The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  In October and November 1990 Kirpichenko led another delegation to Ethiopia to discuss intelligence co-operation. On the outskirts of Addis Ababa stood the shell of the unfinished Stasi-designed training centre of the Ethiopian KGB, whose construction had been abandoned after the collapse of the GDR. Kirpichenko seemed unaware of the surreal nature of the negotiations between the intelligence services of two doomed regimes, noting merely that:

  The negotiations took place in a businesslike atmosphere. The Ethiopians always accepted our modest help with gratitude, attended to our advice, but at the same time, which is completely natural, reserved the right to complete independence and freedom of actions . . . Nobody could accuse us of ever . . . pushing the Ethiopian security services into any actions . . . harmful to their national interests.

  On 1 November Kirpichenko became the last Soviet representative to have a meeting with President Mengistu, both seated on high-backed red leather chairs decorated with the hammer and sickle. ‘What is happening in the USSR?’ demanded Mengistu. ‘Do Soviet- Ethiopian relations have a future? We are no longer counting on your economic help, but we would ask you to maintain at least military assistance.’ Without that assistance, declared Mengistu, he would be unable to put down the rebellion which threatened his regime. At the end of the meeting, he threw out a final reproach: ‘You yourselves oriented us towards the socialist path of development, and now you are turning your backs on us!’24

  Nothing in Kirpichenko’s account of the meeting betrayed any awareness that he was dealing with an unhinged mass murderer who in 1977-78 had killed half a million of his adult subjects in the name of Marxism-Leninism even as he forced many of their children to dress in uniforms modelled on those of Soviet young pioneers, and had reduced many others to starvation in order to equip the most powerful army in Africa with Soviet planes, missiles and tanks worth $12 billion. Six months after bidding farewell to Kirpichenko, Mengistu was forced to flee to exile in Zimbabwe. The looters who entered his private study found on the mantelpiece a photo of Mengistu posing with a grinning, back-slapping Fidel Castro, on the desk a bust of Lenin together with a Bob Marley LP, and on the bookshelf Marxist-Leninist texts side by side with histories of British kings and queens which had once belonged to Haile Selassie. In the garden was a starving lion in a cage.25

  By the time Mengistu went into exile in May 1991, reproaching his former Soviet friends for failing to support his supposedly Marxist-Leninist regime, the Soviet Union had begun to crumble too. The KGB leadership, as they witnessed the wreckage of their hopes both for the Soviet Union and for its place in the world, were almost as disoriented as Mengistu. Though all had come to recognize that there were flaws within the Soviet system, they also blamed its disintegration on an imperialist plot masterminded by the United States. Leonov, head of KGB intelligence assessment as the Soviet Union began to fall apart, warned Gorbachev and the rest of the Soviet leadership that the United States had become a ‘vulture swooping over the Soviet Union’, plotting to ‘incite our people to hate each other’ and ‘pour oil on the flames of our internal discontent’. When the General Secretary paid no attention to his alarmist classified reports, Leonov made his warnings public, dramatically comparing Gorbachev’s refusal to heed KGB admonitions on the threat from the American ‘vulture’ to Stalin’s failure to heed intelligence on the mortal danger from Nazi Germany half a century before.26 A number of other senior KGB officers also publicized previously classified conspiracy theories about alleged American plots to subvert the Soviet Union and undermine its global influence. In December 1990 the KGB Chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov (former head of the FCD), blamed some of the appalling failures of Soviet grain storage on (non-existent) CIA operations to infect grain imports. In February 1991 Viktor Grushko, First Deputy Chairman of the KGB (previously deputy head of the FCD), attributed Soviet financial problems to an equally improbable plot by Western banks to undermine the ruble: a conspiracy theory quickly taken up by the newly appointed Prime Minister, Valentin Pavlov. Speaking to a closed session of the Supreme Soviet in June 1991, Kryuchkov sought to justify the belief of the KGB old guard in a deep-laid Western conspiracy to sabotage the Soviet system by reading out a classified FCD report circulated to the Politburo by Andropov fourteen years earlier. The report claimed that the CIA, ‘regardless of cost’, was recruiting agents within the Soviet economy, administration and scientific research, and training them to commit sabotage. Some of the Soviet Union’s current problems, Kryuchkov declared, derived from this secret sabotage offensive.27

