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The librarian who stole KGB secrets
00:32:07
Gordon Corera introduces Vasili Mitrokhin, a Soviet archivist whose quiet rebellion exposed the deepest secrets of the KGB
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- [00:04]
Narrator
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. When an elderly man with a battered suitcase walked into the British Embassy in Vilnius in 1992, few could have guessed what he was about to hand over. In today's podcast, author and journalist Gordon Carrera tells the story of of Vasily Mitrokin, a Soviet archivist who embarked on a quiet rebellion that exposed the deepest secrets of the kgb. But what was driving him and what impact did this intelligence have in the years after the Cold War had effectively ended? Gordon explains more about the subject of his new book, the Spy in the Archive, to Eleanor Evans.
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Eleanor Evans
Gordon, thank you so much for joining me today to talk about your new book, the Spy in the Archive. How are you doing?
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Gordon Carrera
I'm very well, thank you. And thank you very much for having me. The podcast, it's nice to be able to talk about it with you.
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Eleanor Evans
It's brilliant to be talking about such a fascinating figure, Vasily Mitrokin. And I wonder if some listeners might recognize him if they were following news of KGB revelations in the late 90s. His name might be familiar. But I want to rocket back to a moment that's really pivotal in this story where you start the moment where he walks into the British Embassy in the early 90s in Vilnius in Lithuania. Can you take us into this moment and give us the picture of what's happening as he does this?
- [01:33]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, it's. It's March 1992, and an old man dressed quite shabbily, wheeling a kind of grubby bag, walks up to the British Embassy in Vilnius and knocks on the door. It's a cold call. They're not expecting him. Asked to see someone from the British Special services, which is kind of Russian jargon for a spy. There's no one there who's a spy, but a young female diplomat in her twenties will meet him and talk to him. And this is a huge moment for Mitrokin because it's not the first time he's tried to approach a Western embassy carrying a bag full of seatbelt secrets. He's actually tried it with the Americans already and been turned away, partly because there's so many people. This is just as the Soviet Union is collapsing, borders are opening up, and they don't appreciate that this is actually a remarkable man carrying a remarkable treasure trove of secrets. But fortunately for him and for Britain, I think this diplomat talks to him and offers him a cup of tea, and she speaks Russian and looks at some of the files he's brought out and suddenly Realizes, well, perhaps this man is interesting, perhaps he's not kind of grubby tramp on the take with some fake documents that others seem to think he was. And that really begins a journey which will do more to expose the secrets of the kgb, the Soviet Union's intelligence service, than anything else that ever happened through its history.
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Eleanor Evans
So before we get into a few more of the details of how they begin this process of bringing these secrets further to the west, what brought you to Matrokin's story?
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Gordon Carrera
Well, he is a figure who's been known about for some time, because a book co authored by him and the eminent historian Christopher Andrew came out in 1999, and that book contained details from his archive. But what it didn't do is explain how the archive came into being really his personal story, his personal journey. And it had nothing about the process we just talked about, which is his exfiltration, which is the contact with MI6 that begins and the process of getting him out of Russia and getting his secrets out and getting his family. Family out. And so I knew there was, you know, a very interesting human and spy story there, but I think the other thing that. That made it very interesting for me is it's a story about Russia and it's a story about Russian history, it's a story about Russian intelligence, and it's a story about the continuities in Russian intelligence that exist through the end of the Cold War and to today. And actually, I think Mitrokin today looks more interesting and more prescient as a figure than he did 25 years ago when we first learned about him, because he was a man who understood the Soviet Union spy services. And he could also see their persistence through the end of the Cold War into the post Cold War era in the form of people like Vladimir Putin. And so actually, the kind of warning he was offering and he was giving to people now looks much more interesting and important than I think had been understood before. And that's why I thought it was a very, very compelling story, because it's a human drama about one individual, but also tells you quite a lot about the trajectory of Russia.
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Eleanor Evans
You're beginning to give us a sense then of how one man can have such an impact in this story and the access that he had. Can you take us into how his career sort of tracks the evolution of the organisation that did become the kgb?
