Just as some of the Old Left of the 1930s, seduced by the myth-image of the Soviet Union as the world’s first worker-peasant state, had been blind to the savage reality of Stalin’s Russia, so a generation later many of the New Left of the 1960s shut their eyes to the increasingly authoritarian (though much less homicidal) nature of Castro’s rule and his sometimes brutal disregard of basic human rights. The heroic image of Castro as a revolutionary David in battle fatigues blockaded on his island by the Goliath of American imperialism had a global appeal exploited by Soviet as well as Cuban propagandists. Among Castro’s most naively enthusiastic Western supporters were the Americans of the Venceremos (‘We Shall Overcome’) Brigade, who from 1969 onwards came to cut sugar cane in Cuba and show their solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. Castro paid public tribute to the courage of the brigadistas ‘in defying the ire of the imperialists’. 73
Privately, however, he looked askance at the presence of gay and women’s liberation movements among his American New Left supporters. Venceremos feminists, for their part, were taken aback by the behaviour of the Cuban female singers sent to entertain the Brigade: ‘They frequently had bleached hair and tight-fitting skirts, and relied on sexual gestures and flirtation with the audience. We knew that, when not entertaining, these women were probably dedicated revolutionaries, doing hard work. The incongruity was hard to deal with.’74
Doubtless reflecting the views of the Maximum Leader, the DGI complained to the KGB that many of the New Left brigadistas were homosexuals and drug addicts. Venceremos gays, the DGI bizarrely reported, saw ‘the possibility of using homosexuality to bring about the physical degeneration of American imperialism’. The Brigade, however, proved a valuable source of US identity documents for use in illegal intelligence operations.75 The brigadistas were also regarded as an important propaganda asset.
Castro’s return to Moscow loyalism had an immediate effect on the DGI’s relations with the KGB. As a DGI officer later acknowledged, its role ‘was always limited by the fact that Fidel Castro’s strategic assumptions, personal convictions and intuitions were effectively off limits. Cuban intelligence was unable to challenge or contradict these.’76 In accordance with the wishes of the Maximum Leader, during the winter of 1968-69 all heads of DGI overseas stations were recalled to Havana to be given new instructions on co-operation with the KGB. The DGI chief, Manuel Piñeiro, informed them that there had been a ‘lessening of contradictions’ between Cuba and the Soviet Union, and that they were to participate in a major new drive to collect scientific and technological intelligence (S&T) for the USSR. Piñeiro, however, had incurred the displeasure of the Centre as a result of his earlier investigation of KGB contacts with the pro-Moscow ‘microfaction’ before its show trial in January 1968. Early in 1969 KGB pressure led to his replacement by the more reliably pro-Soviet José Méndez Cominches. Henceforth the main priority of the DGI was intelligence collection rather than the export of revolution. Assistance to national liberation movements was hived off to the newly independent Dirección de Liberación Nacional (DLN), later the Departamento de América (DA), headed by Piñeiro.77 Following a trip by Raúl Castro to Moscow in the spring of 1970, there was a purge of those DGI officers who still appeared reluctant to co-operate with the KGB. A senior KGB adviser was given an office next door to the DGI chief, Méndez.78
The Soviet ‘bridgehead’ in Cuba seemed once again secure.
4
‘Progressive’ Regimes and ‘Socialism with Red Wine’
At the beginning of the 1970s the greater part of Latin America was still, in Andropov’s phrase, ‘a new field for Soviet foreign policy activity’. He wrote in an unusually frank memorandum to the FCD, ‘Our leaders know very little about Latin America. We must write more about these countries, and draw attention to them.’ Andropov was determined that the lead in expanding Soviet influence in Latin America should be taken not by the Foreign Ministry but by the KGB:
We must remember that, when it comes to shedding light on the situation in the countries of Latin America, without us neither the Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor the Ministry of Foreign Trade will be able to undertake any effective action. We must be the first to establish contacts with important individuals in those countries where we do not have embassies, and to send our officers there on short or long-term visits.1
Andropov was anxious to exploit the new opportunities for KGB operations offered by the emergence of ‘progressive’ military regimes in Peru and Bolivia, and by the election of a Marxist President of Chile. Rather than attempting the high-risk strategy of trying to recruit Latin American Presidents and other leading politicians as Soviet agents, Andropov’s preferred strategy was to turn as many as possible into ‘confidential contacts’, willing to have clandestine meetings with KGB officers who attempted to influence their policies, particularly towards the United States.2 Agent recruitment was pursued only at a lower level of the Latin American political and official hierarchies, as well as in the media and other professions.
