WHAT DID STALIN KNOW, AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT?
How does intelligence affect decisions for peace and war ? This has been a subject of much partisan rancor regarding the case made by President Bush and his administration for war in Iraq but the Iraq War was hardly the first war in which intelligence and its accuracy played a critical but disputed role. Intelligence as a factor in decisions for war has generally been ignored or underplayed by diplomatic historians until recent times. The opening of Soviet and Eastern Bloc archives, and lesser efforts at declassification on the American side during the Clinton years, have caused historians to begin to take a second look at well known events.
The CIA’s new issue of Studies In Intelligence has an interesting review of What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa by David E. Murphy, a former CIA Sovietologist. The reviewer, CIA historian Dr. Donald P. Steury, correctly frames the historical questions:
” The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 was one of the pivotal events of the 20th century. It transformed the Second World War and led, perhaps inevitably, to the Cold War and the half-century domination of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union. It was, furthermore, one of the most brutal campaigns of modern times, bringing unspeakable atrocities and the near-annihilation of whole nationalities. The Nazis probably bear the principal responsibility for the character of the campaign, but the Soviet regime must shoulder some of the blame.
The sheer enormity of the event long has cried out for explanation on the strategic, political, economic, and even cultural level. At the heart is the question of why it happened at all. Why did Hitler attack the Soviet Union, thereby virtually abandoning his war with Britain and France at the very moment that he seemed about to achieve victory? Why did the attack come as such a surprise to the Soviet Union? How was Stalin, the canny, ruthless Realpolitiker in Moscow, flummoxed by the half-crazed ideologue in Berlin? Why did Stalin ignore the yearlong military buildup in eastern Europe and the (by one count) 87 separate, credible intelligence warnings of the German invasion that he received during 1940–41?”
If you pick up any decent biography Stalin, the chapters on the events of 1936-1941 will usually be among the most interesting. A period that saw the convergence of Soviet foreign policy with the internal policy of Stalinist terror – the dictator’s unholy mixture of brutal realpolitik with ideologically paranoiac mass-murder. As Operation Barbarossa approached however, Stalin’s rejection of unwelcome news about Hitler’s intentions extended even to Stalinist insiders in the secret police hierarchy like Dekanazov ( then also Soviet ambassador in Berlin), not just to foreign statesmen, professional Soviet diplomats and militay officers and spies like Richard Sorge.
Steury describes the evidence in What Stalin Knew:
” Murphy massively documents the in-pouring of intelligence from all over Europe and even Japan, warning of the German military buildup for invasion. Insofar as this intelligence was used at all, it was to avoid any action that might be seen as a provocation. German aircraft were allowed to fly reconnaissance missions deep into Soviet territory; German troops were allowed to violate Soviet borders in search of intelligence. All this was intended to remind the Germans of the depth of Soviet resolve, while demonstrating that the Soviet Union was not about to attack. Moreover, Stalin was absolutely convinced that Hitler would attempt nothing until he had resolved his conflict with Great Britain. He was encouraged in this preconception by a well-orchestrated German deception operation—including the two letters to Stalin—that was, at least in part, personally directed by Hitler. Thus it was that Stalin was able to ignore the massive military buildup on his borders and to dismiss every warning of a German attack as disinformation or provocation, right up until the morning of 22 June.
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