The Sword and the Shield - The Mitrokhin Archive PDF

 Table of Contents BY CHRISTOPHER ANDREW Title Page Dedication ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS THE EVOLUTION OF THE KGB, 1917-1991 THE TRANSLITERATION OF RUSSIAN NAMES Foreword Introduction ONE - THE MITROKHIN ARCHIVE TWO - FROM LENIN’S CHEKA TO STALIN’S O GPU THREE - THE GREAT ILLEGALS...

 Table of Contents BY CHRISTOPHER ANDREW Title Page Dedication ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS THE EVOLUTION OF THE KGB, 1917-1991 THE TRANSLITERATION OF RUSSIAN NAMES Foreword Introduction ONE - THE MITROKHIN ARCHIVE TWO - FROM LENIN’S CHEKA TO STALIN’S O GPU THREE - THE GREAT ILLEGALS FOUR - THE MAGNIFICENT FIVE FIVE - TERROR SIX - WAR SEVEN - THE GRAND ALLIANCE EIGHT - VICTORY NINE - FROM WAR TO COLD WAR TEN - THE MAIN ADVERSARY ELEVEN - THE MAIN ADVERSARY APPENDIX - SOME FAVORITE KGB YAVKAS (MEETING PLACES) IN THE 1960’S TWELVE - THE MAIN ADVERSARY THIRTEEN - THE MAIN ADVERSARY FOURTEEN - POLITICAL WARFARE FIFTEEN - PROGRESS OPERATIONS SIXTEEN - PROGRESS OPERATIONS SEVENTEEN - THE KGB AND WESTERN COMMUNIST PARTIES EIGHTEEN - EUROCOMMUNISM NINETEEN - IDEOLOGICAL SUBVERSION TWENTY - IDEOLOGICAL SUBVERSION  APPENDIX - THE INTERROGATION OF YURI ORLOV ON DECEMBER 29, 1977 TWENTY-ONE - SIGINT IN THE COLD WAR TWENTY - TWO - SPECIAL TASKS APPENDIX 1 - INSTRUCTIONS FOR DISARMING THE MOLNIYA [“LIGHTNING”) EXPLOSIVE DEVICE APPENDIX 2 - EXAMPLE OF BOOBY- TRAPPED RADIO CACHE PUT IN PLACE BY THE BERNE RESIDENCY APPENDIX 3 - EXAMPLES OF RADIO CACHES PUT IN PLACE BY THE ROME RESIDENCY TWENTY - THREE - SPECIAL TASKS APPENDIX - “SPECIAL POLITICAL ACTION” PROPOSED BY THE ATHENS RESIDENCY TO THE... TWENTY - FOUR - COLD WAR OPERATIONS AGAINST BRITAIN TWENTY - FIVE - COLD WAR OPERATIONS AGAINST BRITAIN TWENTY - SIX - THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY TWENTY - SEVEN - FRANCE AND ITALY DURING THE COLD WAR TWENTY - EIGHT - THE PENETRATION AND PERSECUTION OF THE SOVIET CHURCHES TWENTY - NINE - THE POLISH POPE AND THE RISE OF SOLIDARITY THIRTY - THE POLISH CRISIS AND THE CRUMBLING OF THE SOVIET BLOC CONCLUSION: FROM THE ONE-PARTY STATE APPENDIX A - KGB CHAIRMEN, 1917-91 APPENDIX B - HEADS OF FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE, 1920-99 APPENDIX C - THE ORGANIZATION OF THE KGB APPENDIX D - THE ORGANIZATION OF THE KGB FIRST CHIEF DIRECTORATE (FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE) APPENDIX E - THE ORGANIZATION OF A KGB RESIDENCY NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX Copyright Page  BY CHRISTOPHER ANDREW THÉOPHILE DELCASSÉ AND THE MAKING OF THE ENTENTE CORDIALE THE FIRST WORLD WAR: CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES (VOLUME 19 OF THE HAMLYN HISTORY OF THE WORLD) FRANCE OVERSEAS: THE GREAT WAR AND THE CLIMAX OF FRENCH IMPERIAL EXPANSION (WITH A.S. KANYA-FORSTNER) THE MISSING DIMENSION: GOVERNMENTS AND INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITIES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (WITH DAVID DILKS) HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE: THE MAKING OF THE BRITISH INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY CODEBREAKING AND SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE INTELLIGENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, 1900-1945 (WITH JEREMY NOAKES} KGB: THE INSIDE STORY OF ITS FOREIGN OPERATIONS FROM LENIN TO GORBACHEV (WITH OLEG GORDIEVSKY) INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE CENTRE: TOP SECRET FILES ON KGB FOREIGN OPERATIONS, 1975-1985 (PUBLISHED IN THE USA AS: COMRADE KRYUCHKOV’S INSTRUCTIONS) (WITH OLEG GORDIEVSKY) MORE ‘INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE CENTRE’: TOP SECRET FILES ON KGB GLOBAL OPERATIONS, 1975-1985 (WITH OLEG GORDIEVSKY) FOR THE PRESIDENT’S EYES ONLY: SECRET INTELLIGENCE AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY FROM WASHINGTON TO BUSH ETERNAL VIGILANCE? FIFTY YEARS OF THE CIA (WITH RHODRI JEFFREYS-JONES) IN MEMORY OF “MA”  ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS Armed Forces Security [SIGINT] Agency AFSA [USA] AKEL Cyprus Communist Party American-Soviet Trading Corporation, New Amtorg York ASA Army Security [SIGINT] Agency [USA] AVH Hungarian security and intelligence agency AVO predecessor of AVH BfV FRG security service BND FRG foreign intelligence agency CDU Christian Democratic Union [FRG] All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Cheka Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage: predecessor KGB (1917-22) CIA Central Intelligence Agency [USA] COCOM Coordinating Committee for East-West Trade Comecon [Soviet Bloc] Council for Mutual Economic Aid Comintern Communist International CPC Christian Peace Conference CPC Communist Party of Canada CPCz Communist Party of Czechoslovakia CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union Communist Party of the United States of CPUSA America CSU Christian Social Union [FRG: ally of CDU] DCI Director of Central Intelligence [USA] DGS Portuguese security service DGSE French foreign intelligence service DIA Defense Intelligence Agency [USA] DLB dead letter-box DRG Soviet sabotage and intelligence group DS Bulgarian security and intelligence service DST French security service “Special Actions” department in KGB F Line residencies FAPSI Russian (post-Soviet) SIGINT agency FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation [USA] First Chief [Foreign Intelligence] Directorate, FCD KGB FCO Foreign and Commonwealth Office [UK] FRG Federal Republic of Germany Government Communications Head-Quarters GCHQ [British SIGINT Agency] GDR German Democratic Republic Soviet security and intelligence service GPU (within NKVD, 1922-3) GRU Soviet Military Intelligence Soviet security and intelligence service GUGB (within NKVD, 1943-43) Gulag Labour Camps Directorate HUMINT intelligence from human sources (espionage) HVA GDR foreign intelligence service ICBM intercontinental ballistic missile IMINT imagery intelligence foreign intelligence department of INO Cheka/GPU/OGPU/ GUGB, 1920-1941; predecessor of INU foreign intelligence directorate of INU NKGB/GUGB/MGB, 1941-54; predecessor of FCD IRA Irish Republican Army JIC Joint Intelligence Committee [UK] club of former political prisoners jailed under K-231 Article 231 of the Czechoslovak criminal code KAN Club of Non-Party Activists [Czechoslovakia] Soviet security and intelligence service (1954- KGB 1991) KHAD Afghan security service Soviet foreign intelligence agency, initially KI combining foreign intelligence directorates of MGB and GRU (1947-51) KKE Greek Communist Party breakaway Eurocommunist Greek Communist KKE-es Party KOR Workers Defence Committee [Poland] KPÖ Austrian Communist Party Counter-intelligence department in KGB KR Line residencies LLB live letter box MGB Soviet Ministry of State Security (1946-54) Moscow State Institute for International MGIMO Relations MI5 British security service MI6 alternative designation for SIS [UK] Monarchist Association of Central Russia MOR (“The Trust”) Illegal support department in KGB N Line residencies NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization People’s Commisariat for State Security NKGB (Soviet security and intelligence service, 1941 and 1943-6) People’s Commisariat for Internal Affairs NKVD (incorporated state security, 1922-3, 1934-43) NSA National Security [SIGINT] Agency [USA] NSC National Security Council [USA] People’s [anti-Bolshevik] Union for Defence NSZRiS of Country and Freedom National Labour Alliance (Soviet émigré NTS social-democratic movement) Okhrana Tsarist security service, 1881-1917 OMS Comintern International Liaison Department OSS Office of Strategic Services [USA] OT Operational Technical Support (FCD) OUN Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists OZNA Yugoslav security and intelligence service PCF French Communist Party PCI Italian Communist Party PCP Portuguese Communist Party PFLP Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine PIDE Portuguese Liberation Organization PLO Palestine Liberation Organization Workers Unification Party (Spanish Marxist POUM Trotskyist Party in 1930s) political intelligence department in KGB PR Line residences PSOE Spanish Socialist Party PUWP Polish United Workers [Communist] Party RCMP Royal Canadian Mounted Police ROVS [White] Russian Combined Services Union Raketno-Yadernoye Napadenie (Nuclear RYAN Missile Attack) SALT Strategic Arms Limitation Talks SAM Soviet surface-to-air missile SB Polish Security and intelligence service Second Chief [Internal Security and Counter- SCD Intelligence] Directorate, KGB French foreign intelligence service; SDECE predecessor of DGSE SDI Strategic Defense Initiative (‘Star Wars’) SED Socialist Unity [Communist] Party [GDR] intelligence derived from interception and SIGINT analysis of signals SIS Secret Intelligence Service [UK] SK Line Soviet colony department in KGB residencies SKP Communist Party of Finland SOE Special Operations Executive [UK] SPD Social Democratic Party [FRG] Spetsnaz Soviet special forces SR Socialist Revolutionary S&T scientific and technological intelligence Stapo Austrian police security service Stasi GDR Ministry of State Security Stavka Wartime Soviet GHQ/high command Czechoslovak security and intelligence StB service Russian (post-Soviet) foreign intelligence SVR service TUC Trades Union Congress [UK] UAR United Arab Republic Polish security and intelligence service; UB predecessor of SB Yugoslav security and intelligence service; UDBA successor to OZNA VPK Soviet Military Industrial Commission Supreme Military Council [anti-Bolshevik VVR Ukranian underground] WCC World Council of Churches WPC World Peace Council X Line S&T department in KGB residencies THE EVOLUTION OF THE KGB, 1917- 1991 The term KGB is used both generally to denote the Soviet State Security organisation throughout its history since its foundation as the Cheka in 1917 and, more specifically, to refer to State Security after 1954 when it took its final name.  THE TRANSLITERATION OF RUSSIAN NAMES We have followed a simplified version of the method used by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and BBC Monitering Service. Simplifications include the substitution of “y” for “iy” in surnames (Trotsky rather than Trotskiy) and of “i” for “iy” in first names (Yuri rather than Yuriy). The “y” between the letters “i” and/or “e” is omitted (for example, Andreev and Dmitrievich— not Andreyev and Dmitriyevich), as is the apostrophe used to signify a soft sign. In cases where a mildly deviant English version of a well-known Russian name has become firmly established, we have retained that version, for example: Beria, Evdokia (Petrova), Izvestia, Joseph (Stalin), Khrushchev, Nureyev and the names of Tsars.  