Vasiliy Mitrokhin was born in central Russia on 3 March 1922 and began training as an archivist before transferring to the Kharkov Higher Juridical Institute from which he graduated in 1944. After serving briefly as a police lawyer he was nominated for a three year course at the Higher Diplomatic School in Moscow. From 1948 he worked in foreign intelligence for the Committee of Information, undertaking several short term foreign assignments, before being assigned to the foreign intelligence archives in the KGB First Chief Directorate. From 1972 onwards, until his retirement in 1984, he took extensive manuscript notes of many of the papers passing through his hands. Following his retirement he organised this material geographically and typed out systematic studies of KGB operations in different parts of the world in 10 volumes. He and his family and his archive were exfiltrated from the Soviet Union by the Secret Intelligence Service in 1992. Once in London, Mitrokhin continued to work on transcribing and typing his manuscript notes, producing a further 26 typed volumes, which provided the basis for the two volume book with Professor Christopher Andrew, "The Mitrokhin Archive" (Penguin, 1999). Vasiliy Mitrokhin died in January 2004.