In the euphoria of liberation from colonial rule there were many who, like Nkrumah, were seduced by anti-imperialist fantasy economics. Convinced that heavy industry was the key to rapid economic development, they welcomed inefficient Soviet steel mills and other heavy plant as symbols of modernity rather than potential industrial white elephants. In the small African state of Guinea alone during the Khrushchev era, the Soviet Union constructed an airport, a cannery, a sawmill, a refrigeration plant, a hospital, a polytechnic and a hotel as well as carrying out geological surveys and a series of research projects. The report presented to the Central Committee plenum which ousted Khrushchev in 1964 stated that during his decade in power the Soviet Union had undertaken about 6,000 projects in the Third World.15 Khrushchev, the report implied, had allowed his enthusiasm for strengthening Soviet influence in developing countries to run away with him - at enormous cost to the Soviet economy.
Khrushchev, however, was supremely confident that the Soviet command economy, despite the scale of its investment in the Third World, was rapidly overhauling capitalism. ‘It is true that you are richer than we are at present’, he told Americans during his flamboyant coast-to-coast tour of the United States in 1959. ‘But tomorrow we will be as rich as you. The next day? Even richer! But is there anything wrong with that?’16 Khrushchev’s optimism seemed less absurd at the time than it does now. The deputy leader of the British Labour Party, Aneurin Bevan, told the 1959 party conference that the triumph of nationalization and state planning in the Soviet Union proved that they were vastly superior to capitalism as a means of economic modernization: ‘The [economic] challenge is going to come from Russia. The challenge is not going to come from the United States.’17 The early achievements of the Soviet space programme encouraged wildly exaggerated expectations in the West as well as in the East of the ability of the Soviet economy to pioneer new technology. In 1957 the Soviet success in putting into orbit Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite, had created a global sensation. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was taken aback by the ‘wave of near hysteria’ which swept the United States. Amid claims that America had suffered a scientific Pearl Harbor, the Governor of Michigan, G. Mennen Williams, expressed his inner anguish in verse:
Oh Little Sputnik, flying high
With made-in Moscow beep
You tell the world it’s a Commie sky
And Uncle Sam’s asleep.18
‘How can we not rejoice, comrades,’ asked Khrushchev in 1958, ‘at the gigantic achievements of our industry? . . . What other state has ever built on such a scale? There never has been such a country!’19
Khrushchev was also enthused by the fiery rhetoric of the new generation of Third World leaders against both their former colonial masters and American imperialism. During his visit to the United States in 1959, he gave a speech to the General Assembly in New York, basking in the applause after his ‘warm greetings from the bottom of my heart’ to the independent states which had freed themselves from colonial rule:
Coming generations will highly appreciate the heroism of those who led the struggle for the independence of India and Indonesia, the United Arab Republic and Iraq, Ghana, Guinea and other states, just as the people of the United States today revere the memory of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who led the American people in their struggle for independence.
Khrushchev went on to denounce the imperialist exploitation which continued after the formal end of colonial rule:
The peoples of many of these countries have won political independence, but they are cruelly exploited by foreigners economically. Their oil and other natural wealth is plundered, it is taken out of the country for next to nothing, yielding huge profits to foreign exploiters.
Khrushchev’s call for the plundered wealth to be returned as economic aid was music to the ears of many of his Third World listeners.20
The fact that neither the United States nor the European colonial powers yet took seriously the problems of racism within their own societies increased the popularity of anti-imperialist rhetoric. It now almost passes belief that, during the decade when most African colonies gained their independence, it was still legal for British landlords to put ‘No Coloured’ notices in their windows and illegal for African delegates to the United Nations in New York to travel on seats reserved for whites on the segregated buses of the Deep South. Because of Russia’s lack of either African colonies or a black immigrant community, the racism of Russian society was far better concealed.21
Following the success of his brief visit to the United Nations in 1959, Khrushchev took the unprecedented decision to spend a month in New York as leader of the Soviet delegation at the autumn 1960 meeting of the UN General Assembly, which welcomed seventeen newly independent members, sixteen from Africa. While Khrushchev was bear-hugging the new African leaders, President Dwight D. Eisenhower went on a golfing holiday. With new African embassies opening in Washington, the President’s chief of protocol became notorious for complaining about having to invite ‘these niggers’ to White House receptions.22 Khrushchev, meanwhile, became joint sponsor of a draft UN declaration subsequently adopted in modified form as a ‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’, which denounced colonialism in all its forms and demanded immediate independence for all subjugated peoples. The abstention of the main Western powers merely served to enhance Moscow’s prestige.23 The fact that most still ‘subjugated peoples’ did not receive immediate independence meant that the Soviet Union was regularly able henceforth to complain that the colonial powers were defying a UN resolution.24
