The KGB’s dealings with Yasir Arafat and the PLO were ambivalent. Moscow gave strong support to an Arab initiative in the UN General Assembly recognizing the PLO as the lawful representative of Palestinian Arabs and giving it observer status at the UN. A Palestinian delegation to Moscow in 1975, headed by Arafat, expressed profound gratitude to the Soviet Union ‘for its unfailing support of the just struggle of the Palestinian people for their national aspirations, against the intrigues of imperialism, Zionism and reaction’.29 But despite Moscow’s public praise for the PLO and the secret training for its guerrillas provided by the KGB, Arafat never gained the trust of either the Kremlin or the Centre. When PLO forces in Lebanon were defeated by an Israeli invasion in 1982, the Soviet Union offered no assistance. Though Moscow was embarrassed by the homicidal feud which broke out between Asad and Arafat in 1983, the closeness of its alliance with Syria was unaffected by it. In the final years of the Cold War Arafat was almost as unpopular in Moscow as in Washington.30
8
The Rise and Fall of Soviet Influence in Egypt
The first Arab leader to be courted by the Kremlin was Gamal Abdel Nasser, who in 1954, at the age of only thirty-six, became the first native Egyptian ruler of an independent Egypt since Persian invaders had overthrown the last of the pharaohs almost 2,500 years earlier. Nasser’s campaign against imperialism went back to his childhood protests against the British occupation of Egypt. ‘When I was a little child’, he recalled, ‘every time I saw aeroplanes flying overhead I used to shout:
“O God Almighty, may
A calamity overtake the English!” ’ 1
Despite his hostility to the British, neither the Kremlin nor the Centre immediately warmed to Nasser. As Khrushchev later acknowledged: ‘We were inclined to think that Nasser’s coup was just another one of those military take-overs which we had become so accustomed to in South America. We didn’t expect much to come of it.’2 Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov, who became KGB Chairman in 1954, knew so little about Egypt that he believed Egyptians were black Africans rather than Arabs. His Middle Eastern specialists appear to have been too embarrassed by his ignorance to point his error out to him.3
Moscow began to pay serious attention to Nasser when, only six months after taking power, he successfully put pressure on the British to withdraw their troops from the Suez Canal zone. Two months later, in December 1954, the youthful FCD high flier, Vadim Kirpichenko, arrived in Cairo as head of political intelligence with the principal ambition of penetrating Nasser’s entourage. He had an early success, though neither Kirpichenko’s memoirs (unsurprisingly) nor the files noted by Mitrokhin reveal the identity of the individual involved. Kirpichenko identifies him only as ‘a firm friend [who] provided interesting information’, without making clear whether he was an agent or a confidential contact. Given that Nasser’s entourage was aware that the individual was sometimes in contact with Kirpichenko, it seems more likely that he was a confidential contact. At a time when the Soviet ambassador in Cairo, Daniil Semenovich Solod, was still inclined to dismiss Nasser as a reactionary nationalist, Kirpichenko’s contact provided the first reliable evidence of ‘where Nasser intended to lead his country’ - towards a special relationship with the Soviet Union.4 In September 1955 Nasser delighted Moscow and shocked the West by signing an agreement to purchase large quantities of Soviet arms via Czechoslovakia - an agreement concluded in such secrecy that even the Egyptian ambassador in Moscow was kept in ignorance of negotiations for it.5
Kirpichenko’s contact also proved his worth during the visit to Cairo of Khrushchev’s private envoy (shortly to become his foreign minister), Dmitri Shepilov, on a fact-finding mission in May 1956. After Solod had tried and failed for several days to arrange a meeting between Shepilov and Nasser, Kirpichenko went round to his contact’s house at 1 a.m., failed to find him in but eventually tracked him down around dawn. At 9.30 a.m. the contact rang to say that a presidential motorcade would shortly arrive to conduct Shepilov to a meeting with Nasser at 10 o’clock.6 Two Soviet defectors, the KGB officer Vladimir Kuzichkin and the diplomat Vladimir Sakharov (a KGB co-optee), both Middle Eastern specialists, later identified Kirpichenko’s confidential contact or agent as Sami Sharaf, a pot-bellied man with a drooping moustache and the flattering codename ASAD (‘Lion’) who in 1959, as Director of the President’s Office of Information, was to become Nasser’s chief intelligence adviser.7 Kirpichenko insists that ‘Sami Sharaf was never our agent, and I did not even know him’.8 He does, however, acknowledge that Sharaf was an ‘ardent supporter’ of Egyptian-Soviet friendship who, after Nasser’s death, had repeated unauthorized discussions of official business at the Soviet embassy9 - the kind of man, in other words, whom the KGB would almost certainly have attempted to recruit as at least a ‘confidential contact’. When Sharaf finally met Brezhnev a year after Nasser’s death, he was profuse in his protestations of gratitude and friendship:
I must thank Comrade Brezhnev for giving me this opportunity to see him in spite of all his preoccupations. I am sure . . . that this is a special favour for me personally. I trust relations between us will be everlasting and continuous, and that the coming days and the positions which we adopt will be taken as a sincere witness to the friendship which exists between [Egypt] and the Soviet Union, parties, peoples and governments . . . I firmly believe that, since Sami Sharaf is the son of the great leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, he occupies a special position in relation to his Soviet friends.10
