About this title: In 1992, Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist, snuck out of Russia carrying with him a vast cache of transcriptions of top-secret KGB intelligence files. The FBI later described his trove of documents as the most complete and extensive intelligence ever achieved from any source. Renowned historian Christopher Andrew had exclusive access to ...
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Your search:Books»World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World: Newly Revealed Secrets from the Mitrokhin Archive(42 available copies)
Description: Good. 0465003133 Thanks for looking at bookhaven1. these books may have shelf wear hardcover books may have missing or torn Dust Jackets. read more
Description: Fair. 0465003133 Thank you for looking at bookhaven1. Ships from PA. Hardcover books may have missing or torn Dust Jackets. the books may be slighly bent. read more
Description: Fine. 0465003133 Thanks for looking at bookhaven1. these books may have shelf wear hardcover books may have missing or torn Dust Jackets. read more
Description: Good. This book has medium cover wear, light cover lift, medium spine tilt, some creases on covers, light page edge wear. I will ship this book out on the next business day! Each book individually hand cleaned. read more
Binding: Softcover.
Publisher: N.Y. : Basic Books/Perseus Books Group
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780465003136ISBN:0465003133
Description: Very Good+. Illustrated. Panels curled at fore-edge. A few nicks to top page edge, tiny speck to fore-edge of textblock. Newly revealed secrets from the Mitrokhin Archive. 677 pp. read more
"Not at all what I expected. It was a very dull recap of Soviet dealings in third world countries, where not much of anything happened. There was some slightly interesting stuff about Castro and the role the Soviet Union played in how South America looks at us today, but it was all written as a list of facts with no narrative at all. A very boring read!"
"This is a great book for anyone interested in what the CIA does and has done in the world. It gives a very interesting commentary on the work the CIA has done in fighting Communism. The reach of both the USSR and the USA were way beyond anything I ever imagined. A must read for political junkies. The writing is a little dry. Not the best historical narrative I've ever read."
"Vasili Mitrokhin worked as an archivist for the KGB for the better part of his career, and spent over a decade copying and transcribing information from the files that passed through his hands. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he took some of the files with him to the newly independent state of Latvia, and managed to attract the attention of British intelligence. The files revealed an incomparable amount of information about the extent of KGB activity in the heyday of the Cold War -- and as a result, Mitrokhin's archive is often regarded as one of the greatest intelligence coups of all time.
The first volume of The Mitrokhin Archive dealt with KGB activity in the West, mostly in Europe and the United States. The Mitrokhin Archive II focuses on the rest of the world, most specifically on the 'Third World' nations that the Soviet Union regarded as likely locations in which to build socialist or communist states. The book is divided into sections on Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, with chapters focusing on either a specific country or time period for the KGB's activities. For instance, Mitrokhin and Andrew devote two chapters to India, one of the premier targets for KGB activity, pointing out the extent to which the KGB promoted Indira Gandhi's paranoia that the CIA and various other Western intelligence services were plotting to depose or murder her. The Soviet war of attrition in Afghanistan also gets two chapters of coverage, attempting to untangle the complicated connections between various factions and rival groups in the late 1970s through the 1980s. Other countries and regions also receive a careful study, with some intriguing revelations:
- Soviet espionage in China after the Sino-Soviet split was made all but impossible by the fact that the Chinese secret police knew all the identities of the KGB's agents in the PRC and proceeded to kill them all off -- a lesson on why it's not always good to share everything with your allies - Attempts to spy on China by way of Japan ran into problems when the Japanese Communist Party chose to ally itself ideologically with Beijing - The KGB was actually involved in starting and spreading the urban legend about Latin American children being kidnapped and killed to provide donated organs for rich Americans.
I'm not entirely certain if it's a reflection on the fact that I'm not as 'genned up' on Third World Cold War history as I thought I was, but I found the second volume to be a little less readable than the first. It may simply be that I'm not as familiar with the names and events mentioned and discussed, in which case I could probably come back to it after a little outside reading and find that it makes more sense to me. Just a bit of qualification that might explain why I preferred the first volume to the second.
Vasili Mitrokhin died in 2004, shortly after the publication of the first volume of The Mitrokhin Archive, the work that he and historian Christopher Andrew. Andrew completed this second volume on his own, working with Mitrokhin's original notes. There has been some controversy over the archive, particularly from scholars who question Mitrokhin's credibility. How, they ask, could someone who never managed to rise above a middling rank in the KGB manage to evade the strict security surrounding the archives and spend the better part of his career making notes on extremely sensitive case files? When I think about some of the real-life spy stories that have shown up in the press since the late 1980s, I'm a little more inclined to take Mitrokhin's archive at face value. But even if it's exposed as a fraud at some point in the future, the Mitrokhin Archive would still be a great set of books to show just how engrossing a fraud can be."
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