The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  Since 1969, the British embassy in Baghdad had correctly identified Saddam Hussein as President Bakr’s ‘heir apparent’. The embassy found him a ‘presentable young man’ with ‘an engaging smile’ who, despite his reputation as a ‘Party extremist’, might ‘mellow’ with added responsibility. Speaking ‘with great warmth and what certainly seemed sincerity’, Saddam assured the British ambassador that Iraq’s relationship with the Soviet bloc ‘was forced upon it by the central problem of Palestine’, and expressed an apparently ‘earnest’ hope for improved ties with Britain and the United States. The ambassador summed up Saddam as ‘a formidable, single-minded and hard-headed member of the Ba‘athist hierarchy, but one with whom, if only one could see more of him, it would be possible to do business’.32 Moscow, however, was impressed by a quite different side of the Iraqi heir apparent’s devious personality. Saddam Hussein’s fascination with the career of Joseph Stalin appeared to offer an unusual opportunity to strengthen Soviet-Iraqi relations. Saddam’s henchmen had frequently to listen to his tedious descriptions of Stalin’s powers of dictatorial leadership. A Kurdish politician, Dr Mahmoud Othman, who visited his private apartments, was struck not merely by the crates of Johnnie Walker whisky but also by his bookshelf of works on Stalin translated into Arabic. ‘You seem fond of Stalin,’ Othman told him. ‘Yes,’ replied Saddam, ‘I like the way he governed his country.’ The KGB arranged secret visits by Saddam to all the villas which had been reserved for Stalin’s private use along the Black Sea coast. Stalin’s biographer, Simon Sebag Montefiore, has plausibly argued that among the qualities which Saddam so admired was Stalin’s sadistic pleasure in disposing of his enemies. ‘My greatest delight’, Stalin once admitted, ‘is to mark one’s enemy, avenge oneself thoroughly, then go to sleep.’ Saddam shared a similar mindset.33

  Moscow’s hopes of turning Iraq into its major Middle Eastern bridgehead were reflected in its growing military investment. From 1974 to 1978 Iraq was the chief recipient of Soviet military aid to the Third World. The Soviet bridgehead in Baghdad, however, was always insecure. With Kurdish resistance apparently broken in 1975, the brutal Ba‘th regime had less need thereafter of Communist support and set about achieving the complete subordination of the ICP. Desperate to avoid an open breach with Baghdad, Moscow made no public protest at the open persecution of Iraqi Communists which began in 1977. The Iraqi leader most suspicious of the Soviet-ICP connection was probably Saddam Hussein, whose admiration for Stalin did not extend to sympathy for Iraqi Communists. Saddam’s suspicions of a plot to prepare a Communist take-over in Iraq were fuelled by Soviet support for a coup in Afghanistan in April 1978 which brought to power a Marxist regime headed by Nur Muhammad Taraki. The Ba‘th regime in Iraq swiftly denounced the ICP’s ‘subservience to Moscow’. Twenty-one Party members were executed on charges of ‘forming secret groups inside the Iraqi armed forces’. ‘The Soviet Union’, declared Saddam Hussein, ‘will not be satisfied until the whole world becomes Communist.’34

  With the Party forced into an underground existence, an ICP Politburo member, Zaki Khayri (codenamed SEDOY, ‘Bald’), asked the KGB resident in Baghdad to take the Party archives into safe-keeping. In an elaborate operation on 18 August 1978 approved by the Centre, an ICP car containing three trunks of Party documents followed a pre-arranged route through Baghdad, kept under surveillance by KGB officers, to a secret rendezvous where the archives were transferred to a residency car.35 In November, A. A. Barkovsky, the Soviet ambassador to Iraq, reported to Moscow that three of the seven-man Politburo, including the general secretary, Aziz Muhammad (codenamed GLAVNY, ‘Head’), had gone abroad some months earlier. According to the ambassador, their absence had aroused great suspicion within the Ba‘th regime, which doubtless suspected that a plot was being hatched.36 Its suspicions would have been all the greater had it known that Muhammad was in exile in Moscow and communicating with the ICP via the Baghdad residency.37

