The Spy in the Archive

REVIEWS FOR THE SPY IN THE ARCHIVE:

‘The overdue and often striking memorial to Vasili Mitrokhin’ Sunday Times

‘An intriguing new biography’ Daily Telegraph

‘Corera’s fluent narrative draws on many sources … a dramatic story well told’ Spectator

‘Enthralling … it is a study of why Mitrokhin began this unprecedented plunder of top-secret material and how he got away with it. Although Corera never met Mitrokhin or his family, his intuition and the secondary sources give us a convincing picture’ Literary Review

‘Provides important context to Mitrokhin’s story and contains many fascinating details. Corera’s book, though acknowledging that some details of the story will never be known, makes an important contribution not just to understanding Mitrokhin, but to understanding 21st-century Russia, too’ Engelsberg Ideas

REVIEWS FOR RUSSIANS AMONG US:

‘This [is a] superb study of the illegals system … In the West it was erroneously assumed that the illegals programme ended with the Cold War, but as Corera proves it was ramped up and modernised by Putin for the 21st century … Alexander Poteyev was a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan who rose to become deputy head of Directorate S. His story, told here for the first time, is an extraordinary one… Corera tells this astonishing tale with deft authority, placing it in the wider context of Russian intelligence strategy. Few are better versed in the intricacies of the continuing spy war between East and West’ Ben Macintyre, The Times

‘Extremely readable … A lively and disturbing account of the extraordinary events that led to, and the terrible ones that followed, the Vienna spy swap in 2010, an episode perhaps best remembered in the West for Anna Chapman, the strikingly beautiful socialite who turned out to be a Russian spy’ Daily Telegraph

Gordon Corera was BBC security correspondent for over twenty years covering intelligence, terrorism and security issues before leaving to launch The Rest is Classified podcast, which he writes and hosts with David McCloskey.

He is the author of:

• Russians Among Us: Sleeper Cells, Ghost Stories and the Hunt for Putin’s Agents
• Secret Pigeon Service: Operation Columba, Resistance and the Struggle to Liberate Europe
• Intercept: The Secret History of Computers and Spies (entitled Cyberspies in the US)
• MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service (also entitled The Art of Betrayal)
• Shopping for Bombs

He was educated at Oxford and Harvard universities, and lives in London.