49. The Man Who Tried To Kill The KGB: A Traitor in the Kremlin (Ep 1)

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The sky was heavy with storm clouds as a yellow minibus with a Baltic tours sign painted on the side pulled up by the docks at Klypeda.

A sharp-eyed observer on that afternoon of 7 November, 1992 might have realized they were not the only ones watching as an odd collection of characters disembarked.

Hovering at the edges were a group of tough-looking figures, bulges beneath long coats tracing the shape of weapons as they scanned the decaying industrial docks on Lithuania's Baltic coast for trouble.

The fact that this was the 75th anniversary of the revolution that led to the creation of the Soviet Union was not a coincidence.

A suave, rakish, well-dressed man with graying hair seemed to be directing events.

Another man, heavier-built, wearing glasses, a blue scarf, and a long trench coat, seemed to be helping.

But then something seemed to go wrong.

There was shouting.

Watching events unfold, a wiry older man was the calm center of a storm.

He did not appear anxious or nervous, not even as the limp body of another man was slung.

over his shoulder.

For him, the steps from the minibus to the waiting boat might be dangerous, but they represented the culmination of his life's journey.

He carried with him a warning that he believed the world needed to hear and a weapon with which to do battle.

At that moment, he believed he was finally about to slay the beast that had preyed upon his country and inhabited his nightmares.

Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified.

I'm David McCloskey, and I'm Gordon Carrera.

And that brilliant piece of prose, worthy of a spy novel, if I do say so myself,

comes from the pen of none other than Gordon Carrera.

And it is exceptional, Gordon.

It is also my audition to read the audiobook.

Too late.

Too late.

I've already done it.

You're already doing it.

But that is the opening from your new book, Gordon, The Spy in the Archive, How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB.

It's out in a few weeks in the UK.

It is absolutely brilliant.

And it is the subject of the next few episodes here on The Rest is classified.

That's right.

And it's very unlike us to plug our own books, isn't it?

It's very out of character.

We, of course, we never do this.

We barely mentioned yours.

We barely mentioned yours.

What was it?

Fifth floor, sixth floor?

Seventh floor, wasn't it?

Yep, seventh floor.

Seventh floor.

Out now and higher back.

Wherever you get your books, that's right.

So you have a book coming out, and we're going to tell that story today.

It is the story of Asali Matrokin.

I have got the pronunciation right.

Yeah, that's pretty good.

It's pretty good.

Okay.

Some people say Matrokin, but I've been told Matrokin is the better version of it.

Who was he?

Well, he was the senior archivist of the KGB's Foreign Spy Service.

An interesting character, but also a man who developed a profound, even spiritual hatred for the very organization that he worked for, the KGB, and who set out effectively to destroy it.

And he did so by stealing their deepest secrets, even though, as we'll come to, he wasn't your typical spy.

And then with the help of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service

trying to escape.

This is the nexus of the British Secret Intelligence Service and Russians.

We've hit all of the squares on your bingo card, haven't we?

Yeah, within a few minutes, the first few minutes.

And we're going to get to the CIA soon.

So don't worry, you won't get left out of this story.

So Machokin had stolen the secrets.

at the heart of the KGB's Foreign Spy Service.

Details of undercover agents, operations around the world, some of their most secret deep cover spies.

And he would, I think, become one of the most consequential spies of recent decades because what he had uncovered, what he would hand over, would really shine a light on what the KGB had been up to for decades around the whole world.

So from India to America, Australia to Africa to Britain itself, going back decades.

And his name might be a bit familiar to people interested in the spy world because in 1999, a book came out which had details from his files and showed really the scale of what he was revealing and that there'd never really been a compromise of secrets quite like it.

But what no one has revealed before, and what I try and do in the book, is tell the story of the man himself, who he was, how he did it, why he did it.

and I think most remarkably, how he escaped.

That scene that you read from so beautifully in your audition for the audiobook at the start is really the first time that that part of the story has been told.

This story in Lithuania of first how we approached the British and then how we got out.

Much of it has actually been clouded in mystery, maybe even misdirection, going back for decades, I think.

I was disgusted to find out that you had already booked yourself to read the audiobook.

So my audition is far too late.

I mean, I'm talking about a spy in the archives, and I think we tend to think they have access to military secrets.

