ISBN 0-7006-1279-3-1
xiv + 349 pages

Acknowledgments; Introduction; Glossary; photos; maps; diagrams; Endnotes; Bibliography; Index

Appendices: Soviet Organization; Chronology of Soviet Intelligence; Chiefs of Soviet Intelligence; Evolution of Soviet Military Counterintelligence; German Organization for Secret War

   Robert Stephan is the first to admit Stalin's Secret War doesn't tell the whole story about how Soviet counterintelligence kept the Germans cut off from almost all access to accurate information about the Red Army's strength, dispositions, and intentions. The trouble, he explains in his Introduction, is simply that the relevant archives in Moscow still haven't been opened, and Stalin's successor's to this day prefer to hide the full record of intelligence and counterintelligence operations in World War II.
   Nevertheless, Stephan has performed an impressive job of assembling this remarkable book from available Soviet archives, German records, and Allied materials. Impressive and remarkable, yes, but not entirely a breeze to read. The author, tackling a convoluted subject with many mysterious facets and shadowy protagonists, reminds readers right from the start they will need to pay attention. He spends several pages defining various intelligence terms and comparing the words and their meanings in English, German, and Russian. He also provides a thorough and extensive glossary of terms and abbreviations in all three languages. Even so, readers will need to be on their toes to keep track of multiple aliases by which various individuals are known, and there's no slowing down for definitions when Stephan remarks, for example, that certain agents communicated via a cut-out.
   Beyond the Introduction, the text itself, divided into eight chapters, is relatively short at just under 180 pages, but Stephan delivers maximum punch per page and he also tacks on several full-bodied appendices packed with more information.
   The first chapter reviews the course of the war and provides some statistics and general comparisons about the German and Soviet war efforts, including their relative intelligence resources. The final two paragraphs of the chapter point the way to the remainder of the book:

   In the midst of this endless carnage the Nazi and Soviet security and intelligence services were pitted against each other in a four-year-long intelligence and counterintelligence war of unprecedented breadth and scope. While Hitler's and Stalin's secret police exterminated, tortured, deported, enslaved, and starved to death untold millions of soldiers and civilians, the German and Soviet services also conducted a ruthless clandestine human intelligence (HUMINT) war on a massive scale. The Soviets won the "invisible war" not because they were more efficient but because they were able, under impossible conditions, to effectively exploit German mistakes in numerous instances and reduce the Nazi ability to exploit Soviet ones. To quote Frederick the Great in the Seven Years War: "It is not enough to kill Russians, you have to knock them down."
   The Soviet State Security apparatus decisively thwarted the Germans' ability to recruit agents within the higher levels of the CPSU, the armed forces, and the security and intelligence services. Colonel Hermann Baun, commander of all Abwehr clandestine human operations targeted against Russia during the war, said in his postwar interrogation that virtually none of his operations was successful. This was a staggering admission considering the bloody history of Soviet repression that drove millions into the hands of the Germans in the initial phase of the war. That the Germans never had a reliable human intelligence source (or a significant technical one such as Ultra) that could, for one thing, tell them the Stavka's true military intentions or, for another, give them information on any Soviet agents working at the senior levels of their own intelligence and security services became two of the most important factors in the success of Soviet military deception, which the Russians employed to great effect in virtually every operation during the war.

