The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945

But the radioman kept sending: in 1940 he transmitted sixty times, sending 29,179 words of Sorge’s wisdom. Prominent among the spy’s scoops was the draft of a proposed Japan–China peace treaty. It was deemed a vital Soviet interest to keep the China war going, because its termination would free the Japanese army to strike at Russia. When the treaty leaked and the draft was torn up, Sorge was also able to supply the substitute version – though this, too, remained unsigned. From the German embassy he secured data on the Mitsubishi and Nakajima aircraft factories. He provided accurate forecasts on Japan’s aggressive intentions towards French Indochina. He was not infallible, however, and gave Moscow some cause for scepticism. He predicted, for instance, that the British would reject Tokyo’s demand for closure of the Burma Road supply route to China shortly before they did so for three months. As is so often the case with intelligence, Sorge’s original report was not mistaken: Churchill simply changed his mind.

By the end of 1940, Sorge’s standing was higher in Berlin than in the Kremlin. Indeed, the excellence of his reports for the Nazis almost caused his undoing: Schellenberg of the RSHA ran a security check which revealed his communist past. The Gestapo’s Joseph Meisinger was posted to Tokyo as embassy security officer, with orders to look closely at Sorge, though as yet the Nazis had no suspicion of his supreme duplicity. Meisinger was ill-equipped for his task: a creature of Reinhard Heydrich, he was a thug whose reputation rested upon a few months of orchestrating brutality in Warsaw. Much more serious for the spy ring was the fact that some of its principal members were breaking down. Though Sorge sustained his journalistic career, penning fifty-one articles for Frankfurter Zeitung in the first six months of 1941, his nerves were shredded. His drinking worsened, and Hanako found him an increasingly violent lover. When she sobbed and begged him to explain himself, he responded sullenly, ‘I am lonely.’ She said, ‘How can this be, when you have so many German friends here in Tokyo?’ He muttered, ‘They are not my true friends.’ In a September 1940 signal to Moscow, he said that he was forty-four years old and desperately tired. He yearned to be allowed to go ‘home’ to Russia, though he must have known that Centre would never countenance this until the war ended.

Max Clausen became too sick to keep pace with transmission of Sorge’s flood of material, and began secretly to destroy unsent a substantial proportion, arbitrarily selected. Thus, while it is known what information Sorge claimed to have passed on to the Fourth Department, it is unclear what actually reached them in 1941: Russian releases of some of his material in the 1990s must be treated with caution, because selective. From the end of 1940 onwards, Sorge was personally convinced that Germany and the Soviet Union would go to war. He was deeply troubled by the prospect, and by its implications for himself. During the early months of 1941 he reported an increasing Japanese focus on a ‘Strike south’ strategy against the European Asian empires. On 10 March he wrote of German pressure on Japan ‘to invigorate her role in the Tripartite Pact’ by attacking the Soviet Union. But Sorge added that this war would only start ‘once the present one is over’.

In May he asserted that Hitler was resolved ‘to crush the Soviet Union and keep the European parts … in his hands’, but suggested that there was still scope for diplomacy to prevent war. Later that month he said that his German contacts expected an invasion to be launched before June, but then added that some important visitors from Berlin believed that the prospect of such action taking place in 1941 had receded. Both these signals probably reflected Sorge’s conversations with Lt. Col. Schol, a Wehrmacht officer passing through Tokyo en route to taking up the post of military attaché in Bangkok. On 30 May he wirelessed: ‘Berlin has informed Ambassador Ott that the German offensive against the USSR will begin in the second half of June. Ott is 95 per cent sure that the war will begin. The indirect proofs that I see at the present are as follows: The Luftwaffe technical delegation in [Tokyo] has been ordered home. Ott has requested the military attaché to halt the transmission of important documents via the USSR. The shipment of rubber via the USSR has been reduced to a minimum.’

