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  Since there is no generally accepted system of transliterating Arabic names into English, we have tried to follow what we believe is best current practice (for example, Ahmad and Muhammad rather than Ahmed and Mohammed). Where there is a well-established English version of an Arabic name, we use this rather than a more technically correct transliteration: for example, Gamal Abdel Nasser (rather than Abd al-Nasir) and Saddam Hussein (rather than Husain). The same applies to Anglophone and Francophone names of Arabic origin: for example, Ahmed (rather than Ahmad) Sékou Touré. Once again, occasional discrepancies will be found between the text and the notes/bibliography.

  Foreword: Vasili Mitrokhin and His Archive

  On 9 April 1992 a scruffy, shabbily dressed seventy-year-old Russian arrived in the capital of a newly independent Baltic state by the overnight train from Moscow for a pre-arranged meeting with officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6) at the offices of the new British embassy. He began by producing his passport and other documents which identified him as Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin, a former senior archivist in the First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate of the KGB. SIS then took the unprepossessing (and hitherto unpublished) photograph of him which appears in the illustrations.

  Mitrokhin’s first visit to the embassy had taken place a month earlier when he arrived pulling a battered case on wheels and wearing the same shabby clothes, which he had put on before leaving Moscow in order to attract as little attention as possible from the border guards at the Russian frontier. Since he had an image of the British as rather stuffy and ‘a bit of a mystery’, he made his first approach to the Americans. Apparently overwhelmed by asylum seekers, however, US embassy staff failed to grasp Mitrokhin’s importance and told him to return at a later date. Mitrokhin moved on instead to the British embassy and asked to speak to someone in authority. The junior diplomat who came to the reception area struck him as unexpectedly ‘young, attractive and sympathetic’, as well as a fluent Russian speaker. Used to the male-dominated world of Soviet diplomacy, Mitrokhin was also surprised that the diplomat was a woman. He told her he had brought with him samples of top-secret material from the KGB archives. Had the diplomat (who prefers not to be identified) dismissed him as a down-at-heel asylum seeker trying to sell bogus secrets, this book and its predecessor would probably never have been written. Happily, however, she asked to see some of the material which Mitrokhin had brought with him, concealed in his suitcase beneath the bread, sausages, drink and change of clothing which he had packed for his journey, and asked if he would like tea. While Mitrokhin drank his first ever cup of English tea, the diplomat read some of his notes, quickly grasped their potential importance, then questioned him about them. Since the embassy contained no intelligence station, he agreed to return a month later to meet representatives from SIS’s London headquarters.

  At his meeting with SIS officers on 9 April, Mitrokhin produced another 2,000 pages from his private archive and told the extraordinary story of how, while supervising the transfer of the entire foreign intelligence archive from the overcrowded offices of the Lubyanka in central Moscow to the new FCD headquarters at Yasenevo, near the outer ring road, between 1972 and 1982, he had almost every day smuggled handwritten notes and extracts from the files out of the archives in his pockets and hidden them beneath his family dacha. When the move was complete, he continued removing top-secret material for another two years until his retirement in 1984. The notes which Mitrokhin showed SIS officers revealed that he had had access even to the holy of holies in the foreign intelligence archives: the files which revealed the real identities and ‘legends’ of the elite corps of KGB ‘illegals’ living abroad under deep cover posing as foreign nationals. After a further meeting with SIS in the Baltic, Mitrokhin paid a secret visit to Britain in the autumn to discuss plans for his defection. On 7 November 1992, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution,1 SIS exfiltrated Mitrokhin, his family and his entire archive, packed in six large containers, out of Russia in a remarkable operation the details of which still remain secret.

  Those who have had access to the Mitrokhin archive since its arrival in Britain have been amazed by its contents. In the view of the FBI, it is ‘the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source’.1 The CIA calls it ‘the biggest CI [counter-intelligence] bonanza of the post-war period’. A report by the all-party British Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) reveals that a series of other Western intelligence agencies have also proved ‘extremely grateful’ for the numerous CI leads provided by Mitrokhin’s material.2 The Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki (SVR), the post-Soviet successor of the FCD, at first refused to believe that such a massive haemorrhage of top-secret intelligence records could possibly have occurred. When a German magazine reported in December 1996 that a former KGB officer had defected to Britain with ‘the names of hundreds of Russian spies’, the SVR spokeswoman, Tatyana Samolis, instantly ridiculed the 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!’3 In reality, as both the SVR and the internal security and intelligence service, the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB), now realize, the Mitrokhin Archive includes details not just of hundreds but of thousands of Soviet agents and intelligence officers around the globe.

