The Reagan administration’s campaign against the Sandinista regime was a public-relations disaster on a global scale. Just as the Bay of Pigs invasion was remembered by President John F. Kennedy as ‘the most excruciating period of my life’, so the lowest point in Ronald Reagan’s generally popular presidency came as a result of the revelation that the profits from secret arms sales to Iran, then a state sponsor of terrorism, had been illegally diverted to support the Nicaraguan Contra rebels in their attempt to overthrow the Marxist Sandinista regime. When Reagan was informed in 1985 that this episode had been uncovered by the Attorney General, his chief of staff noted that ‘the color drained from [the president’s] face’.13
A survey in the mid-1980s found that the two most ‘unappealing countries’ in the view of Mexican academics were the United States and Pinochet’s Chile. Though the USSR came in third place, 72 per cent of those polled believed that reports of ‘repression’ in the Soviet Union had been exaggerated. Clearly the most admired country was Castro’s Cuba.14 Estimating how much Service A’s disinformation contributed to the Latin American distrust of Yanqui imperialism is an almost impossible task. It is, however, possible to identify some causes of widespread anti-American indignation which were clearly of Soviet origin. Among them was the ‘baby parts’ fabrication which alleged that wealthy Americans were buying up and butchering Latin American children in order to use their bodies for organ transplants. The story was taken up by a Soviet front organization, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), and publicized extensively in the press of over fifty countries. Those taken in by the fabrication included groups as remote from the KGB as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who published the story in 1989 in their magazine Awake, which had a world-wide circulation of 11 million copies printed in fifty-four languages.15 In 1990 an American correspondent in Mexico noted that the ‘baby parts’ story was still current even in ‘the respectable press’:
It was reported that Mexican children routinely were being kidnapped, spirited across the US border, and murdered for their vital organs, which were then transplanted into sick American children with rich parents . . . Millions of educated and uneducated people - particularly in Latin America - firmly believe that the United States has created, in essence, an international network of child murderers, backed by gruesome teams of medical butchers.16
Despite their many differences, KGB active measures and American policy to Latin America thus had one strikingly similar effect - to strengthen the traditional distrust of Yanqui imperialism.
3
‘The Bridgehead’, 1959-1969
One of the most striking news photographs of 1960 showed the tall, youthful, bearded ‘Maximum Leader’ of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz,1 being greeted with a bear hug by the short, podgy, beaming Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations in New York. Khrushchev’s boisterous embrace symbolized a major shift in both Soviet foreign policy and KGB operations. Moscow had at last a charismatic revolutionary standard-bearer in the New World.
Castro later claimed that he was already a Marxist-Leninist when he began his guerrilla campaign against the corrupt pro-American Cuban dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1953: ‘We felt that Lenin was with us, and that gave us great strength in fighting.’ That claim, however, was one of a number of attempts by Castro, once in power, to rewrite the history of his unorthodox early career. The word ‘socialism’ did not appear in any of Castro’s speeches until 1961.2 Castro had a privileged upbringing in an affluent Cuban landowning family, and drew his early political inspiration not from Lenin but from the radical nationalist Partido del Pueblo Cubano and the ideals of its anti-Marxist founder, Eduardo Chibás. Until 1958 the Cuban Communist Party - the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP) - continued to insist, with Moscow’s backing, that Batista could only be overthrown not by Castro’s guerrillas but by a popular uprising of Cuban workers led by the Communists. As late as October 1958, three months before Batista fled and Castro entered Havana in triumph, Khrushchev spoke pessimistically of ‘the heroic but unequal struggle of the Cuban people’ against imperialist oppression.3 Not until 27 December did the Kremlin approve a limited supply of arms by the Czechs to Castro’s guerrillas. Even then it insisted that only German weapons of the Second World War era or arms of Czech design be handed over, for fear that a Soviet arms shipment,
33 if discovered, might provoke a crisis with the United States. The arms, however, arrived too late to make a difference. At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve 1958, Batista fled from Cuba, leaving Castro and his guerrillas to enter Havana in triumph.4
