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The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for The Third World, Vol. 2
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About The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB And The Battle
Product Description In 1992 the British Secret Intelligence Service exfiltrated from Russia a defector whose presence in the West remained a secret until the publication of The Sword and the Shield in 1999. That man was Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB's most senior archivist. Unknown to his superiors, Mitrokhin had spent over a decade making notes and transcripts of highly classified files which, at enormous personal risk, he smuggled out of the KGB archives. The FBI described the archive as "the greatest single cache of intelligence every received by the West." In The Sword and the Shield , Christopher Andrew revealed the secrets of the KGB's operations in the United States and Europe; now in The World Was Going Our Way , he has written the first comprehensive account of the KGB and its operations throughout the Third World. Our understanding of the contemporary world remains incomplete without taking into account the vast impact of the KGB in developing nations: Andrew reveals the names of political leaders on the KGB payroll as well as the KGB's successful penetration of numerous foreign governments. He also points to the many absurdities of KGB operations-such as agents attempting to assess the spread of influence of rival Chinese communism by visiting African capitals and counting the number of posters of Mao Tse Tung. For decades the KGB believed that the world was going their way-and Americans at the highest reaches of government lived in fear that they were losing the Cold War in the Third World. This extraordinary book will transform our understanding of the history of the twentieth century. From Publishers Weekly This second volume of the post-war history of the KGB-based on the "Mitrokhin Archive" of secret documents purloined by the late co-author, a KGB dissident-surveys the Soviet spy agency's skullduggery in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Historian Andrew portrays Russian policy toward the Third World as largely the creation of the KGB, which hoped that the spread of Soviet influence and revolutionary upheavals would make these regions the decisive Cold War battleground. The Cuban Revolution inspired these ambitions, and by 1980, after the American defeat in Vietnam and with leftist regimes installed in Nicaragua and Grenada, Cuban troops fighting in Africa and Russian forces occupying Afghanistan, both American and Soviet officials saw communism on the march. Still, in Andrew's account, Soviet initiatives-with a few exceptions, like the Afghanistan intervention-seem cautious, reactive and uncomfortably dependent on fickle client regimes; wary of confronting the United States, Russia often exerted a restraining influence on local allies. Andrew's engaging, occasionally gossipy narrative provides new evidence of Soviet sponsorship of Latin American insurgencies and Palestinian terrorists, along with details of KGB spycraft and dirty tricks. The world-wide communist conspiracy he depicts was far from a juggernaut, but he sheds new light on the hidden history of the Cold War. Photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the Author Christopher Andrew is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Cambridge University. In addition to The Sword and the Shield , his previous books include Her Majesty's Secret Service , KGB , and For the President's Eyes Only . He lives in Cambridge, England. From The Washington Post Yes, Virginia, there really was a KGB, nasty and brutish and also pretty dumb much of the time. So we are reminded by this second volume produced by Christopher Andrew, a Cambridge University historian, from a juicy cache of KGB documents copied and spirited out of Russia by Vasili Mitrokhin. He was a bureaucrat in the old Soviet intelligence agency who got the last laugh on his old bosses by stealing many of their best secrets. The first volume, The Sword and the Shield, used the Mitrokhin documents to show the extent of Soviet
