An Impeccable Spy

by Owen Matthews

  This tale of German defence against Soviet aggression was not entirely bluff. The truth was that Stalin did indeed have a plan in place for invading German-occupied Poland and the Reich itself, if the need arose, known as Operation Groza, the Russian for thunderstorm. In today’s Russia the very existence of this plan remains deeply controversial, as it contradicts the official historiography of an innocent Stalin double-crossed by Hitler. But the document can be found in a so-called osobaya papka, or special file, in the Russian Defence Ministry archive.26 The original plan, dated 18 September 1940, three months before the birth of the Germans’ own Operation Barbarossa, was signed by Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Kirill Meretskov. A slightly later version of the plan, updated after Marshal Georgy Zhukov took over after Meretskov’s removal and subsequent arrest for espionage in February 1941, detailed a Soviet offensive across Poland to Berlin and beyond. The plan of Operation Groza listed the military forces available to Stalin as 300 divisions, including 8 million soldiers, 27,500 tanks and 32,628 aeroplanes. On paper, at least, that gave the USSR numerical superiority over the Wehrmacht – which was also at that moment partly tied down in occupied Europe and north Africa.

  It is possible that it was Meretskov himself who betrayed Groza to the Germans.27 It seems that Berlin knew of its existence as early as March 1941, when Walter Schellenberg and the Soviet ambassador to Germany, Vladimir Dekanozov, discussed Groza over drinks in Berlin. Dekanozov asked Schellenberg directly about ‘“a plan called Operation Barbarossa which means a German assault against us”. The RHSA chief remained quiet for a while before replying: “This is correct, this plan exists and it was elaborated with great thoroughness. We communicated this plan through secret channels to the Americans and the British, to make them believe that we are preparing to attack you. If they believe it, we have a good chance to succeed with our Operation Sealion. But we also know about your “Operation Grom”.’*28 Indeed the existence of Plan Groza – and the Soviet General Staff’s planning for an invasion of Germany, not a defence of the Motherland – has been cited as one of the reasons for the USSR’s unpreparedness for invasion in June 1941. Units along the frontier had been equipped with maps of German territory, but not of the Russian rear.29

  In Tokyo, neither the Germans nor Sorge knew anything of the Kremlin’s contingency plan to invade Germany. They were more concerned with the mounting probability of Hitler’s attack in the opposite direction. By early May, both Ott and Wenneker had become convinced that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable. ‘I chatted to the Ambassador and the Naval attaché about German-Soviet relations,’ Sorge cabled Moscow on 2 May. ‘Ott informed me that Hitler is full of determination to destroy the USSR and seize the European part of the USSR as a grain and raw materials base in order to control all of Europe … German generals estimate the Red Army’s fighting capacity is so low that they believe the Red Army will be destroyed in the course of a few weeks … A decision about war against the USSR will be taken by Hitler alone, either already in May, or after the war with Britain. Ott, who is personally against such a war, has already advised Prince Urach to return to Berlin in May.’30

  Days later the courier Colonel Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer arrived in Tokyo with even more detailed information. Niedermayer told Sorge – in a bar, naturally – that he had been sent to Tokyo specifically ‘to investigate to what extent Japan would be able to participate’ in the forthcoming war against Russia.31 Niedermayer knew the USSR well, having spent nearly a decade living there in the 1920s, during the period when German units were secretly training on Russian soil under the secret deal supervised by Ott himself. The ‘opening of a German-Russian war was already a determined fact’, Niedermayer confided to Sorge. ‘Hitler believed that it was high time to fight the Soviet Union.’32 Sorge reported to Centre that Germany had a threefold objective:

  (1) to occupy the European grain area of the Ukraine;

  (2) to obtain at least a million or two million captives to supplement the German scarcity of labour and use them for agriculture and industry;

  (3) to eliminate completely the danger existing at the eastern border of Germany. Hitler thought that probably he could not find another chance if he should pass this one up.33

  The evidence, from Sorge’s point of view, was crystal clear. Massive preparations were under way to attack Russia. The only outstanding question was exactly when and where the blow would fall. But there was a problem. Centre, in the person of Director Golikov, resolutely refused to believe not only Sorge but also the mounting pile of agent reports from around the world that screamed urgent warnings of the coming offensive.

