The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB Paperback – 1 Jan. 1734

Very satisfied with the book and the service!!!!

Published in 1999, this is Christopher Andrew's masterful study and analysis of `The Mitrokhin Archive`.For sheer in-depth and reliable material on the KGB and it's workings this book is without equal.The author is an eminent authority on the world of intelligence and espionage and all of his published works are rightly regarded as 'bench-marks' on the subject.This fat volume is crammed from cover-to-cover with - what amounts to - the entire history of the KGB, it's operatives and it's operations throughout the USA and Europe.Everything is here, from the well-know names of Blake, Blunt, Burgess, Philby and Maclean to names and events that were hitherto unknown to anyone outside the KGB.For serious students and casual readers alike, your `spy bookshelf' is incomplete without this remarkable offering from Christopher Andrew.Barry

An eye opener book.Must read how murky the government to government exchange through spying and social engineering is.Thriller.

Received late but nice book to have

A great treasure of informatin on KGB and its impact on the world. More interesting than even movoes and other fiction. It's worth the price and waiting time. My book was delivered after 20 days. I recommend you buy it.

great buy from great seller

Interesting read.

The Sword and The Shield by Christopher Andrew is perhaps the most complete history of an intelligence agency ever written. Having first read the second volume The World was Going Our Way, The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, I resolved to expand my knowledge by reading the acclaimed first volume. There is no getting around the fact the The Sword and the Shield is an extremely tedious and somewhat cumbersome read. The author constantly exposes the reader to hundreds of sources, agents, and operations that are hard to keep straight. The author also expects that the reader will have a high degree of knowledge about the Cold War and the Soviet Union, and for that reason I do not recommend this book to readers unfamiliar with those topics. Because of the tediousness and seriousness of the topic I have only awarded the book 4 stars. That being said, for anyone interested in studying intelligence or the Soviet Union, this book is a must read. The author successfully promotes the claim that the KGB and the Soviet Security Apparatus was much more crucial to the survival and promotion of the Soviet State than recent experts on the Soviet Union have claimed. He does this by tracing the history of the Soviet Intelligence from the Bolshevik revolution until the dissolution of the Soviet State in 1991. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the early history of the KGB which is mostly unknown to students of the Cold War. The KGB from the 1920s until the mid 1950s and early 1960s was perhaps the most successful intelligence agency agency of its time. Achieving high level penetrations of government institutions in almost every western country, while at the same time assassinating and terrorizing opponents of the Soviet State both domestic and abroad. The earlier successes of the KGB did much to enhance the reputation of the KGB as the brutal and and brilliant intelligence service that it is often portrayed as in today's popular culture. The TV show The Americans as well as recent movies such as Salt are current examples of the KGB's mythical status in popular culture. Despite the KGB's early successes the author portrays the KGB as much less efficient than the official histories of the KGB and its successor agency, The SVR, would suggest. For all the KGB's success western intelligence agencies, particular the agencies of the United States and Great Britain, had largely leveled the playing field by the 1960s. The KGB collected immense amounts of intelligence, yet often failed to produce objective analysis of the intelligence it collected due to fears of subverting the widely held beliefs and biases of senior party officials. The KGB also spend enormous amount of time and effort countering ideological subversion from dissidents in the Soviet Union, including Jehovah's witnesses, members of the protest movement Solidarity, and prominent intellectuals critical of the Soviet State. The author suggests that the pursuit of individuals who did not prove a serious threat to the Soviet State was a waste of time and resources. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the book was the ingenious methods soviet intelligence used to convince individuals in positions of power to spy or work for the Soviet Union. Threats of violence, sexual blackmail, harassment, "false flag" operations, and even love from spouses who were KGB officers were used to compromise and convince intelligence targets. In some ways the book could even be considered a manual of how the KGB compromised and recruited intelligence targets. The ruthlessness of KGB blackmail operations reached the point where targets sometimes committed suicide to escape the clutches of the KGB.For anyone interested in the history of the Soviet Union and the methods of the KGB this book is essential to understanding the role and function of the KGB in the Soviet Union.

Bought this book in two months ago and still working on it. So be prepared to spend some time on the Mitrokhin Archives. This is a fascinating and DETAILED account of espionage tactics used by the Russians from 1917 to the present. I have been told that some of the exploits described in the book were used as source material and story ideas for the cable TV series "The Americans."The most amazing part of the archive details just how deeply penetrated the Roosevelt presidency was during World War II. Heck, the Soviets even had a Cabinet Secretary in their pocket and THREE scientists on the Manhattan Project.Lots of detail from the Soviet perspective on Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, The Rosenbergs, Christopher Boyce, Aldrich Ames,and other major spies who we have heard about over the years, but getting the picture from the Russian point of view was interesting.

