Vasili Mitrokhin Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin ( ; March 3 , 1922 – January 23 , 2004 ) was a Major and senior archivist for the Soviet Union ' s foreign intelligence service , the First Chief Directorate of the KGB , and co - author with Christopher Andrew of " The Mitrokhin Archive : The KGB in Europe and the West " , a massive account of Soviet intelligence operations based on copies of material from the archive . The second volume , " The Mitrokhin Archive II : The KGB in the World " , was published in 2005 , soon after Mitrokhin ' s death . Education . Mitrokhin was born in Yurasovo , in Central Russia , Ryazan Oblast , Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic . After leaving school , he entered artillery school , then attended university in Kazakh SSR , graduating with degrees in history and law . Career . Military . Towards the end of the second World War , Mitrokhin took a job in the military procurator ' s office at Kharkov in the Ukrainian SSR . He entered the MGB as a foreign intelligence officer in 1948 . His first foreign posting was in 1952 . During the 1950s he served on various undercover assignments overseas . In 1956 , for example , he accompanied the Soviet team to the Olympic Games in Australia . But later that year , after he had apparently mishandled an operational assignment , he was moved from operational duties to the archives of the KGB ' s First Chief Directorate , and told he would never work in the field again . Disillusionment . Mitrokhin sometimes dated the beginnings of his disillusionment to Nikita Khrushchev ' s famous speech to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union congress denouncing Joseph Stalin , though it seems he may have been harbouring doubts for some time before that . For years he had listened to broadcasts on the BBC and Voice of America , noting the gulf between their reports and party propaganda . Yet when he began looking into the archives , he claimed to have been shocked by what he discovered about the KGB ' s systematic repression of the Soviet people . " I could not believe such evil , " he recalled . " It was all planned , prepared , thought out in advance . It was a terrible shock when I read things . " Between 1972 and 1984 he supervised the move of the archive of the First Chief Directorate from the Lubyanka to the new KGB headquarters at Yasenevo . While doing so he made copies and immensely detailed notes of documents from the archive . He retired in 1985 . Defection . In the Soviet era Mitrokhin made no attempts to contact any western intelligence service . After the dissolution of the Soviet Union ( in 1992 ) he traveled to Latvia with copies of material from the archive and walked into the American embassy in Riga . Central Intelligence Agency officers there did not consider him to be credible , concluding that the copied documents could be faked . He then went to the British embassy and a young diplomat there saw his potential and after a further appointment one month later with representatives of the Secret Intelligence Service ( MI6 ) operations followed to retrieve the 25 , 000 pages of files hidden in his house , covering operations from as far back as the 1930s . He and his family were then exfiltrated to Britain , although authorities of Yeltsin ' s Russia were not creating any obstacles for free traveling abroad of active or retired members of secret services or members of their families . Richard Tomlinson , the MI6 officer imprisoned in 1997 for attempting to publish a book about his career , was one of those involved in retrieving the documents from containers hidden under the floor of the dacha . Mitrokhin Archive . These works are collectively referred to as the Mitrokhin Archive s .