The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. Max Hastings
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five months of the Eastern war.
Meanwhile Willy Lehmann’s material also began to include evidence of Germany’s commitment to war with Russia. On 28 May he told his handler that he had been ordered for undisclosed reasons to organise a twenty-four-hour duty roster for his section. A few days later his health collapsed, and he was obliged to take sick leave, from which he returned only on 19 June. What he then learned in his office caused him to discard tradecraft and call an immediate meeting with Zhuravlev, his courier: the Gestapo had been formally informed of an order to initiate military operations against the Soviet Union. This report was immediately forwarded to Moscow, but it seems unlikely that Beria showed it to Stalin until the last hours before the German invasion.
Another significant NKVD German source was Captain Walter Maria Stennes, once an enthusiastic Nazi stormtrooper and friend of Hitler. Stennes – ‘Friend’ in Moscow Centre’s books – had since experienced a dramatic change of heart, becoming an ardent foe of the regime. Having survived a brief term of imprisonment, he departed for China where he became Chiang Kai-shek’s air adviser and was recruited by the Russians. On 9 June 1941, following a conversation with a high-ranking Wehrmacht visitor, he informed Vasily Zarubin that the invasion had been planned for May, then postponed, and that a three-month campaign was now scheduled to start on 20 June. Zarubin also told Moscow that Stennes had met Sorge in Shanghai, who had heard the same story.
Schulze-Boysen wrote to his NKVD bosses on 11 June, warning the Russians to ‘prepare for a surprise attack’. He urged Moscow to bomb the Romanian oilfields and rail junctions at Königsberg, Stettin and Berlin, as well as to launch a thrust into Hungary, to cut off Germany from the Balkans. This was an extraordinary step for a German officer to take, even one as disaffected from his own government as Schulze-Boysen – explicitly to urge a foreign power to bomb his own country. But to such a pass had matters come. In all, between September 1940 and June 1941, Harnack and Schulze-Boysen provided forty-two reports which remain extant – and perhaps more which have been lost or never reached Moscow – offering ever more circumstantial detail about Hitler’s preparations and operational planning. Moreover, on 20 June a Rome source informed Centre that the Italian ambassador in Berlin had sent his Foreign Ministry a coded telegram reporting that the German invasion of the Soviet Union would start between 20 and 25 June.
4 THE DEAF MAN IN THE KREMLIN
Thus, from early 1941 onwards a flood of intelligence reached Moscow, conveying a common message: Hitler was on the brink, though there were many divergences of opinion about when he would attack – unsurprising, since the Wehrmacht’s timetable was repeatedly pushed back by operational delays. In those days, however, the Soviet Union was better protected against its own people than against foreign foes. Russia’s intelligence chiefs were preoccupied with enemies within. There were fears about rising Ukrainian nationalism. Beria reported subversive activity by Jewish and Zionist organisations – he advanced the implausible claim that these were acting on behalf of the Nazis. Merkulov described successful purges of ‘anti-Soviet elements’ in the Baltic republics, with 14,467 people arrested and 25,711 exiled to Siberia.
The man chiefly responsible for analysing incoming intelligence was Lt. Gen. Pavel Fitin, who had headed the foreign section of the NKVD since 1939, when he ascended to office in the wake of the Purges. He was an unlikely appointment, selected for political reliability. A former Komsomol leader and Party official, he had studied at Moscow’s agricultural mechanisation school before working for some years at a farming advice service. Only then was he selected to attend SHON, the foreign intelligence training school established at Balashikha, fifteen miles east of Moscow. Students – 120 in the first three years, just four of them women – were perfunctorily introduced to bourgeois Western living: teachers with European experience lectured them on dress, manners, ‘good taste’. Trainees spent four hours a day studying languages, two on intelligence tradecraft. Fitin was already thirty-nine in 1938, when he started work at the NKVD. A visiting American, gazing at his long fair hair and blue eyes which conveyed an illusion of innocence, suggested that he looked more like a cruise director than a spymaster. Although no fool, Fitin would never present to his superiors Merkulov, Beria and beyond them Stalin anything likely to incur their anger. When in mid-June 1941 an NKVD agent in Helsinki reported large-scale Finnish troop movements, a nervous Fitin scribbled to his deputy, ‘Please process carefully for Khozyain’ – ‘the Master’, as Stalin was always described.
