The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  For different reasons, Central America turned into a major policy failure for both the United States and the Soviet Union. The disorganized Contras (whose numbers, even on the most optimistic estimate, were never more than one-fifth those of the EPS) had no prospect of defeating the Sandinistas. Their inept guerrilla campaign served chiefly to discredit themselves and their American supporters. On 24 May 1984 the House voted another Boland Amendment, more drastic than the first. Signed into law by Reagan in October, Boland II (as it became known) prohibited military or paramilitary support for the Contras by the CIA, Defense ‘or any other agency or entity involved in intelligence activities’ for the next year. The Deputy Director for Intelligence (and future DCI), Robert Gates, wrote to the DCI, Bill Casey, on 14 December 1984:

  The course we have been on (even before the funding cut-off) - as the last two years will testify - will result in further strengthening of the regime and a Communist Nicaragua which, allied with its Soviet and Cuban friends, will serve as the engine for the destabilization of Central America. Even a well-funded Contra movement cannot prevent this; indeed, relying on and supporting the Contras as our only action may actually hasten the ultimate unfortunate outcome.

  The only way to bring down the Sandinistas, Gates argued, was overt military assistance to their opponents, coupled with ‘air strikes to destroy a considerable portion of Nicaragua’s military buildup’. Covert action could not do the job. Neither Casey nor Reagan was willing to face up to this uncomfortable truth.62

  The attempt to circumvent the congressional veto on aid to the Contras led the White House into the black comedy of ‘Iran-Contra’ - an illegal attempt to divert to the Contras the profits of secret arms sales to Iran, followed by an attempted cover-up. Though the word ‘impeachment’ was probably never uttered either by the President himself or by his advisers in their conversations with him during the Iran-Contra crisis, it was in all their minds after the affair became public knowledge at a press conference on 25 November 1986. White House reporters, Reagan’s chief-of-staff believed, were ‘thinking a single thought: another Presidency was about to destroy itself’. That evening Vice-President George Bush dictated for his diary a series of staccato phrases which summed up the despondency in the White House: ‘The administration is in disarray - foreign policy in disarray - cover-up - Who knew what when?’ US support for the Contras had proved hopelessly counterproductive, handing a propaganda victory to the Sandinistas and reducing the Reagan presidency to its lowest ebb.63

  Though the failures of US policy in Central America were eagerly exploited by Soviet active measures, however, Moscow was beginning to lose patience with the Sandinistas. In May 1986, despite the fact that Nicaragua already owed the Soviet Union $1.1 billion, the Politburo was still willing ‘to supply free of charge uniforms, food and medicine to seventy thousand servicemen of the Sandinista army’.64 By 1987, with economic problems mounting at home, Gorbachev was increasingly reluctant to throw good money after bad in Central America. The Nicaraguan Minister of External Cooperation, Henry Ruiz, ruefully acknowledged that Soviet criticism of the Sandinistas’ chronic economic mismanagement was ‘legitimate’. 65 The economic pressure created by the decline of Soviet bloc support was heightened by a simultaneous US embargo. According to the secretary-general of the Sandinista Foreign Ministry, Alejandro Bendaña, Moscow told Managua bluntly that it was ‘time to achieve a regional settlement of security problems’. After three years of tortuous negotiations, continued conflict and missed deadlines, a peace plan chiefly devised by the Costa Rican President, Oscar Arias Sánchez, finally succeeded. According to Bendaña, ‘It wasn’t the intellectual brilliance of Oscar Arias that did it. It was us grabbing frantically onto any framework that was there, trying to cut our losses.’66 As part of the peace plan, the Sandinistas agreed to internationally supervised elections in February 1990, and - much to their surprise - lost to a broad-based coalition of opposition parties.

  With the demise of the Sandinistas, Cuba was, once again, the only Marxist-Leninist state in Latin America. During the later 1980s, however, there was a curious inversion of the ideological positions of Cuba and the Soviet Union. Twenty years earlier, Castro had been suspected of heresy by Soviet leaders. In the Gorbachev era, by contrast, Castro increasingly saw himself as the defender of ideological orthodoxy against Soviet revisionism. By 1987 the KGB liaison mission in Havana was reporting to the Centre that the DGI was increasingly keeping it at arm’s length. The situation was judged so serious that the KGB Chairman, Viktor Chebrikov, flew to Cuba in an attempt to restore relations. He appears to have had little success.67 Soon afterwards the Cuban resident in Prague, Florentino Aspillaga Lombard, defected to the United States and publicly revealed that the DGI had begun to target countries of the Soviet bloc. He also claimed, probably correctly, that Castro had a secret Swiss bank account ‘used to finance liberation movements, bribery of leaders and any personal whim of Castro’.68 At the annual 26 July celebration in 1988 of the start of Castro’s rebellion thirty-five years earlier, the Soviet ambassador was conspicuous by his absence. In his speech Castro criticized Gorbachev publicly for the first time. Gorbachev’s emphasis on glasnost and perestroika was, he declared, a threat to fundamental socialist principles. Cuba must stand guard over the ideological purity of the revolution. Gorbachev’s visit to Cuba in April 1989 did little to mend fences.

