The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. Max Hastings
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to Moscow through their diplomatic missions agent reports from all over the world, without need for using hazardous wireless links. In Berlin, the Gestapo’s Willy Lehmann had languished since Moscow shut down contact to him in the wake of the 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact. Lehmann was a loner, and his self-purpose had come to revolve around his intelligence activities for the Russians. Why had they abandoned him? In September 1940, season of the Battle of Britain, he risked slipping a letter into the Soviet embassy mailbox, addressed to ‘the military attaché or his deputy’. In it, ‘Breitenbach’ pleaded for a resumption of relations. He said that unless he could serve the NKVD once more, ‘my work at the Gestapo will become pointless’, and provided a password for telephone contact.
This letter, and the question of whether to reactivate Lehmann, were referred to Moscow. Draconian instructions from the Kremlin decreed that the Berlin NKVD should neither offer nor respond to any provocation that might help to justify German aggression. Nonetheless, after a debate Centre dispatched an able young officer, Alexander Korotkov, codename ‘Stepanov’, to become deputy station chief. He contacted Lehmann, and reported back after a long meeting: the man seemed sincerely desperate to reopen his line to Centre. On 9 September 1940, a personal order from Beria reached Berlin: ‘No special assignments should be given to “Breitenbach”. [But] you should accept all material that falls within his direct sphere of knowledge, and also any information he can offer about the operations of various [German] intelligence services against the USSR.’ ‘Breitenbach’s’ extravagant enthusiasm kept alive Beria’s suspicion that he was a Gestapo plant, testing the sincerity of the Kremlin’s commitment to the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Hence the security chief emphasised that the Berlin informant should be pressed to provide documentary evidence for every assertion he made. So impoverished was the NKVD’s staff in the wake of the Purges that a complete novice was dispatched to act as Lehmann’s courier: Boris Zhuravlev scarcely spoke any German, and after arriving in Berlin his first step was to hire a language tutor. The young man also bought a bicycle, in order to start learning his way around the city. From the outset he was almost overwhelmed by the flow of documents Lehmann delivered at evening meetings, which had to be copied overnight, then returned before the informant set off for his office.
On 20 September 1940, for instance, the Gestapo man warned Moscow that the Abwehr was planning a honeytrap for Soviet military attaché Nikolai Shornyakov, using a singer from the Rio-Rita bar named Elisabeth Holland, an Austrian friend of the attaché’s landlady. Breitenbach gave a detailed description of the Abwehr case officer, Siegfried Müller: tall, blue-eyed, black hair, small moustache, sunken cheeks, piercing stare, with big ears and a thin neck. Müller was rash enough to seek to pass himself off as a member of the Gestapo. When this was brought to the attention of Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s deputy dispatched a stinging rebuke to Admiral Canaris for allowing the Abwehr man to fly false colours.
Meanwhile Alexander Korotkov was also charged by Moscow to reopen contact with the Harnack/Schulze-Boysen groups. To achieve this, in mid-September he risked repeatedly calling on Harnack at his home. On several occasions he was informed by a housekeeper that Herr Harnack was out. Only on the 16th did Korotkov at last meet his man. Their interview was initially tense, for Harnack was wary. When at last he was convinced of his visitor’s bona fides – if that is not a contradictory term for an NKVD officer – he had plenty to say about his own range of contacts. Most significantly, he told the Russian that he and his friends were convinced that Hitler intended to invade the Soviet Union in the following year, 1941. Back at the embassy, Korotkov messaged Lt. Gen. Pavel Fitin, head of the foreign section of the NKVD in Moscow, under the signature of his nominal boss, Amayak Kobulov, ‘Zakhar’:
Top secret
To comrade Viktor
‘Corporal’ has learned from ‘Albanian’ who has spoken to a top Wehrmacht officer, that Germany intends to initiate a war against the Soviet Union early next year …
16 September 1940
Zakhar
Yet Moscow had reason to be sceptical about these sensational tidings. History shows that they were correct, but on 16 September 1940 Hitler had not yet committed himself. An invasion of Russia was being feverishly debated by prominent Nazis and the army high command. But Operation ‘Barbarossa’ remained a controversial option rather than a settled decision. The fact that Arvid Harnack’s prediction was ultimately fulfilled does not alter the important fact that it remained speculative at a moment when he asserted its finality, as did the earlier report of the ‘Lucy’ Ring’s Alexander Radó. Only in November did Hitler decide.
