The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  In the later 1970s, Moscow once again made the mistake of trying to force the pace in strengthening its alliance with Asad. In an obvious reference to renewed Soviet proposals for a Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation, Brezhnev told him during a Moscow banquet in his honour in October 1978 that the Soviet Union was prepared to expand co-operation with Syria still further, ‘particularly in the field of politics’. A month later, during a visit to Moscow by the Chief of the Syrian General Staff, General Hikmat Shihabi, there was an attempt to pressure him to conclude a trilateral pact with the Soviet Union and Iraq. He was also told that, to avoid the risk of exposing further Syrian MiG-27s to Israeli surprise attack, they would be better stationed in Iraq. Shihabi took deep offence and returned home two days ahead of schedule. Soon afterwards the Syrian ambassador in Moscow was recalled to Damascus.56

  Once again, however, the rift was mended, due chiefly to the common Soviet and Syrian opposition to both Camp David and Israeli support for the Maronite Phalangists in southern Lebanon. Encouraged by KGB active measures57 which played on his own penchant for conspiracy theory, Asad saw the Camp David agreements as part of a gigantic US-Israeli conspiracy. In March 1980 Asad publicly accused the CIA of encouraging ‘sabotage and subversion’ in Syria in order to bring ‘the entire Arab world under joint US-Israeli domination’.58 Asad repeatedly claimed and almost certainly believed that a central part of the plan for the subjection of ‘the entire Arab world’ was a secret Zionist conspiracy, with American support, to create a greater Israel. His close friend and Defence Minister, Mustafa Talas, later claimed absurdly that, ‘Had it not been for Hafiz al-Asad, Greater Israel would have been established from the Nile to the Euphrates.’59

  During 1979 Moscow supplied more MiG-27s and other advanced weaponry, as well as writing off 25 per cent of Syria’s estimated $2 billion military debt. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December, Asad was one of the very few leaders outside the Soviet bloc not to join the world-wide chorus of condemnation. His Foreign Minister, Khaddam, told an interviewer: ‘We have studied the situation and have come to the conclusion that the fuss about Afghanistan is meaningless theatrics, designed to reshuffle the cards in the Arab region, to end Sadat’s isolation, and to assist in bringing success to the Camp David agreements.’

  In January 1980, in a further attempt to please Moscow, Asad included two members of the Bakdash faction of the Syrian Communist Party in his new government. He also allowed the exiled leader of the Iraqi Communist Party, Aziz Muhammad,60 to base himself in Syria. In October, Asad finally agreed to sign a twenty-year Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation with the Soviet Union. During 1980 Syrian arms imports from the Soviet bloc exceeded $3 billion.61

  While reinforcing its alliance with Asad, Moscow secretly strengthened its covert relationship with Bakdash. In 1978 Bakdash had assured one of his KGB contacts that, while he remained Party leader, ‘there would never be a Carrillo or even a Marchais’ - in other words, that the Party would remain uncompromisingly loyal to Moscow and ideologically orthodox.62 He told the Party Congress in 1980: ‘I firmly believe that it is not enough [merely] to declare friendship for the Soviet Union. Rather, we must support every action in Soviet foreign policy which has always been, still is, and always will be in harmony with the interests of all people.’63

  Bakdash also benefited from the support of Asad. Immediately after the signature of the Friendship Treaty in October 1980, Asad began a campaign of intimidation and terror against a Communist breakaway group, led by Bakdash’s opponent, Riyadh al-Turk. Most of al-Turk’s supporters were jailed, forced to leave the Party, driven underground or went into exile. Some were tortured. According to reports by Amnesty International and human rights groups during the 1980s, al-Turk was systematically tortured throughout the decade, and was rushed to hospital at least six times on the verge of death to be resuscitated for further abuse, which included breaking bones in all his limbs.64

