12 September 1999
Source:
http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/99/09/12/stinwenws02009.html?999
The Times (UK), September 12, 1999
INSIGHT
Defector smuggled out copies of the 'crown jewels' of Soviet espionage
TO HIS colleagues at KGB headquarters in Moscow, Vasili Mitrokhin was known as the keeper of the Kremlin's secrets. Diligent, trusted and apparently loyal, the quiet librarian's work as head archivist of the KGB's First Chief Directorate was highly regarded by Russia's spymasters.
Mitrokhin's job was to catalogue and store the "crown jewels" of the KGB's foreign espionage operations.
The files, meticulously logged, listed the names and identities of KGB officers, their agents and informants. They included detailed "contact reports" of information that the KGB had gleaned from its spies around the world. Among them were the identities of the KGB's most valued assets in Britain, America, Germany and a host of other countries.
However, for 10 years up until his retirement in 1985 the quiet, unassuming academic kept his own remarkable secret.
His treachery, it has been revealed this weekend, amounted to probably the greatest coup for British intelligence since the second world war.
On an almost daily basis the KGB's top archivist removed key files from storage, copying down their contents on pieces of paper. Hiding the handwritten documents in his shoes, socks or trousers, he smuggled them past the security guards and took them to his home on the outskirts of Moscow.
According to sources with knowledge of his case, Mitrokhin assiduously typed up verbatim transcripts of his handwritten notes. Later he concealed them in trunks around his house and, sources claimed yesterday, in milk cartons at the bottom of his back garden.
"He had remarkable access to remarkable documents," one senior Whitehall security insider told The Sunday Times yesterday. "They concern Soviet intelligence operations worldwide and over a period of decades up to the mid-1980s."
In retirement, the quiet librarian watched and waited. In 1992, seven years after he had left the KGB, he travelled to Latvia, taking thousands of pages of his documents with him. He walked into the American embassy in Riga and asked if he could defect.
Incredibly, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers at the embassy were not interested. Mitrokhin was not a spy, just a librarian. The documents he had were clearly not originals and could easily have been fakes.
The local CIA team were struggling to cope with hundreds of Russian exiles seeking to flee the collapsing former Soviet Union. One senior CIA man, Paul Redmond, head of the agency's counterintelligence section, argued that Mitrokhin should be recruited. In what has emerged as one of the spy agency's most embarrassing blunders, his protests were ignored.
Undeterred, Mitrokhin went to the British embassy. There, a female officer with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) spotted his potential. After a series of in-depth interviews and consultations with headquarters, Mitrokhin was formally accepted as an MI6 agent. Sources say he was given an MI6 codename: Kurb.
Whisked back to Britain, he was provided with a new identity, a safe house and a generous pension. MI6, contemplating one of its greatest intelligence coups, faced two challenges. It needed to retrieve the remainder of the documents that were hidden in Mitrokhin's house and garden. It also needed to authenticate them.
Within weeks of his defection, MI6 carried out a delicate operation to remove the files. Sources say that a young MI6 officer, who did not work in Moscow and was unknown to the Russians, was brought into the country. Undetected by Russian counterintelligence he went to the librarian's home, dug up the files and carried them to the British embassy. From there they were returned to Britain in six large trunks.
The Mitrokhin archive stunned spy chiefs. The classified files went back to the 1930s. It seemed that Mitrokhin, with his vast knowledge of the KGB's foreign operations, had been able to cherry-pick the best.
"There was a massive amount of material," a senior Whitehall official with knowledge of the case said. "It presented a pretty big picture of what the KGB had been up to."
Ronald Kessler, an espionage expert, said: "A lot of the information was like reading the other side's mail; simply to learn what the enemy has been doing all these years in such detail, in such volume, in such accuracy. It was amazing."
Mitrokhin's motive was unlike that of most other spies. He did not do it for the money and he was not being blackmailed. Instead, his motive was disgust at the way the corrupt Soviet regime had treated its people. "He was disillusioned about what was being done in the name of communism," said a security source.
After such treachery, it is likely that the Russians have put a price on his head. But the former KGB archivist insisted that at least some of his work be made public. Professor Christopher Andrew, the historian of British and Soviet intelligence, was later contacted. His book on the Mitrokhin archive, the result of several years of intensive checking, is published this week.
According to those close to the case, the range and depth of the disclosures are astonishing. It is impossible to calculate the full contribution of the archive to the West's understanding of KGB activities. But senior intelligence officers say that the files have generated hundreds of new leads and could lead to a spate of new espionage prosecutions.
In Germany, where the KGB was intensely active for nearly 40 years during the cold war, the archive is said to have prompted up to 50 security investigations.
