The Road to Berlin (33 page)

These equations Stalin proposed to solve irreversibly in his own favour on ground suitably adapted for large-scale manoeuvre by powerful mobile formations, the very ground where in 1941 the
Panzer
divisions had wounded the Soviet Union so terribly. The reconquest of the western Ukraine, in addition to all its internal benefits, would station the Red Army on the Soviet Union’s south-western frontiers, poised there for an advance through Rumania into the Balkans or on to Poland and into the flank and rear of Army Group Centre. Operations in the ‘south-western theatre’ involved not only Front offensives but the co-ordination of several fronts on a line running from Ovruch in the north to Kahkovka on the lower Dnieper: Vatutin (1st Ukrainian), while striking westwards for Lutsk, would develop his main offensive in a south-westerly direction on Vinnitsa–Moghilev Podolskii; Koniev (2nd Ukrainian) was to attack towards Kirovgrad–Pervomaisk with an additional drive aimed at Khristonovka (a point of aim for Vatutin also); while Malinovskii (3rd Ukrainian) and Tolbukhin (4th Ukrainian) developed concentric attacks to destroy German forces in the Nikopol–Krivoi Rog area, after which both fronts would advance on Nikolayev and Odessa. The first phase of the destruction of the German armies on the southern wing was to take place in the easterly reaches of ‘right-bank Ukraine’ (the western Ukraine), the clearing of all enemy forces from the Dnieper and then a Soviet advance to a line running from the southern Bug to Pervomaisk, on to Shirokoe and the river Ingulets. The second phase involved a Soviet advance to a line running from Lutsk, north-west of Rovno, to Moghilev–Podolskii, south-west to Vinnitsa, thence to the Dniester—by which time the Crimea was to be cleared.

As autumn gave way to winter in 1943, Stalin positioned fifty-eight armies across the whole length of the Eastern Front, from the Arctic to the Black Sea.
Far to the north, from the Barents Sea to the Gulf of Finland, where the Front ran from the west of Murmansk through Belomorsk on to the river Svir and the southern shore of lake Ladoga, German, Finnish and Soviet troops had not budged since the autumn of 1941; the Soviet Karelian Front deployed four armies of its own plus men from the 7th Independent Army, with the 23rd Army of the Leningrad Front holding the Karelian isthmus. From the Gulf of Finland to Nevel, the front ran south of Leningrad, east of Chudov, Novgorod and Staraya Russa and on to the west of Velikie Luki—three Soviet fronts (Leningrad, Volkhov and 2nd Baltic) with eleven armies facing the forty-four divisions of Army Group North. The ‘western theatre’, from Nevel to Mozyr, came within the area of the 1st Baltic, Western and Belorussian Fronts with a combined strength of fifteen armies operating against the sixty-three divisions of Army Group Centre along a line that ran to the east of Orsha and Vitebsk and to the west of Gomel. From Mozyr to the Black Sea lay the tier of Ukrainian Fronts, 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th, fielding twenty-one ‘all-arms’ armies and three tank armies; south of Kanev and on to the Black Sea the front more or less followed the Dnieper held by Army Groups South and A with ninety-three divisions. Though the Crimea was still in German hands, Seventeenth Army was trapped; 51st Army (4th Ukrainian Front) was at Perekop and on the Sivash, while Petrov’s Independent Coastal Army was ashore at Kerch.

The scale of these forthcoming offensive operations, the results anticipated and the probable outcome—indeed, the whole turn of events on the Eastern Front since the late summer of 1943
(korennoi perelom
, ‘the fundamental turning point’)—imparted both urgency and singular relevance to Stalin’s participation in the ‘Big Three’ meeting held at Teheran towards the end of November. The decisive year was almost over. In the east Germany had neither won success nor achieved its nearest equivalent, a stalemate. In a future well within Stalin’s immediate grasp Soviet divisions would once more be on the 1941 frontier lines and in many places across them, thus enabling Stalin to promote his widest strategic enterprises with none of that premature ambition he had displayed in the bitter spring of 1942. Teheran was the opportunity for which he had stubbornly and determinedly pressed, for which he had manoeuvred, blustered and bullied. With his pocket full of plans and his mind implanted with his own notion of ‘co-ordination’, it was an opportunity to exploit to the full.