The KGB’s greatest asset in recruiting both confidential contacts and an agent network was the popular resentment in Latin America at the arrogance of the Yanqui colossus of the North. The Centre’s leading Latin American expert, Nikolai Leonov, who had been the first to identify Fidel Castro’s revolutionary potential, later acknowledged:
All political efforts by the Soviet government, and hence by our country’s intelligence service, were aimed at causing the greatest possible harm to North American dominance in this part of the world. So we supported politically, sometimes by sending weaponry or other aid, anyone who was against United States dominance - any government, any national liberation movement, any revolutionary group. However, with few exceptions, the extreme left [other than pro-Moscow Communist parties] did not enjoy great popularity in the Kremlin at that time. They were feared, and for that reason were always sidelined. But reasonable patriotic centre-left forces in Latin America always found strong support in the USSR. I personally took part in many operations of this type. I worked with many Latin American leaders, trying at least to encourage them, to help them as far as possible in their anti-American stance.3
Moscow’s suspicion of ‘the extreme left’ was due, in large part, to fear that it was contaminated with Maoist heresy. A subsidiary theme in KGB operations in Latin America was to defeat the Chinese challenge to Soviet Communism. Alistair Horne wrote in 1972:
It is not in South-east Asia, the Middle East or Africa that the ideological battle of the seventies seems likely to be waged, but in South America. Here, one feels, may well be the battleground where the orthodoxy of Soviet communism will triumph definitively over Maoism or vice-versa.4
That estimate proved to be exaggerated, though at the beginning of the twenty-first century the main vestiges of Maoist revolutionary movements - in particular the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) - were located in Latin America. At the beginning of the 1970s, however, Horne’s prophecy seemed highly plausible.
The first ‘progressive’ junta to attract the attention of the Centre in Latin America was in Peru. To Marxist-Leninists, class conflict in Peru seemed to make it ripe for revolution. Since the foundation of the Peruvian Republic in 1821, vast wealth had been concentrated in the hands of an urban élite, while the mass of the rural population - mostly aboriginals - lived in grinding poverty. Land ownership was more unequal than anywhere else in Latin America. In the 1960s 9 per cent of landowners owned 82 per cent of the land, while millions of peasants had none at all. The slums which ringed Lima, mostly inhabited by peasants unable to make a living in the countryside, were among the most wretched on the continent. Half-hearted land reform was halted in the mid-1960s by a hostile, conservative Congress.5 Dependency theory, which became popular in the 1950s and 1960s, blamed Peru’s backwardness on American imperialism. In order to maintain its own prosperity, the United States was allegedly promoting the ‘underdevelopment’ or ‘dependency’ of Latin America by controlling access to m
ajor natural resources, by maintaining financial and military control, and by other methods designed to prevent its southern neighbours escaping from their poverty. The US-owned International Petroleum Company, an Exxon subsidiary which dominated Peru’s petroleum industry, seemed to the Latin American left to symbolize the way in which the power of American capital undermined Peruvian national sovereignty.6
Peru’s political history had been punctuated by military coups. However, the junta headed by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, which seized power in October 1968, broke with precedent. It was the first Peruvian coup led by left-wing radicals, many of them with a background in military intelligence. ‘Intelligence’, claimed one of the radicals, ‘. . . opened our eyes and made us see the urgency for change in our country.’ Within days of his coup, on what became known as ‘National Dignity Day’, Velasco nationalized the International Petroleum Company without compensation,7 and began preparations for a series of other nationalizations. The junta went on to announce a radical programme of land reform and sought to prevent the flight of capital to Swiss bank accounts by giving itself the power to inspect bank deposits. Its policies combined radical reform with military discipline. The junta banned the riotous annual Lima carnival on the grounds of public safety and arrested those who transgressed traditional standards of sexual propriety in public parks.8
Since the Soviet Union did not have diplomatic relations with Peru at the time of the coup, it had no embassy or legal residency capable of reporting on the new regime. Nikolai Leonov, who had recently been given accelerated promotion to the post of deputy head of the FCD Second (Latin American) Department, was sent to investigate, staying at a Lima hotel posing as a correspondent of the Novosti Press Agency. With the help of the press office at the Peruvian Foreign Ministry, Leonov succeeded in making contact with a number of members and supporters of the new regime. His stay was none the less a difficult one - chiefly, he believed, because the CIA had revealed his real identity to a number of its local contacts. As a result, Leonov later claimed, he received threatening phone calls in Russian and the unwanted attentions of a photographer who took numerous pictures of him while he was dining in restaurants. On one occasion, he was ‘followed along the street by a carload of semi-naked girls’ - possibly festival dancers whose playful intentions Leonov misconstrued as a CIA provocation. A further difficulty was the fact that the only way that he could communicate with the Centre from Lima was by post. When he went to the main post office, he was told not to seal his letters with sticky tape, doubtless in order to make them easier