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

The first ever atomic attack on people, the use of atomic weapons for blackmail and the escalation of the arms race were sanctioned by the 33-degree Mason Harry Truman.

The first ever call for the Cold War was sounded by Mason Winston Churchill (with Truman’s blessing).

The onslaught on the economic independence of Western Europe (disguised as the Marshall Plan) was directed by the 33-degree Mason George Marshall.

Truman and West European Freemasons orchestrated the formation of NATO.

Don’t we owe to that cohort the instigation of hostility between the West and the Soviet Union…?

(Behind the Facade of the Masonic Temple, pp. 6-7, 141.)

An important part of the explanation for the survival of some old KGB conspiracy theories into today’s SVR is the continuity of personnel.

72. The third and latest volume of the SVR official history, which ends in 1941, concludes that Soviet foreign intelligence “honorably and unselfishly did its patriotic duty to Motherland and people.” Primakov et al., Ocherki Istorii Rossiyskoi Vneshnei Razvedki, vol. 3, conclusion.

73. That is why the SVR selected as the first subject for a collaborative history between one of its own consultants and a Western historian a biography of Aleksandr Orlov, a senior foreign intelligence officer who, despite being forced to flee to the West from Stalin’s Terror, allegedly kept “faith with Lenin’s revolution” and used his superior intelligence training to take in Western intelligence agencies for many years. Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions.

74. See below, ch. 5.

75. See below, chs. 15, 16, 19, 20, 29, 30.

76. See below, ch. 18.

77. On the destruction of KGB files, see Knight, Spies Without Cloaks, p. 194.

Chapter Two From Lenin’s Cheka to Stalin’s OGPU

1. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 56-63.

2. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 52-3.

3. vol. 6, ch. 3, part 3, n. 2; k-9,218.

4. Leggett, The Cheka, p. 17.

5. k-9,67.

6. Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924, pp. 92-3.

7. k-9,67,204.

8. Tsvigun et al. (eds.), V.I. Lenin i VChK, no. 48.

9. Ostryakov, Voyennye Chekisty, ch. 1.

10. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 69-75. On the evidence for Lenin’s involvement, see Brook-Shepherd, Iron Maze, p. 103.

11. Brook-Shepherd, Iron Maze, p. 107.

12. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 79.

13. Before his execution, Kannegiser was twice interrogated personally by Dzerzhinsky. Though he had formerly been an active member of the Workers’ Popular Socialist Party, he claimed—perhaps to protect other supporters of the Party—that, “as a matter of principle,” he was not currently a member of any party. Kannegiser said that he had carried out the assassination entirely on his own to avenge those shot on Uritsky’s orders as “enemies of Soviet power.” According to his father, one of those shot had been a friend of Kannegiser. The family maid, Ilinaya, claimed that Kannegiser “was linked with some suspicious people who often came to see him, and that he himself would disappear from his house at night, returning only during the day.” Rozenberg, another witness interrogated by the Cheka, claimed that Kannegiser had told him of his plan to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. Mitrokhin noted, after reading the Cheka interrogation records, that the conflicts in evidence had not been resolved. vol. 10, ch. 4.

14. The record of Kaplan’s interrogation was published in 1923; Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p. 807.

15. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 75-81.

16. Pipes (ed.), The Unknown Lenin, pp. 48, 54.

17. Though the KGB files examined by Mitrokhin do not record Filippov’s fate after his arrest by the Petrograd Cheka, he was never heard of again. k-9,67,204.

18. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 237.

19. Leggett, The Cheka, p. 417 n. 21. Conquest, The Great Terror, pp. 325-7.

20. vol. 7, ch. 1, para. 5. Buikis subsequently wrote two brief memoirs of his early experiences in the Cheka in Rozvadovskaya et al. (eds.), Rytsar Revoliutsii, and Lyalin et al. (eds.), Osoboie Zadanie.

21. See, for example, Ostryakov, Voyennye Chekisty, ch. 1.

22. For the text of the official document certifying Ulyanov’s “rights to hereditary nobility” (suppressed during the Soviet era), see Pipes (ed.), The Unknown Lenin, p. 19.

23. Pipes (ed.), The Unknown Lenin, pp. 3-5, 138-9.

24. Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 11-12.

25. vol. 1, app. 3. Cf. Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 12-14.