While FRELIMO was locked in an internal power struggle, the MPLA had emerged as a significant threat to Portuguese rule, though its claims to control one-third of Angola were greatly exaggerated. Following Neto’s election as MPLA President in 1969, the MPLA was riven by internal disputes similar to those which had previously disrupted FRELIMO. Reports reached the Centre from supposedly ‘reliable sources’ that Neto was embezzling Soviet funds and salting them away in a Swiss bank account. His first case officer, Oleg Nazhestkin, tried to defend Neto against these charges:
‘Allow me to point out,’ I said, ‘that as a condition of our assistance we demanded of Neto that no more than one to two individuals within the MPLA should know about it, that only he should personally decide all questions linked with our assistance. And where is he supposed to keep the hard-currency funds, in his desk drawer or in a knapsack on his back during trips out to the liberated regions?’82
During the early 1970s Portuguese intelligence reported, somewhat prematurely, that the MPLA no longer represented a military threat. There is some evidence that by 1973 Moscow was shifting support to the MPLA eastern commander, Daniel Chipendra, who had emerged as a challenger to Neto’s leadership. Soviet support for the MPLA was reduced to a trickle.83 FRELIMO, by contrast, had largely recovered from its earlier infighting. In 1973 it forced the closing of Gorongosa National Park, world famous as a big-game hunting ground for wealthy tourists.84 Simultaneously, Machel led a FRELIMO delegation to Moscow.85 The Dar-es-Salaam residency maintained covert contact with both Machel and TSOM.86
The Centre’s principal hopes of influence in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1970s, however, were centred on Somalia. In October 1969 Somalia’s unpopular civilian government was toppled by a military coup which established a Supreme Revolutionary Council (SRC), composed of officers and headed by the army commander General Muhammad Siad Barre. The KGB residency was given advance notice of the coup (codenamed KONKORD) by one of the chief plotters, codenamed KERL, who had visited Moscow and became a member of the SRC.87 According to KERL’s file, he continued after the coup to influence Siad Barre along lines approved by the KGB.88 Though Mitrokhin’s notes give no details, KERL may have had - or at least told the KGB that he had - some influence on Siad Barre’s early decision to invite the Soviet navy to visit Somali ports and his simultaneous expulsion of the whole of the American Peace Corps and half the US embassy staff.
The SRC suspended the constitution, abolished the National Assembly, banned political parties and renamed the country the Somali Democratic Republic (SDR). Though poorly educated and little acquainted with Marxism, Siad Barre declared on the first anniversary of the coup that the new regime would be based on ‘scientific socialism’. On public occasions, the streets were festooned with heroic images of himself as the ‘Victorious Leader’, flanked by portraits of Marx and Lenin. The Victorious Leader’s notion of ‘scientific socialism’, however, was somewhat eccentric. Siad Barre claimed to have synthesized Marx with Islam, and produced a little blue-and-white book reminiscent of Mao’s little red book, which contained a platitudinous mixture of pontifications and exhortations. In 1971 he announced that the SDR was to be transformed into a one-party state, an ambition eventually fulfilled with the creation of the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party (SRSP) five years later.89
The Centre had far greater confidence in KERL than in Siad Barre. Such was his importance in KGB eyes that during visits to Moscow he had discussions with Andropov, KGB Vice-Chairman Semyon Tsvigun and Brezhnev. KERL was used for a considerable variety of KGB operations: among them a meeting with Muammar al-Qaddafi in Tripoli at the Mogadishu residency’s request in 1969 as part of an influence operation; the expulsion of five US diplomats in the spring of 1970 and the cancellation of a visit by the US navy to Mogadishu; active-measures articles in the Somali press; and the purchase for Moscow of US and other Western technology whose export to the Soviet Union was banned under COCOM regulations. 90 KERL’s motives were both ideological and mercenary. After obtaining US technology from an Italian source for onward transmission to Moscow in 1972, he was given $5,000.91 KERL’s fellow member of the SRC, Lieutenant-Colonel Salah Gaveire Kedie (codenamed OPERATOR), who had trained at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow, was recruited as a KGB agent. In 1971, however, Gaveire Kedie was accused with Vice-President Muhammad Ainanche of plotting Siad Barre’s assassination. Both were found guilty of treason and executed in public.92
