Mitrokhin Archive


The "Mitrokhin Archive" is a collection of handwritten notes made secretly by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin during his thirty years as a KGB archivist in the foreign intelligence service and the First Chief Directorate. When he defected to the United Kingdom in 1992 he brought the archive with him.
The official historian of MI5, Christopher Andrew, wrote two books, The Sword and the Shield and The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, based on material in the archives. The books purport to provide details about many of the Soviet Union's clandestine intelligence operations around the world.
In July 2014, the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College released Mitrokhin's edited Russian-language notes for public research. The original handwritten notes by Vasili Mitrokhin are still classified.

Investigations after publication of the books

The publication of the books prompted parliamentary inquiries in the UK, Italy, and India.

UK inquiry

After the first book was published in the UK, an inquiry was held by the House of Commons' Intelligence and Security Committee. Its findings, "The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report", were presented to Parliament in June 2000.
The Committee expressed concern that the Secret Intelligence Service knew the names of some spies years before the publication of the book, but took a decision, without informing the proper prosecuting authorities, not to prosecute them. This decision, ISC believed, was for the Law Officers to take, not the SIS. The ISC interviewed Mitrokhin. He was not content with the way the book was published, he told them, and felt he had not accomplished what he intended when writing the notes. He wished that he had retained "full control over the handling of his material".
SIS stated that they were clearing the UK chapters with the Home Secretary and the Attorney General, as required before publication of the book, but, the Committee found, they did not do so. In addition, ISC thought, "misleading stories were allowed to receive wide circulation", and the Committee found that SIS had handled neither the publication nor related media matters appropriately.

Italy inquiry

In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, who was Prime Minister at the time, established the Mitrokhin Commission in 2002 to investigate information about the KGB connections in Italy claimed in the Mitrokhin Archives. However, after not being able to verify any of the information in the book, he tried to use the Commission as a political tool against members of the Italian Left by setting them up. The Mitrokhin Commission ended in a scandal, and without evidence to tie any Italian politician. An Italian minister said that the archive "is not a dossier from the KGB but one about the KGB constructed by British counter-espionage agents based on the confession of an ex-agent, if there is one, and 'Mitrokhin' is just a codename for an MI5 operation."

India inquiry

In India, a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, L. K. Advani, requested of the Government a white paper to file defamation suits against Christopher Andrew. The spokesperson of the Indian Congress party referred to the book as "pure sensationalism not even remotely based on facts or records" and pointed out that the book is not based on official records from the Soviet Union.

Origin of the notes

Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin originally started his career with the First Chief Directorate of the KGB in Undercover operations. After Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech, Mitrokhin became critical of the existing KGB system and was transferred from Operations to the Archives. Over the years, Mitrokhin became increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, especially after the stories about the struggles of dissidents and the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which led him to conclude that the Soviet system was un-reformable."
By the late 1960s, the KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka Building became increasingly overcrowded, and the Chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, authorized the construction of a new building outside of Moscow in Yasenevo, which was to become the new headquarters of the First Chief Directorate and all Foreign Operations. Mitrokhin, who was by that time the head of the Archives department, was assigned by the director of the First Directorate, Vladimir Kryuchkov, with the task of cataloging the documents and overseeing their orderly transfer to the new Headquarters. The transfer of the massive archive eventually took over 12 years, from 1972 to 1984.
Unbeknownst to Kryuchkov and the KGB, while cataloging the documents, Mitrokin secretly took his own copies and immensely detailed notes of the documents which he smuggled to his dacha and hid under the floorboards. Mitrokhin made no attempt to contact any Western intelligence service during the Soviet Era. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union he traveled to Latvia with copies of material from the archive and walked into the American embassy in Riga. Central Intelligence Agency officers there did not consider him to be credible, concluding that the copied documents could be faked. He then went to the British embassy and a young diplomat there saw his potential. After a further meeting one month later with representatives of MI6, operations followed to retrieve the 25,000 pages of files hidden in his house, covering operations from as far back as the 1930s.

Content of the notes

Notes in the Mitrokhin Archive claim that more than half of the Soviet Union's weapons are based on US designs, that the KGB tapped Henry Kissinger's telephone when he was US Secretary of State, and had spies in place in almost all US defense contractor facilities. The notes allege that some 35 senior politicians in France worked for the KGB during the Cold War. In West Germany, the KGB was said to have infiltrated the major political parties, the judiciary, and the police. Large-scale sabotage preparations were supposedly made against the US, Canada, and elsewhere in case of war, including hidden weapons caches; several have been removed or destroyed by police relying on Mitrokhin's information.

