THE SWORD AND THE SHIELD: THE MITROKHIN ARCHIVE AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE KGB - CHRISTOPHER ANDREW & VASILI MITROKHIN

This motherfucker was looooong. On pure page count, TSATS isn’t totally insane, it’s ~550 pages followed by copious notes, but man, does it slow down those ~550 pages. I’m quite clearly pretty obsessed with history and especially 20th century history and parapolitics but most of my reading in this area is around the US and what we’re up to, my hope was that TSATS would fill in some of the gaps w/r/t the KGB and their role in recent world history. This book itself is the product of a pretty amazing story, a KGB archivist, named Mitrokhin, defected in the 90’s and brought all these notes, files and archives with him. Eventually, the official historian (apparently a real job) of MI5, Chris Andrew, distilled these files into this book, which seeks to track the KGB (and NKVD and MGB and GPU and all the other names this agency has gone by) across it’s 74 year history. I will leave aside the critique that this book, having been written by a MI5 partisan, is itself propaganda but I will note that the tone of the book, expectedly, is very anti-Soviet. Lots of long asides about how dumb or evil or naïve these people are and how Communism has baked in contradictions that the KGB can’t overcome. He’s likewise intensely deferential to Western intelligence and uncritical of their motives, (i.e. lots of stuff about them being interested in “spreading democracy”). For instance, he bizarrely claims that “The truth about Hoover’s probably severely repressed sexuality is unlikely to be known.” I was not aware that Hoover’s tortured, closeted psyche was “unlikely to be known.” But I read things pretty constantly that have this sort of tone against the USA so it’s pretty easy for me to read past. What I was really interested in revolves around what this enemy that so much is projected on was actually capable of achieving. To me, the history of the KGB works in 2 phases, before WWII and during the Cold War. Before WWII they had the best intelligence network in the world and scored some huge, early victories. Because Communism is ideological and consciously internationalist  they’re able to recruit sympathetic leftists across the world. Stalin knows much more about the plans of Churchill and Roosevelt than vice-versa. The NKVD was quite familiar with Nazi plans before Operation Barbarossa, but in a strange irony of history, Stalin, one of the most paranoid men to ever live, decided he could trust the Germans. The Soviets also stole the MANHATTAN project discoveries very early on. The book quotes a scientist who reasons that both countries having the weapons is safer overall for the world, which does strike me as true. Though after the war, they are increasingly inept and ineffective. The book feels so long because Andrew draws out every agent that they sent over who becomes an alcoholic and basically achieves nothing. There are so, so many of these people. Even high placements and successes like Ken Philby don’t seem like they really did anything to change the tide of the Cold War. When the CIA is doing things like overthrowing governments on 3 continents and orchestrating political assassinations, the KGB doesn’t seem very formidable. The book could very much have been edited down to include only the really explosive, interesting stuff. I see the value, academically (tho, like I said, the tone was too polemic to be properly academic) of such a thorough account but a 200-300 page version would have made more sense to me and read much more smoothly. There were a couple of interesting plots and storylines that I was surprised to learn and I’m still thinking about. There’s an interesting through line where the KGB keeps trying to exacerbate race-relationships in the US by impersonating the KKK. They try to release the Hoover-sexuality stuff by writing a letter as the KKK to different papers and they sent threatening letters to various Civil Rights organizations. They discussed, in project PANDORA, bombing Black churches in NYC and blaming the American Jewish Defense League. The book posses an intriguing alternate history where Henry Wallace stays FDR’s VP and becomes president since Harry Dexter Wallace and Laurence Duggan, who Wallace would have put at Treasury and State, respectively, were KGB-connected the texture and position of the Cold War would have been very different from the very beginning. I think the Wallace-as-president thing is one of the bigger “what if’s?” of the 20th century, and I really do think we’d be living in a much, much better world if this had happened, so I don’t view this with as much horror as Andrew does. They had plans to sneak agents into the US over the Mexican and Canadan borders to destroy infrastructure as well as Special Forces unit Alpha that assassinated Amin and were, apparently, were ordered by Communist hard-liners to kill Yeltsin. There were lots of honeytraps with both male and female “swallows,” which is a great term, as well as lots of fake abortions for black-mail reasons. They also had lots and lots of Nazi files so accusing someone of having been a Nazi was very popular. While this book doesn’t focus on the period, the KGB was most fearsome in its NKVD iteration and never seemed particularly effective (and certainly not compared to the CIA) outside of Russia and even the KGB seemed to spend a lot of time during the Cold War hunting down and killing defectors, rather than other countries Presidents. The stuff about them planting fake news in other countries papers is, of course, quite prescient these days. India was apparently the main source for this, they infiltrated dozens of papers and got thousands of stories they wanted published a year. Compared to, say, killing Patrice Lumumba,  this doesn't seem all that James Bond-y but it’s good to get a more rounded sense of the history. There’s nothing about a KGB-equivalent to MKULTRA which surprised me. I suppose all that Mancherian Candidate stuff really was Sidney Gottlieb’s paranoia.  Needed an editor but useful irregardless. 1917 Secret Polices