Red Orchestra (31 page)

Korotkov's report ran directly counter to Stalin's convictions about Hitler. When Stalin received the information, he called in his intelligence chief (and Korotkov's boss), Lavrenty Beria, and asked him his opinion. Beria had recently intervened on Korotkov's behalf, but he had also just inherited his position from the executed former chief of secret police. Beria told Stalin what he wanted to hear: “I will drag this Korsikanets [Harnack] to Moscow and jail him for disinformation,” he responded.
¹⁷

Both Alexander Korotkov and Arvid Harnack saw the need to regroup. Arvid realized that his economic reports would be useful to the Soviets, but updates from Kuckhoff's new friend at air force intelligence would be far more critical. He called a meeting. Over the past five years, Arvid Harnack, Adam Kuckhoff, and Harro Schulze-Boysen had all met one-on-one, but now, over October and November of 1940, they gathered as a group for the first time.

For Arvid, a cautious man by nature, the meetings must have come as a jolt. At Arvid and Adam's prompting, Harro ran through his alarmingly long list of activities. He started with his professional duties. He was supplementing his work at air force intelligence with some university courses, and he had just been asked to teach a class for young officers at the school of foreign affairs. Harro's resistance work was even more expansive, and he cheerfully mixed it up with his day job. He gave daily
press conferences for his friends, briefing them on the information he gathered from the foreign newspapers he analyzed in the office. His information was passed along to other discussion groups or published in clandestine newsletters for small circles of like-minded friends. Harro found new recruits for the resistance everywhere, including the air force, the university, and his social circles.

All in all, he was a security nightmare. Arvid Harnack told Harro that if he was going to be of any real use in fighting the Nazis, he'd have to rein himself in. It was particularly important for him to break off contact with Walter Küchenmeister's Communist exiles in Switzerland. These circles were rife with informers. Adam Kuckhoff was unsurprised by Harro's haphazard activities. Harro's wife, Libertas, had told Greta that she was concerned by the way her husband got “carried away” by his temperament, and hoped that Arvid's sober approach would be a moderating influence.
¹⁸

Korotkov returned to headquarters for further instructions. Whatever Stalin's reaction to his initial report, Moscow was hungry for more. In December 1940 the Soviet deputy director of foreign intelligence, Pavel Sudoplatov, drew up a ten-point shopping list for Korotkov to present to Arvid Harnack. First, Sudoplatov wanted Harnack to acquire military intelligence through his ministry connections. Second, Harnack was asked to gather information about the conservative German resistance to Hitler (to address Soviet concerns that the German generals and Social Democrats would join forces with the British and the Americans against the Soviets).
¹⁹

Later that month, Harnack officially brought Harro Schulze-Boysen into the operation. He was assigned the code name “Starshina” (a Russian military rank).
²⁰
Korotkov asked Adam Kuckhoff to serve as the third of his direct contacts, with the code name “Starik” (“old man”). Kuckhoff was described as an old friend of Korsikanets who could report on the opposition to Hitler and assist in communications.
²¹
For the time being Arvid Harnack would serve as the sole contact to Korotkov.

Korotkov's reports from Berlin provided an early warning of the Nazis' plans to invade Russia, and offered the Soviets ample time to mount a strong defense. But Stalin's trust in his fellow dictator was unperturbed, and Hitler took imaginative measures to lead him on. On
New Year's Eve 1940, Hitler sent Stalin a holiday greeting, accompanied by a reassuring message. If the Soviet leader happened to hear any rumors about a possible German invasion, he confided, it was part of his deliberate smokescreen.

“I especially want to warn you of the following,” Hitler added.

Hitler closed his letter by suggesting that the two leaders get together sometime to discuss the disposal of England's remains and plan the new world order. Hitler was a little busy at the moment, he said, but he expected his schedule to free up around the “end of June.” As it happened, his June invasion would keep both men fully occupied.

It is possible that Stalin discounted Arvid's initial report as vague, but once Harro Schulze-Boysen joined the effort in December, the information became extensive and detailed. Harro's office was directly involved in implementing Directive Number 21, signed into effect by Adolf Hitler on December 18, 1940. Known as “Operation Barbarossa,” it stated: “The German armed forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign before the end of the war against England. Preparations are to be completed by May 15, 1941.”
²³

Arvid Harnack met with Alexander Korotkov again in January 1941, the first of dozens of meetings that would occur over the first half of the year. Arvid reported that his network had grown to some sixty people.
Among the military officers from the German army, navy, and air force were Baron Wohlzogen-Neuhaus from the technical department of the German army, assigned the code name “Grek” (“Greek”), and young officers from Harro's classes. Other members worked in critical areas of the defense industry. These included Karl Behrens, code name “Luchisty” (“ray of light”), an engineer for the giant electrical company AEG, and Hans Rupp, a high-ranking economist at the chemical giant I.G. Farben.
²⁴

But Harro Schulze-Boysen was the prize. In January 1941 he was transferred to the Wildpark-West complex near Potsdam, where Göring had built his underground command center. Harro's new post gave him the perfect vantage point for observing the preparations for war. The headquarters included both air force communications and intelligence operations, and his duties included writing up the reports from air force attachés at various foreign embassies.
²⁵
Twice a week, Harro made the short trip into Berlin to teach his young officers at the university's Institute of Foreign Affairs.
²⁶
If the invasion went forward as planned, he could offer an unparalleled intelligence perspective.

