The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the the Third World

CHRISTOPHER ANUREW
and VASILI MlTROKlilN

The World Was Going Our Way

The KGS and the Battle for
the Third World

BASIC.

BCX>i.S

A IVlcmbcr of the Perseus l^tjoks Cirtjup

New Yt>rk

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

The Evolution of the KGB. 1917-91

The Transliteration of Russian and Arabic Names

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 - Introduction: ‘The World Was Going Our

Way’ The Soviet Union, the ...

Latin America

Chapter 2 - Latin America: Introduction

Chapter 3 - ‘The Bridgehead’. 1959-1969

Chapter 4 - ‘Progressive’ Regimes and ‘Socialism with

Red Wine’

Chapter 5 - Intelligence Priorities after Allende

Chapter 6 - Revolution in Central America

The Middle East

Chapter 7 - The Middle East: Introduction
Chapter 8 - The Rise and Fall of Soviet Influence in

Egypt

Chapter 9 - Iran and Iraq

Chapter 10 - The Making of the Syrian Alliance

Chapter 1 1 - The People’s Democratic Republic of

Yemen

Chapter 12 - Israel and Zionism

Chapter 13 - Middle Eastern Terrorism and the

Palestinians

Asia

Chapter 14 - Asia: Introduction

Chapter 15 - The People’s Republic of China From

‘Eternal Friendship’ to ...

Chapter 1 6 - Japan

Chapter 17 - The Special Relationship with India

Chapter 1 8 - The Special Relationship with India

Chapter 19 - Pakistan and Bangladesh

Chapter 20 - Islam in the Soviet Union

Chapter 2 1 - Afghanistan

Chapter 22 - Afghanistan

Africa

Chapter 23 - Africa: Introduction
Chapter 24 - The Cold War Comes to Africa

Chapter 25 - From Optimism to Disillusion

Chapter 26 - Conclusion: The KGB in Russia and the

World

Appendix A - KGB Chairmen. 1917-91

Appendix B - Heads of Foreign Intelligence. 1920-2005

Appendix C - The Organization of the KGB in the later

Cold War

Appendix D - The Organization of the KGB First Chief

Directorate (Foreign Intelligence)

Appendix E - The Organization of a KGB Residency

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Copyright Page

ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER ANDREW
AND VASILI MITROKHIN

The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive
and the Secret History of the KGB
ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER ANDREW

Theophile Delcasse and the Making of the Entente

Cordiale

The First World War: Causes and Consequences
(Volume 19 of the Hamlyn History of the World)
France Overseas: The Great War and the Climax
of French Overseas Expansion
(with A. S. Kanya-Forstner)

The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence
Communities in the Twentieth Century
(with David Dilks)

Her Majesty ’s Secret Service: The Making of
the British Intelligence Community
Codebreaking and Signals Intelligence
Intelligence and International Relations 1900-1945

(with Jeremy Noakes)

KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations
from Lenin to Gorbachev
(with Oleg Gordlevsky)

Instructions from the Centre: Top Secret Files on
KGB Foreign Operations 1975-1985 (published in the

USA as

Comrade Kryuchkov ’s Instructions)

(with Oleg Gordlevsky)

More Instructions from the Centre: Top Secret Files on
KGB Global Operations 1975-1985
(with Oleg Gordlevsky)

For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and
the American Presidency from Washington to Bush
Eternal Vigilance? Fifty Years of the CIA
(with Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones)

ALSO BY VASILI MITROKHIN

KGB Lexicon: The Soviet Intelligence Officer’s Handbook

(editor)

CHRISTOPHER ANDREW
andVASILI MITROKHIN

The World Was Going Our Way

The KGB and the Battle for
the Third World

BASIC

BOOKS

A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York

In Memory of

Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin
( 1922 - 2004 )
and

Nina Mikhailovna Mitrokhina
( 1924 - 1999 )

The Evolution of the KGB, 191 7-91

December 1917 C’hcka

v

February 1922 Incorporated isi NKVl) (as GPU)

\

July 1923

July 193^ KLinctJrptjraicd ii] NKVD (;is GUCA\)

February 1941 NKCA^

\

July 1941 lUincorporateJ in NKVD (as GUGlS)

\

April 1943 NKGll

\

Marcm94e^ MGB

4 ^

October 1947- . . j i/i

November 1951 transferred to K|

4 ^

March 1953 Coinbicicd witli MVD to form cn6arj;ed MVl)

March 1954 -
December 1991

KGB

The functions, unlike the nomenclature, of the Soviet
security and intelligence apparatus remained relatively
constant throughout the period 1917-91. In recognition of
that continuity, KGB officers frequently described
themselves, like the original members of the Cheka, as
Chekisty. The term KGB is sometimes used to denote the
security and intelligence apparatus of the whole Soviet
era, as well as, more correctly, for the period after 1954.

FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE

Founded in 1920, the foreign intelligence department of
the Cheka and its inter- war successors was known as the
Inostranni Otdel (INO). From 1941 to 1947 it was
succeeded by the Inostrannoye Upravlenie (INU), also
known as the First Directorate. From 1947 to 1951, the
main foreign intelligence functions were taken over by the
Komitet Informatsii (KI). From 1952 to 1991 foreign
intelligence was run by the First Chief Directorate (save
for the period from March 1953 to March 1954, when it
was known, confusingly, as the Second Chief
Directorate).

HEADQUARTERS

Foreign intelligence officers and directives to residencies
referred to KGB headquarters as the ‘Centre’. In practice
the ‘Centre’ usually referred to the HQ of foreign
intelligence rather than of the KGB as a whole. The
organization of the KGB First Chief (Foreign
Intelligence) Directorate is given in Appendix D.

KGB TERMINOLOGY

For detailed definitions, see Mitrokhin (ed.), KGB
Lexicon.

Abbreviations and Acronyms

AFSA

ANC

ARA

ASA

AVH

AVO

AWACS

BfV

BND

BNS

CCP

CDR

CDU

Centre

Cheka

Armed Forces Security [SIGINT] Agency
(USA)

African National Congress

American Relief Association

Army Security [SIGINT] Agency (USA)

Hungarian security and intelligence agency

predecessor of AVH

airborne warning and control system

security service (FRG)

foreign intelligence agency (FRG)

Bureau of National Security (Syria)

Chinese Communist Party

Committee for the Defence of the Revolution
(Cuba)

Christian Democratic Union (FRG)

HQ of the KGB (or FCD) and their
predecessors

Vserossiiskaya Chrezvychainaya Komissiya
po Borbe s Kontrrevolyutsiei i Sabotazhem:
All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for
Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage
(predecessor of KGB (1917-22))

Cl

CIA

CISPES

COCOM

Comecon

Comintern

CPC

CPC

CPCz

CPGB

CPI

CPJ

CPM

CPSA

CPSU

CPUSA

CSU

DCI

Derg

counter-intelligence

Central Intelligence Agency (USA)

Committee in Solidarity with the People of El
Salvador (USA)

Coordinating Committee for East- West Trade
(NATO and Japan)

Council for Mutual Economic Assistance
(Soviet bloc)

Communist (Third) International
Christian Peace Conference
Communist Party of Canada
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia
Communist Party of Great Britain
Communist Party of India
Communist Party of Japan
Communist Party of India, Marxist

Communist Party of South Africa (later
SACP)

Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Communist Party of the United States of
America

Christian Social Union (ERG; ally of CDU)
Director of Central Intelligence (USA)

Co-ordinating Committee of the Armed
Forces, Police and National Guard (Ethiopia)

DGI

DGS

DGSE

DIA

DISA

DLB

DRG

DRU

DS

DST

EPS

F Line

FAPSI

FBI

FCD

FCO

FLN

Direccion General de Inteligencia (Cuba)
Portuguese security service
French foreign intelligence service
Defense Intelligence Agency (USA)

Dire^ao de Informa^ao e Seguranca de
Angola

dead letter-box

diversionnye razvedyvatelnye gruppy: Soviet
sabotage and intelligence groups

Direccion Revolucionaria Unida (El
Salvador)

Bulgarian security and intelligence service

French security service

Ejercito Popular Sandinista (Nicaragua)

‘Special Actions’ department in KGB
residencies

Federalnoye Agentsvo Pravitelstvennoi
Sviazi i Informatsii: Russian (post-Soviet)
SIGINT agency

Federal Bureau of Investigation (USA)

First Chief [Foreign Intelligence] Directorate,
KGB

Foreign and Commonwealth Office (UK)
Front de Liberation Nationale (Algeria)
Farabundo Marti de Liberacion Nacional (El

FMLN

Salvador)

FNLA Frente Nacional de Liberta^ao de Angola

FRAP Frente de Accion Popular (Chile)

FRELIMO Frente de Liberta^ao de Mozambique

FRG Federal Republic of Germany

FSB Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti: Russian

security and intelligence service

FSLN

GCHQ

GDR

GKNT

GPU

GRU

GUGB

Gulag

Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional
(Nicaragua)

Government Communications Head-Quarters
(British SIGINT Agency)

German Democratic Republic

Gosudarstvennyi Komitet po Nauke i
Tekhnologii: State Committee for Science
and Technology

Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie:
Soviet security and intelligence service
(within NKVD, 1922-23)

Glavnoe Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenie: Soviet
Military Intelligence

Glavnoe Upravlenie Gosudarstvennoi
Bezopasnosti: Soviet security and intelligence
service (within NKVD, 1934-43)

Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei: Labour Camps
Directorate

HUMINT

HVA

ICBM

ICP

IDF

IMINT

INO

INU

IRA

ISC

ISI

JCP

JIC

JSP

KDP

KGB

KHAD

KI

intelligence from human sources (espionage)
GDR foreign intelligence service
intercontinental ballistic missile
Iraqi Communist Party
Israeli Defence Force
imagery intelligence

Inostrannyi Otdel: foreign intelligence
department of Cheka/GPU/OGPU/GUGB,
1920-41; predecessor of INU

Inostrannoe Upravlenie: foreign intelligence
directorate of NKGB/GUGB/MGB, 1941-47

Irish Republican Army

Intelligence and Security Committee (UK)

Pakistani Inter- Services Intelligence

Japanese Communist Party

Joint Intelligence Committee (UK)

Japanese Socialist Party
Kurdistan Democratic Party

Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti:
Soviet security and intelligence service
(1954-91)

Afghan security service

Komitet Informatsii: Soviet foreign
intelligence agency (1947-51), initially
combining foreign intelligence directorates of

MGB and GRU

KMT Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalists)
Komsomol Communist Youth League

KRLine

Counter-intelligence department in KGB
residencies

Kommunisticheskii Universitet
KUTV Trudiashchikhsia Vostoka: Communist

University of the Toilers of the East

LDP Liberal Democratic Party (Japan)

LLB live letter-box

MEISON

MGB

MGIMO

All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement

Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti:
Soviet Ministry of State Security (1946-54)

Moscow State Institute for International
Relations

MI5

MI6

MITI

MLSh

MPLA

UK security service

alternative designation for SIS (UK)

Ministry of International Trade and Industry
(Japan)

Mezhdunarodnaya Leninskaya Shkola:
International Lenin School

Movimento Popular de Liberta^ao de Angola

MVD

Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del: Soviet
Ministry of Internal Affairs

NLine

NAM

NATO

NKGB

NKVD

NPUP

NSA

NSC

NSS

NSZRiS

NTS

OAU

OGPU

Okhrana

OMS

illegal support department in KGB
residencies

Non-Aligned Movement

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Narodnyi Kommissariat Gosudarstvennoi
Bezopasnosti: Soviet security and intelligence
service (1941-46; within NKVD, 1941-43)

Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del:
People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs
(incorporated state security, 1922-23, 1934-
43)

National Progressive Unionist Party (Egypt)
National Security [SIGINT] Agency (USA)
National Security Council (USA)

National Security Service (Somalia)

People’s [anti-Bolshevik] Union for Defence
of Country and Freedom

National Labour Alliance (Soviet emigre
social-democratic movement)

Organization of African Unity
Obedinennoe Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe

Upravlenie: Soviet security and intelligence
service, 1923-34)

Tsarist security service, 1881-1917
Comintern international liaison department

OSS

OT

OUN

OZNA

PAIGC

PCA

PCF

PCI

PCP

PDP

PDPA

PDRY

PFLP

PLO

PPP

PR Line

PRI

PSOE

PUK

Office of Strategic Services (USA)
Operational Technical Support (FCD)
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists

Yugoslav security and intelligence service;
predecessor of UDBA

Partido Africano da Independencia da Guine
e Cabo Verde

Algerian Communist Party
French Communist Party
Italian Communist Party
Portuguese Communist Party
Partido del Pueblo (Panama)

Afghan Communist Party

People’s Democratic Republic of [South]
Yemen

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Palestine Liberation Organization
Pakistan People’s Party

political intelligence department in KGB
residencies

Partido Revolucionario Institucional
(Mexico)

Spanish Socialist Party
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan

PUWP Polish United Workers [Communist] Party

RCMP Royal Canadian Mounted Police

RENAMO Resistencia Nacional Mocambicana

RYAN

SACP

SADUM

SALT

SAM

SB

SCD

SDECE

SDI

SDR

SED

SIGINT

raketno-yadernoe napadenie (nuclear missile
attack)

South African Communist Party (previously
CPSA)

Central Asian Spiritual Directorate of
Muslims

Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
Soviet surface-to-air missile
Polish security and intelligence service

Second Chief [Internal Security and Counter-
Intelligence] Directorate (KGB)

French foreign intelligence service;
predecessor of DGSE

US Strategic Defense Initiative (‘Star Wars’)

Somali Democratic Republic

Socialist Unity [Communist] Party (GDR)

intelligence derived from interception and
analysis of signals

SIN Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional (Peru)

SIS Secret Intelligence Service (UK)

SK Line Soviet colony department in KGB residencies

SKP

SNASP

SNI

SOE

SPC

SPD

Spetsnaz

SR

SRC

SRSP

S&T

Stapo

Stasi

Stavka

StB

SVR

SWAPO

TUC

UAR

UB

Communist Party of Finland

Servi^o Nacional de Seguran^a Popular
(Mozambique)

Servi^o Nacional de Informa^oes (Brazil)
Special Operations Executive (UK)

Sindh Provincial Committee
Social Democratic Party (ERG)

Soviet special forces
Socialist Revolutionary
Supreme Revolutionary Council (Somalia)
Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party
scientific and technological intelligence
Austrian police security service
GDR Ministry of State Security
Wartime Soviet GHQ/high command

Czechoslovak security and intelligence
service

Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki: Russian (post-
Soviet) foreign intelligence service

South-West Africa People’s Association

Trades Union Congress (UK)

United Arab Republic

Polish security and intelligence service;
predecessor of SB

UDBA

UNITA

VPK

VTNRP

VVR

WCC

WPC

XLine

XUAR

YAR

YSP

ZANLA

ZANU

ZAPU

ZIPRA

Yugoslav security and intelligence service

Uniao Nacional para a Independencia Total
de Angola

Voenno-promyshlennaya Komissiya: Soviet
Military Industrial Commission

Voenno-Trudovaya Narodnaya
Revolyutsionnaya Partiya: Military-Labour
People’s Revolutionary Party; Russian name
for anti-Chinese underground in XUAR

Supreme Military Council (anti-Bolshevik
Ukrainian underground)

World Council of Churches

World Peace Council

S&T department in KGB residencies

Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of
China

[North] Yemen Arab Republic
[South] Yemeni Socialist Party
Zimbabwe African Liberation Army
Zimbabwe African National Union

Zimbabwe African People’s Union
Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army

The Transliteration of Russian and Arabie

Names

For ease of reference to published sources, when referring
to authors and titles of Russian publications in the notes
and bibliography we have followed the Library of
Congress system usually used in library catalogues.

In the text we have followed a simplified version of the
more readable system used by the US Board on
Geographic Names and BBC Monitoring Service. There
are thus occasional discrepancies between the
transliteration of names in the text and those of authors
and titles in the notes and bibliography. Simplifications
include the substitution in surnames of ‘y’ for Ti’
(Trotsky rather than Trotskii, as in the Library of
Congress system) and ‘yi’ (Semichastny rather than
Semichastnyi). For first names we have substituted T’ for
Ti’ (Yuri rather than Yurii). Instead of initial Ta’, Te’ and
‘iu’ we use ‘ya’, ‘ye’ and ‘yu’. Soft and hard signs have
been omitted. In cases where a mildly deviant English
version of a well-known Russian name has become firmly
established, we have retained that version, for example:
Beria, Izvestia, Joseph (Stalin) and the anglicized names
of Tsars.

Since there is no generally accepted system of
transliterating Arabic names into English, we have tried to

follow what we believe is best current practice (for
example, Ahmad and Muhammad rather than Ahmed and
Mohammed). Where there is a well-established English
version of an Arabic name, we use this rather than a more
technically correct transliteration: for example, Gamal
Abdel Nasser (rather than Abd al-Nasir) and Saddam
Hussein (rather than Husain). The same applies to
Anglophone and Francophone names of Arabic origin: for
example, Ahmed (rather than Ahmad) Sekou Toure. Once
again, occasional discrepancies will be found between the
text and the notes/bibliography.

Foreword: Vasili Mitrokhin and His Archive

On 9 April 1992 a scruffy, shabbily dressed seventy-year-
old Russian arrived in the capital of a newly independent
Baltic state by the overnight train from Moscow for a pre-
arranged meeting with officers of the British Secret
Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6) at the
offices of the new British embassy. He began by
producing his passport and other documents which
identified him as Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin, a former
senior archivist in the First Chief (Foreign Intelligence)
Directorate of the KGB. SIS then took the
unprepossessing (and hitherto unpublished) photograph of
him which appears in the illustrations.

Mitrokhin ’s first visit to the embassy had taken place a
month earlier when he arrived pulling a battered case on
wheels and wearing the same shabby clothes, which he
had put on before leaving Moscow in order to attract as
little attention as possible from the border guards at the
Russian frontier. Since he had an image of the British as
rather stuffy and ‘a bit of a mystery’, he made his first
approach to the Americans. Apparently overwhelmed by
asylum seekers, however, US embassy staff failed to
grasp Mitrokhin ’s importance and told him to return at a
later date. Mitrokhin moved on instead to the British
embassy and asked to speak to someone in authority. The
junior diplomat who came to the reception area struck him
as unexpectedly ‘young, attractive and sympathetic’, as

well as a fluent Russian speaker. Used to the male-
dominated world of Soviet diplomacy, Mitrokhin was also
surprised that the diplomat was a woman. He told her he
had brought with him samples of top-secret material from
the KGB archives. Had the diplomat (who prefers not to
be identified) dismissed him as a down-at-heel asylum
seeker trying to sell bogus secrets, this book and its
predecessor would probably never have been written.
Happily, however, she asked to see some of the material
which Mitrokhin had brought with him, concealed in his
suitcase beneath the bread, sausages, drink and change of
clothing which he had packed for his journey, and asked
if he would like tea. While Mitrokhin drank his first ever
cup of English tea, the diplomat read some of his notes,
quickly grasped their potential importance, then
questioned him about them. Since the embassy contained
no intelligence station, he agreed to return a month later to
meet representatives from SIS’s London headquarters.

At his meeting with SIS officers on 9 April, Mitrokhin
produced another 2,000 pages from his private archive
and told the extraordinary story of how, while supervising
the transfer of the entire foreign intelligence archive from
the overcrowded offices of the Lubyanka in central
Moscow to the new FCD headquarters at Yasenevo, near
the outer ring road, between 1972 and 1982, he had
almost every day smuggled handwritten notes and
extracts from the files out of the archives in his pockets

and hidden them beneath his family dacha. When the
move was complete, he continued removing top-secret
material for another two years until his retirement in
1984. The notes which Mitrokhin showed SIS officers
revealed that he had had access even to the holy of holies
in the foreign intelligence archives: the files which
revealed the real identities and ‘legends’ of the elite corps
of KGB ‘illegals’ living abroad under deep cover posing
as foreign nationals. After a further meeting with SIS in
the Baltic, Mitrokhin paid a secret visit to Britain in the
autumn to discuss plans for his defection. On 7 November
1992, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik
Revolution,- SIS exfiltrated Mitrokhin, his family and his
entire archive, packed in six large containers, out of
Russia in a remarkable operation the details of which still
remain secret.

Those who have had access to the Mitrokhin archive
since its arrival in Britain have been amazed by its
contents. In the view of the FBI, it is ‘the most complete
and extensive intelligence ever received from any
source’.- The CIA calls it ‘the biggest Cl [counter-
intelligence] bonanza of the post-war period’. A report by
the all-party British Intelligence and Security Committee
(ISC) reveals that a series of other Western intelligence
agencies have also proved ‘extremely grateful’ for the
numerous Cl leads provided by Mitrokhin’ s material.-
The Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki (SVR), the post-Soviet

successor of the FCD, at first refused to believe that such
a massive haemorrhage of top-secret intelligence records
could possibly have occurred. When a German magazine
reported in December 1996 that a former KGB officer had
defected to Britain with ‘the names of hundreds of
Russian spies’, the SVR spokeswoman, Tatyana Samolis,
instantly ridiculed the story as ‘absolute nonsense’. ‘
“Hundreds of people”! That just doesn’t happen!’ she
declared. ‘Any defector could get the name of one, two,
perhaps three agents - but not hundreds!’- In reality, as
both the SVR and the internal security and intelligence
service, the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB),
now realize, the Mitrokhin Archive includes details not
just of hundreds but of thousands of Soviet agents and
intelligence officers around the globe.

The Mitrokhin Archive contains extraordinary detail on
KGB operations in Europe and North America, which
formed the subject of our first volume. But there is also
much on the even less well-known Cold War activities of
the KGB in the Third World,- which pass almost
unmentioned in most histories both of Soviet foreign
relations and of developing countries. The lucid synthesis
of scholarly research on Soviet foreign policy by Caroline
Kennedy-Pipe, Russia and the World, 1917-1991, for
example, contains barely a mention of the KGB, save for
a brief reference to its role in the invasion of
Afghanistan.- By contrast, no account of American Cold

War policy in the Third World omits the role of the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The result has been a
curiously lopsided history of the secret Cold War in the
developing world - the intelligence equivalent of the
sound of one hand clapping. The generally admirable
Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, for instance,
contains an article on the CIA but none on the KGB or its
post-Soviet successors.- As this volume of the Mitrokhin
Archive seeks to show, however, the role of the KGB in
Soviet policy towards the Third World was even more
important than that of the CIA in US policy. For a quarter
of a century, the KGB, unlike the CIA, believed that the
Third World was the arena in which it could win the Cold
War.

Much of the story of Mitrokhin’ s career was told in
The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the
Secret History of the KGB (hereafter referred to as volume
I).- Some parts of it, however, can now be revealed for
the first time. For fear that the FSB would make life
uncomfortable for some of his surviving relatives,
Mitrokhin was unwilling while we were working on
volume I to include any details of his early life - even his
exact date of birth. He was bom, the second of five
children, on 3 March 1922 in central Russia at the village
of Yurasovo in Ryazan oblast (province). Ryazan is
probably best known in the West as the birthplace of the
Nobel laureate Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, discoverer of the

‘conditioned reflex’ through his work with what became
known as ‘Pavlov’s dogs’. Unlike Mitrokhin, who
became a secret dissident, Pavlov was often openly at
odds with the Soviet authorities but, protected by his
international renown, was allowed to carry on working in
his laboratory until he died in 1936 at the age of eighty-
seven. Most of Mitrokhin ’s childhood was spent in
Moscow, where his father was able to find work as a
decorator, but the family kept its links with Yurasovo,
where, despite the bitter cold, he acquired a deep and
abiding love of the Ryazan countryside and the forests of
central Russia. English forests, by contrast, were a
disappointment to him - too small, too few and
insufficiently remote. In retirement near London there
were few things he missed more on his long winter walks
than the sight of a fresh snowfall in the forest .-

Mitrokhin ’s interest in archives started as a teenage
fascination with historical documents. After leaving
school, he completed his compulsory military service in
the artillery, then began studying at the Historical
Archives Institute in Moscow. Such was the extraordinary
importance which the Stalinist regime attached to its files
that, even after Hitler’s invasion in the summer of 1941,
Mitrokhin was allowed to continue training as an archivist
instead of being conscripted to defend the Soviet Union in
its hour of supreme peril. He thus took no part in the great
battles at Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad which

helped to make the Eastern Front both the longest and the
bloodiest front in the history of warfare. Instead, he was
sent with a group of trainee archivists to Kazakhstan, far
beyond the furthest limit of the German advance,
probably to work on some of the files of suspect national
minorities and prisoners in the Gulag who were deported
in wartime, usually in horrendous conditions, to central
Asia. Losing his early ambition to become an archivist,
Mitrokhin managed to enrol at the Kharkov Higher
Juridical Institute, which was evacuated to Kazakhstan
after the German conquest of Ukraine. After the liberation
of Ukraine, he returned with the Institute to Kharkov. His
memories of the brutal punishment of many thousands of
‘anti-Sovief Ukrainians sometimes gave him nightmares
in later life. ‘I was deep in horrors,’ was all he would tell
me about his experiences. After graduating in Kharkov in
1944, he became a lawyer first with the civil police
(militia), then with the military procurator’s office. He did
well enough to attract the attention of the MGB
(predecessor of the KGB), which in 1946 sent him for a
two-year course at the Higher Diplomatic School in
Moscow to prepare him for a career in foreign intelligence
which he began in 1948.-

Mitrokhin’s first five years as an intelligence officer
coincided with the paranoid, final phase of the Stalin era,
when he and his colleagues were ordered to track down
Titoist and Zionist conspirators, whose mostly non-

existent plots preyed on the disturbed mind of the ageing
dictator. His first and longest foreign posting before
Stalin’s death in 1953 was to the Middle East, of which he
was later reluctant to talk because it involved the
penetration and exploitation of the Russian Orthodox
Church - an aspect of KGB operations for which, like the
persecution of the dissidents, he later developed an
especial loathing.- Mitrokhin had happier memories of
subsequent short tours of duty which took him to such
diverse destinations as Iceland, the Netherlands, Pakistan
and Australia.

