Because of Stalin’s terror rampages and Beria’s ascent, the Germans acquired a double agent with ready access to the Soviet embassy in Berlin. Whereas in 1935 the NKVD intelligence station in Berlin had sixteen operatives besides the station chief, by 1939 that number had dropped to two. For nine months after the station chief had died on the operating table with an ulcer in December 1938, he had no replacement, until finally the Beria minion Amayak Kobulov (“Zakhar”) arrived, posing as an embassy counselor. Kobulov (b. 1906) was a Tbilisi-born Armenian like his older brother, Bogdan. He had completed five years at the Tiflis Trading School, spoke no German, had no intelligence experience, and had never even been abroad. During the terror, in Gagra, he beat those he arrested himself with a pole, after having them placed on the floor. Most recently he had served as NKVD regional boss for Abkhazia (1938) and then Ukraine (1938–39).248 In Berlin, Kobulov fooled no one, as confirmed by the Soviet agent in Gestapo counterintelligence, Willy Lehmann (“Breitenbach”), who had fallen completely out of contact but in late June 1940 had taken the risk of throwing a letter into the Soviet embassy mailbox with rendezvous coordinates and password, thereby reestablishing contact.249 Kobulov was forbidden by Moscow Center to have any contact with the Soviet civilian intelligence spy networks in Germany, which were being reconstituted (see chapter 14). He needed his own.
Kobulov violated basic spycraft, visiting agents at their apartments and bringing them together in a single place. He had been recalled to Moscow HQ to defend his work; Beria complained in writing to Fitin, his underling for foreign intelligence, about the corridor whispers concerning Kobulov’s dangerous amateurism.250 Beria ordered Kobulov to step up the agent recruitment and, in traceable ways, the minion sought spies among the Berlin population who had past Soviet connections. He met Orests Berlings, a twenty-seven-year-old Latvian, the former Berlin correspondent for the Latvian newspaper
MOLOTOV-HITLER
While Stalin fantasized about a new pact with Hitler, events on the far eastern flank of the USSR continued to be alarming.253 In the third Five-Year Plan’s investment allocation, the Soviet Far East received fully 10 percent, allowing for construction of strategic railroads to buttress frontiers, a secret tunnel under the Amur River at Khabarovsk, a pipeline under the sea to transport Sakhalin oil to refineries at Komsomolsk, a second port (in addition to Vladivostok) on the Tatar Strait, and roads. Despite mass deportations from the region, a combination of incentives and coercion had boosted the local population to 3.15 million by 1940, up from 2.27 million in 1937.254 Japan, in a dream come true for Stalin, had become stalemated in its war to conquer all of China. But, contrary to his further wishes, a domestic showdown loomed there, desired by both the Nationalists and the Chinese Communists. Mao had dispatched a coded telegram (November 7, 1940) warning of an imminent Chinese Nationalist attack on the Chinese Communists and seeking Stalin’s permission for “a preventive counteroffensive.” Mao’s telegram was received in Moscow on November 12. Dimitrov convened the Comintern executive committee, then tried to stall, instructing Mao to prepare his forces but not to act. That same day, at around 11:00 a.m., Molotov arrived at Berlin’s Anhalter train station, near Potsdamer Platz.255
