I learned about The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill by Greg Mitchell from the bibliography of Tunnel 29, which I read earlier this year. By the titles alone one can see that Mitchell wrote about several tunnelling operations (both successful and not) while Tunnel 29 only profiled the one. The main focus of the Mitchell book, however, was the Tunnel 29, so I didn’t learn anything new there.
Mitchell made the secretive planning, 24-hour digging and visits across the border seem as intriguing and suspenseful as the actual underground escapes. With Stasi spies infiltrating almost all of the tunnelling teams, it’s amazing that some of them managed to pull it off and get people out. I was buried nose-deep as I read about cross-border espionage and the plans to secrete people out. The pages rapidly turned themselves. However the subject matter associated with the second half of the book’s lengthy subtitle did drag the book down. Only briefly touched upon in Tunnel 29 were the plans by American TV networks CBS and NBC to film the work of the diggers and get the big money shots on escape day. Mitchell dealt with, at length, how prime-time American TV got involved which the tunnelling projects, and how they had to keep everything quiet. When Washington found out–and with all the spies involved in the divided Berlin, it wasn’t long before they did–they were against any network broadcasts. The Kennedy administration was hard-handed yet in spite of its threats always made it seem as if it was giving the individual networks a choice whether to air their tunnelling documentaries or not. In spite of the knowledge that the US government was steadfastly against these shows, Mitchell never conveyed exactly why. The general idea was that the US would look bad if its major TV networks were filming–and funding–these escape attempts. It would appear as if American TV was running the country’s foreign policy. Secretary of State Dean Rusk simply said that the films would endanger American interests. The networks argued that they were working for the values of freedom and defying communist oppression–what could be more pro-American?–by helping the digging teams but Kennedy wouldn’t have it. The politics, though, was a dry and repetitive read.
At the beginning of the book Mitchell included in his note to readers that all the dialogue was real and that nothing between quotation marks was invented. He also used other sources such as published interviews, interrogations, court records and letters. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction, as no master spy novelist could have dreamt up what the mole people under the Wall could possibly be thinking of. Mitchell was able to capture it all. Although written over fifty years since the first escapes, Mitchell was able to interview almost everyone involved in these secretive projects and corroborate stories with those involved.