The spy in the archive How one man tried to kill the KGB

Vasili Mitrokhin was an unassuming archivist, quietly filing reports and other documents, except that he worked in the nerve center of the most secretive and ruthless intelligence agency in the world, the Soviet KGB. Corera never met his subject, but through interviews with a large network of agents from the U.S. and UK he came to understand the archivist well. Mitrokhin started as a foreign operative before getting demoted to dusty stacks containing records of repression and atrocities where he grew disgusted with the "filth" and decided to smuggle out hand-copied records a few at a time over two decades. Corera conveys the dedication and uncertainty Mitrokhin faced and the discipline to carry on when hopes of publishing his horrific findings were extremely low. However, when the USSR collapsed, Mitrokhin made his move. He defected and turned over his documents to MI6 at the British embassy in Lithuania in 1992. Corera deftly tells Mitrokhin's life story and illuminates the valuable intelligence he brought to the West in a compelling narrative about standing up for justice and against tyranny. But, Mitrokhin lived to see the opportunity for freedom in Russia squandered under Putin. Ultimately, his experiences show that no system of repression is airtight and secrets do not stay buried.

A failed Soviet spy, consigned to processing files in a KGB archive, becomes disillusioned with the brutality of his own government and defects to the West in this arresting biography from journalist Corera (The Art of Betrayal). As a young man, Vasili Mitrokhin (1922--2004) joined the KGB filled with patriotic fervor. Yet after a career setback--he fumbled the handling of tensions surrounding a political uprising in Hungary during the 1956 Australian Olympics, where Soviet and Hungarian water polo players ended up brawling--he was consigned to the organization's archives. There he came to regard the work of the KGB (and its precursor, the Cheka) as "pure filth." He began an elaborate system of transcribing and encoding what he read and recreating it at home. Mitrokhin's story is paralleled by that of the British and U.S. embassies and counterintelligence agencies' reaction to the appearance of "a grubby, lean old man, unshaven and poorly dressed," claiming to have vital information--including the names of KGB spies in their respective countries. Corera fascinatingly spotlights how the files, handed over in 1992, reveal important historical details about the early years of the Soviet Union, and he intriguingly tracks how Vladimir Putin's KGB career unfolded alongside, but in a very different direction from, Mirokhin's. Novelistic and deeply researched, this propulsive account is a must for readers with a taste for espionage. (Jan.)

Stealing Soviet secrets. Journalist Corera's account is the kind of real-life espionage on which John le Carré based his spy novels. Set behind Soviet lines during the Cold War, the story delivers codes, secret signals, double-crossing, and moles. We also have a problematic hero, Vasili Mitrokhin, once bound for the glamorous life of a spy in the West, but demoted to running an archive in the bowels of Moscow's notorious Lubyanka prison--turned KGB headquarters. Disillusioned by Stalin and the collapse of the Soviet Union and influenced by fellow dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Mitrokhin takes the opposite path to Vladimir Putin--himself a security official in Dresden--and begins to regard his country as a gulag, particularly after the 1956 invasion of Hungary and the crushed hopes following the Prague Spring. The bones of the story are straightforward: Top secret files, archived at Lubyanka, are to be rehoused in a new KGB complex outside Moscow. One man is responsible for summarizing the files, which name both former and active spies and the names of operatives embedded in U.S., British, and French intelligence. The man responsible takes secret notes over a period of years, then visits embassies in Vilnius as a "walk-in," offering the notes first to the Americans--who refuse him--and then the British, who facilitate his defection. That man is Mitrokhin. What Corera makes clear is how unglamorous espionage can be, and how unwelcome its findings. Since Mitrokhin copied rather than stole the files, the Russians had to assume everything was compromised. Similarly, Western intelligence agencies discovered moles themselves and purged not only the agents, but those failing to detect them. It is to Corera's credit that he brings a journalist's detailed narrative to historical events. Yet the lives of all concerned are so bleak--and the unrewarding, labyrinthine lives so grimly dull--that by book's end we not only understand their world, but gladly flee it. A true-life spy thriller in relentlessly gruesome detail. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.