Prominent KGB spies named in the files

Christopher Andrew states that in the Mitrokhin Archive there are several Latin American leaders or members of left wing parties accused of being KGB informants or agents. For example, FSLN leader Carlos Fonseca Amador was described as "a trusted agent" in KGB files. Nikolai Leonov was Sub-Director of the Latin American Department of the KGB between 1968–1972. In 1998 he gave a lecture where he made statements that contradicted these claims. For instance he said that the KGB was not allowed to recruit members from Communist or other left wing parties.
Daniel Ortega agreed to "unofficial meetings" with KGB officers. He gave Nikolai Leonov a secret program of the Sandinista movement, which stated the FSLN's intent to lead class struggle in Central America, in alliance with Cuba and the Soviet bloc. However, Leonov stated that he became friends with many Latin Americans including some leaders, and that he and other Soviets supported the struggles of left wing groups. But he clarifies that he did not let people know that he was a KGB agent and that his relationships with them did not involve intelligence.

Middle Eastern figures accused of being informants or agents of the KGB

On September 2016, a work by two researchers stated that Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian National Authority, worked for the Soviet intelligence agency. According to a recently released document from the Mitrokhin Archive, entitled "KGB developments – Year 1983", Abbas apparently worked under the code name "Krotov", starting early 1980s.

KGB operations revealed in the files

Andrew described the following active measures by the KGB against the United States:
According to Mitrokhin's notes, Soviet security organizations played key roles in establishing puppet Communist governments in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan. Their strategy included mass political repressions and establishing subordinate secret police services at the occupied territories.
The KGB director Yuri Andropov took suppression of anti-Communist liberation movements personally. In 1954, he became the Soviet Ambassador to Hungary, and was present during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. After these events, Andropov had a "Hungarian complex":
Andropov played a key role in crushing the Hungarian Revolution. He convinced reluctant Nikita Khrushchev that military intervention was necessary. He convinced Imre Nagy and other Hungarian leaders that the Soviet government had not ordered an attack on Hungary while the attack was beginning. The Hungarian leaders were arrested and Nagy was executed.
During the Prague Spring events in Czechoslovakia, Andropov was a vigorous proponent of "extreme measures". He ordered the fabrication of false intelligence not only for public consumption, but also for the Soviet Politburo. "The KGB whipped up the fear that Czechoslovakia could fall victim to NATO aggression or to a coup." At that moment, Soviet intelligence officer Oleg Kalugin reported from Washington that he had gained access to "absolutely reliable documents proving that neither CIA nor any other agency was manipulating the Czechoslovak reform movement." But, Kalugin's messages were destroyed because they contradicted the conspiracy theory fabricated by Andropov. Andropov ordered many active measures, collectively known as operation PROGRESS, against Czechoslovak reformers.

Assassinations attempts and plots

The book describes establishing the "Moscow Patriarchate" on order from Stalin in 1943 as a front organization for the NKVD, and later, for the KGB. All key positions in the Church, including bishops, were approved by the Ideological Department of CPSU and by the KGB. The priests were used as agents of influence in the World Council of Churches and in front organizations such as World Peace Council, Christian Peace Conference, and the Rodina Society founded by the KGB in 1975. The future Russian Patriarch Alexius II said that Rodina was created to "maintain spiritual ties with our compatriots" and to help organize them. According to the archive, Alexius worked for the KGB as agent DROZDOV, and received an honorary citation from the agency for a variety of services.

