Макс Хейстингс – The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945 (страница 40)

Merkulov and Fitin went together to the Kremlin at noon on 17 June. The latter, who had seldom met Stalin, afterwards acknowledged his own trepidation, which might more justly be called terror. The two grey, bleak, merciless heroes of so many state killings agreed their line before entering Khozyain’s presence: they would describe their own intelligence assessment as merely ‘likely to be true’, rather than certain. They found Stalin calm, pacing the room as was his custom. Fitin saw the most recent decrypt from Berlin lying on his desk. ‘I have read your report,’ murmured Stalin in his accustomed slow, understated fashion. ‘So Germany is getting ready to attack the Soviet Union?’ And he stared at both Fitin and Merkulov.

They had not been expecting him to address the issue so baldly, and felt lost. ‘We were silent,’ recalled Fitin. ‘Only three days before, on 14 June, newspapers had published the TASS statement saying that Germany was still unwaveringly adhering to the conditions of the Soviet-German pact.’ Both he and Merkulov preserved the stone-faced silence that seemed to offer their most plausible path to survival. Stalin fired a string of contemptuous questions about the NKVD’s sources. Fitin described the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack networks, then Stalin said: ‘Listen, intelligence chief, there are no Germans that can be trusted, except Wilhelm Pieck’ – the Comintern’s secretary, now exiled in Moscow. Then followed a silence that seemed to the visitors interminable before Stalin once more looked up, gazed hard at them and barked, ‘Misinformation! You may go.’ In another version of the conversation, he instructed the intelligence chiefs to go back to the sources, check their information and once more review the NKVD assessment. What is certain is that Stalin rejected the war warning.

Rybkina wrote later: ‘It is hard to describe the state of our team while we awaited Fitin’s return from the Kremlin. He called to his office me and [Pavel] Zhuravlev’ – the veteran director of the German section, much admired by colleagues. Fitin tossed the stapled document onto the coffee table at which his two subordinates sat. ‘I’ve reported to the Boss,’ he said. ‘Iosif Vissarionovich studied your report and threw it back at me. “This is bluff!” he said irritably. “Don’t start panic. Don’t deal with nonsense. You’d better go back and get a clearer picture.”’ Fitin told the nonplussed intelligence officers: ‘Check this one more time and report to me.’ Once alone together, Zhuravlev said to Rybkina, with the parade of conviction indispensable to survival in the Soviet universe: ‘Stalin can see further from his bell-tower. Apart from our reports he is being briefed by the GRU, ambassadors, trade missions, journalists.’ Rybkina professed to agree, but added: ‘This means that our agents, who have been tested over years, must be considered untrustworthy.’ Zhuravlev shrugged, with authentic Russian fatalism, ‘We shall live, we shall see.’ Beria, in grovelling anticipation of Khozyain’s wishes, ordered that forty NKVD officers who had passed on warnings of war should be ‘ground into labour camp dust’. He wrote to Stalin on 21 June: ‘I again insist on recalling and punishing our ambassador to Berlin, Dekanozov, who keeps bombarding me with “reports” on Hitler’s alleged preparations to attack the USSR. He has reported that this attack will start tomorrow … But I and my people, Iosif Vissarionovich, have firmly embedded in our memory your wise conclusion. Hitler is not going to attack us in 1941.’

Much ink has been expended by historians on attempts to determine what proportion of the intelligence garnered by Russia’s secret services reached the Kremlin, rather than remaining in the desk drawers of Beria, Merkulov and Fitin. This controversy seems spurious. Beyond doubt, Stalin was provided with overwhelming evidence about the German military build-up on the Soviet border. The Homeric blunder lay in his analysis of its significance. Posterity derides Stalin for rejecting obvious truth. But he merely chose to share the strategic view held by the British, and especially their Joint Intelligence Committee, with the sole exception of Churchill, until the last days before ‘Barbarossa’. This seems important in comprehending the tyrant’s conduct. Thanks to Whitehall traitors, the Kremlin knew that Bletchley Park had begun to read German wireless traffic on a substantial scale, which increased Stalin’s belief in London‘s omniscience. A perversely exaggerated respect for the skill of Britain’s secret services and the guile of its diplomacy thus caused him to accept Whitehall’s view of Hitler’s intentions in preference to that of his own marvellous networks of spies. He could never believe that Churchill’s personal judgement about Hitler’s intention to attack Russia was both honestly expressed, and superior to that of Britain’s intelligence apparatus – until the JIC changed its mind, thanks to Ultra, just before Hitler struck.

