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The Shadow Dossier — The City Where Every Side Was Listening · The Shadow Dossier

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  the shadow dossier act i four flags over one
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  city at the end of the second world war vienna
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  like berlin was divided into occupation zones
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  controlled by the four allied powers the united
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  states britain france and the soviet union unlike
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  berlin vienna's very center the historic inner
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  city was placed under joint four -power control,
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  meaning representatives of all four militaries
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  patrolled the same streets together, in the same
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  jeeps, for a full decade, from 1945 until the
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  Austrian state treaty restored full sovereignty
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  in 1955. That arrangement, unique in occupied
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  Europe, made Vienna something like a pressure
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  valve and a listening post at once. A city where
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  East and West sat physically closer together
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  than almost anywhere else on the continent, and
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  where the ordinary machinery of espionage, recruitment,
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  surveillance, and defection could be conducted
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  with relative ease. Act II. A city built for
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  tradecraft. Vienna's layout. gave it particular
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  advantages for intelligence work. The city's
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  famous sewer system, vast and interconnected
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  beneath the old city, offered a means of movement
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  that avoided checkpoints entirely, a detail that
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  entered popular imagination through the 1949
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  film The Third Man. It self -shot on location
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  during the real occupation and drawing directly
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  on the black market and smuggling networks that
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  flourished there. Beyond the sewers, Vienna's
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  cafes, hotels, and international organizations,
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  already a traditional hub of diplomacy from its
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  Habsburg past, provided natural cover for meetings
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  between agents and handlers from services that,
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  in Berlin, might have had to work far more carefully.
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  British, American, French, and Soviet intelligence
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  services. along with those of neutral and non
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  -aligned countries, who set up shop there once
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  Austria's neutrality was established in 1955,
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  all maintained substantial stations in the city
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  throughout the Cold War. Act III. The traffic
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  that passed through. Vienna's role didn't end
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  with the 1955 treaty. If anything, Its position
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  as a neutral capital sitting on the border between
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  East and West made it more useful afterward,
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  not less. It became a preferred site for East
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  -West diplomatic contacts too sensitive for either
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  side's own capital, including arms control negotiations
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  later in the Cold War. Defectors moving in both
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  directions frequently transited through Vienna.
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  and Austrian neutrality meant that both superpowers
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  could maintain a substantial intelligence presence
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  there without the diplomatic friction that a
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  similar footprint might cause elsewhere. The
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  city's international organizations, including
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  later the United Nations Vienna office and the
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  International Atomic Energy Agency, added further
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  diplomatic cover under which intelligence officers
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  of multiple nations routinely operated, sometimes
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  with mutual, unspoken awareness of exactly what
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  their opposite numbers across the table were
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  really doing there. Vienna never had a single
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  defining incident the way Berlin had its wall.
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  or its famous tunnel its reputation as an espionage
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  capital rested instead on sheer accumulated volume
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  the sustained ordinary decades -long presence
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  of intelligence officers from every side of the
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  cold war operating in closer physical proximity
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  to their rivals than almost anywhere else in
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  the world in a city whose neutrality made it
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  useful precisely because no one fully controlled
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  it Austrian security officials, for their part,
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  developed a pragmatic tolerance for the arrangement.
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  As long as foreign intelligence services didn't
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  operate against Austria itself, and largely confined
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  their activities to spying on each other, the
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  country's own authorities generally looked the
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  other way, treating the whole arrangement as
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  one of the quieter costs and benefits of staying
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  neutral in a divided world. This concludes declassified
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  file number 057 of the Shadow Dossier, the city
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  where every side was listening. What dangerous
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  this is the shadow dossier thank you for listening