Support of international Liberation Movements

The Andrew and Mitrokhin publications briefly describe the history of the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, who established close collaboration with the Romanian Securitate service and the KGB in the early 1970s. The KGB provided secret training for PLO guerrillas. However, the main KGB activities and arms shipments were channeled through Wadie Haddad of the PFLP organization, who usually stayed in a KGB dacha BARVIKHA-1 during his visits to the Soviet Union. Led by Carlos the Jackal, a group of PFLP fighters carried out a spectacular raid on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries office in Vienna in 1975. Advance notice of this operation "was almost certainly" given to the KGB.
Many notable operations are alleged to have been conducted by the KGB to support international terrorists with weapons on the orders from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, including:
In 2002, the Italian Parliament, then led by Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing coalition, the Casa delle Libertà, created a commission, presided over by Senator Paolo Guzzanti to investigate alleged KGB ties to opposition figures in Italian politics. The commission was shut down in 2006 without having developed any new concrete evidence beyond the original information in the Mitrokhin Archive. However, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko said that he had been informed by FSB deputy chief, General Anatoly Trofimov, that "Romano Prodi is our man ".
A British Member of the European Parliament for London, Gerard Batten of United Kingdom Independence Party, demanded a new inquiry into the allegations.

Preparations for large-scale sabotage in the West

Notes in the archive describe extensive preparations for large-scale sabotage operations against the United States, Canada, and Europe in the event of war, although none was recorded as having been carried out, beyond creating weapons and explosives caches in assorted foreign countries. This information has been corroborated in general by GRU defectors, Victor Suvorov and Stanislav Lunev. The operations included the following:
The historian Joseph Persico wrote that "several of the much-publicized revelations , however, hardly qualify as such. For instance, the authors tell how the K.G.B. forged a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald to E. Howard Hunt, the former C.I.A. officer and later Watergate conspirator, in order to implicate the C.I.A. in the Kennedy assassination. Actually, this story surfaced in Henry Hurt's Reasonable Doubt, written 13 years ago. Similarly, the story that the K.G.B. considered schemes for breaking the legs of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev for defecting to the West was first reported in a book written six years ago." And he added that "it does seem odd that a key K.G.B. archivist never had access to a copying machine, but had to copy thousands of pages in longhand. Still, the overall impact of this volume is convincing, though none of the material will send historians scurrying to rewrite their books."
The Central European Review described Mitrokhin and Andrew's work as "fascinating reading for anyone interested in the craft of espionage, intelligence gathering and its overall role in 20th-century international relations," offering "a window on the Soviet worldview and, as the ongoing Hanssen case in the United States clearly indicates, how little Russia has relented from the terror-driven spy society it was during seven inglorious decades of Communism."
David L. Ruffley, from the Department of International Programs, United States Air Force Academy, said that the material "provides the clearest picture to date of Soviet intelligence activity, fleshing out many previously obscure details, confirming or contradicting many allegations and raising a few new issues of its own" and "sheds new light on Soviet intelligence activity that, while perhaps not so spectacular as some expected, is nevertheless significantly illuminating."
Reg Whitaker, a professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto, gave a review at the Intelligence Forum about the book where he wrote that "The Mitrokhin Archive arrives from a cache under a Russian dacha floor, courtesy of the British intelligence community itself, and its chosen historian, Chris Andrew" and that the book "is remarkably restrained and reasonable in its handling of Westerners targeted by the KGB as agents or sources. The individuals outed by Mitrokhin appear to be what he says they were, but great care is generally taken to identify those who were unwitting dupes or, in many instances, uncooperative targets.
Jack Straw stated to the British Parliament in 1999: "In 1992, after Mr. Mitrokhin had approached the UK for help, our Secret Intelligence Service made arrangements to bring Mr. Mitrokhin and his family to this country, together with his archive. As there were no original KGB documents or copies of original documents, the material itself was of no direct evidential value, but it was of huge value for intelligence and investigative purposes. Thousands of leads from Mr. Mitrokhin's material have been followed up worldwide. As a result, our intelligence and security agencies, in co-operation with allied Governments, have been able to put a stop to many security threats. Many unsolved investigations have been closed; many earlier suspicions confirmed; and some names and reputations have been cleared. Our intelligence and security agencies have assessed the value of Mr. Mitrokhin's material world wide as immense."
The author Joseph Trento commented that "we know the Mitrokhin material is real because it fills in the gaps in Western files on major cases through 1985. Also, the operational material matches western electronic intercepts and agent reports. What MI6 got for a little kindness and a pension was the crown jewels of Russian intelligence."
Scholar Amy Knight said that "While The Sword and the Shield contains new information... none of it has much significance for broader interpretations of the Cold War. The main message the reader comes away with after plowing through almost a thousand pages is the same one gleaned from the earlier books: the Soviets were incredibly successful, albeit evil, spymasters, and none of the Western services could come close to matching their expertise. Bravo the KGB."

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