  During 1978 108 Syrian Communists went on training courses (doubtless at Soviet expense) in the Soviet Union. The KGB noted that most were the friends or relatives of Party leaders.65 During 1979 the KGB Damascus residency made five payments to the Party leadership totalling $275,000.66 Bakdash informed the residency that over $50,000 had been spent on setting up an underground printing press and requested an additional allocation.67 Payments in 1980 amounted to at least $329,000 and were probably higher.68 Far more substantial sums, however, were paid to the Party as a result of lucrative Soviet contracts with trading companies controlled by the Party. In 1982, for example, the Damascus residency reported that one of the companies set up with Party funds would contribute during the year 1,200,000 Syrian pounds to the Party.69 At Bakdash’s personal request, the Damascus residency also secretly supplied the Party with arms: 150 Makarov pistols and ammunition were handed over in June 1980. As a security precaution, in case the arms were subsequently discovered, they were wrapped in Syrian packaging obtained by the KGB on the black market.70 A further consignment of seventy-five Makarov pistols with ammunition was handed over in March 1981. Bakdash thanked the KGB for ‘their fraternal assistance and constant concern for the needs of the Syrian Communist Party’.71 At a meeting in a safe apartment a year later with two operations officers from the Damascus residency, Bakdash enumerated one by one the residents with whom he had established close and friendly collaboration over the quarter of a century since he had returned from exile. He ended by eulogizing the KGB: ‘You are the only Soviet authority with which we have always enjoyed, and still enjoy, full mutual understanding on the most varied issues. Please convey to Comrade Andropov the profound gratitude of our Party.’72

  The KGB, however, was increasingly concerned by the growing divisions within the Syrian Communist Party. Late in 1982 Nikolai Fyodorovich Vetrov of the Damascus residency had a series of meetings with Bakdash, then seventy years old, who had been Party leader for half a century. Bakdash complained that ‘not all Party members were totally dedicated to the Marxist-Leninist cause’, and that his age and poor health made it increasingly difficult for him to keep full control over all Party activities. Bakdash was also becoming increasingly suspicious of his associate FARID. He told Vetrov that, though a good Party official, FARID ‘had been unable to break finally with the petit-bourgeois environment from which he came’. Bakdash’s real objection to FARID, however, was fear that he was plotting against him. He told Vetrov that, as well as ‘promoting people who were personally loyal to him’, FARID had become corrupt, borrowing 50,000 Syrian pounds (which he had not repaid) to buy a house in Damascus from a businessman who had made a fortune from Soviet contracts but had ceased to support the Party.73 By the mid-1980s, however, Bakdash caused the Centre greater concern than FARID. For all his past protestations of Soviet loyalism, Bakdash was unable to adapt to the new era of glasnost and perestroika. As the Soviet Union fell apart, Bakdash defended Stalin and denounced Gorbachev.74

  Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 in an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the PLO and strengthen its Maronite allies caused a new crisis in Syrian-Soviet relations. From 9 to 11 June Israel and Syria fought one of the largest air battles of the twentieth century over the Biqa’ valley. The Israeli air force destroyed all Syria’s SAM-6 missile sites on both sides of the Syrian-Lebanese border and shot down twenty-three Syrian MiGs without losing a single aircraft.75 When further SAM sites were installed in the course of the summer the Israelis demolished those too. Behind the scenes the Syrians blamed their defeat on the shortcomings of Soviet equipment, while the Russians blamed Syrian incompetence in using it. Both sides, however, needed each other. ‘Asad needed arms’, writes Patrick Seale, ‘while the Russians needed to restore the reputation of their high-performance weapons as well as their overall political position in the Arab world.’ Asad’s visit to Moscow for Brezhnev’s funeral in November 1982 provided an opportunity to mend fences with the new Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov. Despite opposition from both Gromyko and Ustinov, the Defe
nce Minister, Andropov agreed to provide Syria with advanced weapons systems which were supplied to no other Third World country, some of them operated by Soviet personnel.76

