Mitrokhin Archive

The Mitrokhin Archive is a collection of handwritten notes made secretly by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin during his thirty years as a KGB archivist in the foreign intelligence service and the First Chief Directorate. When he defected to the United Kingdom in 1992 he brought the archive with him.

The official historian of the MI5 Christopher Andrew wrote two books, Sword and the Shield (1999) and The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (2005), based on material in the archives. The books give alleged details about much of the Soviet Union's clandestine intelligence operations around the world.

In July 2014, the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College released Mitrokhin's edited Russian-language notes for public research; the archives are the largest openly available KGB data trove. The original handwritten notes by Vasili Mitrokhin are still classified.

The publication of the books provoked parliamentary inquiries in the UK, Italy, and India. In the UK, the inquiry was conducted by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) after the first book was published in 1999, and it was named "The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report". The report was presented to the Parliament in June 2000. The Committee expressed concern because the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) knew the names of some spies years before the publication of the book, but decided not to prosecute them without informing the proper prosecuting authorities. The committee believed that this decision corresponded to the Law Offices, not to the SIS. The Committee also interviewed Vasili Mitrokhin, who told them that he was not content with the way the book was published, and that he felt he did not accomplish what he intended when writing the notes. He wished that "he had had full control over the handling of his material." The Committee also found that SIS had stated that they were clearing the UK chapters with the Home Secretary and the Attorney General as was required before publication of the book, but they did not do so. Additionally, the Committee thought "that misleading stories were allowed to receive wide circulation", and they found that SIS didn't handle the publication and the media matters appropriately.

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