Khrushchev so enjoyed his time at the UN in the autumn of 1960 that he beat all previous records for loquacity, making a dozen speeches to the General Assembly totalling 300 pages of typescript. His performance was not, however, an unalloyed success. He was so outraged on 13 October by the speech of a delegate from the Philippines, who turned the issue of decolonization against him and claimed that eastern Europe had been ‘swallowed up by the Soviet Union’ and ‘deprived of political and civil rights’, that he began angrily pounding the table with his shoe. Afterwards Khrushchev told a member of the Soviet delegation who had missed his performance, ‘Oh, you really missed something! It was such fun!’ Despite their embarrassment, no one in the delegation dared to remonstrate with him.25 With the heady experience of hearing Western imperialism publicly denounced by Third World leaders in the heartland of American capitalism still fresh in his mind, Khrushchev gave a secret speech in Moscow to Soviet ideological and propaganda ‘workers’ in January 1961, in which he declared that, by supporting the ‘sacred’ anti-imperialist struggle of colonies and newly independent states, the Soviet Union would both advance its own progress to Communism and ‘bring imperialism to its knees’.26
The belief that the Cold War could be won in the Third World transformed the agenda of Soviet intelligence in ways that most Western historians have found difficult to credit. Eric Hobsbawm’s brilliant history of the twentieth century concludes, like many others, that ‘there is no real evidence that [the Soviet Union] planned to push forward the frontiers of communism by revolution until the middle 1970s, and even then the evidence suggests that the USSR made use of a favourable conjuncture it had not set out to create’.27 KGB files show, however, that in 1961 there was already such a plan, though it was not of course publicly revealed. The Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) Programme of that year praised ‘the liberation struggles of oppressed peoples’ as one of ‘the mainstream tendencies of social progress’. This message was enthusiastically received in the Centre (KGB headquarters). The youthful and dynamic chairman of the KGB, Aleksandr Shelepin, won Khrushchev’s support for the use of national liberation movements and the forces of anti-imperialism in an aggressive new grand strategy against the ‘Main Adversary’ (the United States) in the Third World.28 Though Khrushchev was soon to replace Shelepin with the more compliant and less ambitious Vladimir Semichastny, the KGB’s grand strategy survived.
Grasping the extent of the KGB’s ambitions in the Third World has been complicated by the legacy of McCarthyism. Just as the fraudulent inventions of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s self-serving anti-Communist witch-hunt helped to blind liberal opinion to the reality of the unprecedented Soviet intelligence offensive against the United States,29 so simplistic conspiracy theories of Soviet plans for world conquest made most non-conspiracy theorists sceptical of even realistic assessments of Soviet designs in the Third World. McCarthy and America’s other anti-Communist conspiracy theorists were, albeit unconsciously, among the KGB’s most successful Cold War agents of influence. Reaction against their risible exaggerations helps to account for the remarkable degree to which the KGB has been left out of Cold War history.
After Khrushchev himself was forced to step down in 1964 and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, the belief that the Cold War could be won in the Third World was held with greater conviction in the Centre than in the Kremlin or the Foreign Ministry. The future head of KGB intelligence assessment, Nikolai Leonov, then a young foreign intelligence officer in the FCD Second (Latin American) Department, was later to recall: ‘Basically, of course, we were guided by the idea that the destiny of world confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, between Capitalism and Socialism, would be resolved in the Third World. This was the basic premise.’30
That strategy was enthusiastically supported by Yuri Andropov from the moment he succeeded Semichastny as KGB chairman in 1967. He told a meeting of the Second Chief Directorate (Internal Security and Counter-Intelligence) a year later:
One must understand that the struggle between the organs of state security and the special [intelligence] organs of the opponent in the present conditions reflect the present stage of a heightening of the class struggle. And this means that the struggle is more merciless. Today the same question is being decided as in the first days of Soviet power: who prevails over whom? Only today this question is being decided not within our country but within the framework of the whole world system, in a global struggle between two world systems.31
The initiative for the ‘global struggle’ came from the KGB rather than the Foreign Ministry. At the most dramatic moments of Soviet penetration of the Third World, from the establishment of the first Communist ‘bridgehead’ in the Western hemisphere (to use the KGB codename for Castro’s Cuba) to the final, disastrous defence of the Communist regime in Afghanistan, the Centre had greater influence than the Foreign Ministry.
Andrei Gromyko, the long-serving Soviet Foreign Minister, is remembered by his almost equally long-serving ambassador in Washington, Anatoli Dobrynin, as ‘a cautious man who opposed any serious confrontation with the United States’:
. . . The Third World was not his prime domain. He believed that events there could not decisively influence our fundamental relations with the United States; that turned out to be a factor which he definitely underestimated. More than that, our Foreign Ministry traditionally was not really involved with the leaders of the liberation movements in the Third World, who were dealt with through the International Department of the party, headed by Secretary Boris Ponomarev. He despised Gromyko; the feeling was mutual.