The most obvious influence of the KGB on the newly established Somali Democratic Republic was its guiding role in setting up the National Security Service (NSS), headed by Siad Barre’s son-in-law Ahmad Sulaymaan Abdullah, which had what the police chief Jama Muhammad Ghalib later acknowledged were ‘unlimited powers of search, arrest, detention without trial and torture . . . The promotion of Siad Barre’s slogans and the harassment of dissidents, real and imagined, soon became daily routine.’93 The Centre doubtless failed to appreciate the brutal irony of the arrest of the KGB agent Gaveire Kedie by the Somali security service it had trained. It was, however, able to feed disinformation to the NSS, designed to exacerbate its distrust of the United States. With the assistance of Service A, the Mogadishu residency concocted reports that the CIA was collecting intelligence on the Somali army to pass on to Ethiopia, with which Somalia was in conflict over the Somali-speaking Ethiopian region of Ogaden. The KGB claimed that the purpose of a visit by the US ambassador with a member of the CIA station in Mogadishu to Addis Ababa in the spring of 1972 was to pass on this intelligence.94
Later in 1972 Andropov made a personal tour of inspection in Somalia - a certain indication of the importance which he attached to it as a field of KGB operations. In 1973 he invited Sulaymaan for talks in Moscow. By 1974 there were approximately 3,600 Soviet advisers in Somalia, about 1,600 of them military personnel. On 11 July 1974 the Soviet Union and Somalia signed a Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation, the first between Moscow and a black African state, which gave the Soviet fleet access to the strategic port of Berbera. By 1976 Soviet military aid had turned little Somalia into the fourth most heavily armed state in sub-Saharan Africa (after the far larger Nigeria, Zaire and Ethiopia). In a speech to the Twenty-fifth Congress of the CPSU in Moscow in February 1976, Siad Barre declared that Somalia was ‘an inseparable part of the world revolutionary movement’. Somalia’s place within the Soviet orbit, however, was less secure than his rhetoric suggested. Muslim Somali-speakers had historically seen themselves as of Arab descent, and in 1974 Somalia joined the Arab League, sponsored by Saudi Arabia, one of Moscow’s bêtes noires. The Somali ‘revolution’ progressed little beyond the level of revolutionary rhetoric. Though most of Moscow’s doubts were expressed in private, one Soviet commentator observed publicly in 1976 that, despite some Somali nationalizations, ‘the activity of the private sector did not lessen’.95 Castro reported after a visit to Somalia in March 1977 that ‘The power and influence of the rightist group continue to increase. The Interior Minister [and security chief], Sulaymaan, is doing everything possible to bring Somalia closer to Saudi Arabia and the imperialist countries.’96 Soon afterwards the Soviet Union effectively abandoned the position it had built up in Somalia in favour of what seemed to be more promising prospects elsewhere in the Horn of Africa.
25
From Optimism to Disillusion
By the mid-1970s the KGB’s main hopes of African revolution were centred on the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique. In Angola, the richest of Portugal’s colonies, the end of Portuguese rule was followed by civil war in which the Marxist Movimento Popular de Libertacão de Angola (MPLA) was opposed by the non-Marxist Frente Nacional de Libertacão de Angola (FNLA) and União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA), which had different regional strongholds.1 In the early 1970s, save for a hard core of Neto supporters among the Centre’s Africanists, Moscow had largely lost confidence in his leadership of the MPLA. As Neto later acknowledged, the loss of most Soviet support had bro
ught the MPLA to the verge of defeat.2 After the ‘Revolution of the Red Carnations’ in Portugal in April 1974, however, the Portuguese Communist leader and pro-Soviet loyalist, Alvaro Cunhal, who joined a socialist-led coalition government, urged Moscow to resume arms deliveries to the MPLA.3 Failure to do so might result in the victory of the FNLA, which had earlier been supported by both the United States and China, and of UNITA, which had also had Chinese backing in the past and would shortly win support from South Africa. KGB residencies in Algiers, Bamako, Brazzaville, Dakar, Dar-es-Salaam, Lusaka, Mogadishu, Nairobi and Rabat were urgently instructed to send agents and confidential contacts to Angola and Mozambique to obtain first-hand information on the situation.4