   Chapter Two gives readers an idea of the magnitude of the "invisible war" conducted on the Russian Front. "The intelligence-counterintelligence war in the East bore no resemblance to the world of James Bond or to the operations conducted during the Cold War. It was waged over a greater area, involved tens of thousands of agents, and was far more brutal than the one conducted between the Germans and the Western Allies." Estimates run as high as 130,000-150,000 Russian agents and 36,000-44,000 German agents. Stephan also demonstrates the enormous human cost. Due to the "hostile working environment," the Abwehr seemed quite satisfied so long as loss of agents inserted behind Soviet lines did not exceed 90 percent. Soviet losses were also extremely high, but they had more operatives to feed into the contest.
   The third chapter begins to dig more deeply into the nature and structure of the Soviet counterintelligence system. Stephan lists three main components to "defensive counterintelligence and security operations": large numbers of informants; security troops on the ground in substantial numbers at all sensitive locations; and terror and deportation to deal with any threats, real or otherwise. Within the Red Army, Smersh ("Death to spies") conducted counterintelligence work through a formal structure. One Smersh officer was attached to each battalion, and he controlled a number of "resident agents" recruited from that unit. Each resident agent in turn controlled a network of six to eight informants within that unit. Each informant was responsible for reporting on a number of other men, and informants were required to report on every aspect of the troops assigned to them, no matter how mundane. Coverage by this system was so wide that in many cases the majority of men in the unit were—in some way, at some level—working for Smersh. Informants were required to submit written reports at regular intervals to the controlling resident agent. Resident agents passed these reports to the controlling Smersh officer every five days and also were required to write their own reports twice monthly.

   Informants served as the backbone of the state's repressive machinery. The system was highly redundant and no doubt inefficient by Western standards, as it diverted vital resources, created a climate of fear, and destroyed the lives of millions of innocent people. However, inefficiency does not necessarily equate to ineffectiveness. The informant system—along with the threat of swift and brutal punishments—was nevertheless effective in keeping the Soviet armed forces and the population in check, and in limiting the effectiveness of German clandestine collection operations. Although spies cannot be caught without the help of informants, Soviet counterintelligence officers responsible for administering the system also depended on the physical controls imposed by rear-area security units to catch German agents.

   Stephan also devotes attention to guards, rear area security, and "blocking detachments" (charged with machine-gunning Soviet troops attempting to retreat from the front) and he expends a couple of pages on the intricate system of documents required to be in the possession of all Soviet citizens and soldiers. Lack of suitable documents was not the only lapse that could betray a German agent behind Soviet lines.

   Soviet counterintelligence did more than scrutinize documents in its relentless search for agents. Counterintelligence officers also examined the uniforms of suspected persons. For example, the Germans sometimes sewed shoulder tabs down to the sleeves of uniforms issued to their agents; however, on genuine Soviet uniforms the tabs hung from the collar and only touched the sleeve. A detail as insignificant as uncovered buttons on the underwear issued to German agents could generate Soviet suspicion, as Soviet officers wore covered buttons on their underwear. German agents were generally issued a Nagan revolver with twenty cartridges, whereas the Soviet military actually issued its troops twenty-one cartridges for three loadings.
   State Security uncovered other Abwehr "signatures" that revealed the existence of potential German agents. For example, the Soviets tested the speech of suspected German agents to determine if they actually came from the regions claimed on their documents. One Soviet history also noted that German agents trained at the Abwehr school in Poltava consistently received 3,000 rubles in 30-ruble notes. According to this history, military counterintelligence caught many German agents as a result of the Germans not having paid attention to such minutiae. Soviet counterintelligence, for example, caught one German agent because he carried on him a bar of German ersatz soap.

