The ISC’s Mitrokhin inquiry found much to praise as well as criticize:
Carrying the initial contact with Mr. Mitrokhin right through to his and his family’s successful exfiltration together with all his material represents a major achievement by SIS. In addition the management of the material and its dissemination, as appropriate, to foreign liaison [intelligence] services was well handled. The Committee wish to pay tribute to this outstanding piece of intelligence work.[24]
I was heartened by the ISC’s endorsement of the 1996 decision to authorize me to write The Mitrokhin Archive in collaboration with Mitrokhin, as well as by the Committee’s conclusion (which I hope it is not too immodest to quote) that the book is “of tremendous value, as it gives a real insight into the KGB’s work and the persecution of the dissidents.”[25] The ISC’s greatest praise was, quite rightly, reserved for Vasili Mitrokhin:
The Committee believes that he is a man of remarkable commitment and courage, who risked imprisonment or death in his determination that the truth should be told about the real nature of the KGB and their activities, which he believed were betraying the interests of his own country and people. He succeeded in this, and we wish to record formally our admiration for his achievement.
The ISC report regrets that “poor media handling [presumably by Whitehall] of the publication of The Mitrokhin Archive, which allowed the emphasis to fall on the UK spies, detracted from the brave work of Mr. Mitrokhin and the importance of the revelations about the KGB’s work he wanted to expose.”[26] In the initial media coverage, there was little mention of the fact that vastly more of the book is devoted to the KGB’s war against the dissidents and its attempts to stifle dissent throughout the Soviet Bloc than to the careers of Melita Norwood and John Symonds.
The chief problem in understanding both Mitrokhin and his archive, which was evident in much of the media coverage, is that neither is truly comprehensible in Western terms. The very notion of the hero, familiar to all other cultures and all previous Western generations, arouses greater scepticism in the early twenty-first century West than at any other time or place in recorded history. For those whose imaginations have been corroded by the cynicism of the age, the idea that Mitrokhin was willing to risk his life for twenty years for a cause in which he passionately believed is almost too difficult to grasp. Almost equally hard to comprehend 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, as Chapter 1 seeks to show, some of the greatest Russian writers of the Soviet era did precisely that.[27] No biography of any Western writer contains any death-bed scene comparable to the description by the widow of Mikhail Bulgakov of how 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, arguably the greatest novel of the twentieth century, was still in its hiding place. The Master and Margarita survived to be published a quarter of a century later. It is a sobering thought, however, that for every forbidden masterpiece of the Soviet era which survives, there must be a larger number which have failed to survive or which, even now, are mouldering in their forgotten hiding places — as the Mitrokhin archive might well have done if Mitrokhin and SIS had not succeeded in removing it to Britain.
The Mitrokhin archive is no more comprehensible in purely Western terms than Mitrokhin himself. The commonest error in interpreting the KGB is to suppose that it was roughly equivalent to its main Western rivals. There were, of course, similarities in the operational techniques employed by intelligence agencies in East and West, as well as in the importance which each side attached to the other as an intelligence target. The fundamental difference between the Soviet one-party state and the Western democracies, however, was reflected in fundamental differences between their intelligence communities.
The differences were greatest in the Stalinist era. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Stalin regarded the NKVD’s pursuit in Mexico of the great, though harmless, heretic, Leon Trotsky, as a higher priority than collecting intelligence on Adolf Hitler. In the middle of the War, the paranoid strain which regularly distorted Soviet intelligence assessment persuaded Soviet intelligence chiefs — and no doubt Stalin himself — that the Magnificent Five, probably its ablest group of foreign agents, were part of a gigantic British intelligence deception. During his final years Stalin was sometimes obsessed with the hunting down of often imaginary Titoists and Zionists. His chief foreign policy objective at the end of his life may well have been the plan for an MGB (later KGB) illegal to assassinate Marshal Tito, who had succeeded Trotsky as the leading heretic of the Soviet Bloc. Stalin once called Lavrenti Beria, the most powerful of his intelligence chiefs, “my Himmler.” But there was no Western intelligence chief with whom Beria — or Himmler, the head of the SS — could be credibly compared.
Even after Stalin’s death and Beria’s execution in 1953, there remained basic differences between intelligence priorities in East and West. Perhaps the simplest way of judging whether any intelligence report is of critical importance is to ask the question: If it arrives in the middle of the night would you wake the relevant government minister? The answer to that question in Moscow was often quite different from that in Western capitals. On October 27, 1978, for example, the KGB resident in Oslo, Leonid Makarov, rang Mikhail Suslov, the member of the Politburo chiefly responsible for ideological purity, in the early hours. Why? Not to tell him that some great international crisis was about to break but to report that the Russian dissident Yuri Orlov had failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The Oslo residency was warmly congratulated for its supposed “operational effectiveness” in achieving this entirely predictable result.[28] It is simply not possible to imagine any Western minister being woken for any comparable reason.
