- Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin.
The Sword and the Shield.
New York: Basic Books, 1999.
ISBN 978-0-465-00312-9.
-
Vasili Mitrokhin joined the Soviet intelligence service as a
foreign intelligence officer in 1948, at a time when the MGB
(later to become the KGB) and the GRU were unified into a single
service called the Committee of Information. By the time he was
sent to his first posting abroad in 1952, the two services had
split and Mitrokhin stayed with the MGB. Mitrokhin's career
began in the paranoia of the final days of Stalin's regime, when
foreign intelligence officers were sent on wild goose chases
hunting down imagined Trotskyist and Zionist conspirators
plotting against the regime. He later survived the turbulence
after the death of Stalin and the execution of MGB head Lavrenti
Beria, and the consolidation of power under his successors.
During the Khrushchev years, Mitrokhin became disenchanted
with the regime, considering Khrushchev an uncultured
barbarian whose banning of avant garde writers betrayed
the tradition of Russian literature. He began to entertain
dissident thoughts, not hoping for an overthrow of the Soviet
regime but rather its reform by a new generation of leaders
untainted by the legacy of Stalin. These thoughts were
reinforced by the crushing of the reform-minded regime
in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and his own observation of how
his service, now called the KGB, manipulated the Soviet
justice system to suppress dissent within the Soviet
Union. He began to covertly listen to Western broadcasts
and read samizdat publications by Soviet dissidents.
In 1972, the First Chief Directorate (FCD: foreign intelligence)
moved from the cramped KGB headquarters in the Lubyanka
in central Moscow to a new building near the ring road.
Mitrokhin had sole responsibility for checking, inventorying,
and transferring the entire archives, around 300,000 documents,
of the FCD for transfer to the new building. These files
documented the operations of the KGB and its predecessors
dating back to 1918, and included the most secret records,
those of Directorate S, which ran “illegals”:
secret agents operating abroad under false identities.
Probably no other individual ever read as many
of the KGB's most secret archives as Mitrokhin. Appalled
by much of the material he reviewed, he covertly began to
make his own notes of the details. He started by committing
key items to memory and then transcribing them every evening
at home, but later made covert notes on scraps of paper
which he smuggled out of KGB offices in his shoes.
Each week-end he would take the notes to his dacha outside
Moscow, type them up, and hide them in a series of locations
which became increasingly elaborate as their volume grew.
Mitrokhin would continue to review, make notes, and add them
to his hidden archive for the next twelve years until his
retirement from the KGB in 1984. After Mikhail Gorbachev
became party leader in 1985 and called for more openness
(glasnost), Mitrokhin,
shaken by what he had seen in the files regarding Soviet
actions in Afghanistan, began to think of ways he might
spirit his files out of the Soviet Union and publish
them in the West.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mitrokhin tested the new
freedom of movement by visiting the capital of one of the
now-independent Baltic states, carrying a sample of the material
from his archive concealed in his luggage. He crossed the
border with no problems and walked in to the British embassy to
make a deal. After several more trips, interviews with British
Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officers, and providing more
sample material, the British agreed to arrange the exfiltration
of Mitrokhin, his entire family, and the entire
archive—six cases of notes. He was debriefed at a series
of safe houses in Britain and began several years of work typing
handwritten notes, arranging the documents, and answering
questions from the SIS, all in complete secrecy. In 1995, he
arranged a meeting with Christopher Andrew, co-author of the
present book, to prepare a history of KGB foreign intelligence
as documented in the archive.
Mitrokhin's exfiltration (I'm not sure one can call it a
“defection”, since the country whose information he
disclosed ceased to exist before he contacted the British) and
delivery of the archive is one of the most stunning intelligence
coups of all time, and the material he delivered will be an
essential primary source for historians of the twentieth
century. This is not just a whistle-blower disclosing
operations of limited scope over a short period of time, but an
authoritative summary of the entire history of the foreign
intelligence and covert operations of the Soviet Union from its
inception until the time it began to unravel in the mid-1980s.
Mitrokhin's documents name names; identify agents, both
Soviet and recruits in other countries, by codename; describe
secret operations, including assassinations, subversion,
“influence operations” planting propaganda in
adversary media and corrupting journalists and politicians,
providing weapons to insurgents, hiding caches of weapons and
demolition materials in Western countries to support special
forces in case of war; and trace the internal politics and conflicts
within the KGB and its predecessors and with the Party and
rivals, particularly military intelligence (the GRU).