  The Mitrokhin Archive contains extraordinary detail on KGB operations in Europe and North America, which formed the subject of our first volume. But there is also much on the even less well-known Cold War activities of the KGB in the Third World,2 which pass almost unmentioned in most histories both of Soviet foreign relations and of developing countries. The lucid synthesis of scholarly research on Soviet foreign policy by Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, Russia and the World, 1917-1991, for example, contains barely a mention of the KGB, save for a brief reference to its role in the invasion of Afghanistan.4 By contrast, no account of American Cold War policy in the Third World omits the role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The result has been a curiously lopsided history of the secret Cold War in the developing world - the intelligence equivalent of the sound of one hand clapping. The generally admirable Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, for instance, contains an article on the CIA but none on the KGB or its post-Soviet successors.5 As this volume of the Mitrokhin Archive seeks to show, however, the role of the KGB in Soviet policy towards the Third World was even more important than that of the CIA in US policy. For a quarter of a century, the KGB, unlike the CIA, believed that the Third World was the arena in which it could win the Cold War.

  Much of the story of Mitrokhin’ s career was told in The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (hereafter referred to as volume I).6 Some parts of it, however, can now be revealed for the first time. For fear that the FSB would make life uncomfortable for some of his surviving relatives, Mitrokhin was unwilling while we were working on volume I to include any details of his early life - even his exact date of birth. He was born, the second of five children, on 3 March 1922 in central Russia at the village of Yurasovo in Ryazan oblast (province). Ryazan is probably best known in the West as the birthplace of the Nobel laureate Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, discoverer of the ‘conditioned reflex’ through his work with what became known as ‘Pavlov’s dogs’. Unlike Mitrokhin, who became a secret dissident, Pavlov was often openly at odds with the Soviet authorities but, protected by his international renown, was allowed to carry on working in his laboratory until he died in 1936 at the age of eighty-seven. Most of Mitrokhin’s childhood was spent in Moscow, where his father was able to find work as a decorator, but the family kept its links with Yurasovo, where, despite the bitter cold, he acquired a deep and abiding love of the Ryazan countryside and the forests of central Russia. English forests, by contrast, were a disappointment to him - too small, too few and insufficiently remote. In retirement near London there were few things he missed more on hi
s long winter walks than the sight of a fresh snowfall in the forest .7

  Mitrokhin’s interest in archives started as a teenage fascination with historical documents. After leaving school, he completed his compulsory military service in the artillery, then began studying at the Historical Archives Institute in Moscow. Such was the extraordinary importance which the Stalinist regime attached to its files that, even after Hitler’s invasion in the summer of 1941, Mitrokhin was allowed to continue training as an archivist instead of being conscripted to defend the Soviet Union in its hour of supreme peril. He thus took no part in the great battles at Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad which helped to make the Eastern Front both the longest and the bloodiest front in the history of warfare. Instead, he was sent with a group of trainee archivists to Kazakhstan, far beyond the furthest limit of the German advance, probably to work on some of the files of suspect national minorities and prisoners in the Gulag who were deported in wartime, usually in horrendous conditions, to central Asia. Losing his early ambition to become an archivist, Mitrokhin managed to enrol at the Kharkov Higher Juridical Institute, which was evacuated to Kazakhstan after the German conquest of Ukraine. After the liberation of Ukraine, he returned with the Institute to Kharkov. His memories of the brutal punishment of many thousands of ‘anti-Soviet’ Ukrainians sometimes gave him nightmares in later life. ‘I was deep in horrors,’ was all he would tell me about his experiences. After graduating in Kharkov in 1944, he became a lawyer first with the civil police (militia), then with the military procurator’s office. He did well enough to attract the attention of the MGB (predecessor of the KGB), which in 1946 sent him for a two-year course at the Higher Diplomatic School in Moscow to prepare him for a career in foreign intelligence which he began in 1948.8

  Mitrokhin’s first five years as an intelligence officer coincided with the paranoid, final phase of the Stalin era, when he and his colleagues were ordered to track down Titoist and Zionist conspirators, whose mostly non-existent plots preyed on the disturbed mind of the ageing dictator. His first and longest foreign posting before Stalin’s death in 1953 was to the Middle East, of which he was later reluctant to talk because it involved the penetration and exploitation of the Russian Orthodox Church - an aspect of KGB operations for which, like the persecution of the dissidents, he later developed an especial loathing.9 Mitrokhin had happier memories of subsequent short tours of duty which took him to such diverse destinations as Iceland, the Netherlands, Pakistan and Australia.