My first encounter with the KGB (Комитет государственной безопасности, or Committee for State Security) came a few days after we arrived in the Soviet Union. As a naval attaché, whose duty was to collect intelligence about the Soviet armed forces, the Red Fleet in particular, I was the target of surveillance whenever I left the embassy, particularly when we traveled around the USSR in the course of our duties. Although they never did anything to us that was even close to what they were capable of doing, I always had the most sincere respect for this huge organization. I expect everyone has a picture of the KGB, but the book I have just read filled in the picture for me—tremendously. Christopher Andrew wrote this book, based upon huge cases of KGB archives carefully gathered by Vasili Mitrokhin, from 1972 to his retirement in 1984. Mitrokhin was born in Yurasovo, (Ryazanskaya Oblast’) central Russia (140 miles SE of Moscow) in 1922. He began work as a foreign intelligence officer for the MGB (Ministry of State Security) in 1948. The MGB later became the KGB (Committee for State Security). He was actively involved in all the secret activity in an organization answering to the demands of the General Secretary, Josef Stalin. He was ordered to investigate “The Doctors’ Plot” in January, 1953. This “plot” was a manufactured anti-semitic scheme against Zionists. Then, Stalin died in March of 1953, and that began a fight to see who would replace him. Nikita Khrushchev was one of the contenders, and so was Lavrenty Beria, long-term head of the KGB. Mitrokhin was on hand to watch all the manipulation behind the scenes as Beria fell from grace and became “an enemy of the people”, executed in December of 1953. As the years rolled on Mitrokhin traveled outside the USSR enough to learn about the outside world, and to hear what that world was saying about his country. He was also a reader of Russian literature, and admired the Kirov ballet in Leningrad. When he heard about how the KGB sent agents to maim a ballet star who had defected to the west, he was starting to get disillusioned with all that was happening around him. About that time, in 1956, Khrushchev made his famous speech discrediting Stalin and blaming him for the country’s failings. The KGB transferred Mitrokhin from his intelligence collection duties to those of handling the KGB Archives. Mitrokhin then was in position to see every secret, every message that was sent to be filed in the archives. He was able to read the messages and reports all the way back to the days of the Cheka, after the Revolution in 1918. And he was able to read the top secret files of Lenin and all that he did when thousands of Russians were being exterminated. His documents revealed torture like in Kharkov when prisoners’ skin was slowly peeled from their hands to make “gloves”, in Veronezh prisoners were rolled around in barrels studded with nails, in Poltava, priests were impaled, and in Odessa White officers were strapped to boards and fed into a furnace. In Kiev, prisoners had cages with rats in them strapped to their bodies; the cages were heated and the rats ate into the prisoners’ intestines. Mitrokhin’s archives clarify the fact that the terrors attributed to “Stalinism” began with Lenin: The infallible leader, the one-party state, the ubiquitous security service, and the ring of concentration camps and prisons to terrorize opponents. In the years of Lenin and Stalin western countries had little or no intelligence collection organizations, and certainly no “active measures”, but the Soviets always thought they were doing the same things they were. There were always campaigns to discredit and disown various long-term supporters and helpers. The long-running campaign to track down Trotsky and all his supporters, ended with his assassination in Mexico in 1940. Mitrokhin’s picture of Yuri Andropov began when he was Soviet Ambassador to Hungary. Andropov brutally suppressed the 1956 uprising, with hangings and shootings. The Hungarians today remember him as “The Butcher of Budapest”. Andropov went on to become head of the KGB until 1982, when, upon the death of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, he took his place. President Vladimir Putin in 2004, on the 90th anniversary of Andropov’s birth, dedicated a new intelligence school to his old boss, Andropov. He also began several scholarships for students wanting to train in the intelligence field in the name of Andropov. Mitrokhin was stationed in East Germany during the “Prague Spring” of 1968, when the Soviets forcefully suppressed an anti-communist uprising in Czechoslovakia, and he saw how brutally the USSR reacted to that, and he read all the plans for further actions, if needed. Bit by bit, he was growing more disillusioned with his country. In 1972, part of the KGB was transferred from the Lubyanka Prison in Dzerzhinsky Square to Yasenovo, southeast of the Kremlin, out beyond the Ring Road. By this time Mitrokhin found himself “a loner”, seeing the plight of dissidents, hearing more foreign news broadcasts, and exposed to the whole secret history of this communist state. Operating from offices in both Lubyanka and Yasenovo, he was able to handle hundreds of thousands of documents, and he began to memorize some and then go home and transcribe them. Then, when he saw that was too slow, he would make notes and crumple them up and throw them in the basket to be destroyed at the end of the day—but he would conceal them in his shoes and take them home. Mitrokhin had a dacha outside of Moscow and he took the documents there and kept them in an old butter churn, which he concealed beneath the floorboards. As time went on, and no one seemed to pay attention, he began to bring out more and more documents. He concealed them all under the floorboards of his dacha. Finally, in 1984, he retired, but he still didn’t know what he was going to do with all these documents. Finally, in 1991, Mitrokhin traveled to Riga, Latvia and went to the American Embassy there, showing some of his documents to CIA officers. They did not believe he was credible and turned him away. He then went to the British Embassy in Riga, and there a young diplomat listened and looked, and began the process of welcoming him to the West. A month later MI6 agents in Moscow retrieved the 25,000 documents Mitrokhin had stashed under the dacha, and shortly later he and his family arrived in Riga, Latvia, en route the United Kingdom and their new home. Over the decades since the Russian Revolution, various writers have detailed the grisly details of the running of the new Soviet Union. Our various intelligence collection services have added to this picture. The