Shebarshin and Barrington had been on friendly terms since they had met while on diplomatic postings in Pakistan in the mid-1960s before Shebarshin joined the KGB - though Barrington’s wide range of Pakistani contacts had led Shebarshin to conclude wrongly that he was an SIS officer. On leaving the Soviet embassy in Tehran for the appointment made by his secretary with Barrington in the summer of 1982, Shebarshin had only to cross the road to enter the British embassy. Since the beginning of the hostage crisis at the US embassy, however, the Swedish, not the Union, flag had flown over the embassy. To protect those of its staff who remained in Tehran, it had become the British interests section of the Swedish embassy. Instead of following the Centre’s absurd instructions to ask Barrington about the British passport given to Kuzichkin to help him escape across the Turkish frontier, a question which no British diplomat would have dreamt of answering, Shebarshin merely reported that Kuzichkin had disappeared and asked if Barrington had any news. The two men then had a general discussion on the dangers of diplomatic life in Khomeini’s Iran.102 ‘Barrington’, Shebarshin later recalled, ‘was courteous, even sympathetic, and promised to consult London.’103
During his debriefing in Britain, Kuzichkin provided voluminous information on Soviet intelligence operations in Iran, which SIS shared with the CIA. Early in 1983 the CIA passed much of it on to Tehran. The Khomeini regime reacted swiftly, expelling Shebarshin and seventeen other Soviet intelligence officers, and arresting 200 leading Tudeh militants, including the entire Central Committee, on charges of spying for Moscow.104 On May Day the KGB residency was further embarrassed to see both the Tudeh secretary general, Nureddin Kianuri, and its leading ideologue, Ehsan Tabari, make grovelling televised confessions of ‘treason’, ‘subversion’ and other ‘horrendous crimes’, later repeated in even greater detail at show trials where they obsequiously thanked the authorities for their ‘humane treatment’. Though both were spared, largely because of the propaganda value of their regular acts of public contrition, many other Party militants were executed or imprisoned. Tudeh disintegrated as a significant force in Iranian politics. Tehran newspaper headlines declared, ‘Members of the Central Committee Confess to Spying for the KGB’, ‘Tudeh Created for the Sole Purpose of Espionage’ and ‘Confessions Unprecedented in World History’.105
KGB operations in both Iran and Iraq thus ended in strategic failure. Their main priority for what remained of the Soviet era was damage limitation. In the final stages of the Iran-Iraq War, Gorbachev agreed to supply Iraq with the Scud-B missiles whose use in rocket attacks on Iranian cities helped to persuade Khomeini in 1988 to, as he put it, ‘drink poison’ and agree to a cease-fire. Despite the loss of perhaps a million lives, the Iran-Iraq border remained precisely where it had been when Saddam began the war eight years before.
Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990 - the first international crisis of the post-Cold War era - produced a sharp division of opinion among Gorbachev’s advisers. Next day Eduard Amrosievich Shevardnadze, the Soviet Foreign Minister, and James Baker, the US Secretary of State, jointly condemned the invasion and called on ‘the rest of the international community to join with us in an international cut-off of all arms supplies to Iraq’. A fortnight later Gorbachev made a televised defence of Soviet co-operation with the United States: ‘For us to have acted in a different way would have been unacceptable since the [Iraqi] act of aggression was committed with the help of our weapons, which we had agreed to sell to Iraq to maintain its defence capability - not to seize foreign territories . . .’
