The Sword And The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive & The Secret History Of The KGB (2000) - Plot & Excerpts
Not being an expert on the world of Soviet spying, this is a slow read. It is exhaustive and complex. However, embedded in the story are riveting wow moments of humanity and imperfection. In addition, the authors take the reader through history as seen through the lens of intelligence and counterintelligence. From the Russian Revolution through the White Russian Guard to Stalin's rise to the Great Terror to Hitler's invasion of Russia and beyond, this narrative gives the inside story. Some moments are absolutely breathtaking. Others inspire you to read a fuller account in other books, as I realized when reading about the Great Terror, and began to search for a book that could give me a fuller and broader account.In the end, I spent over two months reading this tome, and in the aftermath, it's an extremely mixed bag.On the one hand, it's extraordinary to read the history of the Soviet Union through the stories of its intelligence agencies. It's a history of deception, cunning, subterfuge, murder, sabotage, lives destroyed, lies propogated, and an entire country decimated. Little did I know how many Western spies the USSR planted in the West, from the Magnificent Five in British intelligence, to vast networks within European socialist and communist parties (esp. Italy, France, and Spain), to extensive networks targeted against The Main Adversary (the U.S.). Little did I know how much success they had. This book details those successes by name.It's also an extraordinary story of one man's bravery and sacrifice. Mitrokhin, a KGB bureaucrat, secretly wrote down the history of KGB deception from 1917 to 1985, smuggled his casefuls of notes out of headquarters over a period of years, and in 1990, smuggled them out of the country. That alone should qualify him to a movie deal starring Christopher Plummer. Closely guarded secrets are laid bare. Mitrokhin names names, exposes identities. On the other hand, the prose is often atrocious. Sometimes, I had to read a sentence five times just to make sense of it. It is overly complex, filled with confusing acronyms, and often assumes a knowledge of terminology that the general reader simply doesn't have. This book sprawls, which can be good and bad. It's good that many of the vast connections are being made--Hungary/Czechoslovakia/Poland, Stalin/Beria/Trotsky, Khrushchev/Brezhnev/Kennedy, Andropov/Markus Wolf. On the other hand, it's hard to hold an entire world in your brain at one time, unless this is your area of professional expertise.Still, there are some remarkable anecdotes here. I was fascinated to read about Ramon Mercader's stalking of Leon Trotsky in Mexico, culminating with the final, violent stab of an icepick into Trotsky's skull while he was reading Mercader's article.It was amazing to hear of Soviet spy George Blake's imprisonment in England, and then five years later, his daring escape with Irish bomber Sean Bourke and their flight to Russia. After a few months, Bourke wanted to go back to Ireland, and Russian authorities complied but took a precautionary step. To limit Bourke's usefulness to British authorities should he be caught, they gave him a drug that induced brain damage, then sent him back.There are many stories of homosexual entrapment in this book, which is a snapshot of an earlier time. Many secretaries within Western intelligence were targeted by the USSR, an operation called The Secretaries Offensive. Thirty-year-old Leonore Heinz was secretary to a British foreign ministry department head in 1958, and was seduced by Heinz Sutterlin. For nine years Sutterlin convinced Leonore to share documents with him, which he passed on to the USSR. When they were caught and she discovered that Sutterlin marriage was a sham, she hanged herself in her cell.This book is filled with dramatic stories such as these. Unfortunately, you have to wade through so much to get to them. Still, I'm glad I read this book. It was an investment, and it has paid off.
First of all, I'm filled with respect for the dedication it took for Vasili Mitrokhin to painstakingly copy thousands upon thousands of documents, as a KGB archivist, and secretly store them under his home. The trove most assuredly has been of incalculable value to historians and western intelligence agencies. Because I've always been a fan of the espionage genre - both historical and fictional - I expected to binge-read this book, growing drunk on previously unavailable levels of detail and accuracy in real-life spy drama. Well, I don't "binge-read" anything, considering how methodically I read and how quickly I fall asleep when I finally make my way to bed, but getting through this book was an arduous slog. More than its daunting 600 page length, it was the awkward pacing that continually tripped me up. Because of the organization (traversing the period of history detailed in Mitrokhin's archive not chronologically, but rather by adversary country or espionage method) I was constantly bouncing from decade to decade, and had difficulty in applying a timeline to what I was reading.You'll find this criticism shallow, I suspect, but I was particularly off-put by the rendering (in brackets) of the multiple code names assigned to every character described in the book. Undoubtedly this was done to underscore the credibility of the information, and to position the book as a reference source, but it quickly started to aggravate me, and made the sentences clumsy to read and digest. By the time I had gotten halfway through the book, I was really sick of it, and found myself wishing, on every page, that I had a digest version of the thing, half the length, and arranged more chronologically. Still, I doggedly slogged on, more at the prospect of picking up fascinating little espionage stories (which I frequently did) than out of some stubborn insistence on finishing what I'd started.I really believe that the way this book is edited and arranged, combined with its vast length, would cause perhaps a fourth of well-intentioned readers to abandon it before they complete it. I now despair of what to do with the sequel, "The World Was Going Our Way," which now mocks me from my to-be-read shelf. I suspect that I'll do little more than flip through a chapter or two, unless the structure and style turn out to be very different.
What do You think about The Sword And The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive & The Secret History Of The KGB (2000)?
The problem with this book is there is just too much to take in. I can only read a page or two at a time.Despite Andrew taking a swipe at Sen. Joseph McCarthy, this book does vindicate the man to some extent. Or so it seems to me. The Soviets were all over the place. If anything, McCarthy underestimated the sheer number of spies.Also impressive is the dedication of Mitrokhin, copying this stuff out by hand for years and years. Good thing he did.The book is especially relevant right now, with the Snowden case and all the hoo-hah about the NSA.
—Patrick
Frightening and real: this is a harbinger of the Putin era, as it details the history and string of successes enjoyed by the KGB and its ancestors,the Cheka,the NKVD,et al.Mitrochkin had to relocate the secret files of the KGB from its location in Llubyanka to a new ring road library. He copied the files in a tiny script and removed them from the building in his socks, subsequently hiding them in his dacha. He sought and received asylum from the Brits in 1991 then published this remarkable and chilling account of just how screwed we have always been by the Reds.I listened to it on a CD and despaired of our comparitively crappy CIA and FBI efforts, doomed to destruction by by Senator Frank Church (D. Utah) in 1975 whose misguided search for headlines did as much almost as much damage as did Aldrich Ames. Jamie Gorelik in 1995 wrote into law the walling off of the CIA and FBI, forbidding intelligence sharing to prevent them from connecting of the dots as the Slickster sold space weaponry guidance secrets to the Chinese colonels for $600,000.00.(In Russia, quick execution for Jamie!)Here she is put on the 9/11 commission to blame Bush for the very intel disasters she helped to cause!
—Walker
Interesting return to the Cold War. With unverifiable sources and hear-say, as well as a populist writing style, it can be a tiresome read, but it reminds one of the hard line, realist, Great Power beliefs so recently passed, yet ready to resurface. It also reminds us what a giant (if sometimes lethal) boys' game the whole thing was. Biggles and Tintin were role models for some. Also,although nominally a history of the KGB based on smuggled archival material, Mitrokhin and Andrews emphasize the continuity of the the KGB through FSB and the continuation of this apparat's influence on Soviet and post-Soviet politics. Remember, poisoned umbrella tips and polonium - bisexual Oxford undergrads who believed in Soviet Communism and handled the Royal Art collection may sound like bad Get Smart or James Bond ruses; but they were effective. Cue the Bluetooth smart rocks and the further expulsion of Britain's from Putin's Russia.
—John Wright