   The author goes on to recount in fascinating detail the stories of several operations in which Soviet counterintelligence successfully investigated and captured German agents due to a variety of minor slip-ups.
   Chapter Three concludes by reiterating the abysmal success rate of German intelligence/sabotage operations, collating and comparing numbers from both German and Soviet sources to show that of thousands of agents inserted, loss rates of eighty to ninety percent "were not uncommon." In addition to such a miserable statistic, the accuracy of reports from the few "successful" agents was equally low, with "twenty percent accuracy rate" considered a success by the Germans. No wonder that an internal review stated "instead of clarifying the situation when received, the reports caused the greatest possible confusion."
   Chapter Four tells the stories of a typical cross-section of German agents "doubled" by the Soviets, almost all of whom eventually came to grief. Both sides were ruthless about exploiting operatives, exposing doubled agents, and eliminating anyone who could not be trusted or was of no further use.
   Stephan provides a general survey of "radio games" and how the Soviets used such "playbacks" to feed disinformation to the Germans along with just enough facts to make everything believable to the recipients. Given Soviet successes and dismal German performance, Stephan also reviews evidence that the Russians might have had a highly placed agent in a German security organization or within the German High Command. Possibilities include the Abwehr's Hermann Baun, Heinrich "Gestapo" Mueller, Martin Bormann, and even Heinrich Himmler. Stephan emphasizes there is no proof of these allegations (largely made by various other German officers in their memoirs), but the overall circumstances tend to point toward some kind of serious Soviet penetration at the highest levels in Germany. The author explains that Soviet sources remain silent on this point and offers a number of possible reasons for such reticence, including the fact that the Soviet agent might have gone on to a high position in post-war West Germany.
   Stalin's Secret War digresses somewhat to discuss the "Cambridge Five"—Philby, Burgess, MacLean, Cairncross, and Blunt—and their contribution to Soviet intelligence (including their role in sending to Moscow tidbits gleaned from Ultra and other sources which tended to confirm for the Soviets the viability of their operations). On the other hand, Stephan stumbles a bit when discussing precise military details such as the Soviet air strike which ostensibly destroyed 500 German aircraft on the ground on the eve of the Battle of Kursk. (This is apparently a reference to a series of Red Air Force raids on 6-8 May 1943, for which some older Soviet sources have quoted German losses of upwards of 500 aircraft, mostly on the ground, but that number seems to have been a considerable exaggeration.)
   The author also discusses the Rote Kapelle and particulars of the Schulze-Boysen group. Stephan then briefly sidetracks into the story of Soviet penetration of the OSS, amounting to as many as twenty personnel working for Moscow. More interestingly, Stephan gives a tour of various German schemes such as an attempt to make Stalin believe that some of his senior generals were plotting against him, and Operation Dromedar, intended to start an insurgency in the Caucasus. Chapter Five in particular discusses the internal factors (in addition to Soviet counterintelligence) which limited German success and points out that the Germans were not the only ones to have difficulty running intelligence operations in the USSR.
   The final two chapters of the book study in much greater detail some fairly well-known, and controversial, intelligence and counterintelligence operations.
   Chapter Six delves into Operation Monastery, the story of Soviet agent Aleksandr Dem'ianov who pretended to desert the Red Army, was trained by the Abwehr, inserted back into Soviet territory, and throughout the war fed a carefully concocted mixture of information and disinformation to the Germans from an imaginary organization of dozens of fictitious anti-Soviet sources. Stephan ranks this as one of the major Soviet successes of the intelligence war, all the more because twenty years later Reinhard Gehlen of Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East) still praised the quality of information passed by "Max." Stephan picks apart the details available in Soviet and German sources and makes it clear that even at this late date the Russians have not put all their cards on the table regarding Monastery, raising, not for the first time, "...the question of whether the Russians have systematically omitted specifics on Dem'ianov's activities to purposely avoid disclosing information concerning well-placed Soviet penetrations of the German intelligence services, whether human, technical, or a combination of both."
   Closely related to Monastery, and perhaps even part of the same Soviet radio game, Stephan tries to unravel the case of Richard Kauder's work in Bulgaria. Was Kauder, alias Richard Klatt, a Soviet agent feeding a line to the Germans, or was he a clever opportunist who fabricated reports using foreign newspapers and his own imagination? Although the Kauder operation was also code named "Max," Stephan concludes these were separate operations from both Soviet and German perspectives. In any event, it's a complicated story.

