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By Root 1004 0

its secrets from the Russians—Harry Dexter White worked for Henry Morgenthau, Nathan Silvermaster for the Board of Economic Warfare, and Alger Hiss for the State Department. Harry Hopkins talked with surprising freedom, though surely not ill intent, to a key NKVD agent in the United States. Throughout the war, a mass of British and U.S. government reports, minutes and decrypted Axis messages was passed to Moscow by such people, through their controllers in London and Washington. As a result, before every Allied summit the Russians were vastly better informed about Anglo-American military intentions than vice versa. So much material reached Stalin from London that he rejected some of it as disinformation, plants by cunning agents of Churchill. When Kim Philby told his NKVD handler that Britain was conducting no secret intelligence operations in the Soviet Union, Stalin dismissed this assertion with the contempt he deemed it to deserve. Molotov and Lavrenty Beria, the Soviet intelligence and secret police chief, frequently concealed from their leader accurate intelligence which they believed would anger him.

Yet in August 1942, Stalin was thoroughly briefed about Western Allied strategy, thanks to the highly placed Soviet agents. He had been told of the fierce Anglo-American arguments about the Second Front. On August 4, Beria reported:

Our NKVD resident in London640 sent the following information received from a source close to the English General Staff: A meeting about the second front took place on 21 July 1942. It was attended by Churchill, Lord Mountbatten, General Marshall and others. General Marshall sharply criticized the attitude of the English … He insisted that the second front should be opened in 1942 and warned that if the English failed to do this the USA would have to reconsider sending reinforcements to Great Britain and focus their attention on the Pacific. Churchill gave the following response to General Marshall: “There is not a single top general who would recommend starting major operations on the continent.” A further meeting on the second front took place on 22 or 23 July 1942. This was attended on the English side by Churchill, Mountbatten and the chiefs of staff; on the American side by Marshall, Eisenhower and others. The participants discussed a plan for the invasion of the continent which has been developed by English and American military experts … English chiefs of staff unanimously voted against and were supported by Churchill who declared that he could not vote against his own chiefs of staff. NKVD resident in London also reported the following, based on information from agents which had been also confirmed earlier by a source close to American embassy: on 25 July the British war cabinet agreed that there should be no second front this year.

A further August 12 NKVD intelligence brief to Stalin included a note on the prime minister’s political position: “Churchill departed for the USSR641 in an atmosphere of growing domestic political crisis. The intensification of fighting on the Soviet-German front has had a marked effect on British public opinion … Source believes Churchill will offer a number of concessions to the Soviet Union BERIA.” Russian access to such insights should not be taken to mean that Stalin was always correctly informed. For instance, several times during the war, NKVD agents reported to Moscow supposed parleys between the Western Allies and the Nazi leadership. On May 12, 1942, Beria passed to Stalin a report from the London resident on German attempts to start separate negotiations with the English: “We know from a reliable source642 that an official from the German embassy in Sweden has flown to England from Stockholm on board a civilian aircraft.” Like other such claims, this one was fallacious, but it fuelled Soviet paranoia. NKVD information was entirely accurate, however, about Britain’s position on the Second Front. Moscow was told that the prime minister’s objections did not derive, as Stalin had supposed, from political hostility to the USSR, but instead from