to open. On one occasion early in 1969, when he felt it necessary to send a top-secret cipher telegram to Moscow, he had to travel to the KGB residency in Chile to do so. Though Mitrokhin did not note the text of Leonov’s report, its tone was clearly optimistic. ‘We were’, Leonov said later, ‘working politically against the United States and we put all our heart into this task.’9 The Centre could not fail to be impressed by the new opportunities in Peru for operations against the United States. In February 1969, after an unbroken period of co-operation between American and Peruvian armed forces stretching back to the Second World War, all US military missions were expelled. For the first time, Peru began to turn for military assistance to the Soviet Union. In an attempt to strengthen popular support for its reform policies, the Velasco regime became the first Latin American military junta to form an undeclared tactical alliance with the Communists. Though the previously outlawed Peruvian Communist Party remained illegal, it was permitted to operate openly from its Lima headquarters and to publish its own newspaper.10
In August 1969, following the establishment of Peruvian-Soviet diplomatic relations, the KGB set up its first residency in Lima, headed for the next seven years by Arseni Fyodorovich Orlov.11 Orlov reported optimistically that the military government was adopting ‘a progressive, anti-imperialist line’ with the support of the Communist Party.12 When armed Communists took over the headquarters of the Bankworkers’ Union in June 1970, the government failed to intervene. The most popular manifestation of Peru’s new Soviet connection was the arrival of the Moscow State Circus, which performed in Lima’s Plaza de Toros for an entire month.13
The Lima residency quickly acquired several ‘confidential contacts’ in the junta. One was reported to be President Velasco’s ‘most trusted confidant’ and a ‘firm supporter’ of collaboration between the Peruvian intelligence community and the KGB.14 Orlov reported that, thanks to the good offices of another member of the junta, ‘the Residency has established contact with the President.’15 One of Velasco’s senior advisers (identified by name in Mitrokhin’s notes) was recruited as a KGB agent. According to a 1971 report from the residency, which records a payment to him of $5,000: ‘He enjoys the trust of President Velasco Alvarado. Through [him] influence is exerted on the President and on members of the Peruvian government, and public opinion is shaped through him. Two government newspapers are under his control.’16
In order to impress Soviet leaders, the KGB commonly exaggerated its ability to ‘shape’ foreign public opinion, and it may well have done so in this case. However, the Lima residency undoubtedly approved the Velasco regime’s censorship of media opposition to it. In January 1972 there were world-wide protests at the sequestration of Peru’s leading newspaper, La Prensa, the most influential of the junta’s critics. The nineteenth-century house of its proprietor, Don Pedro Beltrán, an important part of Lima’s cultural heritage, was demolished on the pretext of street-widening. The New York Times denounced the ‘savage vendetta against one of the most respected journalists in the Americas’. 17
Encouraged by the Lima residency’s contacts with the junta, the KGB proposed formal co-operation with its Peruvian counterpart, the Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional (SIN), codenamed KONTORA. Negotiations between KGB and SIN representatives produced a draft agreement providing for an exchange of intelligence, co-operation in security measures, KGB training for SIN officers and the provision to SIN of KGB ‘operational technical equipment’. In June 1971 the CPSU Central Committee approved the draft agreement. Two operations officers and one technical specialist were stationed in Lima to liaise with SIN. Meetings between Soviet and Peruvian intelligence officers took place about once a week, usually in SIN safe apartments. The Lima residency noted with satisfaction that one of the immediate consequences of the agreement was the ending of SIN surveillance of the embassy and other Soviet offices.18 With KGB assistance, SIN set up a surveillance post near the US embassy which secretly photographed all those entering and leaving, and recorded their names in a card index. SIN later used KGB equipment to record embassy phone calls and intercept radio messages. 19 The Centre claimed that co-operation with SIN led to ‘the neutralization of an American agent network in the [Peruvian] trade unions and the liquidation of an American intelligence operational technical group’. It also claimed the credit for ‘the exposure of the conspiratorial activity’ of the Minister of Internal Affairs, General Armando Artola, who appears to have opposed the Soviet connection and was sacked in 1971.20
Initially, KGB liaison officers found some members of SIN ‘guarded’ in their dealings with them. According to KGB files, however, many were won over by items of current intelligence, gifts, birthday greetings, ‘material assistance’, invitations to visit the Soviet Union and other friendly gestures.21 Mitrokhin concluded from his reading of KGB files that intelligence both from ‘confidential contacts’ in the junta and from SIN was ‘highly valued’ in the Centre.22 In 1973 the new head of SIN, General Enrique Gallegos Venero, visited Moscow for discussions with Andropov, Fyodor Mortin, head of the FCD, and other senior KGB officers. During his visit it was agreed to extend intelligence co-operation to include Peruvian military intelligence (codenamed SHTAB by the KGB).23 Though apparently satisfied with the results of Gallegos’s visit, the Centre took a somewhat censorious view of the behaviour of SIN officers, ranging in rank from captain to lieutenant-colonel, who were invited to Moscow at its expense (air travel in
cluded) to take part in FCD training courses. One KGB report primly concluded:
The World Was Going Our Way Page 10