On 25 August the United States began a naval blockade of Iraq, an implied warning that it was prepared to go to war unless Saddam withdrew from Kuwait. The Centre, however, was deeply concerned that co-operation with the United States would weaken Soviet influence in the Middle East. With the support of the KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov and the Defence Minister Dmitri Yazov, Yevgeni Primakov, the Middle Eastern expert on Gorbachev’s Presidential Council whose links with the KGB went back thirty years, persuaded Gorbachev to send him on a mission to Baghdad. James Baker was impressed by Primakov’s ‘skill and cunning’ as well as his knowledge of Arab history, but regarded him as ‘an apologist for Saddam Hussein’. Primakov’s declared aim was to find a compromise which would leave Saddam with two disputed islands and an oil field in return for his withdrawal from the rest of Kuwait and the promise of an international conference on the Palestinian question. In Baker’s view, Primakov’s proposals were ‘more capitulation than compromise’. ‘And he had abetted Saddam’s strategy to weaken the Arab coalition [against him] by linking the Kuwaiti crisis with the larger Arab-Israeli conflict.’106 Like Baker, the CIA was deeply suspicious of Primakov’s ‘game of footsie’ with Saddam.107 So too was Shevardnadze, who privately communicated his suspicions to Baker. In October Shevardnadze told Primakov, in the presence of Gorbachev and Kryuchkov, that his proposals would be disastrous both for the Middle East and for Soviet foreign policy. Primakov, as he later acknowledged, lost his temper, ridiculing the Foreign Minister’s knowledge of Iraq. ‘How dare you,’ he sneered, ‘a graduate of a correspondence course from a teachers’ college in Kutaisi, lecture me on the Middle East, the region I’ve studied since my student days!’ ‘Yevgeni,’ interrupted Gorbachev, ‘stop right now!’108 ‘Shevardnadze’, writes Baker, ‘felt betrayed by Primakov and humiliated by Gorbachev, who by allowing Primakov to peddle a peace initiative, had permitted him to usurp Shevardnadze’s authority as Foreign Minister.’109 In December 1990, deeply depressed at the increasing power of the Moscow hard-liners, whom he rightly suspected of planning a coup, Shevardnadze resigned as Foreign Minister, publicly declaring his support for Gorbachev but calling his resignation ‘my protest against the onset of dictatorship’.110
Primakov’s mission to Baghdad, however, achieved little. Saddam had become so deeply distrustful of Soviet intentions that he failed to show much interest in the lifeline which Primakov was trying to throw him. He told his advisers that Primakov’s warning that Iraq faced attack by a multinational coalition if there was no negotiated settlement was simply a Soviet attempt to intimidate him. Saddam refused to believe, until the last minute, that the US-led air attack would be followed by a ground offensive.111 His suspicions of Soviet policy also led him to disregard intelligence of great importance. Just before the beginning of the ground offensive, operation DESERT STORM, in February 1991, satellite imagery shown by Soviet military experts to the Iraqi leadership provided convincing evidence that coalition forces were about to launch a flanking attack (the so-called ‘Hail Mary’ strategy) instead of - as was widely expected - an amphibious operation directly against the occupying army in Kuwait. Saddam, however, interpreted this intelligence as an attempted Soviet deception agreed with the United States, and made no attempt to reinforce his positions against the flanking attack.112 Partly as a result, his forces were routed in only a hundred hours of ground warfare.
10
The Making of the Syrian Alliance
The Ba‘th regime in Syria, dominated by Hafiz al-Asad from 1970 until his death thirty years later, emerged during the 1970s as the Soviet Union’s only reliable ally among the major states of the Middle East. In the immediate aftermath of the coup d’état, masquerading as a ‘revolution’, which had brought the Ba‘th party to power in March 1963, Moscow had viewed the new regime with deep suspicion - despite its declared commitment to socialism as well as Arab unity. Syria’s new rulers publicly pledged to crush the Communist Party and ‘other enemies of the Revolution’. Moscow retaliated in kind. The Soviet New Times dismissed the Ba‘th Party as ‘a synonym for brutality cloaked by shameless demagogy’. By the spring of 1964, however, encouraged by the nationalization of the main Syrian textile factories and other large industries, Moscow had begun to distinguish between ‘progressive’ and right-wing forces in the new regime. It was also attracted by the Ba‘th’s uncompromisingly anti-Western rhetoric. Despite the continuing ban on the Syrian Communist Part
y, the Soviet Union agreed to supply Syria with both arms and military advisers.1
