Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Early in 1941, the London residency renewed contact with the other members of the Five. Maclean continued to provide large numbers of Foreign Office documents. Unlike Philby, Burgess had failed to secure a transfer from Section D of SIS to SOE and had returned to the BBC. Blunt, however, had succeeded in entering the Security Service, MI5, in the summer of 1940. As well as providing large amounts of material from MI5 files, Blunt also ran as a sub-agent one of his former Cambridge pupils, Leo Long (codenamed ELLI), who worked in military intelligence. 13Among the early intelligence provided by Blunt from MI5 files was evidence that during the two years before the outbreak of the Second World War the NKVD had abandoned one of its best-placed British agents. In the summer of 1937, at the height of the paranoia generated by the Great Terror, the Centre had jumped to the absurd conclusion that Captain King, the Foreign Office cipher clerk recruited three years earlier, had been betrayed to British intelligence by Teodor Maly, the illegal resident in London. Blunt revealed that King had gone undetected until his identification by a Soviet defector at the outbreak of war. 14

Cairncross too had succeeded in occupying what the Centre considered a prime position in Whitehall. In September 1940 he left the Treasury to become private secretary to one of Churchill’s ministers, Lord Hankey, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Though not a member of the War Cabinet (initially composed of only five senior ministers), Hankey received all cabinet papers, chaired many secret committees and was responsible for overseeing the work of the intelligence services. 15By the end of the year Cairncross was providing so many classified documents—among them War Cabinet minutes, SIS reports, Foreign Office telegrams and General Staff assessments—that Gorsky complained there was far too much to transmit in cipher. 16

During 1941 London was easily the NKVD’s most productive legal residency. According to the Centre’s secret statistics, the residency forwarded to Moscow 7,867 classified political and diplomatic documents, 715 on military matters, 127 on economic affairs and 51 on British intelligence. 17In addition it provided many other reports based on verbal information from the Five and other agents. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, until the Soviet Union entered the war, most of this treasure trove of high-grade intelligence was simply wasted. Stalin’s understanding of British policy was so distorted by conspiracy theory that no amount of good intelligence was likely to enlighten him. Despite the fact that Britain and Germany were at war, he continued to believe—as he had done since the mid-1930s—that the British were plotting to embroil him with Hitler. His belief in a non-existent British conspiracy helped to blind him to the existence of a real German plot to invade the Soviet Union.

THE LEGAL RESIDENCY in the Berlin embassy resumed work in 1940 at about the same time as that in London. The NKVD had lost touch with its most important German agent, Arvid Harnack (codenamed CORSICAN), an official in the Economics Ministry, in June 1938. Early on the morning of September 17,1940 contact was resumed by the newly arrived deputy Berlin resident, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Korotkov (alias “Erdberg,” codenamed SASHA and DLINNY). The fact that Korotkov simply knocked on Harnack’s door and arranged their next meeting in the Soviet embassy is evidence both of the decline in tradecraft caused by the liquidation of most experienced INO officers and of the fact that the Gestapo was at this stage of the war far less omnipresent than was widely supposed.

A fellow member of the German Communist underground, Reinhold Schönbrunn, later recalled:

Harnack… had little sense of humor, and we, his colleagues, did not feel at ease in his presence. There was something of the puritan in the man, something narrow and doctrinaire. But he was extremely devoted.

Like Burgess and Philby, Harnack was so highly motivated that he had carried on recruiting intelligence sources even during the two and a quarter years that he was out of contact with the Centre. Korotkov reported that Harnack was in touch with a loose network of about sixty people, although he could not “personally vouch for every person”:

CORSICAN’s description of the way that they camouflage their operations is that, while not all of the members of the circle know one another, something of a chain exists. CORSICAN himself tries to remain in the background although he is at the heart of the organization. 18

The most important of the sources cultivated by Harnack was a lieutenant in the Luftwaffe intelligence service, Harro Schulze-Boysen, codenamed STARSHINA (“Senior”), whose dynamic personality provided a striking contrast with that of the dour Harnack. Leopold Trepper, who knew them both, found Schulze-Boysen “as passionate and hot-headed as Arvid Harnack was calm and reflective.” His tall, athletic frame, fair hair, blue eyes and Aryan features were far removed from the Gestapo stereotype of the Communist subversive. On March 15, 1941 the Centre ordered Korotkov to make direct contact with Schulze-Boysen and persuade him to form his own network of informants independent of Harnack. Schulze-Boysen needed little persuasion. 19

Even a more experienced intelligence officer than Korotkov would have found Harnack, Schulze-Boysen and their groups of agents difficult to run. Both networks put themselves at increased risk by combining covert opposition to the Nazi regime with espionage for the Soviet Union. Schulze-Boysen and his glamorous wife, Libertas, held evening discussion groups for members of, and potential recruits to, an anti-Hitler underground. Libertas’s many lovers added to the danger of discovery. As young resisters pasted anti-Nazi posters on Berlin walls, Schulze-Boysen stood guard over them dressed in his Luftwaffe uniform, with his pistol at the ready and the safety catch off. 20

The most important intelligence provided by the Harnack and Schulze-Boysen networks in the first half of 1941 concerned Hitler’s preparations for operation BARBAROSSA, the invasion of Russia. On June 16 Korotkov cabled the Centre that intelligence from the two networks indicated that “[a]ll of the military training by Germany in preparation for its attack on the Soviet Union is complete, and the strike may be expected at any time.” 21Similar intelligence arrived from NKVD sources as far afield as China and Japan. Later KGB historians counted “over a hundred” intelligence warnings of preparations for the German attack forwarded to Stalin by Fitin between January 1 and June 21. 22Others came from military intelligence. All were wasted. Stalin was as resistant to good intelligence from Germany as he was to good intelligence from Britain.

The Great Terror had institutionalized the paranoid strain in Soviet intelligence assessment. Many NKVD officers shared, if usually to a less grotesque degree, Stalin’s addiction to conspiracy theory. None the less, the main blame for the catastrophic failure to foresee the surprise attack on June 22 belongs to Stalin himself, who continued to act as his own chief intelligence analyst. Stalin did not merely ignore a series of wholly accurate warnings. He denounced many of those who provided them. His response to an NKVD report from Schulze-Boysen on June 16 was the obscene minute: “You can send your ‘source’ from the German air force to his whore of a mother! This is not a ‘source’ but a disinformer. J. Stalin.” 23Stalin also heaped abuse on the great GRU illegal Richard Sorge, who sent similar warnings from Tokyo, where he had penetrated the German embassy and seduced the ambassador’s wife. Sorge’s warnings of operation BARBAROSSA were dismissed by Stalin as disinformation from a lying “shit who has set himself up with some small factories and brothels in Japan.” 24