The most memorable of these tours of duty was as a
member of the KGB escort which accompanied the Soviet
team to the Melbourne Olympics which opened in
October 1956. For the KGB the Games threatened to be a
security nightmare. Two years earlier the KGB resident in
Canberra, Vladimir Petrov, had become the most senior
Soviet defector since the Second World War. Photographs
of his tearful wife, Evdokia, also a KGB officer, losing
her shoe in a melee at Sydney airport as Soviet security
guards hustled her on to a plane to take her back to
Russia, then escaping from their clutches when the
aircraft stopped to refuel at Darwin, had made front-page
news around the world. As Mitrokhin was aware, both the
Petrovs had been sentenced to death after a secret trial in
absentia and plans had been made by KGB assassins to
hunt them down (though the plans were never

successfully implemented).— The Centre was determined
that this recent embarrassment should not be compounded
by defections from the Soviet competitors at Melbourne.
Further anxieties arose from the fact that, as the Duke of
Edinburgh formally opened the games on the Melbourne
cricket ground, Soviet tanks had entered Budapest to
crush the Hungarian rising. The Olympic water-polo
match between Hungary and the Soviet Union had to be
abandoned after a fracas in the pool. At the end of the
games the KGB was alarmed by the sudden decision of
the organizers that all the athletes should mingle together
during the closing ceremonies (thus making it easier to
defect) instead of parading, as at previous games, in their
national teams. In the end, however, the KGB considered
its Melbourne mission a qualified success. There were no
defections and the Soviet team emerged as clear winners
with ninety-eight medals (including thirty-seven golds) to
the Americans’ seventy-four and a series of individual
triumphs which included easy victories by Vladimir Kuts
in both the 5,000 and 10,000 metres.

The 1956 Olympics were to be Mitrokhin’s last tour of
duty in the West. In the aftermath of Khrushchev’s
‘Secret Speech’ earlier in the year denouncing Stalin’s
‘cult of personality’ and his ‘exceedingly serious and
grave perversions of Party principles, of Party democracy
[and] of revolutionary legality’, Mitrokhin had become
too outspoken for his own good. Though his criticisms of

the way the KGB had been run were mild by Western
standards, he acquired a reputation as a malcontent and
was denounced by one of his superiors as ‘a member of
the awkward squad’. Soon after returning from
Melbourne, Mitrokhin was moved from operations to the
FCD archives, where for some years his main job was
answering queries from other departments and provincial
KGBs. His only other foreign posting, in the late 1960s,
was to the archives department of the large KGB mission
at Karlshorst in the suburbs of East Berlin. While at
Karlshorst in 1968, he followed with secret excitement
the attempt just across the German border by the
reformers of the Prague Spring to create what the Kremlin
saw as an unacceptably unorthodox ‘Socialism with a
human face’. Like Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ twelve
years before, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the forces
of the Warsaw Pact in August 1968 was an important
staging post in what Mitrokhin called his ‘intellectual
odyssey’. He was able to listen in secret to reports from
Czechoslovakia on the Russian-language services of the
BBC World Service, Radio Liberty, Deutsche Welle and
the Canadian Broadcasting Company, but had no one with
whom he felt able to share his outrage at the invasion. The
crushing of the Prague Spring proved, he believed, that
the Soviet system was unreformable.

After his return to Moscow from East Germany,
Mitrokhin continued to listen to Western broadcasts.

though, because of Soviet jamming, he had frequently to
switch wavelengths in order to find an audible station.
Among the news which made the greatest impression on
him were items about the Chronicle of Current Events, a
samizdat ]0\xYn2i\ first produced by dissidents in 1968 to
circulate news on the struggle against Soviet abuses of
human rights. By the beginning of the 1970s Mitrokhin’s
political views were deeply influenced by the dissident
struggle, which he was able to follow in KGB files as well
as Western broadcasts. ‘I was a loner’, he later told me,
‘but I now knew that I was not alone.’ Though Mitrokhin
never had any thought of aligning himself openly with the
human rights movement, the example of the Chronicle oj
Current Events and other samizdat productions helped to
inspire him with the idea of producing a classified variant
of the dissidents’ attempts to document the iniquities of
the Soviet system. He had earlier been attracted by the
idea of writing an in-house official history of the FCD.
Now a rather different project began to form in his mind -
that of compiling his own private unofficial record of the
foreign operations of the KGB. His opportunity came in
June 1972 when he was put in charge of moving the FCD
archives to Yasenevo. Had the hoard of top-secret
material which he smuggled out of Yasenevo been
discovered, the odds are that, after a secret trial, he would
have ended up in a KGB execution cellar with a bullet in
the back of his head.

For those whose ideals have been corroded by the
widespread cynicism of the early twenty-first-century
West, the fact that Mitrokhin was prepared to risk his life
for twenty years for a cause in which he passionately
believed is almost too difficult to comprehend. Almost
equally hard to grasp is Mitrokhin’ s willingness to devote
himself throughout that period to compiling and
preserving a secret archive which he knew might never
see the light of day. For any Western author it is almost
impossible to understand how a writer could devote all his
or her energy and creative talent for many years to secret
writing which might never be publicly revealed. Yet some
of the greatest Russian writers of the Soviet era did
precisely that. No biography of any Western writer
contains a death-bed scene comparable to the description
by the widow of Mikhail Bulgakov of how in 1940 she
helped him out of bed for the last time so that he could
satisfy himself before he died that his great, unpublished
masterpiece. The Master and Margarita, was still in its
hiding place. Against all the odds. The Master and
Margarita survived to be published a quarter of a century
later. Though Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s greatest work
was published in his own lifetime (initially mostly in the
West rather than the Soviet Union), when he began
writing he told himself, like Bulgakov, that he ‘must write
simply to ensure that [the truth] was not forgotten, that
posterity might some day come to know of it. Publication

in my own lifetime I must shut out of my mind, out of my
dreams.’—

Though Mitrokhin never had any literary pretensions,
the survival of his archive is, in its own way, as
remarkable as that of The Master and Margarita. Once he
reached Britain, he was determined that, despite legal and
security difficulties, as much as possible of its contents
should be published. After the publication in 1999 of The
Sword and the Shield, the Intelligence and Security
Committee held a detailed enquiry at the Cabinet Office
to which both Vasili Mitrokhin and I gave evidence. As
the ISC’s unanimous report makes clear, it was left in no
doubt about Mitrokhin’ s motivation:

The Committee believes that he is a man of remarkable
commitment and courage, who risked imprisonment or
death in his determination that the truth should be told
about the real nature of the KGB and their activities,
which he believed were betraying the interests of his own
country and people. He succeeded in this, and we wish to
record formally our admiration for his achievement. —

While in Britain, scarcely a week passed without
Mitrokhin re-reading his papers, responding to questions
on them and checking translations. On the eve of his
death on 23 January 2004 he was still making plans for

the publication of parts of his archive.

With his wife Nina, a distinguished medical
specialist,— Mitrokhin was also able to resume the foreign
travels which he had been forced to discontinue a
generation earlier when he was transferred from FCD
operations to archives. Mitrokhin’ s first visit to Paris
made a particular impression on him. He had read the
KGB file on the defection in Paris of the Kirov Ballet’s
greatest dancer, Rudolf Nureyev, and had followed with
personal outrage the planning of operations (happily
never successfully implemented) to break one or both of
Nureyev’ s legs with the aim - absurdly expressed in
euphemistic KGB jargon - of ‘lessening his professional
skills’.— In October 1992, while Mitrokhin was meeting
SIS in Britain to make final plans for the exfiltration of
his family and archive in the following month, Nureyev,
by then seriously ill with Aids, was directing his last
ballet, Bayaderka, at the Paris Opera. When, after the
performance, Nureyev appeared on stage in a wheelchair,
wrapped in a tartan rug, he received a standing ovation.
Many in the audience wept, as did many of the mourners
three months later during his burial at the Russian
cemetery of Sainte Genevieve des Bois in Paris. On his
visit to Paris, Mitrokhin visited Nureyev’ s tomb as well as
the graves of other Russian exiles, among them both
White Russian refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution
and dissidents of the Soviet era. Though also deeply

interested in other Western sites associated with Russian
emigres, from Ivy House in London, home of the great
ballerina Anna Pavlova, to the New York Russian
community at Brighton Beach, his travels ranged far more
widely. After the death of Nina in 1999, he flew around
the world on his British passport. Only a year before his
own death in 2004, he went for a walking holiday in New
Zealand.

Save for his love of travel, Mitrokhin mostly remained,
as he had always been, a man of simple tastes, preferring
his own home-cooked Russian cabbage soup, shchi, to the
elaborate cuisine of expensive restaurants. His favourite
London restaurants were ‘The Stockpot’ chain, which
specialize in good-value ‘home-cooked’ menus. Though
Mitrokhin himself drank little, he would usually produce
wine when entertaining friends and liked to splash out for
family birthdays and major celebrations. On a visit to the
Ritz the family splashed out more than it intended, having
failed to appreciate the cost of a round of vintage cognacs.
Mitrokhin was no more motivated by fame than by
money. It was only after long persuasion that he agreed to
include any of his career in volume 1, and only a few
months before publication that he consented to the use of
his real name rather than a pseudonym. Strenuous efforts
by the media to track Mitrokhin down after publication
were, happily, unsuccessful. He was too private a person
and had arrived in Britain too late in life with too little

experience of the West to have coped with the glare of
publicity. Mitrokhin had, however, perfected the art of
being inconspicuous and travelled unnoticed the length
and breadth of the United Kingdom on his senior citizen’s
rail-card. Until his late seventies he also remained
remarkably fit. Intelligence officers from a number of
countries were mildly disconcerted by his unselfconscious
habit, when meetings dragged on, of dropping to the floor
and doing a set of press-ups.

Mitrokhin was both an inspiring and, at times, a
difficult man to work with while I wrote the two volumes
of the Mitrokhin Archive.— In his view, the material he
had risked his life to smuggle out of KGB archives
revealed ‘the truth’. Though he accepted the need to put it
in context, he had little interest in the work of scholars
however distinguished, which failed, in his view, to
recognize the central role of the KGB in Soviet society.
Mitrokhin tolerated, rather than welcomed, my use of
such works and a wide range of other sources to
complement, corroborate and fill gaps in his own unique
archive.— My admiration for some of the books which
neglected the intelligence dimension of twentieth-century
international relations was beyond his comprehension.
Though Mitrokhin did not, alas, live to see the publication
of this volume, it was virtually complete by the time of
his death and I am not aware of any interpretation by me
of material in his archive with which he disagreed. The

opportunity he gave me to work on his archive has been
an extraordinary privilege.

Since the original material in the Mitrokhin archive
remains classified, the content of this second volume, like
that of the first, was examined in great detail by an
‘interdepartmental working group’ in Whitehall before
clearance for publication received ministerial approval.—
Though the complex issues involved caused extensive
delays in publication, I am grateful to the working group
for the time and care they have taken, and for clearing all
but about two pages of the original text.

As in volume 1, codenames (also known as
‘worknames’ in the case of KGB officers) appear in the
text in capitals. It is important to note that the KGB gave
codenames not merely to those who worked for it but also
to those whom it targeted and to some others (such as
foreign officials and ministers) who had no connection
with it. Codenames are, in themselves, no evidence that
the individuals to whom they refer were conscious or
witting KGB agents or sources - or even that they were
aware of being targeted for recruitment or to influence
operations. At the risk of stating the obvious, it should
also be emphasized that the vast majority of those outside
the Soviet Union who expressed pro-Soviet opinions had,
of course, no connection with the KGB.

Christopher Andrew

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to those colleagues who commented on
parts of this book during the brief interval between the
clearance of the text by the Whitehall interdepartmental
working group and its delivery to the publishers: Mr
Geoffrey Archer, Sir Nicholas Barrington, Professor Chris
Bayly, Dr Susan Bayly, Mr Kristian Gustafson, Professor
Jonathan Haslam, Mr Alan Judd, Professor John
Lonsdale, Dr Gabriella Ramos, Dr David Sneath and Sir
Roger Tomkys. I also owe a considerable debt to the
intellectual stimulation provided by the remarkable group
of young scholars from around the world in the
Cambridge University Intelligence Seminar who are
transforming the academic study of intelligence history.
While writing this book, I have been especially fortunate
to have the opportunity to supervise and learn from the
doctoral research of the outstanding Australian historian
and Gates Scholar Ms Julie Elkner, who is conducting
path-breaking work on the image of the secret policeman
in Soviet and post-Soviet culture. I have also benefited
from her extensive knowledge of published sources.

Christopher Andrew

1

Introduction: ‘The World Was Going Our
Way’ The Soviet Union, the Cold War and

the Third World

Communism, claimed Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
would change not simply the history of Europe and the
West but the history of the world. Their Communist
Manifesto of 1848, though chiefly directed to
industrialized Europe, ended with a clarion call to global
revolution: ‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but
their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of
all countries, unite!’ (Working women, it was assumed,
would follow in the train of male revolutionaries.) After
the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin hailed not only the triumph of the Russian
Revolution but the beginning of ‘world revolution’: ‘Our
cause is an international cause, and so long as a revolution
does not take place in all countries . . . our victory is only
half a victory, or perhaps less.’ Though world revolution
had become a distant dream for most Bolsheviks by the
time Lenin died seven years later, he never lost his
conviction that the inevitable collapse of the colonial
empires would one day bring global revolution in its
wake:

Millions and hundreds of millions - actually the
overwhelming majority of the world’s population - are
now coming out as an independent and active
revolutionary factor. And it should be perfectly clear that,
in the coming decisive battles of the world revolution, this
movement of the majority of the world’s population,
originally aimed at national liberation, will turn against
capitalism and imperialism and will, perhaps, play a much
more revolutionary role than we have been led to expect.-

The Third Communist International (Comintern), founded
in Moscow in March 1919, set itself ‘the goal of fighting,
by every means, even by force of arms, for the overthrow
of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an
international Soviet republic’. For the next year or more,
Comintern’s Chairman, Grigori Yevseyevich Zinoviev,
lived in a revolutionary dream-world in which
Bolshevism was about to conquer Europe and sweep
across the planet. On the second anniversary of the
Bolshevik Revolution, he declared his hope that, within a
year, ‘the Communist International will triumph in the
entire world’. At the Congress of the Peoples of the East,
convened at Baku in 1920 to promote colonial revolution,
delegates excitedly waved swords, daggers and revolvers
in the air when Zinoviev called on them to wage a jihad
against imperialism and capitalism. Except in Mongolia,

however, where the Bolsheviks installed a puppet regime,
all attempts to spread their revolution beyond Soviet
borders foundered either because of lack of popular
support or because of successful resistance by counter-
revolutionary governments. -

By the mid- 1920s Moscow’s main hopes were pinned
on China, where the Soviet Politburo had pushed the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) into alliance with the
Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT). The KMT leader, Chiang
Kai-shek, declared in public: ‘If Russia aids the Chinese
revolution, does that mean that she wants China to apply
Communism? No, she wants us to carry out the national
revolution. ’ Privately, he believed the opposite, convinced
that ‘What the Russians call “Internationalism” and
“World Revolution” are nothing but old-fashioned
imperialism.’ The Soviet leadership, however, believed
that it could get the better of Chiang. He should, said
Stalin, ‘be squeezed like a lemon and then thrown away’.
In the event, it was the CCP which became the lemon.
Having gained control of Shanghai in April 1927 thanks
to a Communist-led rising, Chiang began a systematic
massacre of the Communists who had captured it for him.
The CCP, on Stalin’s instructions, replied with a series of
armed risings. All were disastrous failures. Moscow’s
humiliation was compounded by a police raid on the
Soviet consulate in Beijing which uncovered a mass of
documents on Soviet espionage.-

In an attempt to generate new support for Lenin’s
vision of a liberated post-colonial world, the League
Against Imperialism was founded early in 1927, shortly
before the Chinese debacles, by the great virtuoso of
Soviet front organizations, Willi Miinzenberg,
affectionately described by his ‘life partner’, Babette
Gross, as ‘the patron saint of fellow travellers’ with a
remarkable gift for uniting broad sections of the left under
inconspicuous Communist leadership. Those present at
the inaugural congress in Brussels included Jawaharlal
Nehru, later the first Prime Minister of independent India,
and Josiah Gumede, President of the African National
Congress and head of the League’s South African section.
One of the British delegates, Fenner Brockway of the
British Independent Labour Party, wrote afterwards:
‘From the platform the conference hall was a remarkable
sight. Every race seemed to be there. As one looked on
the sea of black, brown, yellow and white faces, one felt
that here at last was something approaching a Parliament
of Mankind.’

The League, Brockway believed, ‘may easily prove to
be one of the most significant movements for equality and
freedom in world history’.- But it was not to be. Within a
few years the League had faded into oblivion, and
Comintern, though it survived until 1943 as an obedient,
though drastically purged, auxiliary of Soviet foreign

policy and Soviet intelligence,- achieved nothing of
importance in the Third World. The colonial empires
remained intact until the Second World War, and neither
the foreign policy nor the intelligence agencies of Joseph
Stalin made any serious attempt to hasten their demise.
Under his brutal dictatorship, the dream of world
revolution quickly gave way to the reality of ‘Socialism in
one country’, a Soviet Union surrounded by hostile
‘imperialist’ states and deeply conscious of its own
vulnerability.

During the xenophobic paranoia of Stalin’s Terror,
Comintern representatives in Moscow from around the
world lived in constant fear of denunciation and
execution. Many were at even greater risk than their
Soviet colleagues. By early 1937, following investigations
by the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB), Stalin had
convinced himself that Comintern was a hotbed of
subversion and foreign espionage. He told Georgi
Dmitrov, who had become its General Secretary three
years earlier, ‘All of you there in the Comintern are
working in the hands of the enemy.’ Nikolai Yezhov, the
head of the NKVD whose sadism and diminutive stature
combined to give him the nickname ‘Poison Dwarf,
echoed his master’s voice. ‘The biggest spies’, he told
Dmitrov, ‘were working in the Communist International.’
Each night, unable to sleep, the foreign Communists and
Comintern officials who had been given rooms at the

Hotel Lux in the centre of Moscow waited for the sound
of a car drawing up at the hotel entrance in the early
hours, then heard the heavy footsteps of NKVD men echo
along the corridors, praying that they would stop at
someone else’s door. Those who escaped arrest listened
with a mixture of relief and horror as the night’s victims
were taken from their rooms and driven away, never to
return. Some, for whom the nightly suspense became too
much, shot themselves or jumped to their deaths in the
inner courtyard. Only a minority of the hotel’s foreign
guests escaped the knock on the door. Many of their death
warrants were signed personally by Stalin.- Mao’s
ferocious security chief, Kang Sheng, who had been sent
to Moscow to learn his trade, enthusiastically co-operated
with the NKVD in the hunt for mostly imaginary traitors
among Chinese emigres. -

The most enduring impact of Soviet intelligence on the
Third World before the Second World War was thus the
liquidation of potential leaders of post-war independence
movements.- Ho Chi-Minh, Deng Xiaoping, Jomo
Kenyatta and other future Third World leaders who
studied in Moscow at the Comintem-run Communist
University of the Toilers of the East between the wars-
were fortunate to leave before the Terror began. Kenyatta,
in particular, would have been an obvious target. His
lecturers complained that ‘his attitude to the Soviet Union
verges on cynicism’.— When his fellow student, the South

African Communist Edwin Mofutsanyana, accused him of
being ‘a petty bourgeois’, Kenyatta replied, ‘I don’t like
this “petty” thing. Why don’t you say I’m a big
bourgeois?’— During the Terror such outrageously
politically incorrect humour would have been promptly
reported (if only because those who failed to report it
would themselves be suspect), and the career of the future
first Prime Minister and President of an independent
Kenya would probably have ended prematurely in an
NKVD execution cellar.

After victory in the Second World War, the Soviet
Union, newly strengthened by the acquisition of an
obedient Soviet bloc in eastern and central Europe,
initially showed less interest in the Third World than after
the Bolshevik Revolution. During the early years of the
Cold War Soviet intelligence priorities were
overwhelmingly concentrated on the struggle against what
the KGB called ‘the Main Adversary’, the United States,
and its principal allies. Stalin saw the world as divided
into two irreconcilable camps - capitalist and Communist
- with no room for compromise between the two. Non-
Communist national liberation movements in the Third
World were, like capitalists, class enemies. The
decolonization of the great European overseas empires,
which had begun in 1947 with the end of British rule in
India, persuaded Stalin’s ebullient successor, Nikita
Khrushchev, to revive the Leninist dream. At the

Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, as well as secretly
denouncing Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’, he publicly
abandoned the two-camp theory, setting out to win
support from former Western colonies which had won
their independence:

The new period in world history which Lenin predicted
has arrived, and the peoples of the East are playing an
active part in deciding the destinies of the whole world,
are becoming a new mighty factor in international
relations.

Though one of the few major world leaders of peasant
origins, Khrushchev had no doubt that the Soviet Union’s
break-neck industrialization in the 1930s provided a
model for the newly independent former colonies to
modernize their economies. ‘Today’, he declared, ‘they
need not go begging for up-to-date equipment to their
former oppressors. They can get it in the socialist
countries, without assuming any political or military
commitments.’ Many of the first generation of post-
colonial leaders in the 1950s and 1960s, who blamed all
their economic ills on their former colonial rulers, were
happy to accept Khrushchev’s offer.—

‘In retrospect’, writes the economic historian David
Fieldhouse, ‘it is one of the most astonishing features of

post- 1950 African history that there should have been so
general an expectation that independence would lead to
very rapid economic growth and affluence. Kwame
Nkrumah, the leader of the first black African colony to
gain its independence, claimed that Africa’s hitherto slow
industrial development was entirely the fault of colonial
powers which had deliberately held back ‘local economic
initiative’ in order to ‘enrich alien investors’: ‘We have
here, in Africa, everything necessary to become a
powerful, modem, industrialized continent . . . Africa, far
from having inadequate resources, is probably better
equipped for industrialization than almost any other
region in the world. ’—

In the euphoria of liberation from colonial mle there
were many who, like Nkmmah, were seduced by anti-
imperialist fantasy economics. Convinced that heavy
industry was the key to rapid economic development, they
welcomed inefficient Soviet steel mills and other heavy
plant as symbols of modernity rather than potential
industrial white elephants. In the small African state of
Guinea alone during the Khmshchev era, the Soviet
Union constmcted an airport, a cannery, a sawmill, a
refrigeration plant, a hospital, a polytechnic and a hotel as
well as carrying out geological surveys and a series of
research projects. The report presented to the Central
Committee plenum which ousted Khmshchev in 1964
stated that during his decade in power the Soviet Union

had undertaken about 6,000 projects in the Third World.—
Khrushchev, the report implied, had allowed his
enthusiasm for strengthening Soviet influence in
developing countries to run away with him - at enormous
cost to the Soviet economy.