  The most memorable of these tours of duty was as a member of the KGB escort which accompanied the Soviet team to the Melbourne Olympics which opened in October 1956. For the KGB the Games threatened to be a security nightmare. Two years earlier the KGB resident in Canberra, Vladimir Petrov, had become the most senior Soviet defector since the Second World War. Photographs of his tearful wife, Evdokia, also a KGB officer, losing her shoe in a mêlée at Sydney airport as Soviet security guards hustled her on to a plane to take her back to Russia, then escaping from their clutches when the aircraft stopped to refuel at Darwin, had made front-page news around the world. As Mitrokhin was aware, both the Petrovs had been sentenced to death after a secret trial in absentia and plans had been made by KGB assassins to hunt them down (though the plans were never successfully implemented).10 The Centre was determined that this recent embarrassment should not be compounded by defections from the Soviet competitors at Melbourne. Further anxieties arose from the fact that, as the Duke of Edinburgh formally opened the games on the Melbourne cricket ground, Soviet tanks had entered Budapest to crush the Hungarian rising. The Olympic water-polo match between Hungary and the Soviet Union had to be abandoned after a fracas in the pool. At the end of the games the KGB was alarmed by the sudden decision of the organizers that all the athletes should mingle together during the closing ceremonies (thus making it easier to defect) instead of parading, as at previous games, in their national teams. In the end, however, the KGB considered its Melbourne mission a qualified success. There were no defections and the Soviet team emerged as clear winners with ninety-eight medals (including thirty-seven golds) to the Americans’ seventy-four and a series of individual triumphs which included easy victories by Vladimir Kuts in both the 5,000 and 10,000 metres.

  The 1956 Olympics were to be Mitrokhin’s last tour of duty in the West. In the aftermath of Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ earlier in the year denouncing Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’ and his ‘exceedingly serious and grave perversions of Party principles, of Party democracy [and] of revolutionary legality’, Mitrokhin had become too outspoken for his own good. Though his criticisms of the way the KGB had been run were mild by Western standards, he acquired a reputation as a malcontent and was denounced by one of his superiors as ‘a member of the awkward squad’. Soon after returning from Melbourne, Mitrokhin was moved from operations to the FCD archives, where for some years his main job was answering queries from other departments and provincial KGBs. His only other foreign posting, in the late 1960s, was to the archives department of the large KGB mission at Karlshorst in the suburbs of East Berlin. While at Karlshorst in 1968, he followed with secret excitement the attempt just across the German border by the 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’ twelve years before, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the forces of the Warsaw Pact in August 1968 was an important staging post in what Mitrokhin called his ‘intellectual odyssey’. He was able to listen in secret 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 outrage at the invasion. The crushing of the Prague Spring proved, he believed, that the Soviet system was unreformable.

  After his return to Moscow from East Germany, Mitrokhin continued to listen to Western broadcasts, though, because of Soviet jamming, he had frequently to switch wavelengths in order to find an audible station. Among the news which made the greatest impression on him were items about the Chronicle of Current Events, a samizdat journal first produced by dissidents in 1968 to circulate news on the struggle against Soviet abuses of human rights. By the beginning of the 1970s Mitrokhin’s political views were deeply influenced by the dissident struggle, which he was able to follow in KGB files as well as Western broadcasts. ‘I was a loner’, he later told me, ‘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. He had earlier been attracted by the idea of writing an in-house official history of the FCD. Now a rather different project began to form in his mind - that of compiling his own private unofficial record of the foreign operations of the KGB. His opportunity came in June 1972 when he was put in charge of moving the FCD archives to Yasenevo. Had the hoard of top-secret material which he smuggled out of Yasenevo been discovered, the odds are that, after a secret trial, he would have ended up in a KGB execution cellar with a bullet in the back of his head.

  For those whose ideals have been corroded by the widespread cynicism of the early twenty-first-century West, the fact that Mitrokhin was prepared to risk his life for twenty years for a cause in which he passionately believed is almost too difficult to comprehend. Almost equally hard to grasp 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 some of the greatest Russian writers of the Soviet era did precisely that. No biography of any Western writer contains a death-bed scene compar
able to the description by the widow of Mikhail Bulgakov of how in 1940 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, was still in its hiding place. Against all the odds, The Master and Margarita survived to be published a quarter of a century later. Though Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s greatest work was published in his own lifetime (initially mostly in the West rather than the Soviet Union), when he began writing he told himself, like Bulgakov, that he ‘must write simply to ensure that [the truth] 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.’11

  Though Mitrokhin never had any literary pretensions, the survival of his archive is, in its own way, as remarkable as that of The Master and Margarita. Once he reached Britain, he was determined that, despite legal and security difficulties, as much as possible of its contents should be published. After the publication in 1999 of The Sword and the Shield, the Intelligence and Security Committee held a detailed enquiry at the Cabinet Office to which both Vasili Mitrokhin and I gave evidence. As the ISC’s unanimous report makes clear, it was left in no doubt about Mitrokhin’s motivation: