The only African country which arguably represented something of a KGB success story was South Africa. Though the African National Congress (ANC) was never at any point the Communist stooge which the apartheid regime liked to pretend, Soviet support, channelled through the KGB, helped sustain it in some of its darkest hours.21 On paper, the rise to power of the ANC after the end of the Cold War appeared to fulfil many of the Centre’s earlier hopes. Joe Slovo, the South African Communist Party22 (SACP) leader, was the most respected of the ANC’s white members and the man chiefly responsible for persuading Nelson Mandela to end the armed struggle. Many other ANC militants were also SACP members, among them Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki, however, quickly realized that Marxism-Leninism had nothing to offer post-apartheid South Africa. Since succeeding Nelson Mandela, he has co-opted able left-wingers into the government by offering them plum jobs, then entrusted them with Thatcherite reforms. The Centre could never have imagined that at the beginning of the twenty-first century leading South African Communists would find themselves in charge of privatizing state-owned industries, lowering trade barriers and refusing pay rises to public-sector unions.23
24
The Cold War Comes to Africa
The most fiercely fought of Africa’s wars of liberation was the Algerian Revolution (known in France simply as the Algerian War), which between 1954 and 1962 cost the lives of a million Muslims and led to the expulsion from their homes of about the same number of European settlers. The French authorities, who refused for several years to accept that the revolt of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) was a nationalist rebellion against French rule, were quick to see the hand of Moscow behind the beginning of the war. In 1955 the French military commander in the Maghreb, General Jean Calliès, informed the Prime Minister, Edgar Faure, that the outbreak of the rebellion was part of a Cold War strategy ‘announced by Stalin himself’.1 The involvement in the revolt of the Algerian Communist Party, which maintained close links with the staunchly pro-Soviet French Communist Party,2 seemed further evidence of Soviet involvement. In reality, however, Moscow stayed largely aloof from the conflict. Members of the Algerian Communist Party, which drew much of its support from workers of European origin, were never fully trusted by the overwhelmingly Algerian FLN and frequently found themselves selected for ‘suicide missions’ against French forces.3 Though China was quick to recognize the provisional government founded by the FLN in September 1958, it was more than two years before the Soviet Union grudgingly followed suit.4 Even then a leading Soviet journal published an article by the leader of the Algerian Communist Party claiming that a second revolution was needed to correct the errors in the first, essentially bourgeois revolution.5 An attempt by Vadim Kirpichenko soon after Algerian independence in 1962 to conclude an agreement on KGB collaboration with the Algerian intelligence chief, Abdelhafid Boussouf, ended in failure.6
The KGB’s only significant operational successes during the Algerian Revolution were the active measures devised by Service A, chiefly directed against the United States. Service A was able to exploit the willingness of French opinion to blame setbacks during the war on conspiracies by les Anglo-Saxons, their American and British allies.7 In April 1961 the KGB succeeded in planting on the pro-Soviet Italian daily Paese Sera a story suggesting that the CIA was involved in the failed putsch mounted by four French generals to disrupt de Gaulle’s attempts to negotiate a peace with the FLN which would lead to Algerian independence. Among other media taken in by the story was the leading French newspaper Le Monde, which began an editorial on the putsch: ‘It now seems established that some American agents more or less encouraged [General Maurice] Challe [one of the coup leaders].’8 For the remainder of the Cold War bogus CIA plots in Africa, frequently documented by Service A forgeries, were one of the staples of KGB active measures. The credibility of Service A disinformation was greatly enhanced by the fact that, on Eisenhower’s instructions, the CIA had prepared a plan to poison Patrice Lumumba, the pro-Soviet prime minister of the Republic of the Congo,6 later renamed Zaire. In the event, Lumumba was murdered in December 1960 not by the CIA but by his Congolese rival, Joseph Mobutu, who went on to become one of the most corrupt of independent Africa’s kleptomaniac rulers.9 Before expelling the KGB resident in Kinshasa, Boris Sergeyevich Voronin, Mobutu amused himself by putting Voronin up against a wall and personally staging a mock execution.10 Soviet propaganda continued to portray Lumumba as the victim of American imperialism. Khrushchev announced the foundation in his honour of the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University to provide higher education in Moscow for students from Africa, Asia and Latin America. The University’s first vice-rector and a number of its staff were KGB officers who used the student body as a recruiting ground for Third World agents.11
