Zimbabwean independence left the apartheid regime in South Africa and its colony in South-West Africa (in theory a League of Nations mandate conferred in 1919)55 as the continent’s only remaining white minority regime. After the MPLA victory in 1975, the South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) was able to set up guerrilla bases in Angola which were supplied with Soviet arms and training. In 1976 the SWAPO leader, Sam Nujoma (later the first President of independent Namibia), paid two visits to Moscow.56 At about this time, the KGB succeeded in recruiting two major agents inside SWAPO: a relative of Nujoma codenamed KASTONO, who later also operated as a Cuban agent;57 and a member of the SWAPO Central Committee codenamed GRANT, who was recruited in Zambia and paid for intelligence on liberation movements in southern Africa, and on the activities of the Chinese and Western countries in the region.58 In 1977 Nujoma received a hero’s welcome and the usual revolutionary bear hug from Castro during two visits to Cuba. SWAPO was allowed to open an office in Havana and the Cubans provided military training in both Cuba and Angola. In 1981 Nujoma attended the CPSU Congress in Moscow.59
There was an authoritarian ring to Nujoma’s assertion of SWAPO’s right to rule. He declared in 1978: ‘We are not fighting even for majority rule. We are fighting to seize power in Namibia, for the benefit of the Namibian people. We are revolutionaries. We are not counter-revolutionaries.’60 From 1976 onwards there were recurrent purges of mostly innocent SWAPO members suspected of treachery by Nujoma and others in the leadership. As one authoritative study concludes, ‘More and more of the movement’s brightest and most critical minds disappeared from their posts.’61 At the military level, SWAPO was no match for the South African Defence Force. Namibia owed its independence less to the guerrilla war than to changes within South Africa which eroded Pretoria’s will to retain control of it.62
In June 1976 riots in the Soweto townships outside Johannesburg, brutally put down by police firing live ammunition, made South Africa’s racial tensions front-page news around the world. So far from being organized by the ANC, however, the Soweto rising was a spontaneous protest begun by schoolchildren demonstrating against government orders that half their lessons should be in Afrikaans. The anger of young urban blacks, frustrated by the third-rate education and dismal job prospects to which they were condemned by the racist regime in Pretoria, boiled over. Only Durban among South African cities escaped the riots which spread across the country and led to over 600 deaths. The authority of the apartheid state never quite recovered its previous self-assurance.
The ANC’s guerrilla war took four more years before it was able to dent the confidence of the South African security forces. The SACP sought to maintain the morale of the Party underground by circulating secret pamphlets which declared that ‘Secrecy has helped us outwit the enemy’:
The enemy tries to give the impression that it is impossible to carry out illegal work. The rulers boast about all our people they have killed and captured. They point to the freedom fighters locked up in the prisons. But a lot of that talk is sheer bluff. Of course it is impossible to wage a struggle without losses. The very fact, however, that the South African Communist Party and African National Congress have survived years of illegality is proof that the regime cannot stop our noble work. It is because we have been mastering secret work that we have been able, more and more, to outwit the enemy.
The main training in ‘secret work’ was provided by the KGB, as is indicated by the instructions on underground operations circulated within Umkhonto we Sizwe, which followed classic Soviet intelligence tradecraft. Success in the underground war, it was emphasized, required ‘everyone [to] strictly follow the organizational and personal rules of behaviour’ set out in the instructions. Infiltrators must be ‘eliminated - where they pose serious danger to the survival of comrades and there is no other way’.63
In June 1980 the Umkhonto we Sizwe Special Operations force, commanded by Joe Slovo, a Moscow loyalist who six years later became Secretary-General of the SACP,64 launched four simultaneous attacks on oil storage tanks and a refinery, causing huge fires which blazed for a week and were visible for miles around. The team which led the attack was commanded by another SACP member, Motso Mokgabudi (better known by his alias Obadi), who had received extensive military training in the Soviet Union and ran an ANC sabotage training camp in Angola, assisted by Soviet advisers.65 As in the case of other liberation movements, the KGB (and doubtless the GRU) used the military training courses for the ANC in the Soviet Union as an opportunity to try to recruit confidential contacts and agents. The pressure it exerted on at least some of the potential recruits proved, as on ZAPU training courses, to be counterproductive. Mitrokhin made brief notes of the files of two ANC members recruited while being trained at Simferopol, ALEKS66 and POET.67 Both broke contact with the KGB after leaving the Soviet Union.
