The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  From 1972 onwards, however, the Centre maintained close links with the PDRY intelligence service, which proudly called its officers ‘Chekists’ in honour of its Soviet allies.5 On 12 May 1972 Andropov had a meeting in Moscow with the Yemeni Interior Minister, Muhammad Salih Mutiya, during which the KGB agreed to provide free training for PDRY intelligence officers and cipher personnel. The fact that Mutiya also accepted an offer of free Soviet ciphers presumably enabled the FCD Sixteenth Directorate to decrypt PDRY intelligence radio traffic.6 From July 1973 a KGB liaison officer was stationed in Aden (in addition to the undeclared staff of the Aden residency). In May 1974 the KGB and PDRY intelligence agency signed a secret agreement on collaboration in intelligence operations against the United States, United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. As part of the agreement the PDRY was supplied with ‘special equipment’, probably for use in bugging and surveillance operations. In 1976 the two agencies collaborated in operation KHAMSIN to bug the Saudi Arabian embassy in Aden.7

  Just as the Politburo disliked dealing with the divided Yemeni regime, however, so the KGB despised some of its PDRY intelligence allies. A prime example was a senior Yemeni intelligence officer codenamed AREF,8 who was given a free holiday in 1978 at the Dubovaya Roscha Sanatorium at Zheleznovodsk, where he was diagnosed as suffering from cardiac insufficiency, diabetes, insomnia, nervous and physical exhaustion, as well as from excessive alcohol consumption. These ailments were not AREF’s main concern. His first priorities were treatment for incipient baldness and plastic surgery to improve his appearance. His Soviet doctor concluded that many of his problems stemmed from obsessive masturbation and a ‘passive’ homosexual relationship with a senior Yemeni minister which had produced nervous and sexual debility. AREF, however, turned out to be bisexual and pestered his interpreter, V. Konavalov, a KGB operations officer, to persuade a woman he had met at the clinic to have sexual relations with him. When Konavalov refused, saying that his duties were limited to providing translation and arranging medical treatment, AREF replied, ‘Comrade “Aleksandrov” [Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD] paid for the tickets, gave me a free pass to the Sanatorium, and I am convinced that he would not object to my having women.’ When Konavalov still refused, AREF accused him of being a racist. Konavalov also reported that, though AREF had brought with him some of the works of Marx and Lenin, he did not read them and used them only for display purposes.9

  In Kirpichenko’s view, the PDRY ‘Chekists’ also became increasingly demanding:

  [They] were often aggressive in their conduct of negotiations, especially when they needed to hammer out various kinds of material-technological assistance from us. ‘Since we’re in the same boat (the beloved argument of our Arab allies), then you must help us.’ We provided, of course, the minimum, mostly operational technology, and taught the Yemeni free of charge at our short courses . . . But the South Yemen partners sometimes demonstrated immoderate appetites. In the final years they insistently asked us to build them a Ministry for State Security building in Aden, buildings for security services in all the provincial centres and even a prison.10

  The KGB’s main concern, however, was the [North] Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) rather than the PDRY.11 In July 1972 the YAR became the first member of the Arab League to resume the diplomatic relations with the United States which had been broken off after the Six-Day War five years earlier. Moscow’s anxieties increased when a military regime headed by the pro-Saudi Lieutenant Colonel Ibrahim al-Hamdi took power in June 1974 and sought arms from the United States, paid for by the oil-rich Saudis. Al-Hamdi was dissatisfied with the American response. As the US military attaché in the YAR capital, Sana’a, reported to Washington, Saudi Arabia wanted a North Yemen that was ‘strong enough but not too strong’. The United States, in turn, was anxious not to offend its main ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, by meeting all al-Hamdi’s requests for military assistance.12 The relationship of the al-Hamdi regime with Washington and Riyadh thus never became as close as the Centre feared. The KGB none the less embarked on a prolonged active-measures campaign designed to discredit the three men it saw as the main pro-American and pro-Saudi influences within the YAR government: ‘Abd Allah al-Asnadji, Minister of Foreign Affairs, M. Khamis, Minister of Internal Affairs and Chief of the Central National Security Directorate, and Muhammad Salim Basindawa, Minister of Culture and Information. In 1976 the KGB sent an anonymous letter to al-Hamdi, accusing Khamis of being a CIA agent and enclosing a forged document acknowledging his receipt of American money. Khamis, however, succeeded in persuading al-Hamdi that the receipt was a forgery, though - according to KGB files - he blamed the forgery on the Saudis or rebellious sheikhs rather than on the KGB.13

