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

The active measures employed against some of the journalists who wrote articles based on Barron’s book were more imaginative. Doctored versions of blank “information cards” from the Austrian Stapo (security police) registry previously obtained by KGB agents were used to compromise Austrian journalists judged to have used material from KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents to undermine the “peaceloving” policies of the USSR. Fabricated entries on the cards prepared by Service A, the FCD active measures specialists, purported to show that the Stapo believed the journalists concerned to be hand-in-glove with the CIA. Photocopies of the cards were then circulated among the Austrian media. The files noted by Mitrokhin list other KGB countermeasures against Barron’s book in countries as far afield as Turkey, Cyprus, Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Kuwait, Somalia, Uganda, India, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.⁵⁶

The other study of the KGB which did the most to arouse the ire of the Centre was the history published in 1990 by Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev, which drew on KGB documents and other information obtained by Gordievsky while working as a British agent inside the KGB from 1974 to 1985.⁵⁷ The Centre predictably responded with active measures against both the book and its authors.⁵⁸ (Some indication of its continuing hostility to Gordievsky is provided by the fact that, at the time of this writing, he is still under sentence of death in Moscow.) There was, however, one important new element in the reaction of the KGB, and of its chairman Kryuchkov in particular, to the publication of the history by Andrew and Gordievsky. In a top secret “Chairman’s Order” of September 1990 emphasizing the importance of influence operations and other active measures (“one of the most important functions of the KGB’s foreign intelligence service”), Kryuchkov instructed that “wider use should be made of archive material” to publicize a “positive” image of the KGB and “its more celebrated cases.”⁵⁹

The first approach to a Western writer offering material from KGB archives intended to create this “positive” image was to the mercurial John Costello, a freelance British historian who combined flair for research with a penchant for conspiracy theory.⁶⁰ In 1991 Costello published a book on the mysterious flight to Britain fifty years previously of Hitler’s deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, which drew on KGB records selected by the SVR as well as Western sources, and argued (implausibly, in the view of most experts on the period) that the key to the whole affair was a plot by British intelligence.⁶¹ Two years later, in collaboration with the SVR consultant (and former FCD officer) Oleg Tsarev, Costello published a somewhat less controversial biography of the inter-war Soviet intelligence officer Aleksandr Orlov which was described on the dustjacket as “The first book from the KGB archives—the KGB secrets the British government doesn’t want you to read.” The book began with tributes to the disgraced former chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov, and the last head of the FCD, Leonid Vladimirovich Shebarshin, for initiating the project. Costello added a note of “personal gratitude” to the SVR “for the ongoing support that they have given to this project which has established a new precedent for openness and objectivity in the study of intelligence history, not only in Russia, but the rest of the world.”⁶²

The Costello-Tsarev combination set the pattern for other collaborations between Russian authors selected or approved by the SVR and Western writers (who have included both well-known historians and a senior retired CIA officer): a project initially sponsored, but later abandoned, by Crown Books in the United States. For each volume in the series, which covers topics from the inter-war period to the early Cold War, the SVR has given the authors exclusive access to copies of previously top secret documents selected by it from KGB archives. All the books published so far have contained interesting and sometimes important new material; several are also impressive for the quality of their historical analysis. Their main weakness, for which the authors cannot be blamed, is that the choice of KGB documents on which they are based has been made not by them but by the SVR.⁶³