  The rapid disintegration of the Soviet bloc during the remainder of the year, so far from persuading Castro of the need for reform, merely reinforced his conviction that liberalization would threaten the survival of his regime. Gorbachev, he declared in May 1991, was responsible for ‘destroying the authority of the [Communist] Party’. News of the hard-line August coup was greeted with euphoria by the Cuban leadership. One Western diplomat reported that he had never seen Castro’s aides so happy. The euphoria, however, quickly gave way to deep dismay as the coup collapsed. The governments of the Russian Federation and the other states which emerged on the former territory of the Soviet Union quickly dismantled their links with Cuba. The rapid decline of Soviet bloc aid and trade had devastating consequences for the Cuban economy. Castro declared in 1992 that the disintegration of the Soviet Union was ‘worse for us than the October [Missile] Crisis’.69 Never, even in his worst nightmares, had he dreamt that Cuba would be the only Marxist-Leninist one-party state outside Asia to survive into the twenty-first century.

  The Middle East

  The Middle East in the Later Cold War

  7

  The Middle East: Introduction4

  For much of the Cold War, Soviet policy-makers believed they had an in-built advantage in the struggle with the Main Adversary and its allies for power and influence in the Middle East. If Latin America was the United States’ ‘backyard’, the Middle East was that of the Soviet Union. Israel’s special relationship with the United States made its Arab enemies, in Moscow’s view, the natural allies of the Soviet Union. Gromyko and Ponomarev jointly denounced Israel and international Zionism as ‘the main instrument of US imperialism’s assault on Arab countries’.1 Hatred of Israel multiplied hostility to the United States in the rest of the Middle East.2 The dramatic loss of America’s confidence in dealing with the Muslim world after the fall of its ally, the Shah of Iran, and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini was epitomized by the decision of the Carter administration not to send any congratulations to Muslim leaders to celebrate the 1,400th anniversary of Islam in 1979, for fear that it would somehow cause offence. The Soviet Union, by contrast, despite its official atheism, flooded Arab capitals with messages of congratulation.3

  The greatest volume of Soviet intelligence on the Middle East, as on much else of the Third World, came from SIGINT rather than HUMINT. By 1967 KGB codebreakers were able to decrypt 152 cipher systems used by a total of seventy-two states. Though no later statistics are available, the volume of decrypts doubtless continued to increase. Every day an inner circle within the Politburo - consisting in 1980 of Brezhnev,
Andropov, Gromyko, Kirilenko, Suslov and Ustinov - were sent copies of the most important decrypts. The heads of the KGB’s First and Second Chief Directorates were sent a larger selection. Though none of the decrypts have yet been declassified, they will one day be a source of major importance for historians of Soviet foreign policy.4

  The task of KGB and GRU codebreakers was greatly simplified by the vulnerability of Middle Eastern cipher systems, which was also exploited by British and American intelligence. During the Suez crisis of 1956 the British Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, wrote to congratulate GCHQ on both the ‘volume’ and the ‘excellence’ of the Middle Eastern decrypts it had produced and to say ‘how valuable’ they had proved to be.5 Soviet codebreakers also benefited from the KGB’s remarkable success in obtaining intelligence on cipher systems by penetrating Moscow embassies. Though Mitrokhin had no access to the decrypts themselves,6 he and other defectors have provided an important insight into the extent of these penetrations. Ilya Dzhirkvelov has revealed his part during the early 1950s in successful break-ins at the Egyptian, Syrian, Iranian, Turkish and other Middle Eastern embassies in Moscow for which he and his colleagues were rewarded with engraved watches and the title of ‘Honoured Chekist’.7 The files noted by Mitrokhin reveal that in the later stages of the Cold War, at least thirty-four KGB agents and confidential contacts took part in a highly successful operation to penetrate the Moscow embassy of Syria, then the Soviet Union’s main Middle Eastern ally. Middle Eastern states had little idea of the extent to which, because of the vulnerability of their cipher systems and embassy security, they were - so far as Moscow was concerned - conducting open diplomacy.8

