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

Some insight into the turmoil inside the SVR which must have been provoked by the publication of The Mitrokhin Archive is provided by the file (noted by Mitrokhin) on the book on the KGB published by the American journalist John Barron a quarter of a century ago. KGB headquarters ordered no fewer than 370 reports in an attempt to assess the damage to its interests caused by various sections of Barron’s book.[31] Mitrokhin’s revelations have doubtless led to even more damage assessments than Barron’s. There is already unattributable evidence of efforts by the SVR to ensure that no archivist ever again has the unrestricted access to files enjoyed by Mitrokhin.

Like the KGB First Chief Directorate, the SVR contains an “active measures” section, Department MS, specializing in disinformation, which was inevitably instructed to try to undermine the credibility of The Mitrokhin Archive.[32] On two occasions since the publication of the book, it has sent apparent Russian defectors to Western intelligence agencies, each with the same story about The Mitrokhin Archive. The SVR, claimed the “defectors,” had decided on a massive clear-out of redundant and retired agents which it had inherited from the KGB, and had therefore chosen a retired KGB archivist — Vasili Mitrokhin — to transmit their names to the West.[33] This poorly conceived active measure proved counter-productive for two reasons. First, a series of Western intelligence agencies had already been able to establish that Mitrokhin’s material was far too valuable to them for the SVR to have willingly made it available. Secondly, both the bogus “defectors” were quickly and conclusively exposed as SVR plants. The whole episode has merely served to underline the SVR’s deep anxiety at the damage to its agent operations caused by Mitrokhin’s material. Its mood will not have been lightened by the knowledge that there are many more revelations still to come in Volume Two. Mitrokhin’s ambition — unchanged for almost thirty years — remains to publish as much as possible of the top-secret material which he risked his life to collect.

ONE THE MITROKHIN ARCHIVE

This book is based on unprecedented and unrestricted access to one of the world’s most secret and closely guarded archives—that of the foreign intelligence arm of the KGB, the First Chief Directorate (FCD). Hitherto the present Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki), has been supremely confident that a book such as this could not be written. When the German magazine Focus reported in December 1996 that a former KGB officer had defected to Britain with “the names of hundreds of Russian spies,” Tatyana Samolis, spokeswoman for the SVR, instantly ridiculed the whole story as “absolute nonsense.” “Hundreds of people! That just doesn’t happen!” she declared. “Any defector could get the name of one, two, perhaps three agents—but not hundreds!”¹

The facts, however, are far more sensational even than the story dismissed as impossible by the SVR. The KGB defector had brought with him to Britain details not of a few hundred but of thousands of Soviet agents and intelligence officers in all parts of the globe, some of them “illegals” living under deep cover abroad, disguised as foreign citizens. 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. When the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) exfiltrated the defector and his family from Russia in 1992, it also brought out six cases containing the copious notes he had taken almost daily for twelve years, before his retirement in 1984, on top secret KGB files going as far back as 1918. The contents of the cases have since been described by the American FBI as “the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source.”

The KGB officer who assembled this extraordinary archive, Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin, is now a British citizen. Born in central Russia in 1922, he began his career as a Soviet foreign intelligence officer in 1948, at a time when the foreign intelligence arms of the MGB (the future KGB) and the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) were temporarily combined in the Committee of Information.² By the time Mitrokhin was sent on his first foreign posting in 1952,³ the Committee had disintegrated and the MGB had resumed its traditional rivalry with the GRU. His first five years in intelligence were spent in the paranoid atmosphere generated by the final phase of Stalin’s dictatorship, when the intelligence agencies were ordered to conduct witch-hunts throughout the Soviet Bloc against mostly imaginary Titoist and Zionist conspiracies.