Though anxious to recruit agents among non-Communist members of the ANC, the KGB was forbidden to do so in the SACP. Relations with the SACP, as with other fraternal parties, were the primary responsibility of the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee. The KGB, however, was used to transmit funds to both the ANC and the SACP. Oleg Gordievsky, who was posted to the London residency in the summer of 1982, personally handed to Yusuf Dadoo, the SACP Secretary-General, over the next six months the equivalent in US dollars of £118,000 for the ANC and £54,000 for the SACP. Instead of putting the money in a briefcase, Dadoo stuffed it into all the pockets of his suit and overcoat. Gordievsky watched as Dadoo’s thin frame filled out with dollar bills before he left the Soviet embassy on foot, apparently unconcerned with the risk of being robbed on his way home. Like the rest of the SACP leadership, Dadoo was a committed Moscow loyalist, untainted by Euro-Communist heresy, who had supported the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 but was also totally devoted to the liberation struggle in southern Africa.68
After Dadoo’s death in 1983, the London residency ceased to handle the transmission of funds to the ANC and SACP. The main west European capital where the KGB maintained contact with its ANC agents and confidential contacts was Stockholm, where the ANC had its largest office outside Africa and received both public support and generous funding from the Swedish Social Democratic Party for its struggle against apartheid. As the West gradually became less feeble in its opposition to apartheid, the Centre became afraid that the ANC might increasingly be tempted to turn westwards. By the early 1980s KGB residencies in Stockholm, London, New York, Paris, Rome and those African capitals where the ANC maintained offices were regularly bombarded with instructions to monitor Western contacts with the ANC leadership and threats to SACP influence. The Centre was quick to show alarm at the slightest ideological shift. In 1982, for example, the London office of the ANC started showing resistance to the tedious articles supplied to it by a KGB officer working under cover as a Novosti news agency correspondent for publication in African newspapers. Unwilling to accept that the problem lay in the pedestrian quality of the articles it produced, the Centre instructed the London residency to redouble its efforts to track down the source of increasing Western influence within the ANC.69
In an attempt to exacerbate African suspicions of the West, the Centre maintained a stream of active measures designed to demonstrate that the United States and its allies were giving aid and comfort to the apartheid regime. Operation CHICORY in 1981 used Service A forgeries designed to demonstrate that the US arms embargo was a sham and spread the sensational fiction that the CIA and West German intelligence were plotting to supply South Africa with nuclear weapons. Operation GOLF in 1982, which also fabricated evidence of secret American arms supplies, was based on a forged letter to the US ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick, from a counsellor at the South African embassy in Washington conveying ‘best regards and gratitude’ from the head of South African military intelligence, purporting to accompany a birthday present sent ‘as a token of appreciation from my government’. The use of the word ‘priviousl
y’ [sic] in the letter indicates that, as sometimes happened with its forgeries, Service A had forgotten to check its English spelling. The letter was none the less published by the Washington correspondent of the New Statesman, Claudia Wright, who used it as the centrepiece of an article attacking Jeane Kirkpatrick, entitled ‘A Girl’s Best Friend’.70 Among Service A’s fabrications in 1983 was a bogus memorandum by President Mobutu’s Special Adviser in the Zaire National Security Council reporting on a secret meeting between US and South African envoys to discuss ways, with Mobutu’s assistance, of destabilizing the MPLA Angola government. As well as being sent to the ANC and SWAPO, the forgery was widely circulated to the media and successfully deceived some Western as well as African journalists, becoming the centrepiece of a story in the Observer, headlined ‘US and S. Africa in Angola Plot’. Though reporting American claims that the document was fabricated, the Observer gave greater weight to supposed evidence for its authenticity.71 Further Service A forgeries purporting to reveal covert collaboration between Washington and Pretoria continued into the Gorbachev era, among them a 1989 letter from the South African Foreign Minister, ‘Pik’ Botha, referring to a (non-existent) secret agreement concluded with the United States.72 Apart from fabricating secret links between Washington and the apartheid regime, the most successful Soviet active measure in Africa was to blame the devastating Aids epidemic sweeping through the continent on a secret American biological warfare offensive.73