FOREWORD I have written this book in consultation with Vasili Mitrokhin, based on the extensive top secret material (described in Chapter 1) which he has smuggled out from the KGB foreign intelligence archive. For the past quarter of a century, Mitrokhin has passionately wanted this material, which for twelve years he risked his life to assemble, to see the light of day. He wished to reveal “how thin the thread of peace actually was during the Cold War.” From that passion this book has been born. I have felt it my duty to ensure that this material, which offers detailed and often unique insights into the workings of the Soviet State and the history of the Soviet Union, achieves the level of public awareness and recognition that it deserves. Like all archives, those of the KGB require interpretation in the light of previous research and related documents. The end notes and bibliography provide full details of the additional sources used to place Mitrokhin’s revelations in historical context. These sources also provide overwhelming corroborative evidence for his genuineness as a source. Codenames (also known as “worknames” in the case of KGB officers) appear in the text in capitals. Many KGB codenames were used more than once. In such cases, the text and index make clear which individual is referred to. It is also important to note that, although certain individuals were targeted by the KGB, and may have been given codenames, this does not mean that the persons named were conscious or witting agents or sources—or even that they were aware that they were being targeted for recruitment or political influence operations. Similarly, the fact that an individual may have endorsed a position that was favorable to the Soviet Union does not necessarily mean that this person was working as an agent, or agent of influence, for the KGB. The KGB frequently gave prominent policymakers codenames in order to protect the identity of their targets, and to order recruited KGB agents to target such individuals. For legal reasons, some of the Soviet agents identified in KGB files can be referred to in this book only by their codenames. In a limited number of cases, chiefly because of the risk of prejudicing a possible prosecution, no reference can be made to them at all. These omissions do not, so far as I am aware, significantly affect the main conclusions of any chapter. Christopher Andrew  INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION On October 17, 1995, I was invited to the post-modern London headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service (better known as SIS or MI6) at Vauxhall Cross on the banks of the Thames to be briefed on one of the most remarkable intelligence coups of the late twentieth century. SIS told me how in 1992 it had exfiltrated from Russia a retired senior KGB archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin, his family and six large cases of top-secret material from the KGB’s foreign intelligence archive. Mitrokhin’s staggering feat in noting KGB files almost every working day for a period of twelve years and smuggling his notes out of its foreign intelligence headquarters at enormous personal risk is probably unique in intelligence history. When I first saw Mitrokhin’s archive a few weeks after the briefing, both its scope and secrecy took my breath away. It contained important new material on KGB operations around the world. The only European countries absent from the archive were the pocket states of Andorra, Monaco and Liechtenstein. (There was, however, some interesting material on San Marino.) It was clear that Mitrokhin had had access to even the most highly classified KGB files – among them those which gave the real identities and “legends” of the Soviet “illegals” living under deep cover abroad disguised as foreign nationals.1 Soon after my first examination of the archive, I met Vasili Mitrokhin over tea in a conference room at SIS headquarters and discussed collaborating with him in a history based on his material. Mitrokhin said little about himself. Indeed it later required some persuasion to convince him that it was worth including his own story at the beginning of our book. But Mitrokhin was passionate about his archive and anxious that as much of it as possible be used to expose the record of the KGB. Early in 1996 Mitrokhin and his family paid their first visit to Cambridge University, where I am Professor of Modern and Contemporary History. I met them outside the Porters’ Lodge at Corpus Christi College, of which I’m a Fellow, and we had lunch together in a private room overlooking the medieval Old Court (the oldest complete court in Cambridge). After lunch we went to the College Hall to look at what is believed to be the only surviving portrait of the College’s first spy and greatest writer – the Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe, who had been killed in a pub brawl in 1593 at the age of only twenty-nine, probably while working for the secret service of Queen Elizabeth I. Then we walked along the Backs through King’s and Clare colleges to visit Trinity and Trinity Hall, the colleges of the KGB’s best-known British recruits, the “Magnificent Five,” some of whose files Mitrokhin had noted.2 Mitrokhin had long ago mastered the art of being inconspicuous. The friends and colleagues whom we met as we walked round Cambridge did not give him a second glance. In March 1996 the then Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, gave approval in principle (later confirmed by his successor, Robin Cook) for me to write a book based on Mitrokhin’s extraordinary archive.3 For the next three and a half years, because the archive was still classified, I was able to discuss none of it with colleagues in Corpus Christi College and the Cambridge History Faculty-or even to reveal the nature of the book that I was writing. In Britain at least, the secret of the Mitrokhin archive was remarkably well kept. Until The Mitrokhin Archive went to the publishers, who also successfully avoided leaks, the secret was known, outside the intelligence community, only to a small number of senior ministers and civil servants. Tony Blair was first briefed on Mitrokhin while Leader of the Opposition in January 1995. Three years later, as Prime Minister, he endorsed the publication project.4 The secret of the Mitrokhin archive was less rigorously preserved by some of Britain’s allies. But though there were a few partial leaks by foreign governments and intelligence agencies which had been given access to parts of the archive, none had much resonance in Britain. In December 1998, I received out of the blue a phone call from a German journalist who had discovered both the codename by which Mitrokhin was known in Germany and the contents of some fragments of Mitrokhin’s German material. He told me he knew I was completing a first volume based on the Mitrokhin archive and had already planned a second. For the next few months I expected the story to break in the British press. Somewhat to my surprise, it did not do so. On Saturday, September 11, 1999, after three and a half years of secrecy and silence, The Mitrokhin Archive suddenly became front-page news when serialization began in The Times. Between Friday night and Saturday morning I moved from a long period in which I had not talked at all about The Mitrokhin Archive in public to a month in which I seemed to talk about little else. Unsurprisingly, the revelations which captured media attention were human-interest stories about Soviet spies in Britain rather than the more important but less parochial disclosures about KGB operations against NATO as a whole and against democratic dissent within the Soviet Bloc. Hitherto the media stereotype of a major Soviet spy in Britain, modeled on Kim Philby and his friends, had been of a bright but subversive Cambridge graduate, preferably from a good public school and with an exotic sex life. In September 1999 the stereotype changed almost overnight with Mitrokhin’s unmasking of Melita Norwood, an 87-year-old great-grandmother from Bexleyheath memorably described by The Times as “The Spy Who Came In from the Co-op” (where, for ideological reasons, she does most of her shopping), as the longest-serving of all Soviet spies in Britain. A Times reporter was with Mrs. Norwood early on the morning of September 11 as she listened to John Humphrys on the Today program first recount some of the contents of her KGB file noted by Mitrokhin, then interview myself and Ann Widdecombe. “Oh dear!” she told the Times reporter. “This is all so different from my quiet little life. I thought I’d got away with it. But I’m not that surprised it’s finally come out.” Within a few hours, a media scrum had gathered expectantly outside Mrs. Norwood’s end-of-terrace house, interviewing friends and neighbours about how she drank tea from a Che Guevara mug, put “Stop Trident” posters in her window, sold home-made chutney in aid of Cuban support groups, and delivered more than thirty copies of the Morning Star every Saturday morning to veterans of the Bexleyheath Old Left. Mrs. Norwood behaved with extraordinary composure when she emerged later in the day to face the media for the first time in her life. The image of the greatgranny spy walking down her garden path between well-tended rose bushes to make a confession of sorts to a large crowd of reporters caught the imagination of millions of television viewers and newspaper-readers. “I’m 87 and unfortunately my memory is not what it was,” Mrs. Norwood began. “I did what I did not to make money but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, given them education and a health service.” As well as being a media sensation, Mrs. Norwood’s guarded public confession was a remarkable historical document. What had captured her imagination before the Second World War, like that of most other Soviet agents of the time, was not the brutal reality of Stalin’s Russia but the idealistic myth-image of the world’s first worker- peasant state which had abolished unemployment and for the first time enabled working people to realize their full potential – the “new system” nostalgically recalled by Mrs. Norwood when she spoke to reporters. In the mid 1930s that myth-image was so powerful that, for true believers who, unlike Melita Sirnis (as she then was), were able to go on pilgrimage to the Soviet Union, it survived even the contrary evidence of their own eyes. Malcolm Muggeridge, probably the best of the British journalists then in Moscow, later wrote of the British pilgrims he encountered: Their delight in all they saw and were told, and the expression they gave to that delight, constitute unquestionably one of the wonders of our age. There were earnest advocates of the humane killing of cattle who looked up at the massive headquarters of the OGPU [later the KGB] with tears of gratitude in their eyes, earnest advocates of proportional representation who eagerly assented when the necessity for a Dictatorship of the Proletariat was  explained to them, earnest clergymen who reverently turned the pages of atheistic literature, earnest pacifists who watched delightedly tanks rattle across Red Square and bombing planes darken the sky, earnest town-planning specialists who stood outside overcrowded ramshackle tenements and muttered: “If only we had something like this in England!” The almost unbelievable credulity of these mostly university educated tourists astounded even Soviet officials used to handling foreign visitors...5 When Melita Sirnis became a Soviet agent in 1937, the Soviet Union was in the midst of the Great Terror – the greatest peacetime persecution in modern European history.6 Mrs. Norwood, however, still does not seem to grasp the depravity of the Stalinist regime into whose service she entered. “Old Joe [Stalin],” she acknowledges, “wasn’t a hundred percent, but then the people around him might have been making things awkward, as folks do.” At the end of her press statement, she was asked if she had any regrets about her career as a Soviet agent. “No,” she replied, then went back inside her house. In another interview she declared, “I would do everything again.”7 Another former Soviet spy identified in The Mitrokhin Archive who made front-page news in Britain was ex- Detective Sergeant John Symonds. Like Norwood, Symonds gave a number of interviews. Symonds confessed to being, as Mitrokhin’s notes reveal, probably the first British “Romeo spy” recruited by the KGB. He said that he had admitted as much almost twenty years earlier