The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

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.”²¹ Similar 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 21.²² Others 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.”²³ Stalin 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