Khrushchev, however, was supremely confident that
the Soviet command economy, despite the scale of its
investment in the Third World, was rapidly overhauling
capitalism. Tt is true that you are richer than we are at
present’, he told Americans during his flamboyant coast-
to-coast tour of the United States in 1959. ‘But tomorrow
we will be as rich as you. The next day? Even richer! But
is there anything wrong with that?’— Khrushchev’s
optimism seemed less absurd at the time than it does now.
The deputy leader of the British Labour Party, Aneurin
Bevan, told the 1959 party conference that the triumph of
nationalization and state planning in the Soviet Union
proved that they were vastly superior to capitalism as a
means of economic modernization: ‘The [economic]
challenge is going to come from Russia. The challenge is
not going to come from the United States.’— The early
achievements of the Soviet space programme encouraged
wildly exaggerated expectations in the West as well as in
the East of the ability of the Soviet economy to pioneer
new technology. In 1957 the Soviet success in putting into
orbit Sputnik 1 , the first man-made satellite, had created a
global sensation. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was

taken aback by the ‘wave of near hysteria’ which swept
the United States. Amid claims that America had suffered
a scientific Pearl Harbor, the Governor of Michigan, G.
Mennen Williams, expressed his inner anguish in verse:

Oh Little Sputnik, flying high
With made-in Moscow beep
You tell the world it’s a Commie sky
And Uncle Sam ’s asleep.—

‘How can we not rejoice, comrades,’ asked Khrushchev in
1958, ‘at the gigantic achievements of our industry? . . .
What other state has ever built on such a scale? There
never has been such a country! ’—

Khrushchev was also enthused by the fiery rhetoric of
the new generation of Third World leaders against both
their former colonial masters and American imperialism.
During his visit to the United States in 1959, he gave a
speech to the General Assembly in New York, basking in
the applause after his ‘warm greetings from the bottom of
my heart’ to the independent states which had freed
themselves from colonial rule:

Coming generations will highly appreciate the heroism of
those who led the struggle for the independence of India
and Indonesia, the United Arab Republic and Iraq, Ghana,

Guinea and other states, just as the people of the United
States today revere the memory of George Washington
and Thomas Jefferson, who led the American people in
their struggle for independence.

Khrushchev went on to denounce the imperialist
exploitation which continued after the formal end of
colonial rule:

The peoples of many of these countries have won political
independence, but they are cruelly exploited by foreigners
economically. Their oil and other natural wealth is
plundered, it is taken out of the country for next to
nothing, yielding huge profits to foreign exploiters.

Khrushchev’s call for the plundered wealth to be returned
as economic aid was music to the ears of many of his
Third World listeners.—

The fact that neither the United States nor the European
colonial powers yet took seriously the problems of racism
within their own societies increased the popularity of anti-
imperialist rhetoric. It now almost passes belief that,
during the decade when most African colonies gained
their independence, it was still legal for British landlords
to put ‘No Coloured’ notices in their windows and illegal
for African delegates to the United Nations in New York

to travel on seats reserved for whites on the segregated
buses of the Deep South. Because of Russia’s lack of
either African colonies or a black immigrant community,
the racism of Russian society was far better concealed.—

Following the success of his brief visit to the United
Nations in 1959, Khrushchev took the unprecedented
decision to spend a month in New York as leader of the
Soviet delegation at the autumn 1960 meeting of the UN
General Assembly, which welcomed seventeen newly
independent members, sixteen from Africa. While
Khrushchev was bear-hugging the new African leaders.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower went on a golfing
holiday. With new African embassies opening in
Washington, the President’s chief of protocol became
notorious for complaining about having to invite ‘these
niggers’ to White House receptions.— Khrushchev,
meanwhile, became joint sponsor of a draft UN
declaration subsequently adopted in modified form as a
‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial
Countries and Peoples’, which denounced colonialism in
all its forms and demanded immediate independence for
all subjugated peoples. The abstention of the main
Western powers merely served to enhance Moscow’s
prestige.— The fact that most still ‘subjugated peoples’
did not receive immediate independence meant that the
Soviet Union was regularly able henceforth to complain
that the colonial powers were defying a UN resolution.—

Khrushchev so enjoyed his time at the UN in the
autumn of 1960 that he beat all previous records for
loquacity, making a dozen speeches to the General
Assembly totalling 300 pages of typescript. His
performance was not, however, an unalloyed success. He
was so outraged on 13 October by the speech of a
delegate from the Philippines, who turned the issue of
decolonization against him and claimed that eastern
Europe had been ‘swallowed up by the Soviet Union’ and
‘deprived of political and civil rights’, that he began
angrily pounding the table with his shoe. Afterwards
Khrushchev told a member of the Soviet delegation who
had missed his performance, ‘Oh, you really missed
something! It was such fun!’ Despite their
embarrassment, no one in the delegation dared to
remonstrate with him.— With the heady experience of
hearing Western imperialism publicly denounced by
Third World leaders in the heartland of American
capitalism still fresh in his mind, Khrushchev gave a
secret speech in Moscow to Soviet ideological and
propaganda ‘workers’ in January 1961, in which he
declared that, by supporting the ‘sacred’ anti-imperialist
struggle of colonies and newly independent states, the
Soviet Union would both advance its own progress to
Communism and ‘bring imperialism to its knees’.—

The belief that the Cold War could be won in the Third

World transformed the agenda of Soviet intelligence in
ways that most Western historians have found difficult to
credit. Eric Hobsbawm’s brilliant history of the twentieth
century concludes, like many others, that ‘there is no real
evidence that [the Soviet Union] planned to push forward
the frontiers of communism by revolution until the middle
1970s, and even then the evidence suggests that the USSR
made use of a favourable conjuncture it had not set out to
create’.— KGB files show, however, that in 1961 there
was already such a plan, though it was not of course
publicly revealed. The Soviet Communist Party (CPSU)
Programme of that year praised ‘the liberation struggles
of oppressed peoples’ as one of ‘the mainstream
tendencies of social progress’. This message was
enthusiastically received in the Centre (KGB
headquarters). The youthful and dynamic chairman of the
KGB, Aleksandr Shelepin, won Khrushchev’s support for
the use of national liberation movements and the forces of
anti-imperialism in an aggressive new grand strategy
against the ‘Main Adversary’ (the United States) in the
Third World.— Though Khrushchev was soon to replace
Shelepin with the more compliant and less ambitious
Vladimir Semichastny, the KGB’s grand strategy
survived.

Grasping the extent of the KGB’s ambitions in the
Third World has been complicated by the legacy of
McCarthyism. Just as the fraudulent inventions of Senator

Joseph McCarthy’s self-serving anti-Communist witch-
hunt helped to blind liberal opinion to the reality of the
unprecedented Soviet intelligence offensive against the
United States,— so simplistic conspiracy theories of
Soviet plans for world conquest made most non-
conspiracy theorists sceptical of even realistic
assessments of Soviet designs in the Third World.
McCarthy and America’s other anti-Communist
conspiracy theorists were, albeit unconsciously, among
the KGB’s most successful Cold War agents of influence.
Reaction against their risible exaggerations helps to
account for the remarkable degree to which the KGB has
been left out of Cold War history.

After Khrushchev himself was forced to step down in
1964 and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, the belief that the
Cold War could be won in the Third World was held with
greater conviction in the Centre than in the Kremlin or the
Foreign Ministry. The future head of KGB intelligence
assessment, Nikolai Leonov, then a young foreign
intelligence officer in the FCD Second (Latin American)
Department, was later to recall: ‘Basically, of course, we
were guided by the idea that the destiny of world
confrontation between the United States and the Soviet
Union, between Capitalism and Socialism, would be

resolved in the Third World. This was the basic

‘ ’ 30

premise. —

That strategy was enthusiastically supported by Yuri
Andropov from the moment he succeeded Semichastny as
KGB chairman in 1967. He told a meeting of the Second
Chief Directorate (Internal Security and Counter-
Intelligence) a year later:

One must understand that the struggle between the organs
of state security and the special [intelligence] organs of
the opponent in the present conditions reflect the present
stage of a heightening of the class struggle. And this
means that the struggle is more merciless. Today the same
question is being decided as in the first days of Soviet
power: who prevails over whom? Only today this
question is being decided not within our country but
within the framework of the whole world system, in a
global struggle between two world systems.—

The initiative for the ‘global struggle’ came from the
KGB rather than the Foreign Ministry. At the most
dramatic moments of Soviet penetration of the Third
World, from the establishment of the first Communist
‘bridgehead’ in the Western hemisphere (to use the KGB
codename for Castro’s Cuba) to the final, disastrous
defence of the Communist regime in Afghanistan, the
Centre had greater influence than the Foreign Ministry.

Andrei Gromyko, the long-serving Soviet Foreign

Minister, is remembered by his almost equally long-
serving ambassador in Washington, Anatoli Dobrynin, as
‘a cautious man who opposed any serious confrontation
with the United States’:

. . . The Third World was not his prime domain. He
believed that events there could not decisively influence
our fundamental relations with the United States; that
turned out to be a factor which he definitely
underestimated. More than that, our Foreign Ministry
traditionally was not really involved with the leaders of
the liberation movements in the Third World, who were
dealt with through the International Department of the
party, headed by Secretary Boris Ponomarev. He despised
Gromyko; the feeling was mutual.

The Soviet Union’s forward policy in the Third World
was thus led by the KGB with the support of the
International Department of the CPSU Central
Committee.— Khrushchev had nicknamed the
Department’s rigidly doctrinaire head ‘Ponomar’
(sacristan in the Orthodox Church). Tonomar’, he said,
‘is a valuable Party official but as orthodox as a Catholic
priest.’ Within the Politburo, the forward policy was also
supported by the Party’s leading ideologue, Mikhail
Suslov, whose prestige during the 1970s was second only
to Brezhnev’s. ‘Cloaked in the robe of doctrinal
infallibility’, recalls one Soviet diplomat, ‘[Suslov]

regularly issued reminders of what he saw as the correct
Marxist-Leninist policy.’ Speaking ex cathedra, Suslov
declared that the collapse of what remained of the
Western colonial empires and the weakening of the
capitalist system in the face of the onward march of
socialism and progressive, anti-imperialist forces was
‘historically inevitable’.—

Gromyko’s frequent willingness for Andropov to take
the initiative in the Third World reflected his own lack of
interest in it. As Leonov later recalled:

The USSR [Foreign Ministry] and its head A. A.
Gromyko were openly scornful with regard to the ‘third
world’. Andrei Andreyevich [Gromyko] visited and
received his colleagues from small European states with
greater pleasure than the disturbers of the peace from the
countries of the ‘third world’. Even the Politburo failed to
convince him to visit the Near East, Africa, or Latin
America. Trips to the countries of these regions were
isolated incidents in his seemingly endless career as
minister for foreign affairs.—

When taking initiatives in the Third World, Andropov
was always careful not to appear to be treading on
Gromyko’s toes. ‘Their personal relations’, noted
Dobrynin, ‘were not bad, because Andropov was cautious

enough not to interfere in Gromyko’s everyday
management of foreign policy, and Gromyko for his part
respected Andropov’s growing influence in the
Politburo.’ The two men gradually became co-sponsors of
the major foreign policy proposals put before Brezhnev’s
Politburo.—

Further encouragement for a forward policy in the
Third World came from the shift in the balance of power
at the United Nations during the 1960s. With the rapid
increase in newly independent states, the West lost its
previous majority in the General Assembly. The Non-
Aligned Movement (NAM) tended increasingly to vote
with the Soviet bloc rather than the West, some of whose
leading states were tainted by their imperial past. At the
NAM conference which met at Belgrade in July 1969, the
final communique pledged ‘support for the heroic people
of Vietnam’ who were resisting American aggression, but
made no significant mention of the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia in the previous year.— For the remainder
of the Cold War, the KGB saw the Non-Aligned
Movement as ‘our natural allies’. ‘The essential trend of
their activities’, declared the head of the First Chief
(Foreign Intelligence) Directorate (FCD), Vladimir
Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov, in 1984, ‘is anti-
imperialist.’—

The United States’ defeat in Vietnam reinforced the

Centre’s confidence in its Third World strategy. The
unprecedented TV coverage from Vietnam brought the
horrors of war into the living rooms of Middle America
and much of the world. It also gave dramatic global
publicity to the anti-war movement in the United States,
whose daily refrain, ‘Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids
Did You Kill Today?’, helped to persuade President
Lyndon B. Johnson not to run for re-election in 1968.
Both Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, believed
- wrongly - that an international Communist conspiracy
lay behind American anti-war protest, particularly on
university campuses. Richard Helms, the Director of
Central Intelligence (DCI), later testified that, ‘President
Johnson was after this all the time.’ So was Nixon.
Though sceptical about the White House’s conspiracy
theories. Helms began operation CHAOS to discover the
real extent of foreign influence on domestic dissent. In the
course of the operation, the Agency began to spy illegally
on American campus radicals. As Helms acknowledged:
‘Should anyone learn of [CHAOS ’s] existence, it would
prove most embarrassing for all concerned.’ Though the
negative findings of CHAOS failed to convince either
Johnson or Nixon, it did lasting damage to the reputation
of the CIA when the operation was revealed in the mid-
1970s and provided further ammunition for KGB ‘active
measures’.—

Only a fortnight before the final American withdrawal

from Saigon on 30 April 1975, Andropov still found it
difficult to credit that the United States had really been
defeated. He told a specially convened meeting on
Vietnam in the FCD’s Yasenevo headquarters: Do you
remember the Korean War and the course of its
development? Then too the North Korean troops had
occupied almost the whole territory of South Korea . . .
Then the Americans organized a major landing operation
in the rear of the North Koreans, cutting off and
devastating the main section of the North Korean army. In
a matter of days the course of the war had changed. Now
an extremely similar situation is taking shape. All the
forces of North Vietnam have been sent to the south, to
help the patriots. To all intents and purposes North
Vietnam is defenceless. If the Americans undertake
something similar to the Korean manoeuvre, then things
may take a bad turn ... To all intents and purposes the
road to [Hanoi] is open.

Not till Andropov saw the extraordinary TV pictures a
fortnight later of Americans and some of their South
Vietnamese allies being hurriedly rescued by helicopter
from the roof of the US embassy as the Communist
Vietcong made a triumphal entry into Saigon did he
accept that the United States had really been defeated.—

The unprecedented humiliation of the United States at
the end of a war which had divided its society as no other

conflict had done since the Civil War seemed to
demonstrate the ability of a Third World national
liberation movement, inspired by Marxist-Leninist
ideology, to defeat even an imperialist superpower. As
Nixon’s successor. President Gerald Ford, acknowledged,
‘Our allies around the world began to question our
resolve.’ Among the foreign media reports which made a
particular impression on Ford - and, doubtless, also on the
KGB - was a front-page editorial in the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, headed ‘America - A Helpless
Giant’.—

Identifying the United States with the Western colonial
powers, despite strong American support for
decolonization after the Second World War,— was
assisted by creative use of Lenin’s definition of
imperialism as ‘the highest stage of capitalism’. It was
thus possible for Soviet commentators to argue that the
whole of the Third World, whether politically
independent or not, was under imperialist attack: ‘Having
found it impossible to reshape the political map of the
world as it did in the past, imperialism is striving to
undermine the sovereignty of liberated states in
roundabout ways, making particularly active use of
economic levers . . .’—

Such arguments found no shortage of supporters in the
West as well as the Third World. Broadcasting on Radio

Hanoi during the Vietnam War, the great British
philosopher Bertrand Russell told American GIs that they
were being used ‘to protect the riches of a few rich men in
the United States’: ‘Every food store and every petrol
station in America requires, under capitalism, the
perpetuation of war production.’ Vietnam popularized
around the world the idea of the United States as the
leader of world imperialism, bent on crushing the
freedoms of the Third World in the interests of Western
capitalism of which it was the leading exemplar. Russell
declared:

The United States today is a force for suffering, reaction
and counter-revolution the world over. Wherever people
are hungry and exploited, wherever they are oppressed
and humiliated, the agency of this evil exists with the
support and approval of the United States . . . [which went
to war in Vietnam] to protect the continued control over
the wealth of the region by American capitalists.—

The ‘Ballad of Student Dissent’, made famous by Bob
Dylan on American campuses during the Vietnam War,
mocked Washington’s incomprehension of the growing
hostility in the Third World to US ‘imperialism’:

Please don 7 burn that limousine,

Don ’t throw tomatoes at the submarine.
Think of all we ’ve done for you.

You ’ve just got those exploitation blues.

Before the Vietnam War Western denunciations of
Western imperialism were largely confined to limited
numbers of academics and Marxist parties and sects. The
Marxist political scientist, Bill Warren, was, however,
right to claim that in the course of the war, the concept of
imperialism became ‘the dominant political dogma of our
era’:

Together with its offspring, the notion of ‘neo-
colonialism’, it affords the great majority of humanity a
common view of the world as a whole. Not only the
Marxist-educated masses of the Communist world, but
also the millions of urban dwellers of Latin America, the
semi-politicized peasants of Asia, and the highly literate
professional and working classes of the industrialized
capitalist countries, are steeped in this world-view and its
ramifications. It represents, of course, not simply a
recognition of the existence of modem empires, formal or
informal, and of their living heritage. More important, it
embodies a set of quite specific (albeit often vaguely
articulated) theses about the domination of imperialism in
the affairs of the human race as a whole and in particular

about the past and present economic, political, and
cultural disaster imperialism has allegedly inflicted and
continues to inflict on the great majority of mankind.—

Though Soviet writers contributed little of significance by
comparison with Western Marxists to the serious study of
imperialism during the Cold War,— the anti-imperialist
mood which accompanied and followed the Vietnam War
created fertile ground for KGB active measures in the
Third World. During the 1970s, wrote Bill Warren:

. . . Bourgeois publishers have devoted more resources to
the topic of anti-imperialism than to any other social,
political or economic theme, with the possible exception
of inflation. If to this we add the literature of the
masochistic modern version of the White Man’s Burden,
more or less directly inspired by the view of imperialism
as uniformly disastrous, then Marxism can record the
greatest publication and propaganda triumph in its history
. . . In no other field has Marxism succeeded in so
influencing - even dominating - the thought of mankind.—

The final stages of the Vietnam War were, ironically,
accompanied by an unprecedented level of detente
between Washington and Moscow. For the Nixon
administration, anxious to extricate itself from Vietnam

with as little damage to US prestige as possible, there
were obvious advantages in lessening tension with the
Soviet Union as well as the longer-term benefit of
stabilizing the Cold War. A majority of the Politburo saw
the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) with the
United States as a way of preventing further escalation in
the already huge Soviet arms budget. In May 1972 Nixon
became the first US president to visit Moscow, where, in
the ornate surroundings of the Grand Kremlin Palace, he
and Brezhnev signed agreements freezing their nuclear
strike forces (SALT 1) and limiting their anti-ballistic
missile defences. Brezhnev paid a return visit to
Washington the following year. ‘Soviet- American
relations’, wrote Dobrynin, ‘reached a level of amity in
1973 never before achieved in the post-war era.’ Though
no Soviet policy-maker ever accepted that the progress of
detente should prevent the Soviet Union extending its
influence in the Third World at the expense of the United
States, there was disagreement about how vigorously that
influence should be increased. Brezhnev, who adored the
pomp and ceremony of his meetings with Nixon in both
Russia and the United States, was among the doves. In
private talks with the President, he criticized some of his
own colleagues in the Politburo by name and later sent the
President a personal note of sympathy and support ‘from
the depths of my heart’ as the Watergate scandal began to
threaten his survival in office.— The Centre took a much
less sentimental view. During 1973-74 there seems to

have been disagreement within the Soviet leadership
between the advocates of a more vigorous ideological
offensive against the Main Adversary in the Third World
(including the increased use of active measures) and those
who feared the likely damage to detente with the United
States.— The advocates of the offensive, Andropov
probably chief among them, won the argument.—

Over the next decade there was a new wave of
revolution in parts of Africa, Central America and Asia -
most of it actively supported, though not originated, by
the KGB.— The complex detail of events in the Third
World was simply too much for Brezhnev to take in. As
his eyesight deteriorated he found it increasingly difficult
to read all but the briefest texts, and his staff first asked
for the print size of intelligence reports sent to him to be
as large as possible, then for them to be produced in
capital letters. Telegrams were read out to him
increasingly often.— From the mid-1970s he took little
active part in the government of the country. At the rear
of the cavalcade of black limousines in which he travelled
around Moscow was a resuscitation vehicle.— At a
summit in Vienna in 1979 the future DCI, Robert Gates,
‘couldn’t get over how feeble Brezhnev was’:

Going in and out of the embassies, two huge - and I mean
huge - KGB officers held him upright under his arms and

essentially carried him. [William] Odom, a Soviet expert
[later head of the US SIGINT agency, NS A], and I were
trapped in a narrow walkway at one point, and as the
KGB half-carried Brezhnev by we were nearly
steamrollered.—

Despite his shuffling gait, disjointed speech and
dependence on sleeping pills, Brezhnev thrived on a
constant diet of flattery and remained convinced that his
‘great experience and wisdom’ made his continued
leadership indispensable. He was also constantly
reassured about the success of Soviet policy in the Third
World and the enormous respect in which he was
supposedly held by its leaders. Brezhnev opened the
Twenty-sixth Party Congress in 1981 by announcing,
without any sense of the absurd:

At its first Central Committee plenum, which passed in an
atmosphere of exceptional unity and solidarity, the
leading organs of our Party have been elected
unanimously. The plenum has unanimously appointed as
General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU
Comrade L. I. Brezhnev.

