The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  Sir! I urge you to take urgent and just actions to defend the nation from the dangerous activities of certain American diplomats in this country, who are trying with all their might to deceive our soldiers and reduce our nation again to chaos. I am well acquainted with Mr H. Duffy, an officer in the US embassy whom I regard with great respect. It is always pleasant to spend time with him, and I usually visited him whenever I came to Lagos. Some time ago Mr Duffy informed me that their First Secretary, Mr Jack Mauer, wanted to consult with me. He described Mr Mauer as an influential person who could offer me assistance in arranging a trip to study at a US military college. I agreed and was introduced to Mr Mauer at a lawn tennis club. We agreed to meet in the evening. At the appointed time Mr Mauer arrived at the place where I was waiting for him. He was with a friend from the embassy who, as I understood it, was the owner of the car in which they arrived (LR 2229) and in which they drove me home to my brother’s house. They began to question me in detail about several young officers in our battalion, and asked me to inform them about the ones who were stealing weapons from our warehouse. I in fact do suspect that at least three of our soldiers and officers are concealing many weapons. I promised to help Mr Mauer and his friend (I do not know his name), but am not about to do anything for them, since I understood what it is they want. But I thought that no one knows how many others might take their bait.

  In the name of peace and order in this country, I urge you to stop them before they go too far. God bless you!41

  In Morocco two years later, operation EKSPRESS brought to the attention of King Hassan II a forged report from a CIA agent on an Agency plot to overthrow him. To add plausibility to the forgery, the report correctly identified the head of the CIA station, Charles ‘Chuck’ Cogan. Three US businessmen and a Rabat notable whom the KGB wished to discredit were also - probably falsely - named as working for the CIA.42

  Following the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s, the KGB also embarked on a major programme of active measures designed to discredit Mao’s regime. The Chinese message to the newly independent African states which alarmed Moscow was succinctly summarized in a verse by the Gambian poet Lenrie Peters:

  The Chinese then stepped in . . .

  We’re Communist brothers

  To help you build Black Socialism.

  Only you must kick out the Russians.43

  After some early successes, however, the Chinese overplayed their hand. In May 1965 Kenyan security forces seized a convoy of Chinese arms en route via Uganda to rebel forces in Congo (Kinshasa). 44 While on a visit to Tanzania in June, the Chinese Prime Minister, Zhou Enlai, declared that Africa was now ‘ripe for revolution’. African leaders were so indignant (‘Revolution against whom?’) that, despite having been welcomed in a number of their capitals over the previous two years, Zhou found nowhere else willing to receive him after he left Tanzania. The Kenyan authorities refused even to allow his plane to refuel on its journey home. Chinese pledges of aid to Africa dropped from $111 million in 1964 to $15 million in 1965.45 The Centre, which referred to the Chinese in Africa by the demeaning codename ‘Ants’ (MURAVYI),46 claimed much of the credit for the expulsion of PRC missions from Burundi, the Central African Republic, Dahomey, Tunisia and Senegal between 1965 and 1968.47 As frequently happened, the KGB probably claimed more credit than it was due. Burundi’s decision to ‘suspend’ diplomatic relations with the PRC in January 1965 appears to have been motivated by the belief of Mwami (King) Mwambutsa that the Chinese had been implicated in the assassination of the Prime Minister, Pierre Ngendnadumwe.48 Though KGB active measures may well have encouraged Mwambutsa’s suspicions, however, some historians conclude that the assassins did indeed have links with the PRC.49 In January 1966 Colonel Jean Bedel (later self-styled ‘Emperor’) Bokassa, who had just seized power in the Central African Republic, broke off diplomatic relations with China following the discovery of documents which allegedly revealed a plot by an underground Armée Populaire Centrafricaine controlled by ‘Chinese or pro-Chinese’ .50 Though proof is lacking, the emergence of these documents has all the hallmarks of a Service A fabrication. When the Dahomey regime of General Christophe Soglo also broke off relations with Beijing in January 1966, it gave no reasons and no evidence is available on the influence - if any - of Soviet active measures.51 The breaking of diplomatic relations between Tunisia and the PRC in September 1967 followed a bitter polemic between the two countries in which President Habib Bourguiba had accused China of seeking ‘to provoke difficulties, to aggravate existing contradictions, to arm and train guerrillas against the existing [African] regimes’.52 The KGB reported that the polemic had been fuelled by a bogus Chinese letter, fabricated by Service A, which was sent to Bourguiba’s son containing personal threats against him as well as attacking the regime.53 While KGB active measures may have reinforced President Bourguiba’s suspicions of China, however, they are unlikely to have been at the root of them.

