High frequencies had been introduced for wireless in the mid-1930s, and one result was that more and more ciphered diplomatic and military traffic was intercepted, albeit not always decoded. Remarkably, British intelligence, with valuable assistance from the Poles, had broken the German code machine, an upgrade in complexity to the commercially available Enigma system.141 Without letting on to his unique source, Churchill, on April 3, 1941, had seen fit to send a telegram to the British embassy in Moscow, instructing the ambassador, Cripps, to deliver it to Stalin personally. The context was the German pressure to force Yugoslavia to join the Axis. “I have sure information from a trusted agent,” Churchill wrote, “that when the Germans thought they had got Yugoslavia in the net, that is to say after March 20, they began to move three out of five panzer divisions from Romania to southern Poland. The moment they heard of the Serbian revolution this movement was countermanded. Your excellency will appreciate the significance of these facts.”142 Churchill, using terseness to maximize impact, meant to imply that Germany was much weaker than it seemed, as shown by its having to shift troops around, and that Stalin should take advantage of an opportunity to take on Germany while it was occupied in Yugoslavia and Greece (conveniently aiding the British position).143
Cripps had long been convinced that the Germans would attack the Soviet Union, and that a British-Soviet alliance was necessary and possible. At a press conference for British and American journalists back on March 11, he had warned, off the record, that “Soviet-German relations are decidedly worsening. . . . A Soviet-German war is unavoidable.”144 The NKGB, five days later, had reported his words.145 Stalin also read the special “Red TASS” translations of the foreign press—available for the highest echelons of the party-state—and he could see how the British press openly mused about Ukraine serving as a “training ground” for German tanks, and the “inevitability” of a German-Soviet war.146 For Stalin, Cripps’s statements, too, were yet another “British provocation” to instigate war. Cripps—despite his own stumbling—understood that Stalin would also see Churchill’s telegram in the same light, so he had not passed it on, advising London that Stalin was inundated with warnings and that Churchill’s too brief message, for a host of reasons, would be “not only ineffectual but a serious tactical mistake.” Churchill insisted he proceed.147 Cripps had not been able to see Stalin since his first audience after being appointed ambassador; he could not even get to Molotov, so he handed the cryptic message to Vyshinsky, deputy foreign affairs commissar, on April 19, after Germany had effectively decided the fate of Yugoslavia and Greece.148
Neither in the original cryptic text nor in the clumsy way it was communicated did Churchill “warn” Stalin of an impending German attack. On the contrary, the result proved worse than Cripps had feared, and he was the well-intentioned culprit. The day before, on April 18, Cripps, on his own initiative, had handed Vyshinsky a long memorandum addressed to Molotov (the only way he could communicate with him), which outlined the dilemmas facing the USSR, then issued a threat meant as an inducement toward rapprochement, to the effect that it was “not outside the bounds of possibility, if the war were protracted for a long period, that there might be a temptation for Great Britain (and especially for certain circles in Great Britain) to come to some arrangement to end the war.”149
COUP DE MAIN
Yōsuke Matsuoka had embarked on the first trip outside the empire by a Japanese foreign minister since 1907, a six-week sojourn that brought him to Moscow (twice), Berlin (twice), Rome, and Vichy. Sorge, based on a conversation between Ozaki, Sorge’s informant, and Prime Minister Konoe, had delivered the inside story: Matsuoka was to determine whether Hitler intended to invade Britain or not—Konoe feared a German-British deal—and was given wide latitude to conclude a bilateral pact with the USSR.150 Stalin found Japan’s authoritarianism difficult to fathom, with its myriad centers of power, ostensibly rogue military commanders, and a mystifying emperor system (a “god” who reigned but did not exactly rule). What he did know was that the Japanese foreign ministry was now the one offering the USSR a nonaggression pact, hoping to exact a Soviet promise to cease aiding Chiang Kai-shek. But the Soviets would agree to sign only if Japan returned Southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands; otherwise, they suggested a neutrality pact, provided Japan would relinquish its oil and coal leases on Soviet-controlled Northern Sakhalin. The Japanese had asked the Soviets to sell them Northern Sakhalin. “Is that a joke?” Molotov responded.
