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

All these improvements were evident during the battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943 when the Red Army defeated the last great German offensive on the eastern front. Intelligence reports captured by the Wehrmacht from the Red Army during the battle revealed that Soviet SIGINT had located the positions and headquarters of the 6th, 7th and 11th Panzer Divisions, II and XIII Panzer Corps, and Second Army HQ. Aerial reconnaissance before and during Kursk was also on a larger scale and more successful than ever before.⁷⁵

Victory at Kursk opened the way to an almost continuous advance by the Red Army on the eastern front which was to end with Marshal Zhukov accepting the surrender of Berlin in May 1945. With a four-to-one superiority in men over the Wehrmacht, large amounts of military equipment from its Western allies and growing dominance in the air, the Red Army, though suffering enormous losses, proved unstoppable. In the course of its advance, the Red Army sometimes captured lists of the daily settings for periods of up to a month of the Wehrmacht’s Enigma machines, as well as some of the machines and their operators. During the final stages of the war these captures sometimes enabled Soviet cryptanalysts to decrypt spasmodically a still unknown number of Enigma messages.⁷⁶

Despite the improvements after Stalingrad, however, the quality of Soviet intelligence on the eastern front—in particular the SIGINT—never compared with the intelligence on Germany available to their Western allies. The ULTRA intelligence provided to British and American commanders was, quite simply, the best in the history of warfare. The Soviet Union’s most striking intelligence successes during the Great Patriotic War, by contrast, were achieved not against its enemies but against its allies in the wartime Grand Alliance: Britain and the United States.

SEVEN THE GRAND ALLIANCE

For most of the inter-war years the United States had ranked some way behind Britain as a target for INO operations. Even in the mid-1930s the main Soviet espionage networks in the United States were run by the Fourth Department (Military Intelligence, later renamed the GRU) rather than by the NKVD. Fourth Department agents included a series of young, idealistic high-flyers within the federal government, among them: Alger Hiss and Julian Wadleigh, both of whom entered the State Department in 1936; Harry Dexter White of the Treasury Department; and George Silverman, a government statistician who probably recruited White.¹ Like the Cambridge Five, the Washington moles saw themselves as secret warriors in the struggle against fascism. Wadleigh wrote later:

When the Communist International represented the only world force effectively resisting Nazi Germany, I had offered my services to the Soviet underground in Washington as one small contribution to help stem the fascist tide.²

The main NKVD operations in the United States during the mid-1930s were run by an illegal residency established in 1934 under the former Berlin resident, Boris Bazarov (codenamed NORD), with Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov (YUNG), a Soviet Tartar, as his deputy.³ Bazarov was remembered with affection by Hede Massing, an Austrian agent in his residency, as the warmest personality she had encountered in the NKVD. On the anniversary of the October Revolution in 1935 he sent her fifty long-stemmed red roses with a note which read:

Our lives are unnatural, but we must endure it for [the sake of] humanity. Though we cannot always express it, our little group is bound by love and consideration for one another. I think of you with great warmth.

Though Akhmerov, by contrast, struck Massing as a “Muscovite automaton,” he was less robotic than he appeared.⁴ Unknown to Massing, Akhmerov was engaged in a passionate love affair with his assistant, Helen Lowry, the cousin of the American Communist Party leader, Earl Browder, and—unusually—gained permission from the Centre to marry her.⁵