Castro did not feel it necessary, however, to display the same level of sycophancy to other Soviet bloc leaders. The KGB reported that the visit to Cuba shortly after Brezhnev’s by Erich Honecker, the East German leader, had gone extremely badly. In private meetings Castro accused East Germany and other ‘socialist countries’ of doing little to help Cuba and ‘profiteering’ at Cuban expense by refusing to pay a fair price for its sugar. Honecker was said to have responded ‘in an angry and intemperate manner’. ‘If I had known that Castro would react in this manner to our visit’, he told his staff, ‘I would not have gone.’ The atmosphere at Havana airport on Honecker’s departure was said to have been ‘extremely cold’. His entourage spent much of the flight home trying to calm him down, fearful - according to the KGB - that news of his row with Castro might leak to the West.25 Behind the scenes, however, the conflict continued. In 1977 the East German Ministry of State Security (Stasi) liaison officer in Havana, Johann Münzel, told one of his KGB colleagues that the Cuban leadership were doing little to address their economic problems and simply expected other socialist countries to bail them out in the name of ‘proletarian internationalism’. The DGI simultaneously complained to the KGB that Stasi officers were inclined to lecture them rather than treat them as colleagues.26
Moscow, however, judged Cuba’s private quarrels with some member states of the Warsaw Pact in the mid-1970s as of far less significance than its public contribution to the establishment of new Marxist regimes in Africa. The FCD declared in a report to Andropov in 1976, ‘Africa has turned into an arena for a global struggle between the two systems [communism and capitalism] for a long time to come.’27 Cuban assistance in that struggle was of crucial importance. The nearly simultaneous break-up of the Portuguese Empire and the overthrow of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie brought to power self-proclaimed Marxist regimes in Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia. In Angola, the richest of Portugal’s colonies, the end of Portuguese rule was followed in 1975 by a full-scale civil war in which the Marxist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was opposed by the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Though small-scale Soviet support for the MPLA, led by Agostinho Neto, had begun a decade earlier, the decisive factor in the struggle for power was the arrival of Cuban troops beginning in the autumn of 1975. Disappointed by the declining prospects for revolution in Latin America, Castro looked on Angola as an opportunity both to establish himself as a great revolutionary leader on the world stage and to revive flagging revolutionary fervour at home.28 According to Castro’s friend, the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez:
He personally had picked up the commanders of the battalion of special forces that left in the first flight and had driven them himself in his Soviet jeep to the foot of the plane ramp. There was no spot on the map of Angola that he hadn’t memorized. His concentration on the war was so intense and meticulous that he could quote any figure on Angola as if it were Cuba, and he spoke of Angolan cities, customs and people as if he had lived there his entire life.29
Though the initiative for intervention in Angola was Cuban, from October 1975 it was enthusiastically encouraged by Moscow. During the next three months, the Soviet General Staff arranged the transport of over 12,000 Cuban troops to Africa by sea and air, as well as supplying them with advanced military hardware. Moscow was delighted with Castro’s willingness to respect its political primacy in Angola. The Soviet chargé d’affaires in Luanda, G. A. Zverev, reported in March 1976, ‘Close [Soviet-Cuban] co-ordination in Angola during the war has had very positive results.’ The Luanda embassy demonstrated its missionary zeal by distributing huge amounts of Soviet propaganda. By the summer it had run out of portraits of Lenin and requested a further airlift.30
