From Russia with a secret
The KGB building on Lubyanka in the 1970s
A man with a bag
On March 24, 1992, a scruffy-looking, grey-haired elderly man with a tattered travel bag approached the doors of the British Embassy in Vilnius, introduced himself as Vasily Mitrokhin, and asked to speak to a member of the diplomatic staff.
The British Embassy in Vilnius. The British Embassy opened in Vilnius in October 1991, following the recognition of Lithuania's independence on August 27, 1991. The Embassy also represents 14 British Overseas Territories.
Simply put, Vasily Mitrokhin was a former officer of the KGB's First Chief Directorate (intelligence), who worked in its archives and occupied one of the less prestigious, but no less important, positions in the Soviet intelligence service's hierarchy. He held this position for many years, and during that time, countless documents and files on the KGB's inner workings passed through his hands.
The man claimed to have important information, and he had previously made similar requests at the US Embassy, but the Americans wouldn't listen, believing it was another provocation by the newly established Russian intelligence service. The British, as usual, offered him tea and were willing to listen to him, despite his appearance. The truth was that he was extremely nervous and unsure whether they were taking him seriously or understanding the value of the documents he was offering them, for they weren't just documents. They were story!
Secrets Hidden in a Bag
The British diplomat demanded proof, and Mitrokhin produced some of the documents he had, which contained details of the most closely guarded secrets of Soviet intelligence.
He couldn't say how he'd gotten them—who would have believed it was possible to steal an entire secret service archive? He explained to the diplomat that what he had in front of him was just a sample, and that in Moscow he had many more documents on Australia, Canada, India, Israel, and Latin American countries, listing hundreds of KGB agents and their contacts, with code names and details that would allow them to be easily identified. And, of course, the documents contained information on all KGB operations in Britain itself! In total, he had 25,000 notes in Moscow…
The notes presented by the strange man were fascinating. But also as strange as the man himself. He may have once worked for the KGB, but what he presented weren't official documents—rather, they were handwritten and typewritten copies of existing archive files. But be that as it may, how did he get them?
He said he lived in Russia and had once served in the KGB archives as an archivist with the rank of major. So, after a quick review, it became clear that the documents he had brought were not the usual junk offered by small-time agents looking to make a buck or fantasists, but valuable nuggets from the gold mine of the Soviet secret service…
The owner of these nuggets had only two conditions for the British MI6The first was a guarantee of asylum for him and his family in Britain. The second condition was more unexpected: he wanted the materials he provided to be published. He didn't want them locked away in a secret vault and studied in secret. The entire purpose of the journey (in his words) and all the risks it took were spent solely on bringing the truth to the world...
At the next meeting, about a month later, Mitrokhin reappeared in Vilnius, bringing with him about 2000 more documents. A high-ranking MI6 official, specially flown in from London, reviewed the materials and realized that the man sitting before him was nothing less than a veritable treasure trove of intelligence information.
Having confirmed the relative authenticity of the documents, British intelligence MI6 launched a covert operation to smuggle Mitrokhin and his family to Britain. They arrived with the KGB's most important secrets—tens of thousands of documents that Mitrokhin had copied and hidden in milk cans and jars at his dacha outside Moscow. Only a few in Britain, including then-Prime Minister John Major, who personally approved the operation, knew about it.
Echo of revelations
Experts MI6 They immediately began analyzing the documents and uncovered more and more revelations related to the expropriated archive. The documents spanned the period from the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to the beginning of the Gorbachev era in the late 1980s and contained details of KGB operations in most countries of the world!
The list revealed in Mitrokhin's documents remains astounding. Among them:
1. The wiretapping of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, stolen American nuclear secrets and incredibly deep and in-depth penetration into the political leadership of Germany and France.
2. Operation Cedar was the largest sabotage operation to blow up the Hungry Horse Dam (Hungry Horse Dam), the largest electrical grid in the world, with the aim of cutting off power to New York City, the largest metropolis in the United States. Simultaneous explosions were intended to reverberate throughout the city itself, causing panic and destabilizing the situation in the United States.
3. A highly critical report on Pope John Paul II, whom the KGB labeled a "dangerous anti-communist" and tried to discredit.