You know, I'm thinking of friend of the pod, Adolf Tolkachev, who we did a series on a few months ago, who had access to basically advanced aeronautical designs and engineering work inside the Soviet establishment.

Or, you know, you think of actual KGB kind of line staff officers who are running assets who might get recruited themselves.

But Matrakin is actually

maybe far more sort of deadly as a spy because he is quite literally got his hands on all of these documents, right?

I mean, he's got the official record of First Chief Directorate spying outside of the Soviet Union.

I mean, it's an absolutely exceptional hall for a spy service to get its hands on.

That's right.

And I think that's one of the reasons why he's so important.

But the other one is that it's a story which is both about what the KGB had done during the Cold War and which he's going to reveal, but also it's about more than just history.

Because one of the things that I think makes Mitrokin so important is that he was also explaining how the KGB had worked and could see and warn that even though the Cold War had ended effectively in 1991 that actually something of the past and of the KGB's ideology had persisted and he as we'll come to I think later was warning that actually the force that drove the kgb was still there had survived and persisted, particularly in the form of Vladimir Putin.

And so, Machokin was actually also offering a warning about the future and about the world we're in today.

And it's one which I think almost everyone at the time failed to understand.

I think that's one of the other reasons why he is actually a much more important figure than people have previously understood.

So, we've got spy secrets of the highest order.

We have really a daring, very human spy story here about the family, which we'll we'll talk about here.

This is really a family story as well.

So I think it's got a little bit of everything.

And of course, we are going to declassify most of your book here on the podcast, Gordon.

But I will just again note this book is fantastic.

Go out and get a copy.

So, I mean, Gordon, where should we start?

I think maybe we go back to Lithuania in November of 92 and pick up on my beautiful reading that kicked this all off.

That reading was about the moment, the dramatic moment in which Michokin is going to escape.

But if we go back just a few months before that

to the start of the year and to March, there's a moment where an old man walks up to the British Embassy in Vilnius and knocks on the door.

He's about 70 years old.

He's got a small moustache.

He's wiry though, quite fit.

But at this point, he's dressed almost like a tramp in pretty shabby clothes.

And he's pulling pulling along with him a grubby bag on wheels.

The whole idea of how he looks is deliberate to look almost like a tramp because he doesn't want to draw attention to himself, partly because of what's inside that bag.

And he's fearful because he's a former KGB officer and he knows Russian intelligence are still active in Lithuania.

And if they find him, he's in trouble.

But he's walking up to the British Embassy and he's what's known in the trade as a walk-in.

We covered a bit in the Tolkachev series, this idea of walk-ins.

I mean, essentially, he's a volunteer.

No one has tried up to this point, as far as we know, to recruit him.

He is offering his services to the British state.

And what I think is really fascinating about walk-ins is

they tend to be some of the most valuable assets that spy services run, because you think about how hot the interior fire would have to be burning for somebody to take a former KGB officer to go outside of Russia and reach out cold to another secret service, he's committed by definition.

So he's walking in, he hasn't been bumped, he hasn't been developed, and he's potentially in league with some of these other really important walk-ins that have kind of framed Cold War spy history.

That's right.

But the thing is, it isn't the first time he's walked into an embassy because the Brits were not his first choice.

Amazing as it is for me to admit that someone wouldn't choose Britain as your first choice, what had he done?

He'd already tried the Americans.

And I'm afraid he'd been turned down.

He'd been turned away.

He wasn't fit for duty.

The entire record of the KGB's first chief directorate, I guess, we said no.

And I guess it is also, again, to harken back a bit to the Tolkij series.

I mean, there's a track record here of the CIA

turning Russian volunteers away, right?

With some good reason, but this is maybe not abnormal, maybe even less abnormal after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90s.

No, that's right.

And he'd actually tried multiple times in both Riga in neighboring Latvia as well as in Vilnius to go to the Americans.

And he'd been turned away.

He'd arrived in these Baltic states just as the Soviet Union had been broken up.

And they were new embassies, which both the US and the UK had set up in these countries, very small.

So one of them, one of the CIA people does take him seriously.

But that CIA officer, I'm told, from speaking to people at the time, was about to move on to his next posting.

So he said, come back in a few weeks.

I'll leave notes for the next person to look at.

But when Mitrokin comes back a few weeks later, this next person looks at him and sees what looks like a tramp with a shopping cart and basically just dismisses him.

