Martin writes “In early 1992 a scruffy 70-year-old Russian arrived at the British Embassy in a newly-independent Baltic state pulling a battered case on wheels. He rummaged beneath the sausages, bread, drink and clothes he had packed for his journey, pulled out a large wodge of paper and said it was top-secret material he had copied from the KGB archives. He was Vasili Mitrokhin, a former senior archivist in the KGB. The FBI has called the Mitrokhin archive “the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source,â€? and in the view of the CIA it is “the biggest counter-intelligence bonanza of the postwar period.â€? This article from the Times offers an extract of the second published volume of the archive, plus some background on how it made its way to England and how it has influenced our understanding of the roles played by the CIA and the KGB during the Cold War era.
From The Times Online“
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