  Golikov was a civil war hero who had made a career as an infantry officer before joining the Political Directorate of the Red Army in 1937 under the command of Lev Mekhlis. Mekhlis was the main architect of the purge of the army. Golikov was one of his most grimly efficient lieutenants, conducting brutal interrogations of hundreds of officers prior to dispatching them to the NKVD for execution. One of the up-and-coming young commanders Golikov accused of ‘friendships with former enemies of the people and hostility toward political workers’ was the rising star Georgy Zhukov, who had escaped from ‘Beria’s basements’ (a reference to Lavrenty Beria, NKVD chief from August 1938) only thanks to the support of his comrades and superiors in the Belorussian Military District. Golikov had come within a whisker of murdering the Soviet Union’s most brilliant general, a fact that Zhukov never forgot.

  When Golikov was appointed director of the Fourth Department in July 1940 he must have been acutely aware that his five predecessors had all ended up shot. But Golikov was well trained in the kind of dissimulation and buck-passing that prospered in those post-Purge years. ‘He never gave straightforward orders or directions but always left it up to his subordinates,’ recalled one of his officers. ‘If he was not satisfied, he would say, “I never gave you orders like that” or “You did not understand me.”’ Golikov ‘always wore a strange smile whether he approved or disapproved’ of work done by his staff.34 The clear lesson of his predecessors’ grim fates was that the best way to stay alive as head of Soviet military intelligence was to tell Stalin precisely what he wanted to hear. As a result, Golikov consistently distorted the information he received about the increasing likelihood of a German attack to conform to Stalin’s scepticism. The result was a fatally self-reinforcing circle of delusion between dictator and intelligence chief.

  On 20 March 1941, Golikov submitted a report to Stalin and the party’s Central Committee entitled ‘Opinions on the Possibility of Combat Action by the German Army against the USSR’. It was probably the most misleading document ever produced by Soviet intelligence – and would have disastrous consequences for Stalin’s decision-making in the remaining months before Barbarossa.

  ‘The majority of agent reports concerning the possibility of war with the USSR in the spring of 1941 come from Anglo-American sources, the goal of which at present is without a doubt to worsen relations between the USSR and Germany,’ the report began. ‘Recently, English, American, and other sources speak of the preparations for an alleged German invasion of the Soviet Union.’35 In the copy of the report intended personally for Stalin, Golikov underlined passages that would appeal to the dictator’s conviction that Churchill and Roosevelt wished either to provoke a conflict between Germany and the USSR or to make common cause with Hitler to destroy the ‘first socialist state’.

  The meat of Golikov’s report was a catalogue of sixteen paragraphs containing a variety of hearsay remarks and rumours from foreign military attachés, journalists, and the foreign press – all appearing to confirm that Hitler would only contemplate attacking the USSR after defeating Britain. ‘If the Germans don’t have success in England, they will be compelled to carry out their old plans for the seizure of Ukraine and the Caucasus,’ the American minister in Bucharest was quoted as saying.36

  The bitterest irony was that Golikov was in fact extremely we
ll informed about Germany’s real plans, thanks to the NKGB’s – as the NKVD was renamed in February 1941 – brilliant Berlin station chief Aleksandr Korotkov. In defiance of standing orders not to have any contact with networks associated with known traitors, Korotkov deliberately sought out the agents recruited by his predecessor, Boris Gordon, one of the dozens of top rezidenty who were executed in the fatal 1937 recall that Sorge had escaped. One of Gordon’s most promising contacts had been Arvid Harnack, a communist-sympathising official in the Reich’s Ministry of Economics. In September 1940, Korotkov re-established contact with Harnack, who was reactivated as an agent and given the codename Korsikanets – ‘the Corsican’. Korsikanets in turn recruited another colleague, Harro Schulze-Boysen – codename Starshina, or ‘warrant officer’ – a major in German Air Ministry intel-ligence. As early as October 1940, Korsikanets reported to Moscow that ‘Germany would go to war with the USSR in 1941’, the initial phase of the operation being the occupation of Romania. A source in the German high command told Korsikanets that ‘the war would begin in six months’.37 Korotkov’s warning was ignored.