to MI5 and Scotland Yard but had been disbelieved. Though Mitrokhin’s notes give no statistics of the number of women seduced by Symonds during his career as a KGB illegal, Symonds claims that there were “hundreds” of them. Initially the KGB decided that his sexual technique was deficient and, to his delight, sent “two extremely beautiful girls” to act as his instructors. Symonds’s recollection of his subsequent career as a Romeo spy is rather rosier than suggested by his KGB file: I just had a nice life. I’d say join the KGB, see the world – first class. I went all over the world on these jobs and I had a marvellous time. I stayed in the best hotels, I visited all the best beaches. I’ve had access to beautiful women, unlimited food, champagne, caviar, whatever you like, and I had a wonderful time. That was my KGB experience. “The only people I hurt,” Symonds now claims, “was the Metropolitan Police.”8 Many of the women he seduced on KGB instructions would doubtless disagree. Media reaction to Mitrokhin’s revelations was as parochial in most other countries as it was in Britain. The public appeal of the Russian agents identified by Mitrokhin is curiously similar to that of Olympic medal- winners. In espionage as in athletics, most of the world’s media are interested first and foremost in the exploits of their own nationals. The human-interest stories which aroused most interest in the United States were probably the KGB “active measures” designed to discredit the long-serving Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, and the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King. The KGB was among the first to spread stories that Hoover was a predatory homosexual. King, whom the KGB feared might avert the race war it hoped would be ignited by the long hot summers which began in 1965, was probably the only American to be the target of both KGB and FBI active measures. The topic in The Mitrokhin Archive (published in the USA as The Sword and the Shield) which attracted most attention in Congress concerned KGB preparations for sabotage operations against American targets during the Cold War. On October 26, 1999, I gave televised testimony on these preparations to a packed hearing of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. Mitrokhin’s material identifies the approximate locations of a number of the secret sites in the United States selected for KGB arms and radio caches for use in sabotage operations. On present evidence, it is impossible to estimate the number of these caches which were put in place. However, the former KGB general Oleg Kalugin, who was stationed in New York and Washington during the 1960s and early 1970s, has confirmed the existence of some KGB arms caches in the United States.9 As in Europe, some caches were probably booby-trapped and may now be in a dangerous condition. For reasons of public safety, The Mitrokhin Archive gave no clues to the location of any of the American sites selected for KGB arms caches. ABC TV News, however, revealed that one of the sites is located in the region of Brainerd, Minnesota.10 Later press reports, citing “congressional sources,” claimed that the FBI had carried out a search of the Brainerd area.11 In western Europe, The Mitrokhin Archive generated more front-page stories in Italy than it did even in Britain – though almost all the stories, unsurprisingly, were on Italian topics. In October 1999 an Italian parliamentary committee released 645 pages of reports (codenamed IMPEDIAN) on the Italians mentioned in the Mitrokhin archive which had been supplied several years earlier by SIS to Italian intelligence. Most KGB contacts were identified in the reports by name as well as codename. The Italian Foreign Ministry was said to be investigating the cases of thirty employees referred to in Mitrokhin’s notes. Much of the furore aroused by The Mitrokhin Archive in Italy, however, consisted of a revival of Cold War points-scoring which produced more political heat than historical light. Opponents of the government headed by the former Communist Massimo D’Alema seized on the references to Armando Cossutta, leader of the Communist PDCI which was represented in D’Alema’s coalition government. The Left retaliated by pointing to the identification in an IMPEDIAN report of a senator of the right-wing Forza Italia. The debate became further confused by conspiracy theorists on both right and left. A cartoon in La Repubblica, which D’Alema denounced as libellous, showed him blanking out a series of (presumably left-wing) names from the IMPEDIAN reports before their release. L’Unità, by contrast, claimed that left-wing ministers were increasingly convinced that the reports were the result of a plot by MI5 (which it apparently confused with SIS): “What has arrived is not a dossier from the KGB but one about the KGB constructed by British counter-espionage agents based on the confession of an ex-agent, if there is one, and ‘Mitrokhin’ is just a codename for an MI5 operation.”12 The political controversy provoked in Britain by the publication of The Mitrokhin Archive centred chiefly on the behaviour of ministers and the intelligence community. Why, it was asked, had Melita Norwood not been prosecuted when her treachery had been known at least since Mitrokhin’s defection in 1992? And why had ministers not been better briefed about her and other traitors identified in the Mitrokhin archive by the intelligence and security agencies? It emerged, to my surprise, that I had known about the Norwood case for considerably longer than either the Home Secretary or the Prime Minister. Jack Straw was informed in December 1998 that Mitrokhin’s information might lead to the prosecution of “an 86-year-old woman who spied for the KGB forty years ago,” but was not told her identity until some months later. Tony Blair was not briefed about Mrs. Norwood until shortly before her name appeared on the front page of The Times.13 The failure to prosecute Mrs. Norwood combined with the delays in briefing ministers aroused deep suspicion in some of the media. The Express denounced “an appalling culture of cover-ups and incompetence in Britain’s secret services.” The Guardian suspected an MI5 plot: We need to know whether Melita Norwood made a deal with the security services. Remember Blunt.14 Was the decision not to prosecute her based on compassion, or a desire to cover up security service incompetence? Less than a decade earlier there would have been no mechanism for investigating these charges capable of inspiring public and parliamentary confidence. Until 1992 successive British governments refused even to admit SIS’s existence on the extraordinary, though traditional, grounds that such an admission would put national security at risk. Had SIS still been officially taboo seven years later, no official inquiry could possibly have produced a credible public report on the handling of the Mitrokhin archive. In 1999, however, there was an obvious body to conduct an inquiry: the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), established under the Intelligence Services Act of 1994 to examine “the expenditure, administration and policy” of the intelligence and security agencies. Since it began work in 1994, the ISC has been a largely unsung success story.15 Though not technically a parliamentary committee, since it reports to Parliament only through the Prime Minister, eight of its nine members are MPs. (The ninth is a member of the House of Lords.) Under the chairmanship of the former Conservative Defense Secretary, Tom King, its membership spans the political spectrum. Its founder members included Dale Campbell-Savours, previously a leading Labour critic of the intelligence community, who still serves on it. Largely because its members have failed either to divide on party lines and fall out among themselves or to find evidence of major intelligence abuses, the ISC has attracted relatively little media attention. Its generally positive reports on the performance of the intelligence community, however, have inevitably been dismissed by some conspiracy theorists as evidence of a cover-up. On Monday, September 13, 1999, only two days after The Times had begun serialization of The Mitrokhin Archive, Jack Straw announced in a statement to the Commons that the ISC had been asked to conduct an inquiry into “the policies and procedures adopted within the Security and Intelligence Agencies for the handling of the information supplied by Mr Mitrokhin.” Over the next nine months the ISC heard evidence from Jack Straw, Robin Cook and four former Conservative ministers, from the heads and other senior officers of MI5 and SIS, from the previous head of MI5, and from the Cabinet Secretary, Permanent Under Secretaries at the Home and Foreign Offices and other officials. Among the final witnesses were Mitrokhin and myself, who gave evidence to the ISC in the Cabinet Office at 70 Whitehall one after the other on the morning of March 8, 2000. While writing The Mitrokhin Archive, I had wrongly assumed that the Committee had been informed about the project. Some of the confusion which followed publication might well have been avoided if the ISC had been properly briefed well beforehand. The ISC report in June 2000 identified a series of administrative errors which, as usual in Whitehall, had more to do with cock-up than with conspiracy. The first “serious failure” identified by the ISC was the failure of the Security Service to refer the case of Mrs. Norwood to the Law Officers in 1993: This failure... resulted in the decision whether or not to prosecute Mrs. Norwood effectively being taken by the Security Service. The Committee is concerned that the Service used public interest  reasons to justify taking no further action against Mrs. Norwood, when this was for the Law Officers to decide. We also believe that the failure of the Security Service to interview Mrs. Norwood at this time prevented her possible prosecution. For the next five years, owing to “a further serious failure by the Security Service,” the Norwood case “slipped out of sight.”16 MI5 may not deserve a great deal of sympathy for its oversight, but it does deserve some. The first priority of any security service are actual, followed by potential, threats. Among the mass of material provided by Mitrokhin in 1992, the case of the eighty-year-old Mrs. Norwood, who had last been in contact with the KGB over a decade earlier and no longer posed any conceivable danger to national security, must have seemed a very low priority – particularly given the strain on MI5’s resources caused by cutbacks at the end of the Cold War and the threat from Irish terrorist groups. Arguably, however, MI5 underestimated Mrs. Norwood’s past importance. In evidence to the ISC, the Security Service concluded that her “value as an atom spy to the scientists who constructed the Soviet bomb must have been, at most, marginal.”17 That was not the view of the NKGB (as the KGB was then known) in the final months of the Second World War. In March 1945 it described the atomic intelligence she had provided as “of great interest and a valuable contribution to the development of work in this field.”18 Though Mrs. Norwood was not, of course, an atom spy in the same class as Ted Hall and Klaus Fuchs, both of whom provided intelligence from inside the main nuclear laboratory at Los Alamos, the NKGB and the Soviet scientists with whom it was in close touch plainly regarded her intelligence as somewhat better than “marginal.” The intelligence she was able to provide on uranium fuel cladding and post-irradiation corrosion resistance was probably applicable to weapons development