The Spy in the Archive
A retired CIA case officer once observed that the great US advantage in the spy business is that our adversaries produce many more unhappy people than America does, giving CIA and allied intelligence services a consistently greater pool of potential recruits. Disgruntled Americans have many outlets for their angst, including social media and the promise of future elections. In contrast, authoritarian regimes offer their people no legal means of expressing opposition to stultifying repression, censorship, and endemic corruption favoring those with friends in high places. This remains true today, but it was especially the case in the Soviet Union in the 1970s under the sclerotic leadership of Leonid Brezhnev.
Vasili Mitrokhin was in the nerve center of this police state. Mitrokhin worked for the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (FCD), predecessor of what is today Russia’s external intelligence service, the SVR. His dour and introverted personality curtailed his own spy career after inglorious and/or botched overseas assignments in Israel and Australia led to his transfer to the FCD archives in 1956.