The KGB Clerk Who Kept the Receipts

“The Spy in the Archive” is a thrilling masterpiece of intelligence history

Rarely are intelligence agencies presented with a tantalizing possibility that could change history. This was the prospect that two British MI6 operatives encountered when a scruffy, elderly man walked into the newly created British embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania, in the spring of 1992—barely three months after the official collapse of the Soviet Union.

He was a “grubby, lean old man, unshaven and poorly dressed,” writes Gordon Corera in his captivating new book, The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB. “The old man seemed introverted and guarded in the way he answered questions.” It took a while before he gave his real name and job: Vasily Mitrokhin, a records-keeper who worked had worked in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, the elite department which spied on the rest of the world, for the past 40 years. Not only that, he was still working there, he added, which explained his nervousness about coming into the embassy using a pseudonym and talking with them.