The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  Moscow had also become cautious about collaborating with the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, probably the most active state sponsor of terrorist groups ranging from the PFLP to the Provisional IRA. In 1979 a secret Soviet-Libyan agreement had been signed on intelligence and security, followed by the posting of an FCD liaison officer to the Tripoli embassy. The KGB provided training for Libyan intelligence officers in Moscow, gave advice on security and surveillance inside Libya, and supplied intelligence on US activities in the eastern Mediterranean. In return, Libya provided intelligence on Egypt, North Africa and Israel, as well as assisting the KGB in targeting Western diplomatic missions in Tripoli. Collaboration, however, steadily declined as Moscow became increasingly concerned by Qaddafi’s reputation as the godfather of international terrorism. Qaddafi’s first visit to Moscow in 1981 further lowered his reputation. In the Centre his flamboyant posturing and extravagant uniforms were interpreted as an attempt to contrast his own virility with Brezhnev’s visible decrepitude. At a private briefing for Soviet diplomats and KGB officers in London in 1984, Aleksandr Bovin, chief political commentator of Izvestia, denounced Qaddafi as ‘a criminal and a fascist’ .50

  By the early 1980s the Centre seems to have abandoned the hopes it had placed a decade earlier in collaboration with the PFLP and its breakaway groups. Its contacts with the PLO (in particular with Arafat’s dominant Fatah group), however, had somewhat improved. In June 1978 Abu Iyad (codenamed KOCHUBEY), a member of the Fatah Central Committee and head of Arafat’s intelligence service, visited Moscow for talks with the KGB and the International Department.51 Abu Iyad complained of the blunt, tactless behaviour of Lev Alekseyevich Bausin, the KGB officer under diplomatic cover at the Beirut residency who was responsible for contacts with the PLO and other Palestinian groups. Unusually, the Centre showed its desire for better relations by recalling Bausin and replacing him with Nikolai Afanasyevich Kuznetsov, who at his first meeting with Arafat identified himself as a KGB officer.52

  Moscow welcomed Arafat’s increasing attempts to win international respectability. In 1979 he was invited to a meeting of the Socialist International in Vienna and began a successful European diplomatic offensive. By 1980 the countries of the European Community, though not the United States, had agreed that the PLO must be party to peace negotiations in the Middle East. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, declared: ‘The PLO as such is not a terrorist organization.’ Arafat’s success in driving a wedge between the United States and its European allies further enhanced the Centre’s interest in him.53

  The military training courses provided by Moscow for the PLO, however, caused some ill feeling on both sides. A report on a course in 1981 for 194 officers from ten different PLO factions suggests serious deficiencies in both Soviet training and the quality of many PLO recruits. According to the PLO commander, Colonel Rashad Ahmad, ‘The participants in the courses did not correctly understand the political aspects of sending military delegations abroad. As a result, the upper echelon of the delegation, namely the participants in the battalion officer courses, refused to study and asked to return, using all sorts of illogical excuses.’ Ahmad reported that he had been forced to expel thirteen officers from the training course for offences which included alcoholism, passing counterfeit money and sexual ‘perversion’. Had he enforced the code of conduct strictly, he would, he claimed, have been forced to send home more than half the officers. Ahmad appealed for a higher standard of recruits for future courses in the Soviet Union.54 East Germany provided additional training for the PLO in the use of explosives, mines and firearms with silencers.55

  In 1981 Brezhnev at last gave the PLO formal diplomatic recognition. The limitations of Soviet support, however, were graphically illustrated in the following year when Israel invaded Lebanon in an attempt to destroy the PLO as an effective force and establish a new political order headed by its Maronite Christian allies. Moscow, complained Abu Iyad, responded with ‘pretty words’ but no practical assistance.56 In the early stages of the Israeli assault, the Soviet embassy and the Beirut residency were almost unable to function. According to Markus Wolf:

  With Beirut in ruins, there was an interval during which Moscow lost contact with its embassy and its KGB officers in the Lebanese capital. Our officers were the only ones able to maintain radio and personal contact with the leaders of the PLO and, acting as Moscow’s proxies, our men were instructed to pass on the PLO’s reaction to events. They ventured forth, risking their lives among the shooting and the bombings to meet their Palestinian partners. 57

  There were no clear winners in the war. After seventy-five days of savage fighting, the PLO was forced to leave Lebanon and establish a new base in Tunisia on the periphery of the Arab world. Israel, however, failed to achieve its aim of establishing a new pro-Israeli political order in Lebanon. By the time its troops withdrew in the summer of 1983, the war had weakened Israel’s government, divided its people, and lowered its international standing. An official Israeli commission concluded that Israel bore indirect responsibility for the massacre of Palestinians by Christian militia in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Far from relegating the Palestinian problem to the sidelines, as Israel had intended, the war focused international attention on the need to find a solution. 58

