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black hardbound 8vo. 8º (octavo). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. fine cond. binding square & tight. covers clean. edges clean. minor wrinkling to bottom of last couple of pages, otherwise contents free of markings. dustwrapper in fine cond. not worn or torn or price clipped. nice clean copy. no library markings or store stamps, no stickers or bookplates, no names, no inking , no underlining, no remainder markings etc ~. first edition so stated. first printing ( # 1 in # line). xix+700p. glossy b&w photo illustrations. chronology. transliteration of russian names. 5 appendices. notes. bibliography. index. world history. russian history. soviet union. espionage. covert operations. cold war. secret societies. conspiracy theory. ~The Sword and the Shield gives us by far the most complete picture we have ever had of the KGB and its operations in the United States and Europe. It is based on an unprecedented, top~secret archive described by the FBI as "the most complete and extensive intelligence ever achieved from any source." The presence of this archive in the West represents a catastrophic hemorrhage of the KGB's secrets and reveals for the first time the full extent of its worldwide network. In 1992 the British Secret Intelligence Service exfiltrated from Russia a defector whose presence in the West has remained secret until the publication of this book. Vasili Mitrokhin worked for almost thirty years in the foreign intelligence archives of the KGB. In 1972 he was made responsible for moving these entire archives, including all the files on the KGB's deep~cover operatives, to new headquarters just outside Moscow. He was congratulated by the head of foreign intelligence, Vladimir Kryuchkov (later the ringleader of the 1991 Moscow coup), for his success in transferring the archives and his "irreproachable service to the state security authorities." Unknown to Kryuchkov, however, Mitrokhin spent over a decade making notes and transcripts of these highly classified files which, at enormous personal risk, he smuggled daily out of the archives and kept beneath his dacha floor. "Few KGB officers have ever spent so much time reading, let alone noting, foreign intelligence files," writes Christopher Andrew. In 1996 Tatyana Samolis, spokeswoman for the SVR, President Yeltsin's foreign intelligence service, dismissed a German report that a defector had reached Britain with the names of several hundred Soviet spies as "absolute nonsense." "That just doesn't happen," she said. ''Any defector could get the names of one, two, perhaps three agents~but not hundreds!" The facts, however, are far more sensational than the story dismissed by the SVR. No one who spied for the Soviet Union at any point between the Bolshevik Revolution and the 1980s can now be sure that his or her secrets are safe. Christopher Andrew has had exclusive access to both Mitrokhin and his archive, which is now in Britain. Supplementing this treasure trove of KGB secrets with extensive research in other archives, published and unpublished sources, he has written an extraordinary book which forces us to acknowledge that there was indeed an enemy~and that he was very much in our midst.
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