The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  The KGB reported that Castro’s fears of American attack were strengthened by the crisis in Poland, where the authority of the Communist one-party state was being eroded by the groundswell of popular support for the Solidarity movement. Though he had no more (and probably even less) sympathy for Solidarity than he had had for the reformers of the Prague Spring in 1968, Castro told ‘a Soviet representative’ (probably a KGB officer) that if the Red Army intervened in Poland in 1981, as it had done in Czechoslovakia in 1968, there might be ‘serious consequences for Cuba in view of its immediate proximity to the USA’. Castro, in other words, was afraid that a Soviet invasion of Poland might provoke an American invasion of Cuba.41 When General Wojciech Jaruzelski became Polish Party leader in October, Castro insisted on the need for him to take ‘decisive measures’ which would make Soviet intervention unnecessary: ‘Otherwise he will be finished both as a military leader and as a political figure.’ The only solution, Castro argued, was for Jaruzelski to declare martial law, even if Solidarity responded by calling a general strike: ‘One should not be afraid of strikes, since in themselves they are incapable of changing the government.’42 Castro seems to have been aware that Moscow’s policy was essentially the same as his. Andropov told the Politburo that Soviet military intervention was too risky to undertake. The veiled threats of intervention, which Castro took seriously, were intended to persuade the irresolute Jaruzelski to declare martial law and outlaw Solidarity, which he duly did in December 1981.43

  Despite Castro’s impeccable ideological orthodoxy and denunciation of Polish revisionism, his delusions of grandeur as a major statesman on the world stage continued to cause concern in Moscow. The KGB reported in 1981 that the Cuban presence in Africa was giving rise to ‘complications’: ‘Leading personalities in Angola and Ethiopia doubt the desirability of the Cuban troops’ continuing presence on the territory of these countries. The Cubans’ efforts to influence internal processes in developing countries are turning into interference in their internal affairs.’

  Cuban interference was all the more resented because its own mismanaged economy made it impossible for it to offer economic aid. The KGB also reported that Castro was in danger of being carried away by the prospects for revolution in Central America:

  The victory of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua and of progressive forces in Grenada, the increasing number of incidents in El Salvador, and the mobilization of left-wing groups in Guatemala and Honduras give some Cuban leaders the impression that the historic moment has now come for a total revolution in Central Latin America, and that this must be expedited by launching an armed struggle in the countries of the region.

  Raúl Castro reports that some members of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party - [Manuel] Piñeiro, head of the American Department [Departamento América] and Secretary of the Central Committee, together with [José] Abr[ah]antes, the First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs - are prompting Fidel Castro to take ill-considered action and calling for the export of revolution.44

  Castro’s first target for ‘the export of revolution’ remained El Salvador. He told Ogarkov in February 1981 that he had called a secret meeting in Havana of DRU and FMLN leaders in order to work out an agreed strategy for continuing the revolutionary struggle after the failure of what had been intended as the ‘final offensive’ in January.45 Though Mitrokhin’s notes do not record the results of that meeting, Schafik Handal later informed a KGB operations officer that the PCS had adopted a policy of guerrilla warfare and sabotage operations, with the aim of forcing the junta into negotiations with the DRU. In October the DRU held a meeting in Managua with representatives of the Sandinista regime and six revolutionary groups from Honduras. They jointly agreed to prepare for a guerrilla uprising in Honduras in case this proved necessary to prevent action by the Honduran army against FMLN guerrillas. According to KGB reports, pressure had been put on the President of Honduras, General Policarpo Paz García, to prevent his troops from being drawn into the civil war in El Salvador. Guerrilla forces in Guatemala were also allegedly strong enough to deter intervention by the Guatemalan army. Costa Rican Communists were said to have 600 well-trained and equipped guerrillas who were prepared to intervene on the side of the FMLN. Colombian revolutionaries had received over 1.2 million dollars’ worth of weapons and ammunition via the Sandinistas and were reported to be ‘capable of initiating combat actions in Colombia upon command’. The Libyan leader, Colonel Qaddafi, was providing large sums of money for the transport of weapons to guerrilla groups.46

  Late in 1981, the FMLN agreed with Castro on a strategy designed to disrupt the elections due to be held in El Salvador in March 1982. Soviet arms supplies channelled by the Cubans through Honduras and Belize were used to block roads, destroy public transport and attack polling booths and other public buildings.47 Ogarkov, among others, appears to have believed that the strategy might succeed. According to the Grenadan minutes of his meeting in Moscow shortly before the elections with the Chief of Staff of the People’s Revolutionary Armed Forces of Grenada:

  The Marshal [Ogarkov] said that over two decades ago there was only Cuba in Latin America, today there are Nicaragua, Grenada and a serious battle is going on in El Salvador. The Marshal of the Soviet Union then stressed that United States imperialism would try to prevent progress but that there were no prospects for imperialism to turn back history.48

  The FMLN strategy, however, failed. The turnout at the El Salvador elections, witnessed by hundreds of foreign observers and journalists, was over 80 per cent. Henceforth the DRU and FMLN were resigned to a protracted ‘people’s war’ on the Vietnamese model, epitomized by the slogan, ‘Vietnam Has Won! El Salvador Will Win!’49 Civil war continued in El Salvador for another decade.

