Spy story

Soviet files: KGB defector's cold war secrets revealed at last

When the scruffy-looking KGB officer walked into the British embassy in Riga, the Latvian capital, one of his first demands – after being offered a cup of tea – was that his unique cache of files on Moscow's foreign intelligence operations he smuggled out of the Soviet Union must be published.

Twenty years later, Vasili Mitrokhin's wish is beginning to come true. the first batch of 2,000 closely typed pages of notes he made from the KGB archives is being opened to the public.

The documents, including more than a hundred pages devoted to KGB claims about its "agents, controllers and cultivations" in Britain during the cold war, have been made available, after vetting by Whitehall weeders, at the Churchill Archives Centre at Cambridge University.