Unbeknownst to Kryuchkov and the KGB, while cataloging the documents, Mitrokin secretly took his own copies and immensely detailed notes of the documents which he smuggled to his dacha and hid under the floorboards. Mitrokhin made no attempt to contact any Western intelligence service during the Soviet Era. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union (in 1992) he traveled to Latvia with copies of material from the archive and walked into the American embassy in Riga. Central Intelligence Agency officers there did not consider him to be credible, concluding that the copied documents could be faked. He then went to the British embassy and a young diplomat there saw his potential. After a further meeting one month later with representatives of MI6, operations followed to retrieve the 25,000 pages of files hidden in his house, covering operations from as far back as the 1930s.