Hello, Moscow.

Hello, true spies listeners.

Welcome back to True Spies, debrief.

Journalist Gordon Carrera is a seasoned writer and reporter on politics, intelligence, and security matters on both sides of the Atlantic.

His latest book, The Spy in the Archive, spans over a hundred years of history and weaves together some of the most intriguing tales of Cold War espionage.

The common thread?

KGB librarian Vasily Mitrochin.

This week, Gordon joins True Spies producer Morgan Childs to discuss Mitrochin's extraordinary life

and the continued relevance of the warning bells he rang for his

fellow Russians and for the West.

Thank you, Gordon. I have to say, I was quite moved by your book, in part because its scope

is so vast, and also because its relevance today is sort of disturbingly immediate.

So I'm glad to have you.

Your book is about someone that a lot of true spies listeners have heard about.

But for anyone who might not remember or who hasn't got their hands on the book yet,

who was Vasily Matroken?

Well, he was an archivist, a quiet, introverted, obsessive archivist, but an archivist, or a librarian,

if you like, for the KGB, for the Soviet Union's secret police. And I think that made him an

extraordinary figure, actually, in intelligence history. This quiet, slightly unusual, occasionally eccentric man,

actually ended up revealing more of the secrets of the Soviet Union and its spy service than anyone else.

And for that reason, I think he deserves a real place in espionage history.

And his story, I think, is an incredibly rich one because it's a story

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