The Centre was also delighted by the level of Cuban intelligence collaboration. Castro sent the head of the DGI, Méndez Cominches, to take personal charge of intelligence operations in Angola, where, according to KGB files, he regularly provided ‘valuable political and operational intelligence’. Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD, gained Andropov’s approval to send Méndez Cominches regular food parcels from Moscow, each valued by the Centre at 500 rubles, to encourage his continued co-operation.31 Pedro Pupo Pérez, the acting head of the DGI in Havana during Méndez Cominches’s absence, also provided intelligence on Africa and Latin America, and was rewarded with a gift valued at 350 rubles which was intended to ‘consolidate confidential relations’.32 Among the DGI operations in Angola carried out to assist the KGB was a penetration of the Brazilian embassy to obtain intelligence on its cipher system. A technical specialist from the KGB’s Sixteenth (SIGINT) Directorate flew out from Moscow with equipment which enabled a DGI agent to photograph the wiring of the embassy’s Swiss-made TS-803 cipher machine.33 The KGB regularly showed its appreciation to the Cuban Interior Minister, Sergio del Valle, who was responsible for the DGI, for keeping it informed about ‘important political and operational questions’. During a visit to Moscow in 1975, he was presented by Viktor Chebrikov, Deputy Chairman (and future Chairman) of the KGB, with a gift valued at 160 rubles.34 In January 1977, during another visit to Moscow, Andropov approved the presentation to del Valle by Kryuchkov of a gift worth up to 600 rubles ‘in return for information and in order to consolidate relations’.35 Del Valle’s relations with senior KGB officers became so close that he was even willing, on occasion, to complain to them about Castro’s delusions of grandeur as a great international revolutionary leader.36
Late in 1977 Soviet-Cuban collaboration in Angola was extended to Ethiopia in support of the vaguely Marxist military junta headed by Lieutenant-Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam in its war against Somalia. During the winter of 1977-78 Soviet military aircraft, as well as shipping huge quantities of arms, transported 17,000 Cuban troops to Addis Ababa.37 The Cuban forces worked closely with Soviet military advisers to co-ordinate troop movements and military tactics. Their presence in Ethiopia, initially kept secret, was publicly admitted by Castro on 15 March 1978. ‘The Cuban internationalist fighters’, he declared, ‘stood out for their extraordinary effectiveness and magnificent combat ability.’ It was ‘really admirable’ to see ‘how many sons of our people were capable of going to that distant land and fighting there as if fighting in their own country’. In both Moscow and Havana, Cuban military intervention and the decisive defeat of the Somali forces were celebrated as a triumph of proletarian internationalism.38 A joint report in April by the Soviet Foreign Ministry and the International Department of the Central Committee noted with satisfaction: ‘The Soviet Union and Cuba are in constant contact aimed at co-ordination of their actions in support of the Ethiopian revolution.’39
The level of Cuban intelligence and military collaboration during the mid- and late 1970s met and probably exceeded the expectations of the Centre and the Politburo during the policy review of 1974. A KGB delegation to Cuba in 1978, headed by Deputy Chairman Vadim Petrovich Pirozhkov, presented Fidel and Raúl Castro with PSM pistols and ammunition. Raúl was also given a dinner service and food parcel valued at 450 rubles.40 By contrast, KGB operations in the other four priority Latin American targets agreed in 1974 - Argentina, Peru, Mexico and Brazil - failed to achieve as much as the Centre had hoped.
In the immediate aftermath of the Pinochet coup in Chile, the main opportunity identified by the KGB for the expansion of Soviet influence in South America was in Argentina. Twelve days after Allende’s death, Juan Domingo Perón was elected President. Perón’s third wife, María Estela (Isabel) Martínez, a confidential contact of the KGB, became Vice-President. Peronist nationalism, once regarded in Moscow as a ‘fascist’ phenomenon, now fitted in well with the KGB strategy of undermining US preponderance in Latin America by cultivating anti-American leaders.