In December 1974 the Politburo approved proposals to supply the MPLA with heavy weapons and ammunition through Congo (Brazzaville). The Soviet ambassador in Brazzaville, however, warned against the dangers of becoming embroiled in a civil war in which, he predicted, US and Chinese support would give the ‘reactionaries’ of the FNLA and UNITA the upper hand. Moscow threw its weight instead behind attempts by African leaders to persuade the three Angolan liberation movements to join in negotiations with the Portuguese for an orderly transfer of power. These negotiations led to the Alvor Agreement of January 1975 by which Portugal agreed to hand over power on 11 November to a coalition government of MPLA, FNLA and UNITA representatives. None of the three groups, however, took the idea of a coalition government seriously, and from early spring Castro, a strong personal supporter of Neto, put increasing pressure on Moscow to provide armed support for the MPLA. By early summer about 250 Cuban officers had been sent to Angola, where they functioned as a kind of general staff for Neto in planning operations as well as training MPLA forces. Castro looked upon Angola as an opportunity both to establish himself as a great revolutionary leader on the world stage and to revive flagging revolutionary fervour at home. In July President Ford and his ‘Forty Committee’, which oversaw covert action, authorized large-scale CIA covert support for the FNLA and UNITA through Zaire and Zambia, both hostile to the MPLA. In early August the first South African forces crossed into southern Angola. By the middle of the month, the MPLA was on the defensive, retreating towards the capital, Luanda.5
Castro responded by sending a personal appeal to Brezhnev for large-scale support for the MPLA and despatching the first Cuban combat troops to Luanda in the autumn. Many in Moscow, however, continued to see Neto as a maverick. The Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, Vasili Kuznetsov, said privately in 1975, ‘We only need him for a certain period. We know he’s been sick . . . And psychologically he’s not all that reliable.’6 The Politburo, like the Foreign Ministry, was reluctant to take the risks of full-scale involvement in the Angolan civil war, and clung to the unrealistic hope that the Alvor Agreement could be resuscitated and the three liberation movements persuaded to settle their differences.7 The task of conveying this message to Neto was entrusted in October not to a diplomat but to his first case officer, Oleg Nazhestkin, then head of the FCD Angolan desk. Before he left, Nazhestkin was urged by both the Foreign Ministry and the International Department, whose views he found ‘narrow and blinkered’, to ‘convince’ Neto of the advantages of uniting with the FNLA and UNITA - a policy which Nazhestkin himself believed was wholly impracticable. By the time Nazhestkin reached Brazzaville en route for Luanda, however, the intensification of the civil war had produced a change of heart in Moscow - despite continued scepticism in the Foreign Ministry.8 An FCD report to the Politburo, countersigned by Viktor Chebrikov, Deputy Chairman of the KGB, warned that without outside support the MPLA would be unable to hold on to Luanda. A telegram from the Centre authorized Nazhestkin to tell Neto that the Soviet Union was prepared to open diplomatic relations on 11 November with an MPLA government which contained no FNLA or UNITA representatives and to give it military assistance. Nazhestkin flew from Brazzaville to Luanda on 2 November and found a city under siege. On arrival he was driven to the Tivoli Hotel, where the MPLA’s foreign supporters were housed free of charge and fed with bean soup once a day. Nazhestkin’s first problem was to find Neto, who had not been warned of his arrival and was living at a secret location outside Luanda, protected by Cuban troops. A Pravda reporter staying in the Tivoli, however, knew some of the Cuban military mission, had recently interviewed Neto and drove Nazhestkin to Neto’s headquarters. Though it was the middle of the night, Neto was still at work in his office and asked him whether he had come to make another attempt to persuade him to ‘unite with the enemies of the Angolan revolution’. Nazhestkin decided that unless he was frank he would not recover Neto’s trust. There were, he admitted, officials in the Foreign Ministry and International Department who had asked him to do precisely that before he had left Moscow, but wiser counsels had since prevailed and he was authorized to offer an independent MPLA government full support. Neto shed what Nazhestkin describes as a few ‘manly’ tears of joy, then told him, ‘Finally, finally, we’ve been understood. That means we will work together, work together and struggle together. The Cubans, dear friends, are helping us, but without the Soviet Union it was very, very difficult for us. Now we are sure to be victorious.’ The two men carried on talking until daybreak.9
