Taylor Berghoff từ Çakırlar/Adana, Turkey

rolyato

05/17/2024

Dữ liệu người dùng, đánh giá và đề xuất cho sách

Taylor Berghoff Sách lại (11)

2019-05-31 01:31

Học Cách Sống Hòa Thuận - Tớ Đồng Cảm, Tớ Quan Tâm! (Song ngữ Anh-Việt) Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Cheri J. Meiners

Vasili Mitrokhin worked as an archivist for the KGB for the better part of his career, and spent over a decade copying and transcribing information from the files that passed through his hands. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he took some of the files with him to the newly independent state of Latvia, and managed to attract the attention of British intelligence. The files revealed an incomparable amount of information about the extent of KGB activity in the heyday of the Cold War -- and as a result, Mitrokhin's archive is often regarded as one of the greatest intelligence coups of all time. The first volume of The Mitrokhin Archive dealt with KGB activity in the West, mostly in Europe and the United States. The Mitrokhin Archive II focuses on the rest of the world, most specifically on the 'Third World' nations that the Soviet Union regarded as likely locations in which to build socialist or communist states. The book is divided into sections on Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, with chapters focusing on either a specific country or time period for the KGB's activities. For instance, Mitrokhin and Andrew devote two chapters to India, one of the premier targets for KGB activity, pointing out the extent to which the KGB promoted Indira Gandhi's paranoia that the CIA and various other Western intelligence services were plotting to depose or murder her. The Soviet war of attrition in Afghanistan also gets two chapters of coverage, attempting to untangle the complicated connections between various factions and rival groups in the late 1970s through the 1980s. Other countries and regions also receive a careful study, with some intriguing revelations: - Soviet espionage in China after the Sino-Soviet split was made all but impossible by the fact that the Chinese secret police knew all the identities of the KGB's agents in the PRC and proceeded to kill them all off -- a lesson on why it's not always good to share everything with your allies - Attempts to spy on China by way of Japan ran into problems when the Japanese Communist Party chose to ally itself ideologically with Beijing - The KGB was actually involved in starting and spreading the urban legend about Latin American children being kidnapped and killed to provide donated organs for rich Americans. I'm not entirely certain if it's a reflection on the fact that I'm not as 'genned up' on Third World Cold War history as I thought I was, but I found the second volume to be a little less readable than the first. It may simply be that I'm not as familiar with the names and events mentioned and discussed, in which case I could probably come back to it after a little outside reading and find that it makes more sense to me. Just a bit of qualification that might explain why I preferred the first volume to the second. Vasili Mitrokhin died in 2004, shortly after the publication of the first volume of The Mitrokhin Archive, the work that he and historian Christopher Andrew. Andrew completed this second volume on his own, working with Mitrokhin's original notes. There has been some controversy over the archive, particularly from scholars who question Mitrokhin's credibility. How, they ask, could someone who never managed to rise above a middling rank in the KGB manage to evade the strict security surrounding the archives and spend the better part of his career making notes on extremely sensitive case files? When I think about some of the real-life spy stories that have shown up in the press since the late 1980s, I'm a little more inclined to take Mitrokhin's archive at face value. But even if it's exposed as a fraud at some point in the future, the Mitrokhin Archive would still be a great set of books to show just how engrossing a fraud can be.

Người đọc Taylor Berghoff từ Çakırlar/Adana, Turkey

Người dùng coi những cuốn sách này là thú vị nhất trong năm 2017-2018, ban biên tập của cổng thông tin "Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn" khuyến cáo rằng tất cả các độc giả sẽ làm quen với văn học này.