In the summer of 1961 Khrushchev and the CPSU Central Committee approved a new and aggressive KGB global grand strategy to use national liberation movements in the Third World to secure an advantage in the East-West struggle. That strategy, however, was focused not on Africa but on Central America.12 Cuban enthusiasm for the prospects of African revolution predated that of the Soviet Union by over a decade. Ahmed Ben Bella, first president of newly independent Algeria, visited Havana in the midst of the missile crisis of October 1962 to be greeted by what he immodestly called ‘indescribable scenes of popular enthusiasm’. After the crisis was over and Soviet missile bases were being dismantled, Ben Bella echoed Castro’s indignant complaints that Khrushchev ‘had no balls’13 and exchanged ‘very tough words’ with the Soviet ambassador in Algiers. When the Algerian Revolution had to face what Ben Bella considered its ‘first serious threat’ during a Saharan border conflict with Morocco in October 1963, it was Castro not Khrushchev who came to his rescue, sending a battalion of twenty-two Soviet tanks and several hundred Cuban troops ready to take on the Moroccans if the desert war continued, though in the event they were not needed. According to Ben Bella:
The tanks were fitted with infra-red equipment that allowed them to be used at night. They had been delivered to Cuba by the Soviet Union on the condition that they were not to be made available to third countries, even Communist countries such as Bulgaria, in any circumstances. Despite these restrictions from Moscow, the Cubans defied all the taboos and sent their tanks to the assistance of the endangered Algerian revolution without a moment’s hesitation.
Convinced that sub-Saharan Africa was ‘imperialism’s weakest link’, Che Guevara began using Algiers as a base from which to make ineffective revolutionary forays to Angola and Congo (Brazzaville). After each of his forays he spent many hours in conversation with Ben Bella, recounting his adventures and denouncing the passive attitude of pro-Moscow Marxist parties, whose own assessments of the immediate prospects for revolution were more realistic than his own.14 After an ‘extremely chilly’ meeting with Eduardo Mondlane, the leader of the Mozambique national liberation movement, FRELIMO, Guevara patronizingly declared that, ‘[Sub-Saharan] Africa had a long way to go before it achieved real revolutionary maturity’.15
The Algerian border conflict with Morocco enabled Moscow to mend some of its fences with Ben Bella. Before the conflict, the United States and France had supplied arms to Morocco but refused them to Algeria. The conspiratorially minded Ben Bella became convinced that the United States had prompted what he regarded as Moroccan aggression.16 Moscow seized its opportunity. Despite Castro’s unauthorized loan of Soviet tanks, it began substantial arms shipments to Algeria on long-term credit agreements.17 The KGB, meanwhile, fed Ben Bella’s suspicion of the United States by channelling to him Service A forgeries which purported to reveal American plots to overthrow his and other African socialist regimes.18 Moscow also set out to pander to Ben Bella’s growing personality cult, inviting him to Moscow in May 1964 and giving him a hero’s welcome at the Kremlin, where he was presented with both the Lenin Peace Prize and the medal of Hero of the Soviet Union. Only a year later, to Moscow’s dismay, he was overthrown in a military coup
.19
The Soviet Union’s closest relationships with leaders of other newly independent African states were also short lived. Moscow’s main hopes of extending its influence in sub-Saharan Africa were initially centred on Ghana, which in 1957 became the first black African state to achieve independence under the charismatic leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, widely hailed as the prototype of the new educated African statesman committed to both democracy and socialism. Once in power, however, Nkrumah’s rhetoric of liberation was rapidly contradicted by his intolerance of dissent. Though he claimed to be creating a specifically African brand of socialism rather than subscribing to Marxism-Leninism, his speeches became increasingly pro-Soviet. As he and his sycophantic supporters in the Convention People’s Party (CPP) transformed Ghana into a corrupt one-party state, Soviet and East German military, security and technical advisers arrived in increasing numbers. A KGB-trained National Security Service oversaw a huge network of informers. According to a Ghanaian white paper published after Nkrumah’s overthrow: ‘Nkrumah’s security officers, both men and women, were placed everywhere - in factories, offices, drinking bars, political rallies and even in churches, not forgetting the taxi drivers, bus drivers, shop assistants, peddlers and seemingly unemployed persons who were all acting as informants.’20
