Intelligence

Vasili Mitrokhin

KGB archivist who escaped to Britain and presented to the world an unprecedented insight into the workings of the Soviet system

One of the most spectacular defectors from Russia in terms of the “product” he brought with him when he came over in 1992, Vasili Mitrokhin first erupted into the public’s consciousness in September 1999 with the publication of his book The Mitrokhin Archive, written with Professor Christopher Andrew. Based on the unprecedented access he had had to KGB files through his work as the security organisation’s chief archivist from 1972 to 1984, this made a host of revelations about Soviet espionage and counter-espionage operations from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 onwards.

Among the most fascinating of these was the revelation that an octogenarian grandmother, Melita Norwood, had been betraying British nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union for a period of 40 years from 1937. Such a disclosure led to a public furore which ended only with the Attorney-General of the day advising the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, that at such a distance a prosecution would be �inappropriate�.

Then there was the so-called �Romeo agent�, John Symonds, a detective sergeant in the Metropolitan Police, who, according to the archive, had fled the country when faced with corruption charges and had been recruited by the KGB in Morocco. After KGB �charm� training, his job thereafter was to seduce the employees of foreign embassies, with a view to obtaining secret information.

Among other revelations by Mitrokhin were plans to disrupt the 1969 investiture of the Prince of Wales, making it look like an MI5 plot to discredit Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party; a plot to injure and disfigure the defected Russian ballet dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Natalya Makarova, thus wrecking their careers; and details of hidden Soviet arms caches scattered throughout Western Europe and the US, to be used by agents and their pro-Soviet accomplices in the event of a war.

The Mitrokhin Archive also paraded a host of big American names, ranging from Henry Kissinger, whose phone calls to President Nixon the KGB claimed to have tapped, to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter�s national security adviser, whom the KGB allegedly tried to recruit. At the other end of the scale were more spies, traitors and suspects: Robert Lipka, a clerk at the National Security Agency who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1960s and was jailed for 18 years; and Felix Bloch, the highest ranking State Department official ever to be investigated for espionage (he was sacked and stripped of his pension but the FBI never had enough evidence to charge him); as well as more detail about the familiar Burgess, Maclean and Philby.

It seemed an unprecedented treasure trove, as well as being a tremendous coup for British Intelligence. Mitrokhin had offered himself first to the CIA when leaving Russia via the Baltic States in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the US agency was so overrun with defectors, each of whom had exotic claims to make about his or her fundamental importance to Western intelligence, that it turned him down. He therefore approached a British embassy, was welcomed with open arms and passed on to the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) which brought him to London.

Sceptics nevertheless urged caution about the value of The Mitrokhin Archive. It was inevitably a heavily edited selection of Mitrokhin�s �six aluminium trunkfuls of notes� (some of which had been located by MI6 men after his departure from Moscow), worked on over a period of seven years. Some critics argued � the intelligence game being what it is � that the effect of the revelations was tendentious, that direct quotation was sparse, and that reference to specific documents was often absent.

Above all, the question was asked: what had led Mitrokhin to select and transcribe the particular documents he did � and what was he trying to prove? He had apparently become disillusioned with Communism in the early 1960s, when the changes promised by Khrushchev at the 20th party congress in 1956 had failed to materialise. Yet his defection, and the exposure of the evils of the Communist system, which he claimed as his goal, had had to wait for another 30 years, by which time that system had effectively ceased to exist � and had certainly ceased to be a threat to Western civilisation.

Nevertheless, The Mitrokhin Archive undoubtedly contained many vivid insights into the workings of the Soviet system, particularly at times when it came under pressures to which its ossified philosophy was not equal. Party reaction to the uncontrollable rumblings of the Solidarity period in Poland, for example, were vividly documented by the series of panic-stricken phone calls between the leadership and its servants in Warsaw.

Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin was born in 1922 in Yurasovo in Ryazan oblast (province), the second of five children. His childhood was spent partly in Yurasovo and partly in Moscow, depending on where his father, a decorator, could find work and his large family could obtain food. This tended to mean that Mitrokhin spent most winters in Yurasovo, which imbued in him a deep love of the countryside.