First elected as President of Argentina in 1946, Perón had been forced into exile in Spain and his under-age mistress sent to a reformatory after a military coup i
n 1955. Eighteen years later his political fortunes revived with the election in May 1973 of a Peronist candidate, Héctor José Cámpora, as President. The only foreign heads of state to attend Cámpora’s inauguration, which was boycotted by most other political leaders, were Latin America’s two Marxist presidents: Salvador Allende of Chile and Osvaldo Dorticós of Cuba. Within a few days Cámpora had established diplomatic relations with Cuba, East Germany and North Korea. He also moved quickly to legalize the previously outlawed Argentinian Communist Party (CPA). Aware that Cámpora had been elected chiefly to pave the way for Perón himself, the Centre gained Brezhnev’s permission to use a Peronist deputy, who had been recruited as a confidential contact by the Buenos Aires residency, to approach Perón while he was still in exile in Spain, sound him out on his policy towards the Soviet Union and propose ‘unofficial contacts with Soviet representatives’ once he became President. Though Perón was not told, the ‘Soviet representatives’ were to be KGB officers.41 Isabel Perón received a more direct approach from the KGB. Vladimir Konstantinovich Tolstikov (codenamed LOMOV), who had succeeded Leonov as head of the Second (Latin American) Department in 1971, travelled to Spain to make personal contact with her, apparently posing as a representative of the Soviet film export agency and bringing with him a number of gifts.42
On 13 July Cámpora resigned the presidency in order to make it possible for Perón to stand in new presidential elections in September. The CPA immediately offered him an electoral alliance. Though Perón rejected the offer and purged Marxists from the Peronist movement, he none the less received Communist support during the campaign.43 His inauguration as President in October was attended by a Soviet delegation which included Tolstikov, travelling under the alias Sergei Sergeyevich Konstantinov. Rather than drawing attention to himself by a direct approach to Vice-President Isabel Perón, Tolstikov made indirect contact with her through the leading Chilean exile in Argentina, General Carlos Prats González, a former commander-in-chief of the Chilean army whom Allende had made Interior Minister a year before the coup. Prats was given $10,000 from the funds allocated by the Central Committee for ‘work with the Chilean resistance and émigré community’ after the overthrow of the Allende regime. At Tolstikov’s request, Prats reminded Isabel Perón of their meetings in Spain and the gifts she had received from Tolstikov, and asked her to arrange a meeting between him and her husband after the departure of the rest of the Soviet delegation. Tolstikov did not identify himself as a KGB officer. Instead he posed as a senior Latin American specialist in the Foreign Ministry who could henceforth provide a direct confidential channel to the Soviet leadership. Isabel Perón arranged for Tolstikov to be received by the President at his private residence at 9 a.m. on 21 October.
The KGB had no illusion about the prospects of turning Juan Perón into an Argentinian Allende. His secret meeting with Tolstikov, however, confirmed his potential as an ally against the Main Adversary. Perón denounced the United States’ ‘predatory economic policy towards Argentina’ and the high-handed behaviour of American companies: ‘Like an infection, American capital penetrates through all the cracks.’ He told Tolstikov not to be misled by his public expressions of ‘friendship toward the United States’: ‘If one is not in a position to defeat the enemy, then one must try to deceive him.’ Perón also subjected Tolstikov to an exposition of his confused political philosophy, claiming that his ‘concept of justicialismo, or a society based on fairness, differed very little from socialism’. However, ‘the transformation of society proceeds harmoniously and in stages, changing the social structure gradually and not subjecting it to a radical break, which causes great disruption and economic ruin’. Tolstikov then had to listen patiently as Perón subjected him to a rambling disquisition of his views on a variety of other subjects. To the Centre, however, the meeting between Tolstikov and Perón must have seemed an important success. For the first time since Allende’s death, the KGB had opened a direct, covert channel to the President of a major South American state.44
Tolstikov also held talks with Perón’s influential Economics Minister, José Gelbard (codenamed BAKIN), a confidential contact of the Buenos Aires residency since 1970 who would, the Centre hoped, ‘exert useful influence’ on Perón. According to KGB files, Gelbard was described by Castro as an undeclared Communist. Together with two other Jewish businessmen, he secretly helped to finance the Argentinian Communist Party and held regular meetings with the KGB resident, Vasili Mikhailovich Muravyev, in one of the businessmen’s houses. Before each meeting the businessman picked up the resident in his car at a pre-arranged location in Buenos Aires, then drove him to his house to meet Gelbard, who entered through the back door and supplied what the KGB considered ‘important political and economic information’. Meetings of the Communist leadership also sometimes took place in the same house.45
In December 1973 Tolstikov reported to the Centre that Gelbard was, as expected, ‘in favour of strengthening political and economic relations with the USSR’. ‘He believes that co-operation with the USSR in the fields of hydro-electric energy, petrochemicals, ship-building, and fishing will help put an end to Argentina’s dependence on the US, and will reinforce progressive tendencies in government policy.’