as well as to the construction of nuclear reactors.19 Until the final months of the War, the NKGB rated the atomic intelligence obtained in Britain almost as highly as that from the United States.20 As Jack Straw told the Commons when announcing the ISC inquiry, “There is no reason to doubt... that the KGB regarded Mrs. Norwood as an important spy.” Nor is there reason to doubt that she was both the KGB’s longest- serving British agent and its most important female British spy. From early in her career, the KGB had high expectations of her. It maintained contact with her in 1938-39 at a time when the shortage of foreign intelligence officers, many of whom were executed during the Terror, led it to lose touch with many other agents – including some of the Magnificent Five. Since the publication of The Mitrokhin Archive, Viktor Oshchenko, a former senior officer in the KGB scientific and technological intelligence (S&T) directorate, has kindly given me his recollections of the Norwood case. While stationed at the London residency in 1975, Oshchenko recruited Michael Smith, the KGB’s most important British S&T agent during the later Cold War.21 He remembers Mrs. Norwood’s career as a Soviet agent as “a legendary case in the annals of the KGB – an important, determined and very valuable agent,” and was deeply impressed both by her ideological commitment and by her remarkable access to her boss’s papers. Among the intelligence which Oshchenko believes Mrs. Norwood supplied were “valuable papers relating to the materials involved in missile production.”22 Details of the use made of Mrs. Norwood’s intelligence within the Soviet Union, however, remain scarce. Mitrokhin’s notes from her file, though giving precise information on Mrs. Norwood’s controllers and other operational matters, give little indication of the doubtless complex intelligence she supplied in the course of her long career as a Soviet agent. It is highly unlikely that the SVR will reveal any details of this intelligence until after Mrs. Norwood’s death. As well as criticizing MI5 for allowing the Norwood case to “slip out of sight,” the ISC also considered it “a serious failure of the Security Service not to refer Mr. Symonds’ case to the Law Officers in mid-1993.” This too was plainly the result of cock-up rather than conspiracy – probably somewhere in MI5’s middle management. Even the Director-General of the Security Service from 1992 to 1996, Stella Rimington, was not informed by her staff of either the Norwood or the Symonds case, and was thus unable to brief Michael Howard, Home Secretary in the Major government, and his Permanent Under Secretary. Further confusion arose as a result of the fact that the “interdepartmental working group” in Whitehall responsible for monitoring the progress of the publication project was itself “unaware of the significance of [Mitrokhin’s] UK material until late 1998.”23 My own direct contact with the working group was limited to an enjoyable lunch with its Chairman shortly before Christmas 1998. I was asked, when giving evidence to the ISC, whether, while writing The Mitrokhin Archive, I would have liked greater contact with the group. I would indeed. The ISC’s Mitrokhin inquiry found much to praise as well as criticize: Carrying the initial contact with Mr. Mitrokhin right through to his and his family’s successful exfiltration together with all his material represents a major achievement by SIS. In addition the management of the material and its dissemination, as appropriate, to foreign liaison [intelligence] services was well handled. The Committee wish to pay tribute to this outstanding piece of intelligence work.24  I was heartened by the ISC’s endorsement of the 1996 decision to authorize me to write The Mitrokhin Archive in collaboration with Mitrokhin, as well as by the Committee’s conclusion (which I hope it is not too immodest to quote) that the book is “of tremendous value, as it gives a real insight into the KGB’s work and the persecution of the dissidents.”25 The ISC’s greatest praise was, quite rightly, reserved for Vasili Mitrokhin: The Committee believes that he is a man of remarkable commitment and courage, who risked imprisonment or death in his determination that the truth should be told about the real nature of the KGB and their activities, which he believed were betraying the interests of his own country and people. He succeeded in this, and we wish to record formally our admiration for his achievement. The ISC report regrets that “poor media handling [presumably by Whitehall] of the publication of The Mitrokhin Archive, which allowed the emphasis to fall on the UK spies, detracted from the brave work of Mr. Mitrokhin and the importance of the revelations about the KGB’s work he wanted to expose.”26 In the initial media coverage, there was little mention of the fact that vastly more of the book is devoted to the KGB’s war against the dissidents and its attempts to stifle dissent throughout the Soviet Bloc than to the careers of Melita Norwood and John Symonds. The chief problem in understanding both Mitrokhin and his archive, which was evident in much of the media coverage, is that neither is truly comprehensible in Western terms. The very notion of the hero, familiar to all other cultures and all previous Western generations, arouses greater scepticism in the early twenty-first century West than at any other time or place in recorded history. For those whose imaginations have been corroded by the cynicism of the age, the idea that Mitrokhin was willing to risk his life for twenty years for a cause in which he passionately believed is almost too difficult to grasp. Almost equally hard to comprehend is Mitrokhin’s willingness to devote himself throughout that period to compiling and preserving a secret archive which he knew might never see the light of day. For any Western author it is almost impossible to understand how a writer could devote all his or her energy and creative talent for many years to secret writing which might never be publicly revealed. Yet, as Chapter 1 seeks to show, some of the greatest Russian writers of the Soviet era did precisely that.27 No biography of any Western writer contains any death-bed scene comparable to the description by the widow of Mikhail Bulgakov of how she helped him out of bed for the last time so that he could satisfy himself before he died that his great, unpublished masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, arguably the greatest novel of the twentieth century, was still in its hiding place. The Master and Margarita survived to be published a quarter of a century later. It is a sobering thought, however, that for every forbidden masterpiece of the Soviet era which survives, there must be a larger number which have failed to survive or which, even now, are mouldering in their forgotten hiding places – as the Mitrokhin archive might well have done if Mitrokhin and SIS had not succeeded in removing it to Britain. The Mitrokhin archive is no more comprehensible in purely Western terms than Mitrokhin himself. The commonest error in interpreting the KGB is to suppose that it was roughly equivalent to its main Western rivals. There were, of course, similarities in the operational techniques employed by intelligence agencies in East and West, as well as in the importance which each side attached to the other as an intelligence target. The fundamental difference between the Soviet one-party state and the Western democracies, however, was reflected in fundamental differences between their intelligence communities. The differences were greatest in the Stalinist era. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Stalin regarded the NKVD’s pursuit in Mexico of the great, though harmless, heretic, Leon Trotsky, as a higher priority than collecting intelligence on Adolf Hitler. In the middle of the War, the paranoid strain which regularly distorted Soviet intelligence assessment persuaded Soviet intelligence chiefs – and no doubt Stalin himself – that the Magnificent Five, probably its ablest group of foreign agents, were part of a gigantic British intelligence deception. During his final years Stalin was sometimes obsessed with the hunting down of often imaginary Titoists and Zionists. His chief foreign policy objective at the end of his life may well have been the plan for an MGB (later KGB) illegal to assassinate Marshal Tito, who had succeeded Trotsky as the leading heretic of the Soviet Bloc. Stalin once called Lavrenti Beria, the most powerful of his intelligence chiefs, “my Himmler.” But there was no Western intelligence chief with whom Beria – or Himmler, the head of the SS – could be credibly compared. Even after Stalin’s death and Beria’s execution in 1953, there remained basic differences between intelligence priorities in East and West. Perhaps the simplest way of judging whether any intelligence report is of critical importance is to ask the question: If it arrives in the middle of the night would you wake the relevant government minister? The answer to that question in Moscow was often quite different from that in Western capitals. On October 27, 1978, for example, the KGB resident in Oslo, Leonid Makarov, rang Mikhail Suslov, the member of the Politburo chiefly responsible for ideological purity, in the early hours. Why? Not to tell him that some great international crisis was about to break but to report that the Russian dissident Yuri Orlov had failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The Oslo residency was warmly congratulated for its supposed “operational effectiveness” in achieving this entirely predictable result.28 It is simply not possible to imagine any Western minister being woken for any comparable reason. The KGB’s domestic obsession with the detection and suppression of “ideological subversion” spilled over into its foreign operations. It sought to impress the Party leadership by its zeal in discrediting dissidents abroad as well as at home. In the summer of 1978 the KGB First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) and Fifth (Ideological Subversion) Directorates jointly arranged the secret screening in Moscow to an audience of KGB and Party notables of the commencement address by the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard University. The purpose of this extraordinary (by Western standards) evening was to seek to demonstrate that, thanks to the efforts of the KGB, Solzhenitsyn was now a largely discredited figure in the United States.29 The KGB’s mission to discredit dissidents who had emigrated to the West extended even to dissident ballet dancers, musicians and chess players. For Western media used to interpreting the secret Cold War in terms of spy versus spy, Mitrokhin’s material on the KGB’s war against ideological subversion, unlike the revelations about individual spies, had little interest. There was, predictably, greater interest in this material in the countries of the former Soviet Bloc – reflected, for example, in the number of translations of The Mitrokhin Archive into Eastern European languages. The priority given by the KGB to maintaining the ideological orthodoxy of the Soviet Bloc was reflected by the fact that it deployed more of its elite group of illegals to Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968 than, so far as is known, were ever used in any operation against a Western target. The Cold War chapters of The Mitrokhin Archive give equal weight to KGB operations against the United States and to those against ideological subversion. Mitrokhin smuggled out of the KGB foreign intelligence headquarters important material on operations against