̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Christopher Andrew

Mitrokhin’s KGB archive opens to public

sjr81 — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 23:01:00 +0000

From 1972 to 1984, Major Vasiliy Mitrokhin was a senior archivist in the KGB’s foreign intelligence archive – with unlimited access to hundreds of thousands of files from a global network of spies and intelligence gathering operations.

At the same time, having grown disillusioned with the brutal oppression of the Soviet regime, he was taking secret handwritten notes of the material and smuggling them out of the building each evening. In 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he, his family and his archive were exfiltrated by the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service.

Now, more than twenty years after his defection to the UK, Mitrokhin’s files are being opened by the Churchill Archives Centre, where they sit alongside the personal papers of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.

Professor Christopher Andrew, the only historian to date allowed access to the archive, and author of two global bestsellers with Mitrokhin, said: “There are only two places in the world where you’ll find material like this. One is the KGB archive – which is not open and very difficult to get into – and the other is here at Churchill College where Mitrokhin’s own typescript notes are today being opened for all the world to see.

“Mitrokhin dreamed of making this material public from 1972 until his death; it’s now happening in 2014. ̽��ֱ��inner workings of the KGB, its foreign intelligence operations and the foreign policy of Soviet-era Russia all lie within this extraordinary collection; the scale and nature of which gives unprecedented insight into the KGB’s activities throughout much of the Cold War.”

Among the 19 boxes and thousands of papers being opened are KGB notes on Pope John Paul II, whose activities in Poland were closely monitored before his election to the Papacy; maps and details of secret Russian arms caches in Western Europe and the USA; and files on Melita Norwood, ‘the spy who came in from the Co-op’.

Norwood, codename Hola, was the KGB’s longest-serving UK agent, who for four decades passed on classified information from her office at the British Non Ferrous Metals Research Association in Euston, North London, where nuclear and other scientific research took place.

“ ̽��ֱ��Mitrokhin files range in time from the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the eve of the Gorbachev era,” said Andrew. “Initially he smuggled his daily notes out on small scraps of paper hidden in his shoes. After a few months, he began to take them out in his jacket pockets then buried them every weekend at the family dacha in the countryside near Moscow.

“ ̽��ֱ��enormous risks in compiling his secret archive might well have ended with a secret trial and a bullet in the back of the head in an execution cellar. He was a dissident willing to make the most extraordinary sacrifice.”

Vasiliy Mitrokhin was born in 1922. From 1948, he worked in foreign intelligence before being assigned to the foreign intelligence archives in the KGB First Chief Directorate. From 1972 until 1982 he was in charge of the transfer of these archives from the Lubyanka in central Moscow to a new foreign intelligence HQ at Yasenevo.

Following his retirement in 1984, Mitrokhin organised much of this material geographically and, in ten volumes, typed out systematic studies of KGB operations in different parts of the world.

After his exfiltration to London, Mitrokhin continued to work on transcribing and typing his manuscript notes, producing a further 26 typed volumes, which, together with his notes, provided the basis for his publications with Professor Christopher Andrew. Vasiliy Mitrokhin died in January 2004.

Allen Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archives Centre, said: “This collection is a wonderful illustration of the value of archives and the power of archivists. It was Mitrokhin's position as archivist that allowed him his unprecedented access and overview of the KGB files. It was his commitment to preserving and providing access to the truth that led him to make his copies, at huge personal risk. We are therefore proud to house his papers and to honour his wish that they should be made freely available for research."

In accordance with the deposit agreement, the Churchill Archives Centre is opening Mitrokhin’s edited Russian-language versions of his original notes. ̽��ֱ��original manuscript notes and notebooks will remain closed under the terms of the deposit agreement, subject to review.

KGB files from the famous Mitrokhin Archive – described by the FBI as ‘the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source’ – will today open to the public for the first time.

There are only two places in the world where you’ll find material like this. One is the KGB archive – which is not open and very difficult to get into – and the other is here at Churchill College.

Chrisopher Andrew

Churchill Archives Centre

Mitrokhin's handwritten copy of the KGB First Chief Directorate Lexicon

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PsyWar during the Malayan Emergency

tdk25 — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 12:34:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��Malayan Emergency of 1948-1960 is widely regarded as having involved the most successful British counter-insurgency (COIN) campaign in history. Similarly, it also included one of the most successful British psychological warfare operations ever undertaken. This important aspect of the COIN campaign, however, has only been examined in a handful of studies – something which remains true more broadly of British psychological warfare efforts throughout the period of imperial decolonisation and the Cold War.

In this seminar paper (originally given on Friday, 22 February, 2013), Thomas J. Maguire provides an insight into how psychological warfare played an increasingly important part in the largest British counter-insurgency operation of the decolonisation era.

Psychological warfare was conceived as a potential “force multiplier” which would reinforce other counter-insurgency strategies and tactics employed against the communist Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA). It targeted the insurgents’ morale and sought to induce surrenders and defections, while creating dissent, division and instability in their ranks. It was, therefore, intended to both remove insurgents from the battlefield and hasten a greater supply of intelligence.

Maguire explains how, after a relatively ineffective start, the Federation Government psychological warfare strategy became more systematic and refined from about 1950 onwards, eventually playing an important part in the insurgents’ defeat. ̽��ֱ��talk shows how ‘psychological intelligence’ was collected, analysed and disseminated – in particular through the careful interrogation of surrendering enemy personnel. Using this intelligence, the Government information services constructed a number of influential propaganda themes and utilised a variety of techniques to disseminate finished productions, most notably by dropping over 400 million leaflets over the jungle during the course of the conflict.

̽��ֱ��paper also highlights the broader political and cultural context in which psychological operations took place, showing how they influenced British strategy and contributed to the Emergency’s outcome.