And so, you know, the extent to which he's dressed down to avoid drawing attention seems to have really worked against him in that case.

He might have anticipated that.

He might have worn something underneath the tramp disguise to be able to seem more suave as he's talking to these Americans.

Another thing to say is it is the context of the time because 1992, the Soviet Union's just collapsed in 1991.

Russia is plunging into economic crisis.

And there is actually a lot of KGB or former KGB officers who are trying to offer themselves up to the Americans.

I mean, there was this line that came up, which was another drunk KGB colonel.

And that was the joke that the CIA officers had at the time.

It was like, here comes another one after a million dollars and a house in Florida resettlement.

So they're getting a lot of these chances and also occasionally dangles, which are people who are being offered up to smoke out CIA officers, I guess, and to send them down wild goose chases.

So there's tensions within the bit of the CIA, which deals with Russia, which is known as Russia House, isn't it?

Yes, yes.

And

funnily enough, Russia House, so it's obviously the name of the Le Carré novel, which I believe came out in the late 80s.

And it wasn't called Russia House.

Like, Le Carré didn't hear that from inside either CIA or SIS.

I mean, he made up the name.

And then my understanding is that the CIA officers at the time, I believe it was called CE Division, said, oh, that's cool, and basically started to call it Russia House colloquially, right?

So Russia House doesn't appear on the org charts, my understanding, but it's how officers who work on Russia would refer to the group.

Yeah, and it's the same at MI6.

And then at this time, Russia House of the CIA has got a new boss, or it's had one around the end of the Cold War 91, a guy called Milt Beard, and a swaggering Texan type.

He'd run the secret war in Afghanistan, arming the guerrillas to fight the Soviet Union.

And he'd been sent in partly deliberately to clear the old guard out with the view that the Cold War was ended.

So he'd sent out a message which said to hold off recruiting new agents whilst he tried to build a relationship with the Russians.

There's a message which one CIA officer remembers receiving.

This is how they described it to me.

We are cancelling them as their primary target as their dicks are in the dirt.

We will get everything we need from liaison.

And that was how they remember Milt Bearden's message going out.

I guess your dick being in the dirt means you're...

Well, I guess you're lying there.

Or it's been severed, I suppose.

In either case, it's bad.

I guess there's the context here of the liaison comment is interesting because the Russian services are so inward-looking and weak at this point that they're not much of a threat, or this is the perception.

And you're meeting with these drunk KGB colonels during liaison discussions in Moscow.

The idea of paying somebody to commit espionage, you know, maybe you just say, well, we'll save the money and the time and the energy, right?

And I suppose this is also happening at a point in time where the extent to which there will be real democratic change in Russia, real political change in Russia, and a new way of the U.S.

dealing with Russia is also very much up in the air, right?

So you can kind of make some sense of it.

Although it does seem like if someone's shown up to volunteer their services, you might still give them a listen, even if they're dressed like a hobo.

But they don't.

But they don't.

But they don't.

So for that reason, Vitrockin then turns up at the British Embassy in March.

I've been there.

It's a kind of...

quite a grand building just on the edge of town.

Big stone lion looking down on you as you walk up the steps.

He rings the bell.

Receptionist opens the door.

He wants to see a diplomat.

What he gets is a young woman in her 20s.

And he's actually quite disappointed at this because he thinks well kind of a young woman she's not going to be a serious player she's not a spy she's a diplomat some nice kgb chauvinism there on display it was a bit but crucially she's a russian speaker and she's smart and so she has to make that quick instant decision is this person this kind of tramp-like person someone she should take seriously and she does that most British of things.

She offers him a cup of tea,

which I love that detail because because I think she clearly thinks, okay, I'm going to give this guy the time of day and a cup of tea.

But it's quite an interesting exchange because she gives him a cup of tea and he gives her some of the KGB's most deepest secrets because he kind of reaches into his grubby bag, rummages around, there's clothes, sausages, and bread.

Sausages?

Sausages?

Because I think they part of his cover story is that they're hard to get hold of in Russia, I guess.

But at the bottom of the files, and he pulls them out.

Now, the crucial thing is, it's not immediately obvious what they are because they are not original KGB files.

So they haven't got the kind of markings to suggest they're official documents.

Which I guess would explain some of the skepticism on maybe our service's part and yours.

