The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  Oleg Nazhestkin is adamant that Neto was unfairly dealt with by the Party bureaucrats of the International Department ‘who wanted to make Neto into an obedient instrument of their own not always well-conceived policy for building socialism in Africa’:

  He was not an obedient figure in the hands of our party apparatchiks. He always had his own opinion, his own views on how to operate, how to conduct the struggle, how to act in one or another case. And these opinions of his were far from always coinciding with ours, but he knew how to uphold his own positions. He did not understand, for example, why it was necessary to engage in empty anti-imperialist chatter, to come out with declarations in support of Soviet foreign policy, certain actions of which he, incidentally, did not always agree with, and constantly to sign his name under various appeals and addresses, many of which did not have a concrete, realistic meaning.19

  Like Moscow, the Soviet embassy in Luanda had greater faith in Nito Alves,20 and also regretted that his coup had failed. Neto several times complained to Nazhestkin that the International Department was rummaging through his ‘dirty linen’, trying to find compromising material to use against him.21

  In contrast to the war of liberation in Angola, in which the MPLA had to contend with the rival FNLA and UNITA, the only movement which fought against Portuguese rule in Mozambique was the Frente de Libertação de Mocambique (FRELIMO). In September 1974 FRELIMO and the Portuguese revolutionary government in Lisbon signed an accord providing for independence in June 1975. Two months after the accord, posing as an Izvestia correspondent, the KGB officer Boris Pavlovich Fetisov arrived in Mozambique on a tour of inspection.22 The KGB and the Stasi were the dominant influences in the formation in 1975 of Samora Machel’s brutal security service, the Servico Nacional de Seguranca Popular (SNASP), which began a reign of terror against Machel’s opponents real and imagined. The equally brutal Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (RENAMO), originally created by the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organization (CIO) in 1977, was able to exploit widespread rural opposition to the FRELIMO regime in a long drawn-out civil war.23

  The collapse of the Portuguese Empire inaugurated what the Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere called the ‘second scramble’ for Africa. Moscow’s enthusiasm for the scramble greatly exceeded that of Washington. During the five-year period beginning in January 1976, the value of Soviet arms transfers to black Africa was to total almost $4 billion, ten times the value of US arms supplies.24 The emergence of Soviet-backed Marxist regimes in Angola and Mozambique, together with the CIA’s humiliation in Angola, persuaded Andropov to order a major stepping up of the KGB’s African operations. In August 1976 the FCD informed its African residencies:

  One of the main requirements which SVIRIDOV [Andropov] has demanded for our work in Africa consists of directing the residencies towards major political problems. This means working more persistently to undermine the position of the Americans and British in Africa, and to strengthen Soviet influence on the continent. It is necessary to establish firm positions and channels of influence within the ruling circles, governments and intelligence services, in order to obtain reliable prognoses concerning the situation in the country and the region as a whole, and on the activities of the Americans, the British and the Chinese, and to carry out wide-ranging measures against them.25

  Andropov’s optimism on the prospects for undermining US and British influence in Africa and for advancing that of the Soviet Union derived not merely from the establishment of Marxist-Leninist one-party states in Angola and Mozambique but also from increasing evidence that Ethiopia was following in the same direction.26

