The Mitrokhin Archive The KGB in Europe and the West

In 1992, the British Secret Intelligence Service exfiltrated from Russia a defector. Vasili Mitrokhin worked for almost 30 years in the foreign intelligence archives of the KGB, which in 1972 he was made responsible for moving to a new HQ just outside Moscow. He was congratulated by the head of foreign intelligence, Vladimir Kryuchkov (later the ringleader of the 1991 Moscow coup), for his success in transferring the archives and his devoted service to the state security authorities. Unknown to Kryuchkov, Mitrokhin - a secret dissident - spent over a decade noting and copying highly-classified files which, at enormous personal risk, he smuggled daily out of the archives and kept beneath his dacha floor.