Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin: Lies, Spies, and Hitler

The wartime alliance between Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin was not a bond of trust but a fragile, ideologically fraught marriage of convenience forged in the face of Adolf Hitler’s rise. Far from being a unified front, the 'Big Three' were deeply suspicious of one another—Stalin distrusted the West due to its historical hostility to Bolshevism, Churchill and Roosevelt viewed Stalin with growing unease over Soviet ambitions, and all three operated in a fog of deception, espionage, and strategic manipulation. Soviet spies like the Cambridge Five infiltrated British and American intelligence, feeding Stalin vast amounts of Ultra decrypts, diplomatic cables, and even pre-Yalta briefing books—information that allowed him to anticipate Allied moves. Yet Stalin, paranoid and ideologically rigid, often dismissed warnings of Operation Barbarossa, believing them to be British disinformation designed to provoke a German attack on the USSR. Meanwhile, the West, constrained by alliance politics and resource limitations, largely refrained from spying on their Soviet ally, even as Soviet agents operated freely in Washington and London. The real turning point of the war came not from grand strategy, but from Richard Sorge’s intelligence in Tokyo, which revealed Japan’s southern strategy and allowed Stalin to redeploy Siberian forces to halt Hitler’s advance on Moscow—a moment that shifted the tide of the war.