The entire audience jumped to its feet to deliver the usual
sycophantic ‘storm of applause’.— Despite the war in

Afghanistan, Brezhnev exuded confidence in Soviet
policy in the Third World as he stumbled through his
speech, hailing the increased number of states with a
‘socialist orientation’ since the previous Congress five
years earlier, the triumph of the Ethiopian, Nicaraguan
and Afghan revolutions, and the conclusion of friendship
treaties with Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique,
Afghanistan, Syria and the People’s Democratic Republic
of Yemen. —

The Centre had no doubt that its ‘active measures’ to
influence operations had made a major contribution to
turning most Third World opinion against the United
States. In 1974, according to KGB statistics, over 250
active measures were targeted against the CIA alone,
leading - it claimed - to denunciations of Agency abuses,
both real and (more frequently) imaginary, in media,
parliamentary debates, demonstrations and speeches by
leading politicians around the world.— Though Mitrokhin
did not record the statistics for subsequent years, the
volume of active measures almost certainly increased,
assisted by startling American revelations of skulduggery
at the White House and the Agency. The Watergate
scandal which forced Nixon’s resignation in 1974 was
followed in 1975, the ‘Year of Intelligence’, by
sensational disclosures of CIA ‘dirty tricks’ - among them
operation CHAOS and assassination plots against foreign
statesmen. Helms’s successor as DCI, William Colby,

complained that, ‘The CIA came under the closest and
harshest public scrutiny that any such service has ever
experienced not only in this country but anywhere in the
world.’ Though sympathetic to the Agency, President
Ford faced a difficult dilemma. The best way to defend
the CIA would have been to emphasize that, in the words
of a later Congressional report, ‘far from being out of
control’, it had been ‘utterly responsive to the instructions
of the President and the Assistant to the President for
National Security Affairs’. Defending the CIA, however,
would have conflicted with Ford’s primary aim of
rehabilitating the presidency. To restore confidence in the
White House after the trauma of Watergate, the President
and his advisers thus took the decision to distance
themselves from the charges levelled against the Agency,
which continued to multiply. —

In reality, the CIA’s assassination plots, all undertaken
with presidential approval, had either failed or been
abandoned - partly because, unlike the KGB, it did not
possess a group of trained assassins. Shocked by the
revelations of the ‘Year of Intelligence’, however, a
majority of Americans were taken in by conspiracy
theories, which the KGB did its best to encourage,
purporting to show that the CIA had been involved in the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy.— If, as most
of the world as well as most Americans continued to
believe,— the CIA had been involved in the killing of its

own president, it was reasonable to conclude that there
were no limits to which the Agency would not go to
subvert foreign regimes and assassinate other statesmen
who had incurred its displeasure. KGB active measures
successfully promoted the belief that the methods which
the CIA had used to attempt to kill Fidel Castro and
destabilize his regime were being employed against
‘progressive’ governments around the world. One active-
measure operation in the Middle East in 1975 purported
to identify forty-five statesmen from around the world
who had been the victims of successful or unsuccessful
Agency assassination attempts over the past decade.—
Indira Gandhi was one of a number of prominent Third
World leaders who were unconsciously influenced by
disinformation fabricated by Service A (the FCD active-
measures specialists) and who became obsessed by
supposed CIA plots against them.—

The KGB’s active-measures doctrine improbably
insisted that its influence operations were ‘radically
different in essence from the disinformation to which
Western agencies resort in order to deceive public
opinion’:

KGB disinformation operations are progressive; they are
designed to mislead not the working people but their
enemies - the ruling circles of capitalism - in order to
induce them to act in a certain way, or abstain from

actions contrary to the interests of the USSR; they
promote peace and social progress; they serve
international detente; they are humane, creating the
conditions for the noble struggle for humanity’s bright
future.—

KGB active-measures campaigns were extensively
supported by its allies in the Soviet bloc. According to
Ladislav Bittman of the Czechoslovak StB:

Anti-American propaganda campaigns are the easiest to
carry out. A single press article containing sensational
facts of a ‘new American conspiracy’ may be sufficient.
Other papers become interested, the public is shocked,
and government authorities in developing countries have
a fresh opportunity to clamour against the imperialists
while demonstrators hasten to break American embassy
windows.—

KGB active measures were also intended to serve a
domestic political agenda by encouraging the support of
the Soviet leadership for a forward policy in the Third
World. The Centre supplied the Kremlin with regular
reports designed to demonstrate its success in influencing
Third World politicians and public opinion. The
‘successes’ listed in these reports seem to have changed

little from Brezhnev to Gorbachev. Among documents
liberated from the Central Committee archives in the
aftermath of the abortive 1991 Moscow coup was a 1969
report from Andropov, boasting of the KGB’s ability to
organize large protest demonstrations outside the US
embassy in Delhi for $5,000 a time, and a quite similar
letter to Gorbachev twenty years later from the then KGB
chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov (formerly head of the
FCD), reporting with much the same satisfaction the
recruitment of an increased number of agents in the Sri
Lankan parliament and the ‘sincere gratitude to Moscow’
allegedly expressed by the leader of the Freedom Party for
Soviet ‘financial support’.—

Given the tight control over the Soviet media and the
virtual impossibility of mounting dissident
demonstrations in Moscow, the Politburo was
unsurprisingly impressed by the KGB’s apparent ability
to influence Third World opinion. Some KGB active
measures were designed less to influence the rest of the
world than to flatter the Soviet leadership and the Party
apparatus. Unable to report to Moscow that the only
aspect of CPSU congresses which made much impression
on the world outside the Soviet bloc was the mind-
numbing tedium of their banal proceedings, foreign
residencies felt forced to concoct evidence to support the
official doctrine that, ‘The congresses of the CPSU are
always events of major international importance: they are

like beacons lighting up the path already traversed and the
path lying ahead.’— Mitrokhin noted in 1977 that
throughout the year residencies around the world were
busy prompting local dignitaries to send congratulations
to the Soviet leadership on the occasion of the sixtieth
anniversary of the ‘Great October Revolution’ and the
introduction of the supposedly epoch-making (but in fact
insignificant) ‘Brezhnev’ Soviet constitution.— These
carefully stage-managed congratulations, as well as
featuring prominently in the Soviet media, were doubtless
included in the daily intelligence digests prepared by FCD
Service 1 (intelligence assessment), signed by Andropov,
which were delivered to members of the Politburo and
Central Committee Secretariat by junior KGB officers,
armed with the latest Makarov pistols, travelling in black
Volga limousines. —

In the Third World as elsewhere, KGB officers had to
waste time pandering to the whims and pretensions of the
political leadership. Khrushchev, for example, had been
outraged by photographs in the American press showing
him drinking Coca-Cola, which he regarded as a symbol
of US imperialism, and demanded that further
‘provocations’ be prevented. Residencies thus kept a close
watch for Coca-Cola bottles during the numerous foreign
visits of Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova,
respectively the first man and the first woman into space.
Ah went well until a banquet in Mexico in 1963, when an

alert KGB officer noticed a news photographer about to
take a picture of Tereshkova with a waiter holding a bottle
of Coca-Cola in the background. A member of the
Mexico City residency wrote later: ‘The “provocation”
prepared with regard to the cosmonauts did not slip past
our vigilant eyes. The first female cosmonaut, a Soviet
woman, featuring in an advertisement for bourgeois Coca-
Cola! No, we could not permit this. We immediately
turned to our Mexican colleagues for help.’ The ‘Mexican
colleagues’ (presumably local security officials)
successfully prevented the photograph from being
taken.—

Brezhnev’s increasingly preposterous vanity, which
was undiminished by his physical decline, had to be fed
not merely by more medals than were awarded to all
previous Soviet leaders combined— but also by a regular
diet of praise from around the world, some of it
manufactured by the KGB. In 1973, for example, a paid
Moroccan agent codenamed AKMET, who regularly
wrote articles based on material provided by Service A,
published a book extolling Soviet assistance to African
countries. At the prompting of the local residency, he sent
a signed copy to Brezhnev as a token of his deep personal
gratitude and respect. Trivial though this episode was, it
was invested with such significance by the Centre that the
book and dedication were forwarded to Brezhnev with a
personal covering letter from Andropov - who doubtless

did not mention that they had originated as a KGB active
measure Brezhnev was, of course, carefully protected
from any sense of how absurd his personality cult
appeared to much of the outside world - as, for example,
to Joan Baez, who in 1979 composed and sang a satirical
birthday tribute to him:

Happy birthday, Leonid Brezhnev!

What a lovely seventy-fifth
We watched the party on TV
You seemed to be taking things casually
What a mighty heart must beat in your breast
To hold forty-nine medals on your chest I—

As well as manufacturing evidence of the global
popularity of the Soviet leadership, the KGB fed it a
carefully sanitized, politically correct view of the outside
world. Throughout the Soviet era there was a striking
contrast between the frequent success of intelligence
collection and the poor quality of intelligence analysis.
Because analysis in all one-party states is distorted by the
insistent demands of political correctness, foreign
intelligence reports do more to reinforce than to correct
the regime’s misconceptions. Though the politicization of
intelligence sometimes degrades assessment even within
democratic systems, it is actually built into the structure

of all authoritarian regimes. Soviet intelligence reports
throughout the Stalin era, and for some years after,
usually consisted only of selective compilations of
relevant information on particular topics with little
attempt at interpretation or analysis for fear that it might
contradict the views of the political leadership. Though
intelligence analysis improved under Andropov, it
remained seriously undeveloped by Western standards.
Leonov, who was dismayed to be appointed in 1971 as
deputy head of the FCD assessment section. Service 1,
estimates that it had only 10 per cent of the importance
occupied by the Directorate of Intelligence (Analysis) in
the CIA. Its prestige was correspondingly low. A general
air of depression hung over Service 1, which was usually
regarded as ‘a punishment posting’. To be transferred
there from an operational section, as happened to Leonov,
was ‘equivalent to moving from a guards regiment in the
capital to the garrison in a provincial backwater’ .—

In 1973 Leonov was promoted to head Service I and
was soon able to resist the traditional pressure to accept
rejects from operational departments. Freedom of debate,
he claims, came to his department much earlier than to
foreign intelligence as a whole, let alone to the rest of the
KGB.— That debate, however, was coloured by Leonov’s
conspiracy theories about the United States which were
still in evidence during the final years of the Soviet
Union.— There was also little change in the standards of

political correctness required in intelligence reports to the
Soviet leadership:

All the filtration stages . . . were concerned with making
sure that alarming, critical information did not come to
the attention of the bosses. [Such information] was
provided in a sweetened, smoothed form, with all the
thorns removed in advance.—

Vadim Kirpichenko, who later rose to become first deputy
head of foreign intelligence, recalls that during the
Brezhnev era, pessimistic intelligence was kept from him
on the grounds that it would ‘upset Leonid II yich’ . —

When Soviet policy in the Third World suffered
setbacks which could not be concealed, analysts knew
they were on safe ground if they blamed imperialist
machinations, particularly those of the United States,
rather than failures of the Soviet system. As one FCD
officer admitted at the end of the Cold War, ‘In order to
please our superiors, we sent in falsified and biased
information, acting on the principle “Blame everything on
the Americans, and everything will be OK”.’— Within the
Centre it was possible during the Andropov era to express
much franker opinions about Third World problems - for
example, about Soviet prospects in Egypt after the death
of Nasser or economic collapse in Allende’s Chile— -

than were communicated to the political leadership. From
the moment that the KGB leadership had taken up a
position, however, FCD dissidents kept their heads down.
When, for example, Andropov concluded that the first
Reagan administration had plans for a nuclear first strike
against the Soviet Union, none of the probably numerous
sceptics in KGB residencies around the world dared to
breathe a word of open dissent.—

Despite the sanitized nature of the Centre’s reports to
the political leadership, however, its optimism about the
Third World was genuine. By the mid-1970s, the KGB
was confident that it was winning the Cold War in the
Third World against a demoralized and increasingly
discredited ‘Main Adversary’. As Henry Kissinger later
acknowledged:

It is doubtful that Castro would have intervened in
Angola, or the Soviet Union in Ethiopia, had America not
been perceived to have collapsed in Indochina, to have
become demoralized by Watergate, and to have afterward
retreated into a cocoon.—

But while Washington was stricken by self-doubt,
Moscow was in economic denial. The severe structural
problems of the Soviet economy and the military might
which depended on it were far more serious than the

transitory loss of American self-confidence which
followed Vietnam. In June 1977 the Soviet government
was forced to purchase 11.5 million tonnes of grain from
the West. In August it concluded that another 10 million
tonnes would be needed to meet the shortfall in Soviet
production. Yet at the celebration three months later of
the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution,
Brezhnev declared to thunderous applause, ‘This epoch is
the epoch of the transition to Socialism and Communism .
. . and by this path, the whole of mankind is destined to
go.’ Though the naive economic optimism of the
Khrushchev era had largely evaporated, the ideological
blinkers which constricted the vision of Brezhnev,
Andropov and other Soviet true believers made it
impossible for them to grasp the impossibility of the
increasingly sclerotic Soviet command economy
competing successfully with the market economies of the
West.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Andropov
passionately believed that, ‘Everything that has been
achieved here [in the Soviet Union] has long put
socialism far ahead of the most democratic bourgeois
states.’— While the Soviet system would solve its
problems, those of the capitalist West were insoluble. The
onward march of socialism in the Third World pointed to
the inevitability of its ultimate global triumph. In the
confident words of Karen N. Brutents, first deputy head

of the International Department: ‘The world was going
our way.’— The CIA feared that Bmtents might be right.
It reported to the White House in June 1979 that, ‘Part of
the Soviet mood is a sense of momentum in the USSR’s
favour in the Third World.’ Brezhnev and the Soviet
leadership, it concluded, ‘can view their position in the
world with considerable satisfaction’.—

How the KGB set out to win the Cold War in the Third
World, and with what consequences, is the subject of this
book.

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2

Latin America: Introduction

President Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting what he
claimed was Lenin’s description of the Soviet master-plan
to take over the Western hemisphere:

First, we will take over Eastern Europe, then we will
organize the hordes of Asia . . . then we will move on to
Latin America; once we have Latin America, we won’t
have to take the United States, the last bastion of
capitalism, because it will fall into our outstretched hands
like overripe fruit.-

Reagan was so impressed by this quotation that he
repeated it twice in his memoirs. Lenin, however, said no
such thing. His only published reference to Latin
America, in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of
Capitalism, was to cite approvingly a German economist
who claimed that ‘South America, and especially
Argentina, was under the financial control of London’ and
was ‘almost a British commercial colony ’.-

For over forty years after the Bolshevik Revolution,
Moscow doubted its own ability to challenge American

influence in a continent which it regarded as the United
States’ backyard. By far the most important Soviet
intelligence operation in Latin America during the Stalin
era was aimed not at subverting any of the ruling regimes
but at assassinating the great Russian heretic Leon
Trotsky, who had taken refuge near Mexico City.- In
1951, two years before Stalin’s death, he scornfully
dismissed the twenty Latin American republics, most of
them traditionally anti-Communist, as the ‘obedient army
of the United States’.- For the remainder of the decade the
Soviet Union maintained diplomatic missions and ‘legal’
KGB residencies in only three Latin American capitals -
Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Though the
KGB began delivering secret Soviet subsidies to a handful
of pro-Moscow Communist parties in 1955, the amounts
remained small by comparison with those given to the
leading parties in the West and Asia.-

The serious interest of the Centre (KGB headquarters)
and subsequently of the Kremlin in the possibility of
challenging the United States in its own backyard was
first aroused by the emergence of a new generation of
charismatic Latin American revolutionary leaders, chief
among them Fidel Castro. The KGB’s leading Latin
American expert, Nikolai Leonov, who was the first to
make contact with Castro, wrote later, ‘Cuba forced us to
take a fresh look at the whole continent, which until then
had traditionally occupied the last place in the Soviet

leadership’s system of priorities.’- The charismatic appeal
of Castro and ‘Che’ Guevara extended far beyond Latin
America. Though the Western ‘New Left’ of the 1960s
had little interest in the increasingly geriatric leadership of
the Soviet Union, it idolized both Castro and Guevara,
lavishing on them the uncritical adulation which much of
the Old Left had bestowed on Stalin’s supposed worker-
peasant state in the 1930s. Che Guevara T-shirts on
American campuses comfortably outnumbered, even in
presidential election years, those bearing the likeness of
any US politician alive or dead. Though there was much
that was genuinely admirable in Cuban health-care and
educational initiatives, despite the increasingly
authoritarian nature of the Cuban one-party state, the
radical pilgrims to Havana in the 1960s were as uncritical
as those to Moscow in the 1930s of whom Malcolm
Muggeridge had written, ‘Their delight in all they saw
and were told, and the expression they gave to that
delight, constitute unquestionably one of the wonders of
our age.’ One of the wonders of the 1960s was delight
such as that expressed by the political economist Paul
Sweezy after his pilgrimage to Cuba:

To be with these people, to see with your own eyes how
they are rehabilitating and transforming a whole nation, to
share their dreams of the great tasks and achievements
that lie ahead - these are purifying and liberating

experiences. You come away with your faith in the human
race restored.

Though sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution, Frances
Fitzgerald accurately noted that ‘many North American
radicals who visit Cuba or who live there have performed
a kind of surgery on their critical faculties and reduced
their conversation to a kind of baby talk, in which
everything is wonderful, including the elevator that does
not work and the rows of Soviet tanks on military parade
that are in the “hands of the people” ’ .

Similar examples of self-administered brain surgery
proliferated across both the West and the Third World.
Even Jean-Paul Sartre, despite his global reputation for
rigorous philosophical analysis, became for a period
almost incoherent in his hero-worship:

Among these fully awake men, at the height of their
powers, sleeping doesn’t seem like a natural need, just a
routine of which they had more or less freed themselves .
. . They have excluded the routine alternation of lunch and
dinner from their daily programme.

... Of all these night watchmen, Castro is the most
wide awake. Of all these fasting people, Castro can eat the
most and fast the longest . . . [They] exercise a veritable
dictatorship over their own needs . . . they roll back the

limits of the possible.-

Castro’s emergence, after some hesitations, as a reliable
pro-Moscow loyalist was of immense importance for both
Soviet foreign policy and KGB operations. Had he shared
much of the New Left’s scornful attitude to the bloated
Soviet bureaucracy and its increasingly geriatric
leadership, siding instead with the Prague Spring and
other manifestations of ‘Socialism with a human face’ (as
many expected him to do after the tanks of the Warsaw
Pact invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968), Castro
would have added to Moscow’s problems instead of
becoming one of its greatest international assets. With
Castro and other charismatic Latin American
revolutionaries on its side against American imperialism,
the prestige of the Soviet Union in the Third World was
enormously enhanced and its ageing revolutionary image
rejuvenated.

It was often the KGB, rather than the Foreign Ministry,
which took the lead role in Latin America. As
Khrushchev later acknowledged, the first Soviet
ambassador to Castro’s Cuba ‘turned out to be unsuited
for service in a country just emerging from a revolution’
and had to be replaced by the KGB resident, who proved
to be ‘an excellent choice’.- Nikolai Leonov later
described how he had also ‘worked with many [other]

Latin American leaders ... to help them as far as possible
in their anti-American stance’.- The first contacts with
Salvador Allende before his election as President of Chile
in 1970 and with Juan and Isabel Peron before their return
to Argentina in 1973 were also made by the KGB rather
than by a Soviet diplomat. KGB contacts with the
Sandinistas began almost two decades before their
conquest of power in Nicaragua in 1979. As Leonov
acknowledged, the initiative frequently came from the
Centre’s Latin American experts:

We ourselves developed the programme of our actions,
orienting ourselves ... I might as well admit that
sometimes we also wanted to attract attention to
ourselves, to present our work as highly significant. This
was to protect the Latin American direction in intelligence
from withering away and dying out. On the whole we
managed to convince the KGB leadership that Latin
America represented a politically attractive springboard,
where anti-American feeling was strong . . .—

KGB operations were greatly assisted by the clumsy
and sometimes brutal American response to Latin
American revolutionary movements. The poorly planned
and ineptly executed attempt to overthrow Castro by a
CIA-backed landing at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 was

probably the most farcically incompetent episode in Cold
War US foreign policy. Humiliation at the Bay of Pigs,
however, did not prevent Kennedy authorizing
subsequently a series of plans to assassinate Castro which,
mercifully, also degenerated into farce. Some, like the
proposal to place an explosive seashell on the sea bed
when Castro went snorkelling, probably never progressed
beyond the drawing board. The most practicable scheme
devised during Kennedy’s presidency seems to have been
the plan for one of Castro’s lovers to slip two poison
capsules into his drink. While waiting for an opportunity,
she hid them in a jar of cold cream. When she came to
retrieve them, the capsules had melted. It is doubtful in
any case that she would actually have used them.

Investigative journalism and official investigations in
the mid- 1970s gave global publicity to a series of such
homicidal farces. Also revealed were CIA attempts on
presidential instructions to destabilize the regime of
Chile’s Marxist President Salvador Allende in the early
1970s. Among the revelations was that of an apoplectic
President Richard M. Nixon ordering his Director of
Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, to ‘make the
[Chilean] economy scream’.

KGB active-measures specialists could not have hoped
for more promising raw material to use as the basis of
their campaigns than the series of scandalous revelations
of American dirty tricks in Latin America from the Bay of

Pigs to Iran-Contra a quarter of a century later. Service A
was also able to exploit a much older tradition of
resentment at Yanqui imperialism, which was kept alive
during the Cold War by a recurrent US tendency to claim
that its determination to root out Communist influences in
Latin America wherever possible was in reality a high-
minded attempt to defend democratic values in the
interests of Latin Americans themselves. Having
persuaded himself in 1965, contrary to the advice of the
State Department, that a coup in the Dominican Republic
was Communist-inspired, President Johnson sought to
justify US military intervention by the sanctimonious
rhetoric which rarely failed to enrage much of Latin
American opinion: ‘The purpose of America is never to
suppress liberty, but always to save it. The purpose of
America is never to take freedom, but always to return it.’

American intervention, however, had little to do with
democratic renewal. When Johnson’s extravagant claims
of ‘headless bodies lying in the streets of Santo Domingo’
were challenged by opponents of US intervention, he
phoned the US ambassador and appealed to him, ‘For
God’s sake, see if you can find some headless bodies.’
The left-wing regimes overthrown with American
assistance or approval in Guatemala in 1954, in the
Dominican Republic in 1965 and in Chile in 1973 were
replaced by military dictatorships.—

The Sandinista victory in Nicaragua in 1979 revived

much the same hopes and fears of Central American
revolution created by Castro’s triumph in Cuba twenty
years earlier. As one of their supporters noted, the
Sandinistas had inspired ‘a renewal of belief in the
possibility of a revolution’. ‘Backwater Nicaragua’, said
the left-wing writer Paul Berman, became ‘the world
center of the New Left’. For the journalist Claudia
Dreifus: ‘To be in Managua was like being in a time
machine. Here was a place seemingly run by the kind of
people who were Sixties radicals. Wherever one went,
people were young, singing political folk songs and
chanting “Power to the People”.’—

The Reagan administration’s campaign against the
Sandinista regime was a public-relations disaster on a
global scale. Just as the Bay of Pigs invasion was
remembered by President John F. Kennedy as ‘the most
excruciating period of my life’, so the lowest point in
Ronald Reagan’s generally popular presidency came as a
result of the revelation that the profits from secret arms
sales to Iran, then a state sponsor of terrorism, had been
illegally diverted to support the Nicaraguan Contra rebels
in their attempt to overthrow the Marxist Sandinista
regime. When Reagan was informed in 1985 that this
episode had been uncovered by the Attorney General, his
chief of staff noted that ‘the color drained from [the
president’s] face’.—

A survey in the mid-1980s found that the two most
‘unappealing countries’ in the view of Mexican academics
were the United States and Pinochet’s Chile. Though the
USSR came in third place, 72 per cent of those polled
believed that reports of ‘repression’ in the Soviet Union
had been exaggerated. Clearly the most admired country
was Castro’s Cuba.— Estimating how much Service A’s
disinformation contributed to the Latin American distrust
of Yanqui imperialism is an almost impossible task. It is,
however, possible to identify some causes of widespread
anti-American indignation which were clearly of Soviet
origin. Among them was the ‘baby parts’ fabrication
which alleged that wealthy Americans were buying up
and butchering Latin American children in order to use
their bodies for organ transplants. The story was taken up
by a Soviet front organization, the International
Association of Democratic Lawyers (lADL), and
publicized extensively in the press of over fifty countries.
Those taken in by the fabrication included groups as
remote from the KGB as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who
published the story in 1989 in their magazine Awake,
which had a world-wide circulation of 1 1 million copies
printed in fifty-four languages.— In 1990 an American
correspondent in Mexico noted that the ‘baby parts’ story
was still current even in ‘the respectable press’:

It was reported that Mexican children routinely were

being kidnapped, spirited across the US border, and
murdered for their vital organs, which were then
transplanted into sick American children with rich parents
. . . Millions of educated and uneducated people -
particularly in Latin America - firmly believe that the
United States has created, in essence, an international
network of child murderers, backed by gruesome teams of
medical butchers.—

Despite their many differences, KGB active measures and
American policy to Latin America thus had one strikingly
similar effect - to strengthen the traditional distrust of
Yanqui imperialism.

3

‘The Bridgehead’, 1959-1969

One of the most striking news photographs of 1960
showed the tall, youthful, bearded ‘Maximum Leader’ of
the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz,- being greeted
with a bear hug by the short, podgy, beaming Soviet
leader Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations in New
York. Khrushchev’s boisterous embrace symbolized a
major shift in both Soviet foreign policy and KGB
operations. Moscow had at last a charismatic
revolutionary standard-bearer in the New World.