  Early in 1979 the purge of ICP members intensified. Writing in the March issue of the World Marxist Review, the Iraqi Communist Nazibah Dulaymi declared that, in addition to executions of Party militants, ‘more than 10,000 persons have been arrested and subjected to mental and physical torture’. She naively expressed her confidence that ‘fraternal Communist and workers’ parties’ would demand ‘an immediate end to the repression against Communists and their friends in Iraq’. The Soviet Communist Party, however, remained silent. At a time when Iraq was at the forefront of the Arab campaign to prevent the Carter administration brokering a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, Moscow was cravenly anxious not to antagonize Baghdad. The torture and execution of Iraqi Communists counted for less in Soviet eyes than Iraqi attempts to disrupt the Middle Eastern peace process.38

  The brutal persecution of Iraqi Communists in 1978-79 coincided with the rapid decline and fall of the Shah in Iran. Like Western intelligence agencies, the KGB was taken by surprise. During Hoveyda’s twelve years as Prime Minister (1965-77), the Tehran residency had limited success in penetrating the regime. Its two most important Iranian agents during this period, General Ahmad Mogarebi, codenamed MAN,39 and a relative of Hoveyda, codenamed ZHAMAN, had both been recruited, apparently as ideological agents, in the early years of the Cold War. Mogarebi was responsible during the final years of the Shah’s rule for arms purchases from the United States and other Western states. According to Vladimir Kuzichkin, who later defected from the Tehran residency, he was ‘regarded as the Residency’s best agent’ and had ‘innumerable connections in various spheres of Iranian life, including the court of the Shah, the government and SAVAK’.40 Mogarebi became an increasingly mercenary agent whose growing importance was reflected in his monthly salary, raised in 1972 from 150-200 to 330 convertible rubles a month and in 1976 to 500 rubles. In 1976 he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Because of the shortage of high-grade intelligence from other sources, in 1976-77 the residency breached normal security procedures by contacting Mogarebi every two weeks.41 The habitual method of contact was by radio communication from a residency car, usually parked within 1,500 metres of his home.42 For meetings with his controller, Boris Kabanov (remembered by Kuzichkin as ‘Everybody’s favourite, with a sense of humour, good natured, quiet, always smiling . . .’),43 Mogarebi would leave his house and rendezvous with the nearby car. The fact that a residency car with diplomatic number plates was to be seen in the vicinity of Mogarebi’s house every fortnight might well have led to his arrest by SAVAK in September 1977.44

  The KGB found ZHAMAN far less reliable than Mogarebi. When recruited as an ideological agent in 1952, he eulogized the Soviet Union as ‘the stronghold of progress in the struggle against Imperialism and Anglo-American dominance in Iran’. His KGB file, however, complains that he was sometimes ‘uncontrollable’. In 1956 he shocked his controller by condemning the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Uprising. By the time his relative Amir Abbas Hoveyda became Prime Minister, ZHAMAN’s ideological commitment to the Soviet cause had faded away. Though his file claims that he adopted a more pro-Western outlook for careerist reasons, it also acknowledges that he became genuinely devoted to the Shah, to whom he owed his career in the official bureaucracy. The Tehran residency reported that, because of his personal wealth, it had no means of putting financial pressure on him. In the mid-1970s, ZHAMAN none the less took part in KGB active-measures operations, passing disinformation prepared by Service A to the Shah as well as to American, Egyptian, Pakistani and Somali contacts. In 1977 ZHAMAN was presented by the KGB with a thousand-dollar pair of cufflinks for his assistance in promoting Soviet active measures. 45

  In the summer of 1977 economic crisis and growing discontent at rising prices and daily power cuts in Tehran led to the resignation of Hoveyda as Prime Minister. Over the next year the newly arrived Soviet ambassador, Vladimir Vinogradov, formerly stationed in Cairo, paid regular calls on Hoveyda at home. SAVAK, predictably, took a close interest in his movements. On one occasion Hoveyda told Vinogradov that he
had seen a SAVAK report to the Shah complaining that they were having ‘long political discussions’.46 As unrest spilled into the Tehran streets, the slogans used by demonstrators were mostly religious rather than political: Allahu Akhbar!, then increasingly Allahu Akhbar! Khomeini Rakhbar! (‘God is Great! Khomeini is Our Leader!’). The Mujahidin and Fedayin, left-wing groupings who organized demonstrations and strikes, chose the same slogans to win popular support. 47 The KGB residency failed to take seriously the religious fervour of the Tehran demonstrations and pinned its hopes instead on the prospect of a left-wing revolution sweeping the Shah from power. The Centre was much less optimistic about the prospects of the Iranian left. ‘The most likely alternative to the Shah if he were to leave the political stage’, it believed, ‘would be the military. The opposition to the regime in Iran is weak and uncoordinated. In general the opposition in Iran is not a threat to the present regime . . .’48 It did not yet occur either to the KGB or to most Western intelligence services that the seventy-five-year-old Shi’ite fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini, who had lived in exile for the past thirteen years, represented any serious threat to the Shah.49 Gary Sick, the desk officer for Iran in the US National Security Council, noted in retrospect, ‘The notion of a popular revolution leading to the establishment of a theocratic state seemed so unlikely as to be absurd.’ On that point both the White House and the Kremlin were agreed. Visiting Tehran at the beginning of 1978, President Jimmy Carter declared in a New Year toast, ‘Iran is an island of stability in one of the more troubled parts of the world.’ Only a year later, the Shah was forced to abdicate. 50

