5 days ago
The KGB man who betrayed the USSR and smuggled secrets to Britain
Vasily Mitrokhin, subject of an intriguing new biography by the security expert Gordon Corera, was the KGB archivist put in charge of moving the entire foreign intelligence archive from its traditional location in the centre of Moscow to a modern Finnish-designed building at Yasenevo just beyond the outer ring road. On his 60th birthday in 1982, he was given a commemorative certificate to celebrate the exemplary efficiency with which he had managed the move.
In reality, as The Spy in the Archive explains, Mitrokhin had spent more than a decade organising the biggest breach of security in the history of Soviet intelligence. Since he was personally responsible for certifying the safe arrival of all KGB files sent to Yasenevo, he secretly took notes on those he judged most important and smuggled them out. Among Mitrokhin's smuggled notes was much detail on intelligence penetration of the Solidarity movement, which played a central role in ending Communist rule in Poland. Corera argues persuasively that the horrors discovered by Mitrokhin in the KGB archives had 'turned him first into a dissident and then a spy, a man determined to expose the truth about the dark forces that had subverted Russia'.
Mitrokhin first became a major British news story almost 30 years ago. In 1999, he and I published The Mitrokhin Archive, a book-length study of the materials he had smuggled to Britain. It made waves around the world. The Sunday Telegraph called it 'headline news'. Western intelligence agencies agreed: the FBI called the archive 'the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source'.
I first met Mitrokhin on October 17 1995, when I was summoned out of the blue to the London headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service (better known as SIS or MI6) to be briefed privately on one of the most extraordinary intelligence coups of modern times. Mitrokhin had no interest in talking about his own adventures and intelligence operations. Instead, his overriding aim was to expose the 'filth', as he called it, of KGB operations. As an ardent balletomane, to give one instance, he viewed with peculiar loathing a file in 1961 proposing an operation to break the legs of the defector Rudolf Nureyev.
My first meeting with Mitrokhin's family was at a private lunch in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where I'm a fellow. After lunch we walked along the Backs to visit Trinity and Trinity Hall, the colleges of the KGB's best known Cambridge recruits, the 'Magnificent Five' – Maclean, Burgess, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross – some of whose files Mitrokhin had read. Mitrokhin had long ago mastered the art of being inconspicuous. The friends and colleagues whom we met walking around Cambridge didn't give him a second glance.
Mitrokhin could be difficult as well as inspiring to deal with. A reminder of this came in Corera's book when I encountered the declassified text, discovered by Corera in American archives, of a talk I was invited to give in 2000 in the CIA Central Auditorium ('the Bubble') on my experience of working with the ex-Soviet man: 'Only a tiny minority of difficult people are heroes. But a surprisingly large proportion of heroes are really difficult people. Mitrokhin is a really difficult person, but he is also a hero.'
Mitrokhin complained that sensationalist media publicity which followed the publication of our book had cheapened what had become his life's work. The British pro-Soviet spy whom Mitrokhin identified for the first time, 87-year-old Melita Norwood, had been treated by much of the media almost as a folk hero – 'the Spy Who Came In From the Co-op', the supermarket where for ideological reasons she did most of her shopping. Mitrokhin was not amused and annoyed that others were.
Corera never met Mitrokhin. The Spy in the Archive explains better than ever before, however, how the Archive ended up in Cambridge. On that subject, though Mitrokhin and I wrote two books together, I have learned more from Corera. In March 1992, after unsuccessfully trying to contact the CIA, Mitrokhin took samples of his archive to the British embassy in Vilnius, which put him in touch with SIS. Later that year, on the 75th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, an SIS-led operation brought him, his family and his archive to Britain. Remaining inconspicuous was crucial to Mitrokhin's escape: 'I didn't stand out in any way. I didn't reach for the stars. I just did my job, like all the other Soviet citizens who worked for the system.' The Mitrokhins arrived at Gatwick Airport on November 7 1992 – the 75th anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power.
When the contents of Mitrokhin's huge unauthorised cache entered the public domain in 1999, they undercut the plans of the KGB's successor agency, the SVR. Its leadership had been hoping to publish a distorted selection of the Soviet-era archives, in order to furnish a more positive image of the KGB. During the 1990s, for example, the SVR released four successive tranches of the bulky multi-volume file on Philby, the USSR's most famous British agent. But in order to preserve both Philby's heroic image and the reputation of Russian foreign intelligence, Yasenevo had been careful not to release the record of Philby's final weeks as head of MI6 in the USA, the climax of his career as a Soviet spy: he fell out with his case officer, who was recalled to Moscow in disgrace. Mitrokhin's notes on the officially banned parts of Philby's file reveal this farcical episode for the first time. They also reveal that Philby and his fellow Cambridge moles, Burgess and Maclean, together supplied their Soviet case officers with a total of over 20,000 'valuable' British classified documents.
Most of the files in the Mitrokhin Archive are now open to researchers at Churchill College, Cambridge. Their geographic range is so large that the only West European countries omitted from them are the pocket states of Andorra, Liechtenstein and Monaco. What is most remarkable, perhaps, is that they survive at all. They put me in mind of Mikhail Bulgakov, to my mind the greatest writer of the Soviet era, whose widow had to help him out of bed one last time in 1940, just before his death, so that he could satisfy himself that his unpublished masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, was safe in its hiding place. It was, and it survived, to be published a quarter of a century later. There must be other major documents of the Soviet era that have mouldered away in forgotten places. Without the perilous journey that Corera describes so well, the Mitrokhin Archive might have been one of them.