documents Mitrokhin provided confirmed suppositions and suspicions in thousands of different cases, they filled many gaps, and as our FBI later said, this was “the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source". The files confirmed what we had known about the leaders of the Soviet Union. Stalin was a brutal, heartless villain who was so suspicious that he would not believe his own intelligence reports. The Soviets went to great efforts to gather spies in the West; bright, well-educated men and women from the best families and best colleges could not wait to be a part of the dream of a Communist state. These men, like the “Cambridge Five” of Kim Philby, Donald Duart Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, are all identified with their secret KGB work-names. These men earned positions in His Majesty’s government during World War II, and passed loads of intelligence to their KGB handlers. Much of what they provided was not used, as was crucial intelligence provided the Soviets from other sources, because Stalin would not believe that it was valid. His psychotically suspicious nature insulated him from some of the most valuable intelligence, including the warnings that Hitler was planning to turn on his so-called “ally” in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and attack the USSR. Kim Philby’s story was particularly poignant. After a life as a Soviet spy, stealing secrets from the British and Americans, while posted in various countries for the U.K., he finally defected to the USSR, and turned into a hopeless drunk in Moscow. He recovered from that somewhat to conduct seminars to prepare young Russians for learning to adapt to English society, and finally died in Moscow in 1988, a sad, lonely life. According to these KGB records, an agent could be honest, hard-working and loyal, and if his super paranoid superiors woke up on the wrong side of the bed, he could be stripped of his assignment, sent to prison, or to a camp in Siberia, or simply shot. When people up and down the chain of command were denouncing each other, you might feel the need to denounce someone yourself, pre-emptively. It might save you, or you could get killed anyway. One of the most remarkable pieces in Sword and Shield was the unveiling of Melita Norwood, who at time of publication of this book in 1999, was 87 years old. She had fallen in love with the idea of Communism and the Workers’ Paradise in the 1930s, and became a Soviet spy in 1937. She got a job in a defense plant, and passed secret information to her handlers all during the war and into the Cold War. When she wasn’t spying, she carried signs to “Ban the Bomb”, opposing Trident submarines in the Royal and U.S. Navies, and handed out the Communist “Morning Star” in her neighborhood of Bexleyheath. According to the Mitrokhin archives, half the USSR’s weapons are based upon U.S. designs; the KGB tapped Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s phone, and they had spies in place in almost all U.S. defense contractor facilities. Salvador Allende of Chile provided political intelligence to the USSR, and reorganized his own intelligence organization along lines suggested by the KGB. KGB financial support probably played a decisive role in Allende’s victory in 1970, according to author Christopher Andrew. As the Cold War began, revelations in the United States showed America that the Soviet Union was on the march to conquer the world. It was a fearsome image as the Soviets threatened to put all of Europe under the communist yoke. Communists were everywhere in France, and the United Kingdom, under Conservative rule all during World War II, suddenly swerved left with a Labour government, and plans to nationalize major industries. America’s firm grasp of military supremacy with the atom bomb was slipping, as spies who had stolen American atomic bomb secrets started to emerge. There was Klaus Fuchs, and Alger Hiss, and then Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Just at this time, 1950, a little-known Republican Senator from Wisconsin began to make headlines with his call for investigations. Joseph R. McCarthy claimed there were hundreds of communists in the State Department. Americans began to see communists everywhere. In 1951 President Truman said that Sen. McCarthy was the Kremlin’s No. 1 asset in the United States, and according to the authors, that turned out to be true. It took a while for Moscow Center to understand what was happening with the McCarthy Red Scare, but as they did, they began to strengthen their efforts to build up their illegal presence in the U.S. In 1957 Rudolf Abel was caught and convicted of spying for the KGB in America and sentenced to 30 years. However, in 1962 he was freed in a prisoner exchange with the captured U-2 Pilot, Francis Gary Powers, in a dramatic exchange in West Berlin at the Glienecker Bridge. The KGB and their Cuban counterparts supported the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua, blackmailed various western politicians, spread false information regarding the Kennedy assassination, attempted to incriminate E. Howard Hunt with Lee Harvey Oswald, spread rumors that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was a homosexual, and attempted to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. by placing publications portraying him as an “Uncle Tom”, receiving government subsidies. They stirred up racial tension in the U.S. by mailing bogus letters from the Ku Klux Klan, placing an explosive package in “the Negro section of New York (Operation Pandora)” and by spreading conspiracy theories that M.L. King Jr.’s assassination had been planned by the U.S. government. The KGB and their Rumanian counterpart established close ties with PLO leader Yassir Arafat, providing money and secret training for PLO guerrillas. Most arms supplied to the Palestinians were handled through Wadie Haddad of the PFLP, who stayed in a KGB dacha during his visits to Moscow. Haddad and Carlos the Jackal organized the 1975 attack on the OPEC Conference in Vienna, and Haddad organized the highjacking in Entebbe in 1976, as well as several other PLO highjackings. This book illustrated over and over how people in the west have been taken in by the allure of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”, “the Workers’ Paradise”, or the glorious idea of Communism. Some gave up everything to join the cause, even spying for the USSR, and dying for it. The KGB was absolutely essential to the totalitarian nation that was the Soviet Union, to protect it, and to terrorize its citizens and anyone who came too near. Could modern Russia return to the ways of the Soviet Union? Time will tell.-end-