The KGB’s foreign intelligence arm, the First Chief Directorate (FCD), had realized Castro’s potential earlier than either the Soviet Foreign Ministry or the International Department of the Communist Party Central Committee. The first of its officers to do so was a new recruit, Nikolai Sergeyevich Leonov, who was sent to Mexico City in 1953 in order to improve his Spanish before entering the KGB training school. En route to Mexico, Leonov became ‘firm friends’ with Fidel’s more left-wing younger brother, Raúl Castro, at a socialist youth congress in Prague, then crossed the Atlantic with him aboard an Italian freighter bound for Havana. To his later embarrassment, on arrival at Havana Leonov insisted that Raúl hand him the negatives of all the photographs he had taken of him during the crossing for fear that they might be used for ‘provocations’.5 Soon after Leonov’s arrival in Mexico, Fidel Castro led an unsuccessful attack on an army barracks which was followed by the imprisonment of himself and Raúl for the next two years. After his release, Fidel spent a year in exile in Mexico and appealed to the Soviet embassy for arms to support a guerrilla campaign against Batista. Though the appeal was turned down, Leonov met Castro for the first time in 1956, was immediately impressed by his potential as a charismatic guerrilla leader, began regular meetings with him and gave him enthusiastic moral support. Leonov privately regarded Castro’s politics as immature and incoherent, but noted that both Fidel’s closest advisers, Raúl Castro and the Argentinian Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, appeared to be committed Marxists.6 ‘I am one of those’, wrote Che in 1957, ‘. . . who believes that the solution to the problems of this world lies behind what is called the Iron Curtain.’7
Leonov’s far-sightedness and early association with the Castro brothers launched him on a career which led eventually to his appointment in 1983 as deputy head of the FCD, responsible for KGB operations throughout North and South America. His early assessments of Fidel, however, made little impression in the Centre (KGB headquarters).8 Even when Castro took power in January 1959, Moscow still doubted his ability to withstand American pressure. Lacking a residency in Havana, the KGB obtained much of its Cuban intelligence from the PSP,9 which looked askance at the apparently moderate complexion of the new regime. By midsummer, however, the moderates had been ousted from the government, leaving the cabinet as little more than a rubber stamp for policies decided by Castro, the ‘Maximum Leader’, and his advisers. Though initially restrained in his public utterances, Castro privately regarded the United States as ‘the sworn enemy of our nation’. He had written a few months before coming to power, ‘When this war [against Batista] is over, I’ll start a much longer and bigger war of my own: the war I’m going to fight against [the Americans]. I realize that will be my true destiny.’ While American hostility was later to reinforce Castro’s alliance with the Soviet Union, it did not cause it. The initiative for the alliance came from Havana.10
From the outset the KGB was closely involved in establishing the Soviet-Cuban connection. In July 1959 Castro sent his first intelligence chief, Ramiro Valdés, to Mexico City for secret talks with the Soviet ambassador and KGB residency.11 Three months later, a Soviet ‘cultural delegation’ headed by the former KGB resident in Buenos Aires, Aleksandr Ivanovich Alekseyev, arrived in Havana to establish the first Cuban residency. Alekseyev presented Fidel Castro with a bottle of vodka, several jars of caviar and a photographic portfolio of Mosco
w, then assured him of the Soviet people’s ‘great admiration’ both for himself and for the Cuban Revolution. Castro opened the bottle and sent for biscuits on which to spread the caviar. ‘What good vodka, what good caviar!’ he exclaimed. ‘I think it’s worth establishing trade relations with the Soviet Union!’ Castro then ‘stunned’ his visitor by declaring that Marx and Lenin were his intellectual guides. ‘At that time’, said Alekseyev later, ‘we could not even imagine that [Castro] knew Marxist theory.’12