  SIGINT provided only a partial insight into the secretive policy-making of the region. Because of the autocratic nature of Middle Eastern regimes, the decrypted telegrams of their diplomats did not always disclose their real intentions. Anwar al-Sadat was one of a number of rulers in the region whose secret diplomacy was sometimes at variance with his country’s official foreign policy. The KGB, however, may well have been able to break his presidential cipher as well as to decrypt Egyptian diplomatic traffic. It remains unclear whether the KGB discovered his secret contacts with the Nixon administration from SIGINT or HUMINT - or both. The discovery caused serious alarm within the Politburo.9

  Penetrating the inner circles of the mostly suspicious rulers of the Middle East was more difficult than penetrating their Moscow embassies and diplomatic ciphers. The KGB, none the less, had close links with the intelligence services of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Soviet Union’s first major Middle Eastern ally. His main intelligence adviser, Sami Sharaf, was profuse in his protestations of gratitude and friendship to ‘Comrade Brezhnev’, and claimed to be convinced that, as the disciple of ‘the great leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, he occupies a special position in relation to his Soviet friends’. Probably the KGB’s longest-serving agent in Syria was the diplomat and lawyer Tarazi Salah al-Din (codenamed IZZAT), who had been recruited by the KGB in 1954, became Director-General of the Foreign Ministry in the early 1970s, and was a member of the International Tribunal in The Hague at the time of his accidental death in 1980. The KGB also claimed for a time to be able to influence President Asad’s youngest brother, Rif’at, who commanded Asad’s élite ‘Defence Companies’, the best armed and trained units in the Syrian army, as well as the hit squads who operated against Syrian dissidents abroad. Despite, or perhaps partly because of, Saddam Hussein’s fascination with the career of Joseph Stalin, he seems to have made Baghdad a more difficult operating environment for the KGB than Cairo or Damascus.10

  In the Middle East, unlike Latin America, there was no realistic prospect of the emergence of a major Marxist-Leninist regime which would act as a role model for the Arab world and spread revolution through the region. Though the People’s Democratic Republic of [South] Yemen claimed to be such a regime, its almost continuous and frequently homicidal internal power struggles made it, from Moscow’s point of view, more of a liability than an asset. Moscow thus sought to base its strategy in the Middle East on alliance with one of the leading ‘progressive’ Arab powers which, it was hoped, would progress gradually to Marxism-Leninism. Its main hopes from 1955 to 1970 were pinned on Nasser, by far the most charismatic Arab leader of the Cold War as well as ruler of the largest Middle Eastern state. During the halcyon years of Nasser’s special relationship with Moscow, he was one of the most eloquent advocates of the Soviet role in the Middle East. ‘[The Russians]’, he told an American interviewer in 1957, ‘helped us survive. Yes, and they helped us escape domination by the West.’11 After Nasser’s sudden death in 1970, Moscow was never able to find an Arab ally of remotely equal stature. His successor, Sadat, expelled all Russian advisers and opted instead for a special relationship with the United States and peace with Israel. Though Iraq became in the mid-1970s the chief recipient of Soviet military aid to the Third World, Saddam Hussein’s suspicions of Soviet policy - despite his admiration for Stalin - ensured that the Soviet bridgehead in Baghdad was never secure. All that remained thereafter was an alliance with Asad’s Syria, increasingly notorious as a state sponsor of terrorism as well as an increasing drain on the Soviet economy. No wonder that even the usually unsentimental Gromyko looked back nostalgically at the end of his long career on the special relationship with Nasser, arguing unconvincingly that, had he lived only ‘a few years longer’, the subsequent history of the Middle East might have been very different.12

  During the Cold War, the KGB maintained secret links with, and channelled secret subsidies to, most if not all Middle Eastern Communist parties. None of these parties, however, possessed a popular charismatic leader to compare with Castro, Guevara, Allende or the leading Sandinistas, and all were liable to be sacrificed to Soviet strategic interests. In 1965, at a time when Moscow was pursuing its courtship of Nasser, the Egyptian Communist Party was persuaded to dissolve itself and tell its members to join the ruling Arab Socialist Union.13 When Khrushchev made Nasser a Hero of the Soviet Union, one of his Presidium privately complained that he was honouring a leader who ‘drove Communists into concentration camps’.14 In 1972 Moscow put pressure on a somewhat reluctant Iraqi Communist Party to reach an accommodation with the Ba‘th regime. When thousands of Party members were imprisoned and many tortured at the end of the decade, however, Moscow stayed silent for fear of antagonizing Baghdad at a time when it was at the forefront of the Arab campaign to prevent the United States brokering a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. In Syria there was a growing breach between the long-serving Party leader and dogmatic neo-Stalinist, Khalid Bakdash, and the majority of the Party Politburo who resented both Bakdash’s autocratic leadership and Moscow’s support for the equally autocratic Asad.15

