They gained victory along a path similar to our path. They gained victory the only way they, like us, could free themselves of tyranny and imperialist domination - taking up arms [applause], fighting hard, heroically. And we must say and emphasize that the Nicaraguan revolution was outstanding for its heroism, its perseverance, the perseverance of its combatants - because it is not the victory of a single day, it is a victory after twenty years of struggle [applause], twenty years of planning [applause].10
In early August CIA analysts correctly forecast that the Sandinistas would seek Cuban help to ‘transform the guerrilla forces into a conventional army’, the Ejército Popular Sandinista (EPS). According to the same intelligence assessment, ‘The Cubans can also be expected in the months ahead to begin using Nicaragua to support guerrillas from countries in the northern tier of Central America.’11
Castro’s apotheosis as an international statesman, already enhanced by the Nicaraguan Revolution, came in September 1979 at the Havana conference of the Non-Aligned Movement. Active measures to exploit the conference proceedings in the Soviet interest had been co-ordinated in advance at meetings between Pedro Pupo Pérez of the DGI and Oleg Maksimovich Nechiporenko and A. N. Itskov of the KGB.12 In his opening speech as Chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement, Castro denounced not merely the ‘Yanqui imperialists’ but ‘their new allies - the Chinese government’. He then paid fulsome tribute to the Soviet Union:
We are thankful to the glorious October Revolution because it started a new age in human history. It made possible the defeat of fascism and created conditions in the world which united the unselfish struggle of the peoples and led to the collapse of the hateful colonial system. To ignore this is to ignore history itself. Not only Cuba, but also Vietnam, the attacked Arab countries, the peoples of the former Portuguese colonies, the revolutionary processes in many countries of the world, the liberation movements which struggle against oppression, racism, Zionism and fascism in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Palestine and in other areas have a lot to be thankful for regarding socialist solidarity. I ask myself if the United States or any country in NATO has ever helped a single liberation movement in our world.
According to the official transcript of Castro’s speech, this passage was followed by applause.13 Though ninety-two other heads of state were present, Castro was never out of the spotlight. For the next three years he continued as Chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement.
The first Soviet official to arrive in Managua in the immediate aftermath of the Sandinista seizure of power was the Centre’s senior Latin American specialist, Nikolai Leonov, head of FCD Service No. 1 (Analysis and Reports). ‘The city’, Leonov recalls, ‘was still smoking and we had no embassy, but I was there under the cover of a journalist.’14 As after the Cuban Revolution twenty years earlier, the KGB played a far more important role than the Soviet Foreign Ministry in conducting relations with the new regime. The Soviet ambassador from another Latin American country who arrived in Managua to conduct the formal procedures of establishing diplomatic relations created an even worse impression than the first Soviet ambassador to Castro’s Cuba.15 On arrival at the airport, the ambassador staggered down the aircraft steps, his breath reeking of alcohol, and collapsed into the arms of his aides in front of the outraged Sandinista welcoming party. It was officially announced that he had been ‘taken ill as a result of a difficult flight’, and he was driven to hospital where attempts were made to revive him in time for the official ceremonies which were due to take place that evening on the stage of a Managua theatre. The ambassador made it to the theatre but collapsed once more and was forced to depart in the middle of the speeches. His aides had scarcely taken off his shoes and put him to bed when an irate Sandinista minister arrived to demand an explanation. Leonov attended a meeting next morning at the house of the Cuban ambassador where senior Sandinistas sought to register an official protest.
After giving my outraged hosts the opportunity to speak their minds fully, I said as calmly as possible that I shared their assessments and feelings. However, it was hardly worth starting the history of our relations with a protest and a diplomatic conflict. The ambassador was a human being with weaknesses, illnesses, [infirmities of] age . . . An official note of protest (which lay before me on the desk) was unnecessary, because it did not reflect the real climate of our relations but, on the contrary, might spoil them. I gave a firm promise to inform the Politburo of what had taken place, but would prefer to do this orally. It would be awkward for me to accept the note since [as an undercover KGB officer] I had no official status, and the embassy was not yet open. I talked and talked, to buy time for passions to cool down.
Leonov reported the incident to Andropov by a telegram marked strictly ‘personal’, and Andropov informed Gromyko, also on a personal basis. Before long, however, it seemed to Leonov that half the Foreign Ministry knew about the ambassador’s disgrace. Leonov as well as the Sandinistas bore the brunt of the anger of the Ministry, which, he was told, was ‘offended’ by his report and refused to see him on his return to Moscow.16
After delivering a preliminary report in person to the Centre, Leonov returned to Managua on 12 October for a week of secret talks with the Ortega brothers and Borge, the three dominating figures in the new regime, as well as with five other leading Sandinistas.17 Leonov reported to the Centre that:
The FSLN leadership had firmly decided to carry out the transformation of the FSLN into a Marxist-Leninist Party, including within it other leftist parties and groups on an individual basis. The centrist and bourgeois mini-parties already existing in the country would be kept only because they presented no danger and served as a convenient facade for the outside world.