4. Arson attacks on oil and gas pipelines in Canada would disrupt the supply of fuel to American power plants.
5. A massive wiretapping operation in the 1970s and 1980s that provided the KGB with a vast amount of intelligence on everything from the conversations of high-ranking American officials to key projects and plans of the American weapons.
6. The recruitment of two members of the Israeli Knesset, one of whom is a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, the other an IDF general who recently served in the General Staff.
7. Recruitment of Rosario Castellanos, the Mexican ambassador to Israel and a renowned poet in her home country.
8. A large body of information about Guy Burgess, a British diplomat and Soviet double agent who briefly worked in MI6 and was part of the Cambridge Five intelligence network. The Mitrokhinsky archive shows that Burgess passed on a huge number of top secret documents to the KGB.
9. In Britain, Melita Norwood, who had been passing secret documents to the USSR for 40 years, Tom Driberg, Raymond Fletcher and Neil Kinnock, members of the British Parliament from the Labour Party, were exposed.
10Claude Estier, the former leader of the French Socialist Party and confidant of former President François Mitterrand, has been revealed to have collaborated with the KGB.
11. Robert Lipka, a former employee of the US National Security Agency, was exposed (according to other sources, he was betrayed by General O. Kalugin, who now lives in the USA).
12. Planning a "road accident" for Rudolf Nureyev, who defected to the West in 1961.
13. Due to the format of the article, many political figures in Asia and Europe who worked for the KGB are not listed here...
A disillusioned Soviet archivist
Mitrokhin's (1922-2004) story is fascinating. This mid-level officer, after graduating from university law school, joined the intelligence service after World War II. He worked undercover abroad, but the turning point in his life occurred at the 1956 Olympics in Australia, where his mission was to prevent any attempts by Western intelligence agencies to contact Soviet athletes and persuade them to defect to the West.
He performed so poorly on the assignment that he was removed from operational duties and transferred to the archival unit, with the understanding that he would never serve in the field again. It was a dead-end job, where his career was doomed.
Vasily Nikitich Mitrokhin (1922-2004)
Later, assessing his actions, Mitrokhin, like any such scoundrel, also attempted to provide an ideological basis for his betrayal: after N. S. Khrushchev's famous speech at the 20th Party Congress, Mitrokhin allegedly became disillusioned with the Soviet system, but he still continued to hope that the existing Soviet system could somehow be reformed.
Note. The British newspaper The Guardian, trying to portray Mitrokhin as a fiery human rights activist, wrote: “The first five years of his work were overshadowed by the paranoid, final phase of the Stalin era, when he and his colleagues were ordered to devote most of their energies to finding so-called Zionist and Titoite conspirators, whose largely non-existent plots across the Soviet bloc haunted the battered mind of the ageing dictator.”
But when “socialism with a human face” emerged in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Soviet Tanks When Mitrokhin entered Prague to restore what he considered a "neo-Stalinist one-party state," he concluded that the system was beyond reform and must be replaced. Although he never considered openly joining the dissident movement in the USSR, a plan to compile his own personal archive of the KGB's foreign operations gradually began to take shape in his mind. At great personal risk, he began secretly removing various documents from the archives.
Forbidden Scrolls
When in 1972, when the KGB's First Chief Directorate (intelligence) was moving from the Lubyanka building to a new complex in the Yasenevo district of southwest Moscow, Mitrokhin decided his time had come. By the time the move to the new complex began, the fifty-year-old Mitrokhin had immersed himself in monotonous work, finding himself in charge of a special document relocation project. All KGB archives were to be moved from the old building of the legendary Lubyanka, which, as the joke goes, is the tallest building in the world because Siberia could be seen from its basement, in a newly built complex.
The KGB building on Dzerzhinsky Square (now Lubyanka Square)
Thousands of intelligence files, hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, reports, and analytical reports had to be transported from central Moscow out of the city. This is how the traitor gained unlimited access to everything classified as "Top Secret." For several years, he even had two offices for convenience: one in the old building on Lubyanka Square, the other in Yasenevo.
The headquarters of the First Main Directorate of the KGB (intelligence) in Yasenevo (now the SVR), which was often called the "Soviet Langley"
And while he was cataloging and organizing the documents sent from one archive to another, he began reading them, and then began copying everything that came across his desk by hand. Page after page. Word after word. Like a monk a thousand years ago, copying manuscripts by candlelight in his cell...