It's just that they're not the originals, very hard to verify them immediately.

Exactly.

So it's hard to be sure what they are, but the diplomat, who's a Russian speaker, can see that they look like they might be some of the deepest secrets of the KGB.

Well, and maybe there with Matrokin about to hand over the crown jewels, let's take a break.

And when we come back, we'll see how he did it and why.

But welcome back.

Vasily Matrochin, the spy in the archive, has reached out to not the Americans, but the Brits.

And he has met with a British diplomat and he has begun the process of handing over this archive.

That's right.

At this point, interestingly enough, he's not given his real name.

He actually says he's called Urasov.

It's a kind of false name he's using.

And he also tells the woman that he's got to get back to Moscow on a train in a few hours' time.

But he says he can come back in a few weeks with more material.

Now, once he's left, the woman goes to talk to our ambassador.

They agree they need to inform London.

One of the challenges is this embassy is so new.

They don't actually have a secure line in the embassy.

So she's going to have to go to Berlin to send it.

I mean, it's that small.

It's a half dozen people.

They hadn't even done like the electrical plumbing work to even get a secure line set up at that point.

That's wild.

Yeah, it is that early.

So eventually that message gets to London and it clatters out of a teleprinter in London at a place called Century House.

Great name.

It's a great name.

And it was a great building because this was the headquarters of MI6 at that time.

People now remember this place called Vauxhall Cross, which is the current headquarters and Vauxhall Cross, sometimes known as Legoland, because that's how some people think it looks.

Whereas Century House was in Lambeth, and it was actually quite an old and quite crubby block, which people who worked in there joked would not have looked out of place in the Soviet Union.

So, if you think, a slightly kind of brutalist concrete block.

And I think this is also a time when MI6, a bit like the CIA, is undergoing a bit of an identity crisis because the Cold War, which had defined it for so long, had just ended.

And here in Russia House, MI6's version of the team dealing with Russia, they're also kind of trying to cope with the fact that they had been before the top dogs in MI6.

You know, they were the ones with the deepest secrets.

And now everyone is kind of wondering, A, what MI6 is for these days.

People used to kind of ask that.

And B, do we still need to spy on the Russians in the same way as the past?

So it's a disorienting time, I think, for MI6 and Century House.

But they get this message that a man has walked in in Vilnius.

There's a discussion about it.

Some people think he is a dangle.

In other words, he's been sent there by the Russians deliberately to play with them, to flush them out.

The paranoia is fascinating, isn't it?

And I think it's with a decent amount of justification, too, that this is how the Russian services behave.

So even though the entire state has collapsed and Russians are basically growing their own potatoes for sustenance amid the sort of absolute economic collapse of the 90s, the idea that there's still KGB officers who are like, you know, it would be great, a good idea.

Let's dangle this archivist in front of the British service just to mess with them.

But these are the conversations that are going on, right?

It's the mindset.

It's amazing.

Yeah, it is.

But they decide he's worth checking out at the very least.

So they're going to dispatch a team to the Baltics when he returns in April.

Now, who do you send on a mission like this?

It's interesting, isn't it?

Because if you think it might be a dangle, you don't necessarily want to send out newbie officers, you know, recently trained, clean clean skins, who the Russians might not know who they are and blow their cover effectively.

So instead, they send a pair who I call the odd couple for reasons which become clear in the book, I think, particularly.

But let's call them James and Robert.

Real names, yeah.

Not real names.

Last names and driver's license numbers in the show notes.

Unfortunately, not.

Are they longtime, like Russia hands inside

MI6?

They're really interesting characters.

So James is a veteran officer, and he's been around the block.

He's now in his 50s.

He's pretty worldly wise.

He's spent most of his career hunting Russians in various parts of the world, trying to recruit them, trying to spy on them.

That's James.

Now, Robert, the other one, is a really unusual character.

He's actually one of the most unusual characters I've ever come across.

One of the reasons he's technically not an MI6 officer, but technically an agent.

And even more surprisingly, he's actually Russian.

He was born and grew up in the Soviet Union and had come to Britain and ended up working with MI6 as an effectively an agent, but who they are using on multiple operations because of his effectively pretty unique skill set and understanding.

I mean, that's pretty unusual, isn't it?

I mean, I don't know how often you've heard about that happening on the American side.

It is unusual, though not unprecedented.

