The Sword and the Shield Quotes

“Even at a time when the Soviet regime was fighting for its survival during the civil war, many of its own supporters were sickened by the scale of the Cheka's brutality.

A number of Cheka interrogators, some only in their teens, 3 employed tortures of scarcely believable barbarity. In Kharkhov the skin was peeled off victims' hands to produce "gloves" of human skin; in Voronezh naked prisoners were rolled around in barrels studded with nails; in Poltava priests were impaled; in Odessa, captured White officers were tied to planks and fed slowly into furnaces; in Kiev cages of rats were fixed to prisoners' bodies and heated until the rats gnawed their way into the victims' intestines.”
― Christopher Andrew, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

“Until The Mitrokhin Archive went to the publishers, who also successfully avoided leaks, the secret was known, outside the intelligence community, only to a small number of senior ministers and civil servants.”
― Christopher Andrew, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

“Then we walked along the Backs through King’s and Clare colleges to visit Trinity and Trinity Hall, the colleges of the KGB’s best-known British recruits, the “Magnificent Five,” some of whose files Mitrokhin had noted.2”
― Christopher Andrew, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

“It was clear that Mitrokhin had had access to even the most highly classified KGB files – among them those which gave the real identities and “legends” of the Soviet “illegals” living under deep cover abroad disguised as foreign nationals.1”
― Christopher Andrew, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

“Early in 1996 Mitrokhin and his family paid their first visit to Cambridge University, where I am Professor of Modern and Contemporary History.”
― Christopher Andrew, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

“Mitrokhin’s staggering feat in noting KGB files almost every working day for a period of twelve years and smuggling his notes out of its foreign intelligence headquarters at enormous personal risk is probably unique in intelligence history.”
― Christopher Andrew, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

“SIS told me how in 1992 it had exfiltrated from Russia a retired senior KGB archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin, his family and six large cases of top-secret material from the KGB’s foreign intelligence archive.”
― Christopher Andrew, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

“On October 17, 1995, I was invited to the post-modern London headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service (better known as SIS or MI6) at Vauxhall Cross on the banks of the Thames to be briefed on one of the most remarkable intelligence coups of the late twentieth century.”
― Christopher Andrew, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

“made worse during the 1930s by Stalin’s increasing tendency to act as his own intelligence analyst. Stalin, indeed, actively discouraged intelligence analysis by others, which he condemned as “dangerous guesswork.”
― Christopher M. Andrew, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

“On June 28 Cominform (the post-war successor to Comintern) expelled the Yugoslavs and appealed to "healthy elements" in the Party to overthrow the leadership.

Tito's flattering secret codename OREL ("Eagle") was hurridly downgraded to STERVYATNIK ("Carrion Crow").”
― Christopher M. Andrew, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB