The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  Schemes were also devised to kidnap a leading member of the Chilean military government, or one of Pinochet’s relatives, who could then be exchanged for Corvalán.121 These schemes too were abandoned and Corvalán was eventually exchanged for the far more harshly persecuted Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky.

  For the KGB, Pinochet represented an almost perfect villain, an ideal counterpoint to the martyred Allende. Pinochet himself played into the hands of hostile propagandists. Marxist books were burnt on bonfires in Santiago as Pinochet spoke menacingly of cutting out the ‘malignant tumour’ of Marxism from Chilean life. The Dirección de Investigaciones Nacionales (DINA) set out to turn Pinochet’s rhetoric into reality. From 1973 to 1977 its Director, General Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, reported directly to Pinochet. Official commissions established by Chile’s civilian governments after the end of military rule in 1990 documented a total of 3,197 extra-judicial executions, deaths under torture and ‘disappearances’ during the Pinochet era. Since not all could be documented, the true figure was undoubtedly higher.122 A Chilean government report in 2004 concluded that 27,000 people had been tortured or illegally imprisoned.123

  KGB active measures successfully blackened still further DINA’s deservedly dreadful reputation. Operation TOUCAN, approved by Andropov on 10 August 1976, was particularly successful in publicizing and exaggerating DINA’s foreign operations against left-wing Chilean exiles. DINA was certainly implicated in the assassination of Allende’s former Foreign Minister, Orlando Letelier, who was killed by a car bomb in the United States in 1976, and may also have been involved in the murder of other former Allende supporters living in exile. Operation TOUCAN thus had a plausible basis in actual DINA operations. TOUCAN was based on a forged letter from Contreras to Pinochet, dated 16 September 1975, which referred to expenditure involved in the expansion of DINA’s foreign operations, chief among them plans to ‘neutralize’ (assassinate) opponents of the Pinochet regime in Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, the United States, France and Italy. Service A’s forgers carefully imitated authentic DINA documents in their possession and the signature of its Director. The letter was accepted as genuine by some major newspapers and broadcasters in western Europe as well as the Americas (see appendix, p. 88). The Western media comment which caused most pleasure in the Centre was probably speculation on links between DINA and the CIA. The leading American journalist Jack Anderson, who quoted from the KGB forgery, claimed that DINA operated freely in the United States with the full knowledge of the CIA. The Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, he reported, was investigating DINA’s activities.124

  Pinochet’s military government was far more frequently denounced by Western media than other regimes with even more horrendous human-rights records. KGB active measures probably deserve some of the credit. While operation TOUCAN was at the height of its success, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were in the midst of a reign of terror in Cambodia which in only three years killed 1.5 million of Cambodia’s 7.5 million people. Yet in 1976, the New York Times published sixty-six articles on the abuse of human rights in Chile, as compared with only four on Cambodia.125 The difficulty of obtaining information from Cambodia does not provide a remotely adequate explanation for this extraordinary discrepancy.

  APPENDIX: THE SERVICE A FORGERY USED IN OPERATION TOUCAN126

  Secret to the Intelligence Service of Chile

  To the Secretariat of the President of the Republic Copy 1 DINA /R/ No.1795/107

  Explanation of the request for an increase in estimated expenditure

  DINA Santiago 16 September 1975

  From the Director of National Intelligence to the President of the Republic

  In accordance with our agreement with you, I am giving the reasons for the request for the expenditure of DINA to be increased by 600,000 American dollars in the current financial year.

  1. An additional ten members of DINA are to be sent to our missions abroad: two to Peru, two to Brazil, two to Argentina, one to Venezuela, one to Costa Rica, one to Belgium and one to Italy.

  2. Additional expenditure is required to neutralize the active opponents to the Junta abroad, especially in Mexico, Argentine, Costa Rica, the USA, France and Italy.

  3. The expense of our operations in Peru supporting our allies in the armed forces and the press (Equise and Opinion Libre).

  4. Maintenance costs for our workers taking a course for anti-partisan groups at the SNI centre at Manaus in Brazil.

  Yours sincerely,

  Colonel Manuel Contreras Sepulveda

  Director of National Intelligence

  Official stamp of DINA

  5

  Intelligence Priorities after Allende

  In February 1974 the Politburo carried out what appears to have been its first general review of Latin American policy since the Chilean coup. It defined as the three main goals of Soviet policy: ‘to steadily broaden and strengthen the USSR’s position on the continent; to provide support to the progressive, anti-American elements struggling for political and economic independence; and to provide active opposition to Chinese penetration’. Significantly, there was no mention either of encouragement to revolutionary movements in Latin America or of any prospect, outside Cuba, of a new Marxist-led government on the Allende model. The KGB’s main priorities were ‘to expose the plans of the US and its allies against the progressive, patriotic forces and the USSR’; to provide ‘full and timely intelligence coverage’ of the whole of Latin America (including what the Centre called ‘white [blank] spots’ in those countries which had no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union); to expand the number of confidential contacts in Latin American regimes without resorting to the more risky process of agent recruitment; and to maintain clandestine contact with nineteen Communist parties, two-thirds of which were still illegal or semi-illegal. 1

  The five main targets for KGB operations identified in 1974 were Cuba, Argentina, Peru, Brazil and Mexico. Significantly, neither Nicaragua nor Chile any longer ranked as a priority target. In Nicaragua, the prospects for a Sandinista revolution were no longer taken seriously in the Centre. In Chile the firm grip established by the Pinochet military regime seemed to exclude any further experience of ‘Socialism with red wine’ for the foreseeable future.

  As the only surviving Marxist regime in Latin America after the overthrow of the Allende regime, Cuba ranked clearly first in the KGB’s order of priorities. In the view of both the Centre and the Politburo: ‘Cuba is taking on an important role as a proponent of socialist ideas. F. Castro’s reorientation in important political issues (disclaiming the policy of exporting the revolution, accepting a single form of socialism based on Marxist-Leninist doctrine) is of great importance.’2

  At the Twenty-fourth Congress of the CPSU, held in the great palace of the Kremlin in 1971, Fidel Castro had received louder applause than any of the other fraternal delegates - to the deep, though private, irritation of some of them.3 To many foreign Party bureaucrats in their sober business suits, it must have seemed very unfair that, after many years of never straying from the Moscow line, they should arouse less enthusiasm than the flamboyant Castro who had so recently dabbled in revisionism.

  Castro’s popularity in Moscow was due partly to the fact that he had established himself as the Soviet Union’s most persuasive advocate in the Third World. He was the star performer at the Fourth Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement which met in Algiers in 1973, arguing the Soviet case more eloquently than any Soviet spokesman could have done. The host nation, Algeria, supported the traditional non-aligned policy of equidistance between East and West, arguing that there were ‘two imperialisms’: one capitalist, the other Communist. Castro insisted, however, that the countries of the Soviet bloc were the natural and necessary allies of the non-aligned:

  How can the Soviet Union be labelled imperialist? Where are its monopoly corporations? Where is its participation in multinational companies? What factories, what mines, what oilfields does it own in the underdeveloped worl
d? What worker is exploited in any country of Asia, Africa or Latin America by Soviet capital?

  . . . Only the closest alliance among all the progressive forces of the world will provide us with the strength needed to overcome the still-powerful forces of imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism and racism, and to wage a successful fight for the aspirations to peace and justice of all the peoples of the world.

  The delegates were at least partly persuaded. The conference rejected the views of its Algerian hosts, failed to brand the Soviet Union as imperialist and denounced the ‘aggressive imperialism’ of the West as ‘the greatest obstacle on the road toward emancipation and progress of the developing countries’.4

  As well as proving an eloquent advocate of the Soviet cause in the international arena, Cuba was also an important intelligence ally. The Centre established what it regarded as ‘good working relations’ with the head of the DGI, José Méndez Cominches.5 By 1973, if not earlier, Méndez Cominches was attending conferences of the intelligence chiefs of the Soviet bloc. At that time seventy-eight Cuban intelligence officers were at KGB training schools. Technical equipment valued by the Centre at 2 million rubles was provided free of charge to the DGI. The KGB liaison mission in Havana contained experts in all the main ‘lines’ of intelligence operation who provided the Cubans with ‘assistance in the planning of their work’.6 After the mass expulsion of Soviet intelligence officers from London in 1971, the DGI’s London station took over the running of some KGB operations in Britain .7 By, and probably before, 1973, the KGB maintained ‘operational contact’ with the DGI in six foreign capitals as well as in Havana.8 During the 1970s the KGB made increasing use of DGI assistance in operations against the Main Adversary both inside and outside the United States. In 1976, for example, the KGB and DGI agreed on ‘joint cultivation’ of targets in the National Security Agency, the Pentagon and US military bases in Latin America and Spain. The DGI was thought particularly useful in cultivating Hispanics and blacks. Two of the five ‘talent-spotting leads’ in the United States selected by the KGB for ‘joint cultivation’ with the DGI in 1976 were African-American cipher clerks.9

  In Latin America during the 1970s the DGI had fewer legal residencies than the KGB, chiefly because of the smaller number of states with which Cuba maintained diplomatic relations. In 1976- 77 there appear to have been DGI residencies only in Ecuador, Guyana, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Peru and Venezuela.10 Though Mitrokhin’s notes provide only fragmentary information, all appear to have assisted KGB operations in various ways. In 1977 the DGI informed the KGB liaison office in Havana that it had a series of agents in ‘high official positions’ in Mexico, including the Interior Ministry and police force, and suggested that they be run jointly.11 Mitrokhin’s notes do not mention whether this offer was accepted.

