Kremlin’s gift to appoint the hour for a showdown, which was not yet. He clung to the view, slavishly endorsed by Beria, that Hitler was engaged in a massive bluff, designed to cow Russia into letting Germany have its way in the Balkans. Augusto Rosso, the Italian ambassador in Moscow, wrote on 21 September 1940: ‘The Germans have raised a barrier [against the Russians]: the march to the south has been stopped, the oil is at the disposal of the Germans … The Danube is a German river. This is the first diplomatic defeat of Comrade Stalin … and the defeat is even more humiliating because it explodes the dream which throughout the centuries has occupied a special place in the Russian soul: [dominance] of the southern meridian.’
Friedrich von der Schulenberg, Germany’s ambassador, helped to assuage Moscow’s fears about Berlin’s intentions, because his own honesty and sincerity were manifest, and directed towards preserving peace. Beria told Stalin that once Vichy France and Spain had joined the Axis as expected, Hitler planned to induce him to join a pact that would close a steel ring around Britain: ‘Pressure was to be exerted on Russia,’ the Soviet intelligence supremo wrote on 24 October 1940, ‘to reach a political agreement with Germany which would demonstrate to the entire world that the Soviet Union will not hold aloof, and actively join the struggle against Britain, to secure a new European order.’ In November Molotov was dispatched to Berlin, to discover ‘the real intentions of Germany’s proposals for the New Europe’. The foreign minister made plain that Stalin still sought control of the mouth of the Danube, which Hitler had no intention of conceding, and the visit confirmed Germany’s leader in his commitment to war.
The NKVD’s informants in London asserted, correctly, that many of Britain’s businessmen and bankers favoured a compromise peace. Moscow was appalled by such a prospect, which would make Hitler unstoppable. The Kremlin aspired to see Germany weakened, to make Hitler more biddable. Thus, for all Stalin’s disdain for Churchill and his people, he was delighted by British successes against the Luftwaffe at home and the Italians in North Africa. Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, waxed lyrical about the prospects, writing on 3 November 1940: ‘England has not merely survived, but has strengthened its position compared with that which prevailed after the fall of France … in the “Battle of Britain”. Hitler, like Napoleon 135 years earlier, has suffered a defeat, his first serious setback of this war; the consequences are impossible to foresee.’
Through the winter of 1940–41, Stalin was battered by contrary winds and fears. The NKVD and GRU reported insistently and accurately, on the authority of its secret Whitehall informants, that the British were considering a bomber assault on his Baku oil wells, which were supplying Russian fuel to the Luftwaffe. The Kremlin was even more dismayed by Axis preparations to invade Greece, which could presage seizure of the Dardanelles, a centuries-old Russian nightmare. If Turkey came into the war on either side, Stalin thought its army liable to invade the Caucasus, of which the Ottomans had been dispossessed barely seventy years earlier. Vsevolod Merkulov, Beria’s deputy, reported intense Turkish intelligence activity on the Russian border. Meanwhile the Turks, for their part, were fearful of Nazi aggression, and in January 1941 their embassies began to brief the Russians about the German build-up in Romania. The GRU asserted on 27 January 1941 that the Balkans ‘remained the decisive focus of political events, particularly since a headlong clash of German and Soviet vital interests has arisen there’.
But although Stalin was receiving a stream of intelligence about the Nazi threat to the Balkans, there was a torrent about the direct menace to the Soviet Union. On 5 December 1940 Vladimir Dekanozov, Soviet ambassador in Berlin and a veteran intelligence officer, received an anonymous letter: ‘To Comrades Stalin and Molotov, very urgent. Russia, please be alert, as Hitler is soon going to attack you. It will soon be too late, but Russia is asleep now. Can’t you see what is happening on the borders, from Memel to the Black Sea? East Prussia is filled with troops, new units are arriving day and night …’ Moscow was informed by its Berlin military attaché just eleven days after Hitler signed his Directive 21 on 18 December, calling on the Wehrmacht ‘to crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign’. In mid-March 1941 the Soviet military attaché in Bucharest reported a German officer telling a friend: ‘We have completely altered our plans. We aim at the East, at the USSR. We shall seize the Soviets’ grain, coal and oil. We shall then be invincible and will be able to continue the war against England and the United States.’