Castro later claimed that he was already a Marxist-
Leninist when he began his guerrilla campaign against the
corrupt pro-American Cuban dictatorship of Fulgencio
Batista in 1953: ‘We felt that Lenin was with us, and that
gave us great strength in fighting.’ That claim, however,
was one of a number of attempts by Castro, once in
power, to rewrite the history of his unorthodox early
career. The word ‘socialism’ did not appear in any of
Castro’s speeches until 1961.- Castro had a privileged
upbringing in an affluent Cuban landowning family, and
drew his early political inspiration not from Lenin but
from the radical nationalist Partido del Pueblo Cubano
and the ideals of its anti-Marxist founder, Eduardo

Chibas. Until 1958 the Cuban Communist Party - the
Partido Socialista Popular (PSP) - continued to insist,
with Moscow’s backing, that Batista could only be
overthrown not by Castro’s guerrillas but by a popular
uprising of Cuban workers led by the Communists. As
late as October 1958, three months before Batista fled and
Castro entered Havana in triumph, Khrushchev spoke
pessimistically of ‘the heroic but unequal struggle of the
Cuban people’ against imperialist oppression.- Not until
27 December did the Kremlin approve a limited supply of
arms by the Czechs to Castro’s guerrillas. Even then it
insisted that only German weapons of the Second World
War era or arms of Czech design be handed over, for fear
that a Soviet arms shipment,

33 if discovered, might provoke a crisis with the United
States. The arms, however, arrived too late to make a
difference. At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve
1958, Batista fled from Cuba, leaving Castro and his
guerrillas to enter Havana in triumph.-

The KGB’s foreign intelligence arm, the First Chief
Directorate (FCD), had realized Castro’s potential earlier
than either the Soviet Foreign Ministry or the
International Department of the Communist Party Central
Committee. The first of its officers to do so was a new
recruit, Nikolai Sergeyevich Feonov, who was sent to
Mexico City in 1953 in order to improve his Spanish

before entering the KGB training school. En route to
Mexico, Leonov became ‘firm friends’ with Fidel’s more
left-wing younger brother, Raul Castro, at a socialist
youth congress in Prague, then crossed the Atlantic with
him aboard an Italian freighter bound for Havana. To his
later embarrassment, on arrival at Havana Leonov insisted
that Raul hand him the negatives of all the photographs he
had taken of him during the crossing for fear that they
might be used for ‘provocations’.- Soon after Leonov’s
arrival in Mexico, Fidel Castro led an unsuccessful attack
on an army barracks which was followed by the
imprisonment of himself and Raul for the next two years.
After his release, Fidel spent a year in exile in Mexico and
appealed to the Soviet embassy for arms to support a
guerrilla campaign against Batista. Though the appeal was
turned down, Leonov met Castro for the first time in
1956, was immediately impressed by his potential as a
charismatic guerrilla leader, began regular meetings with
him and gave him enthusiastic moral support. Leonov
privately regarded Castro’s politics as immature and
incoherent, but noted that both Fidel’s closest advisers,
Raul Castro and the Argentinian Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara,
appeared to be committed Marxists.- ‘I am one of those’,
wrote Che in 1957, ‘. . . who believes that the solution to
the problems of this world lies behind what is called the
Iron Curtain. ’-

Leonov’s far-sightedness and early association with the

Castro brothers launched him on a career which led
eventually to his appointment in 1983 as deputy head of
the FCD, responsible for KGB operations throughout
North and South America. His early assessments of Fidel,
however, made little impression in the Centre (KGB
headquarters).- Even when Castro took power in January
1959, Moscow still doubted his ability to withstand
American pressure. Lacking a residency in Havana, the
KGB obtained much of its Cuban intelligence from the
PSP,- which looked askance at the apparently moderate
complexion of the new regime. By midsummer, however,
the moderates had been ousted from the government,
leaving the cabinet as little more than a rubber stamp for
policies decided by Castro, the ‘Maximum Leader’, and
his advisers. Though initially restrained in his public
utterances, Castro privately regarded the United States as
‘the sworn enemy of our nation’. He had written a few
months before coming to power, ‘When this war [against
Batista] is over. I’ll start a much longer and bigger war of
my own: the war I’m going to fight against [the
Americans]. I realize that will be my true destiny.’ While
American hostility was later to reinforce Castro’s alliance
with the Soviet Union, it did not cause it. The initiative
for the alliance came from Havana.—

From the outset the KGB was closely involved in
establishing the Soviet-Cuban connection. In July 1959
Castro sent his first intelligence chief, Ramiro Valdes, to

Mexico City for secret talks with the Soviet ambassador
and KGB residency.— Three months later, a Soviet
‘cultural delegation’ headed by the former KGB resident
in Buenos Aires, Aleksandr Ivanovich Alekseyev, arrived
in Havana to establish the first Cuban residency.
Alekseyev presented Fidel Castro with a bottle of vodka,
several jars of caviar and a photographic portfolio of
Moscow, then assured him of the Soviet people’s ‘great
admiration’ both for himself and for the Cuban
Revolution. Castro opened the bottle and sent for biscuits
on which to spread the caviar. ‘What good vodka, what
good caviar!’ he exclaimed. ‘I think it’s worth
establishing trade relations with the Soviet Union!’ Castro
then ‘stunned’ his visitor by declaring that Marx and
Lenin were his intellectual guides. ‘At that time’, said
Alekseyev later, ‘we could not even imagine that [Castro]
knew Marxist theory.’—

During his meeting with Alekseyev, Castro proposed a
visit to Cuba by Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan,
Khrushchev’s favourite personal emissary and elder
statesman of his regime, whose career stretched back to
the Bolshevik Revolution. Under Brezhnev, Mikoyan ’s
career was summed up behind his back as ‘From Ilyich to
Ilyich [from Lenin to Brezhnev], without a heart attack or
paralysis.’ Before leaving for Havana as the most senior
Soviet representative ever to visit Latin America,
Mikoyan summoned Leonov to his presence and asked

him if it was really true that he knew the Castro brothers.
Among the evidence which persuaded Mikoyan to take
him as his interpreter were the photographs taken by Raul
while crossing the Atlantic seven years earlier. The main
Cuban-Soviet talks took place not around a Havana
conference table but after dark at Fidel’s hunting cabin by
a lagoon, the night air punctuated by croaking tropical
frogs and buzzing mosquitoes. Most of their meals were
of fish they caught in the lagoon and cooked themselves
or else taken in workers’ dining halls. They slept on
concrete floors at an unfinished campsite, wrapped in
soldiers’ greatcoats for warmth, occasionally warming up
with strong aromatic coffee. Mikoyan felt transported
back from life as a top-ranking Moscow bureaucrat to his
revolutionary origins. ‘Yes, this is a real revolution,’ he
told Leonov. ‘Just like ours. I feel as though I’ve returned
to my youth!’ By a trade agreement signed during his
visit, the Soviet Union agreed to purchase about one-fifth
of Cuba’s sugar exports, supply oil at well below world
prices and make Cuba a low-interest loan of $100 million
for economic development projects.—

On 15 March 1960, soon after Mikoyan’ s return,
Khrushchev sent his first personal message to Castro.
Instead of putting it in writing, however, he instructed that
it should be delivered verbally by the KGB. Aleksey ev
informed Castro that Khrushchev wanted him to have no
doubt about ‘our sympathy and fellow-feeling’. To flatter

Castro personally, he was told that he was to receive
honoraria for the publication of his speeches and articles
in Russian. According to Alekseyev, the Maximum
Leader was ‘visibly moved’ by the news that his words
were held in such esteem in Moscow. Khrushchev also
announced that Cuba was free to purchase whatever arms
it wished from Czechoslovakia - ‘and, if necessary, then
directly from the Soviet Union’.— The Cuban arms
purchases were negotiated in Prague by a delegation
headed by Raul. Despite sleeping with his boots on and
demanding the services of blonde prostitutes, he displayed
a Marxist-Leninist fervour which made a good impression
on his hosts. According to the Czech general responsible
for hosting the Cuban delegation, ‘The[ir] villa was of
course tapped but we learned nothing from our bugs that
our guests would have been unwilling to tell us.’— During
Raul’s visit to Prague, Leonov was personally instructed
by the foreign intelligence chief, Aleksandr Mikhailovich
Sakharovsky, head of the FCD, to travel to Prague, stay
with the KGB resident and, without the knowledge of
either the Czechs or the Soviet embassy, discover a way
of passing on a personal invitation from Khrushchev to
visit Moscow. An older and experienced KGB colonel
was sent to assist him. Making contact with Raul Castro
proved more difficult than Leonov had expected. Raul’s
villa was in a closed area of the city, he travelled
constantly surrounded by armed guards, and no advance
timetable of his movements was available. In the end

Leonov decided to sit on a street bench on a route which
Raul’s car was bound to pass on its way to the villa. Raul
would recognize Leonov, and tell the car to stop. Beyond
this point, Leonov would improvise. The plan worked;
Raul picked Leonov up, and took him to the villa which
the guards only allowed him to enter when he produced
his Soviet diplomatic passport. Leonov waited for a
moment when the guards were out of earshot, then
whispered to Raul that he had brought with him a
personal invitation from Khrushchev. Two days later, on
17 July, they flew to Moscow, so deep in conversation
that Leonov forgot that, for reasons of protocol, he was
not supposed to accompany Raul off the plane at the
airport, where a reception committee of military top brass
was waiting for him on the airport tarmac. As Leonov
emerged with Raul at the top of the aircraft steps, he was
dragged away by burly KGB bodyguards who were
probably unaware of his role in arranging the visit and, he
believes, would have beaten him up had Raul not shouted
after him, ‘Nikolai, we must see one another again
without fail!’ In the course of Raul’s visit, further arms
supplies were negotiated along with the sending to Cuba
of Soviet military advisers, some of them Spanish
Republican exiles living in Moscow who had fought in
the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War.—

As in arranging Raul Castro’s visit to Moscow, the
KGB played a much more important role than the Foreign

Ministry in developing the Cuban alliance. Fidel Castro
regarded Alekseyev, the KGB resident, as a personal
friend, telling him of his pleasure that they ‘are able to
meet directly, bypassing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
and every rule of protocol’. The Maximum Leader did not
take to Sergei Kudryavtsev, who arrived as Soviet
ambassador in Havana following the formal establishment
in May 1960 of diplomatic relations between Cuba and
the Soviet Union. Kudryavtsev repelled the Cubans by
behaving - according to Alekseyev - as arrogantly as ‘one
of Batista’s generals’. He also appeared constantly
preoccupied with his own security, frequently wearing a
bullet-proof vest as he travelled round Havana. Castro
continued to use the KGB as his main channel of
communication with Moscow. Alekseyev, not
Kudryavtsev, remained his chief contact within the Soviet
embassy.— The FCD set up a new section (which became
its Second Department) to specialize in Latin American
affairs, hitherto the responsibility of its First (North
American) Department. Leonov was appointed to run the
Cuban desk.—

Despite the influential KGB presence in Havana,
Khrushchev’s policy to Castro’s Cuba was distorted by
woefully inaccurate KGB and GRU intelligence reports
from the United States. For most of the Cold War, the
Washington and New York legal residencies had little
success in providing the intelligence from inside the

federal government which had been so plentiful during
the Second World War. Their limitations were clearly
exposed during the two years which led up to the most
dangerous moment of the Cold War, the Cuban missile
crisis of 1962. Conspiracy theory became a substitute for
high-grade intelligence. On 29 June 1960 the KGB
Chairman, Aleksandr Shelepin, personally delivered to
Khrushchev an alarmist assessment of American policy,
based on a horrifically misinformed report from an
unidentified NATO liaison officer with the CIA:

In the CIA it is known that the leadership of the Pentagon
is convinced of the need to initiate a war with the Soviet
Union ‘as soon as possible’ . . . Right now the USA has
the capability to wipe out Soviet missile bases and other
military targets with its bomber forces. But over the next
little while the defence forces of the Soviet Union will
grow . . . and the opportunity will disappear ... As a
result of these assumptions, the chiefs at the Pentagon are
hoping to launch a preventive war against the Soviet
Union.

Khrushchev took this dangerously misguided report at its
improbable face value. On 9 July he issued a public
warning to the Pentagon ‘not to forget that, as shown at
the latest tests, we have rockets which can land in a pre-
set square target 13,000 kilometres away’. ‘Soviet

artillerymen’, he declared, ‘can support the Cuban people
with their rocket fire should the aggressive forces in the
Pentagon dare to start intervention in Cuba.’ During his
visit to Moscow later in July, Raul Castro conveyed
Fidel’s gratitude for Khrushchev’s speech. He also
expressed his personal admiration for the KGB and asked
for some of its officers to be sent to Havana to help to
train Cuban intelligence. In August 1960 the Centre
decided on a new codeword for Cuba - AVANPOST
(‘Bridgehead’). Thanks chiefly to Castro and the KGB,
the Soviet Union now had, for the first time in its history,
a foothold in Latin America.—

Castro and his chief lieutenants made no secret of their
desire to inspire the rest of Latin America with their own
revolutionary example. As early as April 1959 eighty
guerrillas set sail from Cuba in a comic-opera attempt to
‘liberate’ Panama which ended with their own surrender
to the Panamanian National Guard.— Che Guevara, whose
revolutionary fantasies were on an even grander scale
than Castro’s, told Kudryavtsev in October 1960, ‘Latin
America is at boiling point, and next year we can expect
revolutionary explosions in several countries . . .’—
Though the explosions turned out to be damp squibs, they
generated far less publicity than the CIA’s inept attempt,
approved by the White House, to topple the Castro regime
by landing an American-backed ‘Cuban brigade’ at the
Bay of Pigs in April 1961, which gave the Maximum

Leader an international reputation as a revolutionary
David engaged in a heroic struggle with the imperialist
American Goliath. Throughout the Bay of Pigs operation,
Leonov was in the office of Shelepin’s inexperienced
successor as KGB Chairman, Vladimir Semichastny,
briefing him every two to three hours on the latest
developments. On the Chairman’s wall he put up two
large maps: one showing the course of events as reported
by the Americans, the other based on Soviet sources in
Cuba.— It can scarcely have occurred to either Leonov or
Semichastny that the CIA operation would end so rapidly
in humiliating defeat. More than 1 ,000 prisoners captured
at the Bay of Pigs were taken to a sports stadium in
Havana where for four days Castro flamboyantly
interrogated and harangued them on television. At one
point, broadcast on TV news programmes across the
world, the prisoners applauded the man they had come to
overthrow. The abortive invasion served both to raise
Castro’s personal popularity to new heights and to speed
Cuba’s transformation into a one-party state. In front of
cheering crowds at May Day celebrations of the Cuban
victory over American imperialism, Castro announced
that Cuba was now a socialist state which would hold no
further elections. The revolution, he declared, was the
direct expression of the will of the people.

In Washington, President John F. Kennedy, who had
been in office for only three months at the time of the Bay

of Pigs debacle, despairingly asked his special counsel,
Theodore Sorensen, ‘How could I have been so stupid?’
At a summit meeting with Kennedy at Vienna in June,
Khrushchev belligerently demanded an end to the three-
power status of West Berlin and a German peace treaty by
the end of the year. Kennedy said afterwards to the
journalist James Reston: ‘I think [Khrushchev] did it
because of the Bay of Pigs. I think he thought anyone who
was so young and inexperienced as to get in that mess
could be taken, and anyone who got into it and didn’t see
it through had no guts. So he just beat the hell out of
me.’—

Taking its cue from Khrushchev, the KGB also set out
‘to beat the hell’ out of the United States by exploiting the
Cuban bridgehead. On 29 July 1961 Shelepin sent
Khrushchev the outline of a new and aggressive global
grand strategy against the Main Adversary, designed ‘to
create circumstances in different areas of the world which
would assist in diverting the attention and forces of the
United States and its allies, and would tie them down
during the settlement of the question of a German peace
treaty and West Berlin’. The first part of the plan
proposed to use national liberation movements in the
Third World to secure an advantage in the East- West
struggle and ‘to activate by the means available to the
KGB armed uprisings against pro-Western reactionary
governments’. At the top of the list for demolition

Shelepin placed ‘reactionary’ regimes in the Main
Adversary’s own backyard in Central America. His
master-plan envisaged creating a second anti-American
bridgehead in Nicaragua, where the newly founded Frente
Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) was dedicated
to following the example of the Cuban Revolution and
overthrowing the brutal pro-American dictatorship of the
Somoza dynasty. President Franklin Roosevelt was said to
have justified his support for the repellent founder of the
dynasty with the cynical maxim, ‘I know he’s a son of a
bitch but he’s our son of a bitch.’ To the Centre the
Somozas probably appeared as vulnerable to guerrilla
attack as Batista had proved in Cuba. Shelepin proposed
that the KGB secretly co-ordinate a ‘revolutionary front’
in Central America in collaboration with the Cubans and
the Sandinistas. On 1 August, with only minor
amendments, his grand strategy was approved as a
Central Committee directive.—

The FSLN leader, Carlos Fonseca Amador, codenamed
GIDROLOG (‘Hydrologist’), was a trusted KGB agent.—
In 1957, at the age of twenty-one, Fonseca had been the
only Nicaraguan to attend the Sixth World Youth Festival
in Moscow, and he had stayed on in the USSR for another
four months. His book, A Nicaraguan in Moscow, which
he wrote on his return, was full of wide-eyed admiration
for the Soviet Union as a people’s democracy with a free
press, total freedom of religion, and - even more

improbably - magnificently efficient state-run industries.
Fonseca was equally enthusiastic about Fidel Castro.
‘With the victory of the Cuban Revolution’, he said later,
‘the rebellious Nicaraguan spirit recovered its brightness .
. . The Marxism of Lenin, Fidel, Che [Guevara] and Ho
Chi-Minh was taken up by the Sandinista National
Liberation Front which has started anew the difficult road
of guerrilla warfare . . . Guerrilla combat will lead us to
final liberation.’—

Within weeks of the victory of Castro’s guerrillas in
January 1959, Tomas Borge, one of the founders of the
FSLN, and a group of Sandinistas arrived in Havana,
where they were promised ‘all possible support’ by Che.—
Much though he admired Fidel and Che Guevara, Fonseca
was a very different kind of personality - remembered by
one of his admirers as ‘almost always serious’ and by his
son as ‘Super austere, very disciplined, methodical,
cautious. He didn’t drink or smoke.’ Fonseca was a
dedicated revolutionary with little sense of humour and a
solemn expression. Only one published photograph shows
him with a smile on his face.—

The KGB’s second major penetration of the Sandinistas
was probably the recruitment by the Mexico City
residency in 1960 of the Nicaraguan exile Edelberto
Torres Espinosa (codenamed PIMEN), a close friend of
Fonseca as well as General Secretary of the anti-Somoza

Nicaraguan United Front in Mexico, and President of the
Latin American Friendship Society. Initial contact with
Torres had been established when his daughter
approached the Soviet embassy with a request to study at
the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow.
The Mexico City residency reported to the Centre that
Torres was committed to the liberation of the whole of
Latin America and saw revolution in Nicaragua as simply
one step along that path.— An admiring biographer of
Fonseca describes the older Torres as his ‘mentor’.
Among the projects on which they had worked together
was a study of the anti-imperialist nineteenth-century
Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario. Fonseca was later married
in Torres’s house in Mexico City.—

Shelepin reported to Khrushchev in July 1961:

In Nicaragua ... at the present time - via KGB agents and
confidential contacts- PIMEN, GIDROLOG and LOT— -
[the KGB] is influencing and providing financial aid to
the Sandino [Sandinista] Revolutionary Front and three
partisan detachments which belong to the Internal
Revolutionary Resistance Front, which works in co-
ordination with its friends [Cuban and Soviet bloc
intelligence services]. In order to obtain weapons and
ammunition, it is proposed that an additional $10,000 be
allocated to these detachments from KGB funds.—

The main early objective of KGB penetration of the
Sandinista FSLN was the creation within it of what the
Centre called ‘a sabotage-terrorism group’ headed by
Manuel Ramon de Jesus Andara y Ubeda (codenamed
PRIM), a Nicaraguan surgeon working in Mexico.— On
22 November 1961 Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the head of
the FCD, reported to Semichastny, the KGB Chairman:

In accordance with the long-term plan for the KGB’s
intelligence operations in Latin America and Decision No.
191/75-GS of the highest authorities dated 1 August 1961
[approving Shelepin’s grand strategy in the Third World],
our Residency in Mexico has taken measures to provide
assistance in building up the national liberation movement
in Nicaragua and creating a hotbed of unrest for the
Americans in this area. The Residency, through the
trusted agent GIDROLOG [Fonseca] in Mexico, selected
a group of Nicaraguan students (12 people), headed by the
Nicaraguan patriot-doctor PRIM [Andara y Ubeda], and
arranged for their operational training. All operations with
prim’s group are conducted by GIDROLOG in the name
of the Nicaraguan revolutionary organization ‘The
Sandinista Front’, of which he, GIDROLOG, is the
leader. The supervision of the group’s future activities
and financial aid given to it will also be provided through
GIDROLOG. At the present time PRIM’s group is ready

to be despatched to Honduras, where it will undergo
additional training and fill out its ranks with new
guerrillas, after which the group will be sent to
Nicaraguan territory. During the initial period PRIM’s
group will be tasked with the following assignments: the
organization of a partisan detachment on Nicaraguan
territory, filling out its ranks with the local population,
and creating support bases of weapon and ammunition
supplies. In addition, the detachment will make individual
raids on government establishments and enterprises
belonging to Americans, creating the appearance of a
massive partisan struggle on Nicaraguan territory. In
order to equip PRIM’s group and provide for its final
training in combat operations, assistance amounting to
$10,000 is required. The highest authorities have given
their consent to using the sum indicated for these
purposes.

I request your approval.

Though Semichastny had only just been appointed KGB
Chairman and had been selected by Khrushchev for his
political reliability rather than his understanding of
intelligence, he did not hesitate. The day after receiving
Sakharovsky’s report, he gave his approval.—
Semichastny would not have dared to do so unless he had
been confident of Khrushchev’s support. There can be
little doubt that Khrushchev shared the KGB’s

exaggerated optimism on the prospects for a second
bridgehead in Nicaragua on the Cuban model.

