The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West

"I wanted my book choices to reflect that all different states are up to this stuff. This is a really, really important book, with a very fascinating story of how it came about. It’s based on top-secret KGB foreign intelligence archives which, along with the archivist, Mitrokhin, were smuggled out of Russia in 1992 by MI6. Mitrokhin collaborated with perhaps the world’s most preeminent intelligence historian, Christopher Andrew of Cambridge, to write this book exposing and blowing the lid on Soviet covert action and intelligence more broadly throughout the Cold War. It’s a landmark book because it shows us the scope and the global reach of what they were doing. There were operations such as trying to discredit the long-time FBI director J Edgar Hoover by smearing him as a predatory homosexual. There were operations to try and discredit Martin Luther King because the Soviets wanted to try to stoke up a race war. There were also revelations about secret stores of arms dumped inside the US and the UK, ready for Soviet agents to use for sabotage. From a contemporary perspective, it tells us that all this talk about Russian covert action against the United States is nothing new. Russia has been trying to manipulate American elections for a long time. And this book is really important in helping us understand the historical context behind Russian covert action and provides insights into what we’re seeing today. I think it’s really dangerous to only think about covert action through a contemporary lens. This activity has been going on for a very long time. There’s nothing new about what we’re reading in the news at the moment. Yes, he was. Putin has an intelligence background and other people high in the Kremlin have intelligence backgrounds. It’s not really a surprise that they are turning to the hidden hand to try to destabilise the west, NATO, the European Union, and to try to promote their interests in post-Soviet space in the Ukraine and the Baltics. Again, they’ve been using the hidden hand—what the Soviets call ‘active measures’—for a very, very long time. This book is a really authoritative and detailed account, but also one that is a gripping read at the same time. Social media has been really useful in allowing a state to better target its propaganda. In the old days, states like Russia, America, and Britain would basically spam a country with radio broadcasts and newspapers to try to influence a particular election. They’d insert articles into newspapers, for example, or even covertly buy up a certain newspaper, to get their message across. But they had no way of knowing who was reading it or how successful it was. What we have now, with the advent of mass data and social media, is the ability to target really, really carefully the people we think are most likely to be swayed by the message. We can tailor the message to make it as powerful as possible for that particular individual. That’s what, according to American intelligence, we saw the Russians doing in the 2016 presidential election. They were homing in on certain areas in swing states so that the propaganda would have the maximum impact. You can start to measure it as well because you have these metrics; you can quantify it much more easily with social media. So the actual means of targeting is a lot more sophisticated now with social media, but the general point, the plan, and the driver is quite similar. It’s about trying to disrupt, discredit, and to build somebody up."