Here was the most remarkable aspect of Kremlin behaviour in advance of the invasion: ‘Barbarossa’ did not represent a failure by the Soviet intelligence-gathering machine. Few military operations in history have been so comprehensively flagged. There was, instead, simply a historic misjudgement by the head of state. Stalin’s deafness during the overture to ‘Barbarossa’ emphasised the indissolubility of the links between intelligence, diplomacy and governance. Unless all three did their parts, each one was useless.

In the early hours of 22 June 1941, the Lubyanka was almost silent. The NKVD’s heads of department customarily went home at 8 p.m., though never without a nod from Beria or Merkulov. Pavel Sudoplatov was among the building’s few occupants above cell level when, at 3 a.m., the telephone rang. It was Merkulov, who announced that a German invasion of the Soviet Union had begun. Sudoplatov began hastily calling staff into the building, including his wife Emma, who had abandoned operational work to become an agent trainer. Leonid Eitingon, his deputy, almost invariably cracked a joke or two on arrival in the office; but like every other Russian that fateful morning he found nothing to justify breaching the building’s mood of stunned near-paralysis.

The memoirs of Soviet intelligence officers sometimes convey an illusion that life within the Lubyanka was little different from that in Broadway, but glimpses nonetheless break through of the institutionalised terror. The White Russian officer Aleksandr Nelidov, one of those who had predicted ‘Barbarossa’, was told nothing of its occurrence until on 22 July 1941 he was dragged from his cell into the office of Zoya Rybkina. He grew wide-eyed when he found her sitting behind black-out curtains amid the crump of falling bombs and anti-aircraft fire. ‘Zoya Ivanovna!’ he exclaimed. ‘They are firing real shells. This is war!’ She nodded and said, ‘Today is exactly a month since it started. And Minsk did fall, not on the fifth day as you said that the Germans predicted, but on the sixth …’ A guard came running, out of breath, to take Nelidov back to his subterranean quarters. The old tsarist said gloomily, ‘Farewell, Zoya Ivanovna. You can trust all that I have written here, in this room.’ He crossed himself and bowed as he departed, plainly expecting to be shot.

Two days later, however, he was returned to Rybkina’s office, abruptly handed a suitcase of clothes to replace his prison rags, and ordered to go into an adjacent room and change into them. The guard returned a few minutes later and reported that Nelidov was sitting sobbing, paralysed by fear. The prisoner kept asking why they needed to dress him so smartly before killing him. Rybkina marched next door and told the wretched man to pull himself together. ‘Come on, Aleksandr Sergeevich, how could you let yourself go like this? You need to get a grip. I am taking you to meet my bosses.’ They proceeded first to the offices of Pavel Zhuravlev and his deputy Pavel Sudoplatov, then all together presented themselves before Pavel Fitin. The general invited the astounded Nelidov to become an NKVD agent in Turkey, a country he knew well.

Nelidov said with a choked, hysterical giggle, ‘But first of all I should be … executed …’ Fitin responded impatiently, ‘I am asking whether you would agree to work in Turkey. Turkey, as you know, is neutral.’ Nelidov muttered, ‘Whatever you want.’ Rybkina stared reproachfully at her ungracious protégé, who simply muttered again and again, ‘Whatever you want …’ She took the stupefied man back to her office, where he asked why all the chiefs he met were introduced as Pavel; was this a common codename? No, no, said his new employer irritably, merely a matter of chance. She led him out of the building to a nearby restaurant called the Aragvi, where they sat among tables occupied by Red Army officers, and she recommended the kebab.

Her guest remained too traumatised to eat. When she ordered wine, fearful of being poisoned he begged to be allowed to swap glasses. At last he took a cautious sip, then asked, ‘So when are they coming for me?’ Rybkina responded wearily, ‘Didn’t you hear the order for your release being read?’ Her guest persisted: ‘I don’t understand. How can I be forgiven?’ After lunch she suggested that she show him around a nearby agricultural exhibition, and they drove down Gorky Street, where every shop window was sandbagged and the traffic policemen carried gas masks. She left her man that evening at the Moskva hotel, telling him that Vasily Zarubin had been appointed as his case officer.