Sorge’s reports were as good as any government at any moment in history could ask from a secret agent, but he was one among many voices that cried in the wilderness surrounding the Kremlin. Stalin was no more willing to trust the word of his Tokyo man than that of any other source. He once described Sorge, about whom he had been briefed, as ‘a lying shit who has set himself up with some small factories and brothels in Japan’. Although the Soviet warlord was notoriously wrong about ‘Barbarossa’, few national leaders have lost empires by declining to accept the unsupported word of secret agents. Historians carve spies’ coups in letters of gold, but seldom detail the vastly larger volume of humint that has been partially or wholly misleading. Molotov said in old age: ‘I think that one can never trust the intelligence … The intelligence people can lead to dangerous situations that it is impossible to get out of. There were endless provocateurs on both sides … People are so naïve and gullible, indulging themselves and quoting memoirs: spies said so and so, defectors crossed the lines …’ Stalin would have been more likely to believe Sorge had the spy reported that the Germans’ posturings formed part of a plot concocted by the faraway British.

3 THE ORCHESTRA PLAYS

The most authoritative intelligence sent to Moscow in advance of ‘Barbarossa’ came from the Russians’ Berlin networks. What became known as the Rote Kapelle – the Red Orchestra – was not a single entity, though supposed to be such by the Germans. It was a cluster of separate GRU and NKVD networks, which only careless tradecraft and operational emergencies caused to become entwined. The Rote Kapelle was less important for its impact on the war, which proved slight, than for the fact of its existence. The Western Allies secured extraordinary military intelligence through Ultra, but never had humint sources of any significance inside Germany – unless we include a product of Purple, described later – until some members of the anti-Hitler Resistance contacted Allen Dulles of the OSS in 1943. The Russians, by contrast, controlled a shaft to a goldmine.

The Harnack/Schulze-Boysen network supplied Moscow with information from an ever-widening circle hostile to the Nazi regime. Although they themselves were people of the left, they appear to have forged links with some conservative Resistance figures such as Dietrich Bonhöffer, and also to have had contact with the White Rose group in Munich. Given the number of informants involved, and their reckless insouciance about security, the group’s survival until 1942 was a reflection of Abwehr and Gestapo blindness rather than of the Rote Kapelle’s guile. Arvid Harnack was so passionate in his commitment to the cause that he involved his group in printing anti-Nazi pamphlets and even acted personally as a watcher while other group members pasted wall posters by night. Such grandstanding was courageous, but endangered his much more important intelligence work.

Throughout the first twenty-two months of the war, while the British strove to pierce the fog obscuring their view of the Continent, the Russians were able to continue spying almost unimpeded. As neutrals, they channelled 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 to information that Harnack obtained from Ernst von Arnim, [Dr Karl] Gördeler’s [anti-Hitler opposition] group has made an attempt to achieve an agreement with the army leadership to form a new German government … The negotiations had a negative result due to the negative reaction from the military leadership. However, according to Ernst, some top generals sympathise with Gördeler’s plan …

Zakhar

The Berlin station was not alone in dispatching warnings to Moscow about the invasion threat: on 7 February 1941 the NKVD’s Third Department cited its source ‘Teffi’ in Ankara as discussing ‘rumours about a possible German offensive against the USSR. According to one version this will only happen after the Germans defeat England. According to another version, which is regarded as more probable, Germany will attack the USSR before striking at England in order to secure its supplies.’ Next day came another report from Harnack, declaring a widespread belief at OKW headquarters that full German occupation of Romania would become a preliminary to an invasion of the USSR. This was followed by a further message early in March, claiming that the worsening food situation in Germany was intensifying the pressure on the Nazi leadership to attack Russia. Col. Gen. Franz Halder, said the Berlin informants, was planning a lightning strike similar to the 1940 French campaign to occupy Ukraine, before the Wehrmacht drove south to seize Stalin’s oilfields. Harnack also described concerns in high places that Germany, instead of profiting economically from invading Russia, would find such a war draining. In another report a few days later, he described intensive Luftwaffe aerial reconnaissance activity over Russia, and operational planning for an offensive that would reach the Urals in forty-five days.