Among the many paradoxes in Nkrumah’s volatile personality was the fact that, despite his anti-American rhetoric, he was deeply distressed by President Kennedy’s assassination and had a warm personal friendship with Kennedy’s ambassador, William P. Mahoney, and his family.21 Encouraged by KGB active measures, however, his suspicions of the CIA deepened and darkened. Like Ben Bella, Nkrumah was taken in by Service A forgeries.22 After an assassination attempt against him in 1962 Nkrumah became obsessed by the belief that the Agency was plotting his overthrow, frequently giving visitors copies of a book denouncing CIA conspiracies. 23 In February 1964 he became so incensed by a bogus letter fabricated by Service A, supposedly written by a disillusioned US military intelligence officer, which purported to reveal the hostile operations of both the CIA and SIS against his regime, that he wrote a personal letter of protest to President Lyndon Johnson, accusing the CIA of devoting all its energies to ‘clandestine and subversive activities among our people’. To emphasize the importance of his protest, Nkrumah instructed the Ghanaian ambassador in Washington to deliver it in person.24
Over the next few months, in other active-measures operations codenamed DEFEKTOR 3 and DEFEKTOR 4, the KGB used similar tactics to deceive the Francophone Marxist dictators of Guinea and Mali, Ahmed Sékou Touré and Modibo Keïta. The KGB’s influence operations were assisted by penetrations of both the Guinean and Malian intelligence services.25 The paranoid strain in Sékou Touré’s brutal and intolerant personality made him particularly susceptible to rumours of plots against him from almost any source.26 In May a US intelligence report, supposedly leaked by another disillusioned American intelligence officer but in reality fabricated by Service A, purported to reveal a plot to overthrow Sékou Touré, who reacted by dismissing those of his officials he believed were conspiring with the CIA.27 A few months later Ben Bella passed on to Keïta similar disinformation planted on him by the KGB, again deriving from a bogus US intelligence report, on an alleged plot by French intelligence and Mali opposition leaders to assassinate him. In order to encourage Keïta to denounce the plot publicly, the report inaccurately declared that he enjoyed such widespread popularity in Mali that the secret opposition to him was afraid to come out into the open. Keïta duly did as Service A had hoped and, in a speech in Bamako, angrily denounced the imperialist conspiracy to undermine Mali’s construction of a socialist society.28
KGB active measures had similar successes among African delegations at the United Nations. Racism in the United States presented Service A with an easy target which it was quick to exploit. In the segregated Southern states during the early 1960s blacks and whites still could not sit together on buses, eat together in restaurants, or attend the same schools. Pictures of state police beating peaceful civil-rights demonstrators with batons or soaking them with water cannon made front-page news around the world. Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, outlawing racial discrimination, and Martin Luther King’s charismatic leadership of a non-violent campaign to implement those rights, rioting in August 1965 in the Los Angeles black ghetto of Watts, which left thirty-six dead and over 1,000 injured, began a series of long hot summers of racial conflict in the inner cities. KGB officers in New York, wearing gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints on their forged letters, simultaneously bombarded African diplomats at the UN with racially insulting correspondence purporting to come from US white supremacists. Oleg Kalugin, who was stationed at the New York residency in the early 1960s, recalls that, ‘I lost no sleep over such dirty tricks, figuring they were just another weapon in the Cold War.’29 The ‘dirty tricks’ continued for some years. At the twenty-fifth session of the UN General Assembly in 1970, 100 copies of an abusive leaflet, supposedly from an American racist group but in reality fabricated by Service A, were sent to African delegates.30
