BEHIND THE LINES OF ESPIONAGE DUEL IN COLD WAR BERLIN.

Byline: Richard Bernstein The New York Times

``Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War''

By David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev and George Bailey

(Illustrated. 530 pages, Yale University Press; $30)

Our rating: Four Stars

In 1954, looking for an organization that could make contact with Russians in East Berlin and try to persuade them to defect, the CIA recruited one Igor Grigorievich Orlov into a Russian emigre group based in Munich. Orlov, otherwise known as Sasha Kopazky, didn't last long in Munich, but he was to play an ambiguous role as a CIA operative, one of whose tasks was to recruit women who could lure Soviet officers across the border to the West for interrogation.

Strangely, however, his operations seemed to produce Russian officials who, in retrospect, seem to have remained under Soviet control from the beginning.

The strange tale of Sasha, who went to the United States after his spying days were over and was later identified as a probable double agent, is one of the more intriguing stories told in ``Battleground Berlin,'' a volume in a continuing series of books being published by the Yale University Press that exploit the treasure of newly opened Soviet archives.

This important work is crammed full of information about the murky and complicated battle between the Soviet and the U.S. intelligence services between the end of World War II and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

Two of the authors were rival participants in the game they describe: David E. Murphy, a former chief of the CIA's Berlin Operations Base, and Sergei A. Kondrashev, a former head of the KGB's German department. Kondrashev ran the British mole George Blake, who disclosed to the Russians the existence of the boldest Western espionage effort undertaken in Berlin during the entire Cold War, the famous tunnel built to tap into Soviet and East German phone cables.

The third author, George Bailey, is a former director of Radio Liberty and an expert on Russian-German relations.

The three authors have produced a book of undeniable historical value with numerous previously undisclosed facts about Cold War history. The book is also so full of names and organizations, of details about bureaucratic infighting and references to now obscure episodes, that it is not always easy to follow.

Certainly it is a mark of their seriousness that the authors resist the tendency to tell their spy story in what has become the standard faux-novel form. Their aim is not to make the tale exciting but to arrive at solid, careful accounts of the major incidents involving the Americans and the Russians and their respective German allies.

This means that the narrative has a bloodless quality. It is stripped almost bare of color - the sweaty palm, the gloom of a Berlin winter, the desperate life of one of Sasha's women.

Still, rarely if ever before has such a complete and authoritative insiders' account of the game of espionage ever been put into a single volume. It is not a volume that changes in any major way our view of the history of the time, but it does come to some important conclusions about the relative advantage the Western political system provided over the Soviet system even when the most sensational victories, especially the planting of high-level moles, were scored by Moscow.

During the first great East-West confrontation in Germany, the Berlin blockade of 1948, the Americans' Berlin Operations Base showed that the Russians were making no preparations for full-scale hostilities - illuminating information that helped the allies to keep the blockade-busting airlift in place without risk of a European conflagration.

On the Soviet side, by contrast, the intelligence agencies practiced a kind of self-censorship shaped by what they believed Stalin wanted to hear.

As a result the Soviet KI, or Committee on Intelligence, which ran Moscow's combined foreign spying efforts from 1947 to 1951, seriously underestimated the resolve of the British and the Americans to remain in Berlin despite the Russian pressure.

Later, when North Korea invaded South Korea, Soviet intelligence analysts failed to report the genuine anxiety in the West that East Germany might similarly invade West Germany, an anxiety that led directly to efforts to incorporate West Germany into the Western alliance. Allied actions were portrayed instead as part of an anti-Soviet design to force an unwilling West German population into an aggressive anti-Soviet war.

``It is chilling to realize that during this period, when world peace was so threatened, exaggerations and stereotypes about the West in KI reporting compounded the confusion caused by Stalin's preference not to hear about South Korea,'' the authors observe. Stalin, as a result, was comforted in his refusal to consider that the Berlin blockade and the invasion of South Korea were major factors in Western suspicions of Soviet motives and in the creation of a CIA covert operation in Germany.

The authors are able to provide two-sided accounts of the continuing battle in and over Berlin, showing the mirroring actions in both intelligence camps. Their account is often on the dry side, but it is always illuminating.

For example, they sift the often conflicting data on the strange case of Otto John, or, as they call it, ``the longest-running mystery play of the Cold War in Germany.'' John was the West German foreign intelligence chief who reportedly defected to the East in 1954 and then reappeared in the West a bit more than a year later. Was he kidnapped or was his defection voluntary? The case remains murky and complicated, but the revelations in Soviet archives generally do not tend to support John's vociferous claims that his defection had been forced.

The overall picture that emerges in this account is one of the tremendous difficulty the Russians experienced in the face of the fact that West Germany was rapidly becoming far more prosperous and powerful than the East. That is what led ultimately to the construction of the wall in 1961 and the end of the phase of the espionage battle so comprehensively outlined in this book.

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Photo

Photo: The Allies continued to airlift supplies into blockaded Berlin, knowing full well the Russians would not launch a military attack in return.