Happy birthday, Leonid Brezhnev!
What a lovely seventy-fifth
We watched the party on TV
You seemed to be taking things casually
What a mighty heart must beat in your breast
To hold forty-nine medals on your chest !71
As well as manufacturing evidence of the global popularity of the Soviet leadership, the KGB fed it a carefully sanitized, politically correct view of the outside world. Throughout the Soviet era there was a striking contrast between the frequent success of intelligence collection and the poor quality of intelligence analysis. Because analysis in all one-party states is distorted by the insistent demands of political correctness, foreign intelligence reports do more to reinforce than to correct the regime’s misconceptions. Though the politicization of intelligence sometimes degrades assessment even within democratic systems, it is actually built into the structure of all authoritarian regimes. Soviet intelligence reports throughout the Stalin era, and for some years after, usually consisted only of selective compilations of relevant information on particular topics with little attempt at interpretation or analysis for fear that it might contradict the views of the political leadership. Though intelligence analysis improved under Andropov, it remained seriously undeveloped by Western standards. Leonov, who was dismayed to be appointed in 1971 as deputy head of the FCD assessment section, Service 1, estimates that it had only 10 per cent of the importance occupied by the Directorate of Intelligence (Analysis) in the CIA. Its prestige was correspondingly low. A general air of depression hung over Service 1, which was usually regarded as ‘a punishment posting’. To be transferred there from an operational section, as happened to Leonov, was ‘equivalent to moving from a guards regiment in the capital to the garrison in a provincial backwater’.72
In 1973 Leonov was promoted to head Service 1 and was soon able to resist the traditional pressure to accept rejects from operational departments. Freedom of debate, he claims, came to his department much earlier than to foreign intelligence as a whole, let alone to the rest of the KGB.73 That debate, however, was coloured by Leonov’s conspiracy theories about the United States which were still in evidence during the final years of the Soviet Union.74 There was also little change in the standards of political correctness required in intelligence reports to the Soviet leadership:
All the filtration stages . . . were concerned with making sure that alarming, critical information did not come to the attention of the bosses. [Such information] was provided in a sweetened, smoothed form, with all the thorns removed in advance.75
Vadim Kirpichenko, who later rose to become first deputy head of foreign intelligence, recalls that during the Brezhnev era, pessimistic intelligence was kept from him on the grounds that it would ‘upset Leonid Il yich’ . 76
When Soviet policy in the Third World suffered setbacks which could not be concealed, analysts knew they were on safe ground if they blamed imperialist machinations, particularly those of the United States, rather than failures of the Soviet system. As one FCD officer admitted at the end of the Cold War, ‘In order to please our superiors, we sent in falsified and biased information, acting on the principle “Blame everything on the Americans, and everything will be OK”.’77 Within the Centre it was possible during the Andropov era to express much franker opinions about Third World problems - for example, about Soviet prospects in Egypt after the death of Nasser or economic collapse in Allende’s Chile78 - than were communicated to the political leadership. From the moment that the KGB leadership had taken up a position, however, FCD dissidents kept their heads down. When, for example, Andropov concluded that the first Reagan administration had plans for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, none of the probably numerous sceptics in KGB residencies around the world dared to breathe a word of open dissent.79
Despite the sanitized nature of the Centre’s reports to the political leadership, however, its optimism about the Third World was genuine. By the mid-1970s, the KGB was confident that it was winning the Cold War in the Third World against a demoralized and increasingly discredited ‘Main Adversary’. As Henry Kissinger later acknowledged:
It is doubtful that Castro would have intervened in Angola, or the Soviet Union in Ethiopia, had America not been perceived to have collapsed in Indochina, to have become demoralized by Watergate, and to have afterward retreated into a cocoon.80
But while Washington was stricken by self-doubt, Moscow was in economic denial. The severe structural problems of the Soviet economy and the military might which depended on it were far more serious than the transitory loss of American self-confidence which followed Vietnam. In June 1977 the Soviet government was forced to purchase 11.5 million tonnes of grain from the West. In August it concluded that another 10 million tonnes would be needed to meet the shortfall in Soviet production. Yet at the celebration three months later of the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution, Brezhnev declared to thunderous applause, ‘This epoch is the epoch of the transition to Socialism and Communism . . . and by this path, the whole of mankind is destined to go.’ Though the naive economic optimism of the Khrushchev era had largely evaporated, the ideological blinkers which constricted the vision of Brezhnev, Andropov and other Soviet true believers made it impossible for them to grasp the impossibility of the increasingly sclerotic Soviet command economy competing successfully with the market economies of the West.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Andropov passionately believed that, ‘Everything that has been achieved here [in the Soviet Union] has long put socialism far ahead of the most democratic bourgeois states.’81 While the Soviet system would solve its problems, those of the capitalist West were insoluble. The onward march of socialism in the Third World pointed to the inevitability of its ultimate global triumph. In the confident words of Karen N. Brutents, first deputy head of the International Department: ‘The world was going our way.’82 The CIA feared that Brutents might be right. It reported to the White House in June 1979 that, ‘Part of the Soviet mood is a sense of momentum in the USSR’s favour in the Third World.’ Brezhnev and the Soviet leadership, it concluded, ‘can view their position in the world with considerable satisfaction’.83
How the KGB set out to win the Cold War in the Third World, and with what consequences, is the subject of this book.