The affairs of the Berlin NKVD were much complicated by the fact that Korotkov, their best man, was hated and resented by his station chief. The Czech František Moravec, who had extensive dealings with the Russians before the war, has testified to the brutish personalities of most of their intelligence officers. One such, Amayak Kobulov, now ran the NKVD’s Berlin station, where he proved a blunderer more inept than MI6’s Best and Stevens. Kobulov’s only claim on rank was a slavish devotion to the Party hierarchy. Born into a family of Armenian small traders in Tbilisi, he worked as a bookkeeper before joining the security forces in 1927. He owed his survival, and indeed rapid advancement, to his elder brother Bogdan, an intimate of Beria. Kobulov served as a notoriously murderous deputy commissar for Ukraine, and was then appointed to Berlin despite not speaking a word of German. On arrival, he told his staff that he required their absolute subservience. When a young intelligence officer protested about being obliged to serve as the chief’s domestic valet rather than to run agents, his boss threatened to dispatch him to rot in the dungeons of the Lubyanka.
Kobulov also took violent exception to Korotkov, and seized an excuse to return him to Moscow with a highly adverse personal report. Beria, receiving this, summarily sacked the young officer in January 1941. He soon retracted this decision, but for some months Korotkov was confined to desk work in the Lubyanka. Meanwhile Kobulov arranged a personal meeting with Harnack. This encounter went unnoticed by the Gestapo, but could easily have been fatal to the network. At the turn of the year, Centre acknowledged that only Korotkov was competent to handle liaison with its Berlin informants. He was sent back to Germany, with a new brief to pass on to Harnack. The NKVD wanted the German informant’s group to concentrate on economics, not strategy. The NKVD Fifth Department’s orders instructed Korotkov to explore the extent of the German domestic opposition, and how far it might be exploited. Nothing was said about probing Germany’s military intentions towards the Soviet Union – from residual caution lest Harnack prove a Gestapo plant, or find himself under torture.
The order was endorsed in red pencil: ‘Approved by the People’s Commissar. [Pavel] Sudoplatov. 26.12.40.’ Korotkov counter-signed the last page: ‘Read, learned and received as an order. “Stepanov”, 26.12.40.’ He duly passed on the message to the Berlin group, bypassing Kobulov, his nominal chief. Through the months that followed, the Germans delivered a steady flow of intelligence. On 29 January 1941, Harnack reported that the Economics Ministry had been ordered to compile industrial targeting maps of the USSR, similar to those which had been made before the Blitz on Britain. He told Moscow that the head of the Russian Department in Berlin’s Bureau for Foreign Literary Exchanges had been warned for possible duty as a military translator and interpreter; and that the Russian Department of the Economics Ministry was complaining bitterly about shortfalls in promised deliveries of commodities from the USSR, under the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact.
Harnack made explicit his own conviction that Hitler was preparing to invade Russia. He also provided copious details on Germany’s economic situation – coal, iron and steel production; synthetic rubber consumption; industrial manpower difficulties, together with German plans to make these good by recruiting workers from occupied Europe – information MI6 would have given rubies to access. Harnack concluded, in terms that weakened his credibility in Moscow, by reverting to gossip: ‘According to Hitler’s circle, he is now in a very unbalanced state, suddenly runs to watch a film during the night, or – as has happened more than once, tore down the curtains in a fit of fury.’ The NKVD’s Berlin station reported to Moscow on 26 February 1941:
Top Secret
To Comrade Viktor
According