Mitrokhin Archive

UK inquiry

The publication of the books provoked parliamentary inquiries in the UK, Italy, and India. In the UK, the inquiry was conducted by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) after the first book was published in 1999, and it was named "The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report". The report was presented to the Parliament in June 2000. The Committee expressed concern because the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) knew the names of some spies years before the publication of the book, but decided not to prosecute them without informing the proper prosecuting authorities. The committee believed that this decision corresponded to the Law Offices, not to the SIS. The Committee also interviewed Vasili Mitrokhin, who told them that he was not content with the way the book was published, and that he felt he did not accomplish what he intended when writing the notes. He wished that "he had had full control over the handling of his material." The Committee also found that SIS had stated that they were clearing the UK chapters with the Home Secretary and the Attorney General as was required before publication of the book, but they did not do so. Additionally, the Committee thought "that misleading stories were allowed to receive wide circulation", and they found that SIS didn't handle the publication and the media matters appropriately.

Italy inquiry

In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, who was Prime Minister at the time, established the Mitrokhin Commission in 2002 to investigate information about the KGB connections in Italy claimed in the Mitrokhin Archives. However, after not being able to verify any of the information in the book, he tried to use the Commission as a political tool against members of the Italian Left by setting them up. The Mitrokhin Commission ended in a scandal, and without evidence to tie any Italian politician. An Italian minister said that the archive "is not a dossier from the KGB but one about the KGB constructed by British counter-espionage agents based on the confession of an ex-agent, if there is one, and 'Mitrokhin' is just a codename for an MI5 operation".

India inquiry

In India, a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, L. K. Advani, requested the Government a white paper to file defamation suits against Christopher Andrew. The spokesperson of the Indian Congress party referred to the book as "pure sensationalism not even remotely based on facts or records" and pointed that the book is not based on official records from the Soviet Union.

Italian Mitrokhin Commission

In 2002 the Italian Parliament, then led by Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing coalition, the Casa delle Libertà, created a commission, presided over by Senator Paolo Guzzanti (Forza Italia) to investigate alleged KGB ties to opposition figures in Italian politics. The commission was shut down in 2006 without having developed any new concrete evidence beyond the original information in the Mitrokhin Archive. However, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko said that he had been informed by FSB deputy chief, General Anatoly Trofimov (who was shot dead in Moscow in 2005), that "Romano Prodi is our man [in Italy]".

A British Member of the European Parliament for London, Gerard Batten of United Kingdom Independence Party, demanded a new inquiry into the allegations. A report by the Conflict Studies Research Centre of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom from May 2007 noted that Trofimov was never the head of the FSB, which did not oversee intelligence operations, had never worked in the intelligence directorate of the KGB or its successor the SVR, nor had he worked in the counterintelligence department of the intelligence services, nor had he ever worked in Italy, making it difficult to understand how Trofimov would have had knowledge about such a recruitment. Henry Plater-Zyberk, the co-author of the report, suggested that Trofimov was "conveniently dead", so "could neither confirm nor deny the story." He noted Litvinenko's history of making accusations without evidence to back them up.

Preparations for large-scale sabotage in the West

Notes in the archive describe extensive preparations for large-scale sabotage operations against the United States, Canada, and Europe in the event of war, although none was recorded as having been carried out, beyond creating weapons and explosives caches in assorted foreign countries. This information has been corroborated in general by GRU defectors, Victor Suvorov and Stanislav Lunev. The operations included the following:

Reception and reviews

The historian Joseph Persico described the revelations as

"Though much of The Sword and the Shield is drawn from Andrew's earlier works and collaborations, the book does contain fresh revelations" and then he adds that "several of the much-publicized revelations, however, hardly qualify as such. For instance, the authors tell how the K.G.B. forged a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald to E. Howard Hunt, the former C.I.A. officer and later Watergate conspirator, in order to implicate the C.I.A. in the Kennedy assassination. Actually, this story surfaced in Henry Hurt's Reasonable Doubt, written 13 years ago. Similarly, the story that the K.G.B. considered schemes for breaking the legs of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev for defecting to the West was first reported in a book written six years ago." And he added that "it does seem odd that a key K.G.B. archivist never had access to a copying machine, but had to copy thousands of pages in longhand. Still, the overall impact of this volume is convincing, though none of the material will send historians scurrying to rewrite their books."

The Central European Review described Mitrokhin and Andrew's work as

"fascinating reading for anyone interested in the craft of espionage, intelligence gathering and its overall role in 20th-century international relations," offering "a window on the Soviet worldview and, as the ongoing Hanssen case in the United States clearly indicates, how little Russia has relented from the terror-driven spy society it was during seven inglorious decades of Communism".