Having gained Semichastny’s approval, Sakharovsky
directed the KGB residency in Mexico City to give
Andara y Ubeda (PRIM) $6,000 to purchase weapons and
instruct him to despatch an initial group of seven
guerrillas, later to be increased to twenty-two, from
Mexico to Nicaragua. His guerrilla group was to be
assembled at a camp in Nicaragua by 1 March 1962,
ready to begin sabotage operations against American
bases a fortnight later. Andara y Ubeda, however,
insisted, no doubt correctly, that his men were too poorly
armed and trained to launch attacks on the well-defended
US bases. Instead, they engaged in guerrilla and
intelligence operations against the Somoza regime, non-
military American organizations and anti-Castro Cuban
refugees. Between November 1961 and January 1964
Andara y Ubeda’ s guerrillas received a total of $25,200
through the Mexico City residency. Andara y Ubeda,
however, was not at first aware that he was being funded
by the KGB. Torres (PIMEN) told him that the money
came from members of the ‘progressive bourgeoisie’ who
wished to overthrow the Somoza dictatorship. Andara y
Ubeda was asked - and agreed - to sign a political
manifesto, supposedly prepared by his progressive
bourgeois backers (in reality drafted by the KGB), which
called for a Nicaraguan revolution as part of a socialist

struggle against imperialism.—

Torres also kept the KGB informed on the activities of
other small Sandinista guerrilla groups, who were being
trained with varying success in the jungles of Honduras
and Costa Rica. The Mexico City residency reported to
the Centre that he saw himself not as a Soviet agent but as
a member of a national liberation movement working with
the Soviet Union to emancipate the peoples of Latin
America from economic and political enslavement by the
United States. Torres’s case officers, V. P. Nefedov and
V. V. Kostikov, none the less regarded him as ‘a valuable
and reliable KGB agent’, who never failed to fulfil his
assignments.—

In the heady early years of the Cuban Revolution, the
Centre seems to have believed that its example was
capable of inspiring movements similar to the Sandinistas
in much of Latin America. Guerrilla groups sprang up in
Colombia, Venezuela, Peru and Guatemala. In 1961
Castro’s intelligence organization was reorganized as the
Direccidn General de Inteligencia (DGI), under the
Ministry of the Interior. With Ramiro Valdes, Castro’s
first intelligence chief, in overall charge as Interior
Minister, Manuel Pineiro Losada, nicknamed ‘Barba
Roja’ because of his luxuriant red beard, became head of
the DGI. Pineiro’s chief priority was the export of the
Cuban Revolution. The DGI contained a Direccidn de

Liberacion Nacional with three ‘Liberation Committees’
responsible, respectively, for exporting revolution to the
Caribbean, Central and South America. Pineiro and Che
Guevara spent many evenings, usually into the early
hours and sometimes until daybreak, discussing the
prospects for revolution with would-be revolutionaries
from Latin America and the Caribbean. Always spread
out on the table while they talked was a large map of the
country concerned which Che examined in detail,
alternately puffing on a cigar and drinking strong
Argentinian tea - mate - through a straw.—

While Che and Pineiro dreamed their revolutionary
dreams and traced imaginary guerrilla operations on their
maps into the early hours, the KGB sought methodically
to strengthen its liaison with and influence on the DGI.
Among the most striking evidence of the closeness of the
DGI’s integration into the intelligence community of the
Soviet bloc was its collaboration in the use of ‘illegals’,
intelligence officers and agents operating under bogus
identities and (usually) false nationalities. In 1961 the
Spanish- speaking KGB illegal Vladimir Vasilyevich
Grinchenko (successively codenamed RON and KLOD),
who ten years earlier had obtained an Argentinian
passport under a false identity, arrived in Cuba, where he
spent the next three years advising the DGI on illegal
operations.—

Further KGB exploitation of the Cuban ‘bridgehead’,
however, was dramatically interrupted by the missile
crisis of October 1962. In May Khrushchev summoned
Alekseyev, the KGB resident in Havana, unexpectedly to
Moscow and told him he was to replace the unpopular
Kudryavtsev as Soviet ambassador. A fortnight later
Khrushchev astonished Alekseyev once again by saying
that he had decided to install offensive nuclear missile
sites in Cuba targeted against the United States. A small
delegation, including Alekseyev, was sent to Havana to
secure Castro’s approval. ‘If the issue had been only our
defence’, said Castro later, ‘we would not have accepted
the missiles.’ He agreed to the building of the missile
sites, he insisted, in the broader interests of solidarity with
the Soviet bloc - or, as Moscow preferred to call it, ‘the
socialist commonwealth’. Though Khrushchev sought the
KGB’s assistance in cementing the alliance with Castro,
he did not trouble to seek its assessment of the likely
American reaction to the building of the Cuban missile
bases. Acting, like Stalin, as his own intelligence analyst,
he rashly concluded that ‘the Americans will accept the
missiles if we install them before their [mid-term
Congressional] elections in November’. Few world
leaders have been guilty of greater foreign policy
misjudgements. The discovery of the construction of the
missile sites by US U-2 spy planes in October 1962 led to
the most dangerous crisis of the Cold War.—

Khrushchev’s decision to resolve the crisis by
announcing - without consulting Castro - the unilateral
withdrawal of ‘all Soviet offensive arms’ from Cuba
caused outrage in Havana. Castro angrily told students at
Havana University that Khrushchev ‘had no balls’.
Privately, he denounced the Soviet leader as a
‘sonofabitch’, a ‘bastard’ and an ‘asshole’. In a bizarre
and emotional letter to Khrushchev, Castro declared that
the removal of the missile bases brought tears to
‘countless eyes of Cuban and Soviet men who were
willing to die with supreme dignity’. Aleksey ev warned
Moscow in the aftermath of the missile crisis that ‘one or
two years of especially careful work with Castro will be
required until he acquires all of the qualities of Marxist-
Leninist party spirit’. —

In an attempt to shore up the Cuban bridgehead,
Khrushchev issued a personal invitation to Castro to visit
the USSR in order to ‘become acquainted with the Soviet
Union and the great victories achieved by its peoples’,
and ‘to discuss matters concerning relations between the
peoples of the Soviet Union and Cuba, and other matters
of common interest’. In April 1963, accompanied by
Alekseyev, Castro and his entourage arrived in Moscow,
intending to stay only a few days. Castro was persuaded,
however, to stay on for a forty-day tour of the Soviet
Union which, amid almost continuous applause, took him
from Leningrad to the Mongolian border. Old Bolsheviks

in Leningrad told him that no one since Lenin had
received such a hero’s welcome. Wearing his olive-green
battle fatigues when the weather was warm enough,
Castro addressed enthusiastic crowds at sports stadiums,
factories and town centres across the Soviet Union. He
inspected a rocket base and the Northern Fleet, reviewed
the May Day parade with Khrushchev from the top of the
Kremlin wall, was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, and
received the Order of Lenin and a gold star.— Castro
responded with effusive praise for the achievements of
Soviet Communism and its support for the Cuban
Revolution. He told a mass rally in Red Square:

The Cuban Revolution became possible only because the
Russian Revolution of 1917 had been accomplished long
before. (Applause) Without the existence of the Soviet
Union, Cuba’s socialist revolution would have been
impossible . . . The might of the Soviet Union and of the
whole socialist camp stopped imperialist aggression
against our country. It is quite natural that we nourish
feelings of profound and eternal gratitude to the Soviet
Union. (Applause) . . . From the bottom of their hearts the
peoples of the entire world, all the peoples of the world,
must regard your success as their own. (Applause)—

Khrushchev told the Presidium that his personal talks with

Castro had lasted several days: . As soon as I finished

breakfast, he would come and wait for me. We would sit
down together until 2:00. Then we would have lunch and
more time together ... He was left very satisfied.’—
Throughout his forty-day triumphal progress across the
Soviet Union, Castro was escorted both by Alekseyev and
by Nikolai Leonov, the young KGB officer who had first
identified Castro’s revolutionary potential in the mid-
1950s. Leonov acted as Castro’s interpreter and, when the
visit was over, boasted in the Centre that he and the
Maximum Leader were now firm friends for life. In the
wake of the visit, the Centre received the first group of
Cuban foreign intelligence officers for training by the
KGB.^

Scarcely had Castro returned to Cuba, however, than
doubts returned in the minds of his Russian hosts about
his reliability and political maturity. Moscow was
particularly disturbed by the increasing public emphasis
in Havana on ‘exporting the revolution’. In September
1963, Che Guevara published a new, much-quoted article
on guerrilla warfare. Previously, he had insisted on the
importance of a series of preconditions for the
establishment of guerrilla bases, such as the absence of an
elected, constitutional government. Now he appeared to
be arguing that no preconditions were necessary.
‘Revolution’, he declared, ‘can be made at any given
moment anywhere in the world.’ Worse still, in Moscow’s

eyes, was the fact that Che’s revolutionary heresies
seemed to have the blessing of the Castro regime. Despite
his personal closeness to Castro, even Alekseyev was
shocked. A cable from the Soviet embassy in Havana to
Moscow accused Che of ignoring ‘basic tenets of
Marxism-Leninism’ and denounced his essay as
‘ultrarevolutionary bordering on adventurism’. Che paid
no heed either to the criticism from Moscow or to the
opposition to his ideas from Latin American Communist
parties. Henceforth he was to be personally involved in
the export of the Cuban Revolution.—

As well as being increasingly alarmed by Cuban
‘adventurism’, Moscow was also dismayed by the failure
of the Sandinistas to live up to its early expectations. The
first FSLN guerrilla force, inadequately dressed in olive-
green uniforms (which, though unsuitable for the climate,
were chosen to preserve its self-image as freedom
fighters), endured a miserable existence at its
mountainous base on the Honduras-Nicaragua border. As
Borge later recalled, ‘There was nothing to eat, not even
animals to hunt ... It wasn’t just hunger that was terrible,
but constant cold twenty- four hours a day ... We were
always wet through with the clinging rain of that part of
the country . . .’ In order to survive, the guerrillas were
reduced to appealing to local peasants for food. In 1963
the demoralized guerrilla force was routed with heavy
loss of life by the Nicaraguan National Guard. For the

next few years, in the words of one of its supporters, the
FSLN had ‘neither the arms, the numbers nor the
organization to confront the National Guard again’.— In
1964, with the assistance of Torres,— the Mexico City
residency reconstituted a sabotage and intelligence group
(DRG) from the remnants of Andara y Ubeda’s (PRIM’s)
guerrillas. The group was given one of the great historic
codenames of Soviet history, chosen by Lenin as the title
of the newspaper he had founded in 1900: ISKRA -
‘Spark’.— By 1964, however, the extravagant optimism in
the Centre at the prospects for Latin American revolution
which had inspired Shelepin’s 1961 master-plan had
faded. The KGB plainly expected that it would be some
years before the Sandinista ‘spark’ succeeded in igniting a
Nicaraguan revolution.

During his summer leave in 1964, Aleksey ev was told
by Shelepin to discuss Cuban affairs with Leonid
Brezhnev. This was the first hint he received of
preparations for the KGB-assisted coup which led to
Khrushchev’s overthrow in October and Brezhnev’s
emergence as Soviet leader.— Soon after the coup,
Mikhail Suslov, the chief Party ideologist, told the Central
Committee that Khrushchev had been profligate in the
promises he had made to other nations. Though he did not
identify the states concerned, Suslov probably had Cuba
chiefly in mind.— The Kremlin watched aghast as its
Cuban allies squandered its economic aid on such

frivolities as the giant Coppelia ice-cream emporium.
Resentment at the cost of supporting Cuba’s mismanaged
economy combined with growing annoyance at Castro’s
revolutionary indiscipline. In the mid-1960s, despite
opposition from Latin American Communist parties as
well as from Moscow, Cuba made unsuccessful attempts
to set up guerrilla bases in Peru, Argentina, Venezuela,
Guatemala and Colombia.—

The main emissaries of the Cuban Revolution were
illegals belonging to, or controlled by, the DGI. Cuban
illegals were trained far more rapidly than their KGB
counterparts: partly because the DGI was less thorough
and paid less attention to devising secure ‘legends’, partly
because it was far easier for a Cuban to assume another
Latin American nationality than for a Russian to pose as a
west European. Instead of going directly to their Latin
American destinations, most Cuban illegals were
deployed via Czechoslovakia. According to statistics kept
by the Czechoslovak StB (and handed over by it to the
KGB), from 1962 to 1966 a total of 650 Cuban illegals
passed through Czechoslovakia. The great majority
carried Venezuelan, Dominican, Argentinian or
Colombian passports and identity documents. In most
cases the documents were genuine save for the
substitution of a photograph of the illegal for that of the
original owner.— One probable sign that the KGB had
begun to distance itself from the Cuban attempt to export

revolution, however, was the return to Moscow in 1964 of
Grinchenko, who for the past three years had been
advising the DGI on illegal operations.— He does not
appear to have been replaced. In 1965, however, in an
attempt to reinforce collaboration with the DGI,
Semichastny (travelling under the pseudonym ‘Yelenin’)
led a KGB delegation to Cuba. When they met in the
country house of the Soviet ambassador, the easy rapport
between Alekseyev and Castro quickly created an
atmosphere conducive to convivial discussion over a
shashlik dinner. Semichastny was struck by Castro’s
personal fascination with intelligence tradecraft. Later, as
they watched a KGB film on the tracking down and
interrogation of Oleg Penkovsky, the senior GRU officer
who had given SIS and the CIA crucial intelligence on
Soviet missile site construction before the Cuban missile
crisis, Castro turned to Valdes, his Interior Minister, and
the DGI officers who accompanied him, and exhorted
them to learn as much as possible from the KGB
delegation during their stay.— Despite his enthusiasm for
KGB tradecraft, however, Castro continued to alarm the
Centre by what it regarded as his excess of revolutionary
zeal. In January 1966, undeterred by Moscow’s
reservations, Havana hosted a Trilateral Conference to
support the onward march of revolution in Africa, Asia
and Latin America. Tor Cuban revolutionaries’, Castro
declared, ‘the battleground against imperialism
encompasses the whole world . . . And so we say and

proclaim that the revolutionary movement in every comer
of the world can count on Cuban combat fighters.

Castro’s confident rhetoric, however, was belied by the
lack of success of the revolutionary movement in Latin
America. In the summer of 1967 the Sandinistas launched
a new offensive which the Centre condemned as
premature.— Their guerrilla base in the mountainous
jungle on the Honduran border was far better organized
than at the time of the debacle in 1963, thanks largely to
much greater support from local peasants. According to
one of the guerrillas, ‘They took on the job of wiping out
tracks where the [FSLN] column had passed; the
companeros hung out coloured cloths to warn us of any
danger; they invented signals for us with different sounds
. . . We had a whole team of campesino brothers and
sisters who knew the area like the back of their hand.

At the mountain of Pancasan in August 1967, however,
the Sandinistas suffered another disastrous defeat at the
hands of the Nicaraguan National Guard. Among those
killed was the ISKRA leader, Rigoberto Cmz Arguello
(codenamed GABRIEL). The Centre blamed this disaster
on ‘disloyalty’ in the FSLN leadership (all of which had
gathered at the guerrilla base), inadequate resources with
which to take on the National Guard and the ‘unprepared
state’ of the local population.— The jubilant Nicaraguan
dictator, Tachito Somoza, boasted that the Sandinistas
were finished. The late 1960s and early 1970s were ‘a

period of silence’ for the FSLN during which it continued
to rob banks to finance its underground existence but
avoided open clashes with the National Guard.—

The rout of the Sandinistas was quickly followed by a
major setback in the Cuban attempt to ‘export the
revolution’. In 1966 Che Guevara devised a hopelessly
unrealistic plan to set up a base in Bolivia, the poorest
country in Latin America, to train guerrillas from all parts
of the continent and spread revolution across the Western
hemisphere. Che convinced himself that he would turn
Bolivia into another Vietnam. Argentina and Brazil would
intervene and provoke mass protest movements which
would bring down their military regimes. According to
Che’s fantasy master-plan for continental revolution, the
United States would then also be drawn in. The strains of
fighting guerrillas in both Vietnam and Latin America
would force Washington to set up a dictatorship whose
inevitable disintegration would destroy the bourgeois state
and open the way to revolution in the United States. —

To conceal his journey to, and presence in, Bolivia for
as long as possible, Che employed some of the techniques
used by the DGI Illegals Directorate. He shaved off his
beard and moustache, had his long hair cut short, put on a
suit, disguised himself as a Uruguayan bureaucrat and had
his photograph inserted in two false Uruguayan passports,
each made out in a different name. In October 1966 Che

flew to Moscow, then - like most Cuban illegals -
returned to Latin America via Prague on one of his
passports. In November he arrived in Bolivia, where his
grandiose scheme for setting the continent ablaze rapidly
reduced itself to guerrilla operations in a small area of the
Rio Grande basin.— Only a few years earlier, before his
revolutionary rhetoric lost all touch with Latin American
reality, Che had insisted, ‘A guerrilla war is a people’s
war ... To attempt to conduct this kind of war without the
support of the populace is a prelude to inevitable
disaster.’— Che’s Bolivian adventure ended in ‘inevitable
disaster’ for precisely that reason. Not a single peasant in
the Rio Grande basin joined his guerrillas. Even the
Bolivian Communist Party (accused of treachery by Che)
failed to support him. He wrote gloomily in his diary,
‘The peasant masses are no help to us whatever, and they
are turning into informers.’

During a visit to Havana in July 1967 the Soviet Prime
Minister, Aleksei Kosygin, complained that Cuban
attempts to export revolution were ‘playing into the hands
of the imperialists and weakening and diverting the efforts
of the socialist world to liberate Latin America’. Castro’s
refusal to heed Soviet advice caused a significant setback
to the hitherto high-flying career of his friend, Aleksandr
Alekseyev, the former KGB resident turned Soviet
ambassador in Havana, who was accused in the Centre of
going native and failing to restrain Castro’s adventurism.

Alekseyev was recalled to Moscow, allegedly for medical
treatment, in the summer of 1967. His successor as
ambassador was a tough career diplomat, Aleksandr
Soldatov, who did not arrive in Havana until the
following year. The chief KGB adviser in the DGI,
Rudolf Petrovich Shlyapnikov, was also recalled in the
summer of 1967 after being accused by the DGI of
conspiring with a pro-Moscow ‘microfaction’ in the
Cuban Communist Party.—

Che’s guerrilla operations ended in October 1967 with
his capture and execution by US -trained Bolivian forces.
Death enormously enhanced his reputation, replacing the
reality of the brave but incompetent guerrilla with the
heroic image of the revolutionary martyr. Castro declared
in an emotional address to the Cuban people that 8
October, the day of Che’s capture, would henceforth be
for ever celebrated as the Day of the Heroic Guerrilla
Fighter:

As all of us pay him homage, as all our thoughts are
turned to the Che, as we look forward confidently to the
future, to the final victory of the people, we all say to him
and to all the heroes who have fought and fallen at his
side: ‘Ever onward to victory!’

Moscow initially failed to see the symbolic value of the
martyred Che as a weapon in the propaganda war against

US imperialism. Pravda published instead an article by an
Argentinian Communist denouncing the futility of the
Cuban policy of exporting revolution. Leonid Brezhnev
clearly had Guevara in mind when publicly condemning
the idea that ‘a conspiracy of heroes’ could make a
socialist revolution.—

The KGB was later to recognize the world-wide
popularity of the Che Guevara myth as a useful element in
active-measures campaigns against American
imperialism. In October 1967, however, the only
commemoration in Moscow of Che’s death was by a
small, forlorn congregation of Latin American students
who gathered outside the US embassy. In Washington, by
contrast, over 50,000 Americans, most from various
factions of the New Left which spread across American
campuses in the late 1960s, assembled in front of the
Lincoln Memorial and bowed their heads in silent homage
to the great opponent of US imperialism. A poll of US
university students in 1968 discovered that more
identified with Che than with any other figure, alive or
dead.

In the immediate aftermath of Che’s martyrdom and the
thinly veiled Soviet criticism of Cuban adventurism,
Castro showed little inclination to mend his fences with
Moscow. When in January 1968 he scornfully dismissed
some of the ideas ‘put forward in the name of Marxism’
as ‘real fossils’, it was obvious that he had Soviet ideas in

mind: ‘Marxism needs to develop, overcome a certain
sclerosis, interpret the realities of the present in an
objective and scientific way, behave like a revolutionary
force and not like a pseudo-revolutionary church. ’

It was clear to Castro’s listeners that Cuba was the
‘revolutionary force’ and the Soviet Union the ‘pseudo-
revolutionary church’ which had succumbed to
ideological sclerosis. Soon afterwards the Maximum
Leader staged a show trial of a ‘microfaction’ of pro-
Soviet loyalists within the Cuban Communist Party, who
were found guilty of ‘ideological diversionism’
prejudicial to the ‘unity and firmness of the revolutionary
forces’. During the trial, the head of the DGI, Manuel
Pineiro, gave evidence that members of the microfaction
had been in contact with the KGB.—

With the threatened collapse of the Soviet ‘bridgehead’
in Cuba, the KGB’s grand strategy conceived in 1961 to
orchestrate ‘armed uprisings against pro-Western
reactionary governments’ in Latin America seemed in
tatters. The Centre’s early optimism about the prospects
for a Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua had faded away.
During the later 1960s the Centre was more interested in
using FSLN guerrillas in operations to reconnoitre
sabotage targets in the southern United States than in
helping them prepare for revolution in Nicaragua. In 1966
a KGB sabotage and intelligence group (DRG) based on
the ISKRA guerrilla group was formed on the Mexican-

US border with support bases in the area of Ciudad
Juarez, Tijuana and Ensenada. Its leader, Andara y Ubeda
(PRIM), travelled to Moscow for training in Line F
operations. Among the chief sabotage targets were
American military bases, missile sites, radar installations,
and the oil pipeline (codenamed START) which ran from
El Paso in Texas to Costa Mesa, California. Three sites on
the American coast were selected for DRG landings,
together with large-capacity dead-drops in which to store
mines, explosive, detonators and other sabotage materials.
A support group codenamed SATURN was tasked with
using the movements of migrant workers (braceros) to
conceal the transfer of agents and munitions across the
border.—

The year 1968 was a difficult one for the KGB in both
Europe and Latin America. The show trial of the pro-
Soviet microfaction in Havana was quickly followed by
what Moscow considered an outrageous display of
ideological subversion in Czechoslovakia. The attempt by
the reformers of the Prague Spring to create ‘Socialism
with a human face’ was interpreted by the KGB as
counter-revolution. The near-collapse of official
censorship culminated in a Prague May Day parade with
banners proclaiming such irreverent messages for
Moscow as ‘Long live the USSR - but at its own
expense!’ The KGB played a major role both in assisting
the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the forces of the

Warsaw Pact in August 1968 and in the subsequent
‘normalization’ which ensured the country’s return to pro-
Soviet orthodoxy. —

Castro was widely expected to side with Prague
reformers and to condemn the August invasion of
Czechoslovakia. He began his first broadcast speech after
the invasion, however, by saying that some of what he
had to say would ‘run counter to the feelings of many
people’. Castro acknowledged that the invasion had no
legal basis but insisted that, in the greater interests of ‘the
people’s struggle against imperialism’, it was fully
justified:

In short, the Czechoslovak regime was moving toward
capitalism and it was inexorably marching toward
imperialism. About this we did not have the slightest
doubt . . . The essential thing, whether we accept it or not,
is whether the socialist bloc could permit the development
of a political situation which led to the breakdown of a
socialist country and its fall into the arms of imperialism.
From our viewpoint, it is not permissible and the socialist
bloc has the right to prevent it in one way or another.—

All this was music to Moscow’s ears. The Maximum
Leader’s emergence over the next few months as a
dependable Moscow loyalist made it possible for the

Soviet Union to shore up its crumbling Cuban bridgehead.

Probably the main reason for Castro’s ideological
somersault only months after the show trial and
imprisonment of Moscow loyalists within the Cuban
Communist Party was a severe economic crisis which
served to emphasize Cuba’s dependence on Soviet
economic aid. Cuban industry and power stations ran on
Soviet oil shipped from the Black Sea. When Moscow
began to cut back its oil exports as a sign of its
displeasure early in 1968, there were power cuts in
Havana, and Cuban sugar mills and factories began to
grind to a halt. Castro himself worsened the crisis by an
economically disastrous ‘revolutionary offensive’ in
March designed to destroy the remnants of free enterprise
by nationalizing 55,000 small businesses which accounted
for a third of Cuba’s retail sales. As a reward for the
Maximum Leader’s newfound loyalty, the Soviet Union
effectively bailed out the Cuban economy. By the end of
1969, Cuba owed the Soviet Union $4 billion.—

Castro’s decision to side with Moscow against the
Czechoslovak reformers also reflected his own
authoritarian leadership style and distaste for the political
freedoms of the Prague Spring. By the mid-1960s the real
achievements of the Cuban Revolution - the reforms in
health and education and the end of gangsterismo chief
among them - were increasingly overshadowed by an
empty revolutionary rhetoric which bore little relation

either to the regime’s shambolic economic
mismanagement or to its intolerance of dissent. In 1965
Castro himself admitted that Cuban jails contained 20,000
political prisoners.— A huge network of surveillance kept
close watch for any sign of ideological dissidence. The
DGI was assisted by the Committees for the Defence of
the Revolution (CDRs), a nationwide network of
neighbourhood associations which reported all suspicious
activities. Founded in 1960, the CDRs expanded over the
next decade to include almost a third of the adult
population. Immediately after Castro’s endorsement of the
crushing of the Prague Spring, the CDRs, acting on
instructions from the DGI, arranged for a series of
‘spontaneous’ demonstrations to support his speech. Cuba
thus developed a vast system of social control similar to,
but more conspicuous than, those operated by the KGB
and its east European allies. By the late 1960s, Castro was
using the CDRs to dictate even the length of men’s hair
and women’s dresses. In November 1968 the parents of
long-haired youths and miniskirted girls were summoned
to appear before the local authorities.— Castro had a
particular dislike of homosexuals and instructed that they
‘should not be allowed in positions where they are able to
exert an influence on young people’. Gays were routinely
refused tenancies in new housing projects and frequently
singled out for service in forced-labour units.—

Just as some of the Old Left of the 1930s, seduced by

the myth-image of the Soviet Union as the world’s first
worker-peasant state, had been blind to the savage reality
of Stalin’s Russia, so a generation later many of the New
Left of the 1960s shut their eyes to the increasingly
authoritarian (though much less homicidal) nature of
Castro’s rule and his sometimes brutal disregard of basic
human rights. The heroic image of Castro as a
revolutionary David in battle fatigues blockaded on his
island by the Goliath of American imperialism had a
global appeal exploited by Soviet as well as Cuban
propagandists. Among Castro’s most naively enthusiastic
Western supporters were the Americans of the
Venceremos (‘We Shall Overcome’) Brigade, who from
1969 onwards came to cut sugar cane in Cuba and show
their solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. Castro paid
public tribute to the courage of the brigadistas ‘in defying
the ire of the imperialists’. —

Privately, however, he looked askance at the presence
of gay and women’s liberation movements among his
American New Left supporters. Venceremos feminists,
for their part, were taken aback by the behaviour of the
Cuban female singers sent to entertain the Brigade: ‘They
frequently had bleached hair and tight-fitting skirts, and
relied on sexual gestures and flirtation with the audience.
We knew that, when not entertaining, these women were
probably dedicated revolutionaries, doing hard work. The
incongruity was hard to deal with.’—

Doubtless reflecting the views of the Maximum Leader,
the DGI complained to the KGB that many of the New
Left brigadistas were homosexuals and drug addicts.
Venceremos gays, the DGI bizarrely reported, saw ‘the
possibility of using homosexuality to bring about the
physical degeneration of American imperialism’. The
Brigade, however, proved a valuable source of US
identity documents for use in illegal intelligence
operations.— The brigadistas were also regarded as an
important propaganda asset.

