On Tunnels and Warheads: East German Spies and Canadian Nationalists in the Age of Kennedy

More than five decades after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, his presidency continues to entice historians to revisit the thousand days contemporaneous with the most dangerous moments of the Cold War. Two new histories now enter this discussion. The first is Greg Mitchell's The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill, which focuses on one of those dangerous moments, the year in Berlin that followed the building of the wall. The Tunnels is a popular history centered around two escape tunnels dug under the wall in the summer of 1962. Asa McKercher, author of the second book, a scholarly monograph entitled Camelot and Canada: Canadian-American Relations in the Kennedy Era, explores a relationship central to the cohesion and strength of the Western Alliance. The Berlin Wall crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis enter his narrative, but McKercher's central concern is to explain the complex dynamics that affected two countries tied so tightly together by history and geography.

Mitchell's work is a taut page-turner, exactly what one hopes for in a book devoted to subterranean escapes under the epicenter of the Cold War. The book reads like a Cold War spy novel, yet the characters are very human. There are the dozens of men and some women, mostly young, who facilitate the escapes. Many are diggers, but some are couriers, those brave souls who travel through the checkpoints from West to East in order to scout buildings, alert families and friends to the day and time of the escape, and organize the movement of the escapees on the fateful day. Finally, there is the small group that digs the final few feet into a building on the East German side, risking their lives to shepherd the scared, but gutsy, escapees to freedom.

Then there are the East Germans, gun-toting guards manning the watchtowers along the wall and Stasi personnel, the notorious East German secret police force charged with spying on East and West Berliners alike. Mitchell follows a Stasi spy who infiltrates the highest levels of a group devoted to rescuing East Berliners from their totalitarian world. Next to enter the book are the TV newsmen seeking a hard-hitting, drama-laden story that can be boiled down to a one-hour documentary certain to glue viewers to the screen and garner high ratings for the night. Finally, as the subtitle of the book reveals, there is the Kennedy administration, doing everything possible to prevent tunneling tales from seeing the light of America's living rooms.

Mitchell's focal points are two tunnels (one funded by CBS, the other by NBC), both completed in the summer of 1962. Mitchell's flair for storytelling comes through in both cases, but the NBC tunnel is the more compelling tale. Two Italian young men studying in West Berlin, Luigi "Gigi" Spina and Domenico "Mimmo" Sesta, lead the NBC operation. They recruit several friends who are engineering students, ensuring a certain structural integrity to what will become a lengthy tunnel. After some scouting around West Berlin for a favorable starting point, the group finds a swizzle stick factory owned by a man sympathetic to the tunneler's cause, which has a room well hidden from outside eyes and an unobtrusive spot for disposing of the dirt. Interestingly, because these Italians were totally new to tunneling and foreigners, their undertaking never came under the purview of the Girrmann Group, the hub of most fluchthelfer (people smuggling) activity in West Berlin.

NBC's involvement began with Piers Anderton, the network's main Berlin correspondent. Anderton wanted to document a tunnel, found out early on about the Italians...