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Gordon Carrera
That's what I think is so interesting about Vasily Mitrokin is He is born 1922, so just in the early years of the Soviet Union. And his life and career tracks you through much of it. And you can tell the story of Russia, the Soviet Union, and particularly its intelligence services through the eyes of this one man, this Vasily Mitrokin. And he starts off from a humble background, someone who was given opportunities by the Soviet Union, which he probably wouldn't have had under Cyrus Russia, and is a communist true believer. He believes in this cause even as at the end of the Second World War, when he's in Ukraine. He sees some pretty dark things when at that point, he's a prosecutor, but he's drawn into the KGB. It's not yet called the KGB in the late 40s, but that's what most people think of it as. And he's a true believer believer there as well. He's a believer in this ideology of Czechism, Cheka being the original security service founded by Lenin after the revolution. And he sees himself as a Chekist, but he's not a very good one when he's out in the field serving abroad as a spy. And so he ends up being relegated to the archives. And in 1956, he goes to the archives. And then there is this fascinating journey for this man because there are events happening in the outside world. You know, things like 1968, the famous Prague Spring, where, you know, reformist hopes would be crushed by the Soviet Union, where he is seeing these events in the outside world, but he's also watching them from being an archivist for the kgb, because he's been banished, relegated to the archives. One of the worst personnel decisions, I think, in any organization's history, because they think they're demoting him, but actually they are giving him access to the organization's deepest secrets as an archivist. And in that role, he is able to see the truth of what the KGB is and what it's doing and track it against the rhetoric and the events in the outside world. And I found it fascinating because it's a long journey. It's a long journey for him which changes him over years, years and years and years. You know, first banished to the archives in 56, only by really 68 that he's really conceived of the KGB as his enemy. And he sees it. He's got a kind of quite a vivid imagination, but he's very introverted as a beast. You know, he sees this kind of beast having taken over his country and kind of squatting and sitting on it and feeding off it. And this beast is partly in the form of the kgb. And he comes over years to hate it, and to see what it did. And then in turn, by 1972, that leads him to decide to do something about it and to copy down those deepest, darkest secrets of the KGB in the hope of preserving the truth. Because he views the truth, the truth of history, as a weapon with which to fight the KGB and his enemy.
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Eleanor Evans
Now, it's no small undertaking, is it, this. This transcription of this vast archive. And I think Matrokin as a person, you know, this obsessive sort of quality, it really comes out through the pages. And I wonder if we could turn to some of his methods in. How does he go about transcribing this? What sort of tactics is he using? And what sort of strictures is he operating in?
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Gordon Carrera
Well, it's fascinating because, you know, how do you steal an archive? How do you steal a whole library? And the answer is, be a librarian and do it very slowly. And that's, you know, the answer for Matrokhin, because there comes a point in 1972 where the KGB is moving. The first chief directorate of the KGB, which spies abroad, is moving from the Lubyanka, the famous headquarters in Moscow, to a place called the woods or the forest on the outskirts, where its successor still is. And that means moving the files. So he's overseeing this process of moving the files and. And basically looking at them and trying to work out which ones should be kept, which ones should be moved, which ones might be weeded and destroyed. And he's doing this in his office and he begins to note down the details of the files he finds interesting and significant. Initially, he tries to do it all by his memory, but he realises that's too hard, and he'll write it down on tiny bits of paper in his own personal code. He's developed a kind of shorthand. And then he will go home to his apartment and on the weekends to his dacha, and he will reconstitute a file from this code and these tiny fragments that he's written up and then turn that into volumes and volumes of the files. Now, the genius of this is, of course, he's not stealing a file in the sense of carrying one out. You know, that would have been spotted by the guards at the Lubianca or elsewhere, but he's copying them and putting, you know, putting these bits of paper in his shoe or under his arm and as he moves out, and it means he's not spotted. And, you know, as an archivist, frankly, having spoken to other people who worked at the kgb, you know, they were seen as, you know, you didn't care about the archivist. No one paid attention to them. So he was able to go about this surreptitiously for 12 years. 12 years spending his days copying down the deepest secrets of the kgb. The bit I find extraordinary about this, though, is that he wasn't, if you like, a spy. He wasn't doing this because he'd been asked to do it by MI6 or the CIA. He did it out of this commitment to preserve the truth. And in his view, he didn't know what would happen to it. He didn't have a plan even of what to do with all these notes. And it's quite Russian, this idea of writing for the draw, the idea you write not knowing if something might be published. You put it away in the drawer in the hope it might one day be published. And, you know, great authors like Mikhail Bulgakov did this with the Master of Margarita, and Solzhenitsyn did it with the Gulag Archipelago, you know, writing it, hiding it and hoping it will be published. And so, amazingly, a kind of copy of the KGB's deepest secrets are sitting in milk churns under the floorboards of his dacha for years with no one knowing and with him not quite knowing what he's going to do with it.
