Plausible Denial
Dossiers

The Mitrokhin Archive

1992-11-07

The archive of approximately 25,000 pages of handwritten notes copied by Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin from the operational files of the KGB First Chief Directorate between 1972 and 1984, smuggled out of the Russian Federation following his defection to the British Secret Intelligence Service through Latvia in November 1992, and published in declassified form in two volumes co-authored with the Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew (1999 and 2005). The archive identified Soviet intelligence agents, operations, and assets across multiple Western jurisdictions and produced a series of subsequent prosecutions, public unmaskings, and parliamentary inquiries.

Background

Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin was born on 3 March 1922 in the village of Yurasovo, in the Ryazan oblast of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. He was educated at the Higher Diplomatic School in Moscow and joined the Ministry of State Security (the post-war predecessor of the KGB) in 1948. After service in the foreign-intelligence directorate across the late 1940s and the 1950s — including a tour as an operational officer in the Middle East — he was reassigned in the mid-1950s to administrative work in the foreign-intelligence directorate's archive, where he worked across the remainder of his KGB career until his retirement in 1984.1

The First Chief Directorate (Pervoye Glavnoye Upravlenie, PGU) was the foreign-intelligence component of the KGB and was, from the early 1970s onward, headquartered at the Yasenevo complex south-west of Moscow. The PGU's archive — held until June 1972 in the central KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka and from June 1972 in the new Yasenevo complex — contained the operational files of the directorate's foreign-intelligence collection across the post-war period, including the agent-handling files, the Centre's operational correspondence with the residentures, and the substantial body of recruitment, communications, and administrative documentation associated with the running of the directorate's foreign operations.2

Mitrokhin's responsibilities, from his transfer to the FCD archive in the mid-1950s through his retirement in 1984, included the supervision of the physical transfer of the archive from the Lubyanka to Yasenevo across 1972–1984 and the preparation of catalogue summaries of the operational files, both for internal-use indexing and for the satisfaction of file-retrieval requests from the operational sections of the FCD. The combination of his catalogue work and his physical-transfer responsibilities gave him, across the period from 1972 onward, a sustained working access to the operational documentation of the directorate.3

The Operation

Mitrokhin's account, given to his SIS handlers and subsequently elaborated in the published material, of the motivation for the unauthorised copying of the FCD operational files traced his disillusionment to the Khrushchev secret speech of February 1956 and to the subsequent Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising of November 1956. He began the systematic copying of file material in 1972 — in the period of the physical transfer of the archive from the Lubyanka to Yasenevo, when his sustained working access was at its highest — and continued the copying through his retirement in 1984. The copies were made in pencil on small slips of paper that Mitrokhin concealed in his clothing and removed from the Yasenevo complex; the slips were transferred to typed and handwritten notebooks at his Moscow apartment and were stored across his Moscow apartment and his family dacha in the surrounding countryside, principally beneath the floor of the dacha.4

The volume of the material accumulated across the twelve years of copying was approximately 25,000 pages of typed and handwritten notes, organised by Mitrokhin into a categorical scheme that paralleled the FCD's own internal organisation (by geographical residentura, by categorical operational programme, and by named agent). The categorical coverage extended across the principal Western targets of the FCD across the post-war period, with substantial files on the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, the Scandinavian states, Latin America, the Middle East, and South and East Asia.5

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the establishment of the Russian Federation as the successor state, Mitrokhin elected to make contact with a Western intelligence service for the purpose of effecting his own emigration and the transfer of the archive. He travelled in March 1992 to Riga, Latvia — Latvia having declared independence in August 1991 — and presented himself, with a sample of the archive material, at the United States Embassy in Riga. The CIA station's response is documented in the subsequent published accounts as having been to decline the approach. Mitrokhin returned to Riga the following month and presented himself at the British Embassy, where the SIS station's response was to accept the approach, to retain the sample, and to develop a sustained handling relationship across the remainder of 1992.6

The exfiltration of Mitrokhin, his wife, his son, and the archive was conducted by SIS across the period from spring through autumn 1992 and was completed on 7 November 1992. The archive was transferred to the United Kingdom in stages, with the bulk of the material transferred in the final operational phase. Mitrokhin and his family were resettled in the United Kingdom under SIS protection. The material was subsequently shared by SIS with the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Central Intelligence Agency, and a substantial number of further Western and other partner services across the period from 1992 through the late 1990s, with operational follow-up — counter-intelligence investigations, the issuance of warning notices to compromised agents, and in some jurisdictions the initiation of criminal prosecutions — conducted in those services across the same period.7

Disclosure

The decision to publish a declassified scholarly account of the archive was taken by the United Kingdom in the period after the principal operational follow-up had been completed. The Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew — author of the 1985 Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community and, from 1999 onward, the authorised historian of the Security Service (MI5) — was commissioned to work with Mitrokhin on a published scholarly synthesis of the material, with declassification authority over the released portions of the archive vesting in the United Kingdom Government. The first volume, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, was published by Allen Lane in September 1999 (in the United States by Basic Books under the title The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB); the second volume, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World, was published by Allen Lane in 2005, the year after Mitrokhin's death.8

