Vasili Mitrokhin was a KGB colonel smuggled out of Russia by MI6 in the early 1990s with a treasure trove of notes from the KGB’s archive. The resulting 3,500 CI reports (CI meaning counter-intelligence – information about hostile spies) identified 1,000 KGB agents around the world and were shared with 36 countries. The CIA rated it ‘the biggest CI bonanza of the post-war period’, while the FBI described as ‘the most detailed and extensive pool of CI ever received’. The story behind it was as remarkable as the haul itself.
Gordon Corera’s fluent narrative draws on many sources, including the magisterial two-volume Mitrokhin Archive compiled by the historian Christopher Andrew and Mitrokhin himself. From the start, Mitrokhin had insisted that a condition of his defection was that the world – the Russian people especially – should be able to follow what he called ‘the trail of filth’ left in their names by the Russian intelligence services. His other condition was that his family should be exfiltrated with him.
He was born in a small village in provincial Russia in 1922 and never lost his early love of wilderness and snow-covered forests. After military service he trained as an archivist, but by the end of the second world war he had become a prosecuting lawyer in Ukraine, where thousands were imprisoned and killed as the Soviet authorities reimposed communist control. Mitrokhin said little about this period of his life, confessing ‘I saw horrors’ but never revealing the extent to which he had to participate. It led to his recruitment into the overseas arm of the KGB, the First Chief Directorate, and in the early 1950s he was posted undercover to Israel.
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