I did enjoy reading ,"The Sword And The Shield," I had read," American Betrayal" by Diana West and decided to read some of her sources. I was interested in the fact Roosevelt had took Harry Hopkins to Tehran instead of his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull. Harry Hopkins lived in the White House for three years and six months. He slept in the Lincoln bedroom and was FDR's closest advisor. An unelected man, living in the White House, seems very strange. Anyway, Christopher Andrew writes, Hopkins had established a remarkable reputation in Moscow for taking the Russians into his confidence. Earlier in the year he had privately warned the Soviet embassy in Washington that the FBI had bugged a secret meeting at which Zarubin ( apparently identified by Hopkins only as a member of the embassy) had passed money to Steve Nelson, a leading member of the US Communist underground. KGB agents boasted that he (Hopkins) had been a Soviet Agent but Mitrokhin denies that Hopkins was an agent, after reading six or more books concerning communists in FDR's administration, I believe Hopkins was the most impotant Agent/Mole/FellowTraveler,Communist, it makes no difference what we call him, he was the most destructive of them all.

While western intelligences agencies have been rife with traitors and turncoats only too anxious to publish their stories, the Russians always seemed to keep their secrets well buried far behind the Iron Curtain. While spilling the beans in the west can lead to publishing profits, in Russia it leads to a quick and nasty death. Nevertheless Vasili Mitrokhin risked just that to spend years making secretive notes deep within the library of the Russian intel archives. Many years later the British SIS exfiltrated Mitrokhin along with five filing cabinets of notes (the American CIA was first offer but strangely said no). With Christopher Andrew, the former KGB officer wrote the first of this incredible Russian intel service history from those notes. It is all here from the early days of the Cheka under Lenin, to the Stalin era to the modern day - a long awaited and revealing look into the actions and the mindset of the Russian and Soviet spymasters. Wow! Were these guys paranoid! The belief that you are constantly under attack breeds a very capable, determined and ruthless intelligence service. Amazingly, its efforts overt he decades since the revolution were aimed as much at the Soviet population as the real and imagined enemies abroad. There are many shocking revelations in this great read - surprising many did not make headlines in the west when the book was published. It can be heavy (detailed) reading, but for the spy enthusiast to the student of world espionage the book is a must read and must have.

