The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

Christopher Andrew

Language: English

Pages: 736

ISBN: 0465003125

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The Sword and the Shield 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, a U.S. ally succeeded in exfiltrating the KGB officer and his entire archive out of Moscow. The archive covers the entire period from the Bolshevik Revolution to the 1980s and includes revelations concerning almost every country in the world. But the KGB's main target, of course, was the United States.Though there is top-secret material on almost every country in the world, the United States is at the top of the list. As well as containing many fascinating revelations, this is a major contribution to the secret history of the twentieth century.Among the topics and revelations explored are: The KGB’s covert operations in the United States and throughout the West, some of which remain dangerous today. KGB files on Oswald and the JFK assassination that Boris Yeltsin almost certainly has no intention of showing President Clinton. The KGB’s attempts to discredit civil rights leader in the 1960s, including its infiltration of the inner circle of a key leader. The KGB’s use of radio intercept posts in New York and Washington, D.C., in the 1970s to intercept high-level U.S. government communications. The KGB’s attempts to steal technological secrets from major U.S. aerospace and technology corporations. KGB covert operations against former President Ronald Reagan, which began five years before he became president. KGB spies who successfully posed as U.S. citizens under a series of ingenious disguises, including several who attained access to the upper echelons of New York society.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

take a stand against the Home Office decision.52 On November 30 the first in a series of well-publicized meetings to protest against the deportation order was held in London, with speakers including Judith Hart, former Labor Minister of Overseas Development, the leading Labor left-winger Ian Mikardo, Alan Sapper of the film and TV technicians union and the distinguished historian E. P. Thompson. An active defense committee53 based at the National Council of Civil Liberties organized

had spent much of his early career in exile or in Tsarist prisons. Before the First World War, he had specialized in tracking down police spies among Bolshevik émigrés. While serving with the Cheka in 1918, he was reputed to have been caught by “bandits” and hung from a tree, but to have been cut down just in time by Red forces who successfully revived him. Unlike any of his successors, Trilisser sometimes traveled abroad to meet INO agents.42 At least until Lenin was incapacitated by his third

Manhattan (codenamed CROOK), who had volunteered his services to the NKVD in 1937 but demanded a high price for his intelligence. Over the next two years, the NKVD oscillated between pride at having an agent in Congress and suspicion that Dickstein was recycling publicly available information. In June 1939 Ovakimyan denounced him in a message to the Center as “a complete racketeer and blackmailer.” Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, ch. 7. 18. On Duggan’s codenames, see above, n. 7. 19.

Joseph T. McCarthyism McDonnell Douglas McGovern, George McLennan, Gordon McNeil, Hector Mechulayev, Vladimir Ivanovich Medvedev, Roy Melnik, Constantin Menzhinsky, Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzies, Stewart Mercador, Ramón Mercador del Rio, Caridid MERCURY (chemist) Messerschmitt Messmer, Pierre METIL METSENAT Mexico MGB MI1c (British Secret Intelligence Service) MICK Mielke, Erich Mihailovich MIKE (MIT physicist) MIKHAILOV (Geli Vasilyev) Mikhaylovna, Svetlana Mikoyan,

1944, however, Hiss’s role as a Soviet agent took on a new significance when he became actively engaged in preparations for the final meeting of the wartime Big Three at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945. Yalta was to prove an even bigger success for Soviet intelligence than Tehran. This time both the British and the American delegations, housed respectively in the ornate Vorontsov and Livadia Palaces, were successfully bugged. The mostly female personnel used to record and transcribe their

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