The last link in the foreign intelligence chain before ‘Barbarossa’ was Winston Churchill. British perceptions of the Soviet Union, and of the potential of the Red Army, were coloured by the loathing of most soldiers, diplomats and Tory politicians for everything to do with the bloodstained Bolsheviks. Moreover, their expectations of German strategy were distorted by a nationalistic conviction that Hitler saw victory over Britain as his foremost objective. When Sir Victor Mallet, Britain’s ambassador in Stockholm, reported in March that ‘all military circles in Berlin are convinced of conflict with Russia this spring and consider success certain’, the Foreign Office dismissed his dispatch as reflecting ‘the usual contradictory rumours’. On 24 March 1941, Stafford Cripps cabled from Moscow, reporting his Swedish counterpart’s information: ‘German plan is as follows: the attack on England will be continued with U-boats and from the air, but there will be no invasion. At the same time a drive against Russia will take place. This drive will be by three large armies: the first based at Warsaw under von Bock, the second based at Konigsberg, the third based at Cracow under List.’
The Joint Intelligence Committee rejected this warning. In early April the JIC’s assessment was not dissimilar from that of Stalin: ‘1. These reports may be put out by Germans as part of the war of nerves 2. German invasion would probably result in such chaos throughout Soviet Union that the Germans would have to reorganise everything in the occupied territory and would meanwhile lose supplies which they are now drawing from the Soviet Union at any rate for a long time to come 3. Germany’s resources, though immense, would not permit her to continue her campaign in the Balkans, to maintain the present scale of air attack against this country, to continue her offensive against Egypt, and at the same time to invade, occupy and reorganise a large part of the Soviet Union … 5. There have been indications that German General Staff are opposed to war on two fronts and in favour of disposing of Great Britain before attacking Soviet Union.’
Here was a manifestation of the foremost sin in intelligence analysis: the JIC reached conclusions founded upon British and not Nazi logic. The prime minister, however, had long nursed a hunch that Hitler would turn East. On 21 April he dispatched a personal warning to Stalin, inspired by Cripps’s message and some Ultra indications. This was received with derision. Maisky, the Soviet ambassador, taunted Brendan Bracken: ‘Since when does Churchill tend to take the interests of the Soviet Union so closely to his heart?’ He told Bracken, Churchill’s intimate, that such missives from London had entirely the opposite effect to that which was intended. He did not add a vital corollary: that Whitehall’s traitors had briefed the Kremlin about the JIC’s disbelief that Hitler would invade. As late as 23 May, the Committee reported that a new agreement between Germany and Russia might be imminent. Foolish though such speculation sounds today, it was then less than two years since just such a satanic pact had been signed. If the two tyrants had struck a bargain before, why should they not do so again? Nor was Moscow the only place where Churchill’s sincerity was questioned. Bjorn Prytz, the Swedish ambassador in London, told Maisky he thought Britain’s prime minister had no idea how to win the war, save by trying to drag the Russians in. Cripps told the American ambassador in Moscow that he could well imagine the British acquiescing in a German invasion of Russia, if Hitler made a compromise peace offer to Britain.
When informed and influential foreigners clung to such opinions, Stalin’s cynicism about war warnings from Churchill, whom he knew to be defying the views of his own advisers, becomes less baffling. In April, Khozyain ordered the Red Army and the intelligence services to ignore both alleged German military preparations beyond the border, and repeated Luftwaffe violations of Soviet airspace. At the end of the month Merkulov submitted a report designed to silence the ‘warmongers’