Life and Death in the KGB, with The Rest is Classified’s Gordon Corera (Part One)

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**Mia Zarenti** (0:58)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Where Great Minds Meet. I'm producer Mia Zarenti. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with co-host of The Rest is classified and former security correspondent for BBC News, Gordon Corera. Corera joins Sean Walker at Conway Hall to discuss Life and Death in the KGB.
As the main intelligence and security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1991, the KGB instilled fear across Russia and saw to sow discord abroad. This network of government spies was notorious for the often brutal methods it used to keep enemies, loyalists and common people under the thumb of the state. And far from fading as the USSR old guard fell from power, the operatives, methods and networks of the KGB remain at the heart of the Russian state today.
Putin himself was a KGB officer for 16 years, including six years as a foreign intelligence officer stationed in Dresden, East Germany. Drawing on the stories of spies, defectors and dissidents, Corera explores how the Soviet Union's most feared intelligence agency operated, why its methods and networks continue to shape modern Russia. Let's join our host, Sean Walker, now live at Conway Hall.

**Sean Walker** (2:16)
Hi, everyone. Good evening, and welcome to this Intelligence Squared event.
I'm Sean Walker, and I'm delighted to be here tonight with Gordon Corera. Thank you all for coming. It's a fantastic turnout. Delighted to be here with Gordon. He's one of Britain's leading journalists on security and intelligence issues. You probably also know him as the co-host with David McCloskey of the Goalhanger podcast, The Rest is Classified.
Gordon's been writing about this stuff for years. He joined the BBC in 1997, and in 2004, he was made the security correspondent. And since then, he's been reporting from all over the world on terrorism, national security, and intelligence issues. He's the author of many books, and the most recent one, and the one that we're going to talk a bit about tonight, is called The Spy in the Archive. And it's about the KGB archivist Vasily Mitrokin, and how he bought thousands of pages of top secret KGB documents out of Russia when he defected to Britain.
And for me, I'm really excited to be talking about this. I am a correspondent for The Guardian. I was based in Russia for many years. And I wrote a book, which came out last year, about deep cover Russian spies. And for that book, I used many of the documents that Mitrokin had taken out from the archive. So I read all of the documents, but I didn't know much about the man. And it was so interesting to read your book and find out about Mitrokin. Gordon, I thought maybe to start with, you could just tell us a bit about what drew you to this character and this story. When did you find out about it? What made you want to write the story of Mitrokin?

**Gordon Corera** (4:14)
Yep, thank you. And first of all, thank you all very much for being here on a very hot evening. Very welcome. Thank you also to Sean. One thing Sean didn't mention is that today, this morning, we both found out we'd been shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award, which is called The Golden Dagger. And so, both of our books, so we're now bitter rivals, I suddenly realized. And hopefully, I was thinking, Sean is not going to produce a dagger and kind of try and stymie his rival, but no, it's going to be a very friendly conversation, I hope, Sean. So, but we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see how it goes.