  The pro-Western regime in Ethiopia collapsed at almost the same moment as the Portuguese Empire. On 12 September 1974 Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, Elect of God and Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, was arrested by Lieutenant-Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam and a group of young army officers and taken off to prison in the back seat of a Volkswagen. Haile Selassie was later placed under house arrest in his palace where, a year later, he was strangled, probably by Mengistu himself, and buried beneath a latrine in the palace garden.27 Power passed to a military junta known as the Derg (Amharic for committee). Radio Moscow declared that the changes in Ethiopia were ‘not just an ordinary military coup’.28 Pravda praised the revolutionary implications of the land nationalization of 1975. But when the Derg asked for Soviet arms later in the year, Moscow temporized and hinted that the presence of ‘pro-Western’ members of the Derg made such a decision difficult.29 On 20 April 1976 the Derg announced a detailed political programme, the ‘National Democratic Revolution’, which formed the basis of a working alliance with the pro-Soviet Marxist MEISON (an Amharic acronym for All Ethiopian Socialist Movement) dedicated to the creation of a ‘people’s democratic republic’. Despite this optimistic rhetoric, however, Ethiopia itself seemed on the verge of disintegration, with separatist movements in several border provinces, a series of local rebellions elsewhere and several thousand arrests in Addis Ababa for counter-revolutionary activity. At this critical moment, when Ethiopia was close to civil war, the Derg found crucial support in Moscow. The visit by a high-level Derg delegation to Moscow in July 1976 was followed five months later by a secret agreement for the supply of Soviet arms.30

  Mengistu, meanwhile, had consolidated his power within the Derg by murdering, one by one, his rivals both real and imagined.31 In September 1976 the Derg announced the introduction of summary execution for ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Mengistu’s paranoid tendencies were further inflamed by an attempt on his life in October. Moscow was unfazed by the bloodbath which followed. Pravda reported that, faced with an inevitable ‘intensification of the class struggle’, the progressive government in Addis Ababa was successfully ‘liquidating counter-revolutionary bands’ with the support of the mass of Ethiopian society.32 In a speech on 17 April 1977 Mengistu launched a frenzied attack on the ‘enemies of the revolution’, and in an extraordinary piece of paranoid theatre broke three glass flagons containing what appeared to be blood. The broken flagons and the blood spilled from them symbolized, he declared, the three enemies which the revolution must exterminate: imperialism, feudalism and capitalism. A month later the Save the Children Fund reported that the supposedly counter-revolutionary victims of Mengistu’s bloodbath included not merely adults but 1,000 or more children, mostly aged between eleven and thirteen, whose bodies had been left lying in the streets of Addis Ababa. Amnesty International later estimated that a total of half a million people perished during the Red Terror of 1977 and 1978. The families of the victims were frequently required to pay the cost of the bullets which had killed them.33

  Mengistu’s paranoid strain was easily exploited by KGB active measures designed to exacerbate his fears of CIA plots against him. Operation FAKEL used a series of bogus documents supposedly emanating from the CIA station in Nairobi (in reality almost certainly concocted by Service A) to reveal a non-existent imperialist plot involving Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Egypt and Kenya as well as the United States to overthrow the Mengistu regime, assassinate its leaders and invade Ethiopia from both Sudan and Kenya. Doubtless to the delight of the Centre, in September 1977 an agitated Mengistu personally appealed to the Soviet ambassador in Addis Ababa for ‘the necessary political and military support at this critical moment’ to deal with the plot. The ambassador succeeded in keeping a straight face throughout his meeting with Mengistu and passed on the request to Moscow.34

  Moscow had hoped to avoid having to choose between the two rival self-proclaimed Marxist regimes in the Horn of Africa, believing that, as arms supplier to both Ethiopia and Somalia, it would be in a position to broker a settlement between the two. In March a Soviet proposal for a Marxist-Leninist confederation of Ethiopia, Somalia, South Yemen and Djibouti (which was due to become independent in June) was welcomed by Mengistu but rejected by Siad.35 The Somalis had already begun to support a liberation movement in south-eastern Ethiopia. In June 1977, frightened by the Soviet sup
ply of arms to Ethiopia and gambling on the prospect of US military support, Mogadishu launched an invasion which pushed deep into Ethiopian territory. Forced to decide between Ethiopia and Somalia, Moscow opted for Ethiopia. Its motives had more to do with realpolitik than with ideology. Ethiopia had ten times the population of Somalia and an even more important strategic location commanding sea-lanes for oil shipments from the Persian Gulf to the West.36 In July 1977 the Soviet Union withdrew its 1,000 advisers from Somalia. In November Somalia announced that it had abrogated its Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation with the Soviet Union and that it had suspended diplomatic relations with Cuba.37

