The Sword and the Shield
The Mitrokhin Archive is a collection of handwritten notes about secret KGB operations spanning the period between the 1930s and 1980s made by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin which he shared with British intelligence in the early 1990s. Mitrokhin, who had worked at KGB headquarters in Moscow from 1956 to 1985, first offered his material to the US's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Latvia and Lithuania, but they rejected it as possible fakes. After that, he turned to the UK's MI6, which arranged his defection from Russia. Mitrokhin secretly made his handwritten notes by copying archival documents in the period between 1972 and 1984, when he supervised the move of the archive of KGB's foreign intelligence department First Chief Directorate from the Lubyanka Building to their new headquarters at Yasenevo. When he defected to the United Kingdom in 1992, he brought the archive with him, in six full trunks. His defection was not officially announced until 1999. The official historian of MI5, Christopher Andrew, wrote two books, The Sword and the Shield (1999) and The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (2005), based on material from the Mitrokhin…
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