The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. Max Hastings

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      Rybkina’s narrative of these events is shot through with merciless contempt for the weakness of Nelidov. For all her striking looks, she was not a woman to whom any prudent man would offer his back, far less his lips. Nelidov never went to Turkey. When Zarubin knocked on his door next morning, it remained unopened. On breaking in, he found his new recruit suspended from a rope made of torn sheets. The transition from doomed prisoner to favoured protégé of the Lubyanka was too much for his broken spirit. Who can say that Nelidov’s last decision was ill-judged?

5

       Divine Winds

      1 MRS FERGUSON’S TEA SET

      The Japanese made less effective use of intelligence than any other warring nation between 1942 and 1945. But in the months before they went to war, their decisions were significantly influenced by an extraordinary British indiscretion. It would be an exaggeration to say that Mrs Violet Ferguson’s tea set, scarcely a masterpiece of the potter’s art, caused Japan to attack the British Empire. But the incident in which it played a part was an example of an intelligence coup that helped to decide the fate of nations.

      On 11 November 1940 SS Automedon, a humble 7,528-ton British merchant ship of the Blue Funnel Line, exotically named for Achilles’ charioteer, was ploughing a lonely course for Penang, in a stretch of the Indian Ocean west of Sumatra far from any active theatre of war. Nonetheless, at 7 a.m. when the officer of the watch spotted a distant ship, he woke his sleeping captain. ‘The old man’, veteran seafarer William Ewan, quickly made his way to the bridge, just forward of the ship’s spindly funnel. Ewan peered hard through his binoculars, decided that the stranger was a Dutch liner, and held course. At 8.03 the other vessel was less than a mile distant when it broke out the international flag hoists ‘Do not raise the alarm’ and ‘Stop’, then fired a warning shot across the bows of the freighter, which had left Liverpool on 24 September, just as the Battle of Britain gave way to the Blitz, carrying a mixed cargo of aircraft, cars, machine parts, microscopes, military uniforms, cameras, sewing machines, beer, 550 cases of whisky, 2.5 million Chesterfield cigarettes, and six million dollars in newly printed Straits currency.

      The interloper was the disguised German armed merchant-cruiser Atlantis, one of the most successful commerce raiders of the war, which had already captured and sunk twelve Allied vessels since leaving Bremen on 31 March. The ships’ 11 November meeting was not a matter of chance. The Atlantis’s captain, forty-one-year-old Bernhard Rogge, had captured a set of British Merchant Navy codes aboard the freighter City of Baghdad on 11 July, which assisted him in intercepting other vessels thereafter. Moreover, an Italian intelligence unit in the Mediterranean forwarded decrypts which helped to pinpoint the freighter. Automedon’s bridge crew failed to read the German flag hoist, and the ship’s radio-operator began tapping out an ‘RRR’ emergency signal. The doughty Captain Ewan shouted ‘Hard on the wheel!’ and his ship began to sheer away. He then said, ‘Come on everyone, let’s do it – we’re going to fight.’ On the stern deck of the merchantman was mounted a single elderly 4-inch gun. Unfortunately for the British, however, Atlantis carried five 5.9-inch guns and a sophisticated fire-control system. Having intercepted the British ship’s distress call, the Germans started shooting in earnest. The first shell of Atlantis’s opening salvo, fired at point-blank range, smashed into the bridge, followed by a further succession of hammer blows СКАЧАТЬ