After his secondary education, Mitrokhin entered an artillery school. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 he moved to Kazakhstan, where he studied for a degree, graduating in law after first reading history. Towards the end of the war, Mitrokhin took his first job, in the military procurator�s office in Kharkov, Ukraine.

He then secured entry to the Higher Diplomatic Academy in Moscow, a three-year course, which ended with his recruitment in 1948 into the KI (Committee of Information), the name by which the Soviet external service was then known. In 1954 it was absorbed into the newly formed KGB (Committee of State Security).

Mitrokhin was shortly afterwards posted to the Middle East, an undercover assignment, which required extensive training and which lasted about three years until 1953. Back in the Moscow headquarters of the KGB, he was entrusted with operational work which involved occasional visits abroad under cover. In this capacity, he accompanied the Soviet team to the 1956 Olympic Games in Australia.

In the late 1950s, Mitrokhin was transferred from operational activities to the department responsible for the service�s archives. In this capacity he had a second foreign posting in East Berlin in the second half of the 1960s.

On his return to Moscow in 1972, he launched the project which was eventually to make available for public consumption the most comprehensive treasure trove of information from the KGB�s most secret files, stretching back to the time of the Bolshevik revolution, and covering most major aspects of the KGB�s work.

An idealistic Communist in his youth, Mitrokhin later claimed disillusionment at the failure of the Khrushchev reforms to take any meaningful shape. He maintained until the end of his life that he remained a communist at heart, but that this political philosophy had been corrupted by the Soviet leadership. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which he witnessed at fairly close quarters from East Berlin, also made a deep impact.

His extensive reading of KGB files brought home even more starkly to him the criminality of the regime for which he was working. He decided therefore to make his own record of the files under his control in the hope that one day this could be brought to the notice of the Russian public.

He began taking detailed notes of the files which passed across his desk daily, initially hiding these in his shoes to evade security checks. At weekends he would regularly go to his dacha outside Moscow, where he secreted his notes in metal containers in cavities under the ground floor.

His access to top secret information was significantly increased when it was decided to move the external intelligence service � the First Chief Directorate of the KGB � to new premises on the outskirts of Moscow in 1974. This meant that there was a thorough review of all files transferred to the new premises, overseen by Mitrokhin himself. These included the most secret of all the KGB�s files, in which details of Directorate S �illegals� operations were held.

After his retirement from the KGB in 1984, he set about sorting out his notes into coherent form. He had never really expected that his archive would see the light of day, but as the momentous political developments in the Soviet Union began to undermine the unity of the country and the power of both the Communist Party and the KGB, his hopes grew.

He made an exploratory trip to Sakhalin in the Far East to see whether it might be possible to make his way with his archive to Japan. He travelled to Karelia to examine whether he could slip over the border into Finland. Then with the formal break-up of the Soviet Union in late 1991 and the re-establishment of the three independent Baltic states, he made his way there in March 1992, and after offering himself unsuccessfully to the CIA, established contact with the Secret Intelligence Service. He was finally brought out with his family by SIS in November 1992.

Lengthy initial debriefings in London were followed by a decision to publish The Mitrokhin Archive, a collaboration with Professor Andrew, of Cambridge University, one of the foremost academic authorities on intelligence and security matters. The book, covering KGB activities in the West and in Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union itself, became an immediate international success on its publication in 1999. The FBI has described the archive as �the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source�.

Other publications followed. In 2002, the Cold War International Historical Project in Washington published on the internet Mitrokhin�s work on Afghanistan. In January 2002 a KGB Lexicon was published by Frank Cass. At the time of his death, Mitrokhin had completed several other works about which he was negotiating with publishers.

Mitrokhin was a shy man, intensely private, who shunned publicity. Dedicated to his family, he was devastated when his wife, Nina, a doctor, died of motor neuron disease in 1999. To close friends he was charming, kind and generous. At heart he remained a man of simple tastes, never happier than when he was eating his own home-prepared vegetable soup.

Mitrokhin�s health had been in decline in recent months, but typically he insisted on continuing to work until he contracted pneumonia, from which he died.

He is survived by a son.

Vasili Mitrokhin, former KGB archivist, was born on March 3, 1922. He died on January 23, 2004, aged 81.

January 31, 2004 at 01:15 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home