  Finding a solution, however, ranked low in the Soviet order of priorities. Moscow’s difficulties in dealing with the PLO were compounded by the homicidal feud which broke out in 1983 between its main Middle Eastern ally, Asad, and Arafat. Asad expelled Arafat from Damascus, backed an unsuccessful armed rebellion within Fatah against his leadership, and actively supported the assassination campaign against Arafat’s lieutenants being conducted by his sworn Palestinian enemy, Abu Nidal, an unstable terrorist who habitually referred to Arafat as ‘the Jewess’s son’.59 Arafat, the great survivor, kept his position as leader of the PLO but failed to recover the confidence of Moscow. For Soviet as for many Western diplomats, his credibility was undermined by a deviousness born of ceaseless manoeuvring between the different factions within the PLO.60 During the remainder of the Soviet era, Moscow was only peripherally involved in the search for a Palestinian settlement. Though Arafat eventually succeeded in gaining an invitation to Moscow in 1988, Gorbachev was reluctant to receive him. ‘So what’s the point in my meeting with him?’ Gorbachev asked his aides. When persuaded to agree to a meeting, he told Arafat bluntly that the Arab-Israeli dispute was no longer linked to Soviet-American rivalry, and that armed conflict would do terrible damage to the Palestinian cause. The communiqué at the end of the meeting made no reference to the founding of a Palestinian state. ‘The talks’, wrote Gorbachev’s aide, Anatoli Chernyaev, ‘didn’t really yield any results . . . It just gave Arafat the chance to strut all the more.’61

  Asia

  14

  Asia: Introduction

  By far the greatest advances of Communism during the Cold War were in Asia, where it conquered the world’s most populous state, China, its neighbour North Korea, the whole of former French Indo-China (Vietnam north and south, Laos and Cambodia) and Afghanistan. Ironically, however, it was the heartland of Asian Communism which from the early 1960s onwards became the hardest target for Soviet foreign intelligence operations. Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung turned their brutalized countries into security-obsessed societies where the KGB found it as difficult to operate as Western intelligence agencies had done in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

  Even the ‘sickly suspicious’ Stalin (as Khrushchev correctly called him) seems never to have imagined that Mao and Kim would one day dare to reject Moscow’s leadership of world Communism.1 When Mao visited Moscow late in 1949 after the declaration of the Chinese People’s Republic (PRC), he won a standing ovation for delivering a deferential eulogy at Stalin’s seventieth-birthday celebrations in the Bolshoi.2 Kim Il Sung, though impatient to invade South Korea, did not launch his attack until Stalin gave him permission. Stalin allowed the Korean War to begin in June 1950 lar
gely because he had misjudged US policy. Intelligence from the United States, following its failure to intervene to prevent the Communist victory in China, indicated, he believed, that ‘the prevailing mood is not to interfere’ in Korea. That erroneous conclusion seems to have been based on his misinterpretation of a US National Security Council document (probably supplied by the KGB agent Donald Maclean), which excluded the Asian mainland from the American defence perimeter. Having thus misinterpreted US policy, Stalin was prepared for the first time to allow Kim to attack the South.3

  The Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s brought to an acrimonious end the deference from the PRC which Stalin had taken for granted. The first public attack on Moscow was made by Mao’s veteran security chief, Kang Sheng, whose ferocious purges during Mao’s Great Leap Forward were largely modelled on techniques he had learned in Moscow during the Great Terror.4 On the Soviet side, the ideological dispute with China was compounded by personal loathing for Mao - the ‘Great Helmsman’ - and a more general dislike of the Chinese population as a whole. Khrushchev ‘repeatedly’ told a Romanian delegation shortly before his overthrow in 1964 that ‘Mao Zedong is sick, crazy, that he should be taken to an asylum, etc.’5 An assessment of Chinese national character circulated to KGB residencies by the Centre twelve years later claimed that the Chinese were ‘noted for their spitefulness’.6

  What most outraged both the Kremlin and the Centre was Beijing’s impudence in setting itself up as a rival capital of world Communism, attempting to seduce other Communist parties from their rightful allegiance to the Soviet Union. Moscow blamed the horrors of Pol Pot’s regime (on which it preferred not to dwell in detail) on the take-over of the Cambodian Communist Party by an ‘anti-popular, pro-Beijing clique’.7 The decision by Asia’s largest non-ruling Communist party in Japan to side with the PRC deprived the KGB of what had previously been an important intelligence asset and turned it into a hostile target. The Japanese Communist Party complained that its minority pro-Moscow faction was being assisted by Soviet spies and informants.8 The Centre was so put out by the number of portraits of Mao appearing on public display in some African capitals that it ordered counter-measures such as the fly-posting of pictures of the Great Helmsman defaced with hostile graffiti on the walls of Brazzaville.9

  To most Western observers, the least problematic of the Soviet Union’s relations with the Asian Communist regimes appeared to be with the Democratic Republic of [North] Vietnam. As well as providing Hanoi with a majority of its arms during the Vietnam War,10 Moscow was lavish in public praise for its ‘heroic resistance’ to American imperialism and support for the Vietcong guerrillas in the south: ‘With determined military support from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the patriots in South Vietnam struck at the Saigon regime of generals, bureaucrats and landowners with such force that it could not be saved by the deep involvement in the war of the strongest imperial power.’

