Vasili Mitrokhin

Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin (March 3 1922–January 23, 2004) was a Major and senior archivist for the Soviet Union's foreign intelligence service, the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, and co-author with Christopher Andrew of The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, a massive account of Soviet intelligence operations based on copies of material from the archive. Work on the second volume, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB in the World, was completed by Andrew in 2005 after Mitrokhin's death.

Related Topics:
March 3 - 1922 - January 23 - 2004 - Major - Archivist - Soviet Union - First Chief Directorate - KGB - Christopher Andrew

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Mitrokin was born in Yurasovo, in Central Russia, Ryazan, Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. After leaving school, he entered artillery school, then attended university in Kazakh SSR, graduating in History and Law. Towards the end of the Second World War, he took a job in the military procurator's office at Kharkov in the Ukrainian SSR. He entered the MGB as a foreign intelligence officer in 1948. His first foreign posting was in 1952.

Related Topics:
Yurasovo - Central Russia - Ryazan - Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic - Kazakh SSR - Second World War - Kharkov - Ukrainian SSR - MGB

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During the 1950s he served on various undercover assignments overseas. In 1956, for example, he accompanied the Soviet team to the Olympic games in Australia. But later that year, after he had apparently mishandled an operational assignment, he was moved from operational duties to the archives of the KGB's First Chief Directorate, and told he would never work in the field again.

Related Topics:
Olympic games - Australia

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Mitrokhin sometimes dated the beginnings of his disillusionment to Khrushchev's famous speech to the Communist Party congress denouncing Stalin, though it seems he may have been harbouring doubts for some time before that. For years he had listened to broadcasts on the BBC and Voice of America, noting the gulf between their reports and party propaganda.

Related Topics:
Khrushchev's famous speech - Communist Party - Stalin - BBC - Voice of America - Propaganda

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Yet when he began looking into the archives, he claimed to have been shocked by what he discovered about the KGB's systematic repression of the Russian people. "I could not believe such evil," he recalled. "It was all planned, prepared, thought out in advance. It was a terrible shock when I read things."

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Between 1972 and 1984 he supervised the move of the archive of the First Chief Directorate from the Lubyanka to the new KGB headquarters at Yasenevo. While doing so he made copies or stole documents from the archive. He retired in 1985.

Related Topics:
Lubyanka - Yasenevo

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In 1992 he traveled to Latvia with copies of material from the archive and walked into the U.S. embassy. CIA officers there didn't consider him to be credible, concluding that the copied documents could be faked. He then went to the British embassy and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) officer there saw his potential and following consultations with London accepted him as an agent. Operations followed to retrieve the 25,000 pages of files hidden in his house, covering operations from as far back as the 1930s. He and his family were then exfiltrated to Britain.

Related Topics:
Latvia - U.S. - Embassy - CIA - British - Secret Intelligence Service - London

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Richard Tomlinson, the MI6 officer imprisoned in 1997 for attempting to publish a book about his career, was one of those involved in retrieving the documents from empty milk cartons hidden under the floor of the dacha.

Related Topics:
Richard Tomlinson - 1997 - Milk carton - Dacha

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