For decades during the Cold War, Vasili Mitrokhin despised the subject of his work: the KGB. It didn’t matter that he was a member of that Soviet organization. Maybe being part of it made his disdain for the KGB all the more visceral. This hatred by the inside man is the plot behind Gordon Corera’s new nonfiction book, “The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB.”
Corera describes a disheveled old man who finds himself in possession of volumes of state secrets. The accumulated volumes had been a labor of love—or hatred, depending on one’s perspective. The Cold War had pitted the USSR against the democracies of the West. Early on, Mitrokhin had believed in the Soviet way of life, undergirded by the socio-political doctrine of Marxism. But, as Corera notes, it was Mitrokhin’s failure as a KGB agent that led him to uncover the corruption, brutality, deceptions, and, as Mitrokhin identified it, the “filth” of the KGB and the USSR’s communist leadership.
