Why Stalin Believed Every Warning of Invasion Was a Lie

WW2, from the records. https://warshelf.com/ June 17, 1941. Stalin's intelligence chiefs stand in his office with a telegram from two sources inside the German government: every preparation for an attack on the USSR is finished, and the blow may come at any time. Stalin writes across it that the source is not a source but a disinformer. Five days later three million men cross the border. It wasn't that he ignored the warnings. Eighty-four of them reached Soviet hands, from Washington, London, Berlin and Tokyo, and he read them. He had a theory that held together: Hitler would never open a second front with Britain undefeated, every British warning was a plot to buy Britain's survival with Russian blood, and Hitler always made demands before he took anything. So he waited for the demands. His own intelligence chief wrote that the warnings were British disinformation, his admiral called them planted, Sorge's cable from Tokyo was filed with the provocations, and grain trains kept rolling west. The demands never came. The night before the attack, a German deserter swam the Bug to warn them, and Stalin wondered aloud whether he'd been sent to provoke them. The last Soviet grain train crossed the bridge at Brest in the final hours of darkness.