Gelbard asked Tolstikov for a Soviet trade delegation to be sent to Argentina. His request was reinforced by the general secretary of the Argentinian Communist Party, Arnedo Alvarez, who told Tolstikov that the delegation would reinforce Perón’s links with ‘democratic forces’. Tolstikov’s meeting with Gelbard was considered of such importance that the Centre sent a report on it to Brezhnev, who speedily approved the sending of a trade mission.46 Perón turned the arrival of the Soviet delegation in January 1974 into a public relations circus which was in striking contrast to the cool reception accorded to a US delegation a few months later.47 The Centre judged many of the reports it received from the Buenos Aires residency in 1974 ‘especially valuable’, and passed some of them on to Brezhnev.48
In May 1974 Gelbard and a 140-strong Argentinian trade delegation made a highly publicized return visit to the Soviet bloc. The importance attached to the visit was demonstrated by the numerous red carpets laid out for Gelbard in Moscow, where he was successively received in private audience by Brezhnev, Aleksei Kosygin, the Prime Minister, and Nikolai Podgorny, the Soviet President. Radio Moscow congratulated Argentina for having ‘shown other countries in South America how to strengthen their independence and how to free themselves from the shackles of the multi-national corporation’. While in Moscow, Gelbard signed trade and economic co-operation agreements by which the Soviet Union agreed to long-term credits of $600 million - about twice those granted to Allende’s Chile. Similar agreements with other countries in the Soviet bloc added long-term credits worth another $350 million. There were advantages to both sides in the agreements. The Soviet Union, obliged by the failure of its collective agriculture to import massive amounts of grain, had an obvious interest in increasing the number of its suppliers and in particular to limit its dependence on US imports. Argentina, faced with the protectionism of the European Community and contracting demand elsewhere as a result of the dramatic oil price rise of 1973, was anxious to find new markets.49
The hopes raised in the Centre for its Argentinian operations by Juan Perón’s election in September 1973, however, declined rapidly after his sudden death from a heart attack on 1 July 1974. Though his widow and successor, Isabel, was a KGB confidential contact, she lacked both the personal authority and political skill of her husband. Gelbard was sacked as Economics Minister in 1975. In March 1976 Isabel Perón was ousted in a right-wing military coup led by General Jorge Videla, who began a campaign against Communist ‘subversion’. Moscow did its best to salvage what it could of the Argentinian connection. By refraining from public denunciation of the Videla regime, the Argentinian Communist Party managed to remain relatively unmolested. The Soviet delegation at the United Nations went to the extraordinary lengths of vetoing American attempts to
secure UN condemnation of the regime’s appalling human-rights record. Politically, all that was achieved was a face-saving exercise. There were, however, real economic benefits. In 1980 80 per cent of Argentina’s grain exports went to the Soviet Union.50
During the later 1970s, the KGB also lost much of the foothold it had acquired in Peru earlier in the decade. In 1974 the Centre still considered many of the reports from the Lima residency ‘especially valuable’, and passed some of them to Brezhnev, no doubt in order to demonstrate the continuing strength of its contacts with the junta.51 The junta’s economic policies, however, despite their ideological appeal in Moscow, led to chronic inflation, economic stagnation and repeated debt crises. After a coup in August 1975 by General Francisco Morales Bermúdez, the military government drifted to the right.52 As in Argentina, Moscow tried to salvage what it could of the relationship built up over the previous few years. With Andropov’s approval, the KGB presented Morales Bermúdez with a Makarov pistol and 200 cartridges.53 In December 1975 the Centre sent the Peruvian intelligence service, SIN, a gift of operational equipment valued at about $300,000.54 In the following year the new heads of SIN and Peruvian military intelligence were each presented, like Morales Bermúdez, with Makarov pistols; they also received further gifts valued, respectively, at 300 and 150 hard-currency rubles. Ten SIN officers were trained, at the KGB’s expense, at the FCD Red Banner Institute during 1976.55
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