ABCNEWS.com : KGB Defector Tells All
By John McWethy
ABCNEWS.com
W A S H I N G T O N, Sept. 9 &emdash; He worked at KGB headquarters, a quiet bookworm. Now Vasili Mitrokhin is viewed as one of the West's most spectacular espionage finds.
Mitrokhin &emdash; who worked from 1972 to 1984 in the KGB's top-secret archives &emdash; has dumped on Western intelligence agencies six trunkloads of notes and copied archive material exposing the KGB's espionage activities against the West during the Cold War.
Among the startling revelations: Mitrokhin's highly classified notes describe how the Soviet spy agency tried unsuccessfully to recruit Cyrus Vance, who later became U.S. secretary of state, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Carter's national security adviser.
The KGB began operations against Ronald Reagan some five years before he became president, according to the material.
"This is probably one of the most, if not the most, important defector that I've seen in the 20th century," says David Major, a former FBI counterintelligence agent.
Mitrokhin's material explains how the KGB stashed weapons, radios and money in secret hiding places in the United States.
U.S. law enforcement never found the stashes, believed to be located near Brainard, Minn. But Mitrokhin last year was able to lead police to similar hiding places in Switzerland. The sites were booby-trapped with explosives.
The archives also describe attempts by the KGB to discredit U.S. civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. For instance, the KGB planted stories in the press that King was secretly working with President Lyndon Johnson…that he had sold out to the white establishment.
Ironically, at the same time, the FBI was trying to discredit King by claiming he had ties to the communists.
"[Mitrokhin] is really making a massive contribution to our understanding of Soviet activities going back a very long time," says former Justice Department prosecutor John Martin.
Sources say the defector's detailed information, covering Soviet activities from the Bolshevik Revolution to the 1980s, has energized at least a dozen espionage cases, some of which had been gathering dust for decades.
"There were hundreds of cases or leads opened," says Robert "Bear" Bryant, deputy director of the FBI.
Though only one of these cases has yet to reach the courts, officials say anyone who has spied for the Soviets and thinks he is safe should guess again.
Mitrokihn's information helped the Justice department in 1996 convict Robert Lipka. He had spied for the Soviets in the late 1960s when he worked as a clerk at the U.S. National Security Agency, the NSA.
The FBI had followed his trail, but could never identify him…until they had Mitrokhin's information. Lipka is now serving an 18 year sentence.
Officials say other cases could soon reach the courts.
The KGB was disbanded in 1991, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was divided into a number of successor agencies, the main one being the Federal Security Service, or FSB.
Disillusioned with his government, Mitrokhin defected with the material to Britain in 1992.
Working as the head of the KGB's archives, Mitrokhin had taken notes on major KGB operations against the West. He hid scraps of paper in his shoes or trousers as he left work and buried the accumulating records in metal trunks under his house.
Mitrokhin said he was angry with his government's constant lies to its people.
"It was great. This very simple Russian, this bureaucrat, was so disgusted with the evil and immoral regime under which he operated. He was not recruited by Western intelligence, he was not paid. For over a decade he diligently and studiously copied KGB files. What a swell kick in the ass," says Martin.
Western officials say it is like reading your adversary's diary: The materials paint a detailed picture of what the Soviets did, tried to do and even thought about doing.
The Soviets listened to phone calls of U.S. officials like Henry Kissinger, tapped into the telephones and fax machines of U.S. defense contractors, and embedded spies in big companies like General Electric and IBM, according to the documents.
The papers show that the KGB estimated more than half of all Soviet weapons were based on stolen American designs.
The KGB also had files showing detailed plans for sabotaging major dams in the West, including the Flathead and Hungry Horse dams in Montana. The Port of New York was another major target, with KGB files showing massive detail of work schedules and weak points in security.
And Mitrovkhin's material revealed a vengeful scheme. Stung by the publicity surrounding a number of high-profile defections, including that of Rudolf Nureyev in 1961, the KGB devised a plan to end the ballet dancer's career by breaking both his legs. The plan was never carried out.
Mitrokhin had tried to defect at the U.S. embassy in Riga, Latvia in 1992. But he was turned away. CIA officials who handled defectors, overwhelmed at that time by hundreds of Russians trying to get to the West, said they were not interested.
Afterall, Mitrokhin was not a spy, he was essentially a librarian.
Paul Redmond, then head of CIA counter-intelligence, argued to bring Mitrokhin in, but no one listened.
"It was…in my view a breathtakingly stupid thing," says Redmond.
So Mitrokhin went to the British embassy in Latvia where after a long discussion, he was allowed to defect. The British helped Mitrokhin smuggle the six trunks of material out of Russia.
Mitrovkhin now lives in a safe house in Britain. Officials assume he still has a price on his head, but the former KGB archivist insisted that some of his work be made public, in a book to be published next week.
ABCNEWS Pentagon Correspondent John McWethy reports on national security issues and foreign affairs for World News Tonight and Nightline.
Copyright ©1999 ABC News Internet Ventures. Click here for Terms of Use and Privacy Policy applicable to this site.
