Intelligence

KGB defector who handed over file archive dies at 82

By Michael Evans, Defence Editor

VASILI MITROKHIN, the former KGB archivist who handed MI6 thousands of top-secret documents that were smuggled out of Moscow when he defected in 1992, has died at the age of 82.

He was responsible for one of the most remarkable intelligence coups for decades. His material, copies of KGB foreign intelligence documents that he had scribbled down over 12 years, exposed extensive Cold War Soviet subversive operations around the world during seven decades.

Intelligence experts said that the material provided an unprecedented insight into how the KGB and the Soviet Communist Party had worked.

When he decided to defect, MI6 intelligence officers removed him, his family and six large cases of secret material to a safe house in Britain.

Mr Mitrokhin first tried to defect to the Americans. In 1991, with the break-up of the Soviet Union, he took samples of his notes and boarded an overnight train for Latvia, which had become independent. He went to the US Embassy in Riga, the capital but there were so many Russians requesting visas that he left and tried the British Embassy. There he showed a young woman diplomat his copied documents and promised to return a month later with more. At his next visit he brought 2,000 typed documents to show to MI6 intelligence officers. He had hidden the papers under his dacha after retiring in 1984.

He visited London in September 1992 and agreed to defect. He left Moscow for the last time on November 7, travelling by train to Riga, from where MI6 officers escorted him to Britain. The details of his journey remain classified.

The defection was kept secret for seven years. In 1995, MI6 invited the Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew to its headquarters, where he met Mr Mitrokhin and agreed to collaborate with him in writing a history of the KGB based on the secret material. But it was not until 1999 that the extraordinary story of the KGB archivist was made public when the 996-page book he had written with Professor Andrew, The Mitrokhin Archive, was published.

Mr Mitrokhin's wife, Nina, died in 1999. They had a son, who survives. A private funeral will be held.

January 31, 2004 at 01:18 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home