̽��ֱ��seminar is part of the regular Cambridge Intelligence Seminar organised through the Faculty of History and the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. It is chaired by Prof. Christopher Andrew (Corpus Christi), an expert in the international relations sub-field of intelligence and security studies. Prof. Andrew’s extensive list of publications include the recent and much-vaunted ̽��ֱ��Defence of the Realm: the Authorized History of MI5 (2009).

Thomas J. Maguire (Gonville & Caius) is a PhD candidate in POLIS. This paper forms part of a chapter on interrogation and psychological warfare in the forthcoming publication, Simona Tobia & Christopher Andrew (eds), Interrogation in War and Conflict. ̽��ֱ��principal focus of his research is British and American psychological warfare and counter-subversion in early Cold War Southeast Asia. His broader research interests lie within the fields of intelligence and security studies, psychological warfare, and the Cold War.

As part of the Intelligence seminars run by the Faculty of History, Thomas J. Maguire examines how psychological warfare contributed to Britain's counter-insurgency campaign in Malaya from 1948 to 1960.

Intelligence on kills would be supplied for follow-up operations publicising insurgent losses

Thomas Maguire

Credit: UK Department of Information.

Leaflet dropped on Malayan insurgents, urging them to come forward with a Bren gun and receive a $1,000 reward.

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Cold War PR - spinning the ideological battlefront

sjr81 — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:56:45 +0000

Public Relations of the Cold War, organised by CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) sought to examine the ‘selling’ of ideologically motivated policies to domestic audiences during the Cold War – outside of the more commonly studied area of public diplomacy, which concerns a government reaching out to foreign audiences.

̽��ֱ��conference, which drew experts from the UK, Europe, and North America and featured keynote addresses from Professor Christopher Andrew, Official Historian of the Security Service, and Professor Odd Arne Westad, a leading expert in Cold War history, aimed to demonstrate how pervasive the battle to influence domestic public opinion became – on both sides of the Cold War divide.

̽��ֱ��scope of influence was massive, whether it was Executive Branch infighting about how to best present casualty reports to the public during the Vietnam War to models of Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) on sale in children’s toyshops. ̽��ֱ��conference also examined the under-recognized and -examined nuance in various means of disseminating PR.

American historian Hannah Higgin, one of the conference organisers, said: “In today’s PR-laden world, there are very important lessons to be learned by looking at how public relations influenced opinion, occupied governments and seeped into daily life and popular culture.

“And this wasn’t just practised by the USSR and USA. ̽��ֱ��conference has speakers discussing just how neutral Switzerland actually was, how Maoist thought and even the singing of ‘ ̽��ֱ��East is Red’ were among surgeon’s tools in China after the Sino-Soviet split, West Germany’s ‘reptile fund’ and how the work of George Orwell, via the medium of radio, was possibly as potent, if not a more potent, a weapon in the battle against Soviet totalitarianism as any CIA-funded or covertly-backed Cold War cultural enterprise abroad.

“This conference spurred a vital conversation about the channels and means by which governments ‘sold’ the Cold War to their own people - and how journalists, movie-makers, academics, researchers and the general public took up the ideological battle of their own volition.”

̽��ֱ��conference considered a range of controversial issues, including the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the USA’s reporting of combat casualties in both the Vietnam and Korean Wars, and dissected how official policy was transmitted through the mass media.

In the latter case, the media often challenged official casualty statistics, charging that they underreported the actual total. In response, the Pentagon increasingly provided more detailed figures, to the consternation of Truman and particularly Johnson.

In the Soviet Union, the Brezhnev-era of tightly controlled reporting of the 'events' in Afghanistan gave way to the gradual liberalisation of media policy. Under glasnost, the dynamics of public debate could not be controlled by official institutions anymore and contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

Also up for discussion was the selling of the Cold War via the media by America’s ‘Crusade for Freedom’. Developed by the CIA, the Crusade was one of the longest-running and most intensive campaigns which saturated the American media with anti-communist sentiment for two decades.

̽��ֱ��paper, presented by Dr Ken Osgood from the Colorado School of Mines, looked at how such sentiment seeped effortlessly into art, literature, movies, music and politics. ̽��ֱ��Crusade had a particularly wide reach because of the extensive support it received from public relations professionals and the Advertising Council, as well celebrities—including, in one advert, a young Ronald Reagan, corporations and the mass media.

Added Higgin: “America’s battle against Communism touched everyday life through overt and covert means. Whether it was through ‘duck and cover’ (the famous public safety campaign) or Edward R Murrow, one of America’s most respected journalists, becoming the Director of the United States Information Agency in 1961, American culture was filled with subtle and not so subtle messages about how high the ideological stakes were.

“ ̽��ֱ��PR aspect of the Cold War has not been discussed in great depth before. Often domestic and foreign realms of history are studied in relative isolation. Further, people were living with Cold War PR until relatively recently. Now there is some historical distance. We need to understand more about what constitutes domestic PR, how it was—and is—disseminated, and how it was used as means of uniting—or trying to unite—the masses to a common purpose, and when and whether it is good, bad, or something else, for society.”

̽��ֱ��conference was funded by CRASSH as well as by the International History Dept at LSE and the History Faculty at Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��conveners of the conference were PhD students Hannah Higgin (History, Cambridge), Martin Albers (History, Cambridge), Mark Miller (History, Cambridge), and Zhong Zhong Chen (LSE).

̽��ֱ��persuasive powers of Cold War PR, until now little recognised or discussed, was the subject of a three-day conference at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��.

This conference spurred a vital conversation about the channels and means by which governments ‘sold’ the Cold War to their own people - and how journalists, movie-makers, academics, researchers and the general public took up the ideological battle of their own volition.

Hannah Higgin

Image courtesy of X-Ray Delta One via Flickr

American toys for American boys and girls

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