Armed men with bulges beneath their coats watched from the shadows as a peculiar tour group disembarked: two British intelligence officers, an elderly woman with a cane, a younger man in a wheelchair and a quiet, intense figure in his 70s carrying the Soviet Union’s darkest secrets in his head. His father, Vasili, a retired KGB archivist, was escaping to Britain with the most comprehensive collection of Soviet intelligence secrets ever compiled: handwritten notes documenting 12 years of KGB operations, identifying hundreds of spies, revealing atomic espionage networks and exposing the methods Moscow used to crush dissent and infiltrate Western governments. As Vasili processed hundreds of thousands of files during the KGB’s 1972 move from the Lubyanka to new headquarters at Yasenevo, he witnessed the full scope of Soviet intelligence operations: atomic spies, deep-cover “illegals” living under false identities in the West, the crushing of dissidents, the infiltration of churches, the blackmail of diplomats.
Author: Eric Spitznagel
Published at: 2026-01-10 19:00:00
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