Defectors are like grapes, observed that wily old spook Sir Maurice Oldfield. "The first pressings from them are the best . . . the third and fourth lack body."
Vasili Mitrokhin worked for almost 30 years for the KGB in and around Moscow, much of the time looking after its archives. To provide a little insurance for his old age, he took to smuggling out highly-classified documents, copies of which he hid under his dacha floor, we are told. When the time was ripe he contacted MI6 and he, his family and his personal archives were "exfiltrated" (the book is coy on the details) to be debriefed, later to meet his co-author Dr Christopher Andrew.
This complex and scholarly book revealed the identity of the "spy who came in from the garden", a little old lady living in retirement in leafy suburbia. Melita Norwood had been for 40 years a secretary at an innocuous-sounding quango, the British Non-ferrous Metals Research Association. But by conviction she was a communist, and her job gave her access to her boss's safe, which contained important documents relating to the project to build Britain's first atomic bomb, copies of which she passed on to her KGB bosses. In the Andrew/Mitrokhin version she was "the most important British female spy in KGB history". However, her local constabulary in the Home Counties have taken a more considered view and decided not to prosecute this Mata Hari of the potted plants.
Irish readers will focus on a letter in the stolen files from Michael O'Riordan, general secretary of the Irish Communist Party. On November 6th, 1969, just after Northern Ireland had begun a fresh round of agonies, Comrade O'Riordan forwarded a request to Comrade Andropov in Moscow. He was seeking assistance for the IRA, then led by Cathal Goulding and Seamus Costello. The book has him writing to Moscow in these terms (note the somewhat patronising tone towards a less-experienced branch of the revolution):
"There has always existed more or less good relations between the IRA and the Irish communists. We not only conduct a number of public and anti-imperialist activities together, but for more than a year, a secret mechanism for consultation between the leadership of the IRA and the joint council of the Irish Workers' Party has existed and is operating. They unfailingly accept our advice with regard to tactical methods used in the joint struggle for civil rights and national independence for Ireland." And if that much unity ever existed on the revolutionary left in Ireland, I am Queen Marie of Romania. However, Yuri Andropov, then KGB boss who later succeeded Brezhnev as Soviet leader, looked for guarantees of secrecy if he was to send help to Ireland. O'Riordan argued that when seven people were killed in Belfast in August 1969, 750 were injured and almost 1,500 forced out of their homes, the IRA was powerless to do much for them, because "it had previously concentrated its efforts on social protest and educational activity."
TWO and a half years later, arms arrived from the Soviet Union. By then the IRA had split. The Officials, led by the more left-leaning Goulding and the more traditionally nationalist Provisionals, were at loggerheads. Eventually in August or September 1972, the first cargo of machine guns, automatic rifles, pistols and ammunition was dropped on a sandbank off the coast of Northern Ireland, where fishing friends of the Official IRA picked up the waterproof containers and took them ashore.
Late in 1974, Costello and Goulding fell out, and Costello started the rival Irish Republican Socialist Party, beginning a bloody turf-war between the republican revolutionary factions, which led to Costello being murdered.
Andrew speculates that Costello may have been shot with a gun from the batch sent by the KGB to fight the forces of imperialism. Perhaps not. There were plenty of guns around. I encountered Costello very briefly in the Irish Times office in Dublin in 1970 or 1971 when he called to complain about something written about him. A senior colleague, the late Bruce Williamson, observed wearily: "I suppose we had better do something for him. The man is positively clanking with guns."
Sean Bourke, the Limerick man who helped get double agent George Blake out of Wormwood Scrubs prison in London in 1966, makes a brief appearance. Blake and Bourke fled to Moscow, but subsequently Bourke decided to go home. We are told - as a matter of fact - that the KGB gave Bourke a drug designed to cause brain damage before letting him go, lest he might fall into the hands of British intelligence and tell all.
The trouble with this theory is that on his return Bourke wrote some fine essays which his friend Jim Kemmy published in the Limerick Journal. These were not the work of a brain-damaged person; the "demon drink" remains the most likely cause of Bourke's premature demise on the day in February 1982 when Jim Kemmy was bringing down Garret FitzGerald's government over John Bruton's tax on children's shoes.
Dr Andrew, professor of history at Cambridge University, has a formidable reputation as a writer on espionage. It is sometimes said that many KGB operatives were dissuaded from defecting by the prospect of the inevitable collaboration with Christopher Andrew on a Very Large Book.
Be that as it may, there are some irritants to the reader who may be familiar with one or another aspect of this complex canvas which covers a very large part of Russia's role in the history of the 20th century, from Lenin to Yeltsin.
Sometimes, the account in the stolen file is taken too literally. It may be true that the KGB had great hopes of Harold Wilson giving an important ministry to Tom Driberg in 1964 or 1966. If that was ever likely, I am not just Queen Marie but the entire Romanian royal family. Driberg's sexual tastes (rough trade with men in public lavatories) were notorious in London in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a prime target for blackmail, and could never be appointed to a sensitive job. Wilson knew that. And I don't believe Driberg was a KGB double agent, though he was mischievous and quite capable of letting the KGB think he was.
There are two further volumes to come from the Andrew/Mitrokhin collaboration. Let us hope they remember Sir Maurice's strictures on repeated visits to the winepress.
Kieran Fagan is an Irish Times journalist