During the early 1980s, despite the continuing success of KGB active measures, there was a dramatic change of mood in Soviet policy to Africa. In 1980 Andropov was still defiantly optimistic about the prospects for ‘liberated’ Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia. Within a few years Andropov’s optimism had evaporated.74 At the end of the 1970s the civil war in Angola had seemed to be winding down, and Angola’s huge oil resources encouraged optimism about its economic prospects. During the early 1980s, however, thanks to South African support for UNITA, fierce fighting flared up once more. In only two years (1981-82) Angolan GNP fell by 20 per cent. On a visit to Angola in 1981 a KGB delegation led by Vadim Kirpichenko, though accommodated in the relative luxury of a government mansion, experienced regular interruptions to the electricity and water supply and some of the other daily hardships endured by even the more privileged sections of the Luanda population. Kirpichenko found DISA, the Angolan version of the KGB, in ‘primitive’ condition, despite the training provided by Stasi advisers:
One could sense poverty and scarcity everywhere, even in the external appearance of the senior heads. The level of education of the leaders, too, was then extremely low. When the Minister [for State Security] introduced the [KGB] delegation to the leading personnel of the ministry, we saw the head of one department wearing a jacket with one sleeve about ten centimetres longer than the other. We never did understand why he did not shorten the longer sleeve, which would not have required too much effort. We were surprised to discover three local Portuguese amongst the leading personnel of the ministry. After the ceremonial introductions, I began, at the request of the Minister, to outline some of our assessments of current problems of the international situation. I had barely spoken two words before the leading personnel of the ministry began to sink into a sweet sleep.
Kirpichenko insists that this discourteous response was ‘in no way a reflection of the quality of my speech’.75
While Angola remained a drain on the ailing Soviet economy, it depended even more heavily on export earnings from US oil companies. Ironically, the MPLA was forced to use Cuban troops to defend American oil installations from UNITA attack.76 In Mozambique as in Angola, Moscow had to confront the intractable problems caused by a combination of civil war and economic mismanagement. According to Markus Wolf, the long-serving head of the Stasi’s foreign-intelligence arm, ‘Internal power struggles in the [FRELIMO] government were exacerbated by debates between the Soviet military and the KGB over the proper way to handle a conflict that was careering out of control.’77 Dmitri Volkogonov, the first historian to gain access to Andropov’s papers as General Secretary, concludes that he ‘had no idea what to do about such “allies” ’. It was harder still to deal with Ethiopia, where Mengistu continued his orgy of violence against all opposition, much of it a figment of his paranoid imagination. When the political commissar of Mengistu’s army, Asrat Destu, was asked during his visit to Moscow in 1984 why the bloodbath continued, he replied, ‘We are doing what Lenin did. You cannot build socialism without red terror.’ A fortnight after Destu returned to Addis Ababa, he was killed in a shoot-out at a meeting of Mengistu’s Revolutionary Council.78
In March 1984, a month after Andropov’s death, the Centre was taken by surprise when Samora Machel and the South African President, P. W. Botha, signed the Nkomati non-aggression agreement (so called after the town in Mozambique where the signing took place). Photographs of the tall figure of the notoriously short-tempered Botha, nicknamed die Groot Krokodil (‘the Great Crocodile’), towering over the much smaller Machel seemed to symbolize the triumph of Pretoria’s bullying power. In return for FRELIMO’s agreement to cease providing bases for the ANC, Pretoria promised to withdraw support for RENAMO (though, in reality, South African military intelligence continued to provide it with some covert assistance). A dismayed ANC declared that the agreement had ‘surprised the progressive world’.79 Soon afterwards N. V. Shishlin, foreign affairs consultant to the International Department (and later to Gorbachev), told the London embassy and KGB residency in a private briefing that ‘saving Mozambique’ was beyond Moscow’s power; its economy had virtually collapsed and FRELIMO was riven with internal rivalries. Shishlin also described Angola’s economic problems as catastrophic and its political leadership, like that of Mozambique, as divided and incompetent. He feared that the MPLA, like FRELIMO, might be forced to come to terms with South Africa. The KGB residency in London (and doubtless other capitals) was instructed to collect intelligence on what the Centre feared were a series of potential threats to Soviet influence: among them US plans to undermine the Soviet position in southern Africa; US pressure on its allies to deny economic assistance to Angola and Mozambique; the danger that Angola and Mozambique might move into the Western sphere of influence; SWAPO’s willingness to compromise on a Namibian settlement; and Western attempts to undermine the ANC or weaken its Marxist base.80