A massive Soviet airlift of Cuban troops and Soviet arms made it possible to turn the tide of the civil war. The withdrawal of US support for the MPLA’s opponents was of equal importance. On 13 December, CIA covert action in Angola suddenly ceased to be covert. A front-page story in the New York Times revealed both the scale of the Agency’s operation to support the FNLA and UNITA and the fact that five months earlier Nathaniel Davis, Assistant Secretary for African Affairs at the State Department, had resigned in protest against it. Congress responded by voting to cut off all US covert assistance to any faction in Angola. For the first time in American history a President was forced to stop a covert operation abroad to which he was personally committed. In an angry off-the-record briefing, Henry Kissinger condemned Ford for allowing Congress to ride roughshod over his foreign policy.10 The CIA’s humiliation was greeted with jubilation in the Centre. According to the senior Soviet diplomat (and later defector), Arkadi Shevchenko, Moscow drew the conclusion that ‘the United States lacked will in Africa’, just as it had lost the will to fight in Vietnam: ‘After its humiliation in Vietnam in 1975, America was increasingly portrayed by Party militants as a diminished rival in the Third World. Although some experts took a more cautious line, the Soviet leaders judged that, in addition to the “Vietnam syndrome”, the United States now had an “Angola syndrome”.’11 Neto made the same analogy. He declared on 27 July 1976: ‘Our fight must go on until FNLA is defeated as the Americans were in Vietnam.’12 Success in Angola was later to make Moscow much more willing than it would otherwise have been to intervene in Ethiopia.
Though the FNLA virtually collapsed after the withdrawal of US backing, UNITA was able to continue fighting from its tribal homeland in south-eastern Angola with support from South Africa, which was terrified by the prospect of having a Soviet satellite on its doorstep. UNITA’s alliance with the apartheid regime represented an enormous propaganda victory for both Moscow and the MPLA. At the OAU summit in January 1976, member states were initially deeply split over which side to recognize in the Angolan civil war. When it was revealed that South African forces were fighting alongside UNITA, however, its African backers faded away. On 10 February 1976 the OAU officially recognized the People’s Republic of Angola.13
Huge amounts of Soviet propaganda as well as arms were airlifted to Angola, among them a plane-load of brochures of Brezhnev’s speech to the Twenty-fifth (1976) Party Congress and two plane-loads of anti-Mao pamphlets. The Soviet embassy in Luanda claimed unconvincingly that it had put this turgid material to good use, but must have found it difficult to dispose of sets of Lenin’s collected works which were mistakenly sent in French rather than Portuguese translation. By the summer of 1976 the embassy had run out of Lenin portraits and dutifully requested further supplies f
rom Moscow.14 To help Neto control dissent, advisers from the East German Stasi set up a brutal security service, the Direção de Informação e Seguranca de Angola (DISA), under his personal control, which carried out repeated purges of his opponents, real and imagined.15
In October 1976, Neto visited Moscow to sign a Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation with the Soviet Union, pledging both signatories to mutual military co-operation and giving Soviet forces the right to use Angolan airports and Luanda harbour. ‘Soviet aid’, Neto declared, ‘has been the key factor in our historical development, in achieving independence and in the country’s reconstruction.’16 While Moscow publicly hailed Neto as a hero, he continued to be distrusted in both the Foreign Ministry and the International Department. Though the Luanda residency maintained private contact with Neto, probably its most important source for monitoring Neto’s militant intentions in 1976 was a female political assistant. Codenamed VOMUS by the KGB, she became a confidential contact of the Luanda residency, which claimed that she exerted a ‘favourable’ - doubtless pro-Soviet - influence over Neto and others in the MPLA leadership, probably in countering Maoist ideology. In June 1977, however, she was arrested, probably because she sympathized with an almost successful coup by the MPLA Minister of the Interior, Nito Alves, a more orthodox pro-Soviet Marxist, and the chief political commissar in the armed forces, José Van Dúnem.17 Moscow’s reaction to the coup was hesitant. Doubtless to Neto’s indignation, it waited four days before condemning the plotters. The most likely explanation is that it had decided to see who emerged victorious before choosing sides but, like VOMUS, would not have been displeased if Neto had been replaced at the head of the MPLA.18
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