By Paul Redmond
Published in CIA’s Studies in Intelligence
Intelligence in Recent Public Literature
The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB
By Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin. New York: Basic Books, 1999, 700 pages.
Reviewed by Paul Redmond
The publication of The Sword and the Shield is a landmark event. The book is more than a triumph of historiography. Behind it is Mitrokhin’s own amazing persistence and risk-taking over many years while he read KGB First Chief Directorate files and made the thousands of notes which he eventually brought to the West.
The material ended up with the British and not the Americans. As the Cold War ended, the CIA’s Directorate of Operations adopted a policy that the Agency would no longer try to recruit Soviet/Russian intelligence officers. The chief of the Central Eurasia Division, who proclaimed “The KGB is dead,” told me that “We must maintain the high moral ground.” Mitrokhin volunteered twice to the Americans, and after he was turned away, went to the British. They handled the case brilliantly and exploited the information internationally to the great benefit of MI-6 and the British Government in general.
It is probably a good thing that the information went to the British and thus to Professor Andrew, chairman of the History Department at Cambridge. He is uniquely qualified and motivated as a scholar to deal with it. He has no equal in America. His counterparts at Yale, Ohio State, and Stanford specialize, respectively, in Religious Studies, Women’s Studies, and Early Modern Europe and Women’s Studies.
Professor Andrew has done a superb job in taking Mitrokhin’s material, much of it fragmentary, and combining it with hundreds of other sources to draw a full, coherent picture. (The bibliography is more than 12 pages long, and the footnotes number almost 1,000.)
For instance, in the chapter on the “Magnificent Five,” Andrew combines Mitrokhin’s notes with about 30 other sources ranging from Vienna city police records to Kim Philby’s own self-serving, KGB-inspired autobiography. This approach, used throughout the book, represents outstanding scholarship, which allows Mitrokhin’s massive detail to illuminate and expand on, sometimes with stunning new data, what has been written, or simply previously suspected.
An excellent example is the brief section on the Soviet illegal Rudolph Abel, which combines Mitrokhin’s data with information published about him in the West. Abel was lionized as a heroic master spy in the West; according to Mitrokhin’s data, however, he apparently accomplished little.
While this effective use of other sources contributes decisively to the value of the book, it is not without risk, as the approach depends on their accuracy. I noticed two examples of inaccuracy—one minor, one somewhat more significant. A footnote identifies Sergey Bokhan as a KGB officer based on an inaccurate statement in Pete Earley’s book, Confessions of a Spy. Bokhan was a GRU officer.
In another case, Professor Andrew writes that a planned KGB covert action operation to set off bombs in places frequented by the US military in Germany had apparently been “shelved” by the time CIA found out about it in 1985. This statement appears to be based on a mention of the information in Robert Gates’s book, From the Shadows. The planning for this operation was very much alive in spring 1985, and we know that the KGB was feeding the information received later about its cancellation. Aldrich Ames had identified the original source to them, and they were using him for disinformation purposes while trying to figure out how and when to lure him home.
Mitrokhin is not the greatest individual counterintelligence source of the Cold War. That honor probably has to go to someone like Michael Goliniewski, who led the way to the identification of several extremely important, active KGB agents and operations at the height of the Cold War, including George Blake, Hans Felfe, and the Portland naval secrets case.
Mitrokhin does provide a wonderful insight into the Russian way of doing business. The KGB was, CIA’s risible naiveté in the 1990s notwithstanding, a Russian intelligence service shaped by Russian culture and history, if motivated and perhaps ultimately corrupted by Bolshevik ideology and drive.
Mitrokhin’s data paints a picture of KGB operations and activities ranging from the brilliant and productive to the silly and naïve; from the hardnosed and honest to the delusional and consciously dishonest; from brilliantly perceptive agent handling and recruiting to shocking myopia about the outside world. All this is very Russian, particularly when combined with the pervasive sense of conspiracy which characterizes it all.
Americans should pay special attention to the book’s data on how the Soviet Union conducted much of the Cold War. Whether academic historians like it or not, the KGB was viewed and used by the Soviet leadership as the main action arm of their foreign policy. In this context, the book shows the massive effort by the Soviet Union to work against our national interest and security—worldwide—dirty tricks and all.
They got off to an early start. According to Mitrokhin, the first illegal was sent to the United States in 1921. Almost 30 years later, the United States was still blundering around at establishing a clandestine operation in Moscow; the first chief had eight hours of training, the second had 21.
In the mass of data, there are striking pieces of information. Nineteen years before Mr. Gusev’s recent operation against the 7th floor of the State Department was discovered, the KGB ran an identical, productive operation against the System Planning Corporation in Arlington, Virginia. Via a combination of agent penetrations and intercept operations, it appears that the KGB collected valuable information on practically every significant American weapons system during the 1970s and 1980s. Mitrokhin’s data about KGB covert action operations, efforts to interfere in the internal affairs of the United States, whether merely discussed, planned or actually attempted, are stunning.
The Sword and the Shield has provoked the curious commentary that the KGB must have sent all this information to the West. Ted Koppel of Nightline dearly believes this—perhaps because he believes nothing after 20 years of interviewing Washington politicians. Amy Knight in the Times Literary Supplement (‘Who Selected the Mitrokhin Archive?’’) wonders whether the KGB helped Mitrokhin compile the data. She raises all sorts of questions of how he got and maintained access, why he waited so long to get the information out, and how he had time to make all the notes.
These issues can only be described as “ivory tower,” and bespeak an isolated, academic mindset which fails to take into account human nature and drive, chance, bureaucratic vagaries, and the high competence of an intelligence service, in this case MI-6. Ms. Knight’s arguments also display a surprising ethnocentricity and lack of understanding of KGB organization. She asks why Mitrokhin did not note information on Raoul Wallenberg. Perhaps the name meant nothing to him (Vitaly Yurchenko had never heard of him) or, equally likely, any files surviving on Wallenberg would have resided in the internal components of the KGB, not in the First Chief Directorate, where Mitrokhin worked.
In The Sword and the Shield, Professor Andrew displays, and exercises to great effect, a much more realistic, grounded knowledge and understanding of both the KGB and the world of espionage in general. Ms. Knight’s suggestion that the data was sent by the KGB is, indeed, farfetched.
In sum, The Sword and the Shield, because of the massive amount of data, superbly presented, is one of the most important and valuable books to date on the Cold War and on espionage in general. Another volume is in the works, with the first chapter entitled “BEACHHEAD” (“AVANPOST”) which, starting in I960, was the KGB code name for Cuba.
Paul Redmond served in the Directorate of Operations