Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

IN THE FINAL months of 1991, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the relative weakness of frontier controls at the new borders of the Russian Federation at last opened the way to the West for Mitrokhin and his archive. In March 1992 he boarded an overnight train in Moscow bound for the capital of one of the newly independent Baltic republics. 32With him he took a case on wheels, containing bread, sausages and drink for his journey on top, clothes underneath, and—at the bottom—samples of his notes. The next day he arrived unannounced at the British embassy in the Baltic capital and asked to speak to “someone in authority.” Hitherto Mitrokhin had had an image of the British as rather formal and “a bit of a mystery.” But the young female diplomat who received him at the embassy struck him as “young, attractive and sympathetic,” as well as fluent in Russian. Mitrokhin told her he had brought with him important material from KGB files. While he rummaged at the bottom of his bag to extract his notes from beneath the sausages and clothes, the diplomat ordered tea. As Mitrokhin drank his first cup of English tea, she read some of his notes, then questioned him about them. Mitrokhin told her they were only part of a large personal archive which included material on KGB operations in Britain. He agreed to return to the embassy a month later to meet representatives from the Secret Intelligence Service.

Emboldened by the ease with which he had crossed the Russian frontier in March, Mitrokhin brought with him on his next trip to the Baltic capital 2,000 typed pages which he had removed from the hiding place beneath his dacha near Moscow. Arriving at the British embassy on the morning of April 9, he identified himself to the SIS officers by producing his passport, Communist Party card and KGB pension certificate, handed over his bulky typescript and spent a day answering questions about himself, his archive and how he had compiled it. Mitrokhin accepted an invitation to return to the embassy about two months later to discuss arrangements for a visit to Britain. Early in May the SIS Moscow station reported to London that Mitrokhin planned to leave Moscow on an overnight train on June 10. On June 11 he arrived in the Baltic capital carrying a rucksack containing more material from his archive. Most of his meeting with SIS officers was spent discussing plans for him to be debriefed in Britain during the following autumn.

On September 7, escorted by SIS, Mitrokhin arrived in England for the first time. After the near chaos of post-Communist Moscow, London made an extraordinary impression on him—“the model of what a capital city should be.” At the time, even the heavy traffic, dotted with the black cabs and red doubledecker buses he had seen only in photographs, seemed but proof of the capital’s prosperity. While being debriefed at anonymous safe houses in London and the countryside, Mitrokhin took the final decision to leave Russia for Britain, and agreed with SIS on arrangements to exfiltrate himself, his family and his archive. On October 13 he was infiltrated back into Russia to make final arrangements for his departure.

On November 7, 1992, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mitrokhin arrived with his family in the Baltic capital where he had first made contact with SIS. A few days later they arrived in London to begin a new life in Britain. It was a bittersweet moment. Mitrokhin was safe and secure for the first time since he had begun assembling his secret archive eighteen years previously, but at the same time he felt a sense of bereavement at separation from a homeland he knew he would probably never see again. The bereavement has passed, though his attachment to Russia remains. Mitrokhin is now a British citizen. Using his senior citizen’s railcard to travel the length and breadth of the country, he has seen more of Britain than most who were born here. Since 1992 he has spent several days a week working on his archive, typing up the remaining handwritten notes, and responding to questions about his archive from intelligence services from five continents. Late in 1995 he had his first meeting with Christopher Andrew to discuss the preparation of this book. Though The Sword and the Shield could not have been written in Russia, Mitrokhin remains as convinced as he was in 1972 that the secret history of the KGB is a central part of the Soviet past which the Russian people have the right to know. He also believes that the KGB’s worldwide foreign operations form an essential, though often neglected, part of the history of twentieth-century international relations.

NO WORD LEAKED out in the British media about either Mitrokhin or his archive. Because material from the archive was passed to so many other intelligence and security services, however, there were, unsurprisingly, some partial leaks abroad. The first, slightly garbled reference to Mitrokhin’s archive occurred in the United States nine months after his defection. In August 1993 the well-known Washington investigative journalist Ronald Kessler published a bestselling book on the FBI based in part on sources inside the Bureau. Among his revelations was a brief reference to a sensational “probe by the FBI into information from a former KGB employee who had had access to KGB files”:

According to his account, the KGB had had many hundreds of Americans and possibly more than a thousand spying for them in recent years. So specific was the information that the FBI was quickly able to establish the source’s credibility… By the summer of 1993, the FBI had mobilized agents in most major cities to pursue the cases. A top secret meeting was called at Quantico [the FBI National Academy] to plot strategy. 33

Kessler did not name any of the “many hundreds of Americans” identified by the defector. An unnamed “US intelligence official” interviewed by the Washington Post “confirmed that the FBI had received specific information that has led to a ‘significant’ ongoing investigation into past KGB activities in the United States,” but declined to be drawn in on “how many people are implicated.” 34 Time reported that “sources familiar with the case” of the KGB defector had identified him as a former employee of the First Chief Directorate, but had described Kessler’s figures for the number of “recent” Soviet spies in the United States as “highly exaggerated.” 35

Mitrokhin’s notes do indeed contain the names of “many hundreds” of KGB officers, agents and contacts in the United States active at various periods since the 1920s. Kessler, however, wrongly suggested that this number applied to “recent years” rather than to the whole history of Soviet espionage in the United States. Though his figures were publicly disputed, the suggestion that the KGB defector had gone to the United States rather than to Britain went unchallenged. 36When no further information on the unidentified defector was forthcoming, media interest in the story quickly died away.

There was no further leak from Mitrokhin’s archive for over three years. In October 1996, however, reports in the French press alleged that Charles Hernu, Defence Minister from 1981 to 1985, had worked for Soviet Bloc intelligence services from 1953 until at least 1963, and that, when informed by the French security service, the DST, President François Mitterrand had hushed the scandal up. 37 Le Monde reported that from 1993 onwards British intelligence had passed on to the DST “a list of about 300 names of diplomats and officials of the Quai d’Orsay alleged to have worked for Soviet Bloc intelligence.” 38In reality, French diplomats and Foreign Ministry officials made up only a minority of the names in Mitrokhin’s notes supplied by the SIS to the DST. Charles Hernu was not among them. 39None of the media reports on either side of the Channel related the SIS lists of Soviet agents in France to Kessler’s earlier story of a defector with extensive access to KGB files.