  The memoirs of Vadim Kirpichenko, one of the Centre’s leading Middle Eastern experts, contain a curiously fulsome tribute to Asad. During two meetings and five hours of discussions on security and intelligence matters, in the course of which Asad asked many detailed questions about the structure and functions of the KGB,77 Kirpichenko claims to have found him ‘a good-natured, mild, proper and attentive person. No neurosis whatsoever, no haste, no posing whatsoever.’ Asad strongly reminded Kirpichenko of the legendary KGB officer Ivan Ivanovich Agayants, who had been wartime resident in Tehran and post-war resident in Paris: ‘Old intelligence hands still remember this good-natured and wise man.’ (Kirpichenko does not mention that Agayants was a specialist in deception, also a strong interest of Asad’s.)78

  Kirpichenko’s rose-tinted recollections give some sense of the cosmetically enhanced view of Asad’s Syria passed on to the Soviet leadership at the time of the conclusion of the Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation. In reality, Asad was, by any standards, an unattractive ally. The signing of the treaty coincided with the beginning of the most homicidal period of Asad’s rule. During the early 1980s his regime killed at least 10,000 of its own citizens and jailed thousands more in usually atrocious conditions. Most of the Sunni stronghold of Hama, Syria’s most beautiful city and a centre of opposition to the ‘Alawi regime, was destroyed, its magnificent Great Mosque reduced to rubble. Many Lebanese from Syrian-controlled areas of Lebanon disappeared into Syrian prisons never to re-emerge. 79 Like Saddam Hussein and Muammar al-Qaddafi, Asad also used his intelligence agencies to hunt down his enemies abroad. As well as becoming notorious for providing safe haven for some of the Middle East’s most ruthless terrorists, his regime also failed to cover its tracks when carrying out its own terrorist operations against émigré dissidents and other Arab critics. Early in 1981 a Syrian hit squad, operating on the orders of Asad’s brother Rif’at, whom the KGB had once claimed to be able to influence,80 entered Jordan with instructions to assassinate the Jordanian Prime Minister, Mudar Badran, whom Asad had publicly condemned for being in league with Americans, Zionists and Syrian dissidents. The entire group was caught and made a humiliating three-hour public confession on Jordanian television, which could be seen by many Syrian viewers. Despite this embarrassment, Rif’at declared publicly that ‘enemies’ who had fled abroad would be dealt with. In March 1982 there were reports in the British press, based on briefings by ‘Western diplomatic sources in Damascus’, that six well-armed ‘hit squads’ had been despatched to Europe to assassinate dissidents. One such three-man squad arrested in Stuttgart, Germany, was found to be carrying sub-machine guns and explosives. A month later a bomb attack on the Paris offices of an Arab newspaper well known for its hostility to the Asad regime killed a pregnant woman passing by and injured sixty-three others, twelve seriously. The French government, which made little secret of its belief that the Asad regime was responsible, promptly expelled two Syrian ‘diplomats’ for ‘unacceptable activities’.81 It is highly unlikely that Brezhnev’s final years were disturbed by reports of such embarrassing bad behaviour by a regime with which he had just signed, after years of persuasion, a Friendship Treaty.

  Unattractive though Syria had become as an ally, all other Soviet options for alliance with a major Middle Eastern power had disappeared. Syria’s attempt over the next few years to achieve strategic parity with Israel made it more dependent than ever before on advanced Soviet weaponry, among them fighter planes, surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles, and electronic and air-control battle systems. General Dmitri Volkogonov, then of the GRU, later recalled: ‘No country ever had as many Russian-speaking advisers as Syria . . . Everyone lived in a state of half-war, half-peace. The Soviet Union and its ideology were not wanted by anyone there, but its tanks, guns and technicians were highly valued.’82

  By the end of 1985 the Syrian economy was collapsing under the weight of a military budget which accounted for half the gross national product. With Gorbachev unwilling to bail him out, Asad reluctantly accepted in 1986 that strategic parity with Israel was beyond Syria’s reach. The British ambassador in Damascus, Sir Roger Tomkys, found Asad brutally realistic about the changed balance of power in the Middle East. ‘If I were Prime Minister of Israel,’ Asad told him, ‘with its present military superiority and the support of the world’s number one power, I would not make a single concession.’83