That month Harro wrote to his parents about his new situation in breezy, telegraphic prose:

O
VER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, HARRO SCHULZE-BOYSEN PROVIDED
the Soviets with a play-by-play account of the plans for the coming German invasion.
¹
In early January, Harro announced that the formal preparations had begun. The air force had been ordered to start large-scale photographic reconnaissance flights over the Soviet border, and Göring reassigned the Russian experts at the Air Ministry to the operations planning staff. Arvid quickly passed the information on to Korotkov, who encoded it and sent it to Moscow.
²
A few weeks later Arvid told Harro that his information had reached its destination.
³

On January 9, 1941, Arvid sent news from the Economics Ministry. The German high command had ordered the Military-Economic Department of the statistics administration to prepare a map of Soviet industrial flights.

The German resisters thought the implications were clear, but the Soviets continued to have doubts. Some of them were inadvertently sown by Harnack himself. There was nothing clear-cut about German foreign policy, and Harnack provided an overview of the competing viewpoints. Korotkov's files over January and February reflected the tangle of Harnack's leads. While Hitler was preparing for war, Hermann Göring was putting out feelers for a peace agreement with England and America. Donald Heath told Harnack that other German generals had approached the United States for a separate agreement.
⁴
The Nazi monolith was never as solid as it seemed.

A different limitation affected Harro Schulze-Boysen's reports. Stalin's intelligence service was unfamiliar with German air force terminology (and, for that matter, so was Arvid Harnack). Much of the information that Schulze-Boysen offered was never correctly translated.

But this confusion was dwarfed by another factor. Stalin was a prisoner of his own denial. Certain that Hitler would not invade the Soviet Union until he had dispensed with Britain, Stalin filtered every bit of information through his flawed prism, despite concrete evidence that invasion plans were under way.

The German reconnaissance flights, predicted by Harro in October 1940, were already producing a massive collection of aerial photographs of Soviet military targets. Soviet intelligence informed Stalin that between March and December 19, 1940, there were fifteen German violations of Soviet airspace. These increased with time. On March 20, 1941, the Soviet foreign ministry protested to the German ambassador that thirty-seven violations had taken place between October 1940 and March 1941, but the complaint was ignored. Other German authorities blandly noted that there were “many military flying schools” near the border, and their “student pilots easily become disoriented.”
⁵

Anxious officials brought the intelligence reports directly to Stalin's desk, but he continued to accept Hitler's word. Having eliminated his best intelligence officers, the dictator distrusted those who survived. He had no interest in the analysis of experts. Stalin demanded the raw data, which he interpreted through ideological blinders, without benefit of experience in the world beyond. Marxist-Leninist doctrine held that fascist Germany had to go to war against the capitalist nations before it attacked the Soviets. Stalin made executive decisions based on his bias, ignoring all evidence and arguments to the contrary.

Step by step, Harro continued to monitor the Germans' secret plans. A March 9 update stated:

Arvid's report added comments from his friend Egmont Zechlin. Zech lin's Nazi sources had said that they hoped to complete a surprise attack that spring, before the retreating Russians could set fire to their ripening wheat fields. The harvest could be gathered to feed the Germans.
⁷

On March 20, Arvid Harnack sent a meticulous report on logistics:

The following week, Hitler ran into an unexpected snag. The Germans had been counting on the cooperation of reactionary governments in the region, including Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. On March 26 the government and prince regent of Yugoslavia were overthrown in a coup. The new government was cautiously antifascist. It offered to sign a nonaggression pact with Germany but retracted a previous offer of support. In Belgrade, angry crowds spat on the German minister's car. Hitler threw a tantrum.

The following day Hitler informed his astonished generals of his sudden decision to postpone the Soviet invasion by four weeks in order to first crush Yugoslavia. The country would be parceled out to Hungary, Romania, and Italy, with the exception of a small, collaborating slice of Croatia. Earlier, Hitler's leading commanders had balked at the idea of a Soviet invasion. Now they feared that a delay would push their operations into the fearsome Russian winter, which had cost Napoleon his army and his empire over a century earlier. Hitler was not interested in his generals' practical objections.
⁸