During his meeting with Alekseyev, Castro proposed a visit to Cuba by Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan, Khrushchev’s favourite personal emissary and elder statesman of his regime, whose career stretched back to the Bolshevik Revolution. Under Brezhnev, Mikoyan’s career was summed up behind his back as ‘From Ilyich to Ilyich [from Lenin to Brezhnev], without a heart attack or paralysis.’ Before leaving for Havana as the most senior Soviet representative ever to visit Latin America, Mikoyan summoned Leonov to his presence and asked him if it was really true that he knew the Castro brothers. Among the evidence which persuaded Mikoyan to take him as his interpreter were the photographs taken by Raúl while crossing the Atlantic seven years earlier. The main Cuban-Soviet talks took place not around a Havana conference table but after dark at Fidel’s hunting cabin by a lagoon, the night air punctuated by croaking tropical frogs and buzzing mosquitoes. Most of their meals were of fish they caught in the lagoon and cooked themselves or else taken in workers’ dining halls. They slept on concrete floors at an unfinished campsite, wrapped in soldiers’ greatcoats for warmth, occasionally warming up with strong aromatic coffee. Mikoyan felt transported back from life as a top-ranking Moscow bureaucrat to his revolutionary origins. ‘Yes, this is a real revolution,’ he told Leonov. ‘Just like ours. I feel as though I’ve returned to my youth!’ By a trade agreement signed during his visit, the Soviet Union agreed to purchase about one-fifth of Cuba’s sugar exports, supply oil at well below world prices and make Cuba a low-interest loan of $100 million for economic development projects.13
On 15 March 1960, soon after Mikoyan’s return, Khrushchev sent his first personal message to Castro. Instead of putting it in writing, however, he instructed that it should be delivered verbally by the KGB. Alekseyev informed Castro that Khrushchev wanted him to have no doubt about ‘our sympathy and fellow-feeling’. To flatter Castro personally, he was told that he was to receive honoraria for the publication of his speeches and articles in Russian. According to Alekseyev, the Maximum Leader was ‘visibly moved’ by the news that his words were held in such esteem in Moscow. Khrushchev also announced that Cuba was free to purchase whatever arms it wished from Czechoslovakia - ‘and, if necessary, then directly from the Soviet Union’.14 The Cuban arms purchases were negotiated in Prague by a delegation headed by Raúl. Despite sleeping with his boots on and demanding the services of blonde prostitutes, he displayed a Marxist-Leninist fervour which made a good impression on his hosts. According to the Czech general responsible for hosting the Cuban delegation, ‘The[ir] villa was of course tapped but we learned nothing from our bugs that our guests would have been unwilling to tell us.’15 During Raúl’s visit to Prague, Leonov was personally instructed by the foreign intelligence chief, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Sakharovsky, head of the FCD, to travel to Prague, stay with the KGB resident and, without the knowledge of either the Czechs or the Soviet embassy, discover a way of passing on a personal invitation from Khrushchev to visit Moscow. An older and experienced KGB colonel was sent to assist him. Making contact with Raúl Castro proved more difficult than Leonov had expected. Raúl’s villa was in a closed area of the city, he travelled constantly surrounded by armed guards, and no advance timetable of his movements was available. In the end Leonov decided to sit on a street bench on a route which Raúl’s car was bound to pass on its way to the villa. Raúl would recognize Leonov, and tell the car to stop. Beyond this point, Leonov would improvise. The plan worked; Raúl picked Leonov up, and took him to the villa which the guards only allowed him to enter when he produced his Soviet diplomatic passport. Leonov waited for a moment when the guards were out of earshot, then whispered to Raúl that he had brought with him a personal invitation from Khrushchev. Two days later, on 17 July, they flew to Moscow, so deep in conversation that Leonov forgot that, for reasons of protocol, he was not supposed to accompany Raúl off the plane at the airport, where a reception committee of military top brass was waiting for him on the airport tarmac. As Leonov emerged with Raúl at the top of the aircraft steps, he was dragged away by burly KGB bodyguards who were probably unaware of his role in arranging the visit and, he believes, would have beaten him up had Raúl not shouted after him, ‘Nikolai, we must see one another again without fail!’ In the course of Raúl’s visit, further arms supplies were negotiated along with the sending to Cuba of Soviet military advisers, some of them Spanish Republican exiles living in Moscow who had fought in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War.16
As in arranging Raúl Castro’s visit to Moscow, the KGB played a much more important role than the Foreign Ministry in developing the Cuban alliance. Fidel Castro regarded Alekseyev, the KGB resident, as a personal friend, telling him of his pleasure that they ‘are able to meet directly, bypassing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and every rule of protocol’. The Maximum Leader did not take to Sergei Kudryavtsev, who arrived as Soviet ambassador in Havana following the formal establishment in May 1960 of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union. Kudryavtsev repelled the Cubans by behaving - according to Alekseyev - as arrogantly as ‘one of Batista’s generals’. He also appeared constantly preoccupied with his own security, frequently wearing a bullet-proof vest as he travelled round Havana. Castro continued to use the KGB as his main channel of communication with Moscow. Alekseyev, not Kudryavtsev, remained his chief contact within the Soviet embassy.17 The FCD set up a new section (which became its Second Department) to specialize in Latin American affairs, hitherto the responsibility of its First (North American) Department. Leonov was appointed to run the Cuban desk.18
