Despite the diplomatic cover used by Leonov, there is no doubt that Torrijos realized that he was a KGB officer.88 After reviewing the results of Leonov’s mission, the Centre decided to arrange meetings with Torrijos every six to eight months, chiefly in an attempt to influence his policy (mainly, no doubt, to the United States). A KGB officer operating under cover as a correspondent with Tass, the Soviet news agency, was given responsibility for making the detailed arrangements for these meetings. In order to flatter Torrijos another operations officer, also under Tass cover, was sent to deliver to him a personal letter from Brezhnev.89 To reinforce Torrijos’s suspicion of the Carter administration he was also given a bogus State Department document forged by Service A which discussed methods of dragging out the Panama Canal negotiations and removing Torrijos himself from power.90
On 7 September 1977 Torrijos and President Jimmy Carter met in Washington to sign two treaties: a Canal Treaty transferring the Canal Zone to Panamanian control in stages to be completed by 2000 and a Neutrality Treaty providing for joint US-Panamanian defence of the Canal’s neutrality. At another meeting in Washington on 14 October, however, Carter told Torrijos that the administration had only about fifty-five of the sixty-seven Senate votes required for ratification of the treaties.91 For the next few months Torrijos had to spend much of his time acting as a jovial host in Panama to US senators whom he privately detested. According to the US diplomat Jack Vaughn:
[Torrijos] had an uncanny ability, looking at a VIP, to know whether he was the raunchy type who wanted girls around or if he was prudish and straitlaced, or maybe he wanted a more intellectual presentation. And, where do you want to go, what can I show you? He’d take them in a helicopter for short sightseeing trips, and they’d get off and go around and meet the natives. A very carefully orchestrated, devastatingly effective show . . . The effect on a gringo politician was, ‘This guy has real power, he can make things happen.’ He really did a job on the Senate.92
Ratification remained in doubt until the last moment. At the end of 1977, Torrijos asked for a meeting with Leonov to discuss the state of the negotiations with the United States. What probably most concerned him were the charges by leading Republican senators opposed to ratification that he was involved in drug trafficking. Carter, however, was convinced that the charges were false. In mid-February 1978 the Senate went into secret session to hear evidence from the Senate Intelligence Committee refuting the charges.93 Ironically, the KGB believed the charges which Carter and the Senate Intelligence Committee dismissed.94
There is little doubt that the charges were correct. According to Floyd Carlton Caceres, a notable drug smuggler as well as personal pilot to Torrijos and his intelligence chief, Manuel Noriega Morena (later President), Torrijos had made contact with drug traffickers almost as soon as he took power. By 1971 his diplomat brother Moisés ‘Monchi’ Torrijos was providing drug couriers with official Panamanian passports to enable them to avoid customs searches.95 In 1992 Noriega was to become the first foreign head of state to face criminal charges in a US court; he was sentenced to forty years’ imprisonment on eight counts of cocaine trafficking, racketeering and money laundering.
Had the drug-trafficking charges against Torrijos stuck in 1978, there would have been no prospect of ratifying the treaties with the United States. On 16 March, however, the Neutrality Act passed the Senate by one vote more than the two-thirds majority required. Carter later recalled, ‘I had never been more tense in my life as we listened to each vote shouted out on the radio.’96 Apparently unknown to Carter and US intelligence, Leonov arrived in Panama City on 22 March for six days of talks with Torrijos, bringing with him presents for the Torrijos family with a total value of 3,500 rubles. Torrijos used the secret talks with Leonov partly to get off his chest in private the loathing of the Yanquis which he dared not express in public. ‘I hate the United States’, he told Leonov, ‘but my position forces me to tolerate a great deal. How I envy Fidel Castro!’
The biggest strain of all had been dealing with the US Senate:
From November of last year up to March of this year, there have been 50 senators in Panama at our invitation. I worked with all of them personally, and it was a heavy cross for me to bear. Almost all of the senators are crude, arrogant, and unwilling to listen to any arguments from the other side . . . They are cavemen whose thought processes belong to the previous century.