In all probability, Stalin travelled to Teheran forewarned by Soviet intelligence that a special German commando was bent on killing him, along with the two other members of the ‘Big Three’. The actual details known to Stalin remain unclear, but well before he reached Teheran the Soviet leader took care to preserve himself from the whims of fate as well as the machinations of man. He travelled by train to Baku, where he arrived early in the morning, and by 8 am he was at the airfield where a cluster of SI-47s stood about, with Novikov (Air Force
commander) and Golovanov (commander of the Long-Range Air Force) waiting to report. Novikov informed Stalin that two machines were ready, one to be flown by Col.-Gen. Golovanov, the other by Colonel Grachov, with two more aircraft to be flown off in half an hour carrying Ministry of Foreign Affairs personnel. Novikov invited Stalin to board the aircraft to be piloted by Golovanov. Stalin had other views: ‘Colonel-generals don’t often pilot aircraft—we’d better go with the Colonel’, at which Stalin’s entourage clambered into Grachov’s plane. Once Stalin’s plane took off, fighter escorts covered it from above and flew on either side.

Teheran had been largely Stalin’s choice of venue. The Foreign Ministers conference that had met in October had assembled in Moscow at Stalin’s insistence, a concession he had been determined to extract, and for the ‘Big Three’ meeting he steadily resisted the Prime Minister’s suggestion of Egypt, Cyprus or Khartoum. Relaxing inch by inch, Stalin finally proposed Iran, ‘where all three countries are represented’ (thus having legations), and Teheran it had to be, itself no great distance from the Soviet border. In effect, and the effect was deliberately contrived, the British Prime Minister and the President of the United States were both journeying to meet Stalin, who increased the scope of this indebtedness in his own style: once in Teheran, and to thwart would-be assassins, President Roosevelt was persuaded to move into the heavily guarded Soviet compound, rather than risk travelling from the outlying American Legation. The British Legation stood not far from the Soviet Embassy buildings where the conference itself was to take place. Thus were these diplomatic outposts for a brief time transformed into ‘the centre of the world’, where the three Allied leaders, masters between them of more than twenty million fighting men, sat down to confer in unison for the first time. Within an hour of President Roosevelt being installed within his own villa inside the Soviet perimeters on Sunday afternoon (28 November), Stalin paid a call upon him and the talk began.

With the President immured within the Soviet compound, and assuming that these premises were wired for every sound, the Russians were well placed to do some prime eavesdropping, which may have been the motive for all the flurry about a threat to the lives of the Allied leaders. In his talks with Ambassador Harriman, Molotov never referred in any specific terms to a ‘plot’, though he delivered a warning couched in strong terms about the presence of numerous German agents: precautions were being taken out of
fear
of a plot, not from certain knowledge that one existed and was about to be implemented.

Molotov was being either realistic or massively discreet about what Soviet intelligence had learned and how it had come by the information. Subsequent Soviet revelations of intelligence operations related to the Teheran ‘plot’ pinpointed two sources, both involved in penetrating the higher levels of the German command. The first was Ilya Svetlov, and the second was
‘Oberleutnant
Ziebert’, supposedly from Königsberg but in reality Nikolai Ivanovich Kuznetsov, the Soviet intelligence officer who had already delivered valuable information about
Citadel
as a result of his penetration of the German command in the Ukraine.

Ilya Svetlov’s story dates back into the 1920s and even the Russian Civil War, where it becomes intertwined with that of Friedrich Schultz, son of Otto Schultz, a German immigrant in Russia. The Svetlov family lived and worked on a farm near Baku, no great distance from the Persian border, and close to the farm settlement of Helenendorf with its contingent of German immigrants where German was freely and widely spoken. Here Ilya Svetlov and Friedrich Schultz grew up, sharing not only the settlement but finally the same house, when the fathers of both boys were killed fighting for the Bolsheviks in Azerbaijan during the Civil War. As a young man, Ilya Svetlov left the farm and moved to Baku where he worked as an organizer with the
Komsomol:
in this capacity he came to the notice of the
OGPU
, the Soviet intelligence service, which selected the young Svetlov for further training and an education in law.

In 1928 Ilya Svetlov went home on leave to Helenendorf. Friedrich Schultz still lived there, although his fortunes had just taken a surprising turn: his father’s brother Hans Schultz, presently living in Munich and an early supporter of the Nazi Party, had not long before lost both his wife and his daughter, bereavements which prompted him to write to his brother’s son in Russia and invite him to take his place within the now sadly depleted Schultz family. The prospect of this return to a distant family bosom did not, however, arouse Friedrich’s enthusiasm, fully diverted as this was in the direction of his Russian fiancée. Ilya persuaded him to delay replying to his uncle and meanwhile took the news of this development with him on his return to the
OGPU
in Baku.

