Special-purpose radio divisions, which were part of the GRU of the General Staff of the Red Army, practically from the very first days of the war were engaged in radio interception, jamming enemy radio communications, direction finding German radio stations, and also in misinforming the enemy.
The training of specialists in such a difficult matter began in 1937 in Leningrad on the basis of the Military Electrotechnical Academy named after S. M. Budyonny (Engineering and Radio Engineering Faculty). With the outbreak of war in July 1941, graduates were transferred to a training center near Moscow, where targeted training began to work with German ciphers and radiograms.
Lieutenant General of the Intelligence of the Red Army P. S. Shmyrev wrote about this:
“The training center studied the organization of radio communications in the German fascist army within the limits of what the teachers themselves knew. We trained in listening, studied general military disciplines."
It was the battle near Moscow that became the first test for the radio intelligence units of the Red Army, during which it was possible to determine the direction of the main attack of the Germans and the place of concentration. General T. F. Korneev, chief of intelligence of the Western Front, testifies to the events of the fall of 1941:
“By September 23, 1941, front intelligence had established that the enemy was preparing for an offensive and had created for this a large grouping of troops in front of the Western and Reserve Fronts. The main role in detecting offensive groupings was played by the radio reconnaissance of the Western Front. By that time, aviation and other types of reconnaissance had become much more effective, but radio reconnaissance was the leader in revealing the enemy's operational and tactical reserves.”
In the early autumn of 1941, the 490th separate radio division was transferred from Tashkent to the Moscow region, the main task was reconnaissance by the action of German armada of bombers, the determination of base airfields and plans for air strikes. Information from the 490th division came directly to the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command and served as the basis for the successful actions of the Soviet air defense. On the basis of radio intelligence reports in November 1941 near Moscow, it was possible to warn the troops of the impending German offensive two days in advance. And already at the end of November, intelligence informed about the serious losses of the Germans near Tula, the shell starvation near Volokolamsk and the lack of fuel - all this became one of the building blocks of the successful counteroffensive of the Red Army near Moscow.
The strategic consequences of the work of the Soviet decryption service during the Moscow battle are also difficult to overestimate. For example, a veteran of the radio intelligence service, L. A. Kuzmin, in the article "Do not forget your heroes" gives examples of the work of decoders:
“Already in the first days of the war, BA Aronsky (with the help of his assistants and translators) deciphered the coded reports of the ambassadors of a number of allied Germany countries in Japan. On behalf of the Emperor of Japan, the ambassadors reported to their governments that Japan was confident in their imminent victory over Russia, but for the time being it was concentrating its forces in the South Pacific against the United States (and this war had not even begun then!) … Deciphering the code is an extremely work complex and time consuming. It presupposes a careful selection by external signs from the mass of interception cipher of a set of cryptograms related to a given code, then a very scrupulous statistical analysis, which should reflect the frequency of occurrence, place and “neighbors” of each code designation in the entire set. Due to the lack of special equipment in those years, all this was done manually by several assistants of the main cryptographer-analyst. Nevertheless, the many months of work of such a team often led to the analytical opening of a significant part of the content of the codebook and the possibility of prompt reading of the next intercepted coded telegrams. This determined the success of the group of State Security Captain Aronsky, which played a huge role in the outcome of the battle for Moscow."
B. A. Aronsky
State Security Captain S. S. Tolstoy
During the war, the Japanese department of the NKVD was headed by Captain Sergei Semenovich Tolstoy, who made a great contribution to the deciphering of the correspondence of the military command of the Land of the Rising Sun. In addition, Tolstoy and his team uncovered the algorithms of many enemy codes, and also "hacked" Japanese encryption machines: Orange, Red, and Purple.
On November 27, 1941, a message was transmitted from Japan to its own embassy in Berlin, which our specialists successfully decoded: “It is necessary to meet with Hitler and secretly explain to him our position on the United States. Explain to Hitler that Japan's main efforts will be concentrated in the south and that we intend to refrain from serious action in the north."
Actually, this, as well as the confirmation of Japan's neutrality on the part of Sorge, became an important factor in the successful offensive near Moscow. Sorge, as you know, made an almost decisive contribution to a sober assessment of the mood of the Japanese leadership. His message became famous: "Japan's entry into the war against the USSR is not expected, at least until next spring." The work on the Japanese theme resulted in the echelons of the Red Army troops, which were deployed to help Moscow from the Far East and Siberia. In total, the Soviet leadership weakened the grouping of troops in the east by 15 rifle and 3 cavalry divisions, 1,700 tanks and 1,500 aircraft. I think it is unnecessary to talk about the importance of such forces in the defense of Moscow and the subsequent counterattack.
Japanese Navy Red craft intercepted by the US Navy
Detail of a Purple cipher machine discovered by US forces at the end of World War II at the Japanese Embassy in Berlin
The selfless work of radio intelligence did not go unnoticed - in April 1942, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR awarded 54 employees with orders and medals of various denominations.
A separate story of the battle for Moscow was the work of our special services with individual copies of the German Enigma vehicle, which were captured during the battles in December 1941. Several Wehrmacht ciphers were captured by the Soviet Union. The work on the German miracle machine was intense, and by the end of 1942 the specialists of the GRU decryption service had already designed special mechanisms for decryption, and also created a mathematical model of the Enigma. All this made it possible to calculate in detail the algorithms for the operation of the technique, identify shortcomings and take them into account when developing their own similar encryption apparatus. But in January 1943 the Germans complicated the principle of the Enigma (they added a drum), and here our specialists found themselves in a dead end - there was no corresponding electronic base in the USSR at that time. An interesting hypothesis was also put forward in this regard by the researcher of the history of cryptography D. A. Larin, according to which the leadership of the USSR did not need to hack "Enigma". The military received comprehensive information through intelligence, and it would be ineffective to spend gigantic funds on Enigma.
The former director of FAPSI, General A. V. Starovoitov, very accurately assessed the work of domestic codebreakers:
“We had access to information circulating in the structures of the Wehrmacht (almost all!). I believe our marshals were rendered significant assistance in achieving a turning point in the course of the war and, finally, final victory. Our field decryption centers have worked very well. We won the war on air."
