Based on unprecedented access to a secret archive of intelligence, The Sword and the Shield presents by far the most complete picture we have ever had of the KGB and its operations in the United States and Europe, revealing for the first time the full extent of its worldwide network.

Vasili Mitrokhin worked for almost thirty years in the foreign intelligence archives of the KGB. Mitrokhin spent over a decade making notes and transcripts of these highly classified files which, at enormous personal risk, he smuggled daily out of the archives and kept beneath his dacha floor. Now he has offered Christopher Andrew exclusive access to his archive. The picture that emerges in this sobering book will force us to acknowledge that there was indeed an enemy—and that he was very much in our midst.