Author Steve Herman (W7VOA) has been a licensed amateur radio operator for over 50 years and is a retired Voice of America correspondent.

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To the average gamer, the “Hill” is a high-fidelity map in Call of Duty: Black Ops.

But for Alanson “Alan” Higbie, the location outside Berlin, built on piles of wartime rubble, was a real-life cathedral of radomes and reel-to-reel tape decks. Teufelsberg was a key listening post for the U.S. intelligence community’s fight against Communism.

During the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces, Higbie found himself on the Hill playing a bit part in Cold War history when frightened but courageous Czechs at the other end of amateur radio communications asked him to inform the outside world of their fate.

Higbie’s date with destiny atop a German mountain of debris began with a childhood crystal radio set and an amateur radio license. 

Enlisting in the Army

As a teen spending his time acquiring knowledge about electronics and radio communication, Higbie seemed destined for a career as an electronic engineer. But a learning plateau with the mathematics beyond basic physics derailed any such plan.

He took a pause from studies as a political science major at the University of Oregon, but that made him vulnerable for the military at the height of the Vietnam War. Higbie, in 1967, took a gamble and signed up for a four-year enlistment with the Army Security Agency, knowing it “would send you where they want you.”

He figured, however, this increased the odds of going to language school or other non-combat component, while it lowered the odds of toting an M16 rifle in the jungles and risking ambush by the Viet Cong. Higbie asked for training in foreign languages, preferring Russian and Mandarin as “those would give me the best shot to get into language school.” 

And of course, “you don’t get what you want.”

He got German. Not a bad consolation prize, remembers Higbie, who adds, “I’ve been very lucky in my life.”  

After basic training, he was sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., for six months of intensive German courses. 

Higbie struggled in the military’s language school with German. He was called in and told in no uncertain terms that if he flunked out he would not be able to stay in the elite, mostly non-combat cocoon of the Army Security Agency. 

“I learned how to study literally at gunpoint and under the threat of death,” says Higbie. “It was a big wake-up call. I still don’t have much aptitude for language. But German is a very easy language for an American to learn.” 

Higbie, given orders for Germany with the junior enlisted rank of Specialist 5 — a grade equivalent in pay to a corporal — was initially unclear on what he would be doing there.

“I didn’t realize what the mission of the Army Security Agency really was,” remembers Higbie. He quickly discovered that “we worked with the National Security Agency. They were our bosses. They were civilians on the site.”

Teufelsberg mission

Back then, the NSA was super-secret. Now there are signs on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway guiding motorists to the NSA gate at Fort Meade in Maryland. 

Higbie’s new post was Teufelsberg, a pile of rubble atop an unfinished Nazi technical college. Nearly 100 million cubic yards of Berlin rubble was hauled there after the Germans were defeated in the Second World War. That gave rise to a hill at an elevation of about 260 feet above a plateau, affording a spectacular view of Berlin. 

The Allies realized the artificial mountain was also an ideal spot for radio reception. The NSA, in 1963, moved in to snoop on the Warsaw Pact communications.  

“It was a very, very productive site,” according to Higbie. 

The Hill is immortalized in the 21st century in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War as the video game’s multiplayer Echelon map. Having seen the game, Higbie, says, “I can attest to how eerily realistic and accurate the interior of the operations center appears in the game version.”

When Higbie discovered the site’s mission, he was intrigued “because it was radios, and I loved working with and listening to radios.”

Amateur beginnings

As a child, Higbie’s parents had gifted him a crystal radio set kit. 

“I built it, and I could receive police calls and other things locally. I thought it was pretty cool and then started listening to shortwave – the Voice of America, HCJB — the high-power religious station in Ecuador — and Radio Moscow.”

A friend of Higbie’s parents in Cincinnati, Gordon Foote, a chemical engineer for Procter & Gamble, who had the amateur radio call sign of W8YKO, thought Higbie, then 13, should get a ham radio license. 

“He let me visit his station. We talked to somebody in South America.” Higbie went home with a set of instructional Morse Code 78 rpm vinyl records. 

The FCC’s entry-level ham test, in addition to questions on basic regulations, operating procedures and electronic theory, required sending and receiving Morse Code at five words per minute. 

“I was pretty hooked and (Foote) gave me the Novice class license test.”

Higbie passed and received the call sign KN8SQN. In that era, on the high, shortwave frequencies, Novice licensees could only operate continuous wave (CW) mode, which uses Morse Code. 

After a family move to California and a license class upgrade, Higbie became WA6PMK and earned privileges to add a microphone to his ham station. But his love for Morse Code did not abate.  

