The Mitrokhin Archive: The Kgb in Europe And the West - Softcover

Andrew, Christopher; Mitrokhin, Vasili

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140295593 ISBN 13: 9780140295597

Publisher: Penguin, 2000

Synopsis

The Mitrokhin Archive tells for the first time in full the startling story of Soviet attempts to infiltrate the West. Working from Vasili Mitrokhin's archive and his own unrivalled expertise in the history of intelligence, Christopher Andrew has created an extraordinary picture of a USSR committed to covert activity at home and abroad to maintain Communism. From technological espionage to the cultivation of agents of influence, the KGB's methods ranged from financial inducements through sexual blackmail to assassination as they pursued their aims. What emerges is a state apparatus devoted to - even obsessed by - gathering information yet quite incapable of analysing it realistically.

About this title

Review:

Derived from 30,000 top-secret files of the KGB's Foreign Intelligence Service, The Mitrokhin Archive has sparked controversy in Whitehall and Fleet Street. It has also made Melita Norwood--Britain's grandmother-spy--an overnight media celebrity. This huge book is the result of a collaboration between Vasili Mitrokhin, a former senior officer of the Soviet Foreign Intelligence Service, and Christopher Andrew, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and Chair of the Faculty of History at Cambridge University.

Mitrokhin defected to the UK in 1992, bringing with him notes and classified files he had smuggled out of the Soviet foreign intelligence archives. The authors reveal that Norwood was more highly valued by the Soviets as a spy than the more famous Kim Philby. She passed on technical information that had enabled the Russians to build their own atomic bomb. As an employee at the British Non- Ferrous Metals Research Association, she passed on top- secret files on the Tube Alloys (atomic bomb) project. But Norwood was not alone in being approached to spy for the Soviets--others were MPs Tom Driberg and Raymond Fletcher. The book also records a misguided attempt at recruiting Sir Harold Wilson.

The soviets may have been masters at collecting intelligence, but The Mitrokhin Archive shows their inability to interpret the information they received. It's an exhaustive but riveting read--and there's a promise of a second volume. --Susan Sheph

About the Author:

Christopher Andrew is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and former Chair of the Faculty of History at Cambridge University. He is also chair of the British Intelligence Study Group, Founding Co-Editor of Intelligence and National Security, former Visiting Professor at Harvard, Toronto and the Australian National University, and a regular presenter of BBC Radio and TV documentaries. His most recent book, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5, was a major international bestseller. His fifteen previous books include The Mitrokhin Archive volumes 1 and 2, and a number of path-breaking studies on the use and abuse of secret intelligence in modern history.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0140295593
• ISBN 13: 9780140295597
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1056