  On 12 October 1977 al-Hamdi was assassinated in circumstances which still remain obscure.14 KGB active measures sought to persuade his successor, Ahmad al-Gashmi, that Khamis was responsible for al-Hamdi’s assassination. Soviet agents informed al-Gashmi that Khamis was also plotting his overthrow and conspiring to seize power himself.15 On 24 June 1978 al-Gashmi was assassinated, though not by Khamis. The previous day President Salim Rubai’ Ali of the PDRY had telephoned al-Gashmi to tell him he was despatching a special envoy to meet him in Sana’a on the following day. When the envoy arrived in al-Gashmi’s office he opened a briefcase which exploded, killing both men. Two days later Salim Rubai’ Ali was executed in Aden, ostensibly for organizing the assassination of al-Gashmi and plotting a coup in the PDRY with the support of the West and Saudi Arabia. Rubai’ Ali’s supporters later claimed that the explosive had been put in the briefcase on orders from his pro-Soviet rival, ‘Abd al-Fattah Isma’il, who later in the year succeeded him as President.16 Moscow immediately began a propaganda offensive in support of Isma’il, denouncing an alleged Saudi and American threat to the PDRY and flying in Cuban troops from Ethiopia to support the new regime while Soviet warships patrolled the Gulf of Aden.17

  Al-Gashmi’s successor as President of the YAR, Ali Abdullah Salih, survived an assassination attempt a few days after taking power.18 One of the objectives of Soviet policy was to exploit President Salih’s discontent with what he considered was the inadequate level of US arms supplies to the YAR. In November 1978 and January 1979, Salih held well-publicized talks with the Soviet ambassador on ‘ways to strengthen relations’ - including the supply of Soviet arms.19 Soviet attempts to cultivate Salih, however, were complicated by an attack on the YAR in late February 1979 by the PDRY, which for some time had cast envious eyes over its wealthier and more populous neighbour. A leading South Yemeni Communist told the Soviet ambassador, doubtless to Moscow’s displeasure, ‘Yes, it’s us who’ve started the war. If we win, we’ll create Great Yemen. If we lose, you’ll intervene and save us.’20 The war, however, ended bizarrely on 27 March with a meeting in Kuwait between Presidents Salih and Isma’il which concluded with a hopelessly optimistic agreement to produce within four months a draft constitution for the unification of North and South Yemen.21 (Unification did not actually occur until 1990.)

  Immediately after his meeting with Isma’il, Salih announced the dismissal of his Foreign Minister, al-Asnadji, and the Minister of Culture and Information, Basindawa. The Centre claimed the credit for both dismissals, which - it reported - had been strongly opposed by Saudi Arabia. Ever since Salih had become President, the KGB had been using its agents and confidential contacts to feed him disinformation that a pro-Saudi group, led by al-Asnadji and including Basindawa, had been plotting his overthrow with Saudi and American support and planning his assassination.22 The KGB’s victory, however, was far from complete. Despite his dismissal as Foreign Minister, al-Asnadji remained one of Salih’s chief political advisers. In June 1979 al-Asnadji visited Washington to appeal for ‘a more direct US military role in the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Region’ and the despatch of senior US military advisers to train YAR armed forces.23

  In April 1980 Soviet policy in Yemen suffered another setback when a coup in the PDRY overthrew its staunch ally, President Isma�
�il. Among the causes of the coup was dissatisfaction with the amount of Soviet aid - far smaller than that given to other ideological allies in the Third World. Power cuts in Aden were blamed by Yemenis on the Soviet failure to complete the construction of a promised power station. Unlike his immediate predecessor, Isma’il survived his overthrow. Probably due to the intervention of the Soviet ambassador, he was allowed to go into exile in Moscow instead of being executed or imprisoned as his main opponents had intended. The Soviet Union was quick to mend its fences with the new regime in the PDRY, inviting Isma’il’s successor, Ali Nasir Muhammad, on a state visit to Moscow only a month after the coup. The visit led to a new agreement on Soviet economic aid (including construction of the promised power station) and a joint communiqué condemning US policy in the Middle East and supporting the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan.24

