Christopher Andrew is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Cambridge University. One of the leading authorities on intelligence history, Andrew is also the official historian of Britain’s Secret Service (MI-5). Vasili Mitrokhin served as an archivist in Russia’s KGB, and having become disillusioned with the Soviet worldview during Krushchev’s rule, began copying sensitive and highly classified documents from the KGB archive. He defected in 1992, and over 25,000 documents were retrieved from the contained them, buried beneath the floor of his dacha.
The Sword and the Shield follows the history of the KGB from Lenin’s Cheka, to Stalin’s OGPU through the establishment of Yeltsin’s presidency. Andrew documents the operations and impact of several hundred spies who operated during that time frame.The sheer volume of the material is overwhelming. As a result, reading is somewhat tedious with only a few paragraphs dedicated to each operative. Andrew is a historian and has contributed greatly to our understanding of Soviet Intelligence operations. I found myself skimming many sections and reading those which were of special interest, such as operations directed against the United States and those surrounding the Prague Spring in 1968. That would be my recommendation for the amateur historian.
That said, I did enjoy the book. Secret Service, spies, intelligence, counter-intelligence and related stories fascinate me. Andrew focuses on people and what they did. I would have enjoyed a greater discussion of trade craft and operations than he offered. In any case, his work added to my understanding of a secret and until now, hidden world.
Contents and concepts
- The Mitrokhin Archive
- From Lenin’s Cheka to Stalin’s OGPU
- The Great Illegals
- The Magnificent Five
- Terror
- War
- The Grand Alliance
- Victory
- From War to Cold War
- The Main Adversary - Part 1: North American Illegals in the 1950’s
- The Main Adversary - Part 2: Walk-ins and Legal Residencies in the Early Cold War
- The Main Adversary - Part 3: Illegals after “Abel”
- The Main Adversary - Part 4: Walk-ins and Legal Residencies int he Later Cold War
- Political Warfare: Active Measures and the Main Adversary
- PROGRESS Operations - Part 1: Crushing the Prague Spring
- PROGRESS Operations - Part 2: Spying on the soviet Bloc
- The KGB and Western Communist Parties
- Eurocommunism
- Ideological Subversion - Part 1: The War Against the dissidents
- Ideological Subversion - Part 2: The Victory of the dissidents
- SIGINT in the cold War
- Special Tasks - Part 1: From Marshal Tito to Rudolf Nureyev
- Special Tasks - Part 2: The Andropov Era and Beyond
- Cold War Operations Against Britain- Part 1: After the “Magnificent Five”
- Cold War Operations Against Britain- Part 2: After Operation FOOT
- The Federal Republic of Germany
- France and Italy during the Cold War: Agent Penetration and Active Measures
- The Penetration and Persecution of the Soviet Churches
- The Polish Pope and the Rise of Solidarity
- The Polish Crisis and the crumbling of the Soviet Bloc
- Conclusion: From the One-Party State to the Yeltsin Presidency