The Mitrokhin Archive II : The KGB and the World
Review By Amir Taheri

The young girl is beautiful, and the Shah, receiving Iranian students during a visit to Paris, cannot but notice her. The man who heads the office for Iranian students abroad pushes the girl forward, and sings her praises to pin the Shah down in front of her.

Love at first sight? Perhaps , perhaps not. But a few months later the student girl with a charming smile marries the Shah, in a One Thousand and One Night ceremony, to become Empress Farah Pahlavi.

What neither the Shah nor Farah knew at the time, however, was that their “chance encounter” had been carefully planned by the Soviet secret service, the KGB, through one of their “assets”, an Iranian diplomat named Jahangir Tafazoli, who headed the Iranian students’ office at the time.

The always fascinating Amir Taheri provides an exceptional review of The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World [Not yet available through Amazon.com in the US, but it is at Amazon.co.uk, in the UK.]

This book, a follow-up to the earlier The Mitrokhin Archive : The KGB in Europe and the West , goes through the files of the Soviet KGB to see how it influenced politics in the Third World. Taheri, of course, focuses on the Middle East in his review.

Among the more blockbusting documents are those that cite Yasser Arafat as directly ordering the attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich and a tolling of the names of people on the payroll of the KGB–including others in the Palestinian movement, the Syrian government, and in Yemen. Of the book, he says:

Its real value lies in two facts.

The first is that the documents show that by the mid- 1970s the USSR had won the part of the Cold War waged in the “developing world.” Of the Arab countries only Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Morocco had managed to remain “clean” of KGB penetration at the highest levels. Pro-Soviet regimes were in power in all but nine of the 77 countries of the “nonaligned movement.”

And, yet, the Soviet leadership was at a loss as what to do with its victory, especially in the wake of the United States humiliating retreat from Vietnam in 1975.

The tide began to turn against the Soviets thanks to one man: Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat who decided to switch to the American camp at a time that the Soviet side seemed to be winning. Sadat’s switch triggered a movement that didn’t stop, even when his closest regional ally, the Shah, was overthrown by a coalition of Islamists and KGB-financed Communists.

It will be very interesting to see which countries find it convenient to censor or ban this book. Do read the review, at least!