Whose archive is it anyway?

Once we have got past the voyeurism associated with the spilling of spy secrets, the shameful fact that emerges from the Mitrokhin papers is that, of all the countries in the world, India was the easiest to penetrate for Russia's spies.

Diplomats were willing to hop into bed with "swallows" and hand over cyber codes, or be compromised for sums as little as a thousand rupees a month; politicians were busy taking money and instructions from the KGB; and newspapers were happy to publish thousands of articles influenced or provided by the Soviets. It cannot have been the Russians alone.

Though the climate of opinion at the time made it easier to be a Soviet surrogate and still claim to be patriotic (and everyone knew who the pro-Soviets were), other spy services also found easy pickings in India.

Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin provide support for that conclusion, since they say that both the Americans and Russians knew how porous the Indian system was, so neither would trust their secrets with the Indians.

In contrast, countries like China and North Korea, though run by fellow-communist comrades, became impossible to penetrate for the Russians. Across West Asia, rulers were so suspicious that the KGB had to rely more on "sigint" (signals intelligence) than "humint" (spies).

In India, by contrast, though the Prime Minister of the time knew what was going on, little or nothing was done to stop the penetration of the system. Mitrokhin records that Indira Gandhi was quite willing to allow a record number of Russian diplomats (including spies) to be posted in New Delhi. And when the CPI stepped out of line, she complained to Moscow!

Politics for her came before nationalism. Her dependence on communist and Russian friends clearly comes through in her panic reaction to an anti-communist tirade by Sanjay Gandhi.

India's communists were not unique in feeding out of the KGB trough and taking their instructions from the Russian "Centre". Across the world, the KGB was busy financing, training and instructing local communists, with the exception of places like Egypt and Iraq, where local communists were sacrificed when national leaderships turned on them and started butchering them. For the Russian communists, the nation-state came before ideology.

Elsewhere in the world, it is interesting that the socialist poster-boy, Salvador Allende of Chile, is portrayed as a womanising, porn-watching leader on whom the KGB had given up well before the very anticipated coup by General Pinochet. In Iran, the Shah (although installed in office by the CIA) was forever suspicious about American double-dealing, a fear that the KGB encouraged by feeding forged notes and letters.

Indeed, Farah Diba (who became the Shah's third wife) had been contacted by the KGB in her days as a Paris student because she had some Left-leaning friends, but she disappointed the Russians by (surprise!) becoming a royalist after her marriage. And the Russians long regretted their decision to snap ties with Israel after the 1967 war. These are interesting variations on familiar themes.

The Cold War, in many ways, was fought in developing countries. Across the world, no country or leader of consequence was safe from attention. American and Russian spies were forever looking for weaknesses among leaders, seeking openings, making contact. In the face of such relentless effort, backed up by vast resources, it is no surprise that national leaders who usually had feet of clay became prey to the predators.

This review would be incomplete without emphasising that this book has been jointly authored. First authorship, in fact, goes to Christopher Andrew; Mitrokhin's principal role was to pinch the secrets and hand them over to British intelligence. And since the archival material is patchy, Andrew relies on his own knowledge and other material to make several assertions.

In that sense, this is really a book by a British academic with an intelligence orientation, using Russian records. This becomes particularly interesting when, on Afghanistan, the authors insist that Hafizullah Amin (whom the Russians replaced with Babrak Karmal in what they saw as a pre-emptive move) was not about to do a Sadat and replace his Russian minders with American ones. Mitrokhin couldn't have known that, so was Andrew told so by British intelligence? In which case, whose archives are we actually getting access to?

THE MITROKHIN ARCHIVE II
THE KGB AND THE WORLD

Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin
Penguin/Allen Lane
Price: £30; Pages: 677