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THE MITROKHIN ARCHIVE
…On October 11,
1991, the State Council of the disintegrating Soviet Union
abolished the KGB in its existing form. The former FCD was reconstituted as the
SVR, the foreign intelligence service of the Russian Federation, independent of
the internal security service. Instead of repudiating its Soviet past, however,
the SVR saw itself as the heir of the old FCD. Mitrokhin had seen the FCD file
on the SVR’s newly appointed head, Academician Yevgeni Maksimovich Primakov,
previously Director of the Institute
of World Economics and
international Relations and one of the Gorbachev’s leading foreign advisers. The
file identified Primakov as a KGB co-optee, codenamed MAKSIM, who had been sent
on frequent intelligence missions to the United
States and Middle East. Primakov
went on to become Boris Yeltsin’s Foreign Minister in 1996 and Prime minister
in 1998.
IN THE FINAL
months of 1991, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the relative weakness of
frontier controls at the new border 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. With
him he took a case on wheels, containing bread, sausage 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 “some in authority”. Hitherto Mitrokhin had had
an image of the British as rather formal and “a bit of 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 materials 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 drunk his first cup of English tea, she
read some of his notes, the questioned about them. Mitrokhin told her they were
only part of a large personal archive which included material of 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 crossed the Russian frontier in March, Mitrokhin brought
with him on his next trip to the Baltic capital 2,000 typed pages which he removed
from his 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 capital city should be”.
At the time, even the heavy traffic dotted with the black cabs and red
double-decker buses he had seen only on photographs, seemed but proof of the
capital 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 arrangements to ex-filtrate 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 has made first 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 this 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 British citizen. Using his senior citizen’s rail-card
to travel length and breadth of the country, he has seen more of Britain than
most who were born there. Since 1992 he has spent several days a week working
on his archive, typing up the remaining handwritten works, and responding to
questions about his archive from intelligences services from five continents.
Later in 1995 he has his first meeting with Christopher Andrew to discuss the
preparation of this book. Though The
Sword and the Shied could not have been written in Russia. Mitrokhin remains as
convinced as he was in 1972 that the secret history of the KGB is 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 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 former KGB employee who had
access to the KGB files”.
-According
to his account, the KGB had many hundreds of Americans and possibly more than a
thousand spying for them in recent yeas. 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 cases. A
top secret meeting was called [the FBI
National Academy]
to plot strategy.
Kessler did not
name any of the “many hundreds of Americans” identified by defector. An unnamed
“US intelligence official” interviewed by the Washington post “confirmed that 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”. 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 has described Kessler’s
figures for the number of “recent” Soviet spies in the United States
as “highly exaggerated”.
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
1920’s. Kessler, however, wrongly suggested that this number applied to “recent
years” rather than to the whole history of Soviet espionage in United States.
Though this figures were publicly disputed, the suggestions that the KGB
defector had gone to the United States
rather than to Britain
went unchallenged. When no further information on the unidentified defector was
forthcoming, media interest in 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 Francois Mitterrand had hushed the scandal up. Le Monde reported that from 1993 onwards
British intelligence had passed on to DST “a list of about 300 names of diplomats
and officials of the Quai d’Orsay alleged to
have worked for Soviet bloc intelligence”. In 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. None 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.
In December 1996
the German weekly Focus reported
that, according to “reliable sources”, SIS has also provided the BfV, the
German security service, with the names of several hundreds German politicians,
businessmen, lawyers and police officers who had been involved with the KGB. On
this occasion the SIS source was identified as a Russian defector who had had
extensive access to the KGB archives. A later article in Focus reported:
-The Federal Prosecutor has being examining numerous
detailed new leads to a hitherto undiscovered agent network of the former Soviet
secret service, the KGB in Germany.
The researchers in Karlsruhe are primarily
concentrating on Moscow
sources who were taken on by the successors to the KGB and have probably been
reactivated since the end of the Cold War.
The basis for the research is extensive information on
agents which a Russian defector smuggled into London
from the Moscow
secret service. After intensive analysis, the British secret service passed all
information on KGB connections in Germany
to BfV in Cologne,
in early 1996.
In July 1997
another leak from Mitrokhin’s archive occurred in Austria. Press reports quoted a KGB
document giving direction for locating a secret arms dump of mines, explosives
and detonators, codenamed GROT, hidden in a dead letter-box near Salzburg in 1963, which
had been intended for use in sabotage operations:
-Leave the town of Salzburg by the Schallmoser Hauptstrasse
leading to Highway No. 158. At a distance of 8 km. from the town limit, in
direction of Bad Ischl-Graz, there is a large stone bridge across a narrow
valley. Before reaching the bridge, leave the federal highway by turning right
on to a local road which follows the valley in the direction of Ebenau; then go
on 200 meters to the end of the metal parapet, which stands on the left-hand
side of the road. On reaching the end of the parapet, turn left at once and
follow a village road leading in the opposite direction. The DLB is located
about 50 meters (60 paces) from the turn-off point leading from the main road
to the village road…
(Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin:
“THE SWORD AND THE SHIELD – The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of
the KGB”; Basic Books, A Member of
the PERSEUS BOOKS GROUP 1999)
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