Despite the influential KGB presence in Havana, Khrushchev’s policy to Castro’s Cuba was distorted by woefully inaccurate KGB and GRU intelligence reports from the United States. For most of the Cold War, the Washington and New York legal residencies had little success in providing the intelligence from inside the federal government which had been so plentiful during the Second World War. Their limitations were clearly exposed during the two years which led up to the most dangerous moment of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Conspiracy theory became a substitute for high-grade intelligence. On 29 June 1960 the KGB Chairman, Aleksandr Shelepin, personally delivered to Khrushchev an alarmist assessment of American policy, based on a horrifically misinformed report from an unidentified NATO liaison officer with the CIA:
In the CIA it is known that the leadership of the Pentagon is convinced of the need to initiate a war with the Soviet Union ‘as soon as possible’ . . . Right now the USA has the capability to wipe out Soviet missile bases and other military targets with its bomber forces. But over the next little while the defence forces of the Soviet Union will grow . . . and the opportunity will disappear . . . As a result of these assumptions, the chiefs at the Pentagon are hoping to launch a preventive war against the Soviet Union.
Khrushchev took this dangerously misguided report at its improbable face value. On 9 July he issued a public warning to the Pentagon ‘not to forget that, as shown at the latest tests, we have rockets which can land in a pre-set square target 13,000 kilometres away’. ‘Soviet artillerymen’, he declared, ‘can support the Cuban people with their rocket fire should the aggressive forces in the Pentagon dare to start intervention in Cuba.’ During his visit to Moscow later in July, Raúl Castro conveyed Fidel’s gratitude for Khrushchev’s speech. He also expressed his personal admiration for the KGB and asked for some of its officers to be sent to Havana to help to train Cuban intelligence. In August 1960 the Centre decided on a new codeword for Cub
a - AVANPOST (‘Bridgehead’). Thanks chiefly to Castro and the KGB, the Soviet Union now had, for the first time in its history, a foothold in Latin America.19
Castro and his chief lieutenants made no secret of their desire to inspire the rest of Latin America with their own revolutionary example. As early as April 1959 eighty guerrillas set sail from Cuba in a comic-opera attempt to ‘liberate’ Panama which ended with their own surrender to the Panamanian National Guard.20 Che Guevara, whose revolutionary fantasies were on an even grander scale than Castro’s, told Kudryavtsev in October 1960, ‘Latin America is at boiling point, and next year we can expect revolutionary explosions in several countries . . .’21 Though the explosions turned out to be damp squibs, they generated far less publicity than the CIA’s inept attempt, approved by the White House, to topple the Castro regime by landing an American-backed ‘Cuban brigade’ at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, which gave the Maximum Leader an international reputation as a revolutionary David engaged in a heroic struggle with the imperialist American Goliath. Throughout the Bay of Pigs operation, Leonov was in the office of Shelepin’s inexperienced successor as KGB Chairman, Vladimir Semichastny, briefing him every two to three hours on the latest developments. On the Chairman’s wall he put up two large maps: one showing the course of events as reported by the Americans, the other based on Soviet sources in Cuba.22 It can scarcely have occurred to either Leonov or Semichastny that the CIA operation would end so rapidly in humiliating defeat. More than 1,000 prisoners captured at the Bay of Pigs were taken to a sports stadium in Havana where for four days Castro flamboyantly interrogated and harangued them on television. At one point, broadcast on TV news programmes across the world, the prisoners applauded the man they had come to overthrow. The abortive invasion served both to raise Castro’s personal popularity to new heights and to speed Cuba’s transformation into a one-party state. In front of cheering crowds at May Day celebrations of the Cuban victory over American imperialism, Castro announced that Cuba was now a socialist state which would hold no further elections. The revolution, he declared, was the direct expression of the will of the people.
The World Was Going Our Way Page 7