The publication of the first volume produced an immediate public-interest controversy in the United Kingdom around the question of why the United Kingdom Government had, in the period since 1992, declined to prosecute the British nationals identified in the Mitrokhin material as having been Soviet agents — most prominently Melita Norwood, an employee of the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association from 1932 to 1972 who had supplied substantial atomic-weapons-programme material to Soviet intelligence across her career and who was identified in the published Mitrokhin material as the Soviet agent codenamed HOLA. The controversy produced the commissioning of a parliamentary inquiry by the Intelligence and Security Committee of the United Kingdom Parliament, whose report — The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report — was published in June 2000 and concluded that, in the case of Norwood and a small number of similar cases, the period elapsed since the operational activity, the age of the subjects, and the evidentiary difficulty of prosecution under the Official Secrets Act on the basis of the Mitrokhin material alone had been the principal factors in the prosecutorial decisions.9

The principal United States prosecutorial outcome from the archive material was the case of Robert Stephan Lipka, a former cryptologic technician of the United States National Security Agency from 1964 through 1967 who had been identified in the Mitrokhin material as a sustained Soviet asset across his NSA service and after his departure. Lipka was arrested by the FBI in February 1996 in the course of a follow-up operation directed by the Bureau on the basis of the Mitrokhin material, was prosecuted in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and was sentenced in September 1997 to eighteen years' imprisonment.10

Legacy

The Mitrokhin Archive is the largest single body of internal Soviet foreign-intelligence operational documentation that has been transferred to a Western intelligence service. Its principal scholarly contribution has been the substantial extension and correction of the Western public-record account of Soviet foreign-intelligence operations across the post-war period: the identification of agents previously unknown or unconfirmed, the elaboration of the operational arrangements under which known agents had been handled, and the documentary basis for the assessment of the reliability and significance of agent reporting that had previously been the subject of speculation. Andrew's two co-authored volumes, together with the substantial scholarly literature produced by other historians working from the published material, have established the Mitrokhin material as a primary reference work for the historical study of the KGB.11

The personal papers of Mitrokhin — including the original notebooks and the archive of his correspondence with Andrew across the period of the joint authorship — were transferred after his death in 2004 to the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge, where they were opened to public access in 2014 under the catalogue designation MITN. The Mitrokhin Centre at Cambridge maintains the catalogue and the associated reference materials. The original notebooks themselves remain — in their digitised form — the most extensive single body of internal Soviet operational documentation publicly accessible to scholars working in the post-Cold-War archival environment.12

The Russian Federation has not, in the period since the publication of the archive, formally acknowledged the substance of the published material. The Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation (SVR), the successor to the FCD, has on a number of occasions in the period since 1999 issued public statements characterising the archive as fabrication or as the embellished work of a disgruntled former employee; those statements have been treated by the principal scholarly accounts as inconsistent with the documentary evidence and with the corroboration of the Mitrokhin material against independent sources in Western files.13

This dossier is the principal documented case of post-Cold-War defection-derived archive transfer and provides substantial corroborating material for the agency-level entries on the Secret Intelligence Service (which handled the defection and exfiltration), the Security Service (MI5) (which conducted the United Kingdom counter-intelligence follow-up), the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) (the Russian successors to the KGB), and is the principal source of confirmation for substantial elements of the Cambridge Five account. The country-level context is on the pages for the United Kingdom and Russia.

Sources & Further Reading

  1. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (Basic Books, 1999), introduction and ch. 1; Churchill Archives Centre, Mitrokhin Papers (MITN) — biographical materials.
  2. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, introduction; Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (Allen Lane, 2009), ch. 24.
  3. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, introduction and ch. 1; Churchill Archives Centre, Mitrokhin Papers (MITN).
  4. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, introduction; Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World (Allen Lane, 2005), introduction.
  5. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield; Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II; Churchill Archives Centre, Mitrokhin Papers (MITN).
  6. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, introduction; Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report (Cm 4764, June 2000), paras. 4–11.
  7. ISC, Mitrokhin Inquiry Report, paras. 12–35; Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, ch. 24; Churchill Archives Centre, Mitrokhin Papers (MITN).
  8. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield; Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (Allen Lane, 1999); Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II.
  9. ISC, The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report (Cm 4764, June 2000); Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, ch. 9 (atomic espionage); David Burke, The Spy Who Came in from the Co-op: Melita Norwood and the Ending of Cold War Espionage (Boydell & Brewer, 2008).
  10. United States v. Lipka, sentencing memorandum, US District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, September 1997; FBI Vault, Robert Lipka file; Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, ch. 11.
  11. Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, ch. 24; Raymond L. Garthoff, "The KGB Reports to Gorbachev," Intelligence and National Security 11, no. 2 (1996); Mark Kramer, "The Mitrokhin Material and Soviet–East European Relations," Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 4 (2005).
  12. Churchill Archives Centre, Mitrokhin Papers (MITN) — catalogue, opened to public access 2014.
  13. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II, introduction; Mark Galeotti, The Vory: Russia's Super Mafia (Yale University Press, 2018), ch. 1, on the SVR's post-1991 public posture.