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To: snippy_about_it

The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (Hardcover)
by Christopher Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin "This book is based on unprecedented and unrestricted access to one of the world's most secret and closely guarded archives-that of the foreign intelligence arm..."

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465003109/104-4914374-6174369?v=glance&n=283155&st=%2A&v=glance

In early 1992, a Russian man walked into the British embassy in a newly independent Baltic republic and asked to "speak to someone in authority." As he sipped his first cup of proper English tea, he handed over a small file of notes. Eight months later, the man, his family, and his enormous archive had been safely exfiltrated to Britain. When news that a KGB officer had defected with the names of hundreds of undercover agents leaked out in 1996, a spokesperson for the SVR (Russia's foreign intelligence service, heir of the KGB) said, "Hundreds of people! That just doesn't happen! Any defector could get the name of one, two, perhaps three agents--but not hundreds!"
Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin worked as chief archivist for the FCD, the foreign-intelligence arm of the KGB. Mitrokhin was responsible for checking and sealing approximately 300,000 files, allowing him unrestricted access to one of the world's most closely guarded archives. He had lost faith in the Soviet system over the years, and was especially disturbed by the KGB's systematic silencing of dissidents at home and abroad. Faced with tough choices--stay silent, resign, or undermine the system from within--Mitrokhin decided to compile a record of the foreign operations of the KGB. Every day for 12 years, he smuggled notes out of the archive. He started by hiding scraps of paper covered with miniscule handwriting in his shoes, but later wrote notes on ordinary office paper, which he took home in his pockets. He hid the notes under his mattress, and on weekends took them to his dacha, where he typed them and hid them in containers buried under the floor. When he escaped to Britain, his archive contained tens of thousands of pages of notes.......
(I've read this 700 densely packed pages with footnote.
Not a fun, light read, but.....)

Also just released part two

The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (Hardcover)
by Christopher Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465003117/ref=pd_lpo_k2a_2_txt_T2/104-4914374-6174369?%5Fencoding=UTF8

From Publishers Weekly
This second volume of the post-war history of the KGB-based on the "Mitrokhin Archive" of secret documents purloined by the late co-author, a KGB dissident-surveys the Soviet spy agency's skullduggery in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Historian Andrew portrays Russian policy toward the Third World as largely the creation of the KGB, which hoped that the spread of Soviet influence and revolutionary upheavals would make these regions the decisive Cold War battleground. The Cuban Revolution inspired these ambitions, and by 1980, after the American defeat in Vietnam and with leftist regimes installed in Nicaragua and Grenada, Cuban troops fighting in Africa and Russian forces occupying Afghanistan, both American and Soviet officials saw communism on the march. Still, in Andrew's account, Soviet initiatives-with a few exceptions, like the Afghanistan intervention-seem cautious, reactive and uncomfortably dependent on fickle client regimes; wary of confronting the United States, Russia often exerted a restraining influence on local allies. Andrew's engaging, occasionally gossipy narrative provides new evidence of Soviet sponsorship of Latin American insurgencies and Palestinian terrorists, along with details of KGB spycraft and dirty tricks. The world-wide communist conspiracy he depicts was far from a juggernaut, but he sheds new light on the hidden history of the Cold War. Photos.

(This book has been raising holy hell in certain circles in certain counties which I won't name...India (Did I say that outloud?).


121 posted on 11/25/2005 5:29:10 PM PST by Valin (Purgamentum init, exit purgamentum)
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To: Valin

Very interesting. With this and the info from Poland today on the Foxhole it looks like Russian has been uncovered!


123 posted on 11/25/2005 6:56:54 PM PST by snippy_about_it (Fall in --> The FReeper Foxhole. America's History. America's Soul.)
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