Christopher Andrew > Quotes

“The Sukhomlinov effect’: the principle that there is an inverse correlation between the attention a general pays to his uniforms and his military skill.”
― Christopher Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence

“The Legislative Assembly’s decision in April 1792 to declare war on Austria did even more than religious conflict to radicalize the Revolution. The combination of foreign war and internal conflict turned France into the world’s first police state, committed to the surveillance and repression of all opposition. Pressure for its creation came less from revolutionary leaders than from popular hysteria in Paris, whipped up by conspiracy theories of a secret alliance between enemies abroad and counter-revolutionary traitors at home. Many believed that Louis XVI and the Austrian-born Marie-Antoinette were part of an aristocratic plot to join forces with the invading Austrian army and its Prussian allies”
― Christopher M. Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence

“The chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov (later Soviet leader), told a KGB conference in 1979: ‘We simply do not have the right to permit the smallest miscalculation here, for in the political sphere any kind of ideological sabotage is directly or indirectly intended to create an opposition to our system . . .”
― Christopher M. Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence

“We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: ‘To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession?’ And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror.”
― Christopher M. Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence

“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 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

“The Cheka’s early priorities were overwhelmingly domestic. It was, said Dzerzhinsky, ‘an organ for the revolutionary settlement of accounts with counter-revolutionaries’, a label increasingly applied to all the Bolsheviks’ opponents and ‘class enemies’.”
― Christopher M. Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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