Sharing Secrets With Stalin

"As engaging as it is astonishing, this book provides extremely important revelations and striking pen-portraits etched in acid of the main actors. Certainly the sources are fabulous". -- John Erickson, author of The Road to stalingrad. "A well-written account filled with original material and documentation. Good reading for anyone interested in the history of WWII intelligence". -- Publishers Weekly (starred review.)

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 spies, as well as against the Soviet population. For the first time, Robert Stephan now combines declassified U.S. 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 2,400-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 major battle against the Red army, including Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, the Belorussian offensive, and the Vistula-Oder operation. Simultaneously, 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 the most comprehensive account to date 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 under-estimation of Soviet forces by more than one million men during their 1944 summer offensive in Belorussia. Richly detailed and epic in scope, Stalin’s Secret War opens up a previously hidden dimension of World War II.

A primary source examination of the infiltration of Stalin's Soviet intelligence network by members of the American government during World War II reveals the dictator's dubious partnerships with such top-level figures as Vice President Henry Wallace andchief advisor Harry Hopkins.

This updated edition of The Secret State revises Hennessy's picture of the Soviet threat that was presented to ministers from the last days of the Second World War to the 1960s. He maps the size and shape of the Cold War state built in response to that perceived threat, and traces the arguments successive generations of ministers, the military and civil servants have used to justify the British nuclear capability. He also adds new material exploring the threats presented by the IRA and radical Islamic terrorists post 9/11. In what circumstances would the Prime Minister authorize the use of nuclear force and how would his orders be carried out? What would the Queen be told and when? In this captivating new account, Peter Hennessy provides the best answers we have yet had to these questions.

The classic and “utterly engrossing” study of Stalin’s pursuit of a nuclear bomb during the Cold War by the renowned political scientist and historian (Foreign Affairs). For forty years the U.S.-Russian nuclear arms race dominated world politics, yet the Soviet nuclear establishment was shrouded in secrecy. Then, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, David Holloway pulled back the Iron Curtain with his “marvelous, groundbreaking study” Stalin and the Bomb (The New Yorker). How did the Soviet Union build its atomic and hydrogen bombs? What role did espionage play? How did the American atomic monopoly affect Stalin's foreign policy? What was the relationship between Soviet nuclear scientists and the country's political leaders? David Holloway answers these questions by tracing the dramatic story of Soviet nuclear policy from developments in physics in the 1920s to the testing of the hydrogen bomb and the emergence of nuclear deterrence in the mid-1950s. This magisterial history throws light on Soviet policy at the height of the Cold War, illuminates a central element of the Stalinist system, and puts into perspective the tragic legacy of this program―environmental damage, a vast network of institutes and factories, and a huge stockpile of unwanted weapons.

For the period between World War II and the full onset of the Cold War, histories of American intelligence seem to go dark. Yet in those years a little known clandestine organization, the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), emerged from the remnants of wartime American intelligence to lay the groundwork for what would become the CIA and, in ways revealed here for the first time, conduct its own secret war of espionage and political intrigue in postwar Europe. Telling the full story of this early and surprisingly effective espionage arm of the United States, Spying through a Glass Darkly brings a critical chapter in the history of Cold War intelligence out of the shadows. Constrained by inadequate staff and limited resources, distracted by the conflicting demands of agencies of the U.S. government, and victimized by disinformation and double agents, the Strategic Services Unit struggled to maintain an effective American clandestine capability after the defeat of the Axis Powers. Never viscerally anti-communist, the Strategic Services Unit was slow to recognize the Soviet Union as a potential threat, but gradually it began to mount operations, often in collaboration with the intelligence services of Britain, France, Italy, Denmark, and Sweden, to throw light into the darker corners of the Soviet regime. Bringing to bear a wealth of archival documents, operational records, interviews, and correspondence, David Alvarez and Eduard Mark chronicle SSU’s successes and failures in procuring intelligence on the capabilities and intentions of the Soviet Union, a chronicle that delves deeply into the details of secret operations against Soviet targets throughout Europe: not only in the backstreets of the divided cities of Berlin and Vienna, but also the cafes, hotels, offices, and salons of such cosmopolitan capitals as Paris, Rome, Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw. A remarkable account of a clandestine war of espionage, kidnappings, blackmail, disinformation, and political subversion, Spying through a Glass Darkly also describes the quantity and quality of intelligence collected by SSU and disseminated to its “customers” in the U.S. government—information that would influence the attitudes and actions of decision makers and, as the Cold War evolved, the course of the nation in a new and dangerous world.

This breakthrough book provides a detailed reconstruction of Stalin’s leadership from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 to his death in 1953. Making use of a wealth of new material from Russian archives, Geoffrey Roberts challenges a long list of standard perceptions of Stalin: his qualities as a leader; his relationships with his own generals and with other great world leaders; his foreign policy; and his role in instigating the Cold War. While frankly exploring the full extent of Stalin’s brutalities and their impact on the Soviet people, Roberts also uncovers evidence leading to the stunning conclusion that Stalin was both the greatest military leader of the twentieth century and a remarkable politician who sought to avoid the Cold War and establish a long-term detente with the capitalist world. By means of an integrated military, political, and diplomatic narrative, the author draws a sustained and compelling personal portrait of the Soviet leader. The resulting picture is fascinating and contradictory, and it will inevitably change the way we understand Stalin and his place in history. Roberts depicts a despot who helped save the world for democracy, a personal charmer who disciplined mercilessly, a utopian ideologue who could be a practical realist, and a warlord who undertook the role of architect of post-war peace.

Despite all that has already been written on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Persico has uncovered a hitherto overlooked dimension of FDR's wartime leadership: his involvement in intelligence and espionage operations. Roosevelt's Secret War is crowded with remarkable revelations: -FDR wanted to bomb Tokyo before Pearl Harbor -A defector from Hitler's inner circle reported directly to the Oval Office -Roosevelt knew before any other world leader of Hitler's plan to invade Russia -Roosevelt and Churchill concealed a disaster costing hundreds of British soldiers' lives in order to protect Ultra, the British codebreaking secret -An unwitting Japanese diplomat provided the President with a direct pipeline into Hitler's councils Roosevelt's Secret War also describes how much FDR had been told--before the Holocaust--about the coming fate of Europe's Jews. And Persico also provides a definitive answer to the perennial question Did FDR know in advance about the attack on Pearl Harbor? By temperament and character, no American president was better suited for secret warfare than FDR. He manipulated, compartmentalized, dissembled, and misled, demonstrating a spymaster's talent for intrigue. He once remarked, "I never let my right hand know what my left hand does." Not only did Roosevelt create America's first central intelligence agency, the OSS, under "Wild Bill" Donovan, but he ran spy rings directly from the Oval Office, enlisting well-placed socialite friends. FDR was also spied against. Roosevelt's Secret War presents evidence that the Soviet Union had a source inside the Roosevelt White House; that British agents fed FDR total fabrications to draw the United States into war; and that Roosevelt, by yielding to Churchill's demand that British scientists be allowed to work on the Manhattan Project, enabled the secrets of the bomb to be stolen. And these are only a few of the scores of revelations in this constantly surprising story of Roosevelt's hidden role in World War II.