  Though Kenya did not break off relations with the PRC, it expelled four Chinese officials in two years, the last of them the chargé d’affaires, Li Chieh, who was declared persona non grata in June 1967.54 Though not publicly stated, the main reason for the expulsions was the PRC’s support for the left-wing Deputy President of the ruling KANU Party, Oginga Odinga, who had secretly told the Chinese in 1964 that President Jomo Kenyatta should be overthrown. 55 Odinga, who had also been courted by the Russians,56 was replaced as Deputy President in 1966 and lost a trial of strength with Kenyatta over the next year. As evidence of Chinese machinations, Kenyan newspapers published extracts from an inflammatory pamphlet entitled ‘New [Chinese] Diplomats Will Bring the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to Africa’. Though published in the name of the New China News Agency, the pamphlet appears to have been forged. 57 The most likely forger was Service A. Fabrications designed to discredit the Chinese in West Africa included a pamphlet attacking the regime of President Léopold Senghor in Senegal supposedly issued by pro-Chinese Senegalese Communists and bogus information about Chinese plots which was sent to Senghor’s government. On the basis of such active measures, the KGB claimed the credit for the expulsion from Senegal in 1968 of two New China News Agency correspondents.58 In neighbouring Mali the KGB reported also in 1968 that it had brought about the dismissal of the Minister of Information after an active-measures operation, codenamed ALLIGATOR, had compromised him as a Chinese stooge.59 There can have been few long-serving African leaders who were not at various times fed fabricated evidence of both Chinese and CIA conspiracies against them. Occasionally, however, the fabrications were based on fact - as in the case of the evidence of Chinese plots communicated to President Mobutu.60 After the later improvement of relations between the PRC and Zaire, Mao personally told Mobutu during his visit to Beijing, ‘I wasted a lot of money and arms trying to overthrow you.’ ‘Well, you backed the wrong man,’ replied Mobutu .61 The case of Mobutu illustrates the complexity of KGB active measures in some African states. As well as being warned of Chinese plots against him, other active measures spread stories of his collaboration with the CIA.62

  The undoubted decline of Chinese influence in Africa during the mid- and late 1960s, however, was due less to Soviet active measures than to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Beginning in 1966, experienced ambassadors were withdrawn from Africa, often to be paraded in dunces’ hats and abused by Red Guards in Beijing, leaving in charge of PRC embassies fanatics who engaged in hysterical public adulation of Chairman Mao and denunciations of his opponents. Huge quantities of Mao’s writings and portraits flooded some African capitals. In Mali, for example, an estimated 4 million copies of Mao’s Little Red Book were distributed - one per head of the population. And yet not a single African leader publicly echoed Chinese attacks on the Soviet leadership.63

  As elsewhere in the Third World, the KGB’s greatest successes in African intelligence collection were probably obtained through SIGINT rather than HUMINT. Between 1960 and 1967 the number of states whose commun
ications were decrypted by the KGB Eighth Directorate increased from fifty-one to seventy-two.64 The increase was doubtless due in part to the growing number of independent African states. Because of the comparative lack of sophistication of their cipher systems, many were, without realizing it, conducting open diplomacy so far as the KGB and other of the world’s major SIGINT agencies were concerned. The small SIGINT section of the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organization, for example, found little difficulty in breaking the codes of its neighbours - except for South Africa which, like the Soviet Union, used the theoretically unbreakable one-time pad for its diplomatic traffic as well as state-of-the-art cipher technology.65 The work of Soviet codebreakers was simplified by the KGB’s recruitment of cipher personnel at African embassies around the world.66