Daniel Ortega told Leonov:
We do not want to repeat Cuba’s mistakes with regard to the United States, whereas the United States is clearly avoiding a repetition of the mistakes it made with regard to Cuba. Our strategy is to tear Nicaragua from the capitalist orbit and, in time, become a member of the CMEA [Comecon].
According to Leonov, Ortega ‘regarded the USSR as a class and strategic ally, and saw the Soviet experience in building the Party and state as a model to be studied and used for practical actions in Nicaragua’. Ortega agreed to ‘unofficial contacts’ with Soviet representatives (a euphemism for meetings with KGB officers) in order to exchange information. He gave Leonov a secret document outlining the FSLN’s political plans for transmission to the CPSU Central Committee.18 Though Mitrokhin did not note its contents, this was, almost certainly, the so-called ‘Seventy-Two-Hour Document’, officially entitled the ‘Analysis of the Situation and Tasks of the Sandinista People’s Revolution’, prepared by the Sandinista leadership in two secret seventy-two-hour meetings in September. It denounced ‘American imperialism’ as ‘the rabid enemy of all peoples who are struggling to achieve their definitive liberation’ and proclaimed the intention of turning the FSLN into a Marxist-Leninist ‘vanguard party’ which, in alliance with Cuba and the Soviet bloc, would lead the class struggle not merely in Nicaragua but across its borders in Central America.19
The first country to which the Sandinista leadership hoped to export their revolution was El Salvador, the smallest and most densely populated state in Latin America, ruled by a repressive military government. The KGB reported that a meeting of the Central Committee of the Partido Comunista Salvadoreño (PCS) in August 1979, after discussing events in Nicaragua, had agreed to make preparations for revolution. It was even thought likely that, following the flight of the Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Somoza, the Salvadoran President, General Julio Rivera, might surrender power without a fight. In September the PCS leader, Schafik Handal, visited Nicaragua and was promised arms by the Sandinistas.20 Leonov also met Handal, probably soon after his own talks with Sandinista leaders in October, and discussed with him plans for Soviet bloc countries to supply Western-manufactured arms in order to disguise their support for the Salvadoran revolution.21 These plans, however, were overtaken by a
coup in El Salvador led by army officers anxious to maintain the dominant position of the armed forces. The political situation stabilized temporarily at the beginning of 1980 when the Christian Democrat Party agreed to form a new junta with the military and their exiled leader, José Napoleón Duarte. But while Duarte’s government attempted to inaugurate a programme of social reform, right-wing death squads pursued a campaign of terror against their political opponents.
The Soviet attitude towards the prospects for revolution in Central America was ambivalent. The invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 made Moscow both wary of further military commitments and anxious to repair the damage to its international reputation by successes elsewhere. Its desire to exploit the Sandinista revolution was balanced by nervousness at the likely reaction of the United States. The Carter administration, however, though expressing concern at the Sandinistas’ left-wing policies, none the less gave them economic aid. In an attempt to diminish the risks inherent in the challenge to US influence in Central America, Moscow was happy to leave the most visible role to Fidel Castro.22
During the year after the Sandinista victory, Castro flew secretly to Nicaragua on a number of occasions, landing on the private airstrip at one of the estates of the deposed dictator, Anastasio Somoza. In July 1980 he made his first public visit to Managua to celebrate the first anniversary of the revolution and was greeted at the airport by the nine Sandinista comandantes, each in battle fatigues virtually identical to his own. ‘Because you are a profoundly revolutionary people’, he told a cheering crowd, ‘we Cuban visitors feel as if we were in our own fatherland!’23 During the Sandinistas’ early years in power, military and economic assistance to the new regime was jointly discussed by tripartite Soviet-Cuban-Nicaraguan committees. In May 1980 a Sandinista delegation visited Moscow to ask for the large-scale military aid required to turn the Ejército Popular Sandinista into the most powerful force in Central America. Though the Soviet Union agreed to arm and equip the EPS over the next few years, it cautiously left the details to be decided by a tripartite committee which was not due to convene in Managua for another year.24
El Salvador, meanwhile, was slipping into civil war. During 1980 right-wing death squads carried out a series of well-publicized atrocities, among them the killing of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero during a church service, the assassination of several leading Christian Democrats, and the rape and murder of three American nuns and a church worker. In March the PCS decided to support the ‘armed road’ to revolution.25 Three months later, at a secret meeting in Havana attended by Castro and Humberto Ortega, Schafik Handal and the leaders of El Salvador’s four other Marxist factions united as the Dirección Revolucionaria Unida (DRU). The KGB reported that the two dominating figures in the DRU were Handal, the PCS leader, and a former PCS General-Secretary, Cayetano Carpio, leader of a breakaway movement.26 The DRU was given a secure base in Nicaragua and, in consultation with Ortega, agreed to imitate the Sandinistas’ strategy against the Somoza regime by seeking to create a military machine powerful enough to defeat the army of the state.27 Thousands of Salvadoran revolutionaries were given rapid military training in Cuba; several hundred more were trained in Nicaragua.28 The DRU agreed with its Cuban and Sandinista allies on the importance of striking ‘a decisive blow’ before the end of the Carter administration in January 1981 for fear that, if Ronald Reagan were elected President, he would provide more active military assistance to the Duarte government (as indeed he decided to do).29