  The Korsikanets network quickly grew as Harnack inveigled other informants, some under false pretences, into giving information. Grek, ‘the Greek’, was a member of the technical department of the Wehrmacht; Turok, ‘the Turk’, was principal bookkeeper of the industrial chemical giant I. G. Farben; Italianets, ‘the Italian,’ was a German naval intelligence officer; Shved, ‘the Swede’, was a Luftwaffe major who worked as a liaison officer between the Air Ministry and the Foreign Ministry; Albanets, ‘the Albanian’, was a Russian émigré industrialist and former tsarist officer with good contacts in the German military. Korotkov was also in direct contact with an old friend of Korsikanets, codenamed Starik, ‘the old man’,* who was able to report on the opposition to Hitler and assisted in communications among the group.38

  By the early spring of 1941, Korotkov, through this mid-level but extensive network, had access to a broad variety of detailed information on Barbarossa. In early January 1941, Starshina reported that ‘an order had been given to begin large-scale photographic reconnaissance flights over the Soviet border area.’ At the same time Hermann Gӧring ordered the Russian Section of his Air Ministry – concerned with logistics of operations over the USSR – ‘directly subordinated to the active air staff responsible for operational planning’. On 9 January, Korsikanets reported that ‘the Military-Economic Department of the Reich Statistical Administration was ordered by the German high command to prepare a map of Soviet industrial areas’. By mid-March 1941, Starshina warned that ‘the photographic reconnaissance flights were under way at full speed … Gӧring is the “driving force” in planning for a war against the USSR.’39

  On 20 March 1941 – the day that Golikov filed his report claiming that Hitler would wait for a successful invasion of Britain before attacking the USSR – Korsikanets confirmed that ‘only one active division was left in Belgium, thus confirming the postponement of military action against the British Isles. Preparation for an attack against the USSR has become obvious. This is evident from the disposition of German forces concentrated along the Soviet border. The rail line from Lvov to Odessa is of special interest because it has European-gauge tracks.’40

  Like Sorge in Tokyo, Korotkov was growing increasingly desperate that his snowballing trove of information seemed to be falling on deaf ears. Breaking protocol, on 20 March, Korotkov wrote direct to his boss, NKGB chief Lavrenty Beria, to plead for the credibility of Korsikanets and his network. On the same day, the US Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, notified the Soviet ambassador to Washington41 that the United States had ‘authentic information’ that ‘it is the intention of Germany to attack the Soviet Union’.42 But both Beria and Golikov resolutely clung to – and reinforced – Stalin’s delusion that no invasion was imminent.

  Other sources, too, were sounding the alarm. On 7 February 1941, Agent Teffi, a NKGB spy in the Greek embassy in Moscow, warned that ‘there are growing rumours of a German attack on the Soviet Union’. Two weeks later the NKGB’s resident in Switzerland, Alexandr Rado (codename Dora), reported that ‘the German offensive will begin at the end of May’.43 Both reports could, possibly, be dismissed as hearsay. But Rudolf von Scheliha, First Secretary in the German embassy in Warsaw, was an altogether more serious source. He had been recruited as a Soviet spy by Rudolf Herrnstadt, a former Moscow correspondent of the German newspaper Berliner Tageblatt, in Warsaw in 1933.44 After the German conquest of Poland, Scheliha – given the codename Ariets, ‘the Aryan’ – was reassigned to the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin, giving him an ideal vantage point from which to spy on Germany’s diplomacy.45 On 28 February, Ariets urgently contacted Herrnstadt’s mistress (and fellow spy) Ilse Stöbe, codename Alta, saying he had information of the highest urgency for Moscow. Ariets was not exaggerating. The documents he had seen at the Foreign Ministry included a detailed operational plan of the coming German attack. Three army groups under Marshals Leeb, Bock and Rundstedt would be directed at Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev, Ariets reported. ‘The beginning of the attack is provisionally set for May 20th.’46

  Ariets’s warning did find its way into Golikov’s 20 March report to Stalin – albeit in highly distorted form. The intelligence chief claimed that ‘after the victory over England, Germany proposes to deliver blows from two flanks against the USSR: an envelopment from the North (they have in mind Finland) and from the Balkan Peninsula’.47 Golikov’s version bore no resemblance to Barbarossa as Ariets had described it – which turned out to be exactly how the Wehrmacht executed it. Golikov also, fatally, remained convinced that the USSR would be safe from German invasion until after Hitler’s conquest of Britain.