The Sword and the Shield is quite the tome. It is a history of the KGB and NKVD, the Soviet Union's counterpart to the USA's CIA, taken straight from their own archives. Mitrokhin, the chief archivist for the KGB for decades, kept meticulous records on current KGB operations throughout the world and kept them hidden in his dacha. He then defected in the early 1990s to the West, taking all of these notes with him. This is the record of the KBG's operations in the U.S. and Western Europe from the 1930s through the 90s. I have read a couple of reviews that say do not make this your first read on the subject, and I would agree. It reads very much like a textbook and can be quite dry for people unfamiliar with the subject matter. It is not really meant for entertainment, but more serious research. This is a very good research source. That said, the information inside blows away any Hollywood spy movie. The section on Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five alone would make a fantastic Hollywood movie with intrigue, sex, betrayal and danger. And it is all real. The important thing to note about this book is that it is from the KGB archives, not packaged for foreign audiences with propoganda galore. The result is a fascinating and shocking account of what the KGB and Soviet Union were up to in the 20th century. Among many of the revelations to me was that while Joe McCarthy was quite overzealous, he was not as crazy as history has painted him out to be in relation to the scope of intentional Communist penetration into American government and society. Quite a page-turner.

This is not a narrative. It is more a researcher database. Didn't expect that, but am pleased to have it.

I would have rated this book as excellent if it was not for the fact that the author's obvious bias towards the British secret services (which should not come as any prize.This is demonstrated by the fact that the author states that ULTRA was the biggest intelligence success against the nazis (and perhaps in the history of warfare).This is debatable as it is known that in the years before world war ii,the USSR penetrated the military,diplomatic and poitical establishments of all major world powers,which has to rank as one of the greatest acheivements in the history of espionage.Is this to say that the acheivements of Richard Sorge,the Red Orchestra and the Lucy SPy Ring dont count?Mr.Andrews also downplays the role of the NKVD guerilla groups which is strange because they did contribute to the war effort (especially during Operation Bagration).Apart from this,the author does an excellent job of listing the details of KGB operations worldwide listing its acheivements mainly in penetrating a huge number of western establishments and its failings mainly in the field of intelligence analysis.His work teaches us two important details of ideological ,one party states:that they depend hugely on their intelligence apparatus to maintain domestic control and to promote their foreign interests and that their ideologies make for poor intelligence analysis.I highly recommend this book.

This is an excellent review of KGB actions from its beginning to the 1990s. Many surprises. It's thoroughness makes it a long read. If you are interested in the subject matter, I recommend it. If you are just looking for entertainment, then I would pass. Of course, it was likely reviewed and edited by MI-6 and the CIA, but, considering the lives of our assets are involved, that is only fair. And, in fairness to the classified reviewers/editors, they did leave in material that is embarressing for both agencies. For as close a look as the public can get, it is a classic worth reading.

The Sword and the Shield is at times gripping, at times dry, and at times humorous... but always interesting.Andrew wends his way through the history of Soviet spycraft in chronological order, from the days of the revolutionary Cheka to the (almost) modern day. Every step of the way is fascinating and eye-opening from a historical perspective, especially if you -- like me -- wrongly assumed that actual Soviet cloak-and-dagger espionage in the U.S. was limited and rare.But if The Sword and the Shield reveals that Soviet espionage on U.S. soil was much more common that most people believe, it also reveals that the reality is a lot less romantic and more prosaic than you might have imagined. Interesting characters and motivations are few and far between -- most of the spies we encounter work for money, youthful beliefs, or simply as a career. And while there are dead drops, seductions, secret meetings, and assassinations, most of the secret operations (even the really big ones) amount to patiently cultivating friendships and maybe asking for the occasional innocent-sounding favor.And therein lies both the strength and the weakness of Andrew's book. The constant conspiracies of the espionage trade eventually become repetitive, as repetitive as they must have to the hapless Soviet operatives tasked with chasing down imaginary American conspiracies for the hundredth time.If you want to know what Soviet espionage was really like, warts and all, this book is an eye-opening, fascinating, invaluable read. If you're looking for salacious details and thrilling developments, you might find yourself bailing out after a couple chapters.