KGB files smuggled out of Russia to Britain in 1992 by senior KGB official Vasily Mitrokhin have been opened to the public for the first time.
The documents released by the Churchill Archives Center at Cambridge University -- one of the biggest intelligence leaks in history -- describe sabotage plots, booby-trapped weapons caches, and armies of agents under cover in the West.
Mitrokhin was a senior archivist at the KGB's foreign intelligence headquarters. For more than a decade he secretly took files home, copied them in longhand, and then typed and collated them into volumes.
In 1992, Mitrokhin managed to escape to Britain with the files, where he spent the rest of his life until he died in 2004 at the age of 81.
The newly released papers include a list of KGB agents in America over several decades. It runs to 40 pages and about 1,000 names.
One of the pages from the Czechoslovakia files.
Mitrokhin's handwritten copy of the KGB First Chief Directorate Lexicon.
Based on reporting by AP and RIA Novosti