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Eleanor Evans
You mentioned that his career tracks this intelligence service, and I think it's an important point, acknowledged in your book, that he is. He's very embedded and somewhat complicit in some of its earlier horrors as well. How does he reconcile his own complicity or involvement in this regime?
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Gordon Carrera
I think he struggles to. Actually, I think he struggles to. Particularly the period at the end of the war, Second World War, where he was a prosecutor in Ukraine. And it was a pretty bloody awful time in, in Ukraine in which, you know, the Soviet Union and Stalin is trying to reimpose control over Ukraine, having been fought over with the Nazis and there's nationalist groups and others, and it's awful. And, and, and Mitrokin himself is a kind of small cog, you know, in the process of reimposing Stalinist control. And all he will later say to people, including when, you know, he eventually gets out, is, I saw horrors. And he won't talk about what horrors he saw, but we know that there were horrible, terrible things that happened there. And I think the fact he doesn't talk about it to me is a sign of his knowledge that he was complicit in it in some small way and more than just complicit in that, because it is actually through that role he's spotted by the KGB or what's, you know, what's. What gets called the KGB and is recruited into it and joins the kgb, you know, willingly, enthusiastically. So you get this sense of a person who early on in his career is an enthusiastic member of this elite, which eventually he's going to turn against. And I don't know if he ever really came to terms with that. But I think it also perhaps explains some of the deep anger he feels precisely because he's not just witnessed it, but been part of some terrible things. And I think that does explain the kind of spiritual intensity of his feelings and his journey and is coming to hate this organisation.
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Eleanor Evans
And interesting to show that complexity of how he's grappling with his own history, even as he's telling this, this archival story of the organisation that he comes to hate. It's such an interesting element.
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Gordon Carrera
Yeah, it is interesting, isn't it? Because it's someone. Someone who cared about the truth and the history, but actually struggled to tell his own history and was quite selective in what he would explain, you know, particularly because his career in the KGB will go wrong on some of his postings abroad, and that's what leads him to be banished to the archives. He never wanted to talk about that. And actually those were some of the hardest bits of the book to piece together because he didn't talk about it. You know, he didn't want to acknowledge his own failures and also the role perhaps that his own failures played in nursing a grievance. Because, of course, like, you know, most of these, someone like him, he wants to present it as ideological rather than as a based on grievance. But I think the two are quite closely intertwined in his story, which is very common actually in Spies. But I think particularly interesting in the.
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Eleanor Evans
Case of Metrokin, it's a staggering undertaking and something that struck me in the book is that obviously this is a massive mission to do it alone and also to be a dissident in sort of, you know, 70s, 80s, going into the 90s Soviet Union. It's such a lonely existence. And he did have a family, which plays into some of his motivations, perhaps as well.
