Content area
Full Text
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. ISBN 0-465-00310-9. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xix, 700. $32.50.
Vasili Mitrokhin was a trusted but disillusioned worker in the KGB archives who, over a twelve-year period, secretly took thousands of pages of notes from myriad secret files. In 1992 he defected to Britain along with his booty. After several years during which Mitrokhin's information was undoubtedly put to good use, MI6 allowed Professor Christopher Andrew, the foremost British scholar on the history of intelligence, to publish a study based upon the fruits of one of the great intelligence coups of the Cold War. This is not an edited collection of the original documents; rather, Andrew has used the purloined material to enrich and...