The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  Such gestures achieved little. In August 1976 Tolstikov was informed by the Cuban ambassador to Peru and Deputy Interior Minister Abrahantes that Morales Bermúdez had assured Castro that he was ‘a supporter of revolutionary changes in Peru’ and prepared to collaborate in the struggle against the CIA. Simultaneously, however, he was removing ‘progressive’ officials and moving to the right. The Cuban regime concluded that Morales Bermúdez was not to be trusted and suspended aid to Peru.56 By 1976 Cuban intelligence was pessimistic about the prospects for challenging American influence in South America. Manuel Piñeiro, head of the Departamento de América, which was responsible for the export of revolution, told Tolstikov in August that since the tour of five Latin American states earlier in the year by Henry Kissinger, ‘one can begin to observe the onset of reaction and the fascistization of the regimes there’. On the South American mainland, said Piñeiro, only Guyana was following ‘an anti-imperialist course’: ‘[Forbes] Burnham, the Prime Minister of Guyana, shares some of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, but for tactical reasons is forced to conceal this.’57

  Mexico’s presence on the list of the KGB’s five priority Latin American targets in 1974 was due both to its strategic importance as a large state on the southern border of the United States and to the apparent opportunities created by the election as President in 1970 of Luis Echeverría Alvarez. Under the Mexican constitution, Echeverría served for a non-renewable six-year term, controlling during that period vast political patronage and having the final word on all major policy issues. Like his predecessors, though legitimized by a presidential election, he owed his position as President to a secret selection process within the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which had dominated Mexican politics for the past forty years.

  Echeverría’s ultimate ambition (which he never came close to realizing) was, the KGB believed, to follow his term as President by becoming Secretary-General of the United Nations. He thus sought to establish himself during his presidency as a champion of Third World causes, became the first Mexican President to visit Cuba, was frequently publicly critical of the United States and in 1973 made a well-publicized trip to the Soviet Union. The KGB did not succeed in establishing direct access to Echeverría in the way that it did to Juan and Isabel Perón in Argentina and to some members of the military junta in Peru. From 1972 onwards, however, the Mexico City residency claimed to have one agent and two confidential contacts who provided ‘stable channels for exercising influence on the President’. The agent, codenamed URAN, was a former Chilean diplomat of the Allende era. Of the two confidential contacts who were also said to influence Echeverría’s foreign policy, MARTINA was the Rector of a Mexican university and OLMEK a leading member of the Partido Popular Socialista, one of a handful of small parties usually prepared to do deals with the ruling PRI. The Mexico City residency claimed the credit for persuading Echeverría to break off relations with the Pinochet regime, for much of his criticism of the United States, and for his decision to recognize the Marxist MPLA regime in Angola. It reported that its contacts had told Echeverría that these actions would strengthen his reputation in the Third World and enhance his prospects of becoming UN Secretary-General. 58 In 1975 he signed a mutual co-operation agreement with Comecon. In the same year, to the delight of Moscow, Echeverría instructed the Mexican representative at the UN to support an anti-Israeli resolution condemning Zionism as a form of racism - though he had second thoughts when this provoked Jewish leaders in the United States to promote a tourist boycott of Mexico.59

  The KGB may well have exaggerated its ability to influence Echeverría’s policy. When foreign statesmen or media made pronouncements in line with Soviet policy, it was quick to claim the credit for its own active measures. The KGB probably also exaggerated its influence on the press. In 1974, for example, the Mexico City residency reported that it had planted 300 articles in Mexican newspapers, among them Excelsior, then Mexico City’s leading paper, the Diario de México and Universal. 60

