The Spy in the Archive by Gordon Corera
His coworkers disliked him. Grumpy and introverted, he ate alone in the cafeteria and made no small talk. His supervisors at the KGB commended his diligence in a dull job, managing the agency’s sprawling secret archive—an assignment lacking the panache of foreign espionage or the skill set for handling informants.
Vasili Mitrokhin felt passed over and neglected. Nursing his grievances, he began to copy significant documents and smuggle them out of KGB headquarters. One day he turned up at the U.S. embassy in Latvia, newly independent from the Soviet Union. They dismissed him as a nobody with nothing to sell. He then went to the British embassy in neighboring Lithuania. They listened.
Gordon Corera recounts Mitrokhin’s story in The Spy in the Archive. The former BBC security correspondent and current “The Rest is Classified” podcaster readily admits that some of this story will never be more than speculative. Mitrokhin’s inner world was shielded by the high wall he erected against prying eyes in surveillance state maintained by the anxiety of being called out for political incorrectness. He knew the KGB’s methods from the inside. Corera lists several plausible personal motivations for Mitrokhin’s defection that merged with what might have been a growing revulsion against what the rogue agent called the “machine of evil.” Mitrokhin told the British of his admiration for Solzhenitsyn and other dissidents.
Given the pervasive surveillance of Soviet citizens, Mitrokhin’s copying of classified documents was dangerous, but his courage was carefully calibrated. He waited until the Soviet Union dissolved before revealing his trove, albeit still braving arrest from the KGB’s successors.
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In a sense, the evidence Mitrokhin exchanged with Britain for asylum arrived late. The Cold War was over and policymakers in the U.S. and UK had high hopes for the new Russia. However, Mitrokhin’s paperwork, which Britain shared with the U.S., led the FBI to locate a handful of “deep cover” agents who’d lived secretly in America for years. It also exposed a larger number of double agents highly placed in Europe and Israel, which led to controversy and embarrassed coverups. Perhaps the value of Mitrokhin’s archive (excerpts were published in the UK) was to expose a record of brutality and insidiousness that the KGB’s Russian heirs were eager to polish to the bright gleam of patriots “just doing our job.”
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