KGB defector’s made-for-TV secrets now public

Original documents from one of the biggest intelligence leaks in history — a who's who of Soviet spying during the Cold War— were released Monday after being held in secret for two decades.

The files smuggled out of Russia in 1992 by senior KGB official Vasili Mitrokhin describe sabotage plots, booby-trapped weapons caches and armies of undercover agents in the West — the real-life inspiration for the fictional Soviet moles in "The Americans" TV series.

In reality, top-quality spies could be hard to get. The papers reveal that some were given honors and pensions by a grateful USSR but others proved loose-lipped, drunk or unreliable.

Intelligence historian Christopher Andrew said the vast dossier, released by the Churchill Archives Center at Cambridge University, was considered "the most important single intelligence source ever" by British and American authorities.

Mitrokhin was a senior archivist at the KGB's foreign intelligence headquarters — and a secret dissident. For more than a decade he secretly took files home, copied them in longhand and then typed and collated them into volumes. He hid the papers at his country cottage, or dacha, some stuffed into a milk churn and buried.

After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Mitrokhin traveled to a Baltic state — which one has never been confirmed — and took a sample of his files to the U.S. Embassy, only to be turned away. So he tried the British embassy, where a junior diplomat sat him down and asked, "Would you like a cup of tea?"

"That was the sentence that changed his life," said Andrew.

Smuggled out of Russia, Mitrokhin spent the rest of his life in Britain under a false name and police protection, dying in 2004 at 81.

The world did not learn of Mitrokhin until Andrew published a book based on his files in 1999. It caused a sensation by exposing the identities of KGB agents, including 87-year-old Melita Norwood, the "great-granny spy," who passed British atomic secrets to the Soviets for years.

She was more reliable than the famous Cambridge spies, the high-ranking British intelligence officials who worked secretly for the Soviets. The files describe Guy Burgess as "constantly under the influence of alcohol," while Donald Maclean was "not very good at keeping secrets."

The newly released papers include a list of KGB agents in the United States over several decades. It runs to 40 pages and about 1,000 names.

One of the most notorious was code-named Dan. He was Robert Lipka, a National Security Agency employee who was paid $27,000 for handing secrets to the USSR in the 1960s. After Britain passed Mitrokhin's information to U.S. intelligence services, Lipka was arrested and sentenced to 18 years in prison.

The volumes also reveal that Soviet agents stashed weapons and communications equipment in secret locations in NATO countries. It's unclear how many such weapons dumps have been tracked down by Western authorities.

While some agents targeted the West, many more were deployed within the Soviet bloc. The files list undercover agents who targeted the entourage of Polish cleric Karol Wojtyla, who would later become Pope John Paul II. The KGB noted with disapproval the Catholic priest's "extremely anticommunist views."

The Churchill Archive is giving researchers access to 19 boxes containing thousands of Russian-language files typed by Mitrokhin from his original notes. The notes themselves remain classified.

The Associated Press