The Sword and the Shield

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:

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:

“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:

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:

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) 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 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:

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 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.