In accordance with the strategy he had agreed with Leonov, Handal toured the Soviet bloc and two of its allies in June and July 1980 in search of arms and military equipment of Western manufacture for use in El Salvador. On Soviet advice, his first stop was in Hanoi where the Communist Party leader Le Duan gave him an enthusiastic welcome and provided enough US weapons captured during the Vietnam War to equip three battalions. Handal’s next stop was East Berlin where Honecker promised 3 million Ostmarks to pay for equipment but was unable to supply any Western arms. In Prague Vasil Bil’ak agreed to supply Czech weapons of types available on the open market. The Bulgarian Communist Party leader, Dimitur Stanichev, gave 300 reconditioned German machine guns from the Second World War, 200,000 rounds of ammunition, 10,000 uniforms and 2,000 medical kits. Hungary had no Western weapons but the Party leader, Janos Kadar, promised 10,000 uniforms as well as medical supplies. Handal’s final stop was in Ethiopia whose army had been completely re-equipped by the Soviet Union over the previous few years. Lieutenant-Colonel Mengistu promised to supply 700 Thompson automatic weapons and other Western arms left over from the Haile Selassie era.30 According to a KGB report, Handal acknowledged that the success of his arms mission had been possible only because of Soviet support:
We are clearly aware of the fact that, in the final analysis, our relations with the other countries in the socialist camp will be determined by the position of the Soviet Union, and that we will need the advice and recommendations of the leadership of the CPSU Central Committee. We cannot let out a war cry and lead trained personnel into battle without being sure of the full brotherly support of the Soviet Communists.
After Handal’s return to Central America, the various guerrilla factions in El Salvador united as the Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional (FMLN). The KGB reported that the Cubans were confident that revolution would succeed in El Salvador by the end of the year.31 The Salvadoran government was regarded as so divided and corrupt and its army as so poorly equipped and motivated that the guerrilla victory appeared certain.32
In January 1981, however, a supposedly ‘final offensive’ by the FMLN, approved by the Cubans, failed, forcing the guerrillas to take refuge in the mountains.33 Simultaneously the new Reagan administration made clear that it intended to take a much tougher line in Central America. Using strikingly undiplomatic language, Reagan’s first Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, delivered a blunt warning to Moscow that ‘their time of unrestricted adventuring in the Third World was over’. ‘Every official of the State Department, in every exchange with a Soviet official’ was instructed to repeat the same message.34 Wary of publicly provoking the new administration, Moscow sought to distance itself from the bloodshed in El Salvador. At the Twenty-sixth Congress of the CPSU in February, attended by Communist leaders and other fraternal delegates from around the world, Handal and the PCS were conspicuous by their absence - no doubt on instructions from Moscow.
While cautious in its public statements, however, the Soviet leadership authorized an increase in arms shipments to Cuba, some of them secretly intended for other destinations in Central America. According to US officials, more Soviet arms were sent to Cuba during the first eight months of 1981 than at any time since the missile crisis of 1962.35 In May 1981 a Nicaraguan-Soviet-Cuban commission met in Managua to discuss the supply of Soviet arms to the Sandinista EPS. Following agreement in June, the first heavy weapons (tanks and artillery) began to arrive at Port Bluff in July.36 Castro subsequently complained that, instead of continuing to discuss all their arms requirements with Cuba, the Sandinistas were now approaching the Soviet Union directly.37 On 21 November Humberto Ortega and Marshal Ustinov signed an arms treaty in Moscow ratifying the agreement reached in Managua in June.38 Within a few years the EPS was over 100,000 strong and had become the most powerful military force in Central American history.
Castro somewhat hysterically compared the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as US President in January 1981 to Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German Chancellor in January 1933. After Reagan’s election two months earlier, Castro had summoned the Cuban people to organize themselves into territorial militia to defend their fatherland against American attack. To pay for weapons, workers ‘volunteered’ to give up a day’s wages. The Yanqui invaders, Castro declared, would ‘face an anthill, an armed anthill . . . invincible and unyielding, and never, never surrendering!’ In addition to the private warnings which he instructed American diplomats to deliver, Alexander Haig publicly denounced Cuba and
the Soviet Union for acting as both ‘tutors and arms suppliers’ to Central American revolutionaries. Cuba’s activities, he declared, were ‘no longer acceptable in this hemisphere’. The United States would ‘deal with this matter at source’. To Castro that appeared as an invasion threat.39 Privately, he was annoyed that Moscow did not take a stronger line in public towards the new Reagan administration. According to a KGB report, he told a Soviet military delegation which visited Cuba in February, headed by the chief-of-staff of the Soviet armed forces, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, that the Soviet Union should toughen its policy towards the United States. In particular, it should refuse to accept the deployment of American cruise missiles in Europe. Castro made the extraordinary proposal that, if the deployment went ahead, Moscow should seriously consider re-establishing the nuclear missile bases in Cuba dismantled after the missile crisis nineteen years earlier. The new Cuban militia, he boasted, now numbered 500,000 men.40
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