  These and other fantastic conspiracy theories reflected the state of disorientation and denial within the Centre’s leadership produced by the collapse and global humiliation of the political system of which they were a part. The failure was so immense that their ideological blinkers made it impossible for them to comprehend it. Kryuchkov showed the extent of his incomprehension by taking the lead in organizing the failed hard-line coup of August 1991 which, though intended to shore up the Soviet Union, merely accelerated its disintegration. Among those who shared his incomprehension was the Soviet Union’s most dependable Third World ally over the previous generation, Fidel Castro. In June, while Kryuchkov was in the final stages of planning the coup, he flew to Havana, where his welcome was as warm as Gorbachev’s two years earlier had been frosty. Castro, like Kryuchkov, blamed Gorbachev for ‘destroying the authority of the [Communist] Party’. Izvestia later claimed, probably correctly, that Kryuchkov and Castro had concluded secret agreements on repairing the damage to the Soviet-Cuban alliance caused by Gorbachev. In July Kryuchkov’s co-conspirator, Vice-President Gennadi Yanayev, soon to become ‘Acting President’ during the August coup, sent Castro a secret letter assuring him that, ‘Soon there will be a change for the better.’ News of the coup, hinted at in Yanayev’s letter, was greeted by the Cuban leadership with a euphoria which gave way to deep dismay when it collapsed a few days later.28

  Though the KGB had won a series of tactical victories over the West in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, its Cold War operations ended in strategic defeat well before the Soviet Union itself collapsed in the wake of the failed August coup. By the mid- 1980s the grand strategy of a victorious struggle against the Main Adversary in the Third World which would determine ‘the destiny of world confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, between capitalism and socialism’29 was in ruins. The KGB’s grand strategy failed chiefly because the Soviet system failed. Though good intelligence can sometimes act as a ‘force-multiplier’, magnifying the diplomatic and military strength of those states which use it effectively, it cannot compensate for the weaknesses of a system as fundamentally flawed as that of the Soviet Union. Attempts to transplant elements of the inefficient Soviet command economy and collectivized agriculture to other continents were uniformly disastrous. A Harvard economist, Jeffrey Sachs, has estimated that if Africa had followed the free-market policies of East Asian governments, its average growth rate per head between 1965 and 1990 would have reached 4.3 per cent, trebling incomes. The actual figure was a mere 0.8 per cent.30

  After the invasion of Afghanistan, the rhetoric of Soviet solidarity with national liberation movements rang more hollow than ever before. By the 1980s, with both the one-party state and the command economy in irreversible decay, the Soviet Union had nothing of importance to offer the Third World save for arms which most of the recipients could not afford to buy and Moscow could no longer afford to subsidize (though it frequently did). From Peru to Afghanistan vast Soviet arms exports destabilized both the economies and the societies of their Third World recipients. The continent which suffered the most serious consequences was Africa, where the Soviet Union was the major force behind an unprecedented arms boom from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. The value of weapons imports into sub-Saharan Africa rose from an annual average of about $150 million (at constant 1985 US dollar prices) in the late 1960s to $370 million in 1970-73 and $820 million in 1974-76, before reaching a
peak of almost $2,500 million in 1977-78, chiefly as a result of the massive Soviet arms shipments to Ethiopia during its war with Somalia. During the period 1980-87, annual weapons imports remained fairly constant at some $1,575 million, but with the end of the Cold War fell dramatically to $350 million in 1989-93; the 1993 figure was the lowest since the mid-1960s.31 As the African historian Professor John Clapham has argued, the ultimate effect of these huge arms imports was not to strengthen the states which received them, but to weaken and, in some cases, eventually to destroy them. Africa’s major Cold War arms recipients in the 1970s and 1980s became the main failed and collapsed African states of the 1990s.32

  Given how little the Soviet Union had to offer the Third World, it enjoyed - sometimes assisted by its friends - some striking public relations successes. In 1979 its most dependable and eloquent supporter in the Third World, Fidel Castro, was elected Chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement for the next three years - despite the fact that Cuba, so far from being non-aligned, was closely aligned with the Soviet bloc. Castro was quick to exploit his flair for anti-imperialist publicity by travelling to New York in October with impressive quantities of rum and lobsters for a huge reception at the twelve-storey Cuban mission to the United Nations (the largest UN mission save for those of the US and USSR), then made an impassioned two-hour plea at the General Assembly for ‘wealthy imperialists’ (first and foremost the United States) to give developing countries $300 billion over the next decade.33 At least at a rhetorical level, anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism had a greater global appeal than anti-Communism, an appeal which was central to both Soviet official propaganda and KGB active measures.

