The memo originates from Pavel Fitin’s office. The young director of NKVD foreign intelligence has already shown himself to be far less experienced than many of his comrades who were murdered in Stalin’s bloody purges. A number of the agents he runs—agents like Korotkov—have shown lapses in tradecraft, but the memo he sends Gurevich on August 26, 1941, is a mistake so massive that it threatens to eclipse all the others. Indeed, Fitin’s memo will go down in history as one of the most significant espionage blunders of the Second World War.