Note. Copiers weren't readily available back then. Although they existed in the Soviet Union, access to them was quite difficult. Using them required special permission, and they typically had security features, such as printing a second copy that was placed in a special locked compartment, which was then inspected by security personnel.
Mitrokhin was personally appointed by V. A. Kryuchkov, then head of intelligence, to be responsible for the transfer of more than 300,000 files from the Lubyanka to Yasenevo, where he was to individually check each file. Mitrokhin oversaw this labor-intensive process, inspecting and verifying every set of documents sent to Yasenevo. This meant that he would see and learn more secrets from the KGB's foreign intelligence documents than anyone else, since no one other than the KGB's top brass had such complete access to the entire archive.
Shadow over the font
He began his immersion in the secret documents cautiously, while still in Lubyanka. At first, he tried to simply memorize key facts, limiting himself to names, nicknames, and biographical details, and wrote them down at home when he returned from duty. Then he began writing tiny notes, using his personal code in his letters. He never took the documents themselves out of the complex, only what he copied by hand, and, of course, he never used a camera or a copy machine.
Later, having grown bolder, he began copying everything he considered valuable right in his office, crumpling up the written sheets and throwing them in the trash can in case anyone happened to look in—and he always had an alibi. And in the evening, when he went home, he would take the crumpled papers out of the trash can and hide them in his shoes.
Mitrokhin copied secrets from operational files into a school notebook
Over the years, he became convinced that security, both at Yasenevo and Lubyanka, never resorted to personal searches of employees leaving the building. At worst, they'd occasionally glance at their briefcases, after which he began stuffing the papers into his pockets. And in 12 years of secretly copying documents, he was indeed never searched on the way out! And, as mentioned above, when he returned home, he copied his encrypted scribbles into school notebooks, organizing the documents by country, period, and residency.
He even had access to the sacred relics of the foreign intelligence archives—to files revealing the true identities of an elite unit of KGB illegal spies who lived under assumed names abroad, posing as law-abiding citizens.
A sheet of paper from a notebook with notes
And every weekend Mitrokhin would come to his dacha near Moscow, put what he had written during the week into a milk can and jars, and then bury it all in a secluded place...
Note. The materials he collected eventually filled six suitcases. These included materials on KGB foreign operations, the names of KGB officers, agents, and informants, as well as reports from Soviet intelligence officers. These documents, in particular, speak of clandestine arsenals of weapons and communications equipment hidden throughout Europe and potentially used by Soviet agents operating abroad.
In 1986, after twelve years of secretly copying documents, Mitrokhin retired and began searching for ways to smuggle his treasures to the West. His moment came when the Soviet Union collapsed, the old structures crumbled, borders opened, and a window of opportunity opened for him!
And in 1992 he received permission to vacation in Lithuania…
Echoes of betrayal
As a result of a thorough examination of these documents, KGB (SVR) undercover agents were arrested, covert operational methods were exposed, and intelligence operations—some of which had been underway for years—were thwarted. The ensuing intelligence scandal affected not only the United States and Europe but also Israel, although most of Mitrokhin's documents on the KGB's extensive activities in Israel have never been published before. It is estimated that Mitrokhin's documents have exposed approximately 1000 agents worldwide to date!
And when this private archive came to the West, MI6 and the FBI described it as "the most comprehensive and extensive intelligence information ever obtained from any source."
Note. Four years after Mitrokhin's arrival in the UK, the story of his documents leaked to European media and caused a major stir. At first, the SVR, created from the KGB's First Directorate, tried to downplay the event and even ridicule the documents, but as the media provided more and more details, there was no longer any doubt that this was one of the largest leaks in intelligence history.
The leaked "Mitrokhin Archive," as it was dubbed by Western media, led to resignations, arrests, and several court cases around the world, although it is now generally accepted that around 300 illegal agents, planted during the Soviet era, still reside in the UK and America, whose identities have not yet been publicly identified.
The Shadow of a Traitor in Binding
Already living under cover and a false name in Great Britain, Mitrokhin began collaborating with Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew (yes, the same one who helped write the memoirs of the traitor O. Gordievsky) on the book “The Mitrokhin Archives,” published by Allen Lane/Penguin called "Sword and Shield" (The Sword and the Shield). His escape was kept strictly secret until 1999, when the book was published, and then continued to be serialized on the front page of a London newspaper. The Times.
