CHRISTOPHER ANDREW

Reveals the identities of the KGB's top British female agent, militia Norwood, and the corrupt Scotland Yard officer who became a 'Romeo spy' on four continents among many others ...

The Sword and the Shield is based on one of the most extraordinary intelligence coups of recent times: a secret archive of top-level KGB documents smuggled out of the Soviet Union which the FBI has described, after close examination, as the "most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source." Its presence in the West represents a catastrophic hemorrhage of the KGB's secrets and reveals for the first time the full extent of its worldwide network. Vasili Mitrokhin, a secret dissident who worked in the KGB archive, smuggled out copies of its most highly classified files every day for twelve years. In 1992, a U.S. ally succeeded in exfiltrating the KGB officer and his entire archive out of Moscow. The archive covers the entire period from the Bolshevik Revolution to the 1980s and includes revelations concerning almost every country in the world. But the KGB's main target, of course, was the United States. Though there is top-secret material on almost every country in the world, the United States is at the top of the list. As well as containing many fascinating revelations, this is a major contribution to the secret history of the twentieth century.(...)

In 1992 the British Secret Intelligence Service exfiltrated from Russia a defector whose presence in the West has remained secret until the publication of this book. Vasili Mitrokhin worked for almost 30 years in the foreign intelligence archives of the KGB, when in 1972 he was made responsible for moving to a new HQ just outside Moscow. He was congratulated by the head of foreign intelligence, Vladimir Kryuchkov(later the ringleader of the 1991 Moscow coup), for his success in transferring the archives and his devoted service to the state security authorities. Unknown to Kryuchkov, however, Mitrokhin--a secret dissident--spent over a decade noting and copying highly classified files which, at enormous personal risk, he smuggled daily out of the archives and kept beneath his dacha floor. Few KGB officers have ever spent so much time reading, let alone noting, foreign intelligence files, writes Christopher Andrew. Outside the Archives, only the most senior officers shared his unrestricted access, and none had time to read more than a fraction of the material noted by him. Mitrokhin's archive, which extends from the Lenin era to the 1980s, has been described by the FBI as the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source.This unprecedented treasure-trove of KGB material, supplemented by research in a mass of other published and unpublished sources, has enabled Christopher Andrew, the leading Western writer on modern intelligence, to cast new light on the history both of the Soviet Union and of the East-West conflict which spanned three quarters of this century. The first volume of The Mitrokhin Archive gives an extraordinary insight into the KGB's penetration of the West, its secret links with Western communist parties, its covert role in maintaining the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and its brutal war against dissidents inside and outside the Soviet Union, all of which were on a scale and of a variety which we have never previously realised. Among the British agents revealed for the first time are a corrupt Scotland Yard detective who became a KGB Romeo Spy on four continents and a woman who was both KGB's longest-serving British agent and its most important female spy. Both are still alive.