Sean Brennan, "The KGB and the Vatican: Secrets of the Mitrokhin Files"

Vasili Mitrokhin was an agent and later an archivist of the Soviet secret police, the KGB. From 1974 to 1982, while supervising the transfer of tens of thousands of KGB records to its new facility outside of Moscow, Mitrokhin copied and transcribed a substantial amount of them and hid them in his home. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Mitrokhin, his family, and his archive were repatriated to the United Kingdom where they continue to provide a crucially importance primary source for understanding Soviet intelligence activities. This presentation will concern the material from Mitrokhin's archive concerning KGB activities towards both the Vatican and the Catholic Church in Soviet territory during the late Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Among the most important subjects were KGB attempts discredit the Vatican in Europe, Africa, and Latin America, activities designed to infiltrate and weaken clerical emigre organizations, to conduct espionage in the…