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174 FIGHTING THE ELECTRONIC WAR
telephone conversations were recorded, and six million hours
of teletype traffic we·e taken. Entire buildings full of translators
battled to stay ahead of the wave, but inevitably fell behind. 14
Astoundingly, this was partly because the CIA decided it
would rather fall behind than work with its main rival, NSA.
The CIA did not tell NSA about the Berlin tunnel. Indeed, it
was running an entire rival sigint unit called 'Staff D' in parallel
with its compatriots at Fort Meade, led by a code-breaker they
had poached called Frank Rowlett. 15 NSA's Director, General
Ralph Canine, first found out about the Berlin tunnel by reading
of its exposure by the Soviets on the front page of the New York
Times in late April 1956. He literally shouted with anger when
he realised the extent of the CIA intrusion into what he considered
to be NSA turf. The two chiefs, Allen Dulles and Canine,
nurtured an intense personal dislike, and the bitterness between
NSA and the CIA lasted for years.16 Even in the 1970s the CIA
still had numerous rival intercept operations spread around the
world. 17
Another person who was angered when the tunnel hit the
headlines in April 1956 was the Berlin SIS Chief, Peter Lunn.
The Western press hailed the tunnel as a brilliant intelligence
success, and heaped praise on the CIA. Neither the Soviets nor
the American newspapers mentioned the British, despite the
fact that the tunnel was packed with their equipment. This was
too much for Lunn, who assembled the whole staff of the Berlin
SIS station and recounted the story from beginning to end. IS
Everybody seemed to love the so-called 'espionage tunnel'. In
East Berlin, British officials reported, it had been 'turned into
a major tourist attraction and scarcely a day passes without a
delegation of one sort or another being conducted through it'.19
In private, they noted, the Soviets admired the craftsmanship
and the quality of the equipment. 2o
The Berlin tunnel is perhaps the most controversial intelligence
operation of the 1950s. Much of the controversy stems
from the fact that on 22 October 1953, even before its construction
began, George Blake, an SIS officer working for the KGB