The KGB had from the outset significant penetrations of the new regime’s foreign service and intelligence community. The diplomat and lawyer Tarazi Salah al-Din (codenamed IZZAT) had been recruited by the KGB in 1954 and went on to become one of its longest-serving Soviet agents. By the early 1970s he was Director-General of the Foreign Ministry.2 A further senior official in the Foreign Ministry, codenamed KARYAN, was recruited in 1967. Files noted by Mitrokhin also identify one major penetration of Syrian intelligence: KERIM, who had been recruited by the KGB in East Berlin in the early 1960s. The Damascus residency claimed the credit for helping him obtain a job in the main Syrian civilian intelligence agency, the Bureau of National Security (BNS), after his return to Syria. In 1964 KERIM played the central role in operation RUCHEY during which the KGB successfully bugged some of the BNS offices.3
Just as KGB active measures in Iran were able to exploit memories of CIA and SIS covert action during the 1953 coup to overthrow Mossadeq and restore the authority of the Shah, so they benefited in Syria from the deep suspicions left by abortive CIA/SIS attempts during 1956-57 to promote a coup in Damascus to undermine the growing influence of the Ba‘th.4 In Damascus, as in other Middle Eastern capitals, the prevailing culture of conspiracy theory also offered fertile ground for Service A’s fabrications. The KGB’s first major disinformation success after the Ba‘th ‘revolution’ was operation PULYA (‘Bullet’): a series of active measures during 1964-65 designed to unmask a supposed plot by the CIA, in collusion with the West German BND, to undermine the Ba‘th regime. In the summer of 1964 the Soviet military attaché in Damascus visited General Amin al-Hafiz, the commander-in-chief of the Syrian army and increasingly the dominating figure in the Ba‘th regime, to show him a forged BND intelligence report which purported to identify Syrian army officers in contact with both the BND and the CIA, as well as the CIA officers involved in their recruitment. The attaché was given strict instructions not to leave the report in Hafiz’s possession on the pretext of protecting the security of his sources - in reality in order to prevent the forgery being exposed. However, he allowed Hafiz to write down the names of the Syrian officers and CIA personnel mentioned in it. It does not seem to have occurred to Hafiz to challenge the authenticity of the report. Instead, he assured the attaché that he would keep the existence of the document secret and take ‘effective measures’ against those named in it. Soon afterwards the KGB residency sent an anonymous letter to the Bureau of National Security, purporting to give information on the activities of the CIA Damascus station. Posing as an American well-wisher, a residency operations officer also made an anonymous telephone call to a pro-American Syrian army officer to warn him that his links with the United States were about to be exposed. Shocked by the warning, the officer asked whether he should go into hiding or visit the US embassy to seek political asylum. As the KGB had expected, the whole telephone conversation was monitored by the BNS. The officer was removed from the staff of a Syrian military delegation which was about to visit Moscow.5 His subsequent fate, however, is not recorded in Mitrokhin’s notes.
The KGB claimed the credit for the announcement by the Ba‘th regime in February 1965 of the discovery of ‘an American spy organization . . . whose assignment was to gather information on the Syrian army and several kinds of military equipment’. Soon afterwards, against the background of furious denunciations of American policy by the Syrian media and angry demonstrations outside the US embassy, two Syrians were tried and executed on charges of spying for the CIA. A State Department protest was rejected by the Ba‘th regime on the grounds that ‘American policy in Syria is based on espionage and the creation of conspiracy and sabotage networks in the country’.6 The KGB also believed that its active measures convinced the regime in 1966 that the US ambassador was preparing a coup, and led it to make over 200 arrests in mid-September.7
On 23 February 1967 a military coup, publicly praised by Moscow as the work of ‘patriotic forces’, brought to power a left-wing Ba‘th regime headed by the austere Salah Jadid, who rarely appeared in public. High on the list of Soviet aid sought by the new regime was finance for the construction of the Euphrates Dam. Moscow appears to have set three conditions, all quickly accepted by Damascus: the return to Syria of the exiled Communist leader Khalid Bakdash; the inclusion of a Communist in the cabinet; and permission for the Syrian Communist Party to publish a daily newspaper. 8 With the Party once again able to function, though not yet formally legalized, the Damascus residency made arrangements for regular clandestine contact with it. The Communist intermediary, codenamed RASUL, selected by the Party leadership was sent for training in Moscow, where he was taught various forms of secret communication, radio transmission, document photography, use of dead letter-boxes, how to signal danger and arrange emergency meetings with the Damascus residency. He was given a small radio signal transmitter, codenamed ISKUL-2, concealed in a briefcase, which enabled him to send secret signals to the residency from up to 500 metres away. From 1968 until at least the early 1980s a residency operations officer met RASUL once or twice a month.9
