Disclosures from The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, based on a secret archive of top-KGB documents smuggled out of the Soviet Union, are sure to make the front pages of newspapers throughout the West. According to the FBI, this archive is "the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source." Its presence in the West represents a catastrophic hemorrhage of the KGB's secrets and reveals for the first time the full extent of its worldwide network.

Vasili Mitrokhin, a secret dissident, working in the KGB archive smuggled out copies of its most highly classified files every day for twelve years. In 1992, a U.S. ally succeeded in exfiltrating the KGB officer and his entire archive out of Moscow. The archive covers the entire period from the Bolshevik Revolution to the 1980s and includes revelations concerning almost every country in the world. But the KGB's main target, of course, was the United States.

Throughout the 700 pages of The Sword and the Shield, there are revelations of interest to journalists covering U.S. and international intelligence, history, and human interest regarding the following subjects:

-KGB's covert operations in the United States and throughout the West, some of which remain dangerous today.

-KGB files on Oswald and the JFK assassination that Boris Yeltsin almost certainly has no intention of showing President Clinton.

-KGB's attempts to discredit civil rights leaders in the 1960s, including its infiltration of the inner circle of a key leader.

-KGB's use of radio intercept posts in New York and Washington D.C. in the 1970s to intercept high level U.S. government communications.

-KGB's attempts to steal technological secrets from major U.S. aerospace and technology corporations. Their success seems to have inspired Chinese intelligence to do likewise.

-KGB covert operations against former President Ronald Reagan, which began five years before he became president.

-KGB spies who successfully posed as U.S. citizens under a series of ingenious disguises, including several who attained access to the upper echelons of New York society.

The Sword and the Shield is a work of great historical significance, which will fundamentally alter our understanding of Soviet history and modern international relations. For Russia's post-Soviet intelligence service, SVR, the publication of this book poses a real problem. No one who spied for Russia between 1917 and the final years of the Cold War can be sure anymore that his or her secrets are secure.