  In September 1980 the KGB obtained from agents in the YAR intelligence services a copy of a tape recording of a confidential discussion between Presidents Salih and Muhammad which had been made without their knowledge on Khamis’s instructions. The tape was then handed to Salih as evidence of Khamis’s treachery. Attempts were also made to persuade Salih that Khamis had links with the CIA. Khamis was dismissed in October and, according to KGB files, ‘physically eliminated’ in January 1981. The KGB also passed reports to Salih alleging that al-Asnadji was having an affair with a woman in the US Peace Corps, had $30 million in a London bank account and also owned a hotel and three houses in the London suburbs. In March 1981 al-Asnadji and some of his supporters were arrested on charges of preparing a coup. Salih seems to have been influenced by KGB active measures suggesting that the plotters had conspired with the CIA. He told his advisory council on 21 March that ‘if an improper role on the part of the Americans in organizing the conspiracy is confirmed, then questions will be raised about the American presence in Northern Yemen’. The KGB also claimed the credit for persuading Salih to order the expulsion of an American military adviser on a charge of espionage.25

  The KGB’s tactical successes in the YAR, however, had little strategic significance. From 1982 onwards the discovery of oil fields in North Yemen led to a series of concessions to US companies. In April 1986 President Salih and Vice-President George Bush attended the ceremonial opening of the YAR’s first oil refinery. Collaboration in oil production, Bush declared, meant greater US ‘partnership with the Yemeni people’.26 The PDRY, meanwhile, was in turmoil. On 13 January 1986 several of President Muhammad’s opponents were machine-gunned in the Politburo meeting room. The Aden residency appears to have given no advance warning of the renewed bloodshed. In the fortnight’s civil war which followed thousands of YSP members, militia and armed forces were killed. The cost of the damage done to buildings and the economic infrastructure in Aden was estimated at $140 million. Muhammad lost power and was forced to flee with some thousands of his supporters to the YAR. 27 The Soviet Commander-in-Chief Ground Forces, General Yevgeni Ivanovsky, who was despatched to Aden on a ‘peacemaking’ mission, reported that about one third of the Yemeni officers killed in the fighting had been trained at Soviet military academies.28 A few weeks later, representatives of the YSP attended the Twenty-seventh Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow. Fidel Castro is said to have put to the Yemeni delegation a question which summed up much of the frustration of Soviet policy to the PDRY over the previous quarter of a century. ‘When’, he reportedly asked, ‘are you people going to stop killing each other?’29

  In May 1990, after prolonged negotiations, the PDRY and YAR finally merged as the Republic of Yemen, whose 16 million inhabitants accounted for more than half the population of the Arabian peninsula. In April 1994 the more powerful Northern leadership launched an attack on the South which brought the whole of a still-unstable country under Northern control.

  12

  Israel and Zionism

  ‘Zionist subversion’ was one of the KGB’s most enduring conspiracy theories. The Stalinist era bequeathed to the KGB a tradition of anti-semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism still clearly visible even in the mid-1980s. In 1948, however, the Soviet Union had been the first to recognize the state of Israel, seeing its creation as a blow to British imperialism in the Middle East inflicted by ‘progressive’ Jews of Russian and Polish origin. Moscow also counted on Zionist gratitude for the leading role of the Red Army in defeating Hitler. The arms supplied to the Zionists from Czechoslovakia with Moscow’s blessing during the first Arab-Israeli War (known to Israelis as the War of Independence and to Arabs as al-Nakbah, ‘the Disaster’), as well as Soviet diplomatic support, were of crucial importance to the birth of Israel. Within the new state the left-wing Mapam (United Workers) Party described itself on its foundation in 1948 as ‘an inseparable part of the world revolutionary camp headed by the USSR’. Dr Moshe Sneh, member of the Mapam executive committee and head of the Israeli League for Friendly Relations with the USSR, said in his speech of welcome on the arrival of the Soviet legation in Tel Aviv:

  Our people love the Soviet Union and trust the Soviet Union, which has supported us and never let us down. For our part, we swear that we shall never let the Soviet Union down, and shall devote all our energies to strengthening the friendship and unbreakable alliance with our great friend and the defender of mankind - the Soviet Union.1

