S8 Ep368: FILE 8. INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE AND D-DAY DELAYS. GUEST AUTHOR SEAN MCMEEKIN. The author details how the Soviets utilized Lend-Lease to plunder American intellectual property and entire factories, often with Harry Hopkins’s facilitation,. McMeekin notes th

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 25 January 2026

⏱️ 11 minutes

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FILE 8. INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE AND D-DAY DELAYS. GUEST AUTHOR SEAN MCMEEKIN. The author details how the Soviets utilized Lend-Lease to plunder American intellectual property and entire factories, often with Harry Hopkins’s facilitation,. McMeekin notes that Stalin delayed Operation Bagration until weeks after D-Day to let the Allies absorb German strength, while Hopkins consistently overruled officials like Averell Harriman who tried to condition this aid,.
1942

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0:00.0	This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel. My conversation with Sean McMeakin, professor of Bard College,
0:10.0	author of the new book, Stalin's War. This is a tour of the familiar territory in 1939 to 1948.
0:18.5	From the point of view of Moscow, there are, however, puzzles. One of the puzzles we've
0:24.9	bypassed, but I want to come back because it's not all on FDR telling himself this will work out.
0:31.6	It's also Winston Churchill. Sean, who are the Chetniks? Who is Mikhailovich? What does Churchill make of the presentation he's
0:41.2	given by the BBC and other Czechist agents in London that he should side with the wrong people in
0:47.6	Yugoslavia? Well, I do think Churchill at times during the war would put up at least a little
0:53.5	bit more fight than Roosevelt did on some questions and strategy, but not in Yugoslavia.
0:57.8	I mean, this is definitely a good one to single out where I think Churchill really was hoodwinked.
1:03.4	Now, to be fair to Churchill, there was some evidence and some of it was uncovered by British intelligence, the so-called Enigma Decrypts,
1:11.0	that Mikhailovich, who was this officer in the former Yugoslav army,
1:15.1	who was the legity of the Yugoslav government in exile in London,
1:20.5	who led to Chechnik's this kind of group of rebels who took to the hills
1:25.0	and tried to resist the Nazis after the Germans invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941.
1:31.0	Now, Mikhailovich, like his kind of counterpart on the left, Braz or Tito, who was, of course, answering to Stalin,
1:39.2	at times during the war, would have to negotiate various kind of deals with either the Italian occupying
1:44.3	authorities or even once or twice with Serbs or indirectly with the Germans. There were
1:49.9	sometimes prisoner exchanges, weapons, and you could very easily weaponize this information politically
1:54.7	in order to smear someone as a collaborator. And that becomes the official communist line
1:59.3	on Kailovich, is that he's a collaborator.
2:02.0	It's a grotesque slander, of course. I mean, his Chetniks resisted the Germans long before
2:07.0	the partisans of Tito did because they had to have Soviet permission until the Germans invaded
	...

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