Any doubts about the degree of penetration of Western
governments by Soviet intelligence agents are laid to rest by
the exhaustive documentation here. During the 1930s and
throughout World War II, the Soviet Union had highly-placed
agents throughout the British and American governments, military,
diplomatic and intelligence communities, and science and
technology projects. At the same time, these supposed allies had
essentially zero visibility into the Soviet Union: neither
the American OSS nor the British SIS had a single agent in
Moscow.
And yet, despite success in infiltrating other countries
and recruiting agents within them (particularly prior to
the end of World War II, when many agents, such as the
“Magnificent
Five” [Donald Maclean, Kim Philby,
John Cairncross, Guy Burgess, and Anthony Blunt] in
Britain, were motivated by idealistic admiration for the
Soviet project, as opposed to later, when sources tended
to be in it for the money), exploitation of this vast
trove of purloined secret information was uneven and
often ineffective. Although it reached its apogee during
the Stalin years, paranoia and intrigue are as Russian as borscht,
and compromised the interpretation and use of intelligence
throughout the history of the Soviet Union. Despite having
loyal spies in high places in governments around the world,
whenever an agent provided information which seemed “too
good” or conflicted with the preconceived notions of
KGB senior officials or Party leaders, it was likely to be
dismissed as disinformation, often suspected to have been planted
by British counterintelligence, to which the Soviets
attributed almost supernatural powers, or that their agents had
been turned and were feeding false information to the Centre.
This was particularly evident during the period prior to the
Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. KGB archives record
more than a hundred warnings of preparations for the attack having
been forwarded to Stalin between January and June 1941, all
of which were dismissed as disinformation or erroneous due to
Stalin's idée fixe that
Germany would not attack because it was too dependent on raw
materials supplied by the Soviet Union and would not
risk a two front war while Britain remained undefeated.
Further, throughout the entire history of the Soviet Union,
the KGB was hesitant to report intelligence which
contradicted the beliefs of its masters in the Politburo
or documented the failures of their policies and initiatives.
In 1985, shortly after coming to power, Gorbachev lectured
KGB leaders “on the impermissibility of distortions of
the factual state of affairs in messages and informational
reports sent to the Central Committee of the CPSU and other
ruling bodies.”
Another manifestation of paranoia was deep suspicion of
those who had spent time in the West. This meant that often
the most effective agents who had worked undercover in the
West for many years found their reports ignored due to fears
that they had “gone native” or been doubled by
Western counterintelligence. Spending too much time on
assignment in the West was not conducive to advancement
within the KGB, which resulted in the service's senior
leadership having little direct experience with the West and
being prone to fantastic misconceptions about the institutions
and personalities of the adversary. This led to delusional
schemes such as the idea of recruiting stalwart anticommunist
senior figures such as Zbigniew Brzezinski as KGB agents.
This is a massive compilation of data: 736 pages in the
paperback edition, including almost 100 pages of
detailed end notes and source citations. I would be less
than candid if I gave the impression that this reads like
a spy thriller: it is nothing of the sort. Although such
information would have been of immense value during the
Cold War, long lists of the handlers who worked with
undercover agents in the West, recitations of codenames
for individuals, and exhaustive descriptions of now
largely forgotten episodes such as the KGB's campaign
against “Eurocommunism” in the 1970s and 1980s,
which it was feared would thwart Moscow's control over
communist parties in Western Europe, make for heavy
going for the reader.
The KGB's operations in the West were far from flawless.
For decades, the Communist Party of the United States
(CPUSA) received substantial subsidies from the KGB
despite consistently promising great breakthroughs and
delivering nothing. Between the 1950s and 1975, KGB
money was funneled to the CPUSA through two undercover
agents, brothers named Morris and Jack Childs,
delivering cash often exceeding a million dollars a
year. Both brothers were awarded the Order of the Red
Banner in 1975 for their work, with Morris receiving his
from Leonid Brezhnev in person. Unbeknownst to the KGB,
both of the Childs brothers had been working for, and
receiving salaries from, the FBI since the early 1950s,
and reporting where the money came from and went—well,
not the five percent they embezzled before passing it on.
In the 1980s, the KGB increased the CPUSA's subsidy to
two million dollars a year, despite the party's never
having more than 15,000 members (some of whom, no
doubt, were FBI agents).
A second doorstop of a book (736 pages) based upon the Mitrokhin
archive,
The World Was Going our Way,
published in 2005, details the KGB's operations in the Third
World during the Cold War. U.S. diplomats who regarded the globe
and saw communist subversion almost everywhere were accurately
reporting the situation on the ground, as the KGB's own files
reveal.
The Kindle edition is free for Kindle
Unlimited subscribers.
December 2019 