Блокноты Васильева
May. 7th, 2009 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
borislvinhttp://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.documents&group_id=511603
<...> from the summer of 1993 to the spring of 1996 he had unprecedented access to the archival record of KGB activities in America from the 1930s to the early 1950s. The Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia (SVR), a successor to the KGB, had decided to assist a project that partnered an active or retired KGB officer with a Western author to produce a series of books on selected intelligence topics. Vassiliev, who had resigned from the KGB in 1990 to become a journalist, accepted an SVR offer to work with American scholar Allen Weinstein to prepare a book on KGB operations in the United States.
While Vassiliev did not have access to all KGB files, he was allowed to examine many operational files from the KGB’s legal stations, some personal files on both officers and sources, and the first volume of the file on “Enormous,” the KGB’s atomic intelligence project, that covered its assault on the Manhattan Project up to the end of 1945. Although he was prohibited from making photocopies, Vassiliev was allowed to make handwritten notes without restriction, including copying passages verbatim out of hundreds of individual documents. Under the policies of the project, however, the notes were only for his own use and were not to be shared with his American co-author. Instead, under SVR guidelines he prepared sanitized summaries of major topics and themes. With some exceptions, real names and identifying information about sources could not be disclosed, only their cover names, and certain matters could not be discussed at all. Once the summaries were prepared, an SVR committee of senior officers reviewed them to confirm that the guidelines had been followed.
By the spring of 1996, complications has arisen. <...> After receiving threats of retaliation from communist officers in the SVR, Vassiliev decided to leave Russia. He got a journalistic assignment in London. He has not returned to Russia and is today a British citizen.
Concerned about a physical search at the airport, Vassiliev did not take his original handwritten notebooks with him in 1996. Instead, he put his summary chapters, some of which had been approved by the SVR committee and others that were awaiting review, on computer disks and left Russia with this data. <...>
Vassiliev retrieved his original notebooks from Moscow in 2001. Friends had been keeping them and simply shipped them to him in London by DHL.
<...> from the summer of 1993 to the spring of 1996 he had unprecedented access to the archival record of KGB activities in America from the 1930s to the early 1950s. The Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia (SVR), a successor to the KGB, had decided to assist a project that partnered an active or retired KGB officer with a Western author to produce a series of books on selected intelligence topics. Vassiliev, who had resigned from the KGB in 1990 to become a journalist, accepted an SVR offer to work with American scholar Allen Weinstein to prepare a book on KGB operations in the United States.
While Vassiliev did not have access to all KGB files, he was allowed to examine many operational files from the KGB’s legal stations, some personal files on both officers and sources, and the first volume of the file on “Enormous,” the KGB’s atomic intelligence project, that covered its assault on the Manhattan Project up to the end of 1945. Although he was prohibited from making photocopies, Vassiliev was allowed to make handwritten notes without restriction, including copying passages verbatim out of hundreds of individual documents. Under the policies of the project, however, the notes were only for his own use and were not to be shared with his American co-author. Instead, under SVR guidelines he prepared sanitized summaries of major topics and themes. With some exceptions, real names and identifying information about sources could not be disclosed, only their cover names, and certain matters could not be discussed at all. Once the summaries were prepared, an SVR committee of senior officers reviewed them to confirm that the guidelines had been followed.
By the spring of 1996, complications has arisen. <...> After receiving threats of retaliation from communist officers in the SVR, Vassiliev decided to leave Russia. He got a journalistic assignment in London. He has not returned to Russia and is today a British citizen.
Concerned about a physical search at the airport, Vassiliev did not take his original handwritten notebooks with him in 1996. Instead, he put his summary chapters, some of which had been approved by the SVR committee and others that were awaiting review, on computer disks and left Russia with this data. <...>
Vassiliev retrieved his original notebooks from Moscow in 2001. Friends had been keeping them and simply shipped them to him in London by DHL.
