Stalin's secret war: Soviet counterintelligence against the Nazis, 1941-1945

Abstract

The Soviet-German War of 1941-1945 was the most extensive intelligence/counterintelligence war in modern history, involving the capture, torture, deportation, execution and doubling of tens of thousands of agents - most of them Soviet citizens. While Russian armies fought furiously to defeat the Wehrmacht, Stalin's security services waged an equally ruthless secret war against Hitler's secret spies, as well as against the Soviet population. Robert Stephan combines US intelligence documents, captured German records and Russian sources, including a top-secret Soviet history of its intelligence and security services, to reveal the magnitude and scope of the brutal but sophisticated Soviet counterintelligence war against Nazi Germany. Employing as many as 150,000 trained agents across a 2400-mile front, the Soviets neutralized the majority of the more than 40,000 German agents deployed against them. As Stephan shows, their combination of Soviet military deception operations and State Security's defeat of the Abwehr's human intelligence effort had devastating consequences for the German army in every battle against the Red Army, including Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, the Byelorussian offensive and the Vistula-Oder operation. Simultaneously, the Soviet State Security continued to penetrate the world's major intelligence services including those of its allies, terrorize its own citizens to prevent spying, desertion and real or perceived opposition to the regime and run millions of informants, making the USSR a vast prison covering one sixth of the world's surface. Stephan discusses all facets of the Soviet counterintelligence effort, including the major Soviet radio games used to mislead the Germans - Operations Monastery, Berezino and those that defeated Himmler's Operation Zeppelin. He also gives a comprehensive account of the Abwehr's infamous agent Max, whose organization allegedly ran an entire network of agents inside the USSR, and reveals the reasons for Germany's catastrophic underestimation of Soviet forces by more than one million men during their 1944 summer offensive in Byelorussia.