And in fact, the CIA has a name for that sort of officer, which I was actually not allowed to print in one of my books.

It was one of the redactions that they forced me to make.

But essentially, I guess what we're describing here is the typical model would be: there's an intelligence officer who's, let's say, the Brit, and then there's the asset or agent who's Russian.

And this is a kind of middle-ground individual, I guess, who kind of blurs the distinction between those two roles in some ways, where it's essentially a foreign-born individual who's got a foreign passport, but who effectively acts as a staff officer for the intelligence agency that they're working with or for.

You can see why it's very appealing and interesting for an intelligence agency to have these people because they are more vetted, more trusted than your typical agent, but they have all of the sort of documentation and experience and cultural and linguistic skills that the agents might have too.

So it's a very interesting and very valuable type of person.

And this pairing had worked together quite a bit around that time.

And one person described Robert, this Russian, as having effectively what they described as a superpower, which was that they could meet someone and they could smell

or tell

on meeting them, as they put it, if the person in front of them was for real or not and whether they were KGB or not.

And that's how it was described to me, is they could just tell from the aura someone gave off and the body language whether they were really a spy and someone who'd worked for the KGB.

That's the kind of thing which only comes from experience, because I think in this case, Robert had had plenty of run-ins and knew quite a lot about the KGB.

Yeah.

And so has that instinctive understanding of who someone might be and whether they're telling the truth or not.

So you can see the value of that as an asset.

This made me think, and I assume...

You're not familiar with the show.

It's always sunny in Philadelphia, Gordon.

Are you?

I've heard of it.

I've watched it.

There's an episode in which two of the characters write a a terrible movie script about a detective who can smell crime?

Like he can actually smell it in his nose.

And that's when I first read this in your notes, I thought I thought of that because it is really truly a superpower.

But I guess you're right that if you have spent your adult life basically flying out to meet with Russians, and some of whom are probably Dangles and some of whom work for the KGB, it'd be much harder to fool someone like James.

Robert the Russian.

Robert the Russian.

Sorry.

The code names you gave them are very Anglo, so I got them together.

They are very Anglo.

There's a reason.

So the two of them are going to be dispatched.

They'll go out and meet this old man in April.

First couple of days when they're there, actually, he fails to show up.

Finally, he walks back into the embassy in Vilnius.

Robert uses this superpower.

I don't know whether he literally takes a sniff of him, but he says

in his mouth.

He smells the sausages.

And he goes, this guy is for real.

And instantly decides he's not a chancel.

But they also get the sense, I think, right at the start that he's going to be hard to handle.

This person, this guy who's still calling himself Eurosov.

Lots of strange things about him.

He doesn't want to talk at that point exactly how he was able to get hold of this information and why he's doing what he's doing.

He's quite evasive, but he reveals for the first time that his name is Vasily Mitrokin.

And he says that for decades he was the archivist of the first chief directorate of the KGB, which we should say is the KGB was a huge institution in the the Cold War, and it included domestic security and lots of other code breaking, all came under the guise of the KGB.

But the first chief directorate were the elite foreign spies.

They were the equivalent of the CIA or MI6 within the KGB, and he was the archivist for them for decades.

So he's saying he's stolen their secrets, but it's this interesting question.

How do you steal a library?

How do you steal an entire archive of secrets without anyone noticing?

And of the most secret secrets in the world, and to to do it in a way where no one seems to notice the files are missing.

I mean, it's one of the fascinating things about Mitrochen is both why he does it, but how he does it.

And how he got there is a really interesting story.

It's a complicated mixture, I think, of grievance and ideology, grievance because he'd been a proper foreign spy posted abroad.

But his postings, which include Israel and Australia in the early Cold War, had gone wrong.

And so he was banished, effectively, to the belly of the KGB, the Lubyanka, this famous headquarters in Moscow, the building, and been sent there to work on the archives effectively as punishment for having failed as a foreign spies.

I mean,

that's where he was sent.

And so you can see why initially there is a sense of disappointment and grievance that's there for him.

It is.

Also kind of fascinating that the idea is let's take our failures and give them the most wide-reaching access in the organization, right, to all the paper, which I guess gives you some sense of the idea being that these people are so sort of maybe bumbling and incompetent and irrelevant, like what damage could they possibly do?

It also made me think of Molly Duran and Slow Horses.