  The hardest African target for agent penetration as well as for SIGINT was probably the Republic of South Africa, where the KGB lacked either a legal residency or any other secure operational base.67 In April 1971, however, a senior military counter-intelligence officer, subsequently codenamed MARIO, contacted the KGB residency in Lusaka and offered information about the South African intelligence community. A certain indication of the importance attached to MARIO by the FCD was that it briefed both Andropov and Brezhnev personally on him. Over the next two years his KGB case officers had meetings with him in Zambia, Mauritius, Austria and East Germany. His military intelligence was also highly rated by the GRU. In 1973, however, it was discovered that MARIO had left military counter-intelligence some time before he approached the Lusaka residency. The fact that he successfully deceived the KGB for two years is evidence of its lack of other sources able to provide reliable information on South African intelligence.68

  Until the mid-1970s Moscow had only modest expectations of the prospects for national liberation movements in sub-Saharan Africa. The Soviet Union had maintained contact with the [South] African National Congress (ANC), mostly through the South African Communist Party (SACP), since the 1920s. In 1961 the SACP’s influence in the liberation movement was increased by the decision of the ANC, which had been banned a year earlier, to abandon its previous insistence on an exclusively non-violent campaign. The ANC and SACP co-operated in founding Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘Spear of the Nation’) to begin an armed struggle. Unlike the ANC, Umkhonto, which was supplied with Soviet arms and military training, was multiracial and thus open to SACP members, many of whom were of non-African ethnic origin. In 1963 the Soviet Presidium instructed Vladimir Semichastny, the KGB Chairman, to begin transmitting secret subsidies to the ANC - initially $300,000 a year - in addition to the traditional payments to the SACP, then running at $56,000.69

  Despite Soviet assistance, however, the first fifteen years of Umkhonto operations posed no significant threat to the South African apartheid regime. By the mid-1960s, most leading ANC and SACP militants had been imprisoned or forced into exile. The SACP leadership, based mainly in London, had lost touch with those Party members who remained in South Africa.70 In 1969, after long and heated debate, the ANC agreed to admit anti-apartheid South African exiles of all ethnic backgrounds, thus opening its doors to an influx of SACP members. Moscow also welcomed the ANC decision to set up a multiracial Revolutionary Council to direct Umkhonto’s armed struggle, with Oliver Tambo, the ANC Chairman (in exile in Tanzania), as its head and Yusuf Dadoo, the SACP Chairman (in London), as his deputy. When the Tanzanian government began to object to the growing ANC military presence on its territory, Umkhonto was evacuated to the Soviet Union and remained there for several years.71

  The Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), founded in late 1961, and the rival Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), which broke away from ZAPU in 1963, had for the first decade of their existence no greater success in their struggle against Ian Smith’s white-settler regime in Rhodesia, which declared itself independent of Britain in 1965. Moscow chose what proved to be the less successful faction. Robert Mugabe, the Marxist leader of ZANU, who was to become the first Prime Minister of independent Zimbabwe in 1980, committed the unforgivable sin of describing himself as a ‘Marxist-Leninist of Maoist thought’. The Kremlin therefore backed ZAPU, led by the ‘bourgeois nationalist’ Joshua Nkomo, who was arrested in 1964 and spent the next decade in prison while his chief lieutenants bickered among themselves. In 1967 ZAPU formed a military alliance with the ANC but suffered serious losses after the entry into the conflict of helicopter-borne South African police forces on the side of the Rhodesian security forces. During the early 1970s ZAPU operations posed little threat to the Rhodesian security forces and its military alliance with the ANC disintegrated.72

  Like Umkhonto in South Africa, the Angolan Movimento Popular de Libertacão de Angola (MPLA) began its armed struggle against Portuguese colonial rule in 1961.73 In 1962, the Centre instructed the residency in Leopoldville (later renamed Kinshasa) to establish secret contact with a member of the MPLA leadership, Agostinho Neto, a protégé of the Portuguese Communist leader Alvaro Cunhal, a hard-line Soviet loyalist who in 1968 was to be the first Western Party leader to support the crushing of the Prague Spring.74 Oleg Ivanovich Nazhestkin, the KGB officer who met Neto in Leopoldville, where he was living in exile, wrote later that he had expected to encounter a ‘dashing, decisive commander’ but found instead a shy, mild-mannered intellectual who spoke slowly and became lost in thought for long periods before suddenly producing a lucid analysis of the issues under discussion. Though uncompromisingly hostile to the United States and Western imperialism, Neto seemed uncertain about the MPLA’s political aims. He told Nazhestkin:

