompatible with the super-secret military activities going on above. The jumps fell into decay from lack of maintenance and were removed in 1999 because they allegedly interfered with that activity (discussion of which is coming up).
For a brief time in the ’70s and ’80s, the district of Wilmersdorf produced wine on the southern slope of mountain. Up to 120 liters (a little less than 32 gallons) of Wilmersdorfer Teufelströpfchen (Wilmersdorf devil’s droplets) were bottled per year.
It wasn’t just what the mountain was made of or how it was created that’s a curiosity. however; there were many such artificial mounds in bomb-damaged cities all over Germany and much of Europe after the war. It was what was under the mountain.
Buried beneath Teufelsberg are the remains of a uncompleted Nazi military-technical college designed by Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer (1905-81). Only the shell of the compound was finished, but the construction was so sturdy that all the Allies’ attempts to demolish it, even with aid of explosives, failed.
The Occupation forces decided, therefore, to entomb it under
war debris instead. The Wehrtechnische
Fakultät (faculty of defense technology), planned as a department of the
reconceived Technical University in Berlin, is down there still today, buried
under about 63 million tons of rubble.
At the peak of Teufelsberg, the U.S. Army Security Agency, the military counterpart to the National Security Agency formed in 1945, built an elaborate “listening station” called Field Station Berlin, the most secret place in Berlin. FSB was one of the West’s largest spy stations, arguably the most important of the Cold War era.
The military unit of the ASA to which personnel who staffed FSB were assigned changed designations a few times over the lifetime of the listening station. (The NSA had some of its own analysts, researchers, and linguists based at Teufelsberg.) In 1976, two years after I left Berlin, USASA was folded into the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Branch, the combat support branch in which I was commissioned, to form the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM).
Construction of FSB was begun in 1963 (a mobile listening station was installed on Teufelsberg in 1961, the year the Berlin Wall went up, restricting access to East Berlin), so it didn’t exist when The Big Lift was filmed. Even if it did, the filmmakers probably wouldn’t have been allowed to mention that that’s where all the rubble was heading. Now, of course, Teufelsberg’s all over the ’Net—a sci-fi ghost town!
Usually just called Teufelsberg by Berliners, the listening facility, known to insiders simply as “The Hill” (and as “America’s Big Ear” to the East Germans and Soviets) was located in the occupied city’s British Sector even though it was a U.S. site. The Brits had one building on the spy site, but essentially we just shared whatever poop we got with them and the French.
Everyone knew FSB was there—you could see the bulbous towers and antennas, resembling some futuristic city, from many parts of Berlin; with the facility’s large and distinctive structures, and the huge antenna field, low visibility was just not possible or practical.
The listening station had three immense globes, two radomes (radar
domes) perched on top of three-story-high towers and another soaring six stories
higher. Each radome globe contained huge,
40-foot satellite antennas and the most up-to-date listening technology, allowing
the U.S. and its allies to intercept satellite signals, radio waves, microwave
links, and other transmissions before translating, interpreting, and analyzing
the findings.
Teufelsberg Field Station Berlin, ca 1985. Photograph courtesy of John Evans.
The radomes, which look like gigantic, teed-up golf balls, had no radar equipment despite their name. The Allied forces already had radar surveillance covered with installations at Berlin’s airports: Tempelhof in the American sector, Tegel in the French sector, and Gatow in the British sector. (Teufelsberg was used briefly for air traffic control on civilian flights in 1994.)
The people who worked at The Hill had a saying, very popular apparently—a sort of unofficial motto: “In God we trust, all others we monitor.”
Very few who didn’t work there, however, knew what went on. I knew about FSB, of course, but even as an intel officer, I was never on the site in my 2½ years in West Berlin. I was my unit’s resident Russian linguist, so I got info copies of transcripts of telephone conversations from the Soviet military headquarters in Potsdam; they came from FSB. The “Big Ear” was a major target of Soviet espionage both because of its extreme sensitivity and because it was aimed at them.
As a Military Intelligence Special Agent, I had security clearances for which you’d need clearances just to know what the initials stood for. (That’s not a joke or hyperbole.) One of my former classmates from the Russian language program was assigned to FSB’s sister listening station in Helmstedt, on the border between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic.
I took the Duty Train over from Berlin one weekend to visit him, and despite my clearances, he couldn’t tell me what he did, aside from the obvious: listening in on (and, should hostilities break out, disrupting) Russian, East German, and Warsaw Pact communications.
Even today, 20 years after FSB ceased operations, many of its operations are still classified and former staffers are prohibited from talking about what they did there. Documents pertaining to the spy site that are still secret are due for declassification soon; some, in fact, may have been released in the past couple of years.
I was a counterintelligence officer, engaged in “human intelligence,” or HUMINT—that’s spies and counterspies, “sources,” and “subjects”—and “electronic intelligence,” or ELINT, more familiar as bugs, taps, and electronic eavesdropping.
