One landscape, many dreams
After a stalled career in espionage, a Soviet spy was assigned to an archive. What he learned made him decide to smuggle its secrets out.
Mitrokhin’s exploits and his defection to the United Kingdom in 1992 were kept largely under wraps until he and the British historian Christopher Andrew published the first installment of “The Mitrokhin Archive” in 1999. That volume, along with Mitrokhin’s subsequent books, drew upon the detailed notes about KGB operations he had carried to the West.
By contrast, Gordon Corera’s “The Spy in the Archive” focuses primarily on the life of the man who worked mostly in obscurity for nearly three decades before pulling off a coup that stunned his former masters and exposed numerous agents and operations in the West. More than most Cold War thrillers, this true story offers genuine suspense—and genuine insight into Mitrokhin’s complex motivations.
Mr. Corera is well-versed in the cloak-and-dagger world. He covered the intelligence and national-security beat for the BBC for 20 years, and his books about espionage in the modern era include “The Art of Betrayal” (2013) and “Russians Among Us” (2020). His experience with the material lends weight to a thoroughly engrossing tale.
Like many young Chekists—a term from the early Bolshevik era that lived on as a sobriquet for members of the Soviet secret services—Mitrokhin was eager to serve abroad, where spying offered what appeared to be a glamorous career path. But work in the field didn’t pan out: Posted to Israel in the early 1950s, Mitrokhin was part of a spy group that was tainted by accusations of sloppy tradecraft. Agents they were running were discovered. Besides, Mitrokhin possessed none of the attributes of his more polished colleagues. “He was quiet, insular and not exactly blessed with social skills,” Mr. Corera writes.
Afterward, Mitrokhin was sent abroad only on short-term assignments—and one of them ended disastrously. At the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, he was part of a team of KGB agents who were there to thwart defections. Since the games were taking place only weeks after Red Army tanks had crushed the Hungarian uprising, the tension at the water polo semifinal between Hungary and the Soviet Union was extreme. The athletes exchanged insults and then blows. A Soviet official urged his team to exercise restraint, but Mitrokhin was unapologetic when a Russian player smashed an opponent in the face in what became known as the “blood in the water” match. “You should have hit the Hungarian players harder,” he told the athletes.
This was too much for his superiors, who wanted to contain the fallout. “Not suitable for operational work” was written on his file. He was exiled to the archive in the bowels of the Lubyanka, Moscow’s infamous KGB headquarters. It was, Mr. Corera writes, a “dead-end job,” but it offered access to documents that revealed the organization’s dark secrets, such as its labyrinth of informers. Mitrokhin claimed the experience opened his eyes to the insidious nature of the entire system. “I could not believe such evil,” he later declared.
Dismissed by colleagues as a “clerical rat,” he assiduously studied the files whose handling was now his responsibility. They included documents that had been ordered for destruction by Stalin’s successors, who sought to erase the evidence of their complicity in his purges, as well as files that were transferred to a new KGB complex in another part of Moscow.
Mitrokhin could not risk taking the files, but he began writing notes in his own code, which he initially stuffed into his shoes and socks. More extensive versions were later typed up and buried in a milk churn near his dacha. To further avoid detection in a society where any purchase could give you away, he used concentrated fruit juice to extend the life of his typewriter ribbons.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, Mitrokhin was determined that his efforts would not be wasted. Dressed like a poor Russian peasant, he approached the newly established U.S. embassies in the Baltics, only to be spurned by officials who feared he was a plant—or simply an opportunist. At the British embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania, he was taken seriously by MI6, which was astounded by the wealth of information the former archivist had to offer. With the encouragement of the British, he smuggled more out in subsequent trips.
Mitrokhin claimed his motivation was his profound disenchantment. But, as Mr. Corera suggests, he also wanted to prove his worth to his wife, Nina. She was an accomplished doctor who knew nothing of her husband’s double life until the eve of their departure. The couple had been seeking help for their adult son, who was confined to a wheelchair due to a mysterious illness. Their attempts at treatment in Russia, East Germany and even China had ended in failure. The West looked more promising.
Ironies abound in Mitrokhin’s story. His exile to the archives provided him with the arsenal of ammunition he used against the system he came to detest. As for the Americans, they belatedly realized their misjudgment about the “walk-in” they had dismissed. Since MI6 was short on cash, the CIA funded Mitrokhin’s resettlement in Britain in exchange for access to his notes and transcriptions.
Ultimately, the archivist’s revelations did nothing to prevent another Chekist, Vladimir Putin, from ascending to power. By the time of his death, Mitrokhin had no remaining illusions that his actions had changed his country’s course. He warned that “the same people, the same organizations, the same aims” were still in charge. Everything that has happened since has proven him right.
Mr. Nagorski is the author of “Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom.”