Torrijos also had a personal scorn for Carter, whose inadequacy as President was ‘a painful thing to see’.97 Carter, by contrast, had a somewhat naive admiration for Torrijos. ‘No one’, he believed, ‘could have handled the affairs of Panama and its people more effectively than had this quiet and courageous leader.’98
Though the KGB flattered Torrijos skilfully, they did not share Carter’s unreciprocated respect for him. Torrijos’s KGB file contains a description of him by Allende as ‘a lecher’.99 Given his own promiscuity, Allende presumably intended to imply that Torrijos’s sexual liaisons were conducted with less dignity than his own. Torrijos’s current girlfriend at the time of his sudden death in 1981 was a student friend of one of his own illegitimate daughters.100 The Torrijos file also includes Cuban intelligence reports about his involvement, along with some members of his family and inner circle, with the drug trade and other international criminal networks.101 Torrijos’s Panama began to rival Batista’s Cuba as a magnet for Mafia money-laundering, arms smuggling and contraband.102 The KGB regarded many of Torrijos’s personal mannerisms as somewhat pathetic imitations of Castro’s. Like Castro, he dressed in military fatigues, carried a pistol and smoked Cuban cigars (presented to him by Castro, each with a specially printed band inscribed with his name). Also like Castro, he kept his daily schedule and travel routes secret, and pretended to make spontaneous gestures and decisions which were in reality carefully premeditated. Torrijos regularly sought Castro’s advice on his negotiations with the United States, though the advice was so secret that it was concealed even from the Panamanian ambassador in Havana. The KGB reported that Noriega flew frequently to Havana in a private aircraft. As the KGB was aware, however, Noriega was also in contact with the CIA.103
On 18 April 1978 the Canal Treaty finally passed by the US Senate by the same slim majority as the Neutrality Act a month earlier. Doubtless after prior agreement with the Centre, Leonov suggested to Torrijos that the best way of depriving the United States of any pretext for claiming special rights to defend the Canal would be to turn Panama into ‘a permanently neutral state on the model of Switzerland, Sweden, and Austria’. Torrijos was hostile to the idea - chiefly, Leonov believed, because he feared the effect of neutrality on his own authority. ‘Would [a neutral] Panama be able to conduct its own foreign policy?’ he asked Leonov. ‘Would it be possible to assist the anti-imperialist movement? Would I become a political eunuch?’104 Though Torrijos was succeeded as President in 1978 by Education Minister Aristedes Royo, he retained real power as head of the National Guard, resisting gentle pressure from Leonov to end military rule. He gave three reasons for being reluctant to follow Leonov’s advice to set up his own political party:
In the first place, I would then cease to be the leader of the entire nation, and would be the leader of only a political party. In the second place, after creating one party, I would then have to permit the formation of other opposition parties. And third, I do not want to do this because this is what the Americans are always trying to get out of me.105
Torrijos told Leonov he was none the less convinced that by the year 2000 the majority of Latin American states would have adopted ‘socialism in one form or another’.106 Within Panama the pro-Moscow Communist Partido del Pueblo (PDP) was the only political party allowed to operate; the rival Maoist Communist Party was brutally persecuted and several of its leaders murdered.
In its early stages the corrupt, authoritarian Torrijos regime had made reforms in land distribution, health care and education. Progress towards Panamanian socialism, however, was largely rhetoric
al. The PDP unconvincingly declared the regime la yunta pueblo-gobierno - a close union of people and government. The corrupt and brutal National Guard became el brazo armado del pueblo, the people’s weapon arm.107 According to KGB reports, the PDP leadership maintained ‘clandestine contact’ with two ministers in the Torrijos government.108 PDP influence was particularly strong in the Education Ministry. Communist-inspired educational reforms in 1979, however, collapsed in the face of teachers’ strikes and demonstrations. Economic bumbling and corruption together left Panama with one of the highest per capita national debts anywhere in the world.109
On 31 July 1981, while Torrijos was en route with his girlfriend to a weekend retreat, his plane flew into the side of a mountain killing all on board.110 The KGB, always prone to conspiracy theories, concluded that he was the victim of a CIA assassination plot.111 A few years earlier, by resolving the great historic grievance against the United States which dated back to the birth of the state, Torrijos had given Panamanians a new sense of identity and national pride. By the time he died, however, many were pleased to see him go. The celebrations in some cantinas which followed his plane crash became so boisterous that they were closed down by the National Guard. The KGB had little left to show for the effort it had put into cultivating the Torrijos regime.
