The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

The KGB’s domestic obsession with the detection and suppression of “ideological subversion” spilled over into its foreign operations. It sought to impress the Party leadership by its zeal in discrediting dissidents abroad as well as at home. In the summer of 1978 the KGB First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) and Fifth (Ideological Subversion) Directorates jointly arranged the secret screening in Moscow to an audience of KGB and Party notables of the commencement address by the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard University. The purpose of this extraordinary (by Western standards) evening was to seek to demonstrate that, thanks to the efforts of the KGB, Solzhenitsyn was now a largely discredited figure in the United States.[29] The KGB’s mission to discredit dissidents who had emigrated to the West extended even to dissident ballet dancers, musicians and chess players.

For Western media used to interpreting the secret Cold War in terms of spy versus spy, Mitrokhin’s material on the KGB’s war against ideological subversion, unlike the revelations about individual spies, had little interest. There was, predictably, greater interest in this material in the countries of the former Soviet Bloc — reflected, for example, in the number of translations of The Mitrokhin Archive into Eastern European languages. The priority given by the KGB to maintaining the ideological orthodoxy of the Soviet Bloc was reflected by the fact that it deployed more of its elite group of illegals to Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968 than, so far as is known, were ever used in any operation against a Western target.

The Cold War chapters of The Mitrokhin Archive give equal weight to KGB operations against the United States and to those against ideological subversion. Mitrokhin smuggled out of the KGB foreign intelligence headquarters important material on operations against some of the leaders of the struggle for democracy within the Soviet Bloc whose extraordinary moral courage eventually prevailed over the immense coercive force of the KGB and its allies. Two examples stand out. The first is the great Russian dissident and nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov, dubbed “Public Enemy Number One” by Yuri Andropov (successively KGB Chairman and Soviet leader), who survived persecution and internal exile by the KGB to become, in Gorbachev’s words, “unquestionably the most outstanding personality” at the 1989 Congress of People’s Soviets. One of the most striking visual images of the crumbling of the Soviet system, which deserves to be as well known as the destruction of the Berlin Wall, is of Gorbachev and other members of the Politburo standing bareheaded by Sakharov’s open coffin after his sudden death in December 1989.

The second outstanding case is that of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, Archbishop of Kraków, whom the KGB seems to have identified in the early 1970s as its most dangerous opponent in the Soviet Bloc. Wojtyła, however, was protected by his moral authority and eminence. The KGB, like the Polish SB, shrank from the immense public outcry which his arrest would provoke. Seen in hindsight, Wojtyła’s election in 1978 as Pope John Paul II marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Bloc. Though the Polish problem was, with difficulty, contained for the next decade, it could not be resolved.

The organization which has studied The Mitrokhin Archive with the closest attention since its publication is the SVR, which is deeply concerned by its contents. No intelligence agency can expect either to recruit new agents or to maintain the loyalty of its existing agents unless it can convince them that it can keep their secrets indefinitely. The SVR is now ill-placed to do so. Thanks to Mitrokhin, no one who spied for the Soviet Union at any period between the October Revolution and the eve of the Gorbachev era can now be confident that his or her secrets are still secure. Mitrokhin’s material also contains information on Cold War operations conducted by the current head of the SVR, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, and other former senior KGB officers. Volume Two will contain a chapter on KGB activities in India, where Trubnikov made his reputation. If the past secrets of the SVR leadership have proved insecure, SVR agents may well conclude that theirs are also.

From the moment the Mitrokhin archive arrived in Britain, SIS realized that its contents were “of exceptional counter-intelligence significance, not only illuminating past KGB activity against Western countries but also promising to nullify many of Russia’s current assets.” The CIA similarly found the archive “the biggest CI [counter-intelligence] bonanza of the post-war period.” The FBI agreed. As the ISC report reveals, other Western intelligence agencies have also been “extremely grateful” for the numerous CI leads provided by the Mitrokhin archive.[30]