some of the leaders of the struggle for democracy within the Soviet Bloc whose extraordinary moral courage eventually prevailed over the immense coercive force of the KGB and its allies. Two examples stand out. The first is the great Russian dissident and nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov, dubbed “Public Enemy Number One” by Yuri Andropov (successively KGB Chairman and Soviet leader), who survived persecution and internal exile by the KGB to become, in Gorbachev’s words, “unquestionably the most outstanding personality” at the 1989 Congress of People’s Soviets. One of the most striking visual images of the crumbling of the Soviet system, which deserves to be as well known as the destruction of the Berlin Wall, is of Gorbachev and other members of the Politburo standing bareheaded by Sakharov’s open coffin after his sudden death in December 1989. The second outstanding case is that of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, Archbishop of Kraków, whom the KGB seems to have identified in the early 1970s as its most dangerous opponent in the Soviet Bloc. Wojtyła, however, was protected by his moral authority and eminence. The KGB, like the Polish SB, shrank from the immense public outcry which his arrest would provoke. Seen in hindsight, Wojtyła’s election in 1978 as Pope John Paul II marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Bloc. Though the Polish problem was, with difficulty, contained for the next decade, it could not be resolved. The organization which has studied The Mitrokhin Archive with the closest attention since its publication is the SVR, which is deeply concerned by its contents. No intelligence agency can expect either to recruit new agents or to maintain the loyalty of its existing agents unless it can convince them that it can keep their secrets indefinitely. The SVR is now ill-placed to do so. Thanks to Mitrokhin, 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. Mitrokhin’s material also contains information on Cold War operations conducted by the current head of the SVR, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, and other former senior KGB officers. Volume Two will contain a chapter on KGB activities in India, where Trubnikov made his reputation. If the past secrets of the SVR leadership have proved insecure, SVR agents may well conclude that theirs are also. From the moment the Mitrokhin archive arrived in Britain, SIS realized that its contents were “of exceptional counter-intelligence significance, not only illuminating past KGB activity against Western countries but also promising to nullify many of Russia’s current assets.” The CIA similarly found the archive “the biggest CI [counter- intelligence] bonanza of the post-war period.” The FBI agreed. As the ISC report reveals, other Western intelligence agencies have also been “extremely grateful” for the numerous CI leads provided by the Mitrokhin archive.30 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.  NOTES 1 By the time I gained access to the archive, the greater part had been translated and carefully checked by SIS officers working in close collaboration with Mitrokhin. The Security Service and US intelligence officers also assisted in the translation. The translated archive was made available to me in an SIS office both in hard copy and on a computer database with sophisticated indexing and search software. While I was writing the book, Mitrokhin worked three days a week with an SIS officer completing the translation and checking process. 2 On the Magnificent Five, see below, Chapter 4. 3 Intelligence and Security Committee, The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report, Cm 4764, June 13, 2000, pp. 44-5, 47. The authorization doubtless had something to do with the fact that I had earlier written a KGB history and edited two volumes of KGB documents (listed in the Bibliography) with Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB colonel who for eleven years had been one of the most important SIS agents of the Cold War. 4 Some details of the briefing of senior ministers and civil servants are given in Intelligence and Security Committee, The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report, Annex E. 5 Hollander, Political Pilgrims, p. 102. 6 See below, Chapter 5. 7 David Rose, “‘I would do everything again,’ says the agent from suburbia,” Sunday Telegraph, September 12, 1999. While interviewing Mrs. Norwood on August 10 for a BBC2 documentary based on The Mitrokhin Archive, Rose had obtained the first confession that she had been a Soviet spy. 8 John Symonds (interviewed by David Rose), “I told you I was a spy,” Guardian (G2), September 14, 1999. Cf. below, pp. 559-63. 9 Interview with Oleg Kalugin on ABC Nightline, September 9, 1999. 10 ABC News report by John McWethy, September 9, 1999. 11 New York Post, 7 November 1999. Philadelphia Daily News, 8 November 1999. 12 For a selection of Italian newspaper articles, see: Dossier Stampa: L’Affare Mitrokhin (Rome: Camera dei Deputati, Ufficia Stampa, October 22, 1999). Some of the IMPEDIAN reports are published in the Italian edition of The Mitrokhin Archive: L’Archivio Mitrokhin (Milan: Rizzoli, 1999), Appendix F. 13 Intelligence and Security Committee, The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report, pp. 48, 52-5. 14 In 1963, after a long investigation had failed to find enough usable evidence to secure a conviction, the Soviet spy Sir Anthony Blunt had been offered immunity from prosecution in return for a full confession (not a bargain he seems to have completely honoured). It was later alleged, on no adequate evidence, that the real reason for the decision not to prosecute had been an establishment or MI5 coverup. 15 In stating this conclusion, I should perhaps declare an interest. Since the late 1970s I had argued the case for the establishment of a parliamentary intelligence committee with roughly the role of the present Intelligence and Security Committee. (See, for example, the introduction to Andrew and Dilks [eds.], Missing Dimension, and the conclusion to Andrew, Secret Service.) The proposal was initially given a frosty reception in Whitehall. 16 Intelligence and Security Committee, The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report, p. 12. 17 Intelligence and Security Committee, The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report, p. 69. 18 See below, p. 168. It is difficult to see how Mrs. Norwood could have provided atomic intelligence of such “great value” in March 1945 if, as claimed by Phillip Knightley, she did not return to work in the British Non- Ferrous Metals Research Association (BN-FMRA) after extended maternity leave until 1946 (Knightley, “Norwood: the spy who never was,” New Statesman, December 13, 1999). MI5 evidence to the ISC confirms that in 1945 Mrs. Norwood was secretary to the Chairman of the BN-FMRA (Intelligence and Security Committee, The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report, p. 67). 19 This is the view of a government scientist who prefers not to be identified. Precise details of the atomic intelligence provided by Mrs. Norwood are unavailable. Not until they have been carefully analyzed and compared with the other atomic intelligence obtained by Soviet intelligence will it be possible to form a final judgement on the importance of her role as an atom spy. Atomic intelligence provided by Mrs. Norwood after 1945 was irrelevant to the construction of the Soviet bomb which, thanks chiefly to Hall and Fuchs, was an exact replica of the American – not the British – bomb. It remained, however, of some significance. Probably the most important secret in post-war Britain – a secret so sensitive that Prime Minister Clement Attlee withheld it from most of his cabinet – concerned the construction of the British atomic bomb. Mrs. Norwood’s intelligence must have provided some insight into the highly classified progress of British atomic scientists. (See below, pp. 518-19.) 20 According to a file noted by Mitrokhin (vol. 7, ch. 2, item 19), up to November 1944 the NKGB obtained 1,167 documents on “nuclear secrets” from the USA and UK. Of these 88 from the USA and 79 from the UK were rated as “very valuable.” Mitrokhin’s notes contain no similar statistics for the period after November 1944. Further atomic intelligence was received from the GRU. 21 See below, pp. 550-53, 567-8. 22 In 1992, while head of Line X (S&T) at the Paris residency, Oshchenko defected to Britain, where he now lives. 23 Intelligence and Security Committee, The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report, pp. 13, 20, 26. 24 Intelligence and Security Committee, The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report, p. 4. 25 Intelligence and Security Committee, The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report, pp. 4, 16. The government’s response welcomed the ISC’s endorsement. 26 Intelligence and Security Committee, The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report, p. 4. 27 See below, pp. 13-14. 28 See below, pp. 429-30. 29 See below, pp. 418-19. 30 Intelligence and Security Committee, The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report, p. 4. 31 See below, p. 25. 32 The KGB had similarly sought to discredit Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story, after its publication in 1990, by claiming that its best-publicized revelation - the identification of John Cairncross as the “Fifth Man” and the first agent to provide warning of plans to build the atomic bomb – was wrong. The SVR now acknowledges that the identification was correct on both counts. 33 In devising this ill-advised active measure, Department MS may have been encouraged by the fact that two somewhat similar suggestions had surfaced independently in the Western media. A writer in Le Monde had suggested that “...The Mitrokhin archive operation was organized in Moscow either by an undisciplined Stalinist faction in the KGB or by the provisional leadership of the [intelligence] agencies between November 1991 and February 1992.” (“Voyages en mémoire soviétique,” Le Monde, November 5, 1999.) In her review of The Mitrokhin Archive in The Times Literary Supplement (November 26, 1999), Dr. Amy Knight also could not “help but wonder whether [Mitrokhin] had a little help from his former employers in making known the KGB’s archival secrets.” “This,” she added, “is by no means a farfetched suggestion.” Dr. Knight’s earlier review of my book with Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story, had included the eccentric suggestion that I might not have written the lengthy introduction (TLS, December 7, 1990). My own review of Dr. Knight’s book, Spies Without Cloaks, makes clear my respect for her research on Russian intelligence. There is, however, occasionally a mild element of conspiracy theory in her work – as evidenced, for example, by her suggestion in Spies Without Cloaks that Gorbachev was complicit in the attempted coup against him in August 1991.  