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

The choice is sometimes highly selective. During the 1990s, for example, the SVR has made available to Russian and Western authors four successive tranches from the bulky file of the KGB’s most famous British agent, Kim Philby.⁶⁴ In order to preserve both Philby’s heroic image and the reputation of Russian foreign intelligence, however, the SVR has been careful not to release the record of Philby’s final weeks as head of the SIS station in the United States (the climax of his career as a Soviet spy), when money and instructions intended for Philby were mislaid, and he fell out with his incompetent controller who was subsequently recalled to Moscow in disgrace. Mitrokhin’s notes on those parts of the Philby file still considered by the SVR unsuitable for public consumption reveal this farcical episode for the first time.⁶⁵

The SVR has publicly denied even the existence of some of the files which it finds embarrassing. While writing a history of KGB-CIA rivalry in Berlin before the construction of the Wall, based partly on documents selected by the SVR, the Russian and American authors (one of them a former deputy head of the FCD) asked to see the file of the KGB agent Aleksandr Grigoryevich Kopatzky (alias Igor Orlov). The SVR replied that it had no record of any agent of that name. Its only record of “Igor Orlov” was, it claimed, of a visit made by him to the Soviet embassy in Washington in 1965, when he complained of FBI harassment and enquired about asylum in the USSR.⁶⁶ Though still officially an unperson in the SVR version of Russian intelligence history, Kopatzky was in reality one of the KGB’s most highly rated agents. His supposedly non-existent KGB file, noted by Mitrokhin, reveals that he had no fewer than twenty-three controllers.⁶⁷

As well as initiating an unprecedented series of collaborative histories for publication in the West, the SVR has produced a number of less sophisticated works for the Russian market. In 1995, to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, of which it sees itself as the heir, the SVR published a volume on the careers of seventy-five intelligence officers—all, it appears, sans peur et sans reproche—which differs little from the uncritical hagiographies of the KGB era.⁶⁸ In 1995 the SVR also began the publication of a multi-volume official history of KGB foreign operations which by 1997 had reached the beginning of the Great Patriotic War.⁶⁹ Though a mine of mostly reliable factual information, it too presents a selective and sanitized view of Soviet intelligence history. It also preserves, in a mercifully diluted form, some of the traditional conspiracy theories of the KGB. The literary editor of the official history, Lolly Zamoysky, was formerly a senior FCD analyst, well known within the Centre and foreign residencies for his belief in a global Masonic-Zionist plot.⁷⁰ In 1989 he published a volume grandly entitled Behind the Façade of the Masonic Temple, which blamed the Freemasons for, inter alia, the outbreak of the Cold War.⁷¹

The underlying rationale for the SVR’s selection of topics and documents for histories of past operations is to present Soviet foreign intelligence as a dedicated and highly professional service, performing much the same functions as its Western counterparts but, more often than not, winning the contest against them.⁷² Even under Stalin, foreign intelligence is presented as the victim rather than the perpetrator of the Terror⁷³—despite the fact that during the later 1930s hunting down “enemies of the people” abroad became its main priority.⁷⁴ Similarly, the SVR seeks to distance the foreign intelligence operations of the FCD during the Cold War from the abuse of human rights by the domestic KGB. In reality, however, the struggle against “ideological subversion” both at home and abroad was carefully coordinated. The KGB took a central role in the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and the pressure on the Polish regime to destroy Solidarity in 1981. Closely linked to the persecution of dissidents within the Soviet Union were the FCD’s PROGRESS operations against dissidents in the rest of the Soviet Bloc and its constant harassment of those who had taken refuge in the West.⁷⁵ By the mid-1970s the FCD’s war against ideological subversion extended even to operations against Western Communist leaders who were judged to have deviated from Moscow’s rigid Party line.⁷⁶