The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

When Vasili Mitrokhin defected to British intelligence in 1992, he brought with him six cases of handwritten notes — the most comprehensive archive ever exfiltrated from the KGB, documenting Soviet intelligence operations across half a century. Christopher Andrew, the official historian of MI5 and the pre-eminent historian of intelligence, spent years working with Mitrokhin to produce this magisterial account of KGB operations from the 1930s through the Cold War.

The relevance to the contemporary information environment is direct and substantial. The book documents in operational detail the full range of Soviet active measures — disinformation campaigns, forgeries, front organisations, agents of influence, and media manipulation operations conducted across dozens of countries. These are not ancient history: the techniques Mitrokhin documented are the direct ancestors of the influence operations that Russian intelligence conducts today, and many of the operational principles have transferred directly into the digital age. For practitioners who want to understand the institutional heritage and operational DNA of Russian information operations, this book — alongside Shultz and Godson's Dezinformatsia — is indispensable. Awarded the Orwell Prize and widely regarded as one of the most important intelligence history books ever published.