  Even more than American attempts to topple Fidel Castro, the Vietnam War united most of the Third World as well as what Moscow called ‘progressives in all nations’, the United States included, in vocal opposition to US imperialism.11 Both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson made the mistake of seeing the mainspring of the Vietnam War less in Hanoi than in Moscow. Johnson’s conspiracy theories of manipulation by Moscow extended even to the US Senate. He claimed absurdly that Senators William Fulbright and Wayne Morse, two of the leading opponents of his Vietnam policy, were ‘definitely under the control of the Soviet embassy’ - by which he undoubtedly meant the KGB’s Washington residency.12

  In reality, the strongly nationalist Ho Chi-Minh (whose name was chanted in anti-American demonstrations around the world) and the North Vietnamese regime were determined not to be dictated to by either Moscow or Beijing. Despite paying lip service to fraternal co-operation with its Soviet ally, the North Vietnamese intelligence service held the KGB somewhat at arm’s length. As KGB chairman in the mid-1960s, Vladimir Semichastny was never satisfied with the opportunities given to his officers to question American PoWs. On several occasions, interrogations were curtailed just as they seemed to be producing useful results. Semichastny was also frustrated by the reluctance of the North Vietnamese to allow Soviet weapons experts access to captured US military technology. On several occasions he raised the ‘ticklish issue’ of access to American prisoners and weaponry when the North Vietnamese Interior Minister (who was responsible for intelligence) came to visit his daughter who was studying in Moscow. Hanoi’s only response was to present him with a couple of war souvenirs, one of which was a comb made from a fragment of a shot-down American bomber.13

  The Kremlin was acutely aware of its lack of influence on North Vietnamese policy. In 1968 an Izvestia correspondent in Hanoi sent a report to the CPSU Central Committee on a conversation with a Vietnamese journalist, who had mockingly asked him: ‘Do you know what is the Soviet Union’s share of the total assistance received by Vietnam and what is the share of Soviet political influence there (if the latter can be measured in percentages)? The figures are, respectively, 75-80 per cent [for the former] and 4-8 per cent [for the latter].’ The Izvestia correspondent thought the first figure was probably 15-20 per cent too high but that the estimate of Soviet influence in North Vietnam was about right.14 As well as conducting fraternal liaison, the KGB residency in Hanoi carried out much the same hostile operations as in a Western capital. In 1975 it was running a network of twenty-five agents and sixty confidential contacts tasked to collect intelligence on Vietnamese military installations, the internal situation and the frontier with China.15 As in Western capitals, the residency contained an IMPULS radio station which monitored the movements of Vietnamese security personnel and their systems of surveillance in an attempt to ensure that these did not interfere with its KGB contacts or its agent network.16 Though far less hostile than Beijing and Pyongyang, Hanoi was none the less a difficult operating environment. The highest-level Vietnamese source identified by Mitrokhin, ISAYEYEV, a senior intelligence officer probably recruited while he was stationed in Moscow, provided classified information on his intelligence colleagues in return for payment but refused to make any contact while in Hanoi for fear of detection.17

  The Asian intelligence successes of which the Centre was most proud were in India, the world’s second most populous state and largest democracy. It was deeply ironic that the KGB should find democratic India so much more congenial an environment than Communist China, North Korea and Vietnam. Oleg Kalugin, who in 1973 became the youngest general in the FCD, remembers India as both a prestige target and ‘a model of KGB infiltration of a Third World government’. The openness of India’s democracy combined with the streak of corruption which ran through its media and political system provided numerous opportunities for Soviet intelligence. In addition to what Kalugin termed ‘scores of sources throughout the Indian government - in Intelligence, Counterintelligence, the Defence and Foreign Ministries, and the police’, successful penetrations of Indian embassies (replicated in operations against Japan, Pakistan and other Asian countries) assisted the decryption of probably substantial - though as yet unquantifiable - amounts of Indian diplomatic traffic.18

  The Soviet leadership regarded a special relationship with India as the foundation of its South Asian policy. Growing concern in both Moscow and New Delhi with the threat from China gave that relationship added significance. Gromyko and Ponomarev jointly declared: ‘The Soviet Union and India march side by side in the struggle for détente, for peace and world security . . . India has always relied on Soviet assistance on the international scene in safeguarding its rights against colonial schemes.’19

  The primary purpose of KGB active measures in India was to encourage support for the special relationship and strengthen suspicion of the United States. According to Leonid Shebarshin, who served in the New Delhi residency in the mid-1970s, ‘The CIA’s hand could be detected in material published in certain Indian newspapers. We, of course, paid them back in the same coin . . . Like
us, [the CIA] diligently and not always successfully did what they had to do. They were instruments of their government’s policy; we carried out the policy of our State. Both sides were right to do so.’20