Like the people in the archives are always a little bit strange.

You maybe don't join an intelligence service to sit in the archives, right?

And so you do end up, I suppose, with a group of people who have not cut it.

typically in their line jobs for which they might have interviewed and joined.

I mean, do we know when he was in Israel and Australia, was he actually at fault for what happened or was he just not cut out for the job to begin with?

I think people realize he is not a natural foreign intelligence officer.

He is not someone who is naturally good at the cocktail party chat and sidling up to people, nor is he very good at office politics.

He's not very good with his colleagues.

He's seen as kind of grumpy, a bit argumentative, a bit difficult.

He doesn't kind of play the game very well.

And so they think to themselves, where can we get rid of him?

We'll put him in the archives.

And it is going to be the most damaging personnel decision, I think, an intelligence.

The HDB ever made.

Yeah, that's for sure.

Because when he's in the archives, he's not just angry, but he also starts to see over the years what's in the files.

And he starts to read the files and absorb what's in the files.

And there's this interesting interplay between events which are taking place in the outside world, things like the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, when the Soviet Union ends up crushing a moment at which it looks like there'll be more freedom under communism.

And at the same time, he's seeing those events in the outside world and reading in the files what the KGB is up to at that time.

And in other ways, that it's repressing the people of the Soviet Union and spying on its own people.

And I think this transforms his character, but over a period of years.

I mean, really years.

It's not a quick, instant thing.

How long is he in the archives for?

In the end?

Decades.

So effectively from 1956 to 1984.

So, I mean, decades.

I mean, most of his life.

And it's interesting because he's a very introverted character.

That makes sense.

All those years.

Even if you're not naturally an introvert, I suppose all the years with the paper is going to make you one.

And being seen quite dismissively, I think, by the other KGB officers.

But in his own mind, of course, he becomes the hero of his own story, as all spies do.

And he particularly sees himself, in, I think, semi-mystical terms as like a peasant hero from Russian folk stories.

And he actually develops this

quite spiritual, mythical idea that he is actually fighting a beast.

And he actually visualizes what he's fighting and his enemy as a beast, a kind of dragon or a hydra with three heads, which are the Communist Party, the elite, the nomenklatura of the Soviet Union, and finally, most importantly, the KGB and its spies.

And he sees this beast as effectively feeding off the nation of Russia and destroying it.

And he starts to see his own mission as being the hero from the folk stories who is going to try and slay this beast.

So you can see these kind of quite odd ideas are swirling around in his brain, which I guess is, I mean, to be a spy or to get involved in this kind of work, to do the kind of things he's doing, you've got to be perhaps slightly odd.

Yeah, I think you're not.

The psychology is off with most people who eventually volunteer.

I also will note for listeners at the pod that we have yet another example of Gordon Carrera's affinity for a sun-deprived committer of espionage, right?

So there's a theme there.

There is very much a theme here because I do not picture Matrokin as having a nice tan.

I picture him as being quite pasty.

So he's working in the archives for the KGB's first chief directorate.

And I always think of the first chief directorate as being out in Yasenevo and kind of the woods outside Moscow, which is eventually where the SVR has its headquarters.

But of course, that wasn't always the case.

And so in the early 70s, this kind of real estate move, I guess, creates another opportunity for him.

That's right.

So until 1972, the first chief directorate has been in the Lubyanka with the rest of the KGB in the center of Moscow in this quite famous building.

And that's where Matrokin has been working, literally in the basement.

In the basement.

In the Lubyanka.

In the basement, which is where the prison cells used to be as well.

So it's not a particularly nice place.

It's a kind of dark place.

But now in 1972, as you said, they're moving to this place, Yasenevo, which is known as the forest or the woods, and they're going to have to move their files.

And so at this point, Matrokin is one of those few archivists responsible for overseeing the move of the files.

So his job is going to be to weed them effectively, to go, these ones can be destroyed, these ones we need to keep, these ones we'll seal up and we'll move.

And at this point, that gives him the opportunity to forge the weapon in his mind which he's going to use to fight this beast and the weapon is going to be the truth that's in the files and so he starts and he's got his own office at this point to copy what he sees i mean at first he actually tries to memorize it and then write it down when he goes home then he starts to copy it on tiny pieces of paper which he will fold up and place in his shoe and then walk out of the offices of both headquarters, but the Libyancare at first, with those details of the files on them, which he will then reconstitute in his home and in his dacha, his weekend kind of country house or cottage, because he's written them in kind of in his own special code to try and minimise the amount of space, kind of like shorthand.

