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Book Reviews
tion and documents, provided by Gordievsky, who had worked as a
British agent from 1974 to 1985. 2 It is interesting to see that during
this period in the 1990s, when Mitrokhin collaborated with the SIS
and Andrew, few leaks about the defector’s fate occurred until he
and Andrew announced the publication of their book. It is no wonder
that some of the spies who were caught after Mitrokhin revealed
his knowledge must have felt like Rip van Winkle, awaking after
decades of hiding and sleeping in apparent security.
Andrew shows that the ‘priorities of Soviet intelligence under
Lenin, and still more under Stalin, continued to be shaped by greatly
exaggerated beliefs in an unrelenting conspiracy by Western governments
and their intelligence agencies’ (p. 40). He makes clear that the
‘Soviet propensity to conspiracy theory derived both from the nature
of the one-party state and from its Marxist-Leninist ideology’ (p. 40),
and he gives detailed information on hundreds of cases, not only
based on Mitrokhin’s files, but drawn from his complex research on
intelligence history as a whole. Andrew explains how a series of
‘semi official’ books on the history of the KGB, most of them collaborative
works with former members of the KGB by authors from
Britain or the USA, suffer from the weakness ‘that the choice of KGB
documents on which they are based has been made not by them but
by the SVR’ (Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki, the post-Soviet Russian
�oreign Intelligence Service, p. 27). 3
2 Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky (eds), Instructions from the
Centre: Top Secret �iles on KGB �oreign Operations, 1975–1985 (London, 1991);
‘slightly revised’ US edition: Comrade Krychkov’s Instructions: Top Secret �iles
on KGB �oreign Operations, 1975–1985 (Stanford, 1993); Christopher Andrew
and Oleg Gordievsky (eds), More Instructions from the Centre: Top Secret �iles
on KGB Global Operations, 1975–1985 (London, 1992); cf. Christopher Andrew
and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, p. 25.
3 Examples of ‘collaborative volumes’ are: John Costello and Oleg Tsarev,
Deadly Illusions (London, 1993); David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev,
and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs KGB in the Cold War (New
Haven, 1997); Alexander �ursenko and Timothy Naftali, ‘One Hell of a
Gamble’: Khrushchev, Kennedy, Castro and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1958–1964
(London, 1997); Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, The Crown Jewels: The British
Secrets at the Heart of the KGB’s Archives (London, 1998); Allen Weinstein and
Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The
Stalin Era (New York, 1999).
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