The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB, Gordon Corera, William Collins, £25

Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB archivist who defected to the West in 1992, thought that the Russian people had been enslaved by a dragon with three heads: the Communist Party, the nomenklatura (a privileged and corrupt elite) and the KGB itself. During the long years in which he took advantage of his position to compile a massive, clandestine archive formed of notes smuggled out of KGB headquarters, he nursed a growing hatred for all three of the dragon’s heads and in particular the KGB, where he had made his own career. As Gordon Corera writes in The Spy in the Archive, Mitrokhin came to see his life and work as a ‘spiritual struggle against malevolent forces which possessed his nation. He wanted to drive a stake into his enemy’s heart’. To him, Russians were victims whose true soul had been distorted by Marxism; yet, to his disappointment, the end of the Soviet Union failed to bring meaningful change to the power of the secret state. The only way to free his fellow Russians from their enslavement, he decided, was by making his archive public and revealing the full extent of their repression. He could not do that from within Russia: slaying the dragon meant taking the difficult decision to defect, with his family (who had known nothing of his work), and to demand publication as the price of the treasure trove he offered.

The story of Mitrokhin and his archive is not new: the two large volumes based on his notes and published in collaboration with Professor Christopher Andrew in 1999 and 2005 are an indispensable source on decades of aggressive KGB operations on a global scale, including details of agents and contacts. But though details are available of how Mitrokhin compiled his archive, and his exfiltration by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) after the Americans turned him away, Corera’s in-depth account of Mitrokhin’s career and character, and analysis of what drove his defection, tells us much that is new and illuminating. Mitrokhin was a complicated and conflicted man who found collaboration difficult and remained unwilling to reveal much of his personal story; his archive, he insisted, would speak for itself.

The trouble was that while his motivation was principally to open the eyes of his fellow Russians to the way in which the organs of state security had brutalised their country, his Western interlocutors were more interested in the detail of operations against their own and allied countries. In Russia, the effect of publication was limited, Mitrokhin’s defection brushed under the carpet.

The impact was far greater in the rest of the world, as details emerged of prominent figures who had worked for, or accepted funding from the Russians. MI6 had shared much of the material with the CIA (whose rejection of Mitrokhin was a source of friction within the Agency), as well as with MI5, the British domestic agency. Both British and American intelligence were almost overwhelmed by the number of potential leads contained in the archive, and though some significant investigations followed it was impossible to pursue them all and there were some oversights (including the embarrassing failure to follow-up Mitrokhin’s information on the long-term Soviet agent Melita Norwood, the ‘Spy Who Came in from the Co-op’). This episode, together with details of how Mitrokhin and his archive were handled were set out in the very full 2000 report by the Intelligence and Security Committee on which Corera has drawn for this book.

The Spy in the Archive provides important context to Mitrokhin’s story and contains many fascinating details. For example, his account of his training at the Higher Diplomatic School, where prospective intelligence officers were taught the ‘rules of conspiracy’: anyone with whom they came into contact, Soviet or foreigner, must be treated as a potential enemy. Mitrokhin’s own record with the KGB, including overseas postings, was mixed at best. The reasons for this are unclear, but Corera’s view that Mitrokhin was temperamentally unsuited to the social requirements of such a career seems convincing. His job as an archivist, considered by many to be boring and routine, suited him far better. When he realised that, in a state built on secrets and lies, the truth – however partial or unreliable – was a powerful weapon, he was happy to remain in his role, meticulously carrying out his duties while plotting his campaign against the three-headed dragon. There are also interesting insights into Mitrokhin’s thinking: his attachment to the snowy Russian forests, the only thing he really missed; and the fact that his sympathy for the Russian ‘victim’ did not extend to those from former Soviet republics such as Georgia and Ukraine, whom he tended to demonise (Stalin, after all, was Georgian).

It is no secret that many of those who dealt with Mitrokhin found him a very difficult man. But the fact that he was such an awkward character gives Corera, who has written about betrayal in previous books, the opportunity to explore new insights into the motivation of defectors. Ego, ideology, money and revenge are all possible drivers, but Mitrokhin was different. Determined, dogmatic but (unlike many defectors) reticent, and unwilling to compromise, he was a difficult man to understand as well as to do business with.

Corera’s book, though acknowledging that some details of the story will never be known, makes an important contribution not just to understanding Mitrokhin, but to understanding 21^st-century Russia, too. It underscores the value of the information contained in his archive – still not fully exploited, but available at the Churchill Archives Centre. It also illuminates the strength and continuity of Russian culture and history, including the pervasive and deep-rooted power of its intelligence services, that are just as relevant now as they were 35 years ago. Mitrokhin’s work in the archives showed him that there was a clear and unbroken line between the Tsarist intelligence organisation, the Okhrana, through the Cheka to the different incarnations of the KGB. Today, we can trace that unbroken line through to the SVR, FSB and GRU, as well as to more shadowy proxy bodies. It was perhaps inevitable that, as Corera describes, Mitrokhin should be disappointed by the way his material was used, and that his attack on the dragon proved less deadly than he had hoped. But the work he did has a lasting value of which, perhaps, he might have been proud.