David L. Ruffley, from the Department of International Programs, United States Air Force Academy, said that the material

"provides the clearest picture to date of Soviet intelligence activity, fleshing out many previously obscure details, confirming or contradicting many allegations and raising a few new issues of its own" and "sheds new light on Soviet intelligence activity that, while perhaps not so spectacular as some expected, is nevertheless significantly illuminating."

The Economist reviewed the book as:

"curiously unsatisfying. Much of it is an elegantly presented narrative of information already in the public domain about Soviet mischief-making during the cold war." and the reviewers wonder "how much more confusion was sown when a filleted selection of information about KGB operations in the West was published under Mitrokhin's name in 1999, the non-secret world will never know. The same applies to this second volume, which details Kremlin dirty tricks in the third world. As with the first, Mitrokhin has a co-author, Christopher Andrew, an historian who enjoys close ties with Britain's security and intelligence services."

Reg Whitaker, a professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto, gave a review at the The Intelligence Forum about the book:

"The Mitrokhin Archive arrives from a cache under a Russian dacha floor, courtesy of the British intelligence community itself, and its chosen historian, Chris Andrew. The provenance of this archive is itself a matter of some controversy." After questioning and discussing the source of the book he adds that "the hand of British intelligence is evident, and Andrew clearly has a 'special relationship' with SIS." Then, Reg Whitaker goes on to talk about the British Media when it comes to spies and says that "ever since Burgess and Maclean made their run to Moscow in 1951, the British have treated espionage as a branch of pornography", adding that "it is doubtful that many readers enticed by the advance publicity will actually get very far into this voluminous tome of close to 1000 name and date filled pages. A gripping read it ain't.","is remarkably restrained and reasonable in its handling of Westerners targeted by the KGB as agents or sources. The individuals outed by Mitrokhin appear to be what he says they were, but great care is generally taken to identify those who were unwitting dupes or, in many instances, uncooperative targets."

Jack Straw (then Home Secretary) stated to the British Parliament in 1999:

"In 1992, after Mr. Mitrokhin had approached the UK for help, our Secret Intelligence Service made arrangements to bring Mr. Mitrokhin and his family to this country, together with his archive. As there were no original KGB documents or copies of original documents, the material itself was of no direct evidential value, but it was of huge value for intelligence and investigative purposes. Thousands of leads from Mr. Mitrokhin's material have been followed up worldwide. As a result, our intelligence and security agencies, in co-operation with allied Governments, have been able to put a stop to many security threats. Many unsolved investigations have been closed; many earlier suspicions confirmed; and some names and reputations have been cleared. Our intelligence and security agencies have assessed the value of Mr. Mitrokhin's material world wide as immense."

The author Joseph Trento commented that

"we know the Mitrokhin material is real because it fills in the gaps in Western files on major cases through 1985. Also, the operational material matches western electronic intercepts and agent reports. What MI6 got for a little kindness and a pension was the crown jewels of Russian intelligence."

Historian of UCLA, in the American Historical Review (106:2, April 2001): found Mitrokhin's material to be "fascinating," but he also questioned plausibility that Mitrokhin could have smuggled and transcribed thousands of KGB documents, undetected, over 30 years.

The former Indian counter-terrorism chief, Bahukutumbi Raman, pointed out that Mitrokhin did not bring either the original documents or photocopies. He brought handwritten/typed notes of the contents of the documents. He also observed that "one finds it very difficult to believe" that Mitrokhin could have had access to the files and copied them, which should have been impossible if standard intelligence agency safety rules were followed. Regarding the MI5 and MI6, Raman commented that "their interest seems to have been only in the publication of a book on the misdeeds of the KGB", going so far as to suggest that "The Mitrokhin notes and the two books based on it written by Andrew are part of the MI6's psywar against Russia".

Scholar Amy Knight stated that "the story of Mitrokhin's defection ... strains credulity". Like Raman, she expressed bewilderment as to how Mitrokhin could have acquired access to the documents and was able to copy them unnoticed—"incredibly, given the rigorous security rules in all Soviet archives"—as well as take the archive to a Baltic country unhindered. Apart from that, she described the book as "the latest example of an emerging genre of spy histories based on materials from the KGB archives." She believes that the book does not reveal anything really new and significant:

"While The Sword and the Shield contains new information ... none of it has much significance for broader interpretations of the Cold War. The main message the reader comes away with after plowing through almost a thousand pages is the same one gleaned from the earlier books: the Soviets were incredibly successful, albeit evil, spymasters, and none of the Western services could come close to matching their expertise. Bravo the KGB."

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