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http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/10/07/106.html
Intelligence Design
Stalin's failure to predict Hitler's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union was a
classic mistake of 20th-century intelligence: the projection of one's own
values upon an opponent.
By Gabriel Gorodetsky
Published: October 7, 2005
Few Soviet specialists can draw on the kind of personal experience that
distinguishes former CIA officer David E. Murphy, who headed his agency's base
in Berlin before taking over Soviet operations at U.S. headquarters in Langley,
Virginia. Murphy used his insider's perspective to admirable effect in
"Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War," a chronicle of espionage
co-authored with his KGB counterpart, Sergei Kondrashev. Alas, his venture into
less familiar territory exposes the severe shortcomings of a practitioner
turned historian.
In "What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa," Murphy steps back to June 22,
1941, the day Adolf Hitler launched his devastating surprise attack on the
Soviet Union. Caught off balance, the Red Army suffered some 5 million
casualties within the first six months. Yet as has become increasingly clear
with the opening of the archives, Stalin's failure to prepare his country for
war was not due to a lack of intelligence about Germany's plans. Murphy
provides an excellent overview of the personnel and activities of the Soviet
agents then in Europe, profusely cataloging the warnings they submitted to
Stalin in the months and days preceding the invasion. Unfortunately, he fails
to assemble the puzzle into a coherent analysis of Stalin's colossal
intelligence blunder.
If the errors of 20th-century intelligence had anything in common, it was the
failure of analysts to set aside their political and cultural prejudices.
Intelligence involves three major phases: the acquisition of material, its
selection and collation and, finally, assessment and evaluation. How these
phases are integrated determines the decisions made in response. Yet all too
often, the process of integration incorporates preconceived ideas that bind the
intelligence into a straitjacket detached from strategic and political
realities. Ultimately, cultural constraints inhibit intelligence far more
dramatically than the nature of the regime at hand.
The consequences of preconceived ideas are equally calamitous when it comes to
analyzing events in retrospect. Murphy's distinct Cold War perspective on
Operation Barbarossa is best illustrated by his axiomatic, unsubstantiated
assumption that Stalin was oblivious to the danger posed by Hitler because he
was "blinkered by Marxist-Leninist ideology and a conspiratorial cast of mind."
Such premises have been contested by prominent Western researchers such as
Michael Jabara Carley, Geoffrey Roberts, David Glantz and John Erickson, who
have argued that Stalin's foreign policy was in fact pragmatic and based on a
crude, almost Machiavellian, realpolitik.
Indeed, the only proof Murphy is able to muster for Stalin's assumed
ideological aspirations is a 1939 speech "purportedly made at the August 19
meeting of the Politburo" in which the dictator is said to have promoted his
decision to sign the non-aggression pact with Germany as a way of fomenting
world revolution abroad. Most historians consider this speech a forgery, but
Murphy allows it to set the tone of the book. The speech stands in sharp
contrast to Stalin's warning to Comintern Secretary-General Georgi Dimitrov,
shortly after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, not to embark on a
revolutionary path. "In the First Imperialist war," Stalin told Dimitrov, "we
all rushed ahead and made mistakes! This can be explained, but not excused by
the conditions prevailing then. Today we must not repeat the position held by
the Bolsheviks then." When the Comintern continued to hinder Stalin's pragmatic
aims, the dictator had the international body dissolved.
Assuming Stalin's policies to be deterministic, Murphy makes little effort to
understand the political and military constraints that influenced his actions.
Paradoxically, therefore, Stalin -- so conspicuous in the title and on the
cover of the book -- is almost absent from the work itself. Murphy would have
done better to heed the lenient judgment of Georgy Zhukov, who, as Army chief
of staff in 1941, had urged Stalin to launch a pre-emptive strike against
Germany. In memoirs published during the de-Stalinization campaign of the
1960s, Zhukov rationalized Stalin's obstinacy as follows: "There is nothing
more complex than investigating the intricate issues, weighing the varying
opposing forces, the multitude of conflicting opinion, information, and facts
which were available at a given historical moment."
Itar-Tass
Officers of the German Army meet to discuss plans for the June 22, 1941,
attack known as Operation Barbarossa.
As a result of Murphy's own ideological predilection and hindsight approach,
the selection of evidence does not take into account the fact that the two
years leading up to 1941 were the most turbulent period in European history --
a time when interests and allegiances shifted daily and leaders acted on little
more than instinct. The author relies for the most part on a valuable, though
somewhat tendentious, collection of documents commissioned from the Federal
Security Service, or FSB, in the 1990s by then-President Boris Yeltsin in
response to unsubstantiated allegations made by a defector from Soviet military
intelligence, Vladimir Rezun (better known under his pseudonym, Viktor
Suvorov), that Stalin had been on the verge of waging a revolutionary war
against Germany when Operation Barbarossa began. Murphy supplements this
collection with two portfolios of published sources, also produced by the FSB.
Aside from some haphazard and controversial documents, however, his list o
f the warnings put on Stalin's desk holds nothing new for Western -- not to
mention Russian -- readers. An annotated translation of the FSB documents would
have better buttressed the already exhaustive research on the events leading to
the German invasion.
Murphy is also oblivious to the highly contradictory and often hearsay nature
of the intelligence material to which Stalin had access, which, rather than
exposing Hitler's larger aims, mostly focused on tactical questions like German
troop deployment. Stalin's ruinous trust of Hitler was a universal blunder
shared by the British, French, Poles and Czechoslovaks, all of whom failed to
recognize the overriding ideological factor of Germany's foreign policy. It
was, in essence, a classic intelligence failure: the projection of one's own
values upon an opponent. Stalin thought in geopolitical, strategic and economic
terms, and assumed that Hitler was doing the same.
Another reason for Stalin's error, Murphy writes, was his recent purge of the
officer class and the disruption of intelligence nets that followed. Yet while
it is certainly true that Stalin's tyrannical, bloodthirsty and cruel methods
of governing did not help, they were by no means the major cause of the
disaster. Despite the purge, Soviet intelligence functioned at least as
effectively as its Western counterparts, all of which, for instance, estimated
the collapse of the Soviet Union in three weeks should war break out. Even
British intelligence, which had access to German military trafficking,
concluded as late as a week before the invasion that Hitler's deployment of
troops in the East was little more than a tactic in a "war of nerves" bent on
securing conducive terms in forthcoming negotiations.
The frequency of intelligence debacles among even Western democracies is
perhaps the best proof of the trade's innate vulnerability. Suffice it to
mention the fiasco of Pearl Harbor, which took place merely six months after
Barbarossa, the Yom Kippur War in Israel in 1973 and the United States' alleged
detection of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq just recently. Murphy, who
manifestly is unable to shed his Cold War-era suspicion of communism, tends to
project his values on the evidence. In the final chord of the book, he even
suggests a clear continuity between communism and Vladimir Putin's Russia. One
could certainly make the argument that it was this same distrust that prevented
Murphy's agency, the CIA, from foreseeing how Mikhail Gorbachev's dramatic
reforms would lead to the end of the Cold War, the demise of the Soviet Union
and the formation of the world we live in today.
Gabriel Gorodetsky is the director of the Cummings Center for Russian and East
European Studies at Tel Aviv University and the author of "Grand Delusion:
Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia."
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