From the centre in Moscow the KGB poured forth an avalanche of top-secret documents to its residencies the world over. During the decade which culminated in the rise to power of Mikhael Gorbachev, Oleg Gordievsky, at that time a colonel in the KGB, regularly risked his life by making copies of these documents. Now a selection has been translated and analyzed by Gordievsky and Christopher Andrew, offering a classified insight not merely into KGB foreign operations between 1975 and '85, but also into the thinking of its top leadership at the beginning of the 1990s.