Even the most spectacular feats of Soviet espionage boomeranged. NKGB counterintelligence was headed by Pyotr Fedotov (b. 1900), the son of an orchestra conductor, who had acquired long experience in counterinsurgency in the North Caucasus against Chechen fighters, before transferring to Moscow in late 1937 when terror vacancies had to be filled. He targeted the German embassy, which had perhaps 200 employees, including 20 under military attaché General Ernst Köstring, who spoke nearly perfect Russian and traveled far and wide, proving to be a talented observer of the combat potential of the Red Army, Soviet military industry, and Soviet mobilization status.271 Köstring resided in a single-story detached house at Bread Lane, 28, and appears to have assumed that it was secure (the NKGB could not employ microphones placed in adjacent apartments, as it usually did). During one of his absences, Fedotov’s team managed to tunnel a very considerable distance from a neighboring building, on the pretext of pipe reconstruction, and into the mansion’s basement, then entered Köstring’s office, opened his safe, photographed its contents, and installed listening devices, while managing to erase all traces of their penetration.272 Thus could the NKGB eavesdrop on discussions among the Germans and their allies (Italians, Hungarians, Finns, Japanese, Slovaks), which went straight to Merkulov, and from him to Stalin’s desk.273 On May 31, 1941, Fedotov evidently played a recording for Stalin of Köstring’s conversation with the Slovakia ambassador: “Here what we need is to create some kind of provocation. We must arrange for some German or other to be killed and by that means bring on war.”274
Such chatter offered yet more substantiation for the felt imperative to avoid handing the Germans a casus belli, but despite the military attaché’s desire to ingratiate himself, Hitler needed no such provocation to invade. “The transfer of troops according to the mobilization plan is proceeding successfully,” General Halder recorded in his diary (May 30). “The Führer decided that the date for starting the operation ‘Barbarossa’ remains as set—June 22.”275
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Richard Sorge (“Ramsay”) passed on to the Germans as well information he picked up from Japanese government circles, in line with long-ago-issued Soviet permission.276 He so impressed the German ambassador with his knowledge of Japan (based on his secret cabinet source, Ozaki) that Ott gave him the cipher codes for communication with Berlin, allowing Sorge to learn everything known to the embassy about Hitler’s plans.277 But the embassy was receiving information from Berlin late (the pouch was no longer being sent via the Trans-Siberian Railway across Soviet territory) and, even more important, it was not given firsthand information about Barbarossa. On the contrary, Ribbentrop’s foreign ministry knowingly disinformed Ott. Sorge’s dispatches, meanwhile, were transmitted via smuggled microfilms or, far faster, via wireless to Khabarovsk by the skilled shortwave operator Max Clausen, a German Communist residing in Japan, who built his transmitter from scratch. Clausen did the coding himself, using onetime pads (which worked via a secret, random key), making them effectively unbreakable but requiring a prodigious amount of time. Unbeknownst to Sorge, Clausen appears to have passed on only about half of the dispatches. On top of being busy running his own blueprint machinery and reproduction business, which Clausen made profitable, he had begun to suffer from heart trouble, doubt Marxism-Leninism, and resent Sorge’s condescension and personal cluelessness.278
