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Prosecutors try to show that a KGB defector's notes on spies for Russia includes a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel.
By DONG-PHUONG NGUYEN
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 19, 2001
Vasili Mitrokhin was a KGB archivist who squirreled away secret notes about the agency's spies and their activities during the Cold War. Listed among the KBG's most valuable contributors was a high ranking U.S. military officer who shuttled material to the KGB through a clergyman in the Russian Orthodox church.
On Monday, federal prosecutors tried to show a jury that the spy in the archivist's notes was the retired Army Reserve colonel sitting in front of them, now on trial for spying for the Russians for 25 years.
That colonel, George Trofimoff, is the highest ranking U.S. military officer ever charged with espionage.
A British intelligence officer who translated Mitrokhin's notes after he defected to Great Britain testified about the spy known by the KGB aliases of "Markiz," "Konsul" and "Antey" -- whose documents made it up to the Russian prime minister and Ministry of Defense.
The officer, addressed as John Doe in court, said the spy not only provided more than 80 volumes of top secret documents but also had seven volumes on himself in the KGB archives. One volume is made up of about 400 pages.
"The more volume an agent has, the busier he's been," the British intelligence officer said.
Numerous notations indicated that "Markiz" was an official member of the 66th group of American military intelligence and recruited by a clergyman.
Trofimoff, 74, was a member of the Army's 66th Military Intelligence Brigade, serving as the civilian chief of the Army's operations at the Joint Interrogation Center in Nuremberg, Germany.
Previously, the jury was shown six hours of secretly videotaped conversations between Trofimoff and an undercover FBI agent in which Trofimoff detailed 25 years of spying for the Russians with the help of Igor Vladimirovich Susemihl, a childhood friend who served as the equivalent of a cardinal in the Russian Orthodox church.
Trofimoff's name was never mentioned in the volumes of notes extracted by Mitrokhin or during testimony Monday. As a KGB archivist, Mitrokhin handled all of the documents relating to the spies, including details of their meeting places and payments.
Beginning in 1972, Mitrokhin began secretly copying the files by hand, selecting significant nuggets and noting them on scraps of paper. He would fold the pages as tightly as he could and hide them in his shoe. As the years passed and his fear of getting caught subsided, he would leave his office with them hidden in his pockets, in envelopes or in newspapers. Mitrokhin, now in his 80s and living in Great Britain, continued this practice for 12 years, compiling booklets of notes. He typed them up and stored the handwritten pages in jars in his country cottage.
When he defected to Great Britain in 1992, he transcribed the notes into English with help from the British intelligence officer who testified yesterday. In 1999, Mitrokhin published a book titled, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB.
The trial is now in its third week. A former member of the KGB, Oleg Kalugin, is expected to take the stand today. The ex-KGB spymaster wrote a book about an operative whose work closely matches accusations against Trofimoff.