The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  On 18 April 1941, heedless of Stalin’s insistence that no clash with Germany was imminent, Russia’s intelligence services formally shifted to a war footing: the GRU and NKVD warned their networks across Europe, and strengthened their stations in Switzerland and Berlin. But they did little to improve the management of informants in the field, chiefly because experienced handlers were in such short supply. Even more serious, they failed to provide agents with means of long-range communications. Russian-built wirelesses were of poor quality: NKVD communications improved only later in the war, when the Lubyanka secured American sets. In the protracted meanwhile, contact between Moscow and its overseas agents remained precarious. On 1 May 1941 the Berlin station urgently requested transmitters for the Harnack group, in case contact through the embassy was lost. Harnack himself was reluctant to accept such equipment; he said that while he knew nothing about wireless, he was acutely conscious of the ubiquity of the Abwehr’s and Gestapo’s direction-finders. Eventually, however, he acquiesced in a step which merely reflected the logic of his convictions: that war was imminent, and he wished to continue to work against Hitler. After several weeks’ delay, in mid-June his handlers presented him with two sets. The first was a portable D-6, with a range not much over five hundred miles and batteries with two hours’ life. The NKVD man promised more batteries, but these were never forthcoming. The second set was a little more powerful, but required mains electricity.

  Korotkov explained that coding procedure was easy: the spies needed only remember the number 38745 and the keyword ‘Schraube’. He urged Harnack to make Karl Behrens his second wireless-operator, but the German baulked. This was a hugely risky assignment, he pointed out, and Behrens had three small children. He would never forgive himself if the man was caught, and paid the price. Behrens was anyway under Gestapo surveillance, having provided false papers for a Jewish brother-in-law. A second possible candidate, Kurt Schumacher, was called up for military duty. Eventually the second wireless set was placed in the hands of a man named Hans Koppi, suggested by Schulze-Boysen. Within weeks, however, Hitler’s hosts had swept across Russia, driving the Soviets many miles back, beyond reach of Berlin’s feeble signals. The sets given to Harnack fell silent. He continued industriously to gather intelligence, but lacked means to pass it on. This impasse persisted through the first 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 Hozyain’ – ‘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, Hozyain 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’ and talk up prospects for a diplomatic rapprochement with Berlin. He said that German successes in North Africa had encouraged Hitler to finish off Britain before opening any new front. Much was made of the dissension between Hitler and his generals, which was real enough. The NKVD also suggested – a travesty of the truth – that the Luftwaffe was unwilling to fight Russia because of the Red Air Force’s recognised superiority. Stalin briefed his intelligence chiefs that their first objective was now diplomatic: to clarify Hitler’s demands – the price he would seek to extract from Moscow for keeping the peace. They responded that Berlin was likely to want an increased flow of grain, oil and other commodities. Von der Schulenberg’s diplomacy played its part in feeding Stalin’s delusions: as late as mid-May, the German ambassador urged the Soviet dictator to write to Hitler, exploring common ground. Meanwhile Russia’s Neutrality Pact with Japan, signed on 13 April 1941, represented a sincere and desperate Soviet attempt to avert war between the two countries, and thus to reduce the range of threats facing the Soviet Union. When foreign minister Yōsuke Matsuoka left Moscow bearing the signed treaty, in an almost unprecedented gesture Stalin went to the station to see him off.

  Soviet embassies and intelligence stations adhered rigidly to orders from Molotov and Beria to report nothing which suggested the inevitability of war. On 24 May, when the Finnish ambassador in Istanbul gave his Soviet counterpart details of German formations deployed on the Soviet border, Stalin’s man asked contemptuously whether the Finn had counted the soldiers himself. A week later, Timoshenko and Zhukov were summoned to the Kremlin, and arrived expecting orders to put Soviet defences on full alert. Instead they were handed Stalin’s acceptance of a transparently fraudulent request from Berlin that squads of Germans should be allowed to roam inside Russia’s border in search of 1914–18 war dead. The generals were obliged to fume in impotence while Hitler’s scouts surveyed their chosen battlefields, protected by spades and Hozyain’s orders.

  The British government’s clumsy handling of the 10 May parachute descent on Scotland by Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess converted what should have been a propaganda disaster for Hitler into a major embarrassment for his enemy. It persuaded Stalin that both the Germans and the British were toying with him, while preparing to make a separate peace with each other. Lord Beaverbrook, a supreme mischief-maker whose interventions were all the more damaging because he was a known intimate of Churchill, told Maisky in London, ‘Of course Hess is an emissary of Hitler.’ The press lord claimed, rightly enough, that Hess sought to promote a common front against Bolshevik barbarism. Maisky deduced that Britain’s future conduct depended not – as he had hitherto supposed – on Churchillian resolution, but instead on the acceptability of the German terms he assumed Hess to have brought with him from Hitler.