  The well-publicized arrest of Mogarebi in September 1977 produced what Kuzichkin described as ‘an intelligence vacuum’ in the Tehran residency. As a security precaution, it was ordered to suspend agent operations and prepare a damage assessment. With ZHAMAN abroad, the residency had in any case no other agent capable of providing high-grade intelligence during this critical period.51 The residency’s problems were compounded by the Iranian refusal to grant visas for a number of FCD officers whom the Centre had intended to station in Tehran. During a visit to Hoveyda’s house in February 1978, Vinogradov asked if he could intervene with the authorities to help obtain the visas. Hoveyda declined. ‘I will tell you frankly what is happening,’ he replied. ‘The point is that SAVAK does not want to let the KGB into Iran.’52 By this time, operating conditions in Tehran had become so difficult and the surveillance of the Soviet embassy so tight that the residency appealed to the Centre to retaliate against the Iranian embassy in Moscow. Its suggestions for the harassment of Iranian embassy personnel included draining the brake fluid from their cars and slashing their tyres.53

  Though operations officers under diplomatic cover in the Tehran residency were barely able to operate, KGB illegals succeeded in 1977 in hiding a secret weapons cache of twenty-seven Walther pistols and 2,500 rounds of ammunition in a dead letter-box (DLB) in the Tehran suburbs.54 In accordance with common KGB practice, the DLB was probably fitted with a Molniya (‘Lightning’) booby-trap which was intended to destroy the contents if any attempt was made to open it by non-KGB personnel. Since the KGB is unlikely to have taken the risk of trying to retrieve the arms later, the cache may still be there and in a dangerous condition. (A booby-trapped KGB communications equipment cache in Switzerland whose location was identified by Mitrokhin exploded when fired on by a water cannon. According to the Swiss Federal Prosecutor’s Office, ‘Anyone who tried to move the container [in the cache] would have been killed.’)55 Though the purpose of the arms cache is not recorded in Mitrokhin’s brief note on the illegal operation which put it in place, the arms were probably intended for use in the event of a popular rising against the Shah’s regime. In the spring of 1978 a Line PR officer at the Tehran residency under diplomatic cover, Viktor Kazakov, confidently told an American contact that the Shah would be toppled by ‘oppressed masses rising to overthrow their shackles’.56 The still banned Tudeh (Communist) Party, operating through front organizations, began to show renewed signs of life, distributing anti-Shah leaflets and a news-sheet covertly produced with the help of the Tehran residency and Tass, the Soviet news agency.57 During the summer of 1978, however, most Middle Eastern experts in the Centre still believed that the Shah’s regime was too strong to be overthrown in the foreseeable future.58 In July 1978, at a meeting in Moscow with the Tehran resident, Ivan Anisimovich Fadeykin, Andropov was less concerned by the possible consequences of toppling the Shah than by the threat posed to the southern borders of the Soviet Union by the Shah’s alliance with the United States. Andropov instructed Fadeykin to step up active measures designed to destabilize the Shah’s regime and to damage its relations with the United States and its allies.59

  As the Shah’s position worsened, he increasingly resorted to conspiracy theories to account for his misfortunes. KGB active measures probably had at least some success in strengthening his suspicions of the United States. ‘Why do [the Americans] pick on me?’ he plaintively asked his advisers in the summer of 1978.60 The KGB fed disinformation to the Shah that the CIA was planning to create disturbances in Tehran and other cities to bring him down and that Washington was searching for a successor who could stabilize the country after his overthrow with the help of the army and SAVAK.61 There were moments when the Shah did indeed fear that Washington intended to abandon him and turn instead to Islamic fundamentalism to build a barrier against Soviet influence in the Middle East. Not all the Shah’s conspiracy theories, however, conformed to those devised by Service A. At times he feared that the United States and the Soviet Union were jointly conspiring to divide Iran between them. Some of the Shah’s family had even more bizarre theories. According to his son and heir, Reza, the Americans bombarded the Shah with radiation which brought on the malignant lymphoma that eventually killed him.62