  Though the Somali invasion enabled Mengistu to mobilize support for the war from virtually all sections of Ethiopian society, without massive military aid from the Soviet Union and its allies the Derg could not have survived.38 At the height of Soviet arms deliveries to Ethiopia during the winter of 1977-78, at a critical point in its war with Somalia, Soviet military transport aircraft reportedly landed every twenty minutes over a period of three months. An estimated 225 planes were involved in an operation co-ordinated via a Soviet military reconnaissance satellite. Simultaneously, 17,000 Cuban forces were airlifted from Angola to join 1,000 Soviet military advisers and 400 East Germans who were training intelligence and internal security units.39 By March 1978 the Somalis had suffered a decisive defeat. Among the KGB agents apparently alienated by Soviet support for Mengistu was RASHID, one of Somalia’s leading journalists whose contacts included Siad Barre. Mitrokhin’s notes record the strenuous efforts by the KGB to maintain his allegiance:

  In 1978, the residency drilled into RASHID the elementary facts that only the USSR advocated international détente and peaceful co-existence and supported Arab interests. The political errors of the Somali leadership in solving territorial disputes with Ethiopia and Kenya were pointed out to him, the true position in the area of the Horn of Africa was outlined and he was shown the aggressive nature of US policy relating to the solution of this problem, and the role of Saudi Arabia, as the spear-head of the struggle against the National Liberation Movement on the African continent.

  RASHID seems to have been unconvinced, and contact with him was broken off.40

  Mengistu’s loyalty to Moscow, by contrast, appeared complete. Every May Day, his troops paraded through Addis Ababa under giant portraits of Lenin. Even years later in exile after the fall of the Soviet Union, Mengistu recalled nostalgically the first time Brezhnev had enfolded him in a bear hug: ‘From that moment Brezhnev was like a father to me. We met another twelve times, always in the Soviet Union. Each time, before telling him about our problems, I would say, “Comrade Leonid, I am your son, I owe you everything.” And I truly felt that Brezhnev was like a father.’

  On 12 September 1978, the fourth anniversary of the overthrow of Haile Selassie, Mengistu presided over the celebrations enthroned in solitary splendour in a gilded chair upholstered in red velvet. While Fidel Castro, as guest of honour, sat in an armchair to his right, the other members of the Derg, for the first time at an official occasion, were relegated to the side-stands. Castro’s presence appeared to consecrate Mengistu’s dictatorship. Both Havana and Moscow turned a blind eye to the bloodbath which was one of the distinguishing features, under his leadership, of the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.41 At least one of the KGB’s most valuable contacts in Addis Ababa, DYUK, however, told the residency that he blamed the Soviet Union for propping up Mengistu’s brutal dictatorship.42

  The sudden and dramatic rise of Marxist regimes in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Ethiopia gave new impetus to the attempt to overthrow Ian Smith’s white-settler regime in Rhodesia. Moscow continued to back ZAPU, led by Joshua Nkomo, who was released from prison in 1974, rather than Mugabe’s ZANU. Though Nkomo was no Marxist, he took a prominent part in Soviet front organizations as a member of the Executive of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) and later Vice-President of the World Peace Council.43 Mitrokhin’s incomplete and fragmentary notes on ZAPU identify nine KGB penetrations, at least eight of whom had received military training or had studied in Russia and appear to have been recruited there. The most important ZAPU agent identified by Mitrokhin was NED, a member of the five-man War Council, headed by Nkomo, which took all strategic decisions. Though Mitrokhin gives no details of the intelligence supplied by NED, it was highly valued by the Centre. Presumably because most of NED’s intelligence was military, he was passed to GRU control in 1976 - but, most unusually, the KGB was also authorized by the Central Committee to remain in touch with him (a certain sign of the importance attached to him by the Centre).44 There were probably other GRU penetrations of ZAPU. The only other ZAPU agent identified by Mitrokhin, ARTUR, who was recruited while on a military training course at Simferopol, broke contact with the KGB after his return to Africa.45 The remaining seven ZAPU recruits appear to have been classed as confidential contacts rather than agents. The fact that, like ARTUR, three of them (POL,46 SHERIF47 and SHIRAK48) broke contact when they returned to Africa suggests they resented the pressure put on them during their military training to co-operate with the KGB, but felt unable to refuse until they had left the Soviet Union. The most productive of the confidential contacts who remained in touch with the KGB appears to have been RIK, who, though only in the middle ranks of the ZAPU leadership, was reported to be close to Joshua Nkomo and his military chief of staff. According to Mitrokhin’s notes on his file, RIK was ‘conspiratorial, honest and conscientious in his work. For the information that he provided he was paid not more than 5,000 Mozambique Escudos, as well as some presents.’49