  Late in 1947 Andrei Mikhailovich Otroshchenko, head of the Middle and Far Eastern Department of the Committee of Information (KI), which then ran foreign intelligence, called an operational conference to announce that Stalin had given the KI the task of ensuring that Israel became an ally of the Soviet Union. To counter American attempts to exploit Israeli links with the Jewish community in the United States, the KI was to ensure that large numbers of its agents were included in the ranks of the Soviet Jews allowed to leave for Israel. The head of the Illegals Directorate in the KI (and later in the FCD), Aleksandr Mikhailovich ‘Sasha’ Korotkov, who had a Jewish wife, was put in charge of the selection of agents. His chief assistant, Vladimir Vertiporokh, was appointed as the first resident in Israel in 1948 under diplomatic cover with the alias ‘Rozhkov’. Vertiporokh told one of his colleagues that he was anxious about his new posting - partly because he disliked the ‘crafty Jews’, partly because he doubted whether he could fulfil the mission entrusted to the KI by Stalin of turning Israel into a Soviet ally: ‘The work the residency will have to do is so serious and important that, quite simply, I am afraid of not being able to cope with it, and you know what that would mean.’2

  Probably the most successful of the first generation of Soviet agents infiltrated into Israel was the epidemiologist Avraham Marcus Klingberg, who, at the age of thirty, was recruited by Israel’s first Prime Minister in April 1948 to work on chemical and biological weapons. Klingberg was later one of the founders and deputy director of the Israel Institute of Biological Research in Ness Ziona, south-east of Tel Aviv. He continued to work for Soviet and East German intelligence for the remarkable period of thirty-five years.3 Soviet-bloc intelligence services co-operated with the KI in the agent penetration of the new state of Israel; thirty-six of the Jews who left Bulgaria for Israel in the period 1947-50, for example, were Bulgarian agents. Though Mitrokhin’s notes on KGB files give very little detail on their activities, it is clear that they achieved at least a few significant successes. KHAIMOV, for example, obtained a job in the secretariat of Israel’s first President, Chaim Weizmann.4 Contact with another Bulgarian agent, PERETS, whose role is not recorded, continued until 1975.5

  Satisfaction in the Centre at the early successes of agent penetration in Israel, however, was overshadowed by alarm at the enthusiasm of Soviet Jews for the new state and at the evidence of Israel’s growing links with the United States. Within a year of Israel’s foundation, there had been a volte-face in Soviet policy. Henceforth, Zionism was officially condemned as part of an imperialist plot to subvert the Soviet Union. Much of Vertiporokh’s work as resident in Tel Aviv appears to have been taken up by the pursuit of anti-Zionist
conspiracy theories rather than by conventional intelligence collection. In 1949 he had three lengthy meetings with Yitzhak Rabinovich, formerly a member of the Jewish Agency’s Soviet Liaison Committee, to discuss in detail the nature of Zionism. A year later Rabinovich produced, at Vertiporokh’s request, a fifty-page summary of the main points covered in their conversations.6

  During the final years of Stalinist rule the anti-semitic campaign against imaginary Zionist conspiracies in Russia spread throughout the Soviet bloc. In Czechoslovakia the trial in 1952 of the ‘Leadership of the Anti-State Conspiratorial Centre’, led by a former Party leader, Rudolf Slánský, identified eleven of the fourteen defendants, including Slánský himself, as ‘of Jewish origin’. The simultaneous purge of Jews from the Soviet nomenklatura was nowhere more energetically pursued than at the Centre. By early 1953 all had been removed from the MGB (predecessor of the KGB), save for a small number of ‘hidden Jews’: people of partly Jewish origin who were registered as members of other ethnic groups. In the winter of 1952- 53 the MGB crushed a non-existent ‘Jewish doctors’ plot’ to murder Stalin and the Soviet leadership, denouncing a group of innocent doctors as ‘monsters and murderers’ working for a ‘corrupt Jewish bourgeois nationalist organization’ in the service of Anglo-American intelligence. Following the fabrication of the doctors’ plot, the Tel Aviv legation complained that ‘anti-Soviet hysteria’ had reached unprecedented heights. Since the legation could not admit the reality of Soviet anti-semitism, it absurdly blamed the ‘hysteria’ on the Israeli government’s desire both to convince the United States that it could count on Israeli support for its ‘aggressive plans’ and ‘continue to use Israel as a centre of espionage in the countries of the socialist camp’, and ‘to divert the attention of the Israeli population from the economic difficulties’ at home.7