The Tunnels
Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A thrilling Cold War narrative of superpower showdowns, media suppression, and two escape tunnels beneath the Berlin Wall.
In the summer of 1962, the year after the rise of the Berlin Wall, a group of young West Germans risked prison, Stasi torture, and even death to liberate friends, lovers, and strangers in East Berlin by digging tunnels under the Wall. Then two U.S. television networks heard about the secret projects and raced to be first to document them from the inside. NBC and CBS funded two separate tunnels in return for the right to film the escapes, planning spectacular prime-time specials. President John F. Kennedy, however, was wary of anything that might spark a confrontation with the Soviets, having said, “A wall is better than a war,” and even confessing to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “We don’t care about East Berlin.” JFK approved unprecedented maneuvers to quash both documentaries, testing the limits of a free press in an era of escalating nuclear tensions.
As Greg Mitchell’s riveting narrative unfolds, we meet extraordinary characters: the legendary cyclist who became East Germany’s top target for arrest; the Stasi informer who betrays the “CBS tunnel”; the American student who aided the escapes; an engineer who would later help build the tunnel under the English channel; and the young East Berliner who fled with her baby, then married one of the tunnelers. The Tunnels captures the chilling reach of the Stasi secret police as U.S. networks prepared to “pay for play” but were willing to cave to official pressure, the White House was eager to suppress historic coverage, and ordinary people in dire circumstances became subversive. The Tunnels is breaking history, a propulsive read whose themes still reverberate.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Mitchell (Atomic Cover-Up) illuminates a half-forgotten but nasty episode in the annals of Cold War history. In August 1961, infuriated by the exodus of its citizens, Soviet-backed East Germany built a 96-mile-long barrier around West Berlin. In response, Berliners, mostly students and ordinary workers, set to work tunneling underneath. Local American TV journalists loved the idea, paying tunnelers who needed money for supplies and sending cameramen. Warning that the stories would poison Soviet-American relations, the Kennedy administration pressured CBS to drop its planned coverage. NBC persisted, however, and Mitchell delivers a gripping, blow-by-blow account of one grueling dig and dramatic rescue of 29 East Germans, all caught on film. Despite the intense appeals from the Kennedy administration, which soft-pedaled the suppression of free speech in favor of deploring "checkbook journalism," an Emmy Award winning documentary eventually appeared. NBC had gotten lucky. Most of the tunnels failed as a result of ubiquitous East German informers and technical difficulties. More East Germans were caught and imprisoned than escaped, and by 1970 the practice of tunneling died out. Mitchell's tense, fascinating account reveals how the U.S. undermined a freedom struggle for the sake of diplomacy.