  The Tehran residency remained resolutely hostile to Khomeini. He had, it reported, denounced Iranian Communists as unpatriotic puppets of Moscow and was incensed by the Communist coup in Afghanistan in April which he believed had cut short its transformation into an Islamic regime. Though noting increasing popular support for Khomeini, the residency believed that he did not plan to step into the shoes of the Shah himself.63 It was badly mistaken. Though Khomeini had started his revolt against the Shah without political ambitions of his own, fourteen years of exile had changed his mind. His aim now was to preside over Iran’s transformation into an Islamic republic ruled by Shia religious scholars.64 The KGB’s failure to understand Khomeini’s intentions derived not from any lack of secret intelligence but from the fact that it had not bothered to study his tape-recorded sermons which drew such an emotional response in Iranian mosques. The CIA made the same mistake.65 The middle-class Iranian liberals who had wanted to be rid of the autocracy and corruption of the Shah’s regime were equally surprised by the consequences of his overthrow.

  On 16 January 1979 the Shah left Iran for Egypt, vainly hoping that the military would take control and enable him to return. Instead, on 1 February Khomeini returned in triumph from exile in Paris to a delirious welcome from 3 million supporters who thronged the airport and streets of Tehran. Within a week Khomeini’s supporters had taken control of the police and administration in a number of cities across the country. On 9 February a pro-Khomeini mutiny began among air-force technicians and spread to other sections of the armed forces. The Tehran residency was able to follow the dramatic transfer of allegiance to the new Islamic regime by monitoring the radio networks of the police and armed services. While on duty in the residency’s IMPULS radio interception station on 10 February, Kuzichkin listened to government and rebel-controlled police stations exchanging sexual insults over the air. Next day, it became clear that the rebels had won. The government resigned and Khomeini’s nominee, Mehdi Bazargan, became acting Prime Minister.66 Among the most prominent early victims of Khomeini’s revolution was Amir Abbas Hoveyda, who was sentenced to death by a revolutionary tribunal headed by the ‘Hanging Aya
tollah’, Hojjat al-Islam Khalkhali, in May 1979. Khalkhali kept the pistol used to execute Hoveyda as a souvenir. The front pages of Tehran newspapers carried gruesome pictures of his bloodstained corpse.67 The FCD officer who closed Hoveyda’s file in the Centre wrote on it, ‘A pity for the poor man. He was harmless and useful for us.’68

  The Ayatollah Khomeini (codenamed KHATAB by the KGB)69 was even more prone than the Shah to conspiracy theories. All opposition to the Islamic revolution was, he believed, the product of conspiracy, and all Iranian conspirators were in the service of foreign powers. He denounced those Muslims who did not share his radical views as ‘American Muslims’ and many left-wingers as ‘Russian spies’. Since Khomeini claimed to be installing ‘God’s government’, his opponents were necessarily enemies of God Himself: ‘Revolt against God’s government is a revolt against God. Revolt against God is blasphemy. ’70 At least during the early years of the new Islamic Republic, the KGB found Iran even more fertile ground for active measures than under the Shah. Its chief targets included both the US embassy in Tehran and members of the new regime who were judged to have ‘anti-Soviet tendencies’.71 KGB operations against the US embassy, however, paled into insignificance by comparison with those of the new regime. On 4 November 1979 several thousand officially approved militants, claiming to be ‘students following the Imam [Khomeini]’s line’, overran the American embassy, declared it a ‘den of spies’, and took hostage over fifty US diplomatic personnel. But if the United States was denounced as the ‘Great Satan’ by Iran’s fundamentalist revolutionaries, the Soviet Union was the ‘Small Satan’. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of the year, Leonid Shebarshin (codenamed SHABROV), who had become Tehran resident a few months earlier,72 feared an attack on the Soviet embassy. A first incursion on New Year’s Day 1980 did little damage and was repulsed by the local police. By the time a second attack took place on the first anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, so many bars and metal doors had been fitted to the embassy that it resembled, in Shebarshin’s view, ‘something between a zoo and a prison’. No hostages were taken and no documents seized.73 The world’s attention remained focused on the American hostages, who were finally freed in January 1981.