The Travel Bureau

Passport forgery and sewer crawling were, until recently, the unacademic pursuits of a group of West Berlin's most serious university students. Their object: to smuggle as many East Berliners as possible across the Communist Wall to freedom.

It began as a sort of one-way student exchange program last Aug. 13, the day the ugly barrier split the city. To seven liberal arts and science students from West Berlin's Free University and other schools, it was clear that the Wall would cut off hundreds of classmates who lived in East Berlin but studied in the Western half of the city. Over beer and coffee in a cafe, they devised a daring scheme to outwit the Reds. Cutting classes and neglecting their books, the students blandly named themselves Das Reiseburo (the Travel Bureau) and swung into operation.

Sudden Suspicion. Seeking out West Berlin relatives or friends of the hapless students who were now trapped in the East, the Travel Bureau collected photographs of colleagues they knew wanted to escape. They then hunted down West Berliners who resembled their fellow students, bluntly asked to borrow the lookalikes' identity papers (which had the owners' photographs attached) so that their classmates could "legitimately" cross at the border checkpoint while posing as West Berliners. The ruse was highly successful until the Vopos became suspicious of so many West Berliners in the East, barred residents of the free sector from crossing the border. West Germans, however, at the time still had access to East Berlin and the use of phony identity cards continued much as before.

Flushed with success, the Travel Bureau expanded its rescue operations to include families of students and just about anyone else who appealed for help through clandestine contacts. For a while, scores of trapped East Berliners calmly walked to freedom by flashing the borrowed pasteboards to Communist guards. Ink stamps were expertly forged by one Travel Bureau specialist, who insisted that sharpened wooden matches were the best tools.

Microphones in the Sewers. When the tightened border restrictions prevented the Travel Bureau from using counterfeit documents for their clients' perilous frontier crossings, the ingenious plotters switched to routes beneath the border--three sewers that run under the Wall in various parts of Berlin. Lifting 125-lb.

manhole covers, guided groups in East Berlin lowered themselves into the sewer, hunched through the shoulder-high canal, emerged in West Berlin beneath an automobile placed over the open manhole.

Until October, the sewer route worked perfectly. But the Vopos spotted a group trying to flee, tossed tear-gas bombs down the manhole, and reportedly wired all East-West sewers with burglar alarms and microphones. Abruptly, the Travel Bureau was put out of business. Not until last week, when disclosure of the abandoned underground railway no longer mattered, was its existence revealed. By then, the bureau's 50 voluntary agents were back at more conventional studies, reunited in the West with the 600 lucky clients who had successfully completed the Travel Bureau's exclusive tours.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.