Abandoned by the U.S., Teufelsberg has become a fascinating excursion for Berliners curious about the city’s espionage past.
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| Photo: Emily Manthei |
Teufelsberg, in photos, is a tall shaft with a ribbed white vinyl
covering stretching up several stories between two globes perched on a
four-story concrete building looking out over a dense forest. Yes, you
could say it looks phallic. In reality, these globes on the roof of a
featureless building once shielded the antennas at the center of West
Berlin’s Cold War espionage activities. Abandoned by Western military
forces in 1992, the complex has become a giant indoor graffiti park, a very cool movie location, and a fascinating excursion for Berliners curious about the city’s espionage past.
It’s
a rainy day and I am trudging up to the ominous “Devil’s Hill” in the
Grunewald, a leafy forest covering 3,000 hectares in West Berlin.
Hitler’s military planned to build a military staff college on the
forest floor, but were distracted from the unfinished project after the
war started; in 1945, the concrete foundations in the woods proved the
perfect place to dispose of the rubble in the city and the ad hoc
landfill became an earth-covered mountain 115 meters high.
The
height of the hill, post-1945, also made it an ideal spy station for the
United States Army Security Agency (ASA), whose main function was to
listen to, record, and decipher the military communications of the DDR
(East German) and Soviet military forces stationed for hundreds of miles
around Berlin in East Germany. Allied forces officially occupied West
Berlin from 1945 through 1990, but security matters were their main
interest, and under the cover of orbs in the forest, they had discovered
the perfect secret spot.
It doesn’t look exactly inconspicuous
to the local population: the roof offers a view over the entire city on a
clear day. Former ASA Signals Analyst Christopher McLarren, wearing a
blue plastic rain poncho, leads me and some other curious civilians in
soppy wet shoes and clunky umbrellas onto the rooftop between the giant
orbs. He was drafted in Washington D.C. and came to Teufelsberg for his
military assignment in the early 1970s; he has remained a Berliner ever
since. Lately, he spends his Sunday afternoons telling (declassified)
stories about analyzing radio transmissions and avoiding close calls
with World War III to anyone ambitious enough to trod through the
forest. Although the US and British military keep intelligence files
classified for many years, the end of the Cold War and the closing of
the base offer a rare peek into the US intelligence world.
“These
were real people, and there was real danger. I think it’s useful to know
that the world is not necessarily a safe place—yet,” he explains to me
when we meet later for Kaffee und Kuchen. Besides, he adds, “the
mountain does have a kind of magic to it.”
Like most of Berlin’s
Cold War sites, there is a certain resonance with current events that
makes the past feel less like a history lesson and more like a
foreshadowing. Conspicuous, hilltop antennas may be a thing of the past,
but cyber hacks, fake news, and clandestine enemies are the modern
security threats that replace them.
Accessible by
partially-trodden foot trails through the forest and surrounded by tall
fences and “No Trespassing!” signs, the area maintains the allure of the
forbidden although a ticket booth, art studios, techno music, and a
makeshift coffee shop and bar prove that visitors are anything but
unwanted here. (Teufelsberg even has a website.)
In 2006, the property was sold to private owners who planned to turn it
into a luxury retreat center, but a long-ignored county statute to
preserve the Grunewald from commercial development has been vociferously
defended by locals since the sale, leaving the site in a public-private
limbo.
As McLarren trots up an outdoor stairwell with my group, he describes
the nondescript, windowless fortress that he remembers. “We always had
the presumption that the other side was listening. You didn’t ‘talk
shop’ away from the shop.”
Today, the walls of the same building
are open to the outside and the interior has been stripped to its
concrete bones. Everything inside is open to the world. The “private
ownership” of the site hasn’t stopped graffiti muralists from
contributing Berlin’s signature artwork style on a regular basis. Each
of the building’s four stories is filled with murals-on-concrete,
painted on and painted over at will. It’s like a less-commercialized
answer to the enshrined, iconic section of the Berlin Wall left standing
in Friedrichshain, the East Side Gallery.
