THE SPY IN THE ARCHIVE

Stealing Soviet secrets.

Journalist Corera’s account is the kind of real-life espionage on which John le Carré based his spy novels. Set behind Soviet lines during the Cold War, the story delivers codes, secret signals, double-crossing, and moles. We also have a problematic hero, Vasili Mitrokhin, once bound for the glamorous life of a spy in the West, but demoted to running an archive in the bowels of Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison—turned KGB headquarters. Disillusioned by Stalin and the collapse of the Soviet Union and influenced by fellow dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Mitrokhin takes the opposite path to Vladimir Putin—himself a security official in Dresden—and begins to regard his country as a gulag, particularly after the 1956 invasion of Hungary and the crushed hopes following the Prague Spring. The bones of the story are straightforward: Top secret files, archived at Lubyanka, are to be rehoused in a new KGB complex outside Moscow. One man is responsible for summarizing the files, which name both former and active spies and the names of operatives embedded in U.S., British, and French intelligence. The man responsible takes secret notes over a period of years, then visits embassies in Vilnius as a “walk-in,” offering the notes first to the Americans—who refuse him—and then the British, who facilitate his defection. That man is Mitrokhin. What Corera makes clear is how unglamorous espionage can be, and how unwelcome its findings. Since Mitrokhin copied rather than stole the files, the Russians had to assume everything was compromised. Similarly, Western intelligence agencies discovered moles themselves and purged not only the agents, but those failing to detect them. It is to Corera’s credit that he brings a journalist’s detailed narrative to historical events. Yet the lives of all concerned are so bleak—and the unrewarding, labyrinthine lives so grimly dull—that by book’s end we not only understand their world, but gladly flee it.

A true-life spy thriller in relentlessly gruesome detail.