The Mitrokhin Archive -- More Leftist Myths Exposed

Vasili Mitrokhin was a senior KGB archivist who over the course of many years took notes on the contents of KGB files and transferred thousands of those notes to British intelligence on the condition that they be made public so that the world could learn just how extensive and corrupting Soviet subversion had been.

The first volume based on these archives, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, came out in 1999. [here]

It covered KGB activities in the West, especially those directed against “the great adversary,” the United States. In it are details of a spectacularly successful espionage effort aimed at the US military and a largely successful attempt to manage the western media including an extensive ongoing disinformation campaign that spread unsavory rumors about major figures such as Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan and J. Edgar Hoover, which have passed into popular folklore. The KGB also used a variety of techniques, including a mail bombing campaign, to increase racial tensions in the South during the Civil Rights era and spread the rumor, widely accepted at the time, that the CIA was implicated in JFK’s assassination. Since the archive is incomplete, much of its contents is still classified by British intelligence, and the KGB efforts at controlling information so extensive, one is left wondering just how much of “what is commonly known” [especially among leftist academics] about American history in the past half century has been shaped by Soviet disinformation efforts.

Now the second volume of the archives has been published under the title, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World. It too is chock full of fascinating and disturbing information.

The book has had its biggest impact in India because it contains explosive information regarding Soviet successes in penetrating government offices and political parties. Allen Judd summarizes:

A KGB director frankly admitted that it had "scores of sources throughout the Indian Government… It seemed as if the entire country was for sale." Elections were swung, major deals concluded or prevented and suitcases full of banknotes delivered in secret to Mrs Gandhi's house at night (she never returned the empties). In 1975 alone the KGB calculated that its Active Measures operations brought about 5,510 anti-Western or pro-Soviet stories in the Indian media. Among its best agents was one of Mrs Gandhi's senior ministers; yet all the while it was the threat of CIA subversion that worried her.

Indira Ghandi (code name “Vano”) was one of several world leaders who were considered by the KGB to be, if not fully active agents of the Soviet Union, “confidential contacts” whom they could influence and whom they supported. President Allende (code name “Leader”) of Chile was another. Kommersant reports:

Allende’s victory cost the KGB $420,000…. It was not the Soviet Ambassador to Santiago that he regularly met as the main Soviet representative after assuming power but it was a KBG chief in Chile, Svyatoslav Kuznetsov, who personally “guided” Allende. The president’s lover, Miria Kontrereas Bell, known in Moscow as “Marta”, organized the meetings.

Among the payoffs to Allende were various sex films and “associated cavortings” with prostitutes.

There were numerous other KGB successes, among them “active measures” campaigns that spread stories through the world media “ranging from the widely-believed CIA-started-Aids story to the alleged kidnapping of Latin American children for US spare part surgery….”

It is these media successes that are today most troubling because the lies originating in KGB operations have become implanted in the minds of left wing political activists here and around the world and are still part of the global political discourse. I recently reviewed the deeply duplicitous film, The Constant Gardener, based on the book of the same title by spy novelist John LeCarre and noted that a number of film critics, working for major publications throughout the West, assumed that the outrageous premise of the story – that western governments and international corporations were testing out dangerous, often fatal, drugs on unsuspecting Africans, masking the programs as charitable aid – was perfectly plausible and probably accurate. The almost universal suspicion with which American policy initiatives are met throughout the world owes a lot to this half century of systematic lying. Publication of materials from the Mitrokhin archives is a small first step toward correcting that false perception.

Reviews cited here and here.

UPDATE:

Christopher Andrew will be discussing "The World Was Going Our Way" on C-SPAN on November 05, at 4:12 p.m., EST