  The Centre seems to have been well informed about even the most highly classified aspect of DGI activity - its illegal operations. In the early 1970s the DGI had about forty-five illegals, all of whom went on year-long KGB training courses in Moscow.12 Some KGB illegals with bogus Latin American identities were sent to Cuba to perfect their language skills and acclimatize themselves to living in a Latin American environment before being deployed to their final destinations. In 1976 a senior KGB delegation including both the head and deputy head of the FCD illegals directorate, Vadim Alekseyevich Kirpichenko and Marius Aramovich Yuzbashyan, went to Havana to discuss co-operation with their counterparts in the DGI. Agreement was reached on the joint training of several Latin American illegals for deployment against US, Latin American, Spanish and Maoist targets. The DGI agreed that the KGB could use its radio communications system to relay messages to its illegals operating in the United States and Latin America. During a return visit to Moscow the following year, the head of the DGI illegals directorate agreed to recruit two or three illegals for the KGB.13

  Cuba was also one of the most important bases for KGB SIGINT operations, chiefly against US targets. The KGB file on the 1979 running costs of intercept posts in KGB residencies around the world shows that the Havana post (codenamed TERMIT-S) had the third largest budget; only the Washington and New York posts were more expensive to operate.14 An even larger intercept post, also targeted on the United States, was situated in the massive SIGINT base set up by the GRU at Lourdes in Cuba in the mid-1960s to monitor US Navy communications and other high-frequency transmissions.15 On 25 April 1975 a secret Soviet government decree (No. 342-115) authorized the establishment of a new KGB SIGINT station (codenamed TERMIT-P) within the Lourdes base, which began operations in December 1976. Run by the Sixteenth Directorate, TERMIT-P had a fixed 12-metre dish antenna and a mobile 7-metre dish antenna mounted on a covered lorry, which enabled it to intercept microwave communications ‘downlinked’ from US satellites or transmitted between microwave towers. 16

  As well as co-operating closely with the DGI in a variety of intelligence operations, the KGB maintained an undeclared residency in Havana which kept close watch on the Castro regime and the mood of the population; in 1974 it sent 205 reports by cable and sixty-four by diplomatic bag. Its sources included sixty-three agents and sixty-seven co-optees among the large Soviet community. 17 The aspect of Cuban intelligence which gave greatest concern to the Havana residency was its internal security. Though brutal by Western standards, Cuban internal surveillance struck the Centre as unacceptably feeble. The department charged with combating ideological subversion had a total establishment of only 180, many of them - in the KGB’s view - poorly qualified. According to a report from the Havana residency in 1976, one Cuban anti-subversion officer had recruited five out of fourteen members of a Cuban orchestra simply ‘in case the orchestra went on tour abroad’.18 The Centre was particularly disturbed by the fact that it could not persuade the DGI to share its own obsession with Zionist ‘subversion’. The KGB liaison office drew the DGI’s attention to the presence of seventeen Zionist organizations in Cuba but complained to the Centre that no action had been taken against any of them.19

  By Soviet standards, the Cuban surveillance department was also seriously understaffed. With a total of 278 staff in Havana and 112 in the provinces in 1976, the KGB residency calculated that it could deploy only about twelve surveillance groups of nine or ten people per day. Because of the two-shift system, this meant that it was able to keep full-time surveillance of only six moving targets.20 The KGB was also dissatisfied with the scale of Cuban eavesdropping and letter-opening. The 260 people employed to monitor telephone conversations and eavesdropping devices listened in to a daily average of only about 900 international phone calls.21 Cuban censorship monitored about 800 addresses on a full-time basis and translated 300 to 500 foreign-language letters a day.22

  The Centre’s concern at the Cuban failure to reproduce its own absurdly labour-intensive systems of surveillance and obsessive pursuit of even the most trivial forms of ideological subversion was most evident in the months before Brezhnev’s visit to Cuba early in 1974. The Havana residency was also worried by what it believed was lax treatment of Cuban political prisoners. Of the 8,000 ‘sentenced for counter-revolutionary activity’, many were reported to be allowed home once a month and on public holidays. Particular concern was caused by the fact that some of the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ given this comparatively lenient treatment had in the past made ‘anti-Soviet statements’ and might be on the streets during Brezhnev’s visit.23

  No dissident, however, disturbed the stage-managed welcome given to the vain and decrepit Soviet leader in Havana’s Revolution Square by a crowd officially estimated at over a million people. Castro’s own words of welcome plumbed new depths of platitudinous sycophancy. ‘No other foreign visitor to Cuba’, he declared, ‘has ever been welcomed by our people so joyfully or with such rapturous enthusiasm as was Comrade Brezhnev.’ Castro eulogized Brezhnev’s own stumbling banalities as ‘major political statements of tremendous importance’ for the entire world:

  It must be remembered that we attach paramount impor
tance to the history of the Soviet Union itself and to the role played by the CPSU. I refer to both the USSR’s role in the development of the history of all mankind and to the role which the USSR and the CPSU have played in the cause of solidarity with Cuba . . . For us, Comrade Brezhnev - the most eminent Soviet leader - personifies, as it were, the entire policy of the USSR and the CPSU. And it was for this reason that our people looked forward to his arrival and were eager to express their feelings of friendship, profound respect and gratitude towards the Soviet Union.24