  During the later 1980s, Moscow rejected most Syrian requests for advanced weaponry. Asad none the less regarded the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union as a disaster. Despite all his disputes with Moscow over the previous two decades, he had come to regard the Soviet alliance as essential to Syria’s security. A senior Damascus official said mournfully as power in the Kremlin passed from Gorbachev to Yeltsin at the end of 1991, ‘We regret the Soviet collapse more than the Russians do.’84

  11

  The People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen

  The Soviet Union’s closest ideological ally in the Arab world was the People’s Democratic Republic of [South] Yemen (PDRY), founded in 1970, three years after gaining independence from Britain. As in Cuba, the ruling National Liberation Front (NLF) gained power as the result of a guerrilla campaign and thereafter declared itself a Marxist-Leninist party. As the Soviet presence in the Indian Ocean expanded during the 1970s, the Soviet fleet also made increasing use of port facilities at Aden and Socotra Island.1 According to the Soviet ambassador to the PDRY, O. G. Peresypkin:

  We proceeded from the assumption that scientific socialism was a universal theory and we wanted to prove that a small underdeveloped Arab country, a former British colony, would advance with seven-league strides towards the bright future provided it was armed with the slogans of scientific socialism.

  The slogans failed. The Soviet advisers seconded to Yemeni ministries imbued them with the cumbersome inefficiency of the command economy in which they had been trained. Aleksandr Vassiliev, one of the Soviet officials who visited the PDRY, noted later: ‘When I visited Aden before collectivization . . . the Aden market and all the waterfronts were full of fish and fish products. When the fishermen were subjected to [collectivization], the fish immediately disappeared. ’ In retrospect, Peresypkin was ‘inclined to forgive the South Yemeni leaders who brought their country to deadlock. They were simply following blindly along behind their “elder brothers” who had “built socialism” . . .’2

  Despite its early hopes of turning the PDRY into an Arab beacon of ‘scientific socialism’, Moscow found South Yemen an almost constant headache. One of the main tasks of the Aden residency was to monitor the nearly continuous intrigues and power struggles which rent the NLF and its successor (from October 1978), the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP). It could do little to control them. From 1969 to 1978 there was a prolonged power struggle between ‘Abd al-Fattah Isma’il, the staunchly pro-Soviet leader of the NLF, and Salim Rubai’ Ali, the more pro-Chinese head of state. In June 1978, with Soviet and Cuban assistance, Isma’il led a successful coup against Rubai’ Ali, who was executed on charges of plotting an armed coup of his own with the support of the West and Saudi Arabia.3

  The main supporters of the PDRY within the Centre during the mid-1970s were Nikolai Leonov and Service 1 (Intelligence Analysis). In 1975 Leonov submitted a report to Andropov arguing that the Soviet Union was getting a poor return for its vast investment in the Middle East. Egypt, Syria and Iraq had no intention of paying their huge debts. Egypt had ceased to be a reliable ally, the Iraqi connection was insecure and Syria was then unwilling to commit itself to a Friendship Treaty. Service 1 therefore proposed concentrating on the PDRY, which did not require large amounts of aid. Its regime was ‘the most Marxist-Leninist’, Aden was of major strategic significance, and its oil distillery could meet the needs of both the Soviet navy and the air force.
The report cited the way in which the British Empire had used Aden as one of the key points in its global strategy. The PDRY was also well away from the main Middle Eastern conflict zones. Its only - achievable - strategic need was to make peace with North Yemen. Service 1’s revival of the idea of turning the PDRY into an Arab beacon of ‘scientific socialism’ found little favour with Andropov. After keeping the report for several days, he returned it with a request for it to be shortened. Then he returned the shortened version asking for all the proposals to be deleted, leaving only the information it contained on the current position in the PDRY. In Leonov’s view, all that was of interest in the original document had now been removed from it. He had no doubt that Andropov’s demands for cuts derived from his personal discussions of its proposals with Politburo members who disliked the idea of increasing contact with a regime cursed with apparently ineradicable internecine warfare.4