In July 1956 Nasser caused an international sensation by nationalizing the Suez Canal, hitherto a concession run by the Paris-based Suez Canal Company - in Arab eyes, the supreme symbol of Western imperialist exploitation. He then urgently sought Soviet advice on how to respond to Western opposition.11 The black comedy of the failed Anglo-French attempt, in collusion with Israel, to reclaim control of the Suez Canal by force of arms in November played into the hands of both Khrushchev and Nasser. Within the Middle East the balance of power shifted decisively against the conservative, pro-Western regimes in Iraq and Jordan and in favour of the radical forces led by Egypt. Nasser emerged as the hero of the Arab world. Suez also drove him closer to Moscow and to the KGB. On the eve of the Anglo-French invasion Nasser received intelligence about plans to assassinate him, apparently drawn up by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) on the orders of the temporarily unbalanced British Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, who was obsessed by his determination to ‘knock Nasser off his perch’.12 Kirpichenko received a request from his contact in Nasser’s entourage for help in improving his personal security. Two senior officers of the KGB Ninth (Protective Security) Directorate flew to Cairo and, together with Kirpichenko, were invited to lunch with Nasser in what Kirpichenko calls ‘a very warm domestic setting’. Subsequent investigation quickly revealed that Nasser’s only security consisted of a group of bodyguards. There was no alarm system in any of the buildings where he lived and worked. His cook bought bread at a bakery opposite the presidential residence, and meat and vegetables at the nearest market. Having rectified these security failings, the KGB advisers were then asked to provide protection against radiation and poison gas. The best method, they explained, was to keep a caged bird on all premises used by Nasser. If any of the birds died, the building concerned should be evacuated. Egyptian intelligence asked in vain for higher-tech systems of detection which the KGB was reluctant to provide.13
In 1958 Nasser received a hero’s welcome on his arrival in Moscow for a triumphal three-week tour of the Soviet Union which both the Kremlin and the Centre intended to cement the special relationship with him. The entire Soviet leadership turned out to welcome Nasser at the airport and made him guest of honour at the annual May Day parade, standing beside a beaming Khrushchev on the reviewing platform above the Lenin mausoleum. The important role the KGB had assumed in Soviet-Egyptian relations was shown by the choice of Kirpichenko, rather than a diplomat, as interpreter during Nasser’s trip - much as Leonov was later chosen to interpret for
Castro. Kirpichenko found Nasser already tired when he arrived in Moscow and felt increasingly sorry for him as he worked his way through the long list of official engagements prepared for his visit. Since, however, all the engagements had been approved by Khrushchev, Kirpichenko felt powerless to cut any of them. Khrushchev, unlike his guest, was in ebullient form throughout the visit. During an evening at the Bolshoi Ballet to see Swan Lake, when the evil black swan appeared on stage Khrushchev exclaimed, ‘That’s Dulles [US Secretary of State]! But don’t worry, Comrade Nasser, don’t worry! At the end of the act we’ll break his wings . . .’ Kirpichenko duly translated.14 Nasser seems to have been impressed as well as exhausted by the series of effusive welcomes to which he was subjected during his visit. On his return to Cairo, he told a huge, cheering crowd that the Soviet Union was ‘a friendly country with no ulterior motive’ which held the Arab nation ‘in great esteem’.15
The main advantage derived by the KGB from the state visit was the liaison established between Kirpichenko and the head of the main Egyptian intelligence service, Salah Muhammad Nasr, who accompanied Nasser on his tour. ‘Salah Nasr’, writes Kirpichenko, ‘was attentive to me and tried in all sorts of ways to show that he assigned important significance to our contact.’ It was agreed that, after their return to Cairo, Kirpichenko would renew contact under the pseudonym ‘George’. The female receptionist to whom he spoke on arrival at Nasr’s office, however, told him, ‘ “Mister George”, we all know who you are. You were interpreting for our president. You were in the newsreels every day in all the cinemas!’ Despite this minor contretemps, Kirpichenko and Nasr maintained good personal and working relations for the next nine years until Nasr was arrested for plotting against Nasser.16
The special relationship with Nasser had moments of tension, due chiefly to his persecution of Communists in Egypt and in Syria (during the union of the two countries in the United Arab Republic from 1958 to 1961), and his denunciation of Communists in Iraq caused serious friction. By the early 1960s, however, Khrushchev and the Centre, though not all of the Presidium, were convinced that a new ‘correlation of forces’ existed in the Middle East which had to be exploited in the struggle against the Main Adversary. The aggressive global grand strategy devised by KGB Chairman Aleksandr Shelepin and approved by Khrushchev in the summer of 1961 envisaged the use of national liberation movements as the basis of a forward policy in the Third World.17 Castro’s victory in Cuba also encouraged the new policy of allying with anti-imperialist but ideologically unorthodox Third World nationalists, instead of relying simply on orthodox Communist parties which unfailingly toed the Moscow line. As well as supporting Cuba and the Sandinistas, Shelepin also conceived a remarkable scheme to support a Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq and tell Nasser through ‘unofficial’ (probably KGB) channels that, if the rebellion succeeded, Moscow ‘might take a benign look at the integration of the non-Kurdish part of Iraqi territory with the UAR [United Arab Republic] on the condition of Nasser’s support for the creation of an independent Kurdistan’.18 Unrealistic though the scheme was, particularly during the final months of the UAR’s existence, the hugely ambitious plan for a Nasserite union of Egypt, Syria and the greater part of Iraq which Shelepin put to Khrushchev gives some sense of the Centre’s hopes for exploiting both his enormous prestige as the most popular Arab leader of the twentieth century and his willingness to enter a special relationship with the Soviet Union.