There were deep contradictions at the heart of Soviet policy towards southern Africa. Despite its uncompromising denunciation of apartheid, Moscow maintained top-secret contacts with Pretoria over the regulation of the world market in gold, diamonds, platinum and precious minerals, in which the Soviet Union and South Africa between them had something approaching a duopoly. Because of the extreme sensitivity of these contacts and the outrage which their public disclosure would provoke in black Africa, the KGB took a prominent part in arranging them. In 1984, just as the South African economy was on the verge of a serious crisis, the Kremlin decided to step up secret discussions with Pretoria on the regulation of the market. As a preliminary, KGB residencies in the United States, Britain, West Germany, France and Switzerland were asked to collect intelligence on a whole series of South African financial institutions and businesses.81 In the mid-1980s De Beers Corporation in South Africa was paying the Soviet Union almost a billion dollars a year for the supply of high-quality diamonds. Moscow’s lucrative secret agreements with Pretoria to keep mineral prices high did not prevent it attacking South Africa’s Western business partners for doing business with apartheid.82
The Gorbachev era was marked by a growing sense that involvement in sub-Saharan Africa represented an unacceptable drain on Soviet resources, by deepening pessimism about the region’s revolutionary potential, and by an increasing conviction that its manifold problems were peripheral to Soviet interests.83 The leadership of the SACP, hitherto staunch defenders of the Moscow line, found it difficult to hide their frustration. In the ill-concealed quarrel between Gorbachev and Castro, who increasingly saw himself as
the defender of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy against Soviet revisionism,84 the SACP was unmistakably on Castro’s side - choosing to hold its Seventh Party Congress in July 1989 not in Moscow but Havana. Within the Soviet bloc in central and eastern Europe, the SACP leadership now looked not to Gorbachev’s revisionist regime but to Erich Honecker’s hard-line East Germany for inspiration. At the Havana conference it announced its ambition to ‘build East Germany in Africa’ after the end of apartheid.85 Over the next few months, however, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet bloc persuaded the SACP to take a more flexible view.
By a fortunate irony, the Soviet one-party state and the South African apartheid regime began to crumble away at almost the same time. Gorbachev’s unwillingness to devote time or money to the South African struggle helped to turn the ANC toward negotiations. The end of the Cold War pushed Pretoria in the same direction. Early in 1989 South Africa agreed to a deal - jointly brokered by the United States and the Soviet Union - to give independence to Namibia (South-West Africa) in return for the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola. In July the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, the commanding figure (though not yet the President) of the ANC, had a secret meeting with President P. W. Botha. Mandela had heard ‘many accounts of his ferocious temper’: ‘He seemed to me the very model of the old-fashioned, stiff-necked, stubborn Afrikaner who did not so much discuss with black leaders as dictate to them.’ To Mandela’s surprise, he found Botha in conciliatory mood: ‘He had his hand out and was smiling broadly, and in fact, from that very first moment, he completely disarmed me.’ Far more important than Botha’s change of heart, however, was the immense moral authority and capacity for uniting the South African people which Mandela had, amazingly, preserved during over twenty-seven years in jail. Mandela’s leadership did more than Umkhonto’s surprisingly ineffective guerrilla war to bring about the new post-apartheid South Africa. In December 1989, a month after the Berlin Wall came down, Mandela met Botha’s successor as President, F. W. de Klerk, for the first time. Immediately after the meeting, Mandela wrote to the exiled ANC leadership in Lusaka, echoing Margaret Thatcher’s words about Gorbachev five years earlier, that de Klerk was a man he could do business with.86 On 2 February 1990 de Klerk announced to parliament the unbanning of the ANC and - to an audible gasp from those present in the chamber - of the SACP also. On 11 February Mandela walked free through the prison gates. In August he announced that the ANC was unilaterally suspending the armed struggle begun almost thirty years before. Ironically, the man who persuaded Mandela that the time had come to take this historic step was none other than the former pro-Soviet hard-liner Joe Slovo, leader of the SACP. Less than three years later the ANC won South Africa’s first democratic elections.87
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