Vasili Mitrokhin

Vasili Mitrokhin (March 3 1922–January 23, 2004) was a General and head archivist for the Soviet Foreign Intelligence service, the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, and co-author with Christopher Andrew of The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, a massive account of Soviet intelligence operations based on copies of material from the archive. Work on the second volume, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in the World, continues with Andrew after Mitrokhin's death. "The KGB in Europe and the West" promised that the second volume would reveal to the world the Soviet Union's degradations in Afghanistan.

Mitrokin was born in central Russia Yurasovo, in rural Rayazan, Russian Soviet Republic. After leaving school, he entered artillery school, then attended university in Khazakhstan, graduating in History and Law. Towards the end of the Second World War, he took a job in the military procurator's office at Kharkov in the Ukraine. He entered the MGB as a foreign intelligence officer in 1948. His first foreign posting was in 1952.

During the 1950s he served on various undercover assignments overseas. In 1956, for example, he accompanied the Soviet team to the Olympic games in Australia. But later that year, after he had apparently mishandled an operational assignment, he was moved from operational duties to the archives of the KGB's First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate, and told he would never work in the field again. Mitrokhin sometimes dated the beginnings of his disillusionment to Khrushchev's famous speech to the Communist Party congress denouncing Stalin, though it seems he may have been harbouring doubts for some time before that. For years he had listened to broadcasts on the BBC and Voice of America, noting the gulf between their reports and party propaganda.

Yet when he began looking into the archives, he claimed to have been shocked by what he discovered about the KGB's systematic repression of the Russian people. "I could not believe such evil," he recalled. "It was all planned, prepared, thought out in advance. It was a terrible shock when I read things."

Between 1972 and 1984 he supervised the move of the archive of the First Chief Directorate from the Lubyanka to the new KGB headquarters at Yasenevo . He retired in 1985.

In 1992 he traveled to Latvia with copies of material from the archive and walked into the US embassy. CIA officers there didn't consider him to be credible, concluding that the copied documents could be faked. He then went to the British embassy and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) officer there saw his potential and following consultations with London accepted him as an agent. Operations followed to retrieve the 25,000 pages of files hidden in his house, covering operations from as far back as the 1930s. He and his family were then exfiltrated to Britain.

Richard Tomlinson, the MI6 officer imprisoned in 1997 for attempting to publish a book about his career, was one of those involved in retrieving the documents from empty milk cartons hidden under the floor of the dacha.

Among other revelations, the papers disclosed that more than half of Soviet weapons were based on designs stolen from America; that the KGB had tapped the telephones of American officials such as Henry Kissinger and had spies in almost all the country's big defence contractors. In France, at least 35 senior politicians were shown to have worked for the KGB during the Cold War. In Germany, the KGB was shown to have infiltrated all the major political parties, the judiciary and the police. The UK Telegraph, February 2, 2004

Spies exposed as a result of the defection include:

• Melita Norwood
• John Symonds (code-named Scot)
• Tom Driberg (code-named Driberg), a former elected Labour Party Member of Parliament who had visited Moscow with Guy Burgess.
• Raymond Fletcher (code-named Peter), a former elected Labour Party Member of Parliament.
  • Robert Lipka , former clerk at the US National Security Agency (NSA) Lipka denied his guilt until the very last moments before his trial was to begin - when he it was revealed that the US Government's prime witness was a former KGB archivist with proof of his relation with the Soviet Union's spy service.
  • Claude Estier , former leader of the French Socialist Party and confidant of former president François Mitterrand

KGB operations revealed in the files include:

• attempts to incite racial hatred in the US
• bugging of MI6 stations in the Middle East
• bugging Henry Kissinger when he was serving as US Secretary of State.
• leaked documents from defence contractors including Boeing, Fairchild, General Dynamics, IBM and Lockheed Corporation, providing the Russians with detailed information about the Trident, MX (Peacekeeper) and Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Accused but unconfirmed were

• Richard Clements , ally of Neil Kinnock, former leader of the British Labour Party, who denied the allegation, saying that it was an over-inflated claim and "complete nonsense".

External link

• summary of press coverage