Stalin's Secret War: Soviet Counterintelligence Against the Nazis, 1941-45 (review)

Works on military intelligence, counterintelligence, spies, and deception are a popular genre but one difficult to evaluate. Many such books are filled with anecdotal tales of daring cloak and dagger adventures, as well as overblown claims for the effectiveness of such operations. Robert Stephan's book helps to break this mold. In Stalin's Secret War, Stephan presents a reasoned argument backed by extensive research that raises intelligence-counterintelligence studies to a more scholarly level.

Stephan's thesis is refreshingly clear in the introduction: "The Germans decisively lost the intelligence war in Russia, and although their performance in the USSR was better than in the West, it was not good enough" (p. 3). The author lays out an exhaustive argument demonstrating that the Soviets penetrated the German intelligence network while effectively denying the Germans entrance into the Soviets' own intelligence structure.

The author chooses a thematic, vice chronological, structure for his book. Following the introduction, Stephan presents a chapter that gives a brief overview of the war on the Eastern Front. The following chapter is a short résumé of traditional views of the Soviet-German intelligence war that would seem to have been better fitted for the introduction. After this digression come chapters on Soviet defensive and offensive counterintelligence operations, followed by a single chapter that combines German intelligence and counterintelligence operations. The following two chapters are best described as case studies: a chapter on Operation Monastery and Case Klatt, and another on Operations Berezino and Zepplin. The final chapter provides the conclusion.

This organizational structure is one of the weaknesses of the book. It tries to combine too many styles in an ineffective mix. The overview of the war is far too cursory to help the novice and a waste of effort for those already familiar with the Eastern Front. The topical chapters, while filled with valuable material, are difficult to follow. They go back and forth in time and put a strain on the reader's ability to follow the story.

These criticisms aside, Stephan deserves credit for a powerful case in support of the Soviet counterintelligence effort. As with many works on military intelligence, Stephan has difficulty in showing the actual effect of intelligence efforts on the battlefield. To his credit, he does not overreach. His greatest claims concern the number of German agents arrested (or killed) and the vast extent of the Soviet effort against its own citizens in order to prevent Russian people from giving information to the Nazis. Stephan is more circumspect concerning the benefits of these efforts. His modesty in such claims is a virtue often missing in today's historical writings. In sum, the author strongly concludes that the Soviets won the war among agents, but cautiously argues that this victory helped the Soviet fight on the ground.

Finally, Stephan's work argues that pervasive Soviet government control of its own society provided a great protection against outside intelligence. In short, Stalin's system already suspected its own citizenry before the war, and had no problem in arresting thousands in order to find the occasional spy. This observation is well documented, but also disturbing. Thankfully, such distrust of its own people was an integral part of the Soviet Union's own eventual downfall, even if effective in the short term, counterintelligence war. In any case, Stephan provides a powerful view of Soviet counterintelligence efforts—the best we are likely to see for some time to come.