The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB

Corera, a former security correspondent for the BBC, tells the enthralling story of Vasili Mitrokhin, an unsuccessful Soviet spy whom the KGB demoted in 1956 to the role of archivist. Laboring in the security agency’s records, Mitrokhin became obsessed with exposing the crimes of the Soviet regime. From the early 1970s until his retirement in 1984, he covertly copied top-secret documents by hand on tiny slips of paper, smuggling them out tucked inside his shoes. At his dacha, he turned those notes into legible files. In 1992, a year after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mitrokhin offered his materials to the British embassy in newly independent Lithuania. Corera’s narrative traces Mitrokhin’s evolution from poor peasant boy to loyal KGB officer to passionate anti-KGB crusader and details his family’s exfiltration to Britain by MI6. Working with the British historian Christopher Andrew, Mitrokhin published his work under the title “The Mitrokhin Archive.” But to his disappointment, his Western hosts, while thrilled to see evidence of Soviet intelligence operations, hardly shared Mitrokhin’s zeal for exposing the evils of the Soviet system.