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