Eavesdropping

Higbie’s assignment at Teufelsberg did not require Morse Code proficiency. He just needed to listen to German voices. Some were intercepted on microwave radio frequencies used to relay telephone calls, including the East German Communist Party novel telephone system.

After a civil uprising in 1953, during which the landlines were sabotaged, East German authorities decided that communications for the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands had to be destruction-proof and the microwave system was erected, with high towers in East Berlin and at its various district headquarters around East Germany.

The system was line of sight and thought impervious to eavesdropping, but the NSA discovered it could intercept the side lobes of the electromagnetic waves. 

“It was spotty, but sometimes the reception was really good. We had big antennas that were hidden under giant radomes so no one could see in which directions the receiving antennas were pointed,” explains Higbie. 

Although the ruling party officials in East Berlin were not supposed to use the telephones for secret communications, naturally, they did, allowing the intercepts by Higbie and his fellow soldiers to be pieced together to tell a bigger story.  

“In the Cold War, there was so much money available for fighting communism. This was a big, big effort. No piece of information seemed to be too small,” recalls Higbie. 

When Higbie returned to Germany after the Cold War was over and the Berlin Wall was down, he visited Stasi headquarters, which had been turned into a museum, and noticed the push buttons on the telephone on the desk of the secretary of Erich Mielke, the dreaded head of the Ministerium für Staatsicherheit. 

“I recognized the numbers,” remembers Higbie. 

Higbie also listened to soldiers in the field and border guards. 

Reports of flooding in East Germany, agricultural production … Higbie and the others recorded it on reel-to-reel tape decks and transcribed it for dispatch to the NSA. 

One of the site’s targets was the communications of the East German border guards. “We would hear them chasing a ‘fox’, as they called it. Then at some point you come to realize they are chasing real people who are trying to escape across the border to freedom in the West. Sometimes they’d catch the fox — sometimes they didn’t. It’s real. It’s all fun and games until somebody gets their eye poked out.” 

Most of the time the intercepts were routine. 

On both sides of the Cold War there were a “lot of little people just plodding along,” working around the clock. 

Higbie’s colleagues were linguists, with a few years of college who were qualified for the Army Security Agency, but not eligible to be officers as they had not graduated from university. 

While there was widespread disillusionment with President Richard Nixon and the war in Vietnam, for those with the U.S. Army Security Agency in Germany, who had volunteered in hopes of avoiding infantry duty in Southeast Asia, there was an esprit de corps.

Those at Teufelsberg took their job seriously, realizing they were on the front lines separating two alliances and ideologies, in a Cold War that if turned hot might result in leaders in Washington and Berlin authorizing the launch of nuclear weapons. 

“We were paying very close attention when the Warsaw Pact was conducting its exercises. It’s a common cover for military aggression to begin as having an exercise,” noted Higbie. 

Extended duty

The situation was especially tense in 1968 after the first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubček, initiated political liberalization, seeking to create “socialism to a human face.”

But the mass protests in Prague in favor of reform spooked the hardline generals in Moscow. On Aug. 20, several hundred thousand Soviet, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Polish troops invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the newfound freedoms. 

East German troops were pulled out of the invasion force at the last minute to avoid comparisons to the Nazis rolling into Czech territory in 1939. Despite that, the Americans atop Teufelsberg were very busy. To increase available manpower, instead of working eight-hour shifts, they were now at their listening posts for 12 hours on and 12 hours off.

Higbie had a routine that when he was off the clock, he would volunteer to run phone patches on the site’s Military Affiliate Radio System (MARS) shortwave station. 

Phone patches – a telephone/radio relay system – allowed soldiers, sailors and airmen to talk for free with their spouses or parents across the Atlantic Ocean. The radio signals would be bounced off the ionosphere.

It was low-fidelity and not duplex — one would have to say “over” for the radio operators on both ends to switch from transmit to receive or vice versa. This was an era well before cell phones and the internet. A few minutes of trans-Atlantic talking through telephones would have cost approximately $12 for a few minutes of conversation – that’s equivalent to $100 in today’s money. 

“It wasn’t my job, but I would help the Signal Corps guys that were assigned to that. By running some phone patches, I could also operate the station on amateur frequencies using my German amateur radio call sign, DL4QQ,” Higbie said. 

That is, in addition to volunteering to help with the morale-boosting MARS operation, Higbie had access to the elaborate HF radio gear solely for his amateur radio hobby, his way of relaxing. 