The same was true of most of the KGB’s efforts during the 1970s to cultivate anti-American and ‘progressive’ regimes in Latin America. The series of short-term successes which the Centre proudly reported to the Politburo failed to establish a stable basis for the expansion of Soviet influence in Latin America. The KGB itself had lost confidence in the staying power of the Allende regime well before it was overthrown. Covert contacts with the ‘progressive’ junta in Peru, Torres in Bolivia, Perón in Argentina and Torrijos in Panama lasted only a few years until those leaders were deposed or died. At the end of the decade, however, the KGB’s fortunes suddenly revived. The revolution in Central America of which it had been so hopeful in the early 1960s, and in which it had subsequently lost faith, unexpectedly became a reality at the end of the 1970s.
6
Revolution in Central America
For Fidel Castro 1979 was a year of both economic failure and international triumph. After two decades in power, his regime was as dependent as ever on large subsidies which the ailing Soviet economy could ill afford. Popular disaffection was more visible than ever before. Ten times as many Cubans fled to Florida in small boats during 1979 as in the previous year.1 Castro, however, seemed more interested by increasing international recognition of his role on the world stage, newly signalled by his election as Chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement. The KGB liaison office in Havana reported growing concern at Castro’s delusions of grandeur:
The personal influence of F. Castro in [Cuba’s] politics is becoming stronger. His prestige as an ‘outstanding strategist and chief commander’ in connection with the victories in Africa (Angola, Ethiopia), and as a far-sighted politician and statesman, is becoming overblown. F. Castro’s vanity is becoming more and more noticeable.
Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces are extolled. Castro’s approval is needed on every issue, even insignificant ones, and this leads to delays, red tape, and the piling up of papers requiring Castro’s signature. Everyone sees that this is an abnormal situation, but everyone remains silent for fear that any remark could be interpreted as an encroachment on the chief’s incontestable authority. Cuba’s revolutionary spirit is becoming more and more dissipated, while there is an emergence of servility, careerism, and competition between government agencies, and their leaders’ attempts to prove themselves to Fidel in the best possible light. There is competition between the MVD [Ministry of Internal Affairs] and the RVS [Revolutionary Armed Forces] within the government to challenge MVD Minister Sergio del Valle’s subservient position with respect to R. Castro. Their former friendly relationship has cooled.
MVD Minister Valle [whose responsibilities included the DGI], in an outburst of open exasperation, told P. I. Vasilyev, a representative of the KGB, the following:
‘You might think that I, as the Minister of Internal Affairs and a member of the Politburo, can decide everything, but I cannot - I cannot even give an apartment to a Ministry employee. For this too, it is necessary to have the approval of the Commander-in-Chief [Fidel Castro].’2
Castro’s self-importance was further inflated by the long-delayed spread of revolution in Central America. In March 1979 the Marxist New Jewel Movement, led by Maurice Bishop, seized control of the small Caribbean island of Grenada. A month later fifty Cuban military advisers arrived by ship, bringing with them large supplies of arms and ammunition to bolster the new regime. In September 400 Cuban regular troops arrived to train a new Grenadan army. In December 300 Cubans began the construction of a large new airport with a runway capable of accommodating the largest Soviet and Cuban military transport planes.3 The once-secret documents of the New Jewel Movement make clear that, as well as being inspired by the Cuban example, Bishop’s Marxism also had a good deal in common with the variety once described by French student revolutionaries as ‘the Groucho tendency’. Bishop, however, was determined to stamp out opposition. As he told his colleagues: ‘Just consider, Comrades . . . how people get detained in this country. We don’t go and call for no votes. You get detained when I sign an order after discussing it with the National Security Committee of the Party or with a higher Party body. Once I sign it - like it or don’t like it - it’s up the hill for them.’