  In the late spring of 1941 Stalin daily expected to receive details of an Anglo–German compromise peace, followed by a demand from Berlin that Russia should join the Axis and accelerate its economic support for Germany. As late as October 1942 Stalin wrote to Maisky: ‘All of us in Moscow have gained the impression that Churchill is aiming at the defeat of the USSR, in order then to come to terms with the Germany of Hitler or Bruning at the expense of our country.’ With breathtaking hypocrisy, he chose to forget that in the mood of panic that overtook the Kremlin after ‘Barbarossa’ began, the NKVD’s Pavel Sudoplatov had been ordered to pass to the Bulgarian ambassador, for forwarding to Berlin, a secret Kremlin message inviting a compromise Russo–German peace. Only because Hitler was uninterested did that approach go nowhere. At an October 1944 dinner in the Kremlin Stalin could still offer a mocking but at least semi-serious toast to ‘the British intelligence service which had inveigled Hess into coming to England’.

  In June 1941 the NKVD dragged from a cell in the Lubyanka Captain Aleksandr Nelidov, an erstwhile Abwehr man in Warsaw, to invite his opinion of Hess’s flight to Britain. The old soldier responded immediately: ‘This means war, without any doubt. Hess is recruiting England as an ally against the USSR …’ Nelidov, born in 1893, was a former tsarist gunner officer who had roamed Turkey, France and Germany following the White Army’s defeat in Russia’s civil war. He struck up friendships in the German general staff, and attended several of their 1930s war games. Early in 1939 he was foolish enough to accept from Canaris an assignment to Warsaw, where he was promptly seized by the Poles. When the Russians overran eastern Poland and found him languishing in Lvov prison, as a known Nazi intelligence agent he was dispatched to Moscow.

  By the time Zoya Rybkina, the tall, strikingly attractive senior operations officer of the German section of the NKVD, was handed his file in mid-1940, Nelidov was a broken man. Rybkina wrote contemptuously in her 1998 memoirs: ‘His behaviour was servile … I felt amused by him but also ashamed of him, as an officer of the old school.’ The wretched captain was repeatedly summoned from his cell to be quizzed about the Wehrmacht through the day and far into the night: ‘His lunch was brought from our canteen, and when he saw a knife and fork for the first time, he pushed them away and said in terrorised tones: “But I am not supposed to have these.”’

  Rybkina set Nelidov to work composing a narrative of the German war games he had attended, complete with maps and order-of-battle details. He told the NKVD officer that the German plan for invading Russia assumed that Minsk would fall on the fifth day. Rybkina wrot
e: ‘I burst out laughing. “How come, on the fifth day?!” He was embarrassed and swore by every god that this was what [Gen. Wilhelm] Keitel [chief of OKW] reckoned on.’ She passed on the joke to Fitin, who snarled, ‘This bastard is such a liar. Just think about it, Minsk on the fifth day!’ Golikov, the Red Army’s chief of intelligence, laughed even louder: ‘So they have decided to drive wedges forward. And imagine – they plan to take Minsk on the fifth day! Well done, Keitel, you are a strong man, such a strong man! …’ But Nelidov also told his jailers that Gen. Hans von Seekt, the hoary old former army chief of staff, predicted disaster for a German invasion of the Soviet Union, because the logistics were unsustainable.

  Doubts persist, unlikely ever to be resolved, as to what precisely the Red Army knew before ‘Barbarossa’. Marshal Zhukov insisted to the end of his days that he was kept in ignorance of much of the foreign intelligence that went to the Kremlin. If the Germans invaded, he himself expected them to drive south-westwards to secure Ukraine and its immense natural resources, though he thought possible an alternative attack on an axis Riga–Dvinsk. Soviet military attachés, especially those in the Balkans, provided detailed and broadly accurate information about German deployments. Russian frontier-watchers contributed substantially more than the NKVD’s or GRU’s foreign agents to the Stavka’s grasp of the Wehrmacht’s order of battle. By April Zhukov realised the importance of the central front in German planning – large forces were concentrated in East Prussia and Poland. But conflicting evidence reflected continuing arguments between Hitler and his generals.