Amateur radio lifeline

Amateur radio operators’ two-way conversations are typically an exchange of signal reports, their name and locations, mention of their equipment and perhaps, the weather. 

The ham setup at Andrews Barracks in Lichterfelde was first rate: a Collins S-Line transceiver, a high-power transmitting amplifier and a directional yagi antenna mounted on a tower. 

In the days after the Russian military invaded Czechoslovakia, Higbie began having unusual conversations on the amateur frequencies. 

Using Morse Code on the 40-meter band, Higbie made contact with OK1KLC and other stations in Czechoslovakia and listened to other radio amateurs engaged in brief conversations in German and English. 

Instead of just talking about ham gear and the weather, the Czech operators pleaded with those in western Europe to relay urgent messages to relatives who were not behind the Iron Curtain.  

Since Higbie was using a German call sign, others had no idea he was in the U.S. military. Some of the Czechs, to protect their identity and detection, began using fake call signs, which is normally a taboo. They sent messages for relay to England, the Congo and other destinations. 

Call sign OK1J, identifying himself as located in North Bohemia, asked that “you give this news for all the world. Thank you very much, okay?” The Czechs want the world to know that Prime Minister Oldřich Černík, a staunch supporter of the Prague Spring reforms “fly from Moscow now.” 

Days earlier, Černík had been forced to go to the Soviet Union and when he returned to the Czech capital he implored the public to cooperate with the invaders, while dubiously promising he would continue to support reform. 

As Higbie wrote down these messages, he heard deliberate interference on the frequencies the Czechs were using. Most likely the Soviets were engaged in jamming to try to prevent the transmissions from Czechoslovakia getting through to the West. 

One Czech operator said he would like to continue to transmit but “I have to get off now” because helicopters with direction finding equipment were trying to locate him and the other amateur radio stations. 

Another radio amateur, tapping away in Morse Code in German, revealed that “many foreign soldiers stop our automobiles and take our gasoline, seize transistor radios, take bread and other food” and had also imposed a 9 p.m. curfew. 

The Czech operators asked that the information be passed to the BBC. Higbie says he complied with this request to dispatch the message to the newsroom in London. 

On the streets, Czech citizens engaged in non-violent resistance, taking down street signs to confuse the invaders, confronting tanks with offerings of flowers and shouted, “Ivan Go Home!” 

Warsaw Pact troops fatally shot more than 100 peaceful protestors. 

A fellow American amateur radio operator stationed in Berlin, who was an officer with military intelligence and not in Higbie’s chain of command, asked Higbie to share this type of information with him and his unit, but Higbie politely declined.

“This was ham-to-ham kind of stuff, and I felt a little strange and would be like a betrayal of the amateur spirit, so I declined the offer as it wasn’t an order, wasn’t part of my job,” Higbie recalls. 

Higbie ironically adhered to a strict line between his amateur radio hobby and U.S. intelligence, despite his day job of intercepting radio signals and phone calls from East German officials and soldiers on behalf of the NSA. 

“We like to keep it a hobby. I was young. I really had a firm set of ethics,” remembers Higbie. “It just didn’t seem right to me.” 

The military intelligence office, surprisingly, “as a ham, he respected that and that was the last I heard of it.” 

By Aug. 27, it was all over in Prague. 

A doleful Dubček, who had been arrested and flown to Moscow, addressed his nation. 

“We hope that you will trust us even though we might be forced to take some temporary measures that limit democracy and freedom of opinion,” said Dubček.

On the other side

The Communists in Prague would remain submissive to the Kremlin until the 1989 Velvet Revolution which climaxed with dissident writer Václav Havel being elected president. The Cold War would end two years later with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  

Higbie was long gone from Teufelsberg by then. Although after his initial four years he had become an instructor of special intelligence, teaching others the specialized vocabulary related to the communications systems they were monitoring, Higbie did not re-enlist in 1971.

He gained admission to the University of California – Berkeley, resuming his college education. Higbie grew his hair long but kept up his grades, graduated and then went to law school at the University of San Francisco. He moved to Colorado where he passed the bar exam and became a trial lawyer, specializing in criminal defense and personal injury cases.

Higbie is still an amateur radio operator, call sign K0AV, and he takes special enjoyment in digging out weak and distant signals. Occasionally, he finds himself engaged in a Morse Code chat with fellow hams in the Czech Republic. The conversations usually are centered on mundane topics, such as an exchange of weather reports. 

But Higbie sometimes wonders if the person on the other end might be one of those who sent him a dramatic message during those fateful days of Czech history in the summer of ’68.

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