Despite the success of KGB active measures in promoting anti-American conspiracy theories in Africa, the Soviet Union was powerless during the 1960s to prevent the overthrow of two of the African regimes with which it had closest relations. In 1966, due chiefly to his calamitous mismanagement of the supposedly socialist Ghanaian economy and a disastrous fall in world cocoa prices, Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup. The new government expelled over 1,000 Soviet advisers and over the next few years terminated all military-assistance agreements with Moscow.31 With the Politburo’s approval, the Accra residency provided secret financial support for a number of former members and supporters of the Nkrumah regime.32 In 1968, amid wild rejoicings in the Mali capital Bamako, the brutal, bankrupt ‘socialist’ regime of Modibo Keïta, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize, was also overthrown by a military coup.33 In exile in Guinea, probably influenced by further KGB active measures, Nkrumah blamed his overthrow not on his own betrayal of the hopes of the Ghanaian people but on a conspiracy by the CIA which, with the assistance of British and West German intelligence, had sought out ‘quislings and traitors’ to overthrow him. The African-American US ambassador in Ghana, Franklin Williams, who had succeeded Mahoney, was alleged to have personally offered the chief quislings $13 million and to have tried to persuade them to assassinate Nkrumah at Accra airport - a plan they were said to have rejected as impracticable. The street celebrations in Accra which followed Nkrumah’s overthrow were, he improbably claimed, forced by the Americans on a reluctant populace: ‘Banners and posters, most of them prepared beforehand in the US embassy, were pushed into the hands of the unwilling “demonstrators”.’34
The most important lesson drawn by Nkrumah from his overthrow was ‘that independent African states must pursue a policy of all-out socialism if they are to survive’.35 That his host in Guinea, Sékou Touré, survived in power, however, was due not to ‘all-out socialism’ but to the pervasiveness of his reign of terror which left even the army too cowed to attempt a military coup. The prisoners brought from their homes in the early hours for interrogation at Camp Boiro and other prison camps constructed with assistance from the East German Stasi and the Czechoslovak StB were tortured until they confessed to the usually imaginary conspiracies with which Sékou Touré was obsessed.36 The KGB turned a blind eye to the horrors of the Guinean regime, preferring instead to exploit its leader’s paranoid tendencies by active measures designed to convince him that the CIA was plotting to overthrow him. On at least one occasion (and probably on others not noted by Mitrokhin), the Centre heightened the dramatic impact of Service A’s forgeries by sending a senior KGB officer to Conakry, the Guinean capital, to deliver them in person. When shown the forgeries, Sékou Touré became - according to a KGB report - highly emotional, exclaiming angrily, ‘The filthy imperialists!’ The CIA officers responsible for the (non-existent) plot would, he declared, be expelled
within twenty-four hours: ‘We highly appreciate the concern shown by our Soviet comrades.’37 Active measures, however, were powerless to change Guinean economic realities. The Soviet aid and imports which poured into Guinea in the early years of independence achieved little. A Radio Moscow correspondent visiting Conakry complained, ‘We gave them what they wanted and they didn’t know what to do with it.’ But much of the blame lay with Moscow itself for embarking on a series of grandiose prestige projects which collapsed in disarray: among them a city-wide Conakry public address system which was soon switched off and never used again; a giant printing plant which operated at less than 5 per cent of capacity; a huge outdoor theatre which was abandoned half-completed; a 100kW radio station which was erected over a vein of iron ore and never functioned properly; and a national airline equipped with nine Ilyushins which were usually grounded.38 Most remarkable of all was a report that Soviet snow ploughs had arrived in Conakry - a report which was widely disbelieved until a British academic discovered them rusting away at the end of the airport runway.39 In 1978, after almost two decades of supposedly socialist construction, Sékou Touré was finally forced to seek help from the West to bail out his bankrupt economy.40
Though the initial priorities of KGB active measures in Africa were operations in newly independent ‘progressive’ regimes designed to strengthen their suspicion of the United States and their trust in the Soviet Union, the apparent success of Service A’s forged documents purporting to reveal CIA plots led to their use in almost every (perhaps every) country on the continent. In operation ANDROMEDA, for example, the military ruler of Nigeria, General Yakubu ‘Jack’ Gowon, President of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1973-74, was sent a fabricated letter in March 1973 supposedly written by a patriotic junior army officer, anxious to alert him to Agency subversion in the armed forces:
The World Was Going Our Way Page 56