CONFIRMED
The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB Clerk Who Stole the KGB's Secrets
Vasili Mitrokhin was not a spy in the usual sense, and that is exactly what made him so dangerous to the organisation he served. He was a KGB officer who, after years of disillusionment, had been moved sideways into the archives of the First Chief Directorate — the service's foreign-intelligence arm — and given responsibility for supervising the transfer of its entire secret file collection to a new headquarters. It was the most sensitive paper in the Soviet Union: decades of records on agents, operations, and informants spread across the West and the wider world. For roughly twelve years, from 1972 until his retirement in 1984, Mitrokhin used his extraordinary access to commit one of the most audacious acts of intelligence defiance in history. Alone, by hand, he copied and summarised thousands of the KGB's most secret documents, scribbling notes on scraps of paper that he hid in his shoes and clothing and carried out of headquarters past the guards, day after day, year after year. At home he transcribed them, and then he hid the growing archive — sealed in milk churns and tin containers and buried beneath the floor and in the garden of his dacha outside Moscow. He could not get it to the West while the Soviet Union stood. But when the USSR collapsed, in 1992, Mitrokhin travelled to the newly independent Baltic states, walked into a Western embassy, and offered his life's secret work. British intelligence grasped what he was holding, spirited him, his family, and six cases of material out of Russia, and acquired in a single stroke the most comprehensive record of Soviet foreign intelligence operations ever to reach the West. This is the story of the quiet archivist who stole the KGB's own history.