Castro’s return to Moscow loyalism had an immediate
effect on the DGI’s relations with the KGB. As a DGI
officer later acknowledged, its role ‘was always limited
by the fact that Fidel Castro’s strategic assumptions,
personal convictions and intuitions were effectively off
limits. Cuban intelligence was unable to challenge or
contradict these.’— In accordance with the wishes of the
Maximum Leader, during the winter of 1968-69 all heads
of DGI overseas stations were recalled to Havana to be
given new instructions on co-operation with the KGB.
The DGI chief, Manuel Pineiro, informed them that there
had been a ‘lessening of contradictions’ between Cuba
and the Soviet Union, and that they were to participate in
a major new drive to collect scientific and technological
intelligence (S&T) for the USSR. Pineiro, however, had
incurred the displeasure of the Centre as a result of his

earlier investigation of KGB contacts with the pro-
Moscow ‘microfaction’ before its show trial in January
1968. Early in 1969 KGB pressure led to his replacement
by the more reliably pro-Soviet Jose Mendez Cominches.
Henceforth the main priority of the DGI was intelligence
collection rather than the export of revolution. Assistance
to national liberation movements was hived off to the
newly independent Direccidn de Liberacidn Nacional
(DLN), later the Departamento de America (DA), headed
by Pineiro.— Following a trip by Raul Castro to Moscow
in the spring of 1970, there was a purge of those DGI
officers who still appeared reluctant to co-operate with the
KGB. A senior KGB adviser was given an office next
door to the DGI chief, Mendez.—

The Soviet ‘bridgehead’ in Cuba seemed once again

secure.

4

‘Progressive’ Regimes and ‘Socialism with

Red Wine’

At the beginning of the 1970s the greater part of Latin
America was still, in Andropov’s phrase, ‘a new field for
Soviet foreign policy activity’. He wrote in an unusually
frank memorandum to the FCD, ‘Our leaders know very
little about Latin America. We must write more about
these countries, and draw attention to them.’ Andropov
was determined that the lead in expanding Soviet
influence in Latin America should be taken not by the
Foreign Ministry but by the KGB:

We must remember that, when it comes to shedding light
on the situation in the countries of Latin America, without
us neither the Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor the Ministry
of Foreign Trade will be able to undertake any effective
action. We must be the first to establish contacts with
important individuals in those countries where we do not
have embassies, and to send our officers there on short or
long-term visits. -

Andropov was anxious to exploit the new opportunities

for KGB operations offered by the emergence of
‘progressive’ military regimes in Peru and Bolivia, and by
the election of a Marxist President of Chile. Rather than
attempting the high-risk strategy of trying to recruit Latin
American Presidents and other leading politicians as
Soviet agents, Andropov’s preferred strategy was to turn
as many as possible into ‘confidential contacts’, willing to
have clandestine meetings with KGB officers who
attempted to influence their policies, particularly towards
the United States.- Agent recruitment was pursued only at
a lower level of the Latin American political and official
hierarchies, as well as in the media and other professions.

The KGB’s greatest asset in recruiting both confidential
contacts and an agent network was the popular resentment
in Latin America at the arrogance of the Yanqui colossus
of the North. The Centre’s leading Latin American expert,
Nikolai Leonov, who had been the first to identify Fidel
Castro’s revolutionary potential, later acknowledged:

All political efforts by the Soviet government, and hence
by our country’s intelligence service, were aimed at
causing the greatest possible harm to North American
dominance in this part of the world. So we supported
politically, sometimes by sending weaponry or other aid,
anyone who was against United States dominance - any
government, any national liberation movement, any
revolutionary group. However, with few exceptions, the

extreme left [other than pro-Moscow Communist parties]
did not enjoy great popularity in the Kremlin at that time.
They were feared, and for that reason were always
sidelined. But reasonable patriotic centre-left forces in
Latin America always found strong support in the USSR.
I personally took part in many operations of this type. I
worked with many Latin American leaders, trying at least
to encourage them, to help them as far as possible in their
anti-American stance. -

Moscow’s suspicion of ‘the extreme left’ was due, in
large part, to fear that it was contaminated with Maoist
heresy. A subsidiary theme in KGB operations in Latin
America was to defeat the Chinese challenge to Soviet
Communism. Alistair Horne wrote in 1972:

It is not in South-east Asia, the Middle East or Africa that
the ideological battle of the seventies seems likely to be
waged, but in South America. Here, one feels, may well
be the battleground where the orthodoxy of Soviet
communism will triumph definitively over Maoism or
vice-versa.-

That estimate proved to be exaggerated, though at the
beginning of the twenty-first century the main vestiges of
Maoist revolutionary movements - in particular the

Peruvian Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) - were located
in Latin America. At the beginning of the 1970s,
however, Home’s prophecy seemed highly plausible.

The first ‘progressive’ junta to attract the attention of
the Centre in Latin America was in Pern. To Marxist-
Leninists, class conflict in Pern seemed to make it ripe for
revolution. Since the foundation of the Pemvian Republic
in 1821, vast wealth had been concentrated in the hands
of an urban elite, while the mass of the mral population -
mostly aboriginals - lived in grinding poverty. Land
ownership was more unequal than anywhere else in Latin
America. In the 1960s 9 per cent of landowners owned 82
per cent of the land, while millions of peasants had none
at all. The slums which ringed Lima, mostly inhabited by
peasants unable to make a living in the countryside, were
among the most wretched on the continent. Half-hearted
land reform was halted in the mid-1960s by a hostile,
conservative Congress.- Dependency theory, which
became popular in the 1950s and 1960s, blamed Pern’s
backwardness on American imperialism. In order to
maintain its own prosperity, the United States was
allegedly promoting the ‘underdevelopment’ or
‘dependency’ of Latin America by controlling access to
major natural resources, by maintaining financial and
military control, and by other methods designed to
prevent its southern neighbours escaping from their
poverty. The US-owned International Petroleum

Company, an Exxon subsidiary which dominated Peru’s
petroleum industry, seemed to the Latin American left to
symbolize the way in which the power of American
capital undermined Peruvian national sovereignty.-

Peru’s political history had been punctuated by military
coups. However, the junta headed by General Juan
Velasco Alvarado, which seized power in October 1968,
broke with precedent. It was the first Peruvian coup led
by left-wing radicals, many of them with a background in
military intelligence. ‘Intelligence’, claimed one of the
radicals, ‘. . . opened our eyes and made us see the
urgency for change in our country.’ Within days of his
coup, on what became known as ‘National Dignity Day’,
Velasco nationalized the International Petroleum
Company without compensation,- and began preparations
for a series of other nationalizations. The junta went on to
announce a radical programme of land reform and sought
to prevent the flight of capital to Swiss bank accounts by
giving itself the power to inspect bank deposits. Its
policies combined radical reform with military discipline.
The junta banned the riotous annual Lima carnival on the
grounds of public safety and arrested those who
transgressed traditional standards of sexual propriety in
public parks. -

Since the Soviet Union did not have diplomatic
relations with Peru at the time of the coup, it had no

embassy or legal residency capable of reporting on the
new regime. Nikolai Leonov, who had recently been
given accelerated promotion to the post of deputy head of
the FCD Second (Latin American) Department, was sent
to investigate, staying at a Lima hotel posing as a
correspondent of the Novosti Press Agency. With the help
of the press office at the Peruvian Foreign Ministry,
Leonov succeeded in making contact with a number of
members and supporters of the new regime. His stay was
none the less a difficult one - chiefly, he believed, because
the CIA had revealed his real identity to a number of its
local contacts. As a result, Leonov later claimed, he
received threatening phone calls in Russian and the
unwanted attentions of a photographer who took
numerous pictures of him while he was dining in
restaurants. On one occasion, he was ‘followed along the
street by a carload of semi-naked girls’ - possibly festival
dancers whose playful intentions Leonov misconstrued as
a CIA provocation. A further difficulty was the fact that
the only way that he could communicate with the Centre
from Lima was by post. When he went to the main post
office, he was told not to seal his letters with sticky tape,
doubtless in order to make them easier to open. On one
occasion early in 1969, when he felt it necessary to send a
top-secret cipher telegram to Moscow, he had to travel to
the KGB residency in Chile to do so. Though Mitrokhin
did not note the text of Leonov’s report, its tone was
clearly optimistic. ‘We were’, Leonov said later, ‘working

politically against the United States and we put all our
heart into this task.’- The Centre could not fail to be
impressed by the new opportunities in Peru for operations
against the United States. In February 1969, after an
unbroken period of co-operation between American and
Peruvian armed forces stretching back to the Second
World War, all US military missions were expelled. For
the first time, Peru began to turn for military assistance to
the Soviet Union. In an attempt to strengthen popular
support for its reform policies, the Velasco regime
became the first Latin American military junta to form an
undeclared tactical alliance with the Communists. Though
the previously outlawed Peruvian Communist Party
remained illegal, it was permitted to operate openly from
its Lima headquarters and to publish its own newspaper.—

In August 1969, following the establishment of
Peruvian- Soviet diplomatic relations, the KGB set up its
first residency in Lima, headed for the next seven years
by Arseni Fyodorovich Orlov.— Orlov reported
optimistically that the military government was adopting
‘a progressive, anti-imperialist line’ with the support of
the Communist Party.— When armed Communists took
over the headquarters of the Bankworkers’ Union in June
1970, the government failed to intervene. The most
popular manifestation of Peru’s new Soviet connection
was the arrival of the Moscow State Circus, which
performed in Lima’s Plaza de Toros for an entire month.—

The Lima residency quickly acquired several
‘confidential contacts’ in the junta. One was reported to
be President Velasco’s ‘most trusted confidant’ and a
‘firm supporter’ of collaboration between the Peruvian
intelligence community and the KGB.— Orlov reported
that, thanks to the good offices of another member of the
junta, ‘the Residency has established contact with the
President.’— One of Velasco’s senior advisers (identified
by name in Mitrokhin’s notes) was recruited as a KGB
agent. According to a 1971 report from the residency,
which records a payment to him of $5,000: ‘He enjoys the
trust of President Velasco Alvarado. Through [him]
influence is exerted on the President and on members of
the Peruvian government, and public opinion is shaped
through him. Two government newspapers are under his
control.’—

In order to impress Soviet leaders, the KGB commonly
exaggerated its ability to ‘shape’ foreign public opinion,
and it may well have done so in this case. However, the
Lima residency undoubtedly approved the Velasco
regime’s censorship of media opposition to it. In January
1972 there were world- wide protests at the sequestration
of Peru’s leading newspaper. La Prensa, the most
influential of the junta’s critics. The nineteenth-century
house of its proprietor, Don Pedro Beltran, an important
part of Lima’s cultural heritage, was demolished on the

pretext of street- widening. The New York Times
denounced the ‘savage vendetta against one of the most
respected journalists in the Americas’. —

Encouraged by the Lima residency’s contacts with the
junta, the KGB proposed formal co-operation with its
Peruvian counterpart, the Servicio de Inteligencia
Nacional (SIN), codenamed KONTORA. Negotiations
between KGB and SIN representatives produced a draft
agreement providing for an exchange of intelligence, co-
operation in security measures, KGB training for SIN
officers and the provision to SIN of KGB ‘operational
technical equipment’. In June 1971 the CPSU Central
Committee approved the draft agreement. Two operations
officers and one technical specialist were stationed in
Lima to liaise with SIN. Meetings between Soviet and
Peruvian intelligence officers took place about once a
week, usually in SIN safe apartments. The Lima residency
noted with satisfaction that one of the immediate
consequences of the agreement was the ending of SIN
surveillance of the embassy and other Soviet offices.—
With KGB assistance, SIN set up a surveillance post near
the US embassy which secretly photographed all those
entering and leaving, and recorded their names in a card
index. SIN later used KGB equipment to record embassy
phone calls and intercept radio messages. — The Centre
claimed that co-operation with SIN led to ‘the
neutralization of an American agent network in the

[Peruvian] trade unions and the liquidation of an
American intelligence operational technical group’. It also
claimed the credit for ‘the exposure of the conspiratorial
activity’ of the Minister of Internal Affairs, General
Armando Artola, who appears to have opposed the Soviet
connection and was sacked in 1971.—

Initially, KGB liaison officers found some members of
SIN ‘guarded’ in their dealings with them. According to
KGB files, however, many were won over by items of
current intelligence, gifts, birthday greetings, ‘material
assistance’, invitations to visit the Soviet Union and other
friendly gestures.— Mitrokhin concluded from his reading
of KGB files that intelligence both from ‘confidential
contacts’ in the junta and from SIN was ‘highly valued’ in
the Centre.— In 1973 the new head of SIN, General
Enrique Gallegos Venero, visited Moscow for discussions
with Andropov, Fyodor Mortin, head of the FCD, and
other senior KGB officers. During his visit it was agreed
to extend intelligence co-operation to include Peruvian
military intelligence (codenamed SHTAB by the KGB).—
Though apparently satisfied with the results of Gallegos’s
visit, the Centre took a somewhat censorious view of the
behaviour of SIN officers, ranging in rank from captain to
lieutenant-colonel, who were invited to Moscow at its
expense (air travel included) to take part in FCD training
courses. One KGB report primly concluded:

The Peruvians who were studying at the special P-2, P-3,
and P-4 departments at the FCD’s Red Banner [later
Andropov] Institute were active in making contact with
girls and women of loose behaviour in Moscow, and had
intimate relations with them, after which these
acquaintances were handed over to another group of
students for intimate relations. The students did not heed
the attempts of the course supervisors to enlighten them.—

In general, however, the Centre congratulated itself on the
success of intelligence collaboration with Peru. A 1975
report gave the work of the Lima residency ‘a positive
evaluation’.— Intelligence on ‘the situation in Peru’s
ruling circles’, some of it passed on to the Politburo, was
assessed as ‘especially valuable’.— KGB co-operation
with SIN against US targets led to the expulsion of a
series of CIA officers and the curtailment of Peace Corps
activities and US-sponsored English-language courses.—
A relative of President Velasco’s wife, occupying ‘a high
position’ in the administration, was exposed as, allegedly,
a CIA agent.— The Lima residency also carried out ‘wide-
ranging active measures’ against US targets.—
‘Operational technical’ experts were sent from the Centre
to instruct SIN officers in the use of KGB surveillance,
eavesdropping and photographic equipment in operations
against the US, Mexican and Chilean embassies in
Lima.— With financial assistance from the KGB, SIN

agents were sent to carry out KGB assignments in Chile,
Argentina and other parts of Latin America.—

From 1973 onwards Peru made a series of massive
Soviet arms purchases, totalling more than $1.6 billion
over the next twelve years. In the Western hemisphere
only Cuba received more.— The Centre’s claims that it
also succeeded in ‘increasing the progressive measures of
Velasco’s government’,— however, were probably made
chiefly to impress the Soviet leadership. The KGB’s
influence on the military government’s security, defence
and foreign policy did not extend to its domestic reform
programme. In 1972, for example, the Interior Minister,
General Pedro Richter Prado, was dismayed by much of
what he saw on a tour of collective farms in Poland and
Czechoslovakia. Soviet bloc agriculture, he told Alistair
Home, was ‘going backwards’. The junta publicly
declared that, ‘Pern stands for neither Communism nor
Capitalism’. Home concluded that, by this time, its
confused ideological preferences lay somewhere between
Tito’s Yugoslavia and Gaullist France. Its heavy-handed
economic mismanagement was compounded by the
problems of financing the imports of Soviet arms. Almost
a quarter of the national budget went on the armed forces,
double the proportion in neighbouring Colombia. The
revenues from the massive newly discovered oil reserves
in the Amazon basin were frittered away.—

The Centre did not usually make reports to the
Politburo which undermined its own previous claims to be
able to influence foreign leaders. It is therefore unlikely
that it reported to the political leadership on the declining
prospects of the ‘progressive’ Peruvian junta as it
struggled to cope with the consequences of its economic
mismanagement. The coup toppling Velasco in August
1975, led by General Francisco Morales Bermudez, began
a more conservative phase of military rule.— The KGB
was, however, able to claim an apparently striking victory
over Peruvian Maoism. In June 1975 the Lima residency
made ‘operational contact’ with one of the leaders of the
pro-Chinese Marxist-Leninist Party of Peru, codenamed
VANTAN. The KGB claimed the credit for disrupting,
with VANTAN’s assistance, the Party’s 1976 Congress.
According to a file summary noted by Mitrokhin: ‘At its
Congress, the Party sharply criticized Peking’s policy,
including its line of splitting the Communist and
Workers’ movement, and decided to break with Maoism
and to dissolve itself. This operation produced great
repercussions in Latin- American countries.’—

The next Latin American state after Peru to acquire
what the KGB considered a ‘progressive’ military
government was Bolivia, its landlocked southern
neighbour. Bolivia’s turbulent political history had been
punctuated by more military coups than anywhere else in
the world. At the beginning of the 1970s the presidential

palace in La Paz (at 12,000 feet, the highest on the
continent) was still pockmarked with bullet holes from
previous coups which, given the likelihood of further
violent regime changes, were not thought worth repairing.
In front of the palace was a lamp-post with an inscription
recording that a president had been hanged from it in
1946.

The leader of the junta which took power in April

1969, General Alfredo Ovando Candia, had been
commander-in-chief of the Bolivian army at the time of
Che Guevara’s capture and death eighteen months earlier.
It was widely believed, however, that he had since been at
least partly seduced by the Che revolutionary myth and
felt a deep sense of guilt at having ordered his execution.
Once in power, Ovando followed the Peruvian example,
nationalizing American-owned companies, establishing
diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and seeking
support from workers, peasants and students. In October

1970, following a failed coup by right-wing army officers
and riots by left-wing university students, Ovando was
overthrown by the vociferously anti-imperialist General
Juan Jose Torres Gonzalez, who had been sacked as
commander-in-chief for what Ovando considered his
excessive adulation of Fidel Castro.—

The resident in La Paz, Igor Yevgenievich Sholokhov,
was instructed to gain access to Torres (codenamed
CAESAR by the KGB) ‘in order to use him to carry out

measures to rally anti-American forces in Bolivia’.— In
the excitable aftermath of the ‘October Revolution’ which
had brought Torres to power, students at San Andres
University in La Paz led violent demonstrations against
American imperialism. Torres took no action as US
offices were broken into and pillaged and the Yanqui
community was reduced to living in a state of semi- siege.
US diplomats removed the CD plates from their cars for
fear of attack; even the Clinica America in La Paz was
forced to change its name to Clinica Metodista.— The
KGB was encouraged by Torres’s close relations with the
Communists as well as by his hostility to the Yanquis.
Soon after he became President, the First Secretary of the
Bolivian Communist Party, Jorge Kolle Cueto, reported to
Sholokhov that Torres was ‘taking steps to involve the
Left in co-operation with the government’, and had
offered to help the Communists establish paramilitary
groups to meet the threat of a right-wing coup.—

In July Andropov wrote to Brezhnev:

Considering the progressive nature of the change
occurring in Bolivia, Torres’s desire to develop
multifaceted co-operation with the USSR, and the
Bolivian friends’ [Communists’] positive attitude towards
the President, it would be worthwhile examining the
possibility of supplying arms to Bolivia, as well as

providing Torres with economic aid . . . , for the purpose
of increasing his influence in the army and assisting in
frustrating the conspiratorial plans of the reactionaries,
thus gaining the time needed by the country’s democratic
forces to strengthen their position.—

Andropov’s assessment, however, proved far too
optimistic. By the time he wrote his report Torres’s
prospects of survival were already slim. ‘Progressive
change’ in Bolivia was rapidly collapsing into anarchy.
The army was deeply divided between right- and left-
wing factions. In June 1971 the unoccupied Congress
building next to the presidential palace was seized by the
various factions of the left who declared themselves the
Asamblea del Pueblo and began to function as a parallel
government. Inevitably the factions quickly fell out
among themselves, with the Communist Party denouncing
the Maoists as ‘petit bourgeois dedicated to leading the
working class on a new adventure’. The extravagant if
confused revolutionary rhetoric of the Assembly and
Torres’s apparent impotence in the face of it helped to
provoke in August 1971 Bolivia’s 187th coup, led by the
right-wing Colonel Hugo Banzer Suarez, who had been
sacked by Torres as commandant of the Military
Academy. After the discovery of the large quantities of
arms from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia
despatched at Torres’s request, Banzer ordered a mass

expulsion of Soviet diplomats and intelligence officers.—

Despite the disappointment of Torres’s overthrow, the
KGB continued to seek opportunities to cultivate other
Latin American leaders. Before the 1970 presidential
election in Costa Rica, it had secret discussions with the
successful candidate, Jose Figueres Ferrer (codenamed
KASIK).— Figueres was the leading Costa Rican
politician of his generation. As head of the founding junta
of the post-war Second Republic, he had taken the lead in
abolishing the army and turning Costa Rica into an
unarmed democracy - a unique event in the history of the
Americas. Figueres ’s first contact with Soviet
intelligence, though he did not realize it, went back to
1951, when he had unwittingly appointed as envoy in
Rome (and non-resident envoy in Belgrade) a KGB
illegal, Iosif Grigulevich, posing as Teodoro Castro, the
illegitimate son of a dead (and, in reality, childless) Costa
Rican notable. Unknown to Figueres, early in 1953
Grigulevich had been given a highly dangerous mission to
assassinate Marshal Tito. When his mission was aborted
after Stalin’s death in March, ‘Teodoro Castro’
disappeared - so far as Figueres was concerned - into thin
air, beginning a new life in Moscow under his real name,
Grigulevich, as an academic expert on Latin America.—

Figueres was first elected President in 1953, serving
until 1958. His long-running feud with the US-backed

Somoza dictatorship in neighbouring Nicaragua, which
continued after his presidency, appears to have attracted
the favourable attention of the KGB. When President Luis
Somoza challenged him to a duel, Figueres agreed -
provided it was fought on the deck of a Soviet submarine
which Somoza falsely claimed to have captured.— Despite
his anti-militarism, Figueres became a strong supporter of
the Sandinistas. Before the 1970 presidential election the
KGB secretly transmitted to him via the Costa Rican
Communist Party a ‘loan’ of US $300,000 to help finance
his campaign in return for a promise, if elected, to
establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Once
reinstalled as President, Figueres kept his promise.— In
1971 the CPSU Central Committee authorized A. I.
Mosolov, head of the newly established San Jose
residency, to establish contact with him.—

Mosolov and Figueres agreed on regular secret
meetings to be arranged through the intermediary of a
confidant of the President. Before each meeting, the
confidant would meet Mosolov at a pre-arranged
rendezvous in San Jose, then drive him in his own car to
see Figueres.— Some of Mosolov’ s reports on these
meetings were considered sufficiently important by the
Centre to be passed on to the Politburo. The KGB’s
motives in doing so probably had less to do with the
intrinsic importance of the reports’ contents than with the
further evidence they provided of the high level of its

foreign contacts. As in Peru and Bolivia, the Centre
wished to demonstrate to the Soviet leadership that in a
continent formerly dominated by American imperialism,
it now had direct access even to presidents and juntas. It
claimed, probably with some exaggeration, that the KGB
was able ‘to exert useful influence’ over Figueres.—

As well as providing confidential reports on other
countries in Central America and the Caribbean, Figueres
discussed his own political future with the KGB
residency, probably in the hope of obtaining further
Soviet financial support. He told Mosolov that he
intended to stay in control of his political party and
influence government decisions even after he ceased to be
president in 1974. ‘In order to do this’, Mosolov reported,
‘he has acquired a radio station and television channel,
and is preparing to publish his own newspaper. ’ All were
regarded by the KGB as useful vehicles for active
measures. —

The Soviet ambassador in San Jose, Vladimir
Nikolayevich Kazimirov, like his colleagues in a number
of other capitals, deeply resented the fact that the
resident’s political contacts were superior to his own.
While on leave in Moscow in August 1973, he demanded
a meeting with Andropov and complained that Mosolov
did not even bother to inform him about his contacts with
Figueres. On one occasion he had called on the President,

only to discover that Mosolov had met him an hour
earlier. Kazimirov claimed that American agents in Costa
Rica were seeking to use the President’s contacts with the
KGB to compromise him.— The ambassador’s objections
appear to have had little effect. KGB meetings with, and
subsidies to, Figueres continued. The Centre informed
Brezhnev in January 1974: ‘In view of the fact that
Figueres has agreed to publish materials advantageous to
the KGB, he has been given 10,000 US dollars under the
guise of stock purchases in his newspaper. When he
accepted this money, Figueres stated that he greatly
appreciated Soviet support.’—