The KGB’s domestic obsession with the detection and suppression of “ideological subversion” spilled over into its foreign operations. It sought to impress the Party leadership by its zeal in discrediting dissidents abroad as well as at home. In the summer of 1978 the KGB First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) and Fifth (Ideological Subversion) Directorates jointly arranged the secret screening in Moscow to an audience of KGB and Party notables of the commencement address by the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard University. The purpose of this extraordinary (by Western standards) evening was to seek to demonstrate that, thanks to the efforts of the KGB, Solzhenitsyn was now a largely discredited figure in the United States.[29] The KGB’s mission to discredit dissidents who had emigrated to the West extended even to dissident ballet dancers, musicians and chess players.
For Western media used to interpreting the secret Cold War in terms of spy versus spy, Mitrokhin’s material on the KGB’s war against ideological subversion, unlike the revelations about individual spies, had little interest. There was, predictably, greater interest in this material in the countries of the former Soviet Bloc — reflected, for example, in the number of translations of The Mitrokhin Archive into Eastern European languages. The priority given by the KGB to maintaining the ideological orthodoxy of the Soviet Bloc was reflected by the fact that it deployed more of its elite group of illegals to Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968 than, so far as is known, were ever used in any operation against a Western target.
The Cold War chapters of The Mitrokhin Archive give equal weight to KGB operations against the United States and to those against ideological subversion. Mitrokhin smuggled out of the KGB foreign intelligence headquarters important material on operations against some of the leaders of the struggle for democracy within the Soviet Bloc whose extraordinary moral courage eventually prevailed over the immense coercive force of the KGB and its allies. Two examples stand out. The first is the great Russian dissiden
t and nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov, dubbed “Public Enemy Number One” by Yuri Andropov (successively KGB Chairman and Soviet leader), who survived persecution and internal exile by the KGB to become, in Gorbachev’s words, “unquestionably the most outstanding personality” at the 1989 Congress of People’s Soviets. One of the most striking visual images of the crumbling of the Soviet system, which deserves to be as well known as the destruction of the Berlin Wall, is of Gorbachev and other members of the Politburo standing bareheaded by Sakharov’s open coffin after his sudden death in December 1989.
The second outstanding case is that of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, Archbishop of Kraków, whom the KGB seems to have identified in the early 1970s as its most dangerous opponent in the Soviet Bloc. Wojtyła, however, was protected by his moral authority and eminence. The KGB, like the Polish SB, shrank from the immense public outcry which his arrest would provoke. Seen in hindsight, Wojtyła’s election in 1978 as Pope John Paul II marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Bloc. Though the Polish problem was, with difficulty, contained for the next decade, it could not be resolved.
The organization which has studied The Mitrokhin Archive with the closest attention since its publication is the SVR, which is deeply concerned by its contents. No intelligence agency can expect either to recruit new agents or to maintain the loyalty of its existing agents unless it can convince them that it can keep their secrets indefinitely. The SVR is now ill-placed to do so. Thanks to Mitrokhin, no one who spied for the Soviet Union at any period between the October Revolution and the eve of the Gorbachev era can now be confident that his or her secrets are still secure. Mitrokhin’s material also contains information on Cold War operations conducted by the current head of the SVR, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, and other former senior KGB officers. Volume Two will contain a chapter on KGB activities in India, where Trubnikov made his reputation. If the past secrets of the SVR leadership have proved insecure, SVR agents may well conclude that theirs are also.
From the moment the Mitrokhin archive arrived in Britain, SIS realized that its contents were “of exceptional counter-intelligence significance, not only illuminating past KGB activity against Western countries but also promising to nullify many of Russia’s current assets.” The CIA similarly found the archive “the biggest CI [counter-intelligence] bonanza of the post-war period.” The FBI agreed. As the ISC report reveals, other Western intelligence agencies have also been “extremely grateful” for the numerous CI leads provided by the Mitrokhin archive.[30]
Some insight into the turmoil inside the SVR which must have been provoked by the publication of The Mitrokhin Archive is provided by the file (noted by Mitrokhin) on the book on the KGB published by the American journalist John Barron a quarter of a century ago. KGB headquarters ordered no fewer than 370 reports in an attempt to assess the damage to its interests caused by various sections of Barron’s book.[31] Mitrokhin’s revelations have doubtless led to even more damage assessments than Barron’s. There is already unattributable evidence of efforts by the SVR to ensure that no archivist ever again has the unrestricted access to files enjoyed by Mitrokhin.