The key documents describing the Mitrokhin archive—a vast collection of secretly smuggled KGB files—are those of intelligence historian Christopher Andrew and archivist Vasily Mitrokhin. These volumes allegedly contain comprehensive information on all Soviet intelligence operations worldwide.
And after Mitrokhin's death, in 2005, Christopher Andrew published another book, The World Went Our Way: The KGB and the Struggle for the Third World (The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World).
Under the sign of dust
This whole story is so extraordinary that it's difficult to take it at face value. It's a truly stunning intelligence breakthrough in the entire history of the Cold War, even though it occurred after the ideological standoff had ended—a time when various intelligence services around the world were just beginning to realize that the world around them was changing beyond recognition!
It should be noted right away that not all information contained in the documents can be published. British intelligence banned the publication of several important documents concerning Israel and the United States, as Israeli and American military censors also had a say in what could and could not be published. And, apparently, the insistence of these two intelligence services on preventing the publication of certain details, even though the information comes from KGB archives, testifies, above all, to the importance of these details, even years after the events.
Note. A fascinating story is that of a certain Richard Tomlinson, an MI6 officer involved in the recovery of the "Mitrokhin Archive," who was imprisoned in 1997 for merely attempting to publish a book about his career. His version of events is unknown, and it's unclear why MI6 so persistently tried to prevent him from writing his memoirs and persecuted him.
After a thorough review, thousands of leads derived from Mitrokhin's materials were verified worldwide, resulting in intelligence agencies, in cooperation with NATO allied governments, being able to eliminate numerous threats to their security. At the same time, many unsolved investigations were closed, many previous suspicions were confirmed, and several names and reputations were cleared.
Moreover, not the entire KGB archive was removed, only what Mitrokhin deemed important, and only what he was able to copy given the time and opportunity, as many cases are not mentioned at all in these files. And since the original KGB documents, or even copies of the original documents, did not exist, the materials themselves had no direct evidentiary value, but were of enormous value to the intelligence services.
The importance of the information contained in the Mitrokhin documents can be judged by the statement of one of the MI6 officers who participated in the study of the "Mitrokhin Archive":
…if the head of the KGB himself had fled to the West, he would have possessed far less classified information…
Here's what David Murphy, head of the CIA's Soviet division, had to say about these archives:
I have no information about the background of the Vasily Mitrokhin case, but knowing from personal experience the circumstances of some of the KGB operations mentioned in Christopher Andrew and Mitrokhin's book, I believe that the materials Mitrokhin took out are quite accurate.
Conclusion
Now the documents taken out by Mitrokhin are in the public domain at the Churchill Archives Centre (Churchill Archives Centre) in Cambridge, where they are kept alongside the personal papers of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Mitrokhin himself spoke of the importance of the documents stored there:
There are only two places in the world where such materials can be found. One is the KGB archive, which is closed to the public and very difficult to access, and the other is Churchill College, where these handwritten notes are now open for public viewing.
The Churchill Archive Centre (CAC) at Churchill College, University of Cambridge is one of the largest repositories in the United Kingdom for the preservation and study of contemporary personal papers.
It's difficult to judge today what exactly motivated this traitor, who spent twelve years copying valuable information from Soviet intelligence archives. Mitrokhin's motives remain a subject of heated debate, although, in my opinion, even complete disillusionment with the Soviet system could never have served as a reason to betray one's homeland. And, of course, none of this has anything to do with the patriotism Mitrokhin himself so falsely spoke of in an interview in the West.
In closing, it must be said that life in Britain was difficult for Mitrokhin, who lived in fear of persecution from his former colleagues. He spoke little English, had few friends, and was devastated by the death of his wife, Nina, in 1999. Interviewers even noted a sadness hovering over him.
In the photo on the left: V. N. Mitrokhin with his wife Nina
Note. Official representatives of the Foreign Intelligence Service never commented on the damage the traitor inflicted on our country. Moreover, they cast doubt on the entire story of the theft and export of classified documents...
The article was written based on materials from Russian and foreign newspapers and magazines.
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