In 1992, a disheveled man arrived at the gates of the British embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania. At first glance, he looked more like a pensioner running errands than a man about to deliver one of the greatest intelligence windfalls of the 20th century. Inside his tattered duffle bag were pages of handwritten notes — copies of top-secret KGB documents he had smuggled out of Moscow over 12 years.
That man was Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist, and his story is now told in compelling detail by journalist Gordon Corera in his latest book The Spy in the Archive. The book, highlighted in The Times UK, is a striking and overdue tribute to a man whose actions exposed the Soviet Union’s vast spy network and reshaped Western intelligence.
Described by MI6 handlers as a “prickly oddball,” Mitrokhin was anything but ordinary. After working for decades within the heart of the KGB’s bureaucracy, his faith in the communist system eroded. Outraged by what he read in the files he was meant to preserve — including orders to sabotage dissidents and crush cultural figures — Mitrokhin began secretly copying key documents, hiding the notes in his socks, and typing them up at his countryside dacha on a beloved typewriter he named “Erika.”
The risks were monumental. Caught, he would have likely been executed. Yet for over a decade, Mitrokhin quietly compiled an unparalleled record of Soviet espionage — from the Kremlin’s wartime betrayals to Cold War subversion in Western governments. He buried the completed archives under milk churns, never breathing a word to even his own family.
His revelations, eventually handed to British intelligence, stunned the West. The archive revealed the existence of 300 Soviet agents inside France’s elite institutions and 30 within the Italian foreign ministry. In the UK, it led to the exposure of Melita Norwood, “the spy who came in from the Co-op,” who had passed atomic secrets to Moscow for years.
According to The Times UK, Mitrokhin’s files provided MI6 with what former chief Sir Richard Dearlove called “a sweeping overview of KGB operations over 50 years.” The CIA went even further, calling it “the biggest counterintelligence bonanza of the postwar period.”
Yet Corera’s account is not just about the documents. The Spy in the Archive delves into the psychological and political evolution of a man raised to believe in the Soviet ideal, only to be disillusioned by its corruption. As the Soviet Union collapsed, Mitrokhin orchestrated his defection — a chaotic affair involving a wheelchair-bound son, a mother-in-law in tow, and emergency phone numbers that failed to work. Despite the clumsy escape, the KGB never noticed his absence.
Mitrokhin was no defector in the traditional mold. He never sought personal glory and grew increasingly disenchanted with the West in his final years. Corera, co-host of the intelligence podcast The Rest Is Classified, portrays him not as a traitor or zealot, but as a deeply conflicted patriot — one who saw the truth and refused to stay silent.
Despite the explosive content of the Mitrokhin archive, the UK government initially struggled to respond. As The Times UK notes, some politicians dismissed the revelations as relics of a bygone era, while intelligence officials squirmed at the reminder of past failures to uncover Soviet moles.
Mitrokhin died in 2004, disappointed that his effort had not triggered a reckoning within Russia for KGB abuses. He dreamed of a Nuremberg-style trial for Soviet crimes — a dream that never materialized. Yet as Corera’s new account makes clear, his legacy endures.
The Spy in the Archive is both a gripping Cold War thriller and a solemn testament to the lonely, dangerous courage of one man who fought the system with a typewriter and a secret resolve.