He will then reconstitute them into documents and into the story of the KGB.

And it's amazing because he's got access to the files of the first chief directorate, which are things like the instructions going from Moscow Center out to the residencies, the places in the embassies where the the spies are based.

It's got the details of agents, cultivation of agents, some of the production files of the reports that agents are sending back.

And in later years, when they move Directorate S, which is in charge of the deep cover illegal spies, those are the kind of spies who assume different identities and different nationalities.

They're the most secret identities the KGB has.

He will also be in charge of moving those files and be able to note down details about those agents.

So these are effectively the deepest secrets.

Does he have their true names or did he have enough to kind of identify them?

He has true names.

In some cases, he can remember and he writes down the passport numbers, the false names, the true names, the code names.

There are still some files which are kept from him, which are some of the most sensitive files, but almost everything he can see.

And he does this for 12 years, effectively.

12 years of copying files down by day and then writing them up by night and weekend.

I mean, it's kind of intense, isn't it?

It's kind of crazy.

I think it is crazy.

And I guess the other wild thing is he's not being run as an asset or an agent in this period.

He is doing this in his spare time as part of a plan that I would imagine cannot be

even close to fully worked out in his own mind for what he does with this eventually, right?

I mean, he's just kind of stashing it away as he works.

That's one of the things I find extraordinary.

It's not as if he had any idea what he was going to do with it.

I mean, he was doing what Russian or Soviet writers would talk about, which was writing for the draw, which meant you wrote knowing something might not be able to be published now, but in the hope that one day it could be published.

And that's a kind of Russian tradition.

And you see it with dissident writers, you see it with Bulgarkov, who was, you know, wrote The Master of Margarita and kind of wrote it secretly, and then eventually it comes out.

So there is a tradition, I think, in Russia of doing this, of writing secretly.

But you're right, he doesn't see himself so much as

a spy, as a kind of secret dissident in parallel to those other dissidents in the Soviet Union at the time.

No plan to get the stuff out.

He also, and this is going to become important, he doesn't tell his family what he's doing.

So he has a wife, Nina, and she is actually quite an eminent doctor.

She's an academic expert.

She lectures.

She even lectures abroad.

She treats at various times some of the central committee of the Communist Party.

So she's quite a senior figure in her own right, and she's much more extroverted and outgoing and sociable than her husband.

And they have a son, Vladimir.

And Vladimir is important to this story.

He's born in 1953, but it soon becomes clear that he has a muscle-wasting disease, which they struggle to diagnose and to treat.

And he will end up in a wheelchair as a young man.

And I think actually a lot of what Mitrokin will do and will drive him will be driven by his son as well as that ideology and grievance and

the desire i think partly to get treatment for him and to help him and i think that's that's something which he doesn't always openly acknowledge later but i think is definitely one of the the motivations for him the archive is an asset that he can

maybe a call option down the road on medicine or treatment outside of the soviet union or russia for for vladimir they're both desperate to try and get treatment for their son at one point nina actually takes the son to and they both go to china to look for alternative treatments treatments.

This is during the Cold War.

It's quite unusual to have that ability to travel.

And it's part of a desperate desire to help him, really.

But Matrochind is doing this.

He's working on the files.

He eventually retires in 1984, but he's still sitting on the files.

And he's thinking at this point about possible ways of getting them out.

But he's quite scared.

He's quite unsure about how to do that and where to take them where he won't get caught.

Because also, by the now, he's written them up.

And it's not, if you think about Snowden, Edward Snowden could put these things on floppy disks or on USB drives.

But here, we're talking about piles of manuscripts that he's written up.

You can't carry that out by yourself very easily either.

How much physical space did they require?

The whole archive would be a, I guess, a large table's worth, but more than you can carry in a suitcase.

Thousands of pages.

Yeah, hard to move in a clandestine way.

I mean, do you get the sense that he was waiting for political change before he did something?

Because, I mean, I guess the timing to me seems to be retires in 84.

He's done this for 12 years at that point.

He's copying this archive, and then he sits for another

eight.

Is he waiting for a political opportunity?

What's driving that period of time, do you think?