In America, the FBI was able to dust off dozens of its old, unsolved espionage cases and re-energise them with important new leads. Some of Mitrokhin's information helped to convict Robert Lipka, a former clerk at the National Security Agency. He had spied for the Russians in the late 1960s but had evaded FBI surveillance until Mitrokhin came in. He is now serving an 18-year sentence.
Another case that has been reopened is that of Felix Bloch, the highest-ranking State Department official ever investigated for espionage. He was fired in 1989 and stripped of his pension, but the FBI never had enough evidence to charge him.
The file showed how the Soviets had tried unsuccessfully to recruit Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, and Cyrus Vance, who became secretary of state.
They detailed how the KGB planted stories that Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader, was secretly working with President Johnson and had sold out to the white establishment. They included records of telephone taps of conversations between Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser to President Nixon, and his girlfriend as well as calls to other diplomats.
The archives also showed how the Soviets had planted spies in big companies such as IBM and General Electric. Defence companies were also targeted with plans for new planes and tanks regularly being leaked to Moscow.
The files revealed that the KGB had thought of sabotaging the port of New York. A whole range of "active measures" were exposed, including attempts to target key installations such as dams, water supplies, electricity grids and military arsenals.
At one point the files are said to reveal an extraordinary Soviet plan to plant an explosive device inside a large inner- city Afro-American community and later to blame it on white racism.
The KGB penetration of American politics was especially worrying: it extended to the successful planting of a listening device in a room on Capitol Hill, Washington, used by the powerful US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
According to Redmond, from the CIA, the archive revealed a particularly alarming lack of security by the American defence establishment.
"They were extraordinarily effective in taking advantage of the colossal lack of security on the part of the defence contractors in this country who were faxing things in the open about our weapons system," he said. "They were getting it and exporting it and, at one point, as I recall from those documents, roughly 50% of the defence development projects in the Soviet Union were based on secrets stolen in the West."
Some of the schemes had been suspected by the FBI years ago, but the archive provided vital new details that helped to expose the full extent of Soviet intelligence operations in America.
There were revelations, too, about KGB spies in Britain. Yesterday it emerged that one was Melita Norwood, an 87-year-old great-grandmother who lives in Bexleyheath, southeast London. She passed information about Britain's atomic bomb programme to the Russians during the 1930s and 1940s.
During that time she worked at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association in London. It provided detailed scientific and technical advice to government departments including the Ministry of Defence and the Atomic Energy Authority. Both departments were involved in the development of Britain's nuclear bomb programme.
Her greatest spying coup was after the second world war when she stole documents on a top-secret "tube alloys" project, which was a cover for the nuclear weapons programme. The files passed on by Hola (Norwood's codename) meant that Stalin was better briefed on the construction of the British bomb than ministers in the Labour government led by Clement Attlee.
The quality of her revelations to the KGB was said to have placed her on a par with the treachery of such spies as Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross, known as the "magnificent five".
Andrew said yesterday that he did not believe Norwood should be prosecuted. Speaking at a conference in Berlin on East-West spying, he said: "In the mid-1930s she entered the service of one of the vilest regimes of the 20th century. In her mind, however, she had a mythical image of this extraordinary society - the first society run for and by working people. Hola was really better than Kim Philby and the others. They failed to keep their secrets and, by 1951, all of them were under suspicion."
Senior Whitehall sources said, however, that she had stopped providing the Soviets with intelligence when she left her post at a British research institute a few years after the second world war. "There's been a fair amount of exaggeration about her role," one said.
Whatever the assessment of Norwood's true contribution to the history of Soviet intelligence, the disclosure this weekend that she has not been prosecuted for her treachery has ignited a controversy embarrassing for the government.
British intelligence has known since 1992 of her crimes. Yet MI5 is understood not even to have interviewed her. The explanation is that successive law chiefs decided it would not be in the public interest to charge her because of her age. The argument was, apparently, that other spies, such as Blunt and Cairncross, had been spared prosecution. Why prosecute an octogenarian grandmother who might not live to see her first day in prison?
Another KGB spy to be named in the archives was John Symonds, a former detective at Scotland Yard. Symonds had been implicated in a police corruption scandal in the late 1960s and was later recruited by the KGB after he fled Britain following corruption charges.
Andrew said that the archives were "truly extraordinary" and revealed the extent of Soviet penetration of the West from 1930 onwards. He revealed that his book would also document the identities of other people who had collaborated with Soviet intelligence in Britain. Some sources said the archives included the names of 37 Soviet agents in Britain.
Oleg Kalugin, former head of foreign counterintelligence at the KGB, confirmed that the former Soviet Union had been running several British agents who had never been identified.
"These revelations don't come as a surprise," he said. "There were dozens of Soviet-run agents working in Britain. I can't tell you the precise number. But we had people working for us in all walks of life."
Insight: David Leppard, Jon Ungoed-Thomas, Paul Nuki, Gareth Walsh and Clive Freeman in Berlin