  Since Moscow appears to have seen little prospect of an early FMLN victory, the KGB’s main priority became to exploit the civil war in active measures designed to discredit US policy. In particular it set out to make military aid to the El Salvador government (increased more than five-fold by the Reagan administration between 1981 and 1984) so unpopular within the United States that public opinion would demand that it be halted. Mitrokhin’s notes on KGB active measures consist of only a brief file summary: ‘Influence was exerted on US public opinion: about 150 committees were created in the United States which spoke out against US interference in El Salvador, and contacts were made with US Senators.’50

  As often happened, the Centre seems to have exaggerated its ability to influence Western opinion. The majority of US protesters required no prompting by the KGB to oppose the policy of the Reagan administration in El Salvador. Both the KGB and the Cuban Departamento América, however, undoubtedly played a significant and probably co-ordinated role in expanding the volume of protest. A tour of the United States by Schafik Handal’s brother, Farid, early in 1980 led to the founding of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), an umbrella group co-ordinating the work of many local committees opposed to US involvement. Farid Handal’s most important contacts in New York were Alfredo García Almedo, head of the DA’s North American department, who operated under diplomatic cover as a member of the Cuban Mission to the UN, and the leadership of the Communist Party of the United States, which was also in touch with the KGB.51

  Soon after its foundation, CISPES disseminated an alleged State Department ‘Dissent Paper on El Salvador and Central America’, which purported to reflect the concerns of many ‘current and former analysts and officials’ in the National Security Council, State Department, Pentagon and CIA. In reality, the document was a forgery, almost certainly produced by FCD Service A. It warned that continued military aid to the El Salvador government would eventually force the United States to intervene directly, and praised the political wing of the FMLN as ‘a legitimate and representative political force’ with wide popular support. Among the journalists who quoted the document were two columnists on the New York Times. One, Flora Lewis, later apologized
to her readers for having been deceived by a forgery. The other, Anthony Lewis (no relation), did not.52

  Soviet caution about the ‘export of revolution’ in Central America was reinforced by the increased risks of confrontation with the United States. On 1 December 1981 Reagan authorized covert support for the ‘Contra’ opposition, initially approving the expenditure of $19 million to train 500 ‘resistance fighters’. Support for the Contras rapidly ceased to be secret and turned into a public relations disaster which KGB active measures sought to exploit around the world.53 As the ‘Great Communicator’ later acknowledged in his memoirs, ‘One of my greatest frustrations . . . was my inability to communicate to the American people and to Congress the seriousness of the threat we faced in Central America.’54 On 10 March 1982 the Washington Post revealed the covert action programme approved three months earlier and disclosed that the 500 Contras were being secretly trained to destroy Nicaraguan power plants and bridges, as well as to ‘disrupt the Nicaraguan arms supply line to El Salvador’. Six months later the Contras numbered almost 3,500. On 8 November the lead story in Newsweek, headlined ‘America’s Secret War: Target Nicaragua’, revealed the use of the Contras in a CIA covert operation intended to overthrow the Nicaraguan government and the involvement of the US ambassador to Honduras in their training and organization. The Reagan administration was forced to admit its secret backing for the Contras, but claimed implausibly that the purpose was merely to put pressure on, rather than to overthrow, the Sandinistas.

  Congress was unconvinced. On 8 December, by a majority of 411 to 0, the House of Representatives passed the ‘Boland Amendment’, prohibiting both the Defense Department and the CIA from providing military equipment, training or advice for the purpose of overthrowing the Sandinista regime. The experience of the US-backed attempt to overthrow the Castro regime by the landing at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 should have made clear that paramilitary operations on the scale planned against the Sandinistas twenty years later in an era of more investigative journalism could not reasonably be expected to remain secret. ‘A covert operation’, writes George Shultz, who succeeded Haig as Secretary of State in 1982, ‘was being converted to overt by talk on Capitol Hill and in the daily press and television news coverage.’ By the summer of 1983, the CIA favoured making public American support for Contra operations, and transferring management of it to the Defense Department. The Pentagon, however, successfully resisted taking responsibility for such a controversial programme. Reagan’s covert action in Central America had thus become riddled with contradictions which were easily exploited by both his political opponents and Soviet active measures. What had become in practice an overt programme of support to the Contras was still being implemented as a covert operation - with the result, as Shultz complained, that ‘the administration could not openly defend it’. Reagan himself added to the contradictions by publicly proclaiming one policy while secretly following another. The stated aim of support for the Contras was to prevent the Sandinistas undermining their neighbours ‘through the export of subversion and violence’. ‘Let us be clear as to the American attitude toward the Government of Nicaragua,’ the President told a joint session of Congress on 27 April. ‘We do not seek its overthrow.’ The KGB was well aware, however, that Reagan’s real aim was precisely that - the overthrow of the government of Nicaragua.55

