Reconstituted Soviet espionage networks overseas counted some 3,000 different sources, of whom perhaps 70 percent were new since 1938 (such as agents of former Czechoslovak intelligence who agreed to work against Germany).61 The NKVD also intercepted hundreds of thousands of coded telegrams, but only a small percentage (usually less than 15 percent) could be deciphered and read. Soviet intelligence lacked translators, let alone genuine cryptographers.62 Still, Stalin could read intercepts of deciphered communications between Japanese military attachés in Moscow and Tokyo as well as U.S. diplomatic communications with the state department from the Soviet Union, France, and Japan.63 The Soviets did not, however, break British or German codes.64
The despot had spies high up in the British establishment. These included the ideologically committed Cambridge Five: Anthony Blunt (“Tony”), in British counterintelligence (MI5); Guy Burgess (“Mädchen”), in the British secret services (MI6); Donald Maclean (“Homer”), for the foreign office in London; Kim Philby (“Söhnchen”), in the saboteur training unit known as the Special Operations Executive; and John Cairncross (“Liszt”), the personal secretary to Sir Maurice Hankey, the former cabinet secretary and now nominally Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, but really minister without portfolio. “Liszt,” for example, had evidently provided Moscow the UK’s secret September 1940 “Estimate of the Possibilities of War,” which had concluded that Hitler could not mount a successful invasion of the British Isles.65 In 1941, Liszt would pass on 3,349 classified documents, including the telegrams out of Moscow from Ambassador Cripps to Eden at the foreign office, as well as British intelligence reports.66 “Tony” passed British counterintelligence documents to the restored London station chief Anatoly Gorsky beginning in January 1941. “Söhnchen” informed his handlers that the British were not training any undercover agents for work in the USSR, information that in Moscow was double-underlined in red, reinforcing the suspicions that Philby was a double agent working for the British.67 Even after he allowed Gorsky to reestablish the London station, Stalin never trusted the Cambridge Five.68
In Germany, besides the network of Soviet military intelligence centered on Rudolf von Scheliha, who had delivered word of the existence of Barbarossa (without the name), another network of Soviet civilian intelligence centered on Arvid Harnack (b. 1901), who had studied in the United States, married an American, obtained his Ph.D. in his native Germany, traveled to the USSR on a German-government-sponsored research trip prior to the Nazi regime, passed information to the Americans, become an antifascist spy for the Soviets, and joined the Nazi party and now worked in Nazi Germany’s economics ministry. Contact with Harnack (“Corsican”) had been reestablished in 1940 by Alexander Korotkov (b. 1909), who had started at Lubyanka as an electrician and elevator operator but, unlike most post-terror recruits, was fluent in German.69 Korotkov had been appointed deputy head of station under Amayak Kobulov, who initially was kept away from these networks.70
Korotkov was one of the many new people posted abroad by the now thirty-three-year-old second-year head of NKVD foreign intelligence, Pavel Fitin, whose directorate had managed to reestablish about forty Soviet intelligence stations abroad.71 “Corsican” introduced Korotkov to his friend Harro Schulze-Boysen (“Elder”). The Nordic-looking Schulze-Boysen (b. 1909) had campaigned as a youth against the Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany but also against the larger capitalist order; in 1933, SA Brownshirts had smashed his offices and scratched swastikas on his skin. His father was a decorated naval officer (the family was related to Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz) and his mother was friends with Göring; she got him a position in the air ministry (communications).72, 73 “Corsican” and “Elder,” as well as “Aryan” in parallel, cultivated some threescore strategically placed contacts across a variety of ministries, German industry, the Wehrmacht, and German intelligence—a penetration beyond belief in a totalitarian regime.