  One of the KGB’s most spectacular active measures, however, backfired badly. In 1973 the CIA defector Philip Agee (subsequently codenamed PONT by the KGB) had approached the residency in Mexico City and offered what the head of the FCD Counter-Intelligence Directorate, Oleg Kalugin, described as ‘reams of information about CIA operations’. The residency, wrongly suspecting that he was part of a CIA deception, turned him away. According to Kalugin, ‘Agee then went to the Cubans, who welcomed him with open arms . . . [and] shared Agee’s information with us.’61 Service A, the FCD active-measures department, claimed much of the credit for the publication in 1975 of Agee’s sensational memoir, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, most of which was devoted to a denunciation of CIA operations in Latin America, identifying approximately 250 of its officers and agents. Inside the Company was an instant best-seller, described by the CIA’s classified in-house journal as ‘a severe body blow to the Agency’.62

  Before publication, material on CIA penetration of the leadership of Latin American Communist parties was removed at Service A’s insistence.63 Service A seems to have been unaware, however, that KGB residencies were currently attempting to cultivate several of those publicly identified in Inside the Company as CIA agents or contacts. Among them was President Echeverría who, while the minister responsible for internal security, was alleged to have had the CIA codename LITEMPO-14, to have been in close contact with the CIA station in Mexico City and to have revealed to it the undemocratic processes by which, well in advance of his election in 1970, he had been selected by the ruling PRI as the next President.64 The Mexican Foreign Minister told the Soviet ambassador that President Echeverría had been informed of the KGB’s involvement in the publication of Agee’s book and regarded it as an unfriendly act against both Mexico and the President personally. On instructions from Andropov and Gromyko, the ambassador claimed unconvincingly that the Soviet Union had no responsibility for the book.65

  Brazil owed its place in the KGB’s 1974 list of its five priority targets in Latin America simply to its size and strategic importance:

  Special significance is ascribed to Brazil - a huge country with great wealth and claims to becoming a major power in the future, which is acquiring the characteristics of an imperialist state and actively entering the international arena. But the residency there is weak due to quota limitations [by the Brazilian government on the size of the Soviet embassy] and thus has modest capabilities.66

  For most of its existence, the military regime which held power from 1964 to 1985 made Brazil a relatively hostile environment for KGB operations. There was little prospect during the 1970s either of acquiring confidential contacts within the government, as in Argentina and Peru, or of finding contacts with direct access to the President, as in Mexico. The KGB’s best intelligence on Brazil probably came from its increasing ability to decrypt Brazil’s diplomatic traffic. By 1979 the radio-intercept post (codenamed KLEN) in the Brasilia residency was able to intercept 19,000 coded cables sent and received by the Foreign Ministry as well as approximately 2,000 other classified official communications.67

  SIGINT enabled the Centre to monitor some of the activities of probably its most important Brazilian agent, codenamed IZOT, who was recruited while serving as Brazilian ambassador in the Soviet bloc.68 As well as providing intelligence and recruitment leads to three other diplomats, IZOT also on occasion included in his reports information (probably disinformation) provided by the KGB. Assessed by the KGB as ‘adhering to an anti-American line and liberal views concerning the development of a bourgeois society’, IZOT was a paid agent. His remuneration, however, took a variety of forms, including in 1976 a silver service valued by the Centre at 513 rubles. The Centre had increasing doubts about IZOT’s reliability. On one occasion it believed that he was guilty of ‘outright deception’, claiming to have passed on information provided by the KGB to his Foreign Ministry when his decrypted cables showed that he had not done so.69

  The presidency of Ernesto Geisel
(1974-79) made the first tentative moves towards democratization of the authoritarian and sometimes brutal Brazilian military regime. It remained, however, resolutely anti-Communist. In 1976 the official censor banned even a TV broadcast of a performance by the Bolshoi Ballet for fear of Communist cultural contagion. When Geisel revoked the banishment orders on most political exiles in 1978, he deliberately excluded the long-serving Secretary-General of the Brazilian Communist Party, Luis Carlos Prestes.70 The inauguration as President in March 1979 of General João Batista Figueiredo, chief of the Serviço Nacional de Informações (SNI), Brazil’s intelligence service, paradoxically made life somewhat easier than before for both the Communist Party and the KGB residency. The Brazilian intelligence community was divided between reformers who favoured a gradual transition to democracy and hard-liners who were preoccupied by the danger of subversion. Figueiredo sided with the reformers. So, even more clearly, did his chief political adviser and head of his civilian staff, General Golbery do Couto e Silva, who fifteen years earlier had been the chief architect and first head of SNI.71 Despite hard-line opposition, Figueiredo issued an amnesty for most of Brazil’s remaining political exiles, including Prestes and other leading Communists.72