Throughout the 1960s more Soviet hopes were pinned on Nasser than on any other Third World leader outside Latin America. Soviet ideologists devised the terms ‘non-capitalist path’ and ‘revolutionary democracy’ to define a progressive, intermediate stage between capitalism and socialism. Nasser’s decision to nationalize much of Egyptian industry in 1961 provided encouraging evidence of his own progress along the ‘non-capitalist path’.19 Among the Soviet agents in the media who eulogized his achievements was the former SIS officer Kim Philby, who until his defection to Moscow early in 1963 was the Beirut correspondent for the Observer and The Economist. In an article entitled ‘Nasser’s Pride and Glory’ on the tenth anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution in the summer of 1962, Philby declared that he had successfully turned Egypt into a ‘co-operative socialist democracy’: ‘It is now as difficult to conceive an Egypt without Nasser as a Yugoslavia without Tito or an India without Nehru - and Nasser is still a young man.’20 Of all Soviet aid to the Third World between 1954 and 1961 43 per cent went to Egypt. In 1964 Nasser was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, the USSR’s highest decoration. A year later, the Egyptian Communist Party dissolved itself and its members applied for membership of the ruling Arab Socialist Union.21
By the mid-1960s the majority view among Moscow’s Middle Eastern experts was that Soviet equipment and training had transformed the Egyptian armed forces. They were sadly disillusioned by the humiliating outcome of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War in 1967. The Israeli attack on Egypt at 8.45 a.m. (Cairo time) on 5 June took the Centre as well as Nasser by surprise. The Soviet news media learned of the attack before the KGB, which only discovered the outbreak of war from intercepted Associated Press reports.22 The war was virtually decided during the first three hours when Israeli air-raids destroyed 286 of 340 Egyptian combat aircraft on the ground, leaving the Egyptian army without air cover during the ensuing land battles in the Sinai desert.
On 28 June 1967, in one of his first speeches as KGB Chairman, Yuri Andropov addressed KGB Communist Party activists on the subject of ‘The Soviet Union’s Policy regarding Israel’s Aggression in the Near East’. In order to avoid similar intelligence failures in future and have ‘timely information and forecasts of events’, the KGB ‘must draw highly qualified specialists into intelligence work from a variety of academic fields’.23 Among the Soviet journalists and academic experts sent on missions to increase the Centre’s understanding of the Middle East was Yevgeni Primakov, codenamed MAKS (later head of the post-Soviet foreign intelligence agency, the SVR, and one of Boris Yeltsin’s prime ministers). In the late 1960s Primakov succeeded in getting to know both Hafiz al-Asad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.24 Intelligence analysis, which had scarcely existed hitherto in a KGB frightened of offering opinions uncongenial to the political leadership, made modest - though always politically correct - strides during the Andropov era.
In public, the Kremlin stood by Nasser and the Arab cause after the humiliation of the Six-Day War, denounced imperialist aggression and (to its subsequent regret) broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. Privately, however, there was savage criticism of the incompetence of the Arab forces and outrage at the amount of Soviet military equipment captured by the Israelis. Within the Centre there was grudging admiration for both the Israelis’ military skill and the success of Israeli propaganda which sought to create an impression of Arab cowardice in battle by photographing Egyptian PoWs in their underwear and other unheroic poses standing next to undamaged Soviet tanks.25 The débâcle of the Six-Day War left Moscow with only two options: either to cut its losses or to rebuild the Arab armies. It chose the second. President Podgorny visited Egypt with an entourage which included Marshal Matvei Zakharov, chief of the Soviet general staff, Kirpichenko, then working at the Centre, and Primakov.26 Zakharov stayed on to advise on the reorganization and re-equipment of the Egyptian army. Desperate to resurrect his role as the hero of the Arab world, Nasser proved willing to make much larger concessions in return for Soviet help than before the Six-Day War. He told Podgorny:
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