  Our programme sets just, humane, noble, but too distant goals. Now is not the time to be talking about the creation of elements of a communist society in the conditions of African reality. The main task is to produce as broadly based a union as possible of patriotic forces, first and foremost within Angola . . . And what is communism [in African conditions]? Help me to come to grips with this question. After all, you’re a communist and you must understand it well. Help me to obtain the necessary literature.

  Though impressed by Neto’s honesty and commitment to Angolan liberation, Nazhestkin was left wondering whether he had the self-belief required to lead an ‘uncompromising armed struggle’.75 Neto, however, retained the strong backing of Cunhal, who arranged for him to visit the Soviet Union in 1964. Following his visit, Moscow publicly announced its support for the MPLA. Neto paid further visits to the Soviet Union in 1966 and 1967.76

  The Frente de Libertacão de Mocambique (FRELIMO), led by the US-educated Eduardo Mondlane, was slower to pose a threat to Portuguese rule in Mozambique than the MPLA in Angola and did not begin guerrilla warfare until 1964. Though the Centre was unimpressed by Mondlane, it had more confidence in a younger member of the FRELIMO leadership, codenamed TSOM, until recently a student in Paris. TSOM was given military training in the Soviet Union in 1965, and thereafter maintained contact with the International Department of the Central Committee on behalf of FRELIMO as well as with the KGB. In 1970 a proposal by the Centre to recruit him as an agent was vetoed by the International Department but he remained a KGB confidential contact who provided information on FRELIMO and Mozambique.77

  Early in 1967 a four-man interdepartmental mission of enquiry - two from the International Department, a senior diplomat and Vadim Kirpichenko representing the KGB - set off from Moscow to gather information in Dar-es-Salaam, Lusaka and elsewhere on the progress of the national liberation movements in Portuguese Africa. Kirpichenko, as Nazhestkin had been six years earlier, was intrigued by his discussions with Neto but left with mixed feelings:

  Neto would constantly shift conversations about the internal situation in Angola - the positions of various parties and prospects for their unification into a single movement, specific MPLA military actions - to the external aspects of the Angolan problem, which we already knew about. At the same time Neto made no attempt to exaggerate the merits of his party and was quite moderate with regard to the assistance expected from us. The
impression left by the meetings with him was pleasant, and were it not for the colour of his skin, one might have taken Neto for a somewhat phlegmatic European rather than a temperamental African.78

  In July 1967, after receiving the report of the mission of enquiry, the Politburo instructed the KGB to provide training for the ‘progressive nationalist organizations’ fighting for independence in Portugal’s African colonies: the MPLA, FRELIMO, and a smaller guerrilla group in Guinea-Bissau, the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC).79

  The Centre was initially dismayed by the quality of the FRELIMO guerrillas. Between 1966 and 1970 the KGB provided training for twenty-one specialist FRELIMO saboteurs, but found all of them ideologically ‘primitive’ and ignorant of the Soviet Union save as a source of arms and money.80 Serious divisions within FRELIMO’s ranks led in 1968 to riots in Dar-es-Salaam, the sacking of its offices, the killing of one of its Central Committee, and the closure of the FRELIMO school. In the following year Mondlane was assassinated by a parcel bomb delivered by FRELIMO dissidents. The Centre undoubtedly welcomed his replacement as head of FRELIMO by Samora Machel, whose aim was to make Mozambique ‘Africa’s first Marxist state’. Machel claimed that his Marxist convictions derived ‘not from writing in a book. Nor from reading Marx and Engels. But from seeing my father forced to grow cotton and going with him to the market where he was to sell it at a low price - much lower than the Portuguese grower.’81