Since I was in counterintelligence, my responsibility was the defense against these things, rather than gathering actionable intelligence to use against our opponents. FSB had a positive intelligence mission—as did our sister unit whose covert base was next door to our “low profile” offices. We trip-sixes had a brass sign at the front door and a number—just one, though (it was 9666, the same number as our CO’s staff car license plate)—listed in the Berlin Brigade phone book.
We got “phone-ins” and “walk-ins”—people, mostly Germans, who presented themselves to the German Labor Force guards at the compound’s front gate and asked for the OSS or CIC (Office of Strategic Services, World War II forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the Counter Intelligence Corps, WWII predecessor of the army’s MI Branch) if they were old enough, or the CIA, if they were younger.
The guards would call us and we’d send an agent out to escort them to our interview room and hear their stories (some of which I recount in “Berlin Station, Part 2,” posted on 22 July 2009, “Berlin Memoir, Part 3,” 20 January 2017, and “Berlin Memoir, Part 4,” 9 February 2017).
The six-eights next door had none of that; you wouldn’t know they were there unless you were supposed to.
ELINT and SIGINT, or “signals intelligence,” intercepting over-air communications like radio, microwave, and now wifi, was the bailiwick of the ASA and, therefore, FSB. As you might imagine, Berlin was an especially important location for a listening post during the Cold War, situated, as it was, 110 miles east of the Iron Curtain inside Warsaw Pact territory.
Being up on Teufelsberg gave the listening station clear reception for a large swath of Soviet controlled Eastern Europe. The State of Brandenburg, which includes Berlin, is extremely flat terrain so there are few obstructions to interfere with radio and microwave transmissions.
Bristling with antennas, domes, spheres, and silos, The Hill looked like a set from the space opera Star Trek (or Raumschiff Enterprise, as it was entitled on German TV). There were enough microwave transmitters and receivers on top of the complex to zap all the “Grunie pigs,” the wild boar that roamed the Grunewald, into roast pork!
The power of the tech at FSB convinced most Berliners and many East Germans that all the microwave communications inside the GDR were probably recorded. Satellite transmissions and radio communications were all intercepted and analyzed. Wireless communication systems in West Berlin were also monitored, and the wire-based communication were tapped by other installations.
Everyone believed that even small radio-transmitted bugs installed in any room in the city were picked up by FSB’s state-of-the-art antenna systems. Some of this was true—probably unbeknownst to the rumor-mongers—but much of it was just uninformed scuttlebutt.
There were always rumors about this super-secret place. Most of them were ridiculous, but sometimes, odd things did occur. A couple of the false rumors concerned a tunnel Berliners believed the ASA GI’s dug into the mound and all the way down to the Wehrtechnische Fakultät. Two reasons for the tunnel were proposed: one was that it was an escape route in case of emergency; the other was that it was a means of access to a secret subterranean submarine base beneath the mountain.
No tunnel has ever been found, but there’s one story that was actually true: every year in late July and early August, the reception of radio signals from stations far to the east were stronger than during the rest of the year. No one could figure out why at first, until someone noticed that the heightened reception coincided with the annual German-American Folk Festival in Zehlendorf, the district where the U.S. Army headquarters was (and, incidentally, where my quarters were).
Every year at the end of July and the beginning of August, the American forces sponsored the German-American Volksfest on a vacant plot behind the main PX on Clayallee (which was right across the street from my Berlin Station). Each year, the festival spotlighted some aspect of American culture; in the three Volksfests I attended, it was The Wild West, Hawaii, and Las Vegas.
The Volksfest had entertainment drawn from the talents of GI’s from all over USAREUR, street-fair food and games, a beer tent (natch), and carnival rides. (We had a Hawaiian noncom in the unit when I arrived, and when the 1972 Volksfest came around, he taught us some Hawaiian words and expressions. One was “Suck ’em up!” which isn’t actually Hawaiian, but it’s the island version of “Down the hatch!” Another was the Hawaiian word for ice cream, which was being sold all over the fairgrounds: aikalima.)
The signal-booster, it turned out, was the Ferris wheel. So, every year after determining that, the Berlin Brigade commander held the wheel over for a few extra weeks after the Volksfest closed.
No escape tunnel was ever found after the FSB site was vacated by the ASA and explored by urban explorers and the construction workers of the new private owners. Something else wasn’t found on the grounds of the listening station: a protective bunker for the GI’s and civilian spooks assigned there.
It’s curious that at a place in the sights of all the missile-guidance systems of the Soviet Union, there was no bunker. The spooks on The Hill had all the materiel needed to destroy classified documents and tech, plus some small arms, but no place to take refuge. Explanation: they were expendable—and they knew it.
No bunker could withstand the type of targeted attack the Soviets would have launched at FSB, something they’d have been planning for since the place was built. It would have been a waste of time and money to build one, the FSB analysts understood. The Soviet tanks would overrun the city within hours of a conventional attack, and The Hill would have been a priority target.