I think he is looking for an opportunity.

There are moments where he goes close to borders or looks at possible ways of crossing borders, but he's always too nervous about doing it because I think he fears getting caught.

He knows the consequences for him will be terrible.

And he knows that if he's caught, the archive will be captured and then everything will have been for nothing.

So I think there is a bit of nervousness.

And that is until the Soviet Union collapses.

And at that point,

1991, the Soviet Union is effectively gone.

And the Baltic states, so Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, have become independent.

Border controls have also weakened.

And so at that point, he realizes he can get across to a Baltic state, a newly independent Baltic state, where there are, he hopes, an American embassy, but he's going to find a British embassy with a bag, with, if you like, a sample, like a kind of traveling salesman.

He's got a sample in his bag, which he can show to them and try and convince them that he's got the real deal and the secret.

So as a result, by April 1992, he's finally sitting there with these two MI6 officers.

And it's interesting because he makes clear he is willing to hand over his entire archive.

But there are two things he wants, two guarantees he's clear about.

First, he wants to get his whole family out,

all of them, although they so far, he says, know nothing about what he's done.

So you can see there's a slight tension there.

What did his wife think he was doing when he was copying the documents?

Because I would imagine, I'm just imagining now if I was sitting in my office here, like just sort of endlessly on the weekends writing longhand that at some point someone's going to ask a question my sons my wife like what are you doing he must have had an alibi i think he was just so solitary and introverted that he really

he really got away with it i mean he was just in his study again kind of reading or writing and no one dad's in the study again yeah exactly

um but they don't know but it is interesting it's clearly very important to him that they get out and that the whole family get out and that is a a condition that mi6 will have to get his family out.

The second condition he has though is also very interesting because unusually, I think, for a spy, he says he wants his archive to be made public.

He wants it to be published.

Now that is unusual.

That is unusual.

The family bits not necessarily, but this one is.

I mean, coming out and saying, I want all of the secret stuff to be in print.

It's maybe not

the natural response of the committer of espionage.

Because most would either want no one to ever know what they've done, or they know it's going to be kind of technical secrets.

And I think it goes back to that idea of what he thought he was, which was this secret dissident who'd been writing for the draw, who'd been writing in the hope that one day the truth would get out.

He wants his work published.

He wants his work published, like any author.

Like any author.

But I think it goes back to that slightly spiritual sense he has, the mystical sense, in which he views his archive actually as a weapon.

It is the truth.

And the truth is a weapon because it can pierce the kind of armor armor of lies that the KGB and the Soviet Union has built up about what's happened and destroy this beast which he has seen in his mind.

And so it's very important to him that it's going to be published.

He didn't ask for money, by the way?

No.

No.

Wow.

Definitely.

No interest in money.

So absolutely kind of ideologically and personally motivated in that sense.

So those are the two conditions.

They're sitting there in April, Robert and James with him, and they message back to MI6 headquarters at Century House looking for instructions.

You know, they say this guy looks good.

Can we give him these guarantees for this?

And I love it because they get an answer back from MI6 saying it will probably be a fine.

It'll probably be okay, which is, which is maybe,

maybe, maybe, maybe not.

And like I think any good spy, they kind of edge the truth slightly when they go back and talk to Matrokin that day after a few hours gap and basically tell him it's on.

They forget the problem.

It's solid.

It's solid.

We've got the publishing deal in hand right now.

Yeah, it's all good.

So now the question for MI6 is: you know, how do you get a man, his files, and his family out of the country from under the watching eyes of Russian intelligence?

And that is what's going to cause some of the headaches and the showdown at the docks in Lithuania in November.

And so maybe there, Gordon, on that wonderfully Kararan cliffhanger.

And when we come back next time for the thrilling conclusion of the Vasily Matrokin story, we'll see exactly how MI6 does it, how they get him and his archive out.

But we should note, Gordon, of course, that members of our declassified club can get early access to that episode right now.

All you have to do is go to the restisclassified.com, become a member of the club, and start listening right now.

We might get a sudden spike in membership applications from Moscow, from former KGB.

KGBs, Dangles and Watkins from the FSB.

That's right.

Well, how did the breasts do welcome?

Have to know now.

All are welcome, really?

All are welcome.

KGB or SBLBA.

Okay,

we'll see you next time.

We'll see you next time.