  Nkomo conducted most of the negotiations for Soviet arms supplies to ZAPU’s armed wing, the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), through the Soviet ambassador in Lusaka, Vasili Grigoryevich Solodovnikov, who, as Nkomo later acknowledged in his memoirs, was generally believed to be ‘associated with the KGB’. Solodovnikov was one of the leading Soviet experts on Africa but appears to have been only an occasional co-opted collaborator of the KGB, rather than an intelligence officer. According to Nkomo, ‘He was a very nice fellow, and we got on very well on the personal level. Moreover, he was entirely professional about his work, and if you discussed a request with him you could be sure that it would soon get on to the agenda of the right committee in Moscow, and the decision would come back without much delay.’ Nkomo had ‘extensive correspondence’ and at least one meeting with Andropov, at which he discussed the ‘training of [ZAPU] security operatives’. The Cuban DGI also provided ZAPU with intelligence advisers.50

  Moscow’s inside information and influence on ZAPU, however, proved of little avail because it urged on ZIPRA a mistaken strategy which diminished its influence in favour of its ZANU rival, the Zimbabwe African Liberation Army (ZANLA). On Soviet advice, ZIPRA attempted to turn itself into a conventional force capable of launching a cross-border invasion which would gain control of enough Rhodesian territory to give it major political leverage in determining the peace settlement. In so doing, however, it set up military camps in Zambia, Tanzania and Angola which were far easier targets for attack by Rhodesian security forces than more mobile and elusive guerrilla groups. In a series of cross-border raids in the spring and summer of 1979, the Rhodesian army and air force destroyed ZIPRA’s capacity to operate effectively inside Rhodesia before the cease-fire at the end of the year.

  ZANLA, by contrast, had much greater success with a strategy based on infiltrating guerrilla groups from its Mozambique bases across the Rhodesian border and winning support in the countryside. Though militarily superior, the Rhodesian security forces lost control of the rural population and with it the war. As one observer noted, ‘The real problem is that the Rhodesian military have misunderstood the nature of the war which they are fighting. They have failed to realize that the war is essentially political rather than military and that the guerrillas have no immediate need to be militarily efficient.’51

  During 1977,
wrote the Rhodesian intelligence chief Ken Flower, ‘The country had passed the point of no return in its struggle against African nationalism - no political settlement, no answer to the war.’ For the white-settler government of Ian Smith, Flower’s intelligence ‘was unwelcome because it was unpalatable’.52 In 1979, however, Rhodesia’s white minority finally accepted the inevitable and voted for majority rule. To the dismay of both Moscow and the ANC, Mugabe’s ZANU rather than Nkomo’s ZAPU won an outright victory at the 1980 elections. On the eve of the elections, Nkomo’s intelligence chief, Dumiso Dabengwa, had written to Andropov to request his continued backing against ZANU.53 After Zimbabwe became independent in April 1980, however, the Centre was fearful that Mugabe would bear a grudge over the support it had given to his rival. It sent circular telegrams to residencies in Africa, London and elsewhere calling for detailed intelligence on his policy to the Soviet Union.54