  While accepting that, in the East-West struggle, Brazil was ultimately on the side of the ‘Giant of the North’, Golbery argued publicly in favour of a pragmatic foreign policy which avoided subordination to the United States: ‘It seems to us only just that [, like the US,] we should also learn to bargain at high prices.’73 That, Golbery seems to have believed, involved dialogue with the Soviet Union. In the spring of 1980 a Soviet parliamentary delegation headed by Eduard Shevardnadze, then a candidate (non-voting) member of the Politburo, visited Brasilia. Unknown to their hosts, the plane (Special Flight L-62) carried new radio interception equipment to improve the performance of the residency’s SIGINT station, and took the old equipment with it when it left. Among the delegation was Brezhnev’s personal assistant, Andrei Mikhailovich Aleksandrov. The detailed instructions given to the resident on the entertainment of Aleksandrov provide a good example of the pains taken by the Centre to impress the political leadership. He was told to ensure that the KGB officer selected to show Aleksandrov the sights during his visit was smartly but soberly dressed, had his hair neatly cut, and expressed himself lucidly, concisely and accurately at all times.74

  The pampered parliamentary delegation paved the way for other, more covert contacts by the KGB with the Brazilian leadership. In December 1980 Nikolai Leonov travelled to Brazil for talks with General Golbery. Though Leonov posed as an academic working as a Soviet government adviser, Golbery’s background in intelligence makes it highly unlikely that he failed to identify him as a senior KGB officer. In June 1981, with Figueiredo’s approval, Golbery sent a member of his staff for further discussions in Moscow, where it was agreed that a ‘counsellor’ (in fact a KGB officer) would be added to the embassy staff in Brasilia, whose chief duty would be to conduct regular ‘unofficial’ meetings with the President.75 Further, public evidence of a new era in Soviet-Brazilian relations was the signing in 1981 of a series of trade agreements worth a total of about $2 billion.76

  The chief opposition to Golbery’s support for democratic reforms at home and better relations with the Soviet bloc came from military hard-liners led by General Octávio Aguiar de Medeiros, the current chief of SNI. Golbery also opposed the austerity programme of the Minister of Economy, António Delfim Neto. In August 1981 he resigned in protest at the failure to prosecute military extremists involved in bomb attacks against the political opposition. Golbery was replaced as head of Figueiredo’s civilian staff by João Leitão de Abreu, a lawyer more acceptable to military hard-liners .77 Since the Brazilian files noted by Mitrokhin end in 1981, there is no indication of whether or not the meetings arranged by Golbery between Figueiredo and a KGB officer went ahead.

  The KGB sought to compensate for the declining success of its operations against the priority targets established in 1974 by trying to make new ‘confidential contacts’ among ‘progressive’, anti-American political leaders. Among its targets in the mid-1970s was Alfonso López Michelson (codenamed MENTOR), leader of the Colombian Movimiento Revolucionario Liberal (MRL), who was elected President in 1974, declared an economic state of emergency and announced that Colombia would henceforth reject US economic assistance because ‘foreign aid breeds an unhealthy economic dependency and delays or undermines measures that should be taken for development’.78 In March 1975 the Politburo approved a KGB operation, codenamed REDUT, aimed at establishing ‘unofficial relations’ with President López.79 A senior KGB officer was despatched to Bogotá, met López on 29 May and gained his agreement to future meetings. Though Mitrokhin’s notes do not identify the officer concerned, he was almost certainly the head of the FCD Second (Latin American) Department, Vladimir Tolstikov, who also met López on subsequent occasions. As in his earlier meetings with Perón, Tolstikov identified himself during visits to Bogotá as Sergei Sergeyevich Konstantinov, a senior Latin American specialist in the Foreign Ministry, and claimed to be able to provide a direct confidential channel to the Soviet leadership. At his first meeting with Tolstikov, unaware of his KGB connection, López handed him an album of pictures of Colombia which he asked to be presented to Brezhnev with a personal message from himself - a minor diplomatic gesture which was doubtless given an enhanced significance when reported to Brezhnev.80