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Gordon Carrera
Well, yes, it was a very lonely existence. I think he was a very introverted figure. He didn't talk much to people. He has a wife, Nina, who is an eminent doctor herself and actually kind of significant part of the. If you like, you know, the. The communist establishment. She. She knows nothing about what he's doing, has no idea. Crucially as well, they have a son, Vladimir And Vladimir is born in the 50s, but he has a degenerative muscle wasting disease. And they. They struggle to get it diagnosed, they struggle to get it treated, which I think is the cause of sadness and perhaps some resentment for Metrokin himself and is one of the motivations. But it does mean he has a very unusual and a very solitary life in which very few people know what he's doing, including his family.
- [14:28]
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Eleanor Evans
Right. So you've given a sense there of this undertaking that Matrokin spends 12 years of his life doing. He's taken it to the British Embassy. You mentioned at the top of the interview that there is some skepticism there, which you've given us reason for. What are the next steps in terms of verifying Matrokhin and his intelligence?
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Gordon Carrera
Well, he's been clever in what he's brought to the embassies because he's brought, amongst other things in his early visits, files about some of the deepest secrets the KGB have, which are about deep cover so called illegal spies who are operating in the West. And he passes those over knowing that these are incredibly valuable to a foreign intelligence service. And one of the things that there's, you know, there's a meeting in March and there's another meeting in April where he gives more files These go back to British intelligence who look at them and of course, you know, there was skepticism about him or at least, you know, questions about him at first. But they look at these files and, and they realized the details are amazing. Now there is a challenge because as from what I explained, you can see that they're not the original files, they're his write up of the files. So how do you know whether they're true? And one of the things that was done was they would look at details of agents whom MI5 knew had been operating in Britain for the KGB, but who had never been public. So MI5 had spotted them, worked out who they were through intelligence methods, but they'd never been publicly exposed. So no one other than the KGB would know the identities of those agents. And they could see them in Mitrokin's files. So immediately they start to go, well, this is interesting. You know, the man they realize is credible when they meet him, but also they can see in the files that, hang on, this could be a gold mine. This could be something incredibly invaluable in terms of the KGB's operations and revealing its operations of spying in Britain, America and around the world.
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Eleanor Evans
You mentioned the word gold mine there. And I think this is really interesting for me is that surely you think reading the pages, you know, this man is delivering the greatest wealth of intelligence ever, but is it right that it caused a bit of a problem for a lot of governments?
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Gordon Carrera
Yeah, And I found this fascinating as well, because you think, you know, here are, here are the, the deepest secrets from the KGB's inner sanctum being delivered first to Britain and then Britain shares them with America and then they're going to share them with allies. But there is a level at which it's quite awkward because, you know, let's take an example like the French, suddenly from Matrockin's files, you can see that there were a ton of agents who'd been working in something like the French Foreign Ministry and in French government departments, and some, for instance, there'd been a cipher clerk, so someone who encodes telegrams, who'd been working for years and years and years and done enormous damage and was still alive. Now, for spy services, for security services, on the one hand it's great to know it, on the other hand, it raises quite awkward questions. You know, amongst them are, well, why didn't you know about this before and why didn't you catch them? And also, what are you going to do about them now? Are you going to prosecute these people? Is this evidence that you can use in court to prosecute people. This person's notes and the person, you know, the fact he's got out isn't yet public. So what do you do with it? So you add that to the fact that the Cold War has just ended as we get to the early 90s, and you can see it's actually a headache. It's a gold mine and a headache for lots of security services. And I think one of the tragedies is, is they, you know, they don't see what Mitrockin really wants to talk about, which is the way in which the KGB was spying on dissidents and doing all kinds of things around the world. But they are very focused on the. The spies revealed in their own midst. But even there, it proves very problematic to work out what to do with them. And a good example in Britain is there's a woman called Melita Norwood, who Metrokin's files reveal had been an important spy providing atomic secrets from British the atomic weapons program in the early Cold War to the Soviet Union. And she'd actually come under suspicion by MI5 and been investigated. But they, Mitrokin reveals, had missed how important she was. And then they work out she's still alive in South London and MI5 are in a slight bind, you know, do you prosecute this old woman now? What do you do about it? How are they going to deal with it? And it becomes a total mess, total mess, you know, and is terribly handled, frankly, by government and Whitehall because they don't know quite what to do with it. And that's just one example of the. The ways it, you know, what should have been a gold mine wasn't really exploited, I think, in the way it could have been.
