FOIAWEAR — THE BERLIN TUNNEL / Operation Gold Cutaway Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 028 — THE BERLIN TUNNEL (OPERATION GOLD)

In the 1950s, before reconnaissance satellites existed, a wiretap was one of the best technical means of learning what the Soviet Union was doing. And there was no better place to place one than Berlin. The city sat at the centre of a vast communications network running from France to deep inside Russia: almost all Soviet military telephone and telegraph traffic between Moscow, Warsaw and Bucharest was routed through Berlin over land lines strung on poles and buried underground.

The CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service judged that tunnelling from West Berlin into the Soviet sector to reach those cables was feasible and could be hidden from visual surveillance. Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles approved the covert tunnelling and tapping operation in January 1954, and work began the following month under the cover of a US Air Force radar site and warehouse in West Berlin. The compound held the warehouse, a combined kitchen and dining facility, barracks and a generator building; the warehouse itself was designed with a large basement to hide the spoil.

Construction took a year. The diggers removed 3,100 tons of soil — enough to fill twenty average American living rooms — and used 125 tons of steel plate and 1,000 cubic yards of grout. The finished tunnel was 1,476 feet long, roughly the length of the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, with a shield of horizontal “blinds” near the entrance to limit the damage from a cave-in. British technicians installed the taps, and collection began in May 1955.

Unknown to the CIA and MI-6, the KGB had known about the project from the start: George Blake, a KGB mole inside MI-6, had warned the Soviets while it was still being planned. To protect him, the KGB let the operation run until April 1956, when they “accidentally discovered” the tunnel while supposedly repairing faulty underground cables. The discovery was meant to be a propaganda victory. It backfired: instead of condemning the operation, most press coverage marvelled at its audacity and technical ingenuity.

For almost a year the taps produced an enormous volume of material — 50,000 reels of tape, 443,000 fully transcribed conversations, 40,000 hours of telephone traffic, six million hours of teletype traffic and 1,750 intelligence reports. Processing it all took more than two years. Subsequent studies found that the Soviets had not attempted to feed false information over the tapped lines; the intelligence was genuine. It gave US policymakers detailed order of battle and activity reporting on Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces, identified people working on Soviet atomic energy projects, provided early warning of the creation of an East German army, and revealed the poor condition of East German railways, resentment between Soviets and East Germans, great tension in Poland, and Soviet inaction over a military invasion of Western Europe.

The artwork is a stylised technical cutaway tribute to the operation — the tunnel, the taps on the cables and the warehouse above — not a photograph.

Offered in twelve garment colours: the artwork carries light typography on dark garments (Black, Navy, Graphite, Pepper, Espresso, Sapphire) and dark typography on light garments (Moss, Chambray, Mustard, Butter, Light Green, White).

The QR code on the front opens the CIA Museum's exhibit on the Berlin Tunnel, the source for everything above: https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/the-berlin-tunnel/

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed t-shirt. Heavyweight 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²), 100% ring-spun US cotton, pre-shrunk, relaxed fit, double-needle stitched with no side seams and a sewn-in label. Sizes S–4XL. Printed on the front at 300 DPI; plain back. The main artwork prints at 10 × 10 in and the QR at 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, with like colours. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the printed area.

FOIAWEAR is an independent brand and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States government, or any other government or agency.