  The Centre’s exaggerated hopes of establishing ‘unoffical relations’ with López derived from his distrust of the United States which, like many other Latin Americans, he blamed for the economic exploitation of Latin America. After Jimmy Carter’s election as US President in November 1976, López was reported to have dismissed him as ‘a provincial politician with a pathological stubbornness and the primitive reasoning of a person who produces and sells peanuts - an accidental figure on the American political horizon’.81

  Operating under his diplomatic alias, Tolstikov established good personal relations with López, who in 1976 awarded ‘Sergei Sergeyevich Konstantinov’ the Order of San Carlos ‘for active participation in strengthening relations between the USSR and Colombia’.82 A rather more substantial achievement of the Bogotá residency was to establish covert contact at a senior level with the Colombian intelligence service, the Departamento Administrativo de Securidad (DAS) and, it claimed, to influence its intelligence assessments.83

  Alfonso López was the first Colombian President to visit the neighbouring Republic of Panama, which had split from Colombia in 1903 after an uprising engineered by the United States. The new Republic had promptly been bullied into accepting a treaty leasing the Panama Canal Zone in perpetuity to the United States. López gave public support to the campaign for the abrogation of the treaty by the President of Panama, General Omar Torrijos Herrera (codenamed RODOM by the KGB), and agreed to Tolstikov’s request to arrange a meeting for him with Torrijos.84 In the event, the Centre selected for the meeting an even more senior officer operating under diplomatic cover, Nikolai Leonov, who over twenty years earlier had been Castro’s first KGB contact and had since risen to become head of FCD Service No. 1 (Analysis and Reports). On 28 June 1977 Torrijos sent his personal aircraft to Bogotá to fly Leonov to a former US airbase in Panama, where they continued discussions for four days. Though Leonov brought with him gifts valued by the Centre at 1,200 rubles, he initially found Torrijos in a difficult mood. A few days earlier Guatemala had broken off diplomatic relations with Panama after Torrijos had incautiously told an American journalist that he rejected Guatemalan claims to sovereignty over Belize. He told Leonov angrily, ‘I’m not going to receive any more foreigners - not even the Pope!’

  Torrijos’s anger, however, quickly refocused on the United States. He told Leonov that he was determined to restore Panama’s sovereignty over the Canal Zone and eliminate every trace of the American presence. ‘This’, he declared, ‘is the religion of my life!’ He gave Leonov a film entitled The Strug
gle of the People of Panama for the Canal which he asked him to pass on to Brezhnev. In return Leonov presented Torrijos with a hunting rifle and a souvenir selection of vodkas, and gave his wife an enamel box. Torrijos declared his willingness to continue ‘unofficial contact’ with Soviet representatives and gave Leonov the direct phone numbers of his secretary, through whom future meetings could be arranged. He also gave orders for Leonov to be given a visa allowing him to visit Panama at any time over the next year. Leonov gave Torrijos his home telephone number in Moscow - a somewhat irregular proceeding which, as Leonov later acknowledged, disconcerted both the Centre and those members of his family who took calls from Torrijos.85 Shortly after he returned to Moscow, Torrijos phoned him, said that he wanted to check that he had returned safely and discussed with him the negotiation of a Soviet-Panamanian trade treaty.86 Torrijos believed his phone conversations with Leonov were probably intercepted by NSA, the American SIGINT agency, but - according to Leonov - looked on them as a way of putting pressure on the Carter administration, which he knew to be nervous about his Soviet contacts.87