In addition to the
East Side Gallery, many clues refer to the Cold War’s modern relevance
elsewhere in Berlin. An espionage overview at the German Spy Museum
covers the history of human intelligence and communication
surveillance, and asks questions about internet privacy and modern data
collection. The preserved remnants of the East German secret police, the Stasi Headquarters
in Lichtenberg, contains some of the real listening devices and
memories of psychological destabilization tactics used by the Stasi to
keep track of the movements of DDR citizens.
Nearby, an archive
houses the Stasi’s personal files, kept on most of the DDR’s residents
and foreign persons of interest. Although the Stasi frantically shredded
as many files as possible while DDR citizens demonstrated outside,
millions of files never made it to the shredders before the
citizen-takeover. The post-reunification government’s decision to open
these files allows citizens to request access to their own file, often
putting to bed mysteries about their past.
“I put in a request to
see mine,” says McLarren, who doesn’t doubt that the Stasi followed
intelligence workers like himself. “But apparently some of the first
files to be destroyed were those of the foreigners. So if they had a
file on me, I don’t know. It was probably the case for everyone, but
mine doesn’t exist.”
Remnants of the Stasi’s reach and brutality
remind people of the importance of privacy rights and how disastrous it
can be when they are degraded. “I think it makes it clear how evil the
system was,” McLarren says. “Especially as Americans, it’s a good
warning about what can happen if you drift into that sort of thing.” The
drift might happen via government-hyped paranoia and strategic
fear-mongering, as is on display at the Stasi Museum. “In times of
danger, people accept security measures that they wouldn’t otherwise.
But security measures don’t expire. They tend to stay and be added to,”
he adds.
Today, the ASA is folded into the NSA, which was a
separate civilian and political listening agency at the time. (McLarren
stresses that the ASA was only spying on the military, to his
knowledge.) Although Teufelsberg focused on military listening, it still
provides a rare glimpse into the American government’s surveillance
activities.
In Cold War days, agents listened to and recorded the
enemy’s communications, picked up by antennas inside the golf ball domes
on the roof. Inside the windowless building, McLarren and his signals
analyst colleagues decoded patterns and interpreted the meaning of the
information gathered on the roof. “It was our job to figure out who was
speaking and what they were doing. We were learning as much as we could
about the other armies, how they were organized, their tactics,” he
explains. Much of a signal analyst’s work was the detective work of
piecing together small daily facts and uncovering their possible
significance. “It was often quite boring, and nothing like James Bond or
anything,” he tells the tour group.
I ask him later if he learned
anything humanizing about the East Germans and Soviets as a result of
his listening. It turns out, in some regards, they weren’t so different
from the Americans. “The East German army used to tell Polish jokes
about their socialist brothers in arms. The curious thing is, they were
approximately the same Polish jokes we were telling in the States at the
time.”
Down the hall from the analysts, management and officers
met and planned top-secret actions, based on their intel. On the
building’s lower floor, a maintenance crew dealt with day-to-day
details, like running their own massive shredders and destroying
classified items in chemical solutions at a sort of intelligence
crematorium on the ground floor.
Despite the heaviness of the
location, McLarren says West Berliners, both foreign Allies and locals,
felt they were on an “island of relative safety in a very turbulent sea”
after the wall went up. Even in 1989, they still felt safe. While
anti-government protests of one million people (“That’s one in every
seventeen people in the country!”) were raging across the wall in East
Berlin, he says, “we were simply observers of what was going on across
the way.”
I’m not sure I buy that attitude. In an era of intense
suspicion and near-strikes based on mistrust and misinformation, how
could West Berliners feel so uninvolved? But in many ways, they were
right to feel that way. A lot of what we know today proves that the Cold
War was all just posturing, with neither the Soviets or the Americans
ever intending a first strike, only preparing to retaliate if a first
strike was launched.
“In many ways that was sad to hear,”
McLarren says about learning that the Soviets didn’t intend a first
strike either. “Because if they didn’t plan to attack and we didn’t plan
to attack, all of that suspicion and all of that money and all of that
preparation for something that nobody wanted is kind of sad, but I’m
afraid very human. Because you can’t fully trust, you can’t know.”
In Berlin, while much has changed, I can never shake the feeling that so much is still the same.
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