Vasili Mitrokhin Libri

In 1992, MI6 exfiltrated Vasili Mitrokhin, the most senior activist in the KGB, who had been responsible for running the KGB archives. He had noted thousands of documents, described by the FBI as the greatest single cache of intelligence ever received by the West.' This archive resulted in many prosecutions, some of which are still ongoing. of Modern History at Cambridge and the world's leading intelligence scholar. Their first volume, The KGB in Europe and the West, revealed the extent of KGB penetration of what they called The Main Adversary and the existence of a previously unknown nuclear spy, Melita Norwood. The second volume, The KGB and the World, continues the revelations from the sublime to the absurd - which Third World leaders were in the pay of the KGB, precisely how extensive KGB penetration of foreign governments was, and how KGB agents were instructed to assess the spread of the influence of rival Chinese communism (by going round African capitals trying to count the changing number of posters of Mao Tse-tung in shops and public buildings...)

"In 1992 the British Secret Intelligence Service exfiltrated from Russia a defector whose presence in the West has remained secret until the publication of this book. Vasili Mitrokhin worked for almost thirty years in the foreign intelligence archives of the KGB. In 1972 he was made responsible for moving these entire archives, including all the files on the KGB's deep-cover operatives, to new headquarters just outside Moscow. He was congratulated by the head of foreign intelligence, Vladimir Kryuchkov (later the ringleader of the 1991 Moscow coup), for his success in transferring the archives and his "irreproachable service to the state security authorities."" "Unknown to Kryuchkov, however, Mitrokhin spent over a decade making notes and transcripts of these highly classified files which, at enormous personal risk, he smuggled daily out of the archives and kept beneath his dacha floor." "This first volume of The Mitrokhin Archive gives an extraordinary insight into the KGB's penetration of the West, its secret links with Western communist parties, its covert role in maintaining the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, and its brutal war against dissidents inside and outside the Soviet Union, all of which wer on a sccale and of a variety wich we have never previously realized."--Jacket