  Though the United States possessed the world’s largest concentration of public relations experts, it found it difficult to project a favourable - or even balanced - image of its policies to the Third World. And yet, unlike the Soviet Union, the United States had much that the rest of the world wanted. American music, films, TV, IT, casual clothes, fast food and soft drink were all part of the most pervasive popular culture in world history. The United States was the most sought-after destination for both economic migrants and university students from the Third World, few of whom preferred to work or study in the Soviet bloc. America was also one of the world’s leading centres for a series of progressive causes - among them human rights, gay liberation, feminism and environmentalism - which were persecuted in the Soviet Union. And yet in international meetings with a strong Third World participation it was usually the United States which found itself cast in the role of scapegoat-in-chief. The Vancouver Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1983 condemned Western capitalism as the main source of injustice in the world, responsible for the evils of sexism, racism, ‘cultural captivity, colonialism and neo-colonialism’. By contrast, the Assembly took a compassionate view of the Soviet predicament in Afghanistan, calling for a Soviet withdrawal only ‘in the context of an overall political settlement between Afghanistan and the USSR’ (conveniently forgetting that the Kabul regime had been installed by the Soviet invaders) and ‘an end to the supply of arms to opposition groups from outside’ (in other words, the denial of arms to those resisting the Soviet invaders).34

  In the climate of the Cold War one of the greatest strengths of American culture - its ability to criticize itself - became a foreign-policy weakness. While the Soviet Union tried hard to keep its failings secret, the United States exposed its own to public view. By the years of the Vietnam War, many of the most effective critics of US policy in the Third World were American. The ‘Year of Intelligence’ in 1975 also began a period of fierce public criticism of the CIA. No intelligence service had ever been exposed to such public examination of its failings. During the 1976 US presidential election campaign, Jimmy Carter condemned the national disgraces of ‘Watergate, Vietnam and the CIA’.35 Though the abuses of the KGB were at a greater level of iniquity than those of the CIA, they were also far less publicized and attracted far less global attention. The iniquities of American foreign policy and covert operations were further magnified by conspiracy theorists who found a ready market inside as well as outside the United States. Since a majority of Americans believed or suspected that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, it is scarcely surprising that so many in the Third World thought that the CIA was out of control.

  KGB active-measures campaigns against the Main Adversary were thus directed against an easy target. Though it is impossible to quantify their success, they probably produced at least a modest increase in the amount of anti-Americanism, especially in the Third World, and introduced some novel variations into anti-US conspiracy theories. Without Service A forgeries, it is unlikely so many Third World leaders and opinion-formers would have believed that they and their countries were being targeted by the CIA. Nor is it likely that allegations of American responsibility for Aids and trafficking in ‘baby parts’ would have spread so successfully without KGB assistance. The KGB was also strikingly successful in using CIA operations, both real and imagined, to divert attention from its own. Covert action in Africa during the Cold War, for example, is still frequently seen as a monopoly of the Agency. Nelson Mandela’s usually fair-minded and forgiving memoirs condemn the CIA’s ‘many contemptible activities in its support of American imperialism’, 36 but make no criticism of the role of the KGB or any other Soviet-bloc intelligence agency in, for example, training the brutal intelligence agencies of Africa’s Marxist regimes.

  Many former Soviet intelligence officers still take pride in the record of the KGB. Leonid Shebarshin, probably the ablest of all its foreign intelligence chiefs, insists that ‘Soviet intelligence was the best in the world.’ ‘Why’, he asks, ‘did we have such an advantage [over the CIA]? Because most of our officers were passionate about what they were doing . . . The KGB was really about enthusiasm and dedication.’37 Nikolai Leonov, one of the most successful KGB officers in the Third World, continues both to defend the record of Soviet foreign intelligence and to maintain that Soviet political and military influence in the Third World outstripped that of the United States. But for the internal collapse of the Soviet system, he argues, it would have achieved ‘final victory’ over the West abroad.38