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. In January 1953 the MGB was officially accused of “lack of vigilance” in hunting down the conspirators. The Soviet news agency Tass made the sensational announcement that for the past few years world Zionism and Western intelligence agencies had been conspiring with “a terrorist group” of Jewish doctors “to wipe out the leadership of the Soviet Union.” During the final two months of Stalin’s rule, the MGB struggled to demonstrate its heightened vigilance by pursuing the perpetrators of this non-existent plot. Its anti-Zionist campaign was, in reality, little more than a thinly disguised anti-Semitic pogrom. Shortly before Stalin’s sudden death in March 1953, Mitrokhin was ordered to investigate the alleged Zionist connections of the Pravda correspondent in Paris, Yuri Zhukov, who had come under suspicion because of his wife’s Jewish origins. Mitrokhin had the impression that Stalin’s brutal security supremo, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, was planning to implicate Zhukov in the supposed Jewish doctors’ plot. A few weeks after Stalin’s funeral, however, Beria suddenly announced that the plot had never existed, and exonerated the alleged conspirators. By the summer of 1953 most of Beria’s colleagues in the Presidium were united in their fear of another conspiracy—that he might be planning a coup d’état to step into Stalin’s shoes. While visiting a foreign capital in July, Mitrokhin received a top secret telegram with instructions to decipher it himself, and was astonished to discover that Beria had been charged with “criminal anti- Party and anti-state activities.” Only later did Mitrokhin learn that Beria had been arrested at a special meeting of the Presidium on June 26 after a plot organized by his chief rival, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. From his prison cell, Beria wrote begging letters to his former colleagues, pleading pathetically for them to spare his life and “find the smallest job for me”: You will see that in two or three years I’ll have straightened out fine and will still be useful to you... I ask the comrades to forgive me for writing somewhat disjointedly and badly because of my condition, and also because of the poor lighting and not having my pince-nez. No longer in awe of him, the comrades simply mocked his loss of nerve. On December 24 it was announced that Beria had been executed after trial by the Supreme Court. Since neither his responsibility for mass murder in the Stalin era nor his own record as a serial rapist of under-age girls could be publicly mentioned for fear of bringing the Communist regime into disrepute, he was declared guilty instead of a surreal plot “to revive capitalism and to restore the rule of the bourgeoisie” in association with British and other Western intelligence services. Beria thus became, following Yagoda and Yezhov in the 1930s, the third Soviet security chief to be shot for crimes which included serving as an (imaginary) British secret agent. In true Stalinist tradition, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were advised to use “a small knife or razor blade” to remove the entry on Beria, and then to insert a replacement article on the Bering Sea.4 The first official repudiation of Stalinism was Khrushchev’s now-celebrated secret speech to a closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in February 1956. Stalin’s “cult of personality,” Khrushchev declared, had been responsible for “a whole series of exceedingly serious and grave perversions of Party principles, of Party democracy, of revolutionary legality.” The speech was reported to the KGB Party organization in a secret letter from the Central Committee. The section to which Mitrokhin belonged took two days to debate its contents. He still vividly recalls the conclusion of the section’s chairman, Vladimir Vasilyevich Zhenikhov (later KGB resident in Finland): “Stalin was a bandit!” Some Party members were too shocked—or cautious—to say anything. Others agreed with Zhenikhov. None dared ask the question which Mitrokhin was convinced was in all their minds: “Where was Khrushchev while all these crimes were taking place?” In the aftermath of the secret speech Mitrokhin became too outspoken for his own good. Though his criticisms of the way the KGB had been run were mild by Western standards, late in 1956 Mitrokhin was moved from operations to the FCD archives, where his main job was answering queries from other departments and provincial KGBs.5 Mitrokhin discovered that Beria’s personal archive had been destroyed on Khrushchev’s orders so as to leave no trace of the compromising material he had collected on his former colleagues. Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov, chairman of the KGB from 1954 to 1958, dutifully reported to Khrushchev that the files had contained much “provocative and libelous” material.6 Mitrokhin was an avid reader of the Russian writers who had fallen out of favor in the final years of Stalinist rule and began to be published again during the mid- 1950s. The first great literary event in Moscow after Stalin’s death was the publication in 1954, for the first time since 1945, of new poems by Boris Pasternak, the last leading Russian author to have begun his career before the Revolution. Published in a literary magazine under the title “Poems from the Novel Doctor Zhivago,” they were accompanied by a brief description of the epic but still unfinished work in which they were to appear. However, the completed text of Doctor Zhivago, which followed the meandering life of its enigmatic hero from the final phase of Tsarist rule to the early years of the Soviet regime, was judged far too subversive for publication and was officially rejected in 1956. In the novel, when Zhivago hears the news of the Bolshevik Revolution, “He was shaken and overwhelmed by the greatness of the moment, and thought of its significance for the centuries to come.” But Pasternak goes on to convey an unmistakable sense of the spiritual emptiness of the regime which emerged from it. Lenin is “vengeance incarnate” and Stalin a “pockmarked Caligula.” Pasternak became the first Soviet author since the 1920s to circumvent the banning of his work in Russia by publishing it abroad. As he handed the typescript of Doctor Zhivago to a representative of his Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, he told him with a melancholy laugh: “You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad!” Soon afterwards, acting on official instructions, Pasternak sent a telegram to Feltrinelli insisting that his novel be withdrawn from publication; privately, however, he wrote a letter telling him to go ahead. Published first in Italian in November 1957, Doctor Zhivago became a bestseller in twenty-four languages. Some Western critics hailed it as the greatest Russian novel since Tolstoy’s Resurrection, published in 1899. Official outrage in Moscow at Doctor Zhivago’s success was compounded by the award to Pasternak of the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature. In a cable to the Swedish Academy, Pasternak declared himself “immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.” The newspaper of the Soviet Writers’ Union, the Literaturnaya Gazeta, however, denounced him as “a literary Judas who betrayed his people for thirty pieces of silver—the Nobel Prize.” Under immense official pressure, Pasternak cabled Stockholm withdrawing his acceptance of the prize “in view of the significance given to this award in the society to which I belong.”7 Though Pasternak was not one of his own favorite authors, Mitrokhin saw the official condemnation of Doctor Zhivago as typifying Khrushchev’s cultural barbarism. “The development of literature and art in a socialist society,” Khrushchev boorishly insisted, “proceeds... as directed by the Party.” Mitrokhin was so outraged by the neo-Stalinist denunciations of Pasternak by Moscow’s literary establishment that in October 1958 he sent an anonymous letter of protest to the Literaturnaya Gazeta. Though he wrote the letter with his left hand in order to disguise his handwriting, he remained anxious for some time that his identity might be discovered. Mitrokhin knew from KGB files the immense resources which were frequently deployed to track down anonymous letter-writers. He was even worried that, by licking the gum on the back of the envelope before sealing it, he had made it possible for his saliva to be identified by a KGB laboratory. The whole episode strengthened his resentment at Khrushchev’s failure to follow his secret speech of 1956 by a thoroughgoing program of de-Stalinization. Khrushchev, he suspected, had personally ordered Pasternak’s persecution as a warning to all those inclined to challenge his authority. As yet, however, Mitrokhin pinned his faith not on the overthrow of the Soviet regime but on the emergence of a new leader less tainted than Khrushchev by his Stalinist past. When, late in 1958, Serov was replaced as KGB chairman by one of his leading critics, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Shelepin, Mitrokhin believed that the new leader had emerged. Aged only forty, Shelepin had made his reputation as a guerrilla commander during the Second World War. As head of the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) from 1952 to 1958, he had mobilized thousands of young people from Khrushchev’s “Virgin Lands” campaign to turn vast areas of steppe into arable farmland. Though many of the new collective farms were later ruined by soil erosion, in the short term the campaign seemed a spectacular success. Soviet newsreels showed endless lines of combine-harvesters as they advanced through prairies rippling with grain and stretching as far as the eye could see. As Mitrokhin had hoped, Shelepin rapidly established himself as a new broom within the KGB, replacing many veteran Stalinists with bright young graduates from Komsomol. Mitrokhin was impressed by the way that when Shelepin gave televised speeches, he looked briefly at his notes, then spoke directly to the viewer—instead of woodenly reading from a prepared text like most Soviet leaders. Shelepin sought to give the KGB a new public image. “Violations of socialist legality,” he claimed in 1961, “have been completely eliminated... The Chekists [KGB officers] can look the Party and the Soviet people in the eye with a clear conscience.” Mitrokhin also remembers Shelepin for an act of personal kindness to a close relative. Like Beria before him and Andropov after him, Shelepin’s ambitions stretched far beyond the chairmanship of the KGB. As a twenty-year-old university student, he was once asked what he wanted to become. According to the Russian historian Roy Medvedev, he instantly replied, “A chief!”8 Shelepin saw the KGB as a stepping stone in a career which he intended to take him to the post of First Secretary of the CPSU. In December 1961 he left the KGB but continued to oversee its work as chairman of the powerful new Committee of Party and State Control. The new KGB chairman was Shelepin’s youthful but less dynamic protégé, thirty- seven-year-old Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny. On Khrushchev’s instructions, Semichastny resumed the work of pruning the archives of material which too vividly recalled the Presidium’s Stalinist past, ordering the destruction of nine volumes of files on the liquidation of Central Committee members, senior intelligence officers and foreign Communists living in Moscow during the Stalin era.9 Mitrokhin continued to see Shelepin as a future First Secretary, and was not surprised when he became one of the leaders of the coup which toppled Khrushchev in 1964. Memories of Beria, however, were still too fresh in the minds of most of the Presidium for them to be prepared to accept a security chief as Party leader. For most of his colleagues, Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, who had succeeded Khrushchev as First (later General) Secretary, was a far more reassuring figure—affable, lightweight and patient in reconciling opposing factions, though skillful in outmaneuvering his political rivals. By 1967 Brezhnev felt strong enough to sack the unpopular Semichastny and sideline the still-ambitious Shelepin, who was demoted