   Without the Russians making the full truth public and the British or the Americans declassifying Klatt's messages so they can be compared to those of Dem'ianov, the best explanation appears to be that the Germans gave the same name to both Dem'ianov's and Klatt's organizations (different German intelligence organizations ran "Max North" and "Max South") and that Soviet State Security used both as conduits to pass disinformation, albeit possibly using "Max South" somewhat less often than "Max North." Though there is considerable evidence to indicate that Klatt and his associates were substantially less than trustworthy and could easily have passed doctored information to the Abwehr on their own at least some of the time, solid circumstantial evidence—Smersh reports aside—strongly indicates that the opportunity to use Klatt's channel was too good for the Soviets to pass up, especially since the Russians were well aware that the Germans had high regard for Klatt's intelligence. Disinformation is more effective if it reinforces an existing belief. If 8 percent of the thousands of messages on the USSR passed by "Max South" were true, it could still represent a respectable effort by the Soviets to use Klatt's channel for controlled information.
   Western efforts to piece together Klatt's organization centered on investigating and analyzing activities of six people who were either Soviet agents or were used to varying degrees as conduits for Soviet disinformation. Richard Kauder, alias Richard Klatt, alias Richard Karmany, a Jewish sports equipment salesman, who marketed himself to the Abwehr in Vienna, played a key role in forwarding "Max South" reports to the Abwehr. Kauder passed on his reports through an Abwehr-supported station in Sofia, which allegedly received intelligence reports from the USSR via a relay in Turkey. Joseph Schultz, allegedly a longtime Soviet agent and friend of Kauder, introduced Kauder to the Abwehr. According to West, the NKVD had no record of Schultz having been a Soviet agent. General Anton Turkul, a former White officer who fought in the Russian civil war, lent Kauder his name to add an air of authenticity to Kauder's claim to the Abwehr that there were high-level sub-sources in the USSR willing to help the Germans. Ira Longin, alias Ilya Lang—another Russian emigre and possible Soviet agent—had served in the White Army and was described by his U.S. Army interrogator as an intelligent liar. He appears to have provided Kauder with at least some of the reports from the USSR, either via Turkey or directly from the Soviet Embassy in Sofia. Two Abwehr officers involved in the operation were Colonel Rudolph Count von Marogna-Redwitz, chief of Ast Vienna, and Lieutenant Colonel Otto Wagner, chief of the Abwehr Kriegsorganization (KO) in Sofia.
   Just as the reporting from Dem'ianov and his sub-sources was code-named Max, so, too, was the reporting from Klatt's alleged organization in the USSR (reporting other than that of the USSR was code-named Moritz). The documentary evidence tends to support Bezymenskii's claim that Kauder was receiving reports (not necessarily directly by radio) from the USSR and that the intelligence was high-grade. The modus operandi between Dem'ianov's alleged network and Klatt's is similar.

   After following a chain of shadowy figures and piecing together all the evidence, including Kauder's post-war interrogations, much remains unresolved. Stephan seems to lean toward Kauder as an unknowing conduit for Soviet disinformation. When he belatedly realized he was being used by Moscow, he was afraid to tell his German handlers for fear he would be arrested.
   Chapter Seven covers Operation Berezino, a lengthy and complicated scam during which the Germans wasted precious resources trying to support and rescue an imaginary force of 2500 troops supposedly trapped behind Soviet lines. Despite some German suspicions, the Soviets played Army Group Center (and German intelligence) from August 1944 until May 1945, capturing supplies and officers dispatched to support the "pocket." The same chapter also deals with Operation Zeppelin, a major project run by the SD at the behest of Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich with the goal of sabotage and fomenting anti-Soviet partisan movements behind Russian lines. Stephan gives a variety of interesting examples of how nearly every Zeppelin effort by the Germans went awry.
   Although the main part of the text is relatively short, Stephan includes another twenty pages of useful appendices which provide more information. The whole is thoroughly documented with more than seventy pages of very instructive endnotes.
   Stephan does a terrific job of bringing the murky world of espionage and intelligence into focus and, just as importantly, repeatedly demonstrating how closely and intensely intelligence related to success and failure for combat operations. Stalin's Secret War is undoubtedly the best book yet written in English on that aspect of the campaigns on the Russian front. While almost every chapter leaves elements of the story unresolved, and it's sometimes annoying not to have unequivocal conclusions for some mysterious parts of the drama, readers should understand that—even after Stephan has performed Herculean feats of research and stitched together facts from Soviet, German, and Western Allied sources—in many cases answers simply do not exist in any available documentation. Still, the book sheds much light on previously unexplained features of the intelligence war and makes it clear that this component of the struggle loomed larger and more important than generally recognized. The stakes were enormous, the risks high, and the penalty for any mis-step usually torture and execution.
   Certainly one of the best books so far this year, and highly recommended.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from University Press of Kansas.
   Thanks to UPK for providing this review copy.