Latin America
2
Latin America: Introduction
President Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting what he claimed was Lenin’s description of the Soviet master-plan to take over the Western hemisphere:
First, we will take over Eastern Europe, then we will organize the hordes of Asia . . . then we will move on to Latin America; once we have Latin America, we won’t have to take the United States, the last bastion of capitalism, because it will fall into our outstretched hands like overripe fruit.1
Reagan was so impressed by this quotation that he repeated it twice in his memoirs. Lenin, however, said no such thing. His only published reference to Latin America, in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, was to cite approvingly a German economist who claimed that ‘South America, and especially Argentina, was under the financial control of London’ and was ‘almost a British commercial colony’.2
For over forty years after the Bolshevik Revolution, Moscow doubted its own ability to challenge American influence in a continent which it regarded as the United States’ backyard. By far the most important Soviet intelligence operation in Latin America during the Stalin era was aimed not at subverting any of the ruling regimes but at assassinating the great Russian heretic Leon Trotsky, who had taken refuge near Mexico City.3 In 1951, two years before Stalin’s death, he scornfully dismissed the twenty Latin American republics, most of them traditionally anti-Communist, as the ‘obedient army of the United States’.4 For the remainder of the decade the Soviet Union maintained diplomatic missions and ‘legal’ KGB residencies in only three Latin American capitals - Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Though t
he KGB began delivering secret Soviet subsidies to a handful of pro-Moscow Communist parties in 1955, the amounts remained small by comparison with those given to the leading parties in the West and Asia.5
The serious interest of the Centre (KGB headquarters) and subsequently of the Kremlin in the possibility of challenging the United States in its own backyard was first aroused by the emergence of a new generation of charismatic Latin American revolutionary leaders, chief among them Fidel Castro. The KGB’s leading Latin American expert, Nikolai Leonov, who was the first to make contact with Castro, wrote later, ‘Cuba forced us to take a fresh look at the whole continent, which until then had traditionally occupied the last place in the Soviet leadership’s system of priorities.’6 The charismatic appeal of Castro and ‘Che’ Guevara extended far beyond Latin America. Though the Western ‘New Left’ of the 1960s had little interest in the increasingly geriatric leadership of the Soviet Union, it idolized both Castro and Guevara, lavishing on them the uncritical adulation which much of the Old Left had bestowed on Stalin’s supposed worker-peasant state in the 1930s. Che Guevara T-shirts on American campuses comfortably outnumbered, even in presidential election years, those bearing the likeness of any US politician alive or dead. Though there was much that was genuinely admirable in Cuban health-care and educational initiatives, despite the increasingly authoritarian nature of the Cuban one-party state, the radical pilgrims to Havana in the 1960s were as uncritical as those to Moscow in the 1930s of whom Malcolm Muggeridge had written, ‘Their delight in all they saw and were told, and the expression they gave to that delight, constitute unquestionably one of the wonders of our age.’ One of the wonders of the 1960s was delight such as that expressed by the political economist Paul Sweezy after his pilgrimage to Cuba:
To be with these people, to see with your own eyes how they are rehabilitating and transforming a whole nation, to share their dreams of the great tasks and achievements that lie ahead - these are purifying and liberating experiences. You come away with your faith in the human race restored.
Though sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution, Frances Fitzgerald accurately noted that ‘many North American radicals who visit Cuba or who live there have performed a kind of surgery on their critical faculties and reduced their conversation to a kind of baby talk, in which everything is wonderful, including the elevator that does not work and the rows of Soviet tanks on military parade that are in the “hands of the people” ’.
Similar examples of self-administered brain surgery proliferated across both the West and the Third World. Even Jean-Paul Sartre, despite his global reputation for rigorous philosophical analysis, became for a period almost incoherent in his hero-worship:
Among these fully awake men, at the height of their powers, sleeping doesn’t seem like a natural need, just a routine of which they had more or less freed themselves . . . They have excluded the routine alternation of lunch and dinner from their daily programme.
