One of Baker’s cables to Moscow noted that all clandestine activities
“were discussed and considered by father and son.”
In the late 1940s, Baker returned to his native Yugoslavia. He
worked for many years in Belgrade as a translator in the state pub-
lishing house. Far more circumspect than Josef Peters, Baker was one
of the most effective spymasters in the Cold Warbecause of the care
he gave to operational security and tradecraft.BARBAROSSA.Operation Barbarossa was Adolf Hitler’s plan for the
invasion of the Soviet Union. From the inception of planning in late
1940, Joseph Stalin received and ignored good intelligence of
Hitler’s intentions. In early 1941, Stalin received information from
the Red OrchestraandRichard Sorge, as well as other NKVDand
GRUsources, about German intentions, which he rejected as disin-
formation. NKVD foreign intelligence chief Pavel Fitinvainly tried
to warn Stalin, who believed that many of the reports were generated
by the British government. The official Russian intelligence history
of the war notes: “Only the outbreak of the war saved Fitin from a fir-
ing squad.”
Besides more than a hundred credible human intelligence reports
about German intentions, Stalin also received accurate information
about German photo reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory and
the capture of German spies on the Soviet–German frontier. On the
morning of 22 June 1941, just hours before the attack, a German sol-
dier deserted and warned Moscow of the forthcoming attack. That
warning was also ignored; the soldier was shot. Stalin’s intelligence
chiefs were in large part responsible for the intelligence failures. GRU
chief Filipp Golikov informed Stalin that many of the reports came
from British-controlled sources. Intelligence generalissimo Lavrenty
Beriaalso confused the picture, punishing intelligence officers who
accepted agent reports of German preparations. On 20 June—two day
before the war began—he informed Stalin that war would not come
until 1942 at the earliest. As the attack on the morning of 22 June be-
gan and more than 3 million German soldiers advanced into the moth-
erland, Soviet units were caught unprepared. Thousands of airplanes
and tanks were destroyed on airfields and in training commands. Re-
serve units, which had been identified by German reconnaissance,
were destroyed before they could reach the front.22 •BARBAROSSA06-313 A-G.qxd 7/27/06 7:55 AM Page 22