The humiliation of the Six-Day War in June 1967,10 less than four months after the February coup, dealt a shattering blow to the prestige of the Jadid regime. Amid the recriminations which followed, the Defence Minister and future Syrian leader, Hafiz al-Asad, kept his portfolio only because he had the support of the brutal and much-feared head of the BNS, ‘Abd al-Karim al-Jundi.11 A serious rift followed between Asad and Jadid. Jadid’s main concern remained the internal Ba‘th ‘revolution’. For Asad, by contrast, the overwhelming priority was the conflict with Israel and the recovery of the Golan Heights, lost in the Six-Day War. Syria had entered the war with poorly trained forces equipped with out-of-date weaponry being phased out of the Red Army. It had no air-defence missiles to protect it against the crack Israeli air force and only half its 500 tanks were operational. Asad was well aware that, to take on Israel, Syria required not merely far better-trained troops but also massive arms supplies from the Soviet Union.12
During the clash between Jadid and Asad, KERIM continued to operate as a KGB agent inside the BNS. Among the operations recorded in KGB files in which KERIM took part was a secret nighttime entry into the West German embassy in Damascus to abstract (and presumably photograph) classified documents. The operation, which began at 10 p.m. on 20 April 1968 and was concluded at 4 a.m. the following day, was assisted by a Syrian BNS agent inside the embassy. On 24 April the German embassy was burgled again in a similar operation probably also involving KERIM.13
In November 1970, with the support of both the army and security forces, Asad deposed Salah Jadid and seized power. ‘I am the head of the country, not of the government,’ Asad used to claim. In reality, the fear of taking any decision which might displease him meant that even the most trivial issues were frequently referred to President Asad for a decision. The KGB seems to have found his immediate entourage difficult to penetrate. Within the inner circle of his authoritarian regime Asad placed a premium on personal loyalty. Even the clerks and coffee makers on his presidential staff were rarely changed. The key members of his regime - his foreign and defence ministers, chief of the general staff and intelligence chief - remained in power for a quarter of a century or more.14 During the early 1970s Muhammad al-Khuly, previously head of air-force intelligence, built up what was in effect a presidential intelligence service answerable only to Asad, who began each day with security and intelligence briefings.15 The fact that Asad, like a majority of his high command and intelligence chiefs, came from the ‘Alawi sect (whose beliefs fused Shi’ite doctrine with elements of nature worship), in defiance of the tradition that power was held by Sunni Muslims, strengthened his anxiety for regular intelligence reports on the mood in the country. (Even Jadid, an ‘Alawi like Asad, had chosen a Sunni to act as nominal President.) Asad eventually had fifteen different security and intelligence agencies, all rel
atively independent of each other, with a total personnel of over 50,000 (one Syrian in 240) and an even larger number of informers. Each agency reported to the President alone and was instructed by the deeply suspicious Asad to keep watch on what the others were up to. Though brutal and above the law, routinely abusing, imprisoning and torturing its victims, Asad’s security system was also cumbersome. A Human Rights Watch investigation concluded:
A casual visitor to Damascus cannot fail to notice the confusion at airport immigration, the piles of untouched official forms, and the dusty, unused computer terminal. Local security offices convey the same disorderly impression with their yellowing stacks of forms piled on tables and officials chatting on the phone while supplicants wait anxiously to be heard. The atmosphere is one of chaos mixed with petty corruption and the exercise of bureaucratic power, not of a ruthlessly efficient police state.16
The disorderly appearance of Syrian security offices was, however, somewhat misleading. Very few dissidents escaped their huge network of surveillance. Obsessed with his own personal security, Asad was protected by a presidential guard of over 12,000 men. Though his image was ubiquitous - on the walls of public buildings, on trucks, trains and buses, in offices, shops and schools - Asad’s leadership style became increasingly remote. By the 1980s most cabinet ministers met him only at their swearing in.17 Only a handful of key figures had the right to telephone him directly. Foremost among them were his security chiefs. As British ambassador in Damascus in the mid-1980s, Sir Roger Tomkys once had occasion to ring up the head of one of the Syrian intelligence agencies, who replied half an hour later, having just spoken to Asad.18
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