I recently read a book on Richard Sorge, a German Communist who pretended to be a Nazi and spied on the Japanese for Moscow. He had acquired a large amount of information indicating that Germany was preparing for an invasion of the Soviet Union, and was attempting to secure Japanese support for this invasion. His reports were viewed by Stalin and his cabinet, but Stalin refused to believe that his good buddy Hitler would betray him (I believe he referred to Sorge as “a little shit”). This was a bad decision.
It’s even worse than that- Barton Whaley’s definitive history of pre-war Soviet intelligence, Codeword “Barbarossa”, identifies no less than 84 separate warnings Stalin had.
I recently read a book on Richard Sorge, a German Communist who pretended to be a Nazi and spied on the Japanese for Moscow. He had acquired a large amount of information indicating that Germany was preparing for an invasion of the Soviet Union, and was attempting to secure Japanese support for this invasion. His reports were viewed by Stalin and his cabinet, but Stalin refused to believe that his good buddy Hitler would betray him (I believe he referred to Sorge as “a little shit”). This was a bad decision.
It’s even worse than that- Barton Whaley’s definitive history of pre-war Soviet intelligence, Codeword “Barbarossa”, identifies no less than 84 separate warnings Stalin had.
Beware the hindsight bias: how many similar warnings did he have of things that didn’t happen?