A Brief History of the Spy Read Online Free PDF Page B

Union that ‘the Soviet Union would be the only important military and political force on the continent of Europe. The rest of Europe would be reduced to military and political impotence.’ It has been suggested that Roosevelt agreed to Stalin’s plans in return for the Soviet leader’s support for the establishment of the United Nations. (It’s worth noting that the NKVD had the US delegation’s property bugged, and that the Soviets regarded another of Roosevelt’s advisers, Harry Hopkins, almost as one of their own – Hopkins wasn’t a Communist by conviction, but he accepted that the Soviets would inevitably be the dominant power in Europe after the end of the war, and advised the president accordingly.)
    When the leaders met at Yalta in 1945, following the successful invasion on D-Day, the war was all but over. Russian and Allied troops were virtually in Berlin, and great swathes of Eastern Europe were now to all intents and purposes governed by Moscow. As one of Roosevelt’s advisers Bernard Baruch pointed out, it would be futile ‘to demand of Russia what she thinks she needs and most of which she now possesses’. Poland would be under Soviet rule, although Stalin promised there would be elections. Germany would be divided into four zones, with Berlin itself divided, an island within the Soviet zone.
    Charles Bohlen felt that Stalin was hoodwinking the president. ‘What [Roosevelt] did not understand was that Stalin’s enmity was based on profound ideological convictions,’ he wrote. ‘The existence of a gap between the Soviet Union and the United States, a gap that could not be bridged, was never fully perceived by Franklin Roosevelt.’ Roosevelt himself said, ‘I think that if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.’
    But Stalin had no intention of following through on his promises. Roosevelt told Congress that he hoped the Yalta agreement would ‘spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries – and have always failed’. It was a naive view, at best. Stalin refused to allow Western observers in for the elections, and Roosevelt realized, less than three weeks before his death, that: ‘We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.’
    On 12 April 1945, Roosevelt died of a cerebral haemorrhage. His successor, Harry S. Truman, was a great deal blunter than Roosevelt had ever been: when the Soviet Foreign Minister complained that he had never been addressed in such a way, after a dressing-down by the president, Truman replied, ‘Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.’ It was Truman who sat down with Churchill – and then new British Prime Minister Clement Atlee, whose Labour Party took power in the post-war election that occurred mid-conference – and Stalin at Potsdam, a suburb in the south-west of Berlin, and discovered that most of the important decisions had already been taken and Stalin had no intention of accepting any decisions that didn’t directly benefit the Soviet Union’s plans. Truman’s priority, initially, was the still-continuing war in the Far East, and gaining Sovietsupport for that. In the end, though, the use of the atom bomb, first at Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, prompted the Japanese surrender – and Truman could focus on the Soviet duplicity that he saw. Duplicity that would be revealed in detail when a cypher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada, defected to the West that September.
    Just as the record executive who turned down the Beatles has gone down in history as missing one of the great opportunities of the twentieth century, in espionage terms so did the night editor at the
Ottawa Journal
in failing to