The Soviet Union’s forward policy in the Third World was thus led by the KGB with the support of the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee.32 Khrushchev had nicknamed the Department’s rigidly doctrinaire head ‘Ponomar’ (sacristan in the Orthodox Church). ‘Ponomar’, he said, ‘is a valuable Party official but as orthodox as a Catholic priest.’ Within the Politburo, the forward policy was also supported by the Party’s leading ideologue, Mikhail Suslov, whose prestige during the 1970s was second only to Brezhnev’s. ‘Cloaked in the robe of doctrinal infallibility’, recalls one Soviet diplomat, ‘[Suslov] regularly issued reminders of what he saw as the correct Marxist-Leninist policy.’ Speaking ex cathedra, Suslov declared that the collapse of what remained of the Western colonial empires and the weakening of the capitalist system in the face of the onward march of socialism and progressive, anti-imperialist forces was ‘historically inevitable’.33
Gromyko’s frequent willingness for Andropov to take the initiative in the Third World reflected his own lack of interest in it. As Leonov later recalled:
The USSR [Foreign Ministry] and its head A. A. Gromyko were openly scornful with regard to the ‘third world’. Andrei Andreyevich [Gromyko] visited and received his colleagues from small European states with greater pleasure than the disturbers of the peace from the countries of the ‘third world’. Even the Politburo failed to convince him to visit the Near East, Africa, or Latin America. Trips to the countries of these regions were isolated incidents in his seemingly endless career as minister for foreign affairs.34
When taking initiatives in the Third World, Andropov was always careful not to appear to be treading on Gromyko’s toes. ‘Their personal relations’, noted Dobrynin, ‘were not bad, because Andropov was cautious enough not to interfere in Gromyko’s everyday management of foreign policy, and Gromyko for his part respected Andropov’s growing influence in the Politburo.’ The two men gradually became co-sponsors of the major foreign policy proposals put before Brezhnev’s Politburo.35
Further encouragement for a forward policy in the Third World came from the shift in the balance of power at the United Nations during the 1960s. With the rapid increase in newly independent states, the West lost its previous majority in the General Assembly. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) tended increasingly to vote with the Soviet bloc rather than the West, some of whose leading states were tainted by their imperial past. At the NAM conference which met at Belgrade in July 1969, the final communiqué pledged ‘support for the heroic people of Vietnam’ who were resisting American aggression, but made no significant mention of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the previous year.36 For the remainder of the Cold War, the KGB saw the Non-Aligned Movement as ‘our natural allies’. ‘The essential trend of their activities’, declared the head of the First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate (FCD), Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov, in 1984, ‘is anti-imperialist.’37
The United States’ defeat in Vietnam reinforced the Centre’s confidence in its Third World strategy. The unprecedented TV coverage from Vietnam brought the horrors of war into the living rooms of Middle America and much of the world. It also gave dramatic global publicity to the anti-war movement in the United States, whose daily refrain, ‘Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?’, helped to persuade President Lyndon B. Johnson not to run for re-election in 1968. Both Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, believed - wrongly - that an international Communist conspiracy lay behind American anti-war protest, particularly on university campuses. Richard Helms, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), later testified that, ‘President Johnson was after this all the time.’ So was Nixon. Though sceptical about the White House’s conspiracy theories, Helms began operation CHAOS to discover the real extent of foreign influence on domestic dissent. In the course of the operation, the Agency began to spy illegally on American campus radicals. As Helms acknowledged: ‘Should anyone learn of [CHAOS’s] existence, it would prove most embarrassing for all concerned.’ Though the negative findings of CHAOS failed to convince either Johnson or Nixon, it did lasting damage to the reputation of the CIA when the operation was revealed in the mid-1970s and provided further ammunition for KGB ‘active measures’.38
Only a fortnight before the final American withdrawal from Saigon on 30 April 1975, Andropov still found it difficult to credit that the United States had really been defeated. He told a specially convened meeting on Vietnam in the FCD’s Yasenevo headquarters: Do you remember the Korean War and the course of its development? Then too the North Korean troops had occupied almost the whole territory of South Korea . . . Then the Americans organized a major landing operation in the rear of the North Koreans, cutting off and devastating the main section of the North Korean army. In a matter of days the course of the war had ch
anged. Now an extremely similar situation is taking shape. All the forces of North Vietnam have been sent to the south, to help the patriots. To all intents and purposes North Vietnam is defenceless. If the Americans undertake something similar to the Korean manoeuvre, then things may take a bad turn . . . To all intents and purposes the road to [Hanoi] is open.
Not till Andropov saw the extraordinary TV pictures a fortnight later of Americans and some of their South Vietnamese allies being hurriedly rescued by helicopter from the roof of the US embassy as the Communist Vietcong made a triumphal entry into Saigon did he accept that the United States had really been defeated.39
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