Nevertheless, during the Stalin terror of the 1930s, nearly every Soviet intelligence operative outside the country became suspect. Many of them, after returning to Moscow, were arrested in the late 1930s, along with their families, accused of high treason, and shot. Despite the enormous damage the Soviet government did in this way to its own intelligence service, it maintained a core of reliable agents.
As early as the fall of 1940 Moscow received word from Switzerland that a plan for an attack on the Soviet Union, Plan Barbarossa, was being drafted. The source of this information was an officer on the German General Staff. In early 1941 more detailed information on Plan Barbarossa reached Moscow.
Confirmation of such reports from Bern, Berlin, and Paris came from Tokyo from Sorge, whose sources had access to the most confidential documents in the Japanese government's possession. For six years Sorge had transmitted absolutely reliable information to Moscow. On several occasions he had assured the Soviet government correctly that despite the armed clashes between Japanese and Soviet forces in Mongolia, Japan would go to war against the United States, not Russia.
In early May 1941 Sorge provided Moscow with the substance of a conversation between Hitler and the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, in which Hitler revealed his intention of attacking the Soviet Union. On May 12 Sorge reported that 150 German divisions were being massed along the Soviet border and that the proposed date for the invasion was June 20. In his next report, May 15, Sorge corrected the date to June 22 and provided a rough outline of the planned operations. At the height of the German offensive against Moscow, in October 1941, Sorge informed his superiors that the Japanese government intended to attack the British and Dutch colonial possessions in Southeast Asia. On October 18, 1941, Sorge was arrested; three years later, on November 7, 1944, the Japanese government executed him by hanging. The Soviet government did not lift a finger to save him. Stalin had no desire to save the life of this or any other firsthand witness to his mistakes and crimes. Sorge's wife was arrested by the Soviet authorities and sent to a camp. Likewise, nothing was done to save Manevich, who was arrested in Italy. No wonder that a number of Soviet intelligence agents chose not to return to their homeland. Those who did were either shot or spent many years in confinement.
On March 1 and March 20, 1941, official warnings about the coming German attack were also delivered to the Soviet government by Sumner Welles, the U.S. undersecretary of state.149
On April 2 Churchill instructed Ambassador Stafford Cripps to meet with Stalin to give him certain vital information concerning the movement of German troops in Poland and to warn him of an imminent German invasion. Stalin and Molotov avoided meeting with the British ambassador, however.150 Only on April 19 did Cripps succeed in relaying his information to the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.151
Stalin treated all reports with distrust, suspecting British intelligence of fabricating them in order to provoke a war between the Soviet Union and Germany. To please Stalin, Filipp Golikov, head of Soviet army intelligence, told him that the possibility was not excluded that the British were inventing false reports about an imminent German attack. Nevertheless, these reports were so numerous and so consistent that it must have been hard not to conclude that the Germans actually were preparing to attack.
The Soviet border patrol likewise systematically informed the Central Committee and the government of the situation along the border. The number of "enemy spies" killed or detained while on reconnaissance on Soviet territory rose during the first quarter of 1941 to a figure fifteen to twenty times greater than in the first quarter of 1940, and during the second quarter of 1941 the figure was twenty-five to thirty times greater than in the same period of 1940.152 In 1940 there had been 235 incidents on the Soviet western border, and several groups of German commandos wearing Red Army uniforms had been discovered. Starting in the summer of 1940, both the number and depth of penetrations into Soviet air space increased. From January to June 1941 there were 152 such incidents.153
On April 20, 1941, the Ukrainian frontier military district reported increased military preparations on the German side all along the border and on Hungarian territory. On June 5 the Main Frontier Troops Administration (GUPV) reported that during the months of April and May the Germans had concentrated between eighty and eighty-eight infantry divisions, thirteen to fifteen motorized divisions, seven tank divisions, sixty- five artillery regiments, and other forces along the Soviet border.
On June 6 the GUPV reported that approximately 4 million German troops had been concentrated near the Soviet border. Stalin was personally informed of this on the same day. On June 11 Stalin was informed that since June 9 the German embassy in Moscow had been burning its papers and that its personnel had been instructed to prepare for evacuation in a week's time.
On June 10 and 13 the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, was invited to the British Foreign Office and informed that Germany was about to launch an invasion of the Soviet Union. In the event of such an attack, Foreign Minister Anthony Eden said, Great Britain was ready to aid the Soviet Union. Similar warnings were sent to Moscow by Soviet diplomats assigned to the Vichy government in France.
Groups of anti-Nazi fighters warned the Soviet Union of the concentration of troops in Poland, Romania, and Hungary and military construction activities and other preparations for war on those territories. Among inhabitants of the regions on both sides of the border rumors that the Germans were about to attack circulated widely, and the Soviet command was fully aware of these rumors.
Nevertheless, in spite of abundant information, as well as the urgent requests by the military authorities of the border regions that at least minimal precautions be taken in case of an attack, no orders came from Moscow. Some commanders chose to act on their own authority. On June 18 Lieutenant General Bogdanov, commander of the frontier troops in the Baltic region, ordered the evacuation of the families of all military personnel and on June 20 took additional measures to strengthen border defenses.
The German ambassador, Schulenburg, returned to Moscow toward the end of April after reporting to Hitler in Berlin. He came away from his meeting with Hitler with the impression that the attack on the Soviet Union would occur in the very near future. Risking arrest on treason charges, he tried to warn the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Dekanozov (who was also deputy commissar of foreign affairs and a confidant of Beria). Dekanozov dismissed Schulenburg's warning with the greatest suspicion, considering it a provocation.154 (In 1944 Schulenburg took part in the plot against Hitler and was executed.)
On August 22 and 23, 1939, there had been total surprise when the Soviet press reported Ribbentrop's arrival and simultaneously printed an account of the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg, Germany. For many long years the German fascists had been denounced in the Soviet press as the most hated enemies of the Soviet Union. Now it suddenly turned out they were not fascists but National Socialists—that is, socialists of some kind. Ribbentrop, who to the Soviet press had been a warmonger, was greeted ceremoniously at the Moscow airport, which was decked with flags bearing the iron cross as well as the hammer and sickle. The newspapers showed
Ribbentrop next to Stalin, who was smiling and looking pleased. The population of course knew nothing of what went on at the meetings with Ribbentrop.