  Though Soviet commentators continued to express ‘unswerving solidarity’ with the Nicaraguan people and ‘resolute condemnation’ of US aggression towards them, they failed to include Nicaragua on their list of Third World ‘socialist-oriented states’ - a label which would have implied greater confidence in, and commitment to, the survival of the Sandinista revolution than Moscow was willing to give. Both the Soviet Union and Cuba made clear to Sandinista leaders that they would not defend them against American attack. During Daniel Ortega’s visit to Moscow in March 1983, he was obliged - no doubt reluctantly - to assent to Andropov’s declaration as Soviet leader that ‘the revolutionary government of Nicaragua has all necessary resources to defend the motherland’. It did not, in other words, require further assistance from the Soviet Union to ‘uphold its freedom and independence’.56

  Ortega’s visit coincided with the beginning of the tensest period of Soviet-American relations since the Cuban missile crisis. Since May 1981 the KGB and GRU had been collaborating in operation RYAN, a global operation designed to collect intelligence on the presumed (though, in reality, non-existent) plans of the Reagan administration to launch a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. For the next three years the Kremlin and the Centre were obsessed by what the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Anatoli Dobrynin, called a ‘paranoid interpretation’ of Reagan’s policy. Residencies in Western capitals, Tokyo and some Third World states were required to submit time-consuming fortnightly reports on signs of US and NATO preparations for nuclear attack. Many FCD officers stationed abroad were much less alarmist than the Centre and viewed operation RYAN with scome scepticism. None, however, was willing to put his career at risk by challenging the assumptions behind the operation. RYAN thus created a vicious circle of intelligence collection and assessment. Residencies were, in effect, required to report alarming information even if they were sceptical of it. The Centre was duly alarmed and demanded more. Reagan’s announcement of the SDI (‘Star Wars’) programme in March 1983, coupled with his almost simultaneous denunciation of the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’, raised Moscow’s fears to new heights. The American people, Andropov believed, were being psychologically prepared by the Reagan administration for nuclear war. On 28 September, already terminally ill, Andropov issued from his sickbed an apocalyptic denunciation of the ‘outrageous military psychosis’ which, he claimed, had taken hold of the United States: ‘The Reagan administration, in its imperial ambitions, goes so far that one begins to doubt whether Washington has any brakes at all preventing it from crossing the point at which any sober-minded person must stop.’57

  The overthrow of the Marxist regime in Grenada a few weeks later appeared to Moscow to provide further evidence of the United States’ ‘imperial ambitions’. In October 1983 a long-standing conflict between Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and his deputy, Bernard Coard, erupted in violence which culminated in the shooting of Bishop, his current lover and some of his leading supporters in front of a mural of Che Guevara. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher disagreed in their interpretation of the killings. The new regime, Mrs Thatcher believed, though it contained more obvious thugs, was not much different from its predecessor. Reagan, like Bill Casey, his DCI, regarded the coup as a serious escalation of the Communist threat to the Caribbean. Grenada, he believed, was ‘a Soviet-Cuban colony, being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy’. Reagan was also concerned at the threat to 800 American medical students in Grenada. On 25 October a US invasion overthrew the regime and rescued the students. The operation further fuelled Soviet paranoia. Vice-President Vasili Kuznetsov accused the Reagan administration of ‘making delirious plans for world domination’ which were ‘pushing mankind to the brink of disaster’. The Soviet press depicted Reagan himself as a ‘madman’. The Sandinistas feared that Nicaragua might be the next target for an American invasion. So did the KGB.58

  The impact of the Grenada invasion in Moscow was heightened by the fact that it immediately preceded the most fraught phase of operation RYAN. During the NATO command-post exercise, Able Archer 83, held from 2 to 11 November to practise nuclear release procedures, paranoia in the Centre reached dangerous levels. For a time the KGB leadership was haunted by the fear that the exercise might be intended as cover for a nuclear first strike. Some FCD officers stationed in the West were by now more concerned by the alarmism of the Centre than by the threat of Western surprise attack. Operation RYAN wound down (though it did not end) during 1984, helped by the death of its two main protagonists, Andropov and Defence Minister Ustinov, and by reassuring signals from London and Washington, both worried by i
ntelligence reports on the rise in Soviet paranoia.59

  The period of acute US-Soviet tension which reached its peak late in 1983 left Moscow in no mood to raise the stakes in Central America. The Soviet-Nicaraguan arms treaty of 1981 had provided for the delivery of a squadron of MiG-21s in 1985. Moscow was well aware, however, that the supply of MiG-21s would be strongly opposed by the United States. Early in 1984 Castro began trying to persuade the Sandinista leadership that they should accept a squadron of helicopters instead. Humberto Ortega reacted angrily, telling a meeting of the Sandinista National Directorate: ‘It doesn’t seem at all unlikely to me that the Soviets, lining up their international interests, have asked Castro to persuade us to give up the MiG-21s. But we must never renounce them, nor must we allow Cuba to continue being an intermediary between ourselves and the Soviets.’ The MiG-21s, however, were never delivered.60 In the mid-1980s Soviet bloc support for the Nicaraguan economy fluctuated between $150 and $400 million a year, all in bilateral trade credits rather than hard-currency loans - a significant drain on Soviet resources but a small fraction of the aid it gave to Cuba.61