Like the KGB First Chief Directorate, the SVR contains an “active measures” section, Department MS, specializing in disinformation, which was inevitably instructed to try to undermine the credibility of The Mitrokhin Archive.[32] On two occasions since the publication of the book, it has sent apparent Russian defectors to Western intelligence agencies, each with the same story about The Mitrokhin Archive. The SVR, claimed the “defectors,” had decided on a massive clear-out of redundant and retired agents which it had inherited from the KGB, and had therefore chosen a retired KGB archivist — Vasili Mitrokhin — to transmit their names to the West.[33] This poorly conceived active measure proved counter-productive for two reasons. First, a series of Western intelligence agencies had already been able to establish that Mitrokhin’s material was far too valuable to them for the SVR to have willingly made it available. Secondly, both the bogus “defectors” were quickly and conclusively exposed as SVR plants. The whole episode has merely served to underline the SVR’s deep anxiety at the damage to its agent operations caused by Mitrokhin’s material. Its mood will not have been lightened by the knowledge that there are many more revelations still to come in Volume Two. Mitrokhin’s ambition — unchanged for almost thirty years — remains to publish as much as possible of the top-secret material which he risked his life to collect.
ONE
THE MITROKHIN ARCHIVE
This book is based on unprecedented and unrestricted access to one of the world’s most secret and closely guarded archives—that of the foreign intelligence arm of the KGB, the First Chief Directorate (FCD). Hitherto the present Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki), has been supremely confident that a book such as this could not be written. When the German magazine Focus reported in December 1996 that a former KGB officer had defected to Britain with “the names of hundreds of Russian spies,” Tatyana Samolis, spokeswoman for the SVR, instantly ridiculed the whole 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!”1
The facts, however, are far more sensational even than the story dismissed as impossible by the SVR. The KGB defector had brought with him to Britain details not of a few hundred but of thousands of Soviet agents and intelligence officers in all parts of the globe, some of them “illegals” living under deep cover abroad, disguised as foreign citizens. No one who spied for the Soviet Union at any period between the October Revolution and the eve of the Gorbachev era can now be confident that his or her secrets are still secure. When the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) exfiltrated the defector and his family from Russia in 1992, it also brought out six cases containing the copious notes he had taken almost daily for twelve years, before his retirement in 1984, on top secret KGB files going as far back as 1918. The contents of the cases have since been described by the American FBI as “the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source.”
The KGB officer who assembled this extraordinary archive, Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin, is now a British citizen. Born in central Russia in 1922, he began his career as a Soviet foreign intelligence officer in 1948, at a time when the foreign intelligence arms of the MGB (the future KGB) and the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) were temporarily combined in the Committee of Information.2 By the time Mitrokhin was sent on his first foreign posting in 1952,3 the Committee had disintegrated and the MGB had resumed its traditional rivalry with the GRU. His first five years in intelligence were spent in the paranoid atmosphere generated by the final phase of Stalin’s dictatorship, when the intelligence agencies were ordered to conduct witch-hunts throughout the Soviet Bloc against mostly imaginary Titoist and Zionist conspiracies.
In January 1953 the MGB was officially accused of “lack of vigilance” in hunting down the conspirators. The Soviet news agency Tass made the sensational announcement that for the past few years world Zionism and Western intelligence agencies had been conspiring with “a terrorist group” of Jewish doctors “to wipe out the leadership of the Soviet Union.” During the final two months of Stalin’s rule, the MGB struggled to demonstrate its heightened vigilance by pursuing the perpetrators of this non-existent plot. Its anti-Zionist campaign was, in reality, little more than a thinly disguised anti-Semitic pogrom. Shortly before Stalin’s sudden death in March 1953, Mitrokhin was ordered to investigate the alleged Zionist connections of the Pravda correspondent in Paris, Yuri Zhukov, who had come under suspicion because of his wife’s Jewish origins. Mitrokhin had the impression that Stalin’s brutal security supremo, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, was planning to implicate Zhukov in the supposed Jewish doctors’ plot. A few weeks after Stalin’s funeral, however, Beria suddenly announced that the plot had never existed, and exonerated the alleged conspirators.
By the summer of 195
3 most of Beria’s colleagues in the Presidium were united in their fear of another conspiracy—that he might be planning a coup d’état to step into Stalin’s shoes. While visiting a foreign capital in July, Mitrokhin received a top secret telegram with instructions to decipher it himself, and was astonished to discover that Beria had been charged with “criminal anti-Party and anti-state activities.” Only later did Mitrokhin learn that Beria had been arrested at a special meeting of the Presidium on June 26 after a plot organized by his chief rival, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. From his prison cell, Beria wrote begging letters to his former colleagues, pleading pathetically for them to spare his life and “find the smallest job for me”:
You will see that in two or three years I’ll have straightened out fine and will still be useful to you… I ask the comrades to forgive me for writing somewhat disjointedly and badly because of my condition, and also because of the poor lighting and not having my pince-nez.
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