. . . Of all these night watchmen, Castro is the most wide awake. Of all these fasting people, Castro can eat the most and fast the longest . . . [They] exercise a veritable dictatorship over their own needs . . . they roll back the limits of the possible.7
Castro’s emergence, after some hesitations, as a reliable pro-Moscow loyalist was of immense importance for both Soviet foreign policy and KGB operations. Had he shared much of the New Left’s scornful attitude to the bloated Soviet bureaucracy and its increasingly geriatric leadership, siding instead with the Prague Spring and other manifestations of ‘Socialism with a human face’ (as many expected him to do after the tanks of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968), Castro would have added to Moscow’s problems instead of becoming one of its greatest international assets. With Castro and other charismatic Latin American revolutionaries on its side against American imperialism, the prestige of the Soviet Union in the Third World was enormously enhanced and its ageing revolutionary image rejuvenated.
It was often the KGB, rather than the Foreign Ministry, which took the lead role in Latin America. As Khrushchev later acknowledged, the first Soviet ambassador to Castro’s Cuba ‘turned out to be unsuited for service in a country just emerging from a revolution’ and had to be replaced by the KGB resident, who proved to be ‘an excellent choice’.8 Nikolai Leonov later described how he had also ‘worked with many [other] Latin American leaders . . . to help them as far as possible in their anti-American stance’.9 The first contacts with Salvador Allende before his election as President of Chile in 1970 and with Juan and Isabel Perón before their return to Argentina in 1973 were also made by the KGB rather than by a Soviet diplomat. KGB contacts with the Sandinistas began almost two decades before their conquest of power in Nicaragua in 1979. As Leonov acknowledged, the initiative frequently came from the Centre’s Latin American experts:
We ourselves developed the programme of our actions, orienting ourselves . . . I might as well admit that sometimes we also wanted to attract attention to ourselves, to present our work as highly significant. This was to protect the Latin American direction in intelligence from withering away and dying out. On the whole we managed to convince the KGB leadership that Latin America represented a politically attractive springboard, where anti-American feeling was strong . . .10
KGB operations were greatly assisted by the clumsy and sometimes brutal American response to Latin American revolutionary movements. The poorly planned and ineptly executed attempt to overthrow Castro by a CIA-backed landing at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 was probably the most farcically incompetent episode in Cold War US foreign policy. Humiliation at the Bay of Pigs, however, did not prevent Kennedy authorizing subsequently a series of plans to assassinate Castro which, mercifully, also degenerated into farce. Some, like the proposal to place an explosive seashell on the sea bed when Castro went snorkelling, probably never progressed beyond the drawing board. The most practicable scheme devised during Kennedy’s presidency seems to have been the plan for one of Castro’s lovers to slip two poison capsules into his drink. While waiting for an opportunity, she hid them in a jar of cold cream. When she came to retrieve them, the capsules had melted. It is doubtful in any case that she would actually have used them.
Investigative journalism and official investigations in the mid- 1970s gave global publicity to a series of such homicidal farces. Also revealed were CIA attempts on presidential instructions to destabilize the regime of Chile’s Marxist President Salvador Allende in the early 1970s. Among the revelations was that of an apoplectic President Richard M. Nixon ordering his Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, to ‘make the [Chilean] economy scream’.
KGB active-measures specialists could not have hoped for more promising raw material to use as the basis of their campaigns than the series of scandalous revelations of American dirty tricks in Latin America from the Bay of Pigs to Iran-Contra a quarter of a century later. Service A was also able to exploit a much older tradition of resentment at Yanqui imperialism, which was kept alive during the Cold War by a recurrent US tendency to claim that its determination to root out Communist influences in Latin America wherever possible was in reality a high-minded attempt to defend democratic values in the interests of Latin Americans themselves. Having persuaded himself in 1965, contrary to the advice of the State Department, that a coup in the Dominican Republic was Communist-inspired, President Johnson sought to justify US military intervention by the sanctimonious rhetoric which rarely failed to enrage much of Latin American opinion: ‘The purpose of America is never to suppress liberty, but always to save it. The purpose of America is never to take freedom, but always to return it.’
American intervention, however, had little to do with democratic renewal. When Johnson’s extravagant claims of ‘headless bodies lying in the streets of Santo Domingo’ were challenged by opponents of US intervention, he phoned the US ambassador and appealed to him, ‘For God’s sake, see if you can find some headless bodies.’ The left-wing regimes overthrown with American assistance or
approval in Guatemala in 1954, in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and in Chile in 1973 were replaced by military dictatorships.11
The Sandinista victory in Nicaragua in 1979 revived much the same hopes and fears of Central American revolution created by Castro’s triumph in Cuba twenty years earlier. As one of their supporters noted, the Sandinistas had inspired ‘a renewal of belief in the possibility of a revolution’. ‘Backwater Nicaragua’, said the left-wing writer Paul Berman, became ‘the world center of the New Left’. For the journalist Claudia Dreifus: ‘To be in Managua was like being in a time machine. Here was a place seemingly run by the kind of people who were Sixties radicals. Wherever one went, people were young, singing political folk songs and chanting “Power to the People”.’12
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