elow. He was sure they could not be coming from any of his group, since, according to the schedule, they had not yet begun their descent, but he removed the manhole cover anyway. Presently, a young man pushed his head out and said, “Is this West Berlin?” It turned out that he had been wandering through the sewer system for hours by himself and had found the Bureau’s exit by chance. Students and others who tried to negotiate the sewers on their own were called “wild ones.” They caused the Bureau concern, because they were apt to give things away. The Bureau’s worries increased when East Germans who were not among the Bureau’s clients began appearing at the East Berlin entrance to the sewer route as an authorized group was scheduled to depart. Finally, agents of the Bureau were posted in a third-floor East Berlin apartment to keep a twenty-four-hour watch on the entrance to the sewer, clock the tours of duty of the Vopos assigned to the area, and take eight-millimetre movies of any suspicious persons or activities in the vicinity. Despite all efforts to maintain secrecy, the third route was discovered around the middle of October, after it had been in operation exactly two weeks.
Since then, West Berlin students have carried out other Scarlet Pimpernel activities—ventures that have come to light only, as a rule, after being discovered by East German security officials. Early last January, a few days before Erwin Becker had built his private tunnel, the S.S.D. uncovered an attempt by students to dig a tunnel under a subway station on the border. “Willy Brandt’s moles,” as the East German newspapers called the students, had failed to shore up the sides and roof of the passage with timbers heavy enough to withstand the vibrations of the trains rolling overhead, and the shaft caved in about twenty feet from the entrance. This caused the platform on the East Berlin side of the station to sag about four feet, which, in turn, led the perplexed maintenance employees to discover the students’ ill-fated attempt to build what would have been the first tunnel under the wall. However, the discovery was not made until after the diggers had removed their shovels, picks, wheelbarrows, and other equipment, which they put to use elsewhere with better, though not complete, success.
Around the middle of May, a group of students went to work on another tunnel, which started within a temporarily abandoned construction site, enclosed by a six-foot-high wooden fence, at a street intersection some three hundred yards from Checkpoint Charlie. Working only at night, they devoted a month to digging a shaft more than thirty yards long, which surfaced in a nondescript four-story house at 62 Zimmerstrasse, about fifty feet behind the eastern side of the wall. They thereupon made plans to bring a group of nine East Germans—four women, three men, and two children—through the tunnel at five o’clock on the afternoon of June 18th. An hour or so before that, the leader of the tunnelling organization, who will be known here as Walter, and two other students crawled through the tunnel to manage the escape. While Walter’s two companions remained in the house, he went to meet the nine intended refugees a block and a half away. According to the plan, they were to follow him down Zimmerstrasse in two groups, the first consisting of the two children and two of the women, the second of the two other women and the three men. The first group was instructed to stay about twenty feet behind Walter, and the second about half a block behind the first. Walter was within ten feet of the entrance to No. 62 when he was stopped by a Vopo, who asked to see his identity card. Walter took out his wallet and fumbled through its contents, stalling for time. The two women and the children kept walking, and entered the house. Then one of the women in the second group apparently became panicky and started to run. The others started to run after her. This aroused the suspicion of guards in a pill-box nearby, and they opened fire. “The Vopo who had challenged me was hit and fell to the s