  Shebarshin and Leonov, like other former senior FCD officers, still cannot bring themselves to recognize that the KGB, so far from being the victim of a failed system, was at the heart of its most monstrous abuses. Under Stalin the NKVD made possible the surveillance and repression of dissent - both real and imaginary - on a scale unparalleled in the peacetime history of Europe. In the less brutal post-Stalin era, the KGB was central to a system of social control so pervasive that even the possibility of dissent occurred only to a heroic but tiny minority of dissidents. Because of their inability to come to terms with the real record of Soviet intelligence, many of its veterans find it impossible to recognize the motives of secret dissidents within their own ranks, such as Vasili Mitrokhin and Oleg Gordievsky, who recognized the KGB for what it was and set out to undermine its authority. Western historians of intelligence find no difficulty in grasping the fact that there were ideological ‘moles’ in both East and West during the Cold War. Not so the apologists for the FCD. While idealizing the motives of Soviet ideological agents in the West, they usually refuse to admit that there were any Western ideological agents in the Soviet Union. Yevgeni Primakov, one of the leading intellectuals in Russian foreign intelligence who had close, long-standing links with the FCD before becoming the first head of its post-Soviet successor, the SVR, still clings to an improbably romanticized image of the Cambridge ‘mole’, Donald Maclean, whom he knew personally, as ‘a Scottish lord’ (despite the fact that, though the son of a knight, he had no title) who gave up a fortune large enough to meet the entire running costs of Soviet foreign intelligence (a preposterous exaggeration) in order to work as a penetration agent ‘for purely ideological reasons’. By contrast, Primakov denies that Gordievsky, despite the fact that he put his life repeatedly at ris
k for a cause in which he profoundly believed, was motivated by ideological rejection of the Soviet system.39 Like Primakov, Vadim Kirpichenko, now chief consultant to the head of the SVR, continues to insist that no Western agents in the Soviet Union ever worked for ideological motives: ‘There have never been any purely ideological warriors for the wonderful capitalist system.’ Hence Kirpichenko’s insistence that Mitrokhin, Gordievsky and others who risked their lives to expose the vices of the KGB were no more than ‘traitors’ motivated by ‘various types of vices’ - ‘psychological instability’, ‘family discord’, hypochondria, the desire ‘to get their boss into trouble’ or financial greed.40

  Such attitudes are a legacy of the mindset of the Soviet one-party state, which always refused to accept that any dissident acted from principle. As well as being monstrous, the KGB’s Cold War obsession with what it called ‘ideological subversion’ reached levels of absurdity comparable with Brezhnev’s medal-mania. Even taking an interest in abstract paintings or listening to the wrong kinds of music was regarded as potentially subversive. The KGB Moscow Directorate and Fifth Directorate (which dealt with ideological subversion) proudly reported in 1979 that their agents in the artistic community had succeeded in ‘preventing seven attempts by avant-garde artists to make provocative attempts to show their pictures’. Provincial KGBs went to enormous pains to monitor the role of Western popular music in encouraging ideological subversion among the young. The KGB in Dnepropetrovsk oblast, where Brezhnev had begun his career as a Party apparatchik, warned that, ‘Even listening to musical programmes gave young people a distorted idea of Soviet reality and led to incidents of a treasonable nature.’ Such reports are a reminder of how the hunt for ideological subversion destroyed all sense of the absurd among those committed to the holy war against it. The Centre’s in-house journal KGB Sbornik regularly celebrated counter-subversive triumphs which were, by any objective standards, of the most trivial importance. One such ‘triumph’ was the hunt for a subversive codenamed KHUDOZHNIK (‘Artist’), who in 1971 began sending anonymous, handwritten letters attacking Marxism-Leninism and various Party functionaries to CPSU and Komsomol committees. Despite the fact that none of his letters became public and he represented no conceivable threat to the regime, the resources deployed to track him down comfortably exceeded those devoted in the West to most major murder enquiries. Because some of KHUDOZHNIK’s letters were sent to military Komsomols, there was an immense trawl through the records of people dismissed from military training establishments and the files of reserve officers. In Moscow, Yaroslavl, Rostov and Gavrilov-Yam, where his letters were posted, the Postal Censorship Service searched for many months for handwriting similar to KHUDOZHNIK’S. Numerous KGB agents and co-optees were also shown samples of his writing and given his supposed psychological profile. A further enormous research exercise was undertaken to identify and scrutinize official forms which KHUDOZHNIK might have filled in. In 1974, after a hunt lasting almost three years, his writing was finally found on an application to the Rostov City Housing Commission and he was unmasked as a Rostov street committee chairman named Korobov, tried and imprisoned. This surreal investigation was entirely in accord with Centre policy. Andropov told a conference of the Fifth Directorate in 1979 that the KGB could not afford to ignore the activities of a single dissident, however obscure.41 Oleg Kalugin, once the youngest general in Soviet foreign intelligence, who, after disagreements with Kryuchkov, was moved from the FCD to become deputy head of the Leningrad KGB in 1980, quickly realized that most of its work was ‘an elaborately choreographed farce’, in which it tried desperately to discover enough ideological subversion to justify its bloated size and resources.42