Once satisfied that the Bishop regime was solidly established, Moscow also began supplying massive military aid. A Grenadan general, Hudson Austin, wrote to Andropov as KGB Chairman early in 1982 to thank him ‘once again for the tremendous assistance which our armed forces have received from your Party and Government’, and to request KGB training for four Grenadan intelligence officers. Austin ended his letter ‘by once again extending our greatest warmth and embrace to you and your Party - Sons and Daughters of the heroic Lenin’.4
Of far greater significance than Bishop’s seizure of power in Grenada was the ousting of the brutal and corrupt Somoza regime in Nicaragua in July 1979 by the Sandinistas. Until less than a year earlier the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) had had few major successes. On 25 August 1978, however, the Terceristas (or ‘Insurrectional Tendency’), the dominant faction within the FSLN, pulled off one of the most spectacular coups in guerrilla history. Twenty-four Terceristas, disguised as members of an élite National Guard unit, seized control of the Managua National Palace where the Somoza-dominated National Congress was in session, and took all its members hostage. KGB files reveal that the guerrillas had been trained and financed by the Centre, which gave them the codename ISKRA (‘Spark’) - the same as that of the Sandinista sabotage and intelligence group founded by the KGB fourteen years earlier. On the eve of the ISKRA attack on the National Palace, Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD, was personally briefed on plans for the operation by officers of Department 8 (‘Special Operations’) of the Illegals Directorate S.5 In return for the release of the hostages, the Somoza regime was forced to pay a large ransom and free fifty-nine Sandinista prisoners. On their way to Managua airport, where a plane was waiting to take them to Cuba, the guerrillas and the freed prisoners were cheered by enthusiastic crowds. But though the FSLN was winning the battle for hearts and minds, Somoza still retained an apparently firm grip on power. Urban insurrections by the Sandinistas in September were brutally crushed by the National Guard.6
In Havana Castro and other Cuban leaders had a series of meetings with the three most influential Sandinistas: the Tercerista leaders Humberto and Daniel Ortega Saavedra, and the only surviving founder of the FSLN, Tomás Borge, who had been freed from a Nicaraguan prison by the ISKRA operation. It was thanks largely to Cuban pressure on them that the three factions of the FSLN formally reunited by an agreement signed in Havana in March 1979.7 Simultaneously, the Cuban Departamento América (DA) helped the Sandinistas se
t up a base in Costa Rica from which to prepare an offensive against the Somoza regime. At the end of May FSLN forces crossed into Nicaragua. The arms and tactical advice provided by the DA’s operations centre in San José made a major contribution to the rapid Sandinista victory. The former Costa Rican President, José Figueres, said later that, but for arms from Cuba and Costa Rican support for Sandinista operations, the victory over Somoza ‘would not have been possible’. The speed with which the resistance of Somoza’s National Guard crumbled took both the CIA and the KGB by surprise. When the Sandinista offensive began, the CIA reported to the White House that it had little prospect of success. On 19 July, however, dressed in olive-green uniforms and black berets, the FSLN entered Managua in triumph.8
Cuban advisers quickly followed in the Sandinistas’ wake. The most influential of them, the former head of the DA operations centre in San José, Julián López Díaz, was appointed Cuban ambassador in Managua. A week after their seizure of power, a Sandinista delegation, headed by their military commander, Humberto Ortega, flew to Havana to take part in the annual 26 July celebrations of the attack on the Moncada Barracks which had begun Castro’s guerrilla campaign against the Batista regime. Amid what Radio Havana described as mass ‘demonstrations of joy’, a female Sandinista guerrilla in battle fatigues presented Cuba’s Maximum Leader with a rifle captured in combat against Somoza’s National Guard.9 Castro paid emotional tribute to ‘this constellation of heroic, brave, intelligent and capable commanders and combatants of the Nicaraguan Sandinista National Liberation Front’:
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