's headquarters by digging a tunnel under the border between East and West Berlin. This yielded over 50,000 reels of tape with over 440,000 conversations recorded to the Americans containing information concerning the development of a Russian bomb .
An interesting insight to this operation, which gives a revelation of the operating of all intelligence agencies, is that the Russians already were aware of this tunnel. However, they allowed the mission to continue because if they had attempted to stop it, the CIA would have realized that information had leaked through a mole. This would then have started a search for the mole, and if found, the punishment could be capital. This would compromise the life of their agent, any secret information he has knowledge of, and the chance of further intelligence being gathered from him . The Russians weighed this given knowledge against the probable deterioration of the CIA's immediate operations due to international backlash.
When an operation fails, or is revealed before it has an opportunity
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