Instructions from the Centre: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations 1975-85

by Christopher Andrew, Oleg Gordievsky

This offers an insight into KGB operations at the dawn of the Gorbachev era, and into the thinking of its top leadership from 1975-1985.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Christopher Maurice Andrew, FRHistS is an Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Cambridge with an interest in international relations and in particular the history of intelligence services. (military.wikia.org)

Reviews

[Alexander Peterhans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting, and at the same time surprisingly dull. Actually, thinking about it, why did that surprise me? What did I expect from secret government files? The files are very, very bureaucratic in style, quite wordy and dry. Generally I skimmed them. But their actual content is very interesting. Lots of stuff on the national character of the British, how best to manipulate them. A same kind of rundown of the Chinese, who proved to be especially difficult to recruit.

It's also quite sobering to realise how badly informed the Centre (KGB HQ in Moscow, who sent out orders) was about the West. They had strange ideas about the functioning of capitalist states, and they saw anti-socialist conspiracies where there were none, reaching a fever pitch with operation RYAN. This is when the Centre was convinced the US was planning a first strike nuclear attack on Russia, and was feverishly trying to "read" the West - for example, if the police was secretly mobilising, this would be a sign, or if slaughterhouses were processing more meat would be another of the bizarre signs they were looking for.

(To be clear, there is a lot of supplemental text around the files, and that text is never dull.)

Some of the best bits are in the appendices, which detail how KGB files were archived and stored, and how Residencies would handle received files. That's some next level archiving and burning-after-reading. When a Residency would receive microfilm, the agent would watch and read it and make notes. After a couple of months the film and the notes would be destroyed and, this is my favourite part, a certificate of that destruction would be sent back to the Centre, I guess to be neatly archived into oblivion.

I'll leave you with this delicious detail:

"Early in 1990 the KGB opened a Public Relations Centre in Moscow. Later in the year it announced the election of the first Miss KGB, Katya Mayorova, who, according to a Soviet interviewer, wears a bullet-proof vest 'like a Pierre Cardin model' but is able to deliver a powerful karate kick 'to her enemy's head'."