In 1992 the British Secret Intelligence Service exfiltrated from Russia a defector whose presence in the West remained a secret until the publication ofThe 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." InThe Sword and the Shield , Christopher Andrew revealed the secrets of the KGB's operations in the United States and Europe; now inThe 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. About the Author Christopher Andrew is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Cambridge University. In addition toThe Sword and the Shield , his previous books includeHer Majesty's Secret Service ,KGB , andFor the President's Eyes Only . He lives in Cambridge, England. From The Washington Post Yes, Virginia, there really was a KGB, nasty and brutish and also pretty dumb much of the time. So we are reminded by this second volume produced by Christopher Andrew, a Cambridge University historian, from a juicy cache of KGB documents copied and spirited out of Russia by Vasili Mitrokhin. He was a bureaucrat in the old Soviet intelligence agency who got the last laugh on his old bosses by stealing many of their best secrets. The first volume, The Sword and the Shield, used the Mitrokhin documents to show the extent of Soviet espionage in the Western world during the Cold War. It was chock-full of new information that tended to confirm the darkest Western worries about what Soviet spies were up to in the four decades after World War II. It sold tens of thousands of copies in Europe and America.The publishers of this book are hoping for a similar commercial success and are doing their best to hype their product. "Newly Revealed Secrets," the dust jacket promises. But while the information divulged here can be fascinating, it is far from earthshaking. The book may cause a stir in India by demonstrating just how thoroughly news organizations and politics were penetrated by the KGB in the Indira Gandhi era, but there are no startling surprises or sensations disclosed here.And frustratingly, the book adopts a KGB-centric view of Soviet foreign policy that implies that the cold warriors in Moscow had a triumphant sense that, as the title says, the world was going their way. Andrew, a serious scholar who provides extremely useful context for many of the anecdotes he recounts, falls short on the larger issue: the broad context in which the KGB and the CIA played their Cold War games in the Third World. Only at the end of his book does he acknowledge how badly things were going for the Soviets in the most important sense: Their entire system was failing, a process that began long before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and initiated the changes that, in just six years, unraveled the Soviet empire.In the y