Unless, someone in the CIA starts to feel this way:
"Mitrokhin said he was angry with his government's constant lies to its people."
BTTT! Great catch.
Wonder when some librarian working for the feds will get enough of the lies and spill a trunkfull of documents on Waco or OKC?
Nice post.
Spook stuff is hard to evaluate.
Every other breath and utterance is questionable. [like listening to 6 straight minutes of CNN or CBS]
You know the sumbitches are lying...but a truth nugget may be squeezed out, every now and then...
Thanks for the post -- this is a really interesting article.
This guy Mitrokhin seems like a h*** of a good guy -- a real hero.
Some needs to dig through this stuff and see if it contains the record of Bill Clinton being recruited by the KGB when he cut some classes at Oxford and went to the USSR.
Maybe we should post a reward.
"This very simple Russian, this bureaucrat, was so disgusted with the evil and immoral regime under which he operated. . .For over a decade he diligently and studiously copied KGB files. . .What a swell kick in the ass," says Martin."
. . .with only a slightly different MO, he is not unlike our own Gary Aldridge and Linda Tripp et al. . .who got a swell kick and then some from much of America and our own "Western Officials" for their efforts. . .
"Western officials say it is like reading your adversary's diary. . ." Yes, we have been there and still the 'sheeple sleep'..
"Some needs to dig through this stuff and see if it contains the record of Bill Clinton being recruited by the KGB when he cut some classes at Oxford and went to the USSR." If that were to happen I would be oh, so outraged. Maybe are elected representitives could take a vote saying that majority disapproves of clinton having been recruited by the KGB.
Mitrokhin had tried to defect at the U.S. embassy in Riga, Latvia in 1992. But he was turned away.
CIA officials who handled defectors, overwhelmed at that time by hundreds of Russians trying to
get to the West, said they were not interested.
"It was…in my view a breathtakingly stupid thing," says Redmond.
**********
Good find on this article.
Great irony here, in that an actual Russian patriot (i.e. loving his nation so much as to be willing to help destroy the Communist cancer that controlled it) was simply dismissed as though he were a street person -- while the recent money laundering scandal involving $10 billion washed through the Bank of New York has as one of its characters a woman Vice president of the bank, from Russia, who happens to be married to the guy in Russia who controls much of the distribution of IMF money. People with billions of dollars are much more fun to work with some poor slob who only has some paper in a trunk.
We can only hope...
Cheers.
Clinton took 400 cases of documents with him to Washington from Arkansas... maybe a cleaning lady will have a moment of inspiration and take a few boxes to Kinko's.
Exactly. Of course, I was never any good at solving puzzles though, especially those "word problems" used on high school math tests. ;-)
He sure is a hero in my book. Even after being rejected by the USA he didn't take no for an answer.
Sigh. The sheeple can tell you every weirdo that went thru Judge Judy's courtroom this week, but have no freeping clue what's gone on in Washington.
Yeah, and the Russians are fond of saying that paper does not lie. Unreal.
It would be very informative if those documents contain more information on the 'agents of influence' in the media as well.
I.F. Stone was revealed to have been paid by the KGB.
Ted Kopell?...Peter Jennings?.. any other candidates?
It would be useful if this guy had information naming prominent Americans who were also Soviet sympathizers and spies. There must have been tons of them during the Nuclear Freeze movement.
I would bet that any such info has long since been either sanitized or neutralized. But it sure would make interesting reading.
Agreed. The hot summer of 1982 there were Soviet fifth-columnists, agitators and sympathizers out in force to stop the Pershing missiles from deployment in Europe. But as I said above, I'd bet that info is under Zip-Loc nowadays. It will take a good, solid conservative gummint to pry those facts out.
Maybe here, but if I read it right, our 'cousins' got first crack, so the list of those involved is floating around in a few places.
Ahhh, one can only dream.
Blair's boys are too busy hanging out at the gay bars to have much concern about any of this except to make sure that the incriminating information regarding the NWO operatives does not see the light of day. Anyone with any hope for the British needs to examine the Philby/Burgess/MacLean case from the fifties. Totally hopeless with all due apologies to MadIvan.
There is a good audio book on Broadcast.com called Red Horizons written by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa that details a lot of spying by Romanian gvt as well as personality cult. Interesting reading (listening) though.
To those interested here's a LINK to to that online audio book. It's unabridged, therefore it's very long. Twenty-two 45 min tapes.
"The sheeple can tell you every weirdo that went thru Judge Judy's courtroom this week, but have no freeping clue what's gone on in Washington."
. . .exactly right. . .
.... Mitrokhin's material explains how the KGB stashed weapons, radios and money in secret hiding places in the United States.
U.S. law enforcement never found the stashes, believed to be located near Brainard, Minn. .....
But Mitrokhin last year was able to
lead police to similar hiding places in Switzerland. The sites were booby-trapped with explosives....
Wasn't there a story out of Switzerland in the last few weeks about a large arms stash for an unauthorized secret Intelligence unit ??? Damn, have I been spending too much time reading the conspiracy theories here or could there be a KGB connection to the Swiss arms cache ?
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