‘Send your source to fuck his mother,’ he wrote on one report. Stalin could be as mulishly obtuse as he was lupinely astute and felinely flexible. ‘An intelligence officer,’ he said, ‘ought to be like the devil, believing no one, not even himself.’ In this case, the devil out-devilled himself. He knew that Hitler was his enemy and that war would come but believed the pact would delay it until 1943. As tension rose, he should have probed an alliance with Britain. His mistake was to regard Hitler as a conventional statesman, while in fact the Führer was the self-declared ‘sleepwalker’ who sought
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