ership and acted as a back channelfor communications with selected
officials in the party and the police. In his last 10 years, Stalin acted
on rumors to dispatch senior officials to exileor execution. For ex-
ample, in 1946 Marshal Georgi Zhukovwas sent to a minor military
command following information that he had brought back an exces-
sive amount of loot from Germany and had been recruited by British
intelligence. Stalin told the marshal, “I don’t believe these reports,
but people are talking!” During the same period, Stalin condemned
three senior military officers to death on the basis of a taped tele-
phone conversation which showed their concern with the country’s
dismal economic situation.
Stalin’s record as a user of foreign intelligence is mixed. In the late
1930s he oversaw a purge of the foreign intelligence component of
the NKVD and the GRU, which limited critical political and military
intelligence reporting on Nazi Germany. Stalin distrusted any intelli-
gence analysis. In 1936 he warned a GRU officer: “An intelligence
hypothesis may become your hobby horse on which you will ride
straight into a self-made trap.” Stalin thus rejected analysis of Nazi
war preparations and warnings of the German invasion of 22 June
1941, an error that cost the Soviet Union millions of military and
civilian casualties. Five days before the invasion, he minuted a report
predicting an imminent invasion: “You can send your source on the
German air force staff intelligence to his whore of a mother. This is
not intelligence but misinformation.” It is little wonder that in 1941
the leaders of the GRU and NKVD carefully edited warnings from
agents in the field.
Nevertheless, during World War IIStalin used foreign intelli-
gence about Nazi war plans as well as American and British strategy
to maximize Soviet gains in Europe and Asia and to develop Soviet
nuclear weapons. During the war, the Soviets had more than 300
agents working in the United States, providing Stalin with detailed
and accurate information about Washington’s plans for the war and
postwar world. Stalin insisted on bugging Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
bedroom at the Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945) conferences, and he
demanded a translation of all conversations the next morning before
he met with the American leader. Agents within the British estab-
lishment provided documents on British foreign and military policy,
and Pierre Cot, the Free French minister in Moscow, was a SovietSTALIN, JOSEPH VISSARONOVICH (1878–1953)• 25306-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 253