About book What Stalin Knew: The Enigma Of Barbarossa (2005)
Murphy puts all the sources disposable to Stalin alongside and shows that almost all of them pointed in the direction that Hitler would attack, with reasonable indications of the date.The intelligence sources involved were the NKVD Foreign Intelligence Service which controlled foreign operatives across Europe and kept up listening operations at foreign embassies in the SU. The NKVD also used railway personnel on the trains delivering goods to Germany as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to gather information, for example on border defenses.Soviet Military Intelligence had military missions in main embassies abroad, employed their own contacts. Of course reports from troops near the border, with networks of agents across the border. There was some radio intercept capability.The Chief Directorate for border troops employed about 100,000 personnel on the western borders.The border troops and air force kept track of German violations of Soviet airspace.Another source was British intelligence, some of it based on the ENIGMA code breaking. Stalin was wary of of this source as he felt the British only gave him the information with the hope of trying to involve him in the war.The Germans had an active desinformation campaign going, which suggested that the troops were placed outside the range of British bombers before an invasion across the Channel.Murphy also looks at the personalities and direct interaction between Hitler and Stalin.Murphy also emphasises that in this period, the purges of the armed forces still continued, keeping up the sense of paranoia and reducing the willingness of officials to contradict Stalin and the official line.Stalin drew all the information to him personally, reading most of the individual reports himself. Dismissing the accumulated reports from the central intelligence units.
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