Spies and Traitors Knowledge Centers

The Mitrokhin Archive tells for the first time in full the startling story of Soviet attempts to infiltrate the West. Working from Vasili Mitrokhin's archive and his own unrivalled expertise in the history of intelligence, Christopher Andrew has created an extraordinary picture of a USSR committed to covert activity at home and abroad to maintain Communism. From technological espionage to the cultivation of agents of influence, the KGB's methods ranged from financial inducements through sexual blackmail to assassination as they pursued their aims. What emerges is a state apparatus devoted to - even obsessed by - gathering information yet quite incapable of analyzing it realistically.

This book is based on one of the most extraordinary intelligence coups of recent times: a secret archive of top-level KGB documents smuggled out of the Soviet Union which the FBI has described, after close examination, as the "most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source." Its presence in the West represents a catastrophic hemorrhage of the KGB's secrets and reveals for the first time the full extent of its worldwide network. Vasili Mitrokhin, a secret dissident who worked in the KGB archive, smuggled out copies of its most highly classified files every day for twelve years.

In 1992, Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist, snuck out of Russia carrying with him a vast cache of transcriptions of top-secret KGB intelligence files. The FBI later described his trove of documents as "the most complete and extensive intelligence ever achieved from any source"; Renowned historian Christopher Andrew had exclusive access to both Mitrokhin and his archive.