by Christopher Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin

Author Information: Christopher Andrew is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Former Chair of the History Faculty at Cambridge University, Official Historian of the Security Service (MI5), Honorary Air Commodore of 7006 Squadron (Intelligence) in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force, Chair of the British Intelligence Study Group, and former Visiting Professor at Harvard, Toronto and Canberra. Professor Andrew is also co-editor of Intelligence and National Security, and a regular presenter of BBC Radio and TV documentaries, including the Radio Four series What If?. His twelve previous books include a number of path-breaking studies on the use and abuse of secret intelligence in modern history. He is currently a govenor of Norwich School.

In recent years he has collaborated with two KGB defectors, Oleg Gordievsky and Vasili Mitrokhin, producing detailed histories of the KGB and its operations using material and documents provided by the two. In addition to The Sword and the Shield, he has also collaborated with Mitrokhin on The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (2005). (bios: Wikipedia)

Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin was a Major and senior archivist for the Soviet Union's foreign intelligence service, the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. He collected notes over the course of 30 years that form the majority of revelatory information in the book collaborations he had with Andrew.

Book Description: Vasili Mitrokhin, a veteran K.G.B. officer, becomes progressively disenchanted with the Soviet system. In 1972, he is made responsible for checking and sealing some 300,000 K.G.B. files in a move from the Lubyanka headquarters to a new building. He uses this privileged access to take longhand notes of the most sensitive files that pass through his hands. Over the next 12 years he hides thousands of pages of these notes at his dacha. In 1992, Mitrokhin defects to Britain, bringing his cache with him. He makes the smuggled archive available to British intelligence and teams up with Christopher Andrew, a leading writer on Soviet intelligence, to produce this volume. (From this excellent NYT review)

Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by frequent Orange Ukraine reader and commenter IIU.

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