The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the the Third World

Basic Books, 2005. 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.

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.

The Baltic, 1992: A shabbily dressed old man enters a British embassy with a sheaf of topsecret documents hidden at the bottom of his battered suitcase. Ex-KGB worker Vasili Mitrokhin was about to reveal the most sensational intelligence archive the world had seen. The World Was Going Our Way reveals in full the secrets of this astonishing cache, showing for the first time the extent of the KGB's influence around the world, from making friends with Fidel Castro in Cuba to starting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. For over twenty years, the KGB believed that the Third World was the arena in which it could win the Cold War against the West. Telling untold stories of conspiracies combined with bizarre black comedy on a global scale, this expose of the world's most powerful secret organization transforms our understanding of the Cold War. Presents a history of KGB Cold War operations in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America, documenting attempts by the Soviet intelligence service to discredit the United States and foster anti-Americanism in those regions After his defection, Mitrokhin teamed up with Christopher Andrew, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge and the world's leading intelligence scholar. Communism, claimed Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, would change not simply the history of Europe and the West but the history of the world.