Merkulov, Beria’s deputy, read the 11 March report from Berlin. Like all Soviet officials who wished to survive, he was supremely cautious. Born in 1895, he had worked with Beria in the trans-Caucasian region, and rose yapping at his heels through the Soviet hierarchy; his most recent triumph had been to preside over the massacre of 25,000 Polish officers at Katyn. Now, he demanded of Fitin, ‘Aren’t there other sources on this except Harnack? How can we check the information without letting any informants know what it is? The task should be presented to them in a general and cautious form.’ The March reports from Harnack were correct, though Moscow Centre also received plenty of nonsense. ‘Breitenbach’ reported that the British were preparing to unleash chemical warfare against Germany, and that the Germans intended to use poison gas on the Russians in the event of war. Schulze-Boysen claimed that he ‘knows for sure’ that the American air force attaché in Moscow ‘is a German agent. He passes to the Germans the intelligence data which he, in turn, receives from his contacts in the USSR.’

On 15 March Centre increased the risk level for its Berlin informants by ordering Korotkov to establish a direct link with Schulze-Boysen, cutting out couriers, so as to hasten evaluation of his reports. Their first meeting took place in Harnack’s flat, where Schulze-Boysen gave the Russian a momentary fright by turning up in his Luftwaffe uniform. ‘I didn’t have time to change,’ he explained. Korotkov reported to Moscow: ‘We talked exclusively about the information on anti-Soviet plans that was available to him. He is absolutely conscious of the fact that he is dealing with a representative of the Soviet Union [as distinct from the Comintern]. My impression is that he is happy to tell us everything he knows. He answered our questions without equivocation or any attempt to obfuscate. Moreover, it was obvious that he had prepared for this meeting, by writing down some questions for us on a scrap of paper … We hope to establish a close connection with Schulze-Boysen. However, at present he is confined to barracks and is only occasionally and unpredictably free to travel into town, often while it is still light and even in his uniform, as happened when I met him. Any rendezvous must be flexible.’

On the evening of 19 April, in Harnack’s flat Korotkov met Adam Kuckhoff, a writer and theatre director, who was promptly recruited with the codename ‘Old Man’. Korotkov messaged Moscow about him in frankly condescending terms: ‘Kuckhoff strikes one as a cultured and educated man whose views have been influenced by reading the works of Lenin. He still keeps some of Lenin’s works and thinks himself a communist.’ In Moscow the Comintern checked its files on Kuckhoff and endorsed his credentials. They told Korotkov that ‘Old Man’ ‘was deeply affected by the general crisis of the bourgeois culture and became close to the “union of Intellectuals”’. The writer now became a prominent member of the Harnack group.

The insistent theme of all the reporting to Moscow was that of looming Nazi onslaught. On 8 May 1941 ‘Zakhar’ reported: ‘rumours about Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union are constantly increasing … War is going to be declared in mid-May.’ A.S. Panyushkin, who unusually combined the role of Soviet ambassador to the Chinese government in Chongqing with that of NKVD station chief, reported to Moscow early in May that Hitler was expected to invade. The Chinese military attaché in Berlin even told the Russians of the Germans’ intended axes of advance.

The NKVD team in Berlin was fortunate to escape disaster, living through this uniquely sensitive period in Russo–German relations with an oaf as its station chief. Kobulov’s fall from grace began with a drunken row at a May 1941 embassy banquet for a visiting Soviet delegation: he publicly slapped the face of the deputy trade representative. This episode prompted the ambassador to demand the NKVD officer’s recall. Kobulov counterattacked by asking Beria to bring him home; he claimed to dislike the feuding inside the embassy as much as the British bombing of Berlin. Beria felt obliged to report the banquet episode to Stalin and Molotov, but rejected the demand for his man’s recall in return for Kobulov’s maudlin promise of future good behaviour; he was ordered by Moscow to risk no further personal contact with Harnack.

The NKVD man attempted to redeem himself as a spymaster by recruiting as an informant a Latvian journalist codenamed ‘Lycée student’, who, he assured Moscow, was ‘most reliable’. This man, Oreste Berlings, was already on the Gestapo’s books as agent ‘Peter’, a double of whom Ribbentrop said complacently, ‘We can pump whatever information we want into him.’ This foolishness would have been trivial had it not taken place in the last weeks before the Germans launched ‘Barbarossa’, when intelligence from Berlin should have been of critical importance to Soviet decision-making. Kobulov’s blundering contributed to the Kremlin’s stubborn scepticism about NKVD reporting.

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.