Take Hess' defection to Great Britain (the precise template for Lin Piao's defection to the Soviet Union a generation later).
...Joseph Stalin['s] mighty suspicions at this critical time seem to have been concentrated not on Germany, as they should have been, but on Great Britain.
The arrival of Hess in Scotland convinced [Stalin] that there was some deep plot being hatched between Churchill and Hitler which would give Germany...freedom to strike the Soviet Union.
...three years later [Churchill], then on his second visit to Moscow, tried to convince Stalin of the truth, he simply did not believe it. (Shirer 837-8)
Please, go ahead, explain that.
...
THE PLIGHT OF THE KREMLIN
Despite all the evidence of Hitler's intentions--the build-up of German forces in eastern Poland, the presence of a million Nazi troops in the nearby Balkans, the Wehrmacht's conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece and its occupation of Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary--the men in the Kremlin, Stalin above all, stark realists though they were reputed to be and had been, blindly hoped that Russia somehow would still escape the Nazi...
There is, however, something unreal, almost unbelievable, quite grotesque, in the diplomatic exchanges between Moscow and Berlin in these spring weeks...in which the Germans tried clumsily to deceive the Kremlin to the last and the Soviet leaders seemed unable to grasp reality and act on it in time. (emphasis added)
...the Soviets went out of their way to appease Berlin as the date for the German attack approached. Stalin personally took the lead in this. (Ibid 839)
...
Stalin...remained ignorant [of Barbarossa], but not of the signs, or of the warnings...(841 emphasis in original)
Did the crafty Soviet dictator not realize by now--the middle of May 1941...? [842 the original start date for Barbarossa, and within one month of the reset date]
More:
-In January 1941 the U.S. commercial attache in Berlin sent a report "(which proved to be quite accurate)" to the State Department that Hitler was planning an attack on the Soviet Union in the spring. After vetting by the FBI Secretary of State Cordell Hull had the substance of the report turned over to the Soviet Ambassador in Washington. "Mr. Oumansky turned very white." and thanked the State Department for the intelligence. Yet, "Moscow grew more hostile and truculent" toward America and Britain. (842-3)
-On April 3 Churchill had a personal note delivered to Stalin by the British ambassador in Moscow advising of German troop movements in southern Poland.
-On May 22 the German ambassador in Moscow found Molotov and Stalin "amiable...and well-informed as ever" and striving "above all to avoid a conflict with Germany.
-Hull sent the Soviets additional warnings the department had received from its missions in Bucharest and Stockholm in the first week in June that the Nazis would attack in two weeks.
-"In the opinion of Soviet circles the rumors of the intention of Germany...to launch an attack against the Soviet Union are completely without foundation."-Molotov to Tass, June 14, eight days before the attack.
...
Shirer ends this section similar to how he began it:
It is almost inconceivable but nevertheless true that the men in the Kremlin, for all the reputation they had of being suspicious, crafty and hardheaded, and despite all the evidence and all the warnings that stared them in the face, did not realize right up to the last moment that they were to be hit, and with a force which would almost destroy their nation.