from heading the Committee of Party and State Control to become chairman of the comparatively uninfluential Trade Union Council. On arriving in his spacious new office, Shelepin found that his predecessor, Viktor Grishin, had what Medvedev later euphemistically described as “a specially equipped massage parlor” in an adjoining room. Shelepin took revenge for his demotion by circulating stories about Grishin’s sexual exploits around Moscow.10 The main beneficiary of the downfall of Semichastny and the sidelining of Shelepin was Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, who became chairman of the KGB. Andropov had what some of his staff called a “Hungarian complex.” As Soviet ambassador in Budapest during the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, he had watched in horror from the windows of his embassy as officers of the hated Hungarian security service were strung up from lampposts. Andropov remained haunted for the rest of his life by the speed with which an apparently all-powerful Communist one-party state had begun to topple. When other Communist regimes later seemed at risk—in Prague in 1968, in Kabul in 1979, in Warsaw in 1981—he was convinced that, as in Budapest in 1956, only armed force could ensure their survival.11 Since leaving Hungary in 1957 Andropov had been head of the Central Committee Department responsible for relations with Communist parties in the Soviet Bloc. His appointment in 1967 as the first senior Party official brought in to head the KGB was intended by Brezhnev to secure political control of the security and intelligence systems. Andropov went on to become the longest-serving and most politically astute of all KGB chiefs, crowning his fifteen years as chairman by succeeding Brezhnev as General Secretary in 1982. THE FIRST GREAT crisis of Andropov’s years at the KGB was the attempt by the Czechoslovak reformers of the Prague Spring to create what the Kremlin saw as an unacceptably unorthodox “socialism with a human face.” Like Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the forces of the Warsaw Pact in August 1968 was an important staging post in what Mitrokhin calls his “intellectual odyssey.” Stationed in East Germany during the Prague Spring, Mitrokhin was able to listen to reports from Czechoslovakia on the Russian-language services of the BBC World Service, Radio Liberty, Deutsche Welle and the Canadian Broadcasting Company, but had no one with whom he felt able to share his sympathy for the Prague reforms. One episode about a month before Soviet tanks entered Prague left a particular impression on him. An FCD Department V (“special tasks”) officer, Colonel Viktor Ryabov, said to Mitrokhin that he was “just off to Sweden for a few days,” but made clear by his expression that Sweden was not his real destination. A few days after Ryabov’s return, he told Mitrokhin there would be an interesting article in the following day’s Pravda, implying that it was connected with his mission. When Mitrokhin read the report the next day that an “imperialist arms dump” had been discovered in Czechoslovakia, he realized at once that it had been planted by Ryabov and other Department V officers to discredit the reformers. Soon after the crushing of the Prague Spring, Mitrokhin heard a speech given by Andropov in the KGB’s East German headquarters at Karlshorst in the Berlin suburbs. Like Shelepin, Andropov spoke directly to the audience, rather than—like most Soviet officials—sticking to a prepared platitudinous text. With an ascetic appearance, silver hair swept back over a large forehead, steel-rimmed glasses and an intellectual manner, Andropov seemed far removed from Stalinist thugs such as Beria and Serov. His explanation for the invasion of Czechoslovakia was far more sophisticated than that given to the Soviet public. It had, he insisted, been the only way to preserve Soviet security and the new European order which had emerged from the Great Patriotic War. That objective political necessity, Andropov claimed, was accepted even by such unorthodox figures as the great physicist Pyotr Kapitza, who had initially shown some sympathy for the Prague revisionists. Mitrokhin drew quite different conclusions from the Warsaw Pact invasion. The destruction of Czechoslovak “socialism with a human face” proved, he believed, that the Soviet system was unreformable. He still vividly recalls a curiously mythological image, which henceforth he saw increasingly in his mind’s eye, of the Russian people in thrall to “a three-headed hydra”: the Communist Party, the privileged nomenklatura and the KGB. After his return to Moscow from East Germany, Mitrokhin continued to listen to Western broadcasts, although, because of Soviet jamming, he had frequently to switch wavelengths in order to find an audible station. Often he ended up with only fragments of news stories. Among the news which made the greatest impression on him were items on the Chronicle of Current Events, a samizdat journal first produced by Soviet dissidents in 1968 to circulate news on the struggle against abuses of human rights. The Chronicle carried on its masthead the guarantee of freedom of expression in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, daily abused in the Soviet Union. As the struggle against “ideological subversion” intensified, Mitrokhin saw numerous examples of the way in which the KGB manipulated, virtually at will, the Soviet justice system. He later copied down the sycophantic congratulations sent to Andropov by A. F. Gorkhin, chairman of the Soviet Supreme Court, on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Cheka in December 1967: The Soviet Courts and the USSR Committee of State Security [KGB] are of the same age. But this is not the main thing which brings us together; the main thing is the identity of our tasks... We are glad to note that the State Security agencies and the Courts solve all their complicated tasks in a spirit of mutual understanding and sound professional relations.12 Mitrokhin saw mounting evidence both in the classified in-house journal, KGB Sbornik, and in FCD files of Andropov’s personal obsession with the destruction of dissent in all its forms and his insistence that the struggle for human rights was part of a wide-ranging imperialist plot to undermine the foundations of the Soviet state. In 1968 Andropov issued KGB Chairman’s Order No. 0051, “On the tasks of State security agencies in combating ideological sabotage by the adversary,” calling for greater aggression in the struggle against both dissidents at home and their imperialist supporters. 13 One example of this greater aggression which left Mitrokhin, as an ardent admirer of the Kirov Ballet, with a sense of personal outrage was the plan which he discovered in FCD files to maim the ballet’s star defector, Rudolf Nureyev.14 By the beginning of the 1970s Mitrokhin’s political views were deeply influenced by the dissident struggle, which he was able to follow both in KGB records and Western broadcasts. “I was a loner,” he recalls, “but I now knew that I was not alone.” Though Mitrokhin never had any thought of aligning himself openly with the human rights movement, the example of the Chronicle of Current Events and other samizdat productions helped to inspire him with the idea of producing a classified variant of the dissidents’ attempts to document the iniquities of the Soviet system. Gradually the project began to form in his mind of compiling his own private record of the foreign operations of the KGB. Mitrokhin’s opportunity came in June 1972 when the First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate left its overcrowded central Moscow offices in the KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka (once the pre-Revolutionary home of the Rossiya Insurance Company) and moved to a new building south-east of Moscow at Yasenevo, half a mile beyond the outer ringroad. Designed by a Finnish architect, the main Y-shaped seven-story office building was flanked on one side by an assembly hall and library, on the other by a polyclinic, sports complex and swimming pool, with pleasant views over hills covered with birch trees, green pastures, and—in summer—fields of wheat and rye. To the other KGB directorates, most of which worked in cramped conditions in central Moscow, Yasenevo was known—with more envy than condescension—as “The Woods.” For the next ten years, working from private offices both in the Lubyanka and at Yasenevo, Mitrokhin was alone responsible for checking and sealing the approximately 300,000 files15 in the FCD archive prior to their transfer to the new headquarters. While supervising the checking of files, the compilation of inventories and the writing of index cards, Mitrokhin was able to inspect what files he wished in one or other of his offices. Few KGB officers apart from Mitrokhin have ever spent as much time reading, let alone noting, foreign intelligence files. Outside the FCD archives, only the most senior officers shared his unrestricted access, and none had the time to read more than a fraction of the material noted by him. Mitrokhin’s usual weekly routine was to spend each Monday, Tuesday and Friday in his Yasenevo office. On Wednesdays he went to the Lubyanka to work on the FCD’s most secret files, those of Directorate S which ran illegals—KGB officers and agents, most of Soviet nationality, working under deep cover abroad disguised as foreign citizens. Once reviewed by Mitrokhin, each batch of files was placed in sealed containers which were transported to Yasenevo on Thursday mornings, accompanied by Mitrokhin who checked them on arrival.16 Unlike the other departments, who moved to the new FCD headquarters in 1972, Directorate S remained based in the Lubyanka for a further decade. Mitrokhin thus found himself spending more time dealing with the files of Directorate S, the most secret in the FCD, than with those of any other section of Soviet foreign intelligence. The illegals retained a curious mystique within the KGB. Before being posted abroad, every illegal officer was required to swear a solemn, if somewhat melodramatic, oath: Deeply valuing the trust placed upon me by the Party and the fatherland, and imbued with a sense of intense gratitude for the decision to send me to the sharp edge of the struggle for the interest of my people... as a worthy son of the homeland, I would rather perish than betray the secrets entrusted to me or put into the hand of the adversary materials which could cause political harm to the interests of the State. With every heartbeat, with every day that passes, I swear to serve the Party, the homeland, and the Soviet people.17 The files showed that before the Second World War the greatest foreign successes had been achieved by a legendary group of intelligence officers, often referred to as the “Great Illegals.” After the Second World War, the KGB had tried to recreate its pre-war triumphs by establishing an elaborate network of “illegal residencies” alongside the “legal residencies” which operated under diplomatic or other official cover in foreign capitals. The records of Directorate S revealed some remarkable individual achievements. KGB illegals successfully established bogus identities as foreign nationals in a great variety of professions ranging from Costa Rican ambassador to piano tuner to the Governor of New York. Even in the Gorbachev era, KGB propaganda continued to depict the Soviet illegal as the supreme embodiment of the chivalric ideal in the service of secret intelligence. The retired British KGB agent George Blake wrote in 1990: Only a man who believes very strongly in an ideal and serves a great cause