University Press of Kansas Logo

Sharing Secrets with Stalin

How the Allies Traded Intelligence, 1941–1945

Bradley F. Smith

336 pages, 6 x 9
Modern War Studies
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-0800-3, $35.00

Book Cover ImageBestselling author Bradley Smith reveals the surprisingly rich exchange of wartime intelligence between the Anglo-American allies and the Soviet Union, as well as the procedures and politics that made such an exchange possible.

Between the late 1930s and 1945, allied intelligence organizations expanded at an enormous rate in order to acquire the secret information their governments needed to win the war. But, as Smith demonstrates, the demand for intelligence far outpaced the ability of any one ally to produce it. For that reason, Washington, London, and Moscow were compelled to share some of their most sensitive secrets.

Historians have long known about the close Anglo-American intelligence collaboration, but until now the Soviet connection has been largely unexplored. Smith contends that Cold War animosities helped keep this story from a public that might have found it hard to believe that such cooperation was ever possible. In fact, official denials-from such illustrious Cold Warriors as Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell and the CIA's Sherman Kent-continued well into the late 1980s.

Smith argues that, contrary to the official story, Soviet-American intelligence exchanges were both extensive and successful. He shows that East and West were not as hostile to each other during the war or as determined to march right off into the Cold War as many have suggested. Among other things, he provides convincing evidence that the U.S. Army gave the Soviets its highest-grade ULTRA intelligence in August 1945 to speed up the Soviet advances in the Far East.

Based on interviews and enormous research in Anglo-American archives and despite limited access to tenaciously guarded Soviet documents, Smith's book persuasively demonstrates how reluctant and suspicious allies, driven by the harsh realities of total war, finally set aside their ideological differences to work closely with people they neither trusted nor particularly liked.

"As engaging as it is astonishing, this book provides extremely important revelations and striking pen-portraits etched in acid of the main actors. Certainly the sources are fabulous."--John Erickson, author of The Road to Stalingrad

"This richly detailed book is a major revelation, an inquiry into one of the darkest corners of Russian-Allied relations during World War II."--John Prados, author of Combined Fleet Decoded

"Credibility, utility, and readability propel this book into the first ranks of its genre. There, it measures up well with the pre-eminent works by Hinsley, Deutsch, and Drea. This work is particularly timely and useful, appearing when current U.S.-Russian cooperative efforts are plagued by the misunderstandings of the past and when the Russian archives are slowly creaking open."--David M. Glantz, coauthor of When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler

"The most complete and detailed picture of such exchanges of intelligence that we are likely to see for some time."--Warren F. Kimball, author of The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman

"Smith has done an extraordinary job in uncovering a story that forces us to rethink the achievements and the failures of one of history's more improbable alliances."--Wesley K. Wark, author of The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1933–1939

"A major contribution to the literature of World War II by a scholar of considerable intellectual integrity."--Carl Boyd, author of Hitler's Japanese Confidant: General Oshima Hiroshi and MAGIC Intelligence, 1941–1945

BRADLEY SMITH is the author of many books including Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg; The Shadow Warriors: OSS and the Origins of the CIA; The Road to Nuremberg; Operation Sunrise, the Secret Surrender; The ULTRA-MAGIC Deals; The War's Long Shadow; and Adolph Hitler: His Family, Childhood, and Youth.