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Eleanor Evans
Yes, there are lots more examples of that in the book as various countries in the west grapple with how to handle this intelligence. And I think something you alluded to just there as well is that they want to handle it very differently from how Matrokhin intended it to be handled. We've already got a sense of him in terms of his obsession in creating this archive without clear sense of purpose. But he's obviously created it with great energy behind it, and then all of a sudden it's not perhaps matching his expectations. What are the challenges of managing him as an asset, then?
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Gordon Carrera
They're very difficult challenges from the very start, from the first meetings MI6 have with him, which I kind of go into lots of detail about in the Baltics. But it's very interesting. He makes two demands when he meets them. He says, I will give you these files, but I want two things. I want you to get me and all of my family out when I say, and I want you to publish the archive. Now, that is a very unusual thing for a spy to ask for. You know, spies don't normally ask for the secrets to be published, but it goes to Petrochin's motivation, which is that his archive he saw was the truth, the historical truth about the KGB and the Soviet Union, which he felt needed to be heard, particularly actually by the Russian people. And that was his, you know, his first desire was for them to be confronted with the truth so they could kind of come to terms with it. So that was always his driving desire. So he gets out, you know, through a kind of wild operation which I detail in the book in 1992, involving MI6 and trying to get his family out, which nearly goes wrong. But then the problem comes, how is it going to be published and who's going to publish it and in what form? And this does become very, very difficult. You know, he's out in 92. A book will only come out in 1999, co authored with Christopher Andrew, the historian. And it proves to be a very, very difficult process. It's one of the things I lear when writing my book because, you know, the relationships break down. The relationship that matrockin has with MI6 breaks down with Chris Rand, who breaks down. You know, he's angry at one point because he feels like he's lost control of the book and it's not doing what he wanted it to do because inevitably a book is now being published to sell copies to a Western audience because that's what the publishers want. So there's all these tensions which come out and at one point even tries to, you know, talks about trying to pull the plug on the book, on his own book, because he's so unhappy with it. And there's an. There's a discussion about it where he kind of threatens, you know, I'll try and get lawyers who'll look at copyright and things like that. And One person from MI6 muses that, you know, if anyone has a claim of copyright on the book, it's probably the kgb, given it was their files, and they're probably not going to be exercising it. Eventually it's patched up, actually, this relationship, partly thanks to Nina, his wife, and one of the people from MI6. So it doesn't break down completely, but it is a very fraught process which I think goes to his personality, his difficult, introverted obsessive quite emotional personality. Now, that sounds like I'm being critical of him. I mean, I think he was enormously brave and enormously important and consequential. But a normal person wouldn't do what he did. A normal person would not spend 12 years copying down the files without a plan of what to do with it. So I do think there's a sense in which, you know, the fact he was an unusual person shouldn't come as any surprise. And that is the reality for intelligence agencies. These are the kind of people they have to learn how to handle. It's not the kind of. Some of the simple relationships that people think they are. And, you know, often he was someone who's disillusioned with the Soviet Union, but that doesn't mean he was a Western liberal. He was in many ways a Russian nationalist who cared about his own country primarily. So I think, you know, it was not easy, let's put it in that way.
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Eleanor Evans
So all of this considered, then, this archive makes it to the west, and Matrokin is extracted as well. All of that detail is in your book. And I wonder, to sort of begin to wrap up the story a bit for our listeners, you could give a sense of what you think the debt is towards him and this work that he did.
