When former KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin defected to Britain he brought with him what the FBI described as ‘the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source’. The first resulting book, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, created a media storm. But it told only part of the story. Now The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World reveals for the first time the full extent of the KGB’s global penetration, exposing its operations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. For a quarter of a century the KGB believed that the Third World was the arena in which it could win the Cold War. ‘The world,’ claimed Moscow, ‘was going our way.’ The Mitrokhim Archive II discloses the KGB’s secret contacts with a series of world leaders, among them Castro, Allende, Nasser, Saddam Hussein and Mengistu, as well as with terrorist hijackers and communist parties around the globe. It also shows the enormous resources devoted, with varying degrees of success, to trying to determine the course of events in countries as different as India (the main focus for KGB active measures in Asia) and Afghanistan (where the KGB took the lead in the Soviet invasion). The revelations range from the shocking to the absurd-Soviet agents assessing the spread of their great rival, Chinese communism, by counting the changing number of Mao Zedong posters in Africa-and take the story all the way to the disintegrations of the Eastern Bloc. The Mitrokhin Archive II is the first comprehensive account of the Global reach of the world’s most powerful secret organization.
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