A Real Le Carre

The tale of malevolent spymasters, intricate tradecraft and cold-eyed betrayal reads like a John le Carre novel. But The Sword and the Shield (Basic Books) has the added twist of being a work of nonfiction, and last week its publication revealed secrets about the KGB's long-secret war against the West that made headlines around the world.

In Bexleyheath, south London, an 87-year-old great-grandmother, Melita Norwood, confirmed that yes, as the book charges, she stole atomic secrets for Moscow for more than 40 years. Authorities in Western Europe and the U.S. learned that the KGB had easily intercepted revealing faxes from major defense firms and buried booby-trapped caches of arms, radios and uniforms to help saboteurs. In Paris, Le Monde followed up with a story charging that the current Socialist Party leader in the Senate, Claude Estier, worked secretly for the Soviet bloc starting in 1956. Estier called it a "tissue of nonsense."

The source of the storm is Vasili Mitrokhin, 77, who in 1972 was the officer in charge of checking, sealing and moving to a new headquarters 300,000 files kept by the KGB's foreign intelligence service. Disillusioned by the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, he set about copying in longhand the highly sensitive files in his care and stuffing his notes in metal cases beneath his dacha. By his retirement in 1984 he had a trove of the KGB's deepest secrets, including agent names and accounts of assassinations and covert actions. In 1992 he arranged for British intelligence to whisk him, his family and his trunks of paper to safety. Spy hunters and prosecutors got first crack at the papers, and according to Mitrokhin's co-author, Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew, a dozen probes of old spies are still active. Mitrokhin wanted to publish his files to reveal to the world the paranoia, cynicism and abuse endemic in Soviet power--the ultimate dissent from a system that died because it could not accept any.

--By J.F.O. McAllister/London