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Gordon Carrera
I think it's extraordinary because I think he did more than any other individual. I think he's one of the most consequential spies of the last hundred years. And that is because sometimes you can get spies who have enormous impact at a brief moment. They can pass details during the Cuban Missile Crisis or during a crisis in the 80s or some technical development. But what Mitrokin did was, as an archivist and as a historian, revealed the full truth of what the KGB did around the world. You know, and he's. In those archives are details of what the KGB was up to in India, in Italy, in Britain, in Africa, all around the world. This picture which reveals the truth of what a powerful, very powerful secret organization was doing, and it is a remarkable testament and tribute to him. So, you know, there are individual details about spies and individual spy stories that are there, but there is something much more significant there, which is a historical record of what the KGB was up to, which wouldn't otherwise ever be seen, because the KGB's files are going to be closed forever. Some of the files that he copied were destroyed by the KGB themselves. So the only copies or the only versions of the files and of the truth exist within the Mitrovian archive itself. So it is an enormous Testament to the power of history and the truth. The other bit which I think is so important about him is that he also could see the continuities as the Cold War ended, and he could see that the kind of Chekist, you know, this beast he was fighting persisted. And a lot of people in the 90s thought, well, the Cold War's over. We don't need to worry about it anymore. We don't need to worry about Russian spies. Russia's our friend now. It's as simple as that. And, you know, when his book comes out in 1999, the Mitrochin Archive book, again, people are thinking, well, the Cold War's over. And, yeah, there's this guy coming to power in Russia right now called Vladimir Putin. And, yeah, he's ex kgb, but he's someone we can do business with. You could see that in the way Tony Blair and then George Bush talk about him and deal with him. With the Western leaders at the time, even in MI6, they thought, hey, someone who might bring stability to Russia. But Mitrokin could see. He could see, because he had understood the KGB and lived in the belly of the beast and had been one of those Chekists, he could understand it in a way that I think no one else could. Absolutely no one else could. And so, you know, one of the most interesting things was to look at some of his writings in the early 2000s, where you can see that he. He has this incredibly perceptive understanding of what is happening in Russia at that point, and that some of the old forces have changed. They've been transformed, but they're still there, and they are still feeding off his country. The kind of the old Soviet elite has now turned into kind of a group of oligarchs and businessmen who've collected the wealth of the state, but they are still feeding off it in the way the Communist elite did. And the spies, the Chekists, are still there in the form of people like Vladimir Putin. He could see this. Now, today we understand that. Today we can understand that when we look at Russia, some of the continuities and the extent to which they exist and in which we hear about how Russian spy methods are similar today to the ones used in the Cold War. But Mitrokin could see that in the early 2000s and was warning people about it. And that is why I think he is particularly important beyond even the individual details of KGB operations that were taking place during the Cold War.
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Eleanor Evans
And this sense of him being underestimated as an archivist, as one person I think there's also an interesting thought to be taken forwards there as well, in this world where archives are becoming even more fragile of what one person can do. That's just something that struck me from your book.
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Gordon Carrera
Yes, and I think, you know, someone said it, the awesome access of the archivist, you know, this is someone who loved his files, actually, and he'd loved them since he was a boy. And the files and the sense of the truth. And the archives had particular power in the Soviet Union because secrets were buried there, compromising material was buried there. You know, details of who'd been agents were buried there. So there was this sense in which archives, because they have truth, have power. And particularly in regimes where the truth is distorted or hidden from people, it means that it's often kept by the spy services because they are looking for leverage of people or understanding of people. And so that is often the one place the truth is preserved is in those archives. And it means they are incredibly powerful things, archives. And that means that archivists are incredibly powerful, important people. And underestimate them at your peril, I think, is the story of Vasily Mitrochin. Be nice to your archivist next to next time anyone's, you know, thinking about these things because they, it's true, they have an understanding of the history and of the documents and of what's there and how to find things that are there and find the truth that really matters. And I think in a world in which, you know, truth is more contested, the power of the truth and of. Of what's in files is as important as ever. So, yes, today it might be a lot more digital archives and things like that, but I still think there's something in this story which tells you about that importance of archives and of people.
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Narrator
That was journalist and author Gordon Carrera speaking to Ellen Evans. Gordon's latest book, the Spy in the Archive, How One Man Tried to Kill the kgb, is out now.