  Ten days later, Starshina described in detail the operational plan prepared by Göring’s aviation staff for the attack on the Soviet Union. ‘The air force will concentrate its attack on railroad junctions in the central and western parts of the USSR, the power stations in the Donetsk basin, and aviation industry plants in the Moscow area. Air bases near Cracow in Poland are to be the main departure points for aircraft attacking the USSR. The Germans consider ground support for its air forces to be a weak point in Soviet Defence and hope by intensive bombardment of airfields quickly to disorganise their operations.’48 It would turn out to be a precise description of the first days of Barbarossa. Golikov made sure that Stalin never saw it.

  ‘A good spy can decide the outcome of a battle or the course of crucial negotiations – but of course only if he is believed,’ Boris Gudz told an interviewer in 1999. ‘It is a very difficult psychological state when you are not believed, when you have obtained secret information that turned out to be right.’

  By the end of March 1941 almost every Soviet intelligence officer stationed in and around the Axis nations, including Richard Sorge, was in exactly that difficult Cassandra-like predicament – knowing they were right, but not being believed.

  *There seems to have been some competition for this nickname: SS-Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth was also dubbed the Butcher of Warsaw.

  *Schellenberg either mis-spoke or misremembered; grom in Russian means ‘thunder’ and groza ‘thunderstorm’.

  *Not to be confused with Starik, the nickname of the executed director Jan Berzin, nor the identical NKVD codename assigned to the exiled Leon Trotsky, who had been assassinated in Mexico in 1940.

  17

  Barbarossa Takes Shape

  ‘Now they don’t kill us with their swords – but in their hearts they hate us just as much. They smile and behave politely, but don’t be fooled’1

  Richard Sorge on the Japanese

  Sorge composed a long cable to Centre with Niedermayer’s latest infor-mation – but Clausen did not send it. Instead, he composed his own brief summary, leaving out key information and deliberately blurring details. ‘I thought it was a very important subject,’ Clausen told the Japanese after his arrest, ‘but since I had a favourable attitude already at that time tow
ard Hitler’s policies, I did not send out this information.’2 The actual cables received in Moscow confirm this. By the time Clausen actually went on air on 21 May, he sent only eight messages totalling 797 word groups, about a third of the original message. By his own confession, of the roughly 17,472 word groups that Sorge gave him to send in 1941, the radio man transmitted only 1,465 – a stark contrast to his record-breaking output the previous year.

  ‘German officials arriving here from Berlin inform us that war between Germany and the USSR may begin at the end of May,’ was Clausen’s bare precis of his chief’s vital report. ‘Germany has nine Army corps consisting of 150 divisions.’3 Fatally for the credibility of the message, the second paragraph of Clausen’s cable apparently contradicted the first. ‘They also say that for this year the danger might pass.’4 It was hardly a ringing intelligence slam-dunk. Golikov wrote on the telegram: ‘query Ramsay whether he means Corps or Armies’. Sorge, with his military experience, had of course meant armies (and finally clarified on 13 June to that effect). Clausen had confused this vital order-of-battle information, further undermining his chief and the seriousness of his warning.5

  Unbeknown to his boss, Clausen had been systematically sabotaging the ring’s work all year. ‘I already had doubts about communism at that time and so I sent just a little out of the [information] to Moscow,’ admitted Clausen. ‘Most of the manuscripts given to me by Sorge were torn up.’6 Clausen coded and transmitted only what he dared not suppress, dispatching just enough to keep the Fourth Department from suspecting his treachery.7 Sorge waited impatiently for some indication that Moscow had taken heed of his warning. But there was no news on the wires of diplomatic overtures or Soviet troop movements. For two weeks, Centre did not even acknowledge his telegram. Sorge could not know that much of the delay was attributable to sabotage by his own radio man.