  Since the Soviet Union was itself a Middle Eastern power bordering some of the other main states of the region, the Middle East was a greater preoccupation of Gromyko and the Foreign Ministry than Latin America. For that reason the role played by KGB residencies in most major Middle Eastern states, though important, was less central than that of Soviet embassies. The main exception was Israel, with which - to the subsequent dismay of the Foreign Ministry - the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations in 1967. Soviet policy to Israel thereafter became entangled with and was often driven by the KGB’s anti-Zionist obsessions. ‘Zionist subversion’ was a particular obsession of Yuri Andropov who, as KGB Chairman, interpreted every protest by Jewish ‘refuseniks’ who were denied the right to emigrate to Israel as part of an international Zionist conspiracy against the Soviet Union. In a stream of reports to the Politburo he insisted on the need for resolute action to ‘neutralize’ the most minor protests. Even Brezhnev occasionally complained about the lack of proportion evident in the KGB campaign against refuseniks. After one wearisome discussion in the Politburo in 1973, he complained, ‘Zionism is making us stupid’. Gromyko washed his hands of much of the anti-Zionist campaign, telling his staff ‘not to bother him with . . . such “absurd” matters’.16
Moscow none the less considered its role in 1975 in the adoption of UN Resolution 3379 denouncing Zionism as a form of racism as a major diplomatic victory, which demonstrated the Soviet Union’s ‘enormous support for the struggle of the Arab peoples’.17 The Zionist obsession of the KGB leadership came close to, and at times arguably crossed, the threshold of paranoid delusion. A KGB conference concluded absurdly in 1982 that ‘virtually no major negative incidents took place [anywhere] in the socialist countries of Europe without the involvement of Zionists’. Andropov insisted that even the sending of matsos (unleavened bread) from the West to Soviet Jews for their Passover celebrations represented a potentially serious act of ideological sabotage.18

  The unexpected surge of international terrorism in the early 1970s and the precedent set a few years before by the KGB’s use of Sandinista guerrillas against US targets in Central and North America 19 encouraged the Centre to consider the use of Palestinian terrorists as proxies in the Middle East and Europe. In 1970 the KGB began secret arms deliveries to the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).20 The secret was remarkably well kept. Though there were a series of Western press reports on support for the PFLP from Syria, Iraq and Libya, there were none of any significance on its Soviet connection. The KGB’s willingness to use other terrorist proxies was inhibited by fear that the proxies would fail to conceal its involvement21 - just as during the second half of the Cold War it failed to implement any of its numerous and detailed plans for the assassination of KGB defectors for fear that it would be blamed for their demise.22 After the death of the two main Soviet agents within the PFLP in 1978, the KGB’s direct connection with it appears to have died away.23 Nor does the KGB seem to have established a connection with any other Palestinian terrorist group which was nearly as close as that with the PFLP for most of the 1970s. The Centre appears to have regarded the two most active terrorist leaders of the later 1970s and 1980s, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (better known as ‘Carlos the Jackal’) and Sabri al-Banna (better known as ‘Abu Nidal’), as mavericks with whom it was prudent to avoid all direct connection. Its judgement proved right in both cases. Carlos was a champagne terrorist with a passion for killing, high living and self-important revolutionary rhetoric.24 As well as attacking European and US targets, the increasingly paranoid Abu Nidal became obsessed with the hunt for mostly imaginary Palestinian traitors, whom he subjected to horrific torture and execution.25 While refusing to deal directly with either Carlos or Abu Nidal, however, Andropov was content for other Soviet bloc intelligence agencies to do so. With Andropov’s knowledge (and doubtless his blessing), East Germany became what its last interior minister, Peter-Michael Diestel, later called ‘an Eldorado for terrorists’.26 By the mid-1980s, however, both Carlos and Abu Nidal had become such an embarrassment to their Soviet bloc hosts that their east European bases were closed down. Both continued to receive assistance from the Soviet Union’s main Middle Eastern ally, Hafiz al-Asad. Carlos later claimed, in a characteristic transport of semi-reliable rhetoric, to be ‘a senior officer of the Syrian secret service’.27 Abu Nidal died in Baghdad in 2002, allegedly by his own hand, more probably murdered on the instructions of his former protector, Saddam Hussein.28