This was something the spooks at Berlin Station also contemplated. Think about this: West Berlin, with an American military force amounting to an oversized brigade with maybe a score of tanks (an enhanced company), a smaller contingent of British and French soldiers, no German troops (except for the police, who received infantry training), was surrounded by a Soviet tank army. That’s about 300,000 soldiers and anywhere from 500 to 1,000 tanks.
And that doesn’t count the East German forces, or any other Warsaw Pact troops stationed in the GDR. What the hell were we going to do if the Soviets decided to launch the balloon? Fight? Whom? All the Russians would have to do, we reminded ourselves, was roll up to Checkpoints Charlie and Bravo, post a few guards—we were already surrounded by a wall—and put up a sign, “Berlin POW Camp,” and then go around the city without firing a shot—though they’d probably want to lob a few rounds at The Hill.
The ASA soldiers on The Hill knew this, too. They had another saying: “First to know, first to glow.” (They anticipated a nuclear attack, we didn’t.)
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent reunification of Germany, FSB became obsolete; it was decommissioned in 1992 and stripped of its sensitive equipment. There didn’t seem to be anyone to listen to anymore—though I suspect that since Vladimir Putin and his kleptocrats and oligarchs came to power in Russia, some in the Pentagon and at Fort Meade wish they’d had the foresight to hold onto it against that eventuality.
The 11½-acre site was turned over to the city of Berlin, then sold to private developers in 1996. The firm, which paid 5.2 million Deutschmarks (about $350,000 then, about $640,000 today) for the former FSB, wanted to build luxury apartments, a hotel and restaurant, and a spy museum on the grounds. Costs soared beyond profitability, however, and the plans were abandoned.
Struggles over what to do with it stalled other development
plans, and then a building boom after the reunification made the plans
redundant and unprofitable. The site’s
now covered with graffiti (among the most popular words scrawled on the
buildings are, unsurprisingly, ‘ALIEN’ or ‘ALIENS’) and street
art, and is disintegrating into ruin, but it’s still a draw for lookie-loos, urban
explorers, graffiti artists, and adrenalin junkies even though it’s under
24-hour guard.
2018
photos showing current state of the former FSB at Teufelsberg.
Photo by Michael Hodgson.
The spy complex was an immediate attraction for tourists looking for an off-beat place to explore as soon as it closed and the ASA left the building. At first it was by surreptitious entry—there weren’t any security guards at first, just a fence—but then the new owners hired sentries and started charging for tours (or, for a lower fee, simple admission if you just wanted to wander around on your own). This isn’t officially available anymore, but people still come to see the weirdest ghost town on Earth.
There’s no electricity or running water; at least one multi-story elevator shaft is open and empty, a real safety hazard; there’s little light in some locations; the whole place is littered with construction debris, broken glass, rusty metal, spent spray cans, abandoned (and heavily graffitied) cars, and garbage. And yet the urban spelunkers come.
It’s “spooky” in two ways now: one, because it’s where spooks—intel agents like me—used to work: and two, because it’s silent, empty, and decaying, like a non-lethal Chernobyl.
The site’s prospects are in limbo; no one seems to know what to do with it. Plans have been proposed, including the repurchase of the former spy station by the city of Berlin, but none have gone beyond the talking stage, often due to cost.
One proposed deal in 2008, involving filmmaker David Lynch, was for building something called a “Vedic Peace University,” focusing on yoga and transcendental meditation and featuring a 12-story, 164-foot-high “Tower of Invincibility” to house 1,000 students. The city turned down the proposal.
Over the years since The Hill closed as a USASA station, Teufelsberg has been a location for several movies and television programs, including one espionage cable series, Berlin Station, that aired on Epix from 2016 to 2019. Berlin Station was the name of my actual CI unit of the 66th MI Group (part of U.S. Army, Europe) from 1971 to 1974.
FSB had also been the subject or setting for many books, both memoirs and novels. Two of the latter are Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2008) and Reunification: A Monterey Mary Returns to Berlin (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013). Both books are by T. H. E. Hill, which is a pseudonym (get it?) for a 74-year-old retired ASA linguist who served at FSB in the mid-‘70s. (A “Monterey Mary” is a graduate of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. I went there in 1970 and ’71 and, curiously, I never heard the term before.)
There’s a movement, especially among the Teufelsberg veterans, to preserve FSB as a memorial. In 2006, the area was legally declared woodland, ending any development plans, and in 2018, it was given Denkmalschutz (‘monument protection’), a designation similar to landmark status in the U.S., for its historical importance as a Cold War site. This designation eliminated the possibility of new building on the site.
Today, guided tours and paid admission to the late FSB or not, Teufelsberg is popular with mountain bikers, hikers, and paragliders. In the summer, visitors can enjoy 360-degree panoramic views of the whole city and beautiful sunsets there, and in the winter, the mountain’s small ski slope and the cross-country ski trail are popular.
But what to do with the abandoned FSB is still a conundrum.
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