Within a month Ilya’s superiors produced their solution. Hans Schultz’s offer was to be accepted, except that Ilya Svetlov and Friedrich Schultz would change places. The genuine Friedrich could marry his fiancée, assume her maiden name and move away to distant Novosibirsk, while the
OGPU
fashioned a new ‘Friedrich Schultz’ out of Ilya Svetlov. Not that the changes were drastic; Ilya spoke excellent German, he had lived with the real Friedrich; and, in addition to his personal qualities, the
OGPU
gave him a rigorous intelligence training, explaining that he would be on his own after his move to Germany until such time as he found himself in a position to furnish useful information.

In February 1930 Svetlov met his ‘uncle’ Hans Schultz at the railway station in Munich, a scene discreetly observed by another Soviet agent. From this point forward it was Hans Schultz who took charge of ‘Friedrich’s’ fortunes, using his money and his influence to obliterate every trace of the Russian background of his nephew (whose father had died fighting for the Bolsheviks) and providing yet another identity for Ilya Svetlov by giving him the name of Walter Schultz (a younger scion of the Schultz family in Hamburg whose suicide had been hushed up by the family), transferring himself to Berlin and letting ‘Friedrich’ vanish into obscurity by putting it about that his nephew had, in fact, never arrived from Russia. The re-born Walter Schultz took up a course of Oriental studies in the University of Berlin; he also prevailed upon his ‘uncle’ to get him
into the Nazi Party, which the elder Schultz managed with a recommendation emanating from no less a person than Hess himself.

Schultz–Svetlov advanced quickly. He graduated, became engaged to the daughter of a senior official of the German Foreign Office and joined the Storm Troopers. Once a graduate, Schultz–Svetlov found his ‘uncle’s’ connections with Admiral Canaris admirably suited to having him placed in the eastern section of the
Abwehr;
his marriage, however, did not materialize, a painful episode from a personal point of view but an advantage for his ultimate concealment. And in due course came Ilya Svetlov’s first operational assignment for the
Abwehr
, orders that sent him early in 1941 to Iran with instructions to penetrate the Iranian transport system and to prepare for sabotage action that would block any Soviet incursion into Iran. In Iran he was to operate under the auspices of a Swiss textile firm whose representative he ostensibly was (and preparations for which he had already made through his stay in Switzerland). Schultz–Svetlov travelled to Iran through Poland and the Soviet Union, where on a Soviet train he shared his compartment with another ‘foreign passenger’, English-speaking and also in transit through the Soviet Union, who proved to be the same Soviet intelligence officer who had first dispatched him to Germany in 1930. Once in Baku, Svetlov travelled on to Teheran from which he made frequent tours north in pursuit of his textile business and also to set up the sabotage network manned by anti-Soviet elements, simultaneously passing full details of the men involved and the locations of their explosive dumps to the Soviet command. He managed to discreetly bungle the actual sabotage when Soviet troops prepared to move into Iran in the autumn of 1941; ahead of the Soviet columns came Soviet squads who rounded up the saboteurs and disposed of their explosives.

Though he had ‘failed’ in Iran, Schultz–Svetlov resumed work in the eastern section of the
Abwehr
when he returned to Germany, and it was from this post that he was again plucked, in 1943, to operate in Iran, with Schellenberg himself supplying the details of the mission—Operation
Long Jump
, the plan to disrupt the Teheran conference, kill the Prime Minister and Stalin, and carry off President Roosevelt. A German commando group would be flown to Iran, dropped by parachute, conducted to Teheran and hidden there; they would then burst into the city and kill the Allied leaders before the local security forces realized what was happening. Schellenberg had his man in the city itself, a reliable agent named Alexander Gluszek (supposedly a Polish refugee)—what he wanted from Schultz was a contact in the frontier area who could assist the landing operation. Schultz mentioned his earlier dealings with a local leader who was avowedly pro-German, which satisfied Schellenberg for the moment. The next day the conversation was resumed, and Schultz was informed that he was ‘in’ on the operation; he was to go back to Iran under his earlier Swiss cover, to prepare the secret landing-sites and to conduct the commandos to Teheran, where Gluszek would conceal them. This time, however, Schultz–Svetlov was to be accompanied by his ‘wife’, a German woman agent acting as radio operator. Schellenberg ordered Schultz
not to report back to the
Abwehr
but to consider himself—along with all other participants in the operation—sealed off in total quarantine from the outside world, since any ‘leak’ would be fatal to the undertaking.