will agree to embark on such a career, though the word “calling” is perhaps appropriate here. Only an intelligence service which works for a great cause can ask for such a sacrifice from its officers. That is why, as far as I know, at any rate in peacetime, only the Soviet intelligence service has “illegal residents.”18 The SVR continues the KGB tradition of illegal hagiography. In July 1995, a month after the death of the best-known American-born illegal, Morris Cohen, President Yeltsin conferred on him the posthumous title of Hero of the Russian Federation. The files of Directorate S noted by Mitrokhin reveal a quite different kind of illegal. Alongside the committed FCD officers who maintained their cover and professional discipline throughout their postings, there were others who could not cope when confronted by the contrast between the Soviet propaganda image of capitalist exploitation and the reality of life in the West. An even darker secret of the Directorate S records was that one of the principal uses of the illegals during the last quarter of a century of the Soviet Union was to search out and compromise dissidents in the other countries of the Warsaw Pact. The squalid struggle against “ideological subversion” was as much a responsibility of Directorate S as of the rest of the FCD. MITROKHIN WAS UNDERSTANDABLY cautious as he set out in 1972 to compile his forbidden FCD archive. For a few weeks he tried to commit names, codenames and key facts from the files to memory and transcribe them each evening when he returned home. Abandoning that process as too slow and cumbersome, he began to take notes in minuscule handwriting on scraps of paper which he crumpled up and threw into his wastepaper basket. Each evening, he retrieved his notes from the wastepaper and smuggled them out of Yasenevo concealed in his shoes. Gradually Mitrokhin became more confident as he satisfied himself that the Yasenevo security guards confined themselves to occasional inspections of bags and briefcases without attempting body searches. After a few months he started taking notes on ordinary sheets of office paper which he took out of his office in his jacket and trouser pockets. Not once in the twelve years which Mitrokhin spent noting the FCD archives was he stopped and searched. There were, however, some desperately anxious moments. From time to time he realized that, like other FCD officers, he was being tailed—probably by teams from the Seventh (Surveillance) or Second Chief (Counter-intelligence) Directorates. On one occasion while he was being followed, he visited the Dynamo Football Club sports shop and, to his horror, found himself standing next to two English visitors whom his watchers might suspect were spies with whom he had arranged a rendezvous. If he was searched, his notes on top secret files would be instantly discovered. Mitrokhin quickly moved on to other sports shops, hoping to convince his watchers that he was on a genuine shopping expedition. As he approached his apartment block, however, he noticed two men standing near the door to his ninth-floor flat. By the time he arrived, they had disappeared. FCD officers had standing instructions to report suspicious incidents such as this, but Mitrokhin did not do so for fear of prompting an investigation which would draw attention to the fact that he had been seen standing next to English visitors. Each night when he returned to his Moscow flat, Mitrokhin hid his notes beneath his mattress. On weekends he took them to a family dacha thirty-six kilometers from Moscow and typed up as many as possible, though the notes became so numerous that Mitrokhin was forced to leave some of them in handwritten form. He hid the first batches of typescripts and notes in a milk-churn which he buried below the floor.19 The dacha was built on raised foundations, leaving just enough room for Mitrokhin to crawl beneath the floorboards and dig a hole with a short-handled spade. He frequently found himself crawling through dog and cat feces and sometimes disturbed rats while he was digging, but he consoled himself with the thought that burglars were unlikely to follow him. When the milk-churn was full, he began concealing his notes and typescripts in a tin clothes-boiler. Eventually his archive also filled two tin trunks and two aluminum cases, all of them buried beneath the dacha.20 Mitrokhin’s most anxious moment came when he arrived at his weekend dacha to find a stranger hiding in the attic. He was instantly reminded of the incident a few years earlier, in August 1971, when a friend of the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had called unexpectedly at his dacha while Solzhenitsyn was away and surprised two KGB officers in the attic who were probably searching for subversive manuscripts. Other KGB men had quickly arrived on the scene and Solzhenitsyn’s friend had been badly beaten. Andropov cynically ordered Solzhenitsyn to be “informed that the participation of the KGB in this incident is a figment of his imagination.”21 The incident was still fresh in Mitrokhin’s mind when he arrived at the dacha because he had recently noted files which recorded minutely detailed plans for the persecution of Solzhenitsyn and the “active measures” by which the KGB hoped to discredit him in the Western press. To his immense relief, however, the intruder in the attic turned out to be a homeless squatter. During summer holidays Mitrokhin worked on batches of his notes at a second family dacha near Penza, carrying them in an old haversack and dressing in peasant clothes in order not to attract attention. In the summer of 1918 Penza, 630 kilometers southeast of Moscow, had been the site of one of the first peasant risings against Bolshevik rule. Lenin blamed the revolt on the kulaks (better-off peasants) and furiously instructed the local Party leaders to hang in public at least one hundred of them so that “for hundreds of kilometers around the people may see and tremble...”22 By the 1970s, however, Penza’s counter- revolutionary past was long forgotten, and Lenin’s bloodthirsty orders for mass executions were kept from public view in the secret section of the Lenin archive. One of the most striking characteristics of the best literature produced under the Soviet regime is how much of it was written in secret. “To plunge underground,” wrote Solzhenitsyn, “to make it your concern not to win the world’s recognition—Heaven forbid!—but on the contrary to shun it: this variant of the writer’s lot is peculiarly our own, purely Russian, Russian and Soviet!”23 Between the wars Mikhail Bulgakov had spent twelve years writing The Master and Margarita, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, knowing that it could not be published in his lifetime and fearing that it might never appear at all. His widow later recalled how, just before his death in 1940, Bulgakov “made me get out of bed and then, leaning on my arm, he walked through all the rooms, barefoot and in his dressing gown, to make sure that the manuscript of The Master was still there” in its hiding place.24 Though Bulgakov’s great work survived, it was not published until a quarter of a century after his death. As late as 1978, it was denounced in a KGB memorandum to Andropov as “a dangerous weapon in the hands of [Western] ideological centers engaged in ideological sabotage against the Soviet Union.”25 When Solzhenitsyn began writing in the 1950s, he told himself he had “entered into the inheritance of every modern writer intent on the truth”: I must write simply to ensure that it was not forgotten, that posterity might some day come to know of it. Publication in my own lifetime I must shut out of my mind, out of my dreams. Just as Mitrokhin’s first notes were hidden in a milk- churn beneath his dacha, so Solzhenitsyn’s earliest writings, in minuscule handwriting, were squeezed into an empty champagne bottle and buried in his garden.26 After the brief thaw in the early years of “de-Stalinization” which made possible the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s story of life in the gulag, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he waged a timeconsuming struggle to try to prevent the KGB from seizing his other manuscripts until he was finally forced into exile in 1974.27 It did not occur to Mitrokhin to compare himself with such literary giants as Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn. But, like them, he began assembling his archive “to ensure that the truth was not forgotten, that posterity might some day come to know of it.” THE KGB FILES which had the greatest emotional impact on Mitrokhin were those on the war in Afghanistan. On December 28, 1979 Babrak Karmal, the new Afghan leader chosen by Moscow to request “fraternal assistance” by the Red Army which had already invaded his country, announced over Kabul Radio that his predecessor, Hafizullah Amin, an “agent of American imperialism,” had been tried by a “revolutionary tribunal” and sentenced to death. Mitrokhin quickly discovered from the files on the war which flooded into the archives that Amin had in reality been assassinated, together with his family and entourage, in an assault on the Kabul presidential palace by KGB special forces disguised in Afghan uniforms.28 The female clerks who filed KGB reports on the war in the archives after they had been circulated to the Politburo and other sections of the Soviet hierarchy had so much material to deal with that they sometimes submitted to Mitrokhin thirty files at a time for his approval. The horrors recorded in the files were carefully concealed from the Soviet people. The Soviet media preserved a conspiracy of silence about the systematic destruction of thousands of Afghan villages, reduced to forlorn groups of uninhabited, roofless mud-brick houses; the flight of four million refugees; and the death of a million Afghans in a war which Gorbachev later described as a “mistake.” The coffins of the 15,000 Red Army troops killed in the conflict were unloaded silently at Soviet airfields, with none of the military pomp and solemn music which traditionally awaited fallen heroes returning to the Motherland. Funerals were held in secret, and families told simply that their loved ones had died “fulfilling their internationalist duty.” Some were buried in plots near the graves of Mitrokhin’s parents in the cemetery at Kuzminsky Monastery. No reference to Afghanistan was allowed on their tombstones. During the Afghan War Mitrokhin heard the first open criticism of Soviet policy by his more outspoken colleagues at Yasenevo. “Doesn’t the war make you ashamed to be Russian?” an FCD colonel asked him one day. “Ashamed to be Soviet, you mean!” Mitrokhin blurted out. When Mitrokhin retired in 1984, he was still preoccupied with the Afghan War. He spent the first year and a half of his retirement sorting through his notes, extracting the material on Afghanistan, and assembling it in a large volume with a linking narrative. Despite Gorbachev’s call for glasnost after he became Party leader in 1985, Mitrokhin did not believe the Soviet system would ever allow the truth about the war to be told. Increasingly, however, he began to think of ways of transporting his archive to the West and publishing it there. One novel method suggested itself on May 28, 1987, when a single-engine Cessna piloted by a nineteen-year- old West German, Matthias Rust, crossed the Finnish border into Soviet airspace and flew undetected for 450 miles before landing in Red Square. After an hour of confusion, during which Kremlin security guards wondered whether Rust was an actor in a film, he was taken away to the KGB’s Lefor