Beria and Stalin nonetheless agreed that there was alternative evidence to show this to be mere sabre-rattling: Hitler was making a show of force on Russia’s border to advance his Balkan purposes. A 20 March 1941 GRU assessment by Gen. Filip Golikov stated what he knew his readership wished to hear: ‘The majority of the intelligence reports which indicate the likelihood of war with the Soviet Union in spring 1941 are derived from Anglo-American sources, whose immediate objective is undoubtedly to promote the worsening of relations between the USSR and Germany.’ The Swedish minister in Moscow, Vilhelm Assarasson, was consistently well informed about Nazi decision-making, and knew about the commitment to ‘Barbarossa’. But Assarasson’s tip was discounted, because it was forwarded to the Kremlin by Stafford Cripps, the British envoy. The NKVD intercepted the dispatches of Turkish ambassador Haydar Aktay, who also cited Assarasson’s information, along with reports of Hitler’s indiscretions to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, predicting war. Aktay’s view was also dismissed.
In March Soviet intelligence suffered a shock. Moscow considered it an important interest to keep Yugoslavia out of Hitler’s grasp. When it became aware that Prince Paul, the ruling regent, intended to throw in his lot with the Axis, Gen. Solomon Milshtein and a band of GRU ‘illegals’ were dispatched to Belgrade to organise a coup against him. They were confounded when Britain’s SOE pre-empted them, launching its own coup to install King Peter II. Moscow was even more appalled a few days later, when the Wehrmacht swept across Yugoslavia in the face of negligible resistance. Yet even though the Russians sympathised with its people, as fellow-Slavs, Stalin dismissed their pleas for military assistance. He remained stubbornly determined not to be provoked by the British – as he saw it – into an armed struggle against Germany over Yugoslavia. He merely signed a meaningless non-aggression agreement with Belgrade, shortly before German troops swept its new government aside. He had set a course – to buy time before confronting Hitler – and was determined nothing should deflect him from it, least of all the intelligence reports that swamped Moscow Centre between September 1940 and June 1941.
It is hard to assess the contribution of Soviet agents in Switzerland at this time, because modern knowledge is almost entirely dependent on the principals’ later memoirs. All were compulsive liars, bent upon inflating their own roles. Thus, what follows is even more speculative than most accounts of Russian activities. The onset of war had created financial and logistical difficulties for Alexander Radó. There was no Soviet legation in Bern through which cash could be channelled to him, and his cartographic business languished. He was left with little money to fund himself and his family, far less a spy network. Alexander Foote, trained by Ursula Hamburger to serve as Radó’s wireless-operator, was striving with equally meagre funds to sustain a masquerade as a British gentleman of leisure, hoping to sit out the war in the comfort of Lausanne. Wireless assumed a new importance for the network after the fall of France, because Radó could no longer use couriers to shift paper reports via Paris. To provide greater security for the Ring’s communications, he opened a second transmitter operated by a Geneva electrical engineer named Edmond Hamel, who was trained by Foote. Hamel inspired mockery because he was a very small man married to a very large wife, Olga, but he cherished an idealistic enthusiasm for the Soviet Union.
In March 1940, Moscow ordered Anatoli Gourevitch – ‘Monsieur Kent’ – to travel from Brussels to Geneva to hand over a new code to ‘Dora’ – Radó. This was a breach of every rule of espionage, barring contact and thus the risk of contamination between networks, but the GRU man was pleased to be given such an opportunity to spread his wings. As a supposed rich young ‘Uruguayan tourist’, Vincente Sierra commissioned Thomas Cook to make his arrangements, and took a fat book of travellers’ cheques to support his cover. On the train from Paris to Geneva, a man who looked familiar took the seat opposite him. Gourevitch was amazed when his companion introduced
