Rasputitsa
Posts: 2903
Joined: 6/30/2001
From: Bedfordshire UK
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Apollo11
Hi all,
Something just come to my mind...
Since Soviets had high ranking spies in UK establishment since 1930's it is not inconceivable that, possibly, some of them knew of ULTRA and gave that info to Stalin.
Again IIRC officially Western Allies didn't give Soviets info about their breakthroughs into both German and Japan secret codes!
What is least known is actual Soviet deciphering of ENIGMA - what they did and if they did it is still secret... also the Soviet spies in high ranking Nazi establishment played quite a big role in gathering German secrets...
Leo "Apollo11"
The story is not that this was high ranking spies, though these might have existed, but a member of the Bletchley Park team, able to provide detailed raw material, which would have confirmed the more generalised information which was passed through official channels.
The following text from the Q+A session after the talk on Bletchley Park quoted in earlier post.
Q. How closely did Bletchley work with the Russians on decryption?
A. It couldn't be as close as the collaboration I have described with the Americans for a variety of reasons. One is of course that there just hadn't been the close relationship between the two countries that existed historically between the British and the Americans. The other was that when we actually broke the ciphers - Enigma in the first instance, but Fish later - that were relevant to the Eastern Front, they were coming in to us at a time when it was uncertain whether Russia would survive. And then later on when Russia had survived and we were reading more ciphers both Fish and Enigma from the Eastern Front, there was the problem that we knew from the Enigma that the Germans were reading Russian ciphers, so that if they had too much Enigma intelligence in their ciphers you see the security risk was extremely high. Then fourthly the Russians were not collaborative. They wanted any intelligence we supplied but they wouldn't give any in return. Not that they had much Sigint, but they had a lot of other Intelligence.
The answer to your question is with all those difficulties we couldn't have so close a collaboration with the Russians as we had with Washington, but we started sending them a summary of signal intelligence a week after they were attacked by the Germans in '41. We sent it via the British Military Mission in Moscow where there were people to hand it over to the Russian General Staff.
We had to have a cover for it, had to explain to them that this is the horse's mouth but it is coming to us (this is the kind of cover we used) it is coming to us from very high ranking German officers who are slipping the news to us through Berne or somewhere like that, and we are getting it quickly because we have got pretty direct connections with Switzerland.
A steady stream of information about German intentions and dispositions - Airforce and Army on the Eastern Front - were sent to them. They were interrupted from time to time when the Russians were being particularly beastly. For example at the top of Russia, Murmansk at the Kola Inlet where all the convoys taking arms to Russia and supplies were going, we had to keep seamen, sailors, both to man the Allied facilities, unloading facilities - of course the Russians were there too but we had to keep some British sailors there. And then we persuaded the Russians to let us have an Intercept station there because half of the traffic around the top of the North Cape was difficult to intercept even in Northern Scotland.
And of course we covered the risk that they would suspect that we were reading Enigma or that they would do more than suspect that, by saying that the value of the traffic to us was that it enabled us, by traffic analysis, to judge the German reactions to the movements of the convoys. So we had this little intercept station and then the Russians locked them all up because they thought we were spying on them, so you had all sorts of little rows with them like that. From time to time when it wasn't vital we did say if you don't behave better than this we wont send you your daily summary. And we stopped it for a short time, then we started again. But it had to be of that character - the collaboration.
Q. Is there scope for counter-factual historians studying the siege of Leningrad - if they had had access to the Ultra information that you could have given them.
A. Again you have to bear in mind that there were problems. For example, one of the areas in which we found it extremely difficult to intercept German signals because of radio conditions or atmosphere conditions or whatever it is, was the North Cape; and the other was the Leningrad area. It was very difficult to intercept from the Leningrad area because whatever frequency they were using relative to the distances and the ionosphere we never could cover the Leningrad area properly. Caucaucus on the other hand, Central Front, we could hear then as clear as a bell.
Q. If the collaboration had been as close as with the Americans . . .
A. It would have been an advantage if it had been as close as with the Americans, it is quite true. But on the other hand the risks which I briefly portrayed were quite considerable. And we did our best to make sure that they knew about all the important forthcoming development. Don't forget they had very good intelligence of their own, not primarily Sigint but they had very good air reconnaissance and air superiority after a certain time, and they had an enormous espionage system behind the German lines. So they weren't without information. But we did do our best to make sure that they got crucial early notice whenever we got it ourselves.
It was a big dilemma and one that was fought about. Churchill wanted to risk it and let them have more. Naturally the Ultra authorities didn't want to risk it because everything hangs on it you see, so there was a tussle all the time about how much to send.
Q. The was a programme recently on Kursk - one might say that a Russian counter-factual historian would say that if we didn't have the Ultra which we got in various ways, then we wouldn't have been able to win the battle of Kursk and Hitler would have been able to carve up Russia. This is perhaps another case . . .
A. Another case. Stalingrad of course is another one. Those two battles were crucial, especially Stalingrad. Again it wasn't only through us they were getting . . . we did give them the central facts in advance of Kursk. But as we now know, we didn't know at the time, the one single Russian agent in Bletchley was at that time (just that short period of time before and after Kursk in '43) actually giving them decrypts through the Russian Embassy in London. So all sorts of complications about the story. He didn't know that they were getting the supply from London officially, and we didn't know that he was sending the decrypts unofficially. Quite a complex problem!
This is not information from a book, but from someone who was there at the time. 
< Message edited by Rasputitsa -- 2/4/2011 1:07:49 PM >
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Ultra and the eastern front- a question. - 
) was also a good general though he had the misfortune of being placed in many tight positions by Stalin - though his campaign in the Manchuria was almost Mongol like in dispersal of initial deployment and concentration for the crucial battles. 
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