Relations with Figueres, however, gradually cooled. In
1976 Manuel Pineiro, head of the Cuban Departamento de
America (DA), told a senior KGB officer that Figueres
was ‘an arrant demagogue’, who kept a private armoury
of weapons including machine guns and bazookas at his
villa outside San Jose.— A KGB assessment concluded
that Figueres ’s ‘views and actions’ were inconsistent.—

By far the most important of the KGB’s confidential
contacts in South America was Salvador Allende Gossens
(codenamed LEADER by the KGB),— whose election as
President of Chile in 1970 was hailed by a Moscow
commentator as ‘second only to the victory of the Cuban
Revolution in the magnitude of its significance as a
revolutionary blow to the imperialist system in Latin

America’. Allende was the first Marxist anywhere in the
world to win power through the ballot box. His victory in
Chile, following the emergence of ‘progressive’ military
governments in Peru and Bolivia, was cited by Pravda
and other Soviet official organs as proof of ‘the
multiplicity of forms within the framework of which Latin
America is paving its way to true independence’.—

Allende had first attracted KGB attention in the early
1950s when, as leader of the Chilean Socialist Party
(Partido Socialista), he had formed an alliance with the
then banned Communist Party. In 1952 he stood with its
support at the presidential election but won only 6 per
cent of the vote. Though there was as yet no KGB
residency in Chile, a Line PR (political intelligence)
officer, Svyatoslav Fyodorovich Kuznetsov (codenamed
LEONID), probably operating under cover as a Novosti
correspondent, made the first direct contact with Allende
in the following year .— At the presidential election of
1958, standing as the candidate of a left-wing alliance, the
Frente de Accion Popular (FRAP), Allende was beaten
into second place by only 35,000 votes. What Allende ’s
KGB file describes as ‘systematic contact’ with him
began after the establishment in 1961 of a Soviet trade
mission in Chile, which provided cover for a KGB
presence. Allende is reported to have ‘stated his
willingness to co-operate on a confidential basis and
provide any necessary assistance, since he considered

himself a friend of the Soviet Union. He willingly shared
political information . . Though he became a KGB
‘confidential contact’, however, he was never classed as
an agent. The KGB claimed some of the credit for
Allende’s part in the campaign which led to the
establishment of Soviet-Chilean diplomatic relations in
1964. — The new Soviet embassy in Santiago contained
the first KGB legal residency on Chilean soil.—

At the 1964 presidential election, standing once again
as the candidate of the FRAP alliance, Allende was
further from victory than six years earlier, being soundly
beaten by a strong centrist candidate in what became
virtually a two-horse race. But, with 39 per cent of the
vote, he did well enough to show that, if the anti-Marxist
vote were to be divided at the next election, he would
stand a good chance of victory.— The glaring social
injustices of a country in which half the population lived
in shanty towns or rural poverty also seemed to favour the
electoral prospects of the left. The Archbishop of Santiago
told the British ambassador that, ‘considering the
appalling conditions which the mass of the population had
to put up with, it was not surprising that there were many
Communists in Chile; what was . . . surprising was that
the poorer classes were not Communist to a man.’ The
high birth-rate and level of immigration added to Chile’s
social tensions. During the 1960s the population grew by
nearly a third.—

Though recognizing the advantages of electoral alliance
with Allende, the leadership of the Chilean Communist
Party made clear to the KGB that it regarded him as both
‘a demagogue’ and ‘a weak and inconsistent politician’
with Maoist sympathies:

His characteristic traits were arrogance, vanity, desire for
glorification and a longing to be in the spotlight at any
price. He was easily influenced by stronger and more
determined personalities. He was also inconsistent in his
attitude to the Communist Party. LEADER explained his
attitude to the Communist Party by referring to his
position as leader of the Socialist Party to which, as a
party member, he was bound to be loyal. He had visited
China a number of times and ranked Mao Zedong on the
same level as Marx, Engels and Lenin.

The Santiago residency also reported that Chilean
Communists were concerned by Allende ’s close
connections with Freemasonry. His paternal grandfather
had been Serene Grand Master of the Chilean Masonic
Order, and Allende himself had been a Mason since
before the Second World War. His Masonic lodge, the
Communists complained to the KGB, had ‘deep roots
among the lower and middle bourgeoisie’.— Allende was
unlike any existing stereotype of a Marxist leader. During

his visits to Havana in the 1960s, he had been privately
mocked by Castro’s entourage for his aristocratic tastes:
fine wines, expensive objets d’art, well-cut suits and
elegantly dressed women. Allende was also a womanizer.
The Nobel laureate in literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
described him as ‘a gallant with a touch of the old school
about him, perfumed notes and furtive rendezvous’.
Despite the private mockery which they aroused in
Allende ’s Communist allies, however, his bourgeois
appearance and expensive lifestyle were electoral assets,
reassuring middle-class voters that their lives would
continue normally under an Allende presidency. As even
some of Allende ’s opponents acknowledged, he also had
enormous personal charm. Nathaniel Davis, who became
US ambassador in Santiago in 1971, was struck by his
‘extraordinary and appealing human qualities ... He had
the social and socializing instincts of a long-time, top-
drawer political personality. ’—

In 1970 Allende stood again for the presidency as the
candidate of an enlarged left-wing coalition: the Unidad
Popular (UP) of the Communist, Socialist and Radical
parties (and three smaller left-wing groups - the API,
MAPU and SDP). His chances of success were
strengthened by the division of the anti-Marxist vote
between rival Christian Democrat and National Party
candidates. Allende ’s original KGB case officer,
Svyatoslav Kuznetsov, then serving in the Mexico City

residency, was sent to Chile to maintain contact with him
throughout the election campaign and co-ordinate covert
operations designed to ensure his success.—

Both the CIA, acting on instructions from the White
House and the 40 Committee (which oversaw US covert
action), and the KGB spent substantial amounts of money
in an attempt to influence the outcome of the election.
Though the CIA spent $425,000 trying to ensure
Allende’s defeat,— its money was targeted far less
effectively than that of the KGB. The 40 Committee
approved a covert propaganda campaign ‘to alert Chileans
to the dangers of Allende and a Marxist government’ but
forbade support for either of the candidates opposing
Allende. The Director of Central Intelligence, Richard
Helms, was sceptical of the effectiveness of a CIA
operation based on the assumption that it was possible to
‘beat somebody with nobody’.— KGB money, by
contrast, was precisely targeted. Allende made a personal
appeal, probably via Kuznetsov, for Soviet funds.— Like
other ‘fraternal’ parties around the world, the Chilean
Communists received annual subsidies from Moscow,
secretly transmitted to them by the KGB. Throughout the
1960s they were paid more than any other Communist
Party in Latin America. Their original allocation for 1970
was $400,000.— However, doubtless on KGB advice, the
Politburo made an additional allocation to the Party on 27
July to assist its role in the election campaign. It also

approved a personal subsidy of $50,000 to be handed
directly to Allende.— The Chilean Communist Party
provided Allende with an additional $100,000 from its
own funds.— The KGB also gave $18,000 to a left-wing
Senator to persuade him not to stand as a presidential
candidate and to remain within the Unidad Popular
coalition. Given the closeness of the result, even the small
vote which he might have attracted could have tipped the
balance against Allende. That, at least, was the view of
the KGB. ^

On 4 September 1970 Allende won the presidential
election with 36.3 per cent of the vote; his Nationalist and
Christian Democrat opponents gained, respectively, 35
and 27.8 per cent. In its report to the Central Committee,
the KGB claimed some of the credit for Allende ’s
victory.— Though it doubtless did not underestimate the
importance of its role, the closeness of the result suggests
that the KGB may indeed have played a significant part in
preventing Allende being narrowly beaten into second
place. Allende won by only 39,000 votes out of a total of
the 3 million cast. Given the failure of any candidate to
gain 50 per cent of the vote, the election of the President
passed to a joint session of the two houses of the Chilean
Congress on 24 October. Though precedent dictated that
Allende would be elected, Andropov remained anxious
about the outcome. He reported to the Central Committee
on 23 September:

As the question of the election of the President will finally
be decided by a vote in Congress on 24 October, Allende
is still faced with a determined struggle with his political
opponents, and substantial material resources may still be
required for this purpose. With the aim of strengthening
confidential relations with Allende and creating
conditions for continuing cooperation with him in the
future, it would be expedient to give him material
assistance amounting to 30,000 dollars if the need arises.

At the same time, the Committee of State Security
[KGB] will carry out measures designed to promote the
consolidation of Allende ’s victory and his election to the
post of President of the country. The International
Department of the CPSU Central Committee (Comrade V.
V. Zagladin) supports this proposal. —

The KGB’s anxiety about parliamentary confirmation of
Allende’ s electoral victory was understandable. The result
of the presidential election left President Richard Nixon,
according to his National Security Advisor, Henry
Kissinger, ‘beside himself with rage. Having berated the
Democrats for over a decade for allowing Cuba to go
Communist, Nixon now faced the prospect as a
Republican President of seeing Chile follow suit. There
was, he angrily told Kissinger and the DCI, Richard

Helms, ‘only a one in ten chance, perhaps’ of preventing
Allende’s confirmation, but the attempt must be made in
order to ‘save Chile’ from Communism. The CIA drew up
a two-track plan. Track I was to find some method of
persuading the Chilean Congress not to vote Allende into
office. Track II was to engineer a military coup.— Both
failed. On 24 October Allende was formally elected
President by vote of the Chilean Congress.

Regular Soviet contact with Allende after his election
was maintained not by the Soviet ambassador but by
Kuznetsov, who was instructed by the Centre to ‘exert a
favourable influence on Chilean government policy’.
According to LEADER’S KGB file:

In a cautious way Allende was made to understand the
necessity of reorganizing Chile’s army and intelligence
services, and of setting up a relationship between Chile’s
and the USSR’s intelligence services. Allende reacted to
this positively.

The KGB devoted its attention to strengthening
Allende’s anti-American leanings. To this end,
information obtained by the KGB Residency in Chile on
the activities of American intelligence officers trying to
penetrate the leaders of the army and intelligence services
was conveyed to Allende. Important and goal-directed
operations were conducted according to plan.—

CIA covert action against Allende continued during his
presidency. Immediately after the September presidential
election, Nixon gave instructions to ‘make the [Chilean]
economy scream’, though in the event economic
mismanagement by the Allende regime almost certainly
did far more damage than the CIA.— The intelligence
supplied by Kuznetsov to Allende about CIA operations
in Chile included a certain amount of disinformation, such
as the claim that Nathaniel Davis, who arrived in Santiago
as US ambassador in October 1971, was a CIA officer. —
There is no evidence that Allende realized he was being
deceived. In 1971 he presented Kuznetsov with a
Longines watch as a mark of his personal esteem.—

Kuznetsov arranged his regular meetings with Allende
through the President’s personal secretary, Miria
Contreras Bell, known as ‘La Payita’ and codenamed
MARTA by the KGB.— ‘La Payita’ appears to have been
Allende ’s favourite mistress during his presidency.
According to Nathaniel Davis:

Apparently it was for La Payita, and in her name, that
Allende purchased El Canaveral, a property in El Arrayan
suburb outside Santiago. This estate also served as a
training site for the president’s bodyguards, a political
meeting place, and, allegedly, an intimate hideaway

where sex films were shown and the president, UP
bigwigs, and their girlfriends cavorted - and had
themselves photographed as they did so.—

Kuznetsov reported more discreetly that, ‘according to
available information’, Allende was spending ‘a great
deal of time’ in La Payita’s company: ‘Allende is very
attentive to ladies, and tries to surround himself with
charming women. His relationship with his wife has more
than once been harmed as a result.’— Despite Allende ’s
affairs, however, his wife Hortensia remained intensely
loyal to him. Kuznetsov did his best to cultivate her as
well as her husband.—

Cuban intelligence also established close relations with
the Allende family. Allende ’s personal guard, the black-
beret Gmpo de Amigos Personates, contained numerous
Cubans. His daughter, Beatriz, who oversaw presidential
security, married a Cuban intelligence officer, Luis
Fernandez Ona, with the disconcerting nickname ‘tiro
fijo’ (‘quick-on-the-trigger’).— One of the CIA officers
stationed in Chile recalls that he had ‘a lot of respect for
the Cuban Intelligence. They were a lot more effective
than the Russians in the sense that they still had
revolutionary fervour, they were prepared to make
sacrifices, they spoke the language, and they were
prepared to mix it up with the campesinos.'—

In May 1971 FCD Service 1 (Intelligence Analysis), of
which Leonov had become deputy head,— sent Kuznetsov
a lengthy list of topics on which it instructed him to
obtain Allende’s views:

• The President’s assessment of the internal political
situation in the country, and his plans to hinder the
subversive activities of the right-wing opposition.

• The President’s assessment of the economic
situation in the country and measures planned to
strengthen the economy.

• Relations between the government and the parties
in the Popular Unity coalition.

• The President’s attitude towards unilateral actions
by parties within the bloc, especially the Communist
Party.

• The possibility of and conditions necessary for the
unification of the Communists and socialists into a single
party.

• Decisions by the President to strengthen the
leadership of the Chilean armed forces and government
with supporters of the left-wing parties.

• Prospects for the development of economic,
political and military relations between Chile and the
USSR, Cuba, other socialist countries, and China.

• Relations between Chile and the United States.

• Chile’s policy with respect to the countries of Latin
America.

It was a tribute to Kuznetsov’s access to the President that
he was able to obtain full responses on all these topics.
Nikolai Leonov, was full of praise for the quality of
Allende’s information. Reports based on it were
forwarded to the Politburo.— In October 1971, on
instructions from the Politburo, Allende was given
$30,000 ‘in order to solidify the trusted relations’ with
him.— Allende also mentioned to Kuznetsov his desire to
acquire ‘one or two icons’ for his private art collection.
He was presented with two icons, valued by the Centre at
150 rubles, as a gift.—

On 7 December, in a memorandum to the Politburo
personally signed by Andropov, the KGB proposed giving
Allende another $60,000 for what was euphemistically
termed ‘his work with [i.e. bribery of] political party
leaders, military commanders, and parliamentarians’.
Allende was to be urged to strengthen his authority by
establishing ‘unofficial contact’ with Chilean security
chiefs and ‘using the resources of friends [Communists]’
in the Interior Ministry. The KGB also proposed giving an
additional $70,000 to a Chilean monthly already
subsidized by the KGB, to ‘make it more combative and
sharp in its defence of the interests of Popular Unity and
in its exposure of the local reactionaries’ and imperialists’
intrigues’. The proposals were approved by the

Politburo.—

In June 1972 Kuznetsov’s close relationship with
Allende was disturbed by the arrival in Santiago of a
tough new Soviet ambassador, Aleksandr Vasilyevich
Basov, whose membership of the Central Committee
indicated both his high rank within the nomenklatura and
the importance attached by Moscow to relations with
Allende ’s Chile. Unlike his predecessor, Basov was not
prepared to play second fiddle to a KGB officer. His
relations with the residency worsened, apparently soon
after his arrival in Santiago, after the discovery in the
walls of both his office and apartment of American
listening devices with miniature transmitters which could
be activated from some distance away.— Basov doubtless
blamed the KGB for failing to protect the security of the
embassy. The KGB in turn blamed the Chilean
Communist Party for recommending the firm which had
been employed for building work at the embassy. The
Party leader, Luis Corvalan Lepe (codenamed SHEF),
was secretly informed by the KGB that the firm was
untrustworthy and had been penetrated by ‘hostile agents’
who had installed the devices.—

Basov initially insisted on accompanying Kuznetsov to
meetings with Allende, thus hampering the conduct of
KGB business which the resident was reluctant to discuss
in the presence of the ambassador. — Within a few

months, however, Basov was seeking to replace
Kuznetsov as the main Soviet contact with Allende. The
Santiago residency complained to the Centre:

The ambassador intends to set the line himself for
meetings with LEADER [Allende], and he goes to the
meetings with LEADER accompanied not by LEONID
[Kuznetsov] but by other officials. The ambassador is
‘jealous’ of LEONID’S visits to LEADER, because he is
taking away his bread [most important business].
Therefore, he demands detailed meeting plans and reports
on the meetings. He is trying to supervise us on this
matter.

Basov’s ultimate aim was to reduce most Soviet contact
with Allende to ‘a single channel’ controlled by himself.
The residency complained that one channel ‘is insufficient
for conducting active measures and other special
operations’. Hitherto Kuznetsov had built up a close
relationship with Allende’ s wife and his daughter Beatriz.
Both, according to the KGB, ‘turn[ed] directly to
LEONID with various requests’. Basov, however,
assigned contact with the Allende family to a member of
his staff and tried to make it impossible for Kuznetsov to
continue his meetings with Allende ’s wife.— In December
1972, Kuznetsov was able to renew contact with
Hortensia and Beatriz Allende while they were staying at

the Barvikha Sanatorium in the Soviet Union. During
their stay, almost certainly without informing Basov, the
Centre made, at its own expense, a two-week booking at
the sanatorium for Kuznetsov and his wife Galina.— It is
clear from the tone of subsequent KGB reports that, once
again probably without the ambassador’s knowledge,
Kuznetsov succeeded in establishing a secret channel ‘for
handling the most confidential and delicate matters’
directly with Allende.—

The tone of KGB reporting on Chile during 1972 was
somewhat more cautious than during the previous year.
Nixon’s visit to Moscow in 1972 and Brezhnev’s return
visit to Washington in the following year represented the
high point of a period of Soviet- American detente.
Andropov, like the Soviet leadership in general, was
anxious not to provoke the Nixon administration by too
ostentatious a challenge to American influence in Latin
America - all the more so because the United States
seemed tacitly to accept that the Soviet Union was free to
act as it wished within its own sphere of influence in
eastern and central Europe. ‘Latin America’, wrote
Andropov, ‘is a sphere of special US interests. The US
has permitted us to act in Poland and Czechoslovakia. We
must remember this. Our policy in Latin America must be
cautious.’—

A further reason for caution in the level of Soviet

support for Allende was the general instability of Latin
American regimes - as evidenced recently in Bolivia,
where President Torres had been overthrown in August

1971, only a month after Andropov had suggested
supplying him with arms and economic aid. When the
FCD suggested renewing contact with Torres in January

1972, Andropov gave his unenthusiastic approval:

Apparently, this is something that must be done, although
experience in other countries has shown that it is almost
impossible for a deposed president to regain the position
he has lost. This is some sort of irreversible law of
history. Perhaps it is better to turn our attention to the new
leaders who will undoubtedly appear in Bolivia.—

During Torres’s exile in Chile and Argentina, the local
KGB residencies maintained secret contact with him,
using him for active-measures campaigns (of which
Mitrokhin’s notes give no details) and giving him
financial assistance.— Andropov’s forecast that Torres
would never return to power, however, turned out to be
entirely correct.

There was growing anxiety in the Centre at Allende ’s
failure to consolidate his position by bringing the armed
forces and security system under his control. Andropov
decreed that the FCD’s main Latin American priorities in

1972 were to strengthen - discreetly - the Soviet footholds
in Chile and Peru. Both footholds, he had concluded, were
insecure:

The main thing is to keep our finger on the pulse of
events, and obtain multifaceted and objective information
about the situation there, and about the correlation of
forces. It is necessary to direct the course of events, and
make sure that events do not catch us unawares, so that
we don’t have any surprises, and will be aware of the very
first tremors of approaching changes and events - thus
enabling us to report them to the leadership in a timely
manner.

There is one particular question which perhaps does not
affect us [the KGB] directly, but which cannot be
avoided, and that is the interpretation that the events in
Chile and Peru have received in our press, and the
emphasis that has been placed on the role of the Soviet
Union there. One gets the impression that the [Soviet]
press is doing too much boasting and bragging. I don’t
think that the friends [the Chilean and Peruvian
Communist parties] have liked this.

While anxious to bolster the Allende regime by
establishing close KGB liaison with Chilean intelligence,
Andropov instructed that any attempt to force the pace

would be counterproductive:

Do not permit anything that would cause complaints
about our activity in Chile and Peru.

Do not force the establishment of liaison with the
[intelligence] service in Chile. Arouse their interest by
passing them intelligence of a topical nature through
LEADER.22

In the course of 1972 Moscow substantially downgraded
its assessment of the prospects of the Allende regime. In
July a leading Soviet journal was still maintaining, ‘The
record of Chile shows that a number of Latin American
countries can adopt a form of socialist construction.’ In
October, however, the ‘Truckers’ Strike’, allegedly
backed by CIA funding, virtually paralysed the economy
for three weeks, providing dramatic evidence of the
weakness of the Popular Unity government and the power
of its opponents. At a meeting of the CPSU Central
Committee in November, Chile was officially said not to
be building socialism but merely to be seeking ‘free and
independent development on the path of democracy and
social progress’. The mounting evidence of chronic
economic mismanagement also made Moscow reluctant
to provide large-scale support. Allende returned from a
visit to Moscow in December with much less than he had
hoped for. Simultaneously the Sunday Times published a

report by its leading foreign correspondent, David
Holden, headlined ‘Chile, Collapse of a Marxist
Experiment?’ ‘Allende’s own survival is in doubt’,
predicted Holden. ‘ . Anger, fear and a determination to
fight are now more evident on the Right as well as the
Left.’

Andropov was anxious none the less that the KGB
should do what it could to prevent the defeat of the
Allende regime either at the polls or by military coup. On
25 December 1972 he sent the Politburo a memorandum
giving a rather exaggerated impression of the KGB’s
ability to influence Chilean politics:

The KGB maintains confidential relations with Allende
and [a left-wing senator], and also with prominent
individuals in the Socialist, Radical, and Christian
Democratic Parties.

Parliamentary elections will take place in March 1973.

Considering the situation during the pre-election
period, it is planned to take measures to strengthen
relations with the above-mentioned people, and also to
make new contacts in government, party, and
parliamentary circles, including certain representatives of
the right-wing opposition and the extremist organization,
the Leftist Revolutionary Movement (MIR).

Through unofficial contacts with the country’s
influential people and other ways, it is planned to
concentrate [the KGB’s] efforts on the following: helping
to consolidate the forces supporting Chile’s government;
creating obstacles to any co-operation between the
Christian Democratic and the National parties within the
framework of the opposition; exerting an influence on the
armed forces in order to prevent them from being used
against Popular Unity.

The KGB also is planning to use its capabilities to carry
out a series of active measures in Latin American and
other countries for the purpose of exposing the
imperialists’ interference in Chile’s internal affairs, and to
exert the necessary influence on public opinion, thus
inducing the anti-imperialist and progressive elements to
support Popular Unity more actively.

In order to finance these measures, in addition to
operations against government and political figures
(including influencing some of them through financial
means), the sum of $100,000 is required. Part of this
money is to be given to Allende for work with his own
contacts in political and military circles.

Approval for the payment of $100,000 from the Council
of Ministers reserve fund for KGB ‘special measures’ in
Chile was given by the Politburo on 7 February 1973.—

An additional ‘monetary reward’ of $400 was made to
Allende for unspecified ‘valuable information’ he had
provided.—

A further report to the Politburo by Andropov in
February 1973 gave an optimistic assessment of the
KGB’s influence on Allende during his meetings with
Kuznetsov:

Allende set this channel apart from the usual unofficial
governmental contacts and used it for handling the most
confidential and delicate matters (establishing contact
between Chile’s and the USSR’s armed forces, consulting
on the use of Chilean atomic raw materials, organizing
co-operation between the Chilean and Soviet security
services, and other matters) by handing over information
and discussing current political issues. [The KGB] is
succeeding in exerting a definite influence on Allende.
This is aiding, in particular, a more correct understanding
on the President’s part of China’s policies, as well as a
decision on his part to strengthen contact between the
Chilean and Peruvian military for the purpose of exerting
a positive influence on the leadership of Chile’s armed
forces. In turn, Allende is systematically informing us on
the situation in the country and in Popular Unity, on his
own personal plans, and so forth.

Our officer’s meetings with Allende, during which they

discussed business matters, were conducted in private.
The President invited him to pay a visit at any time -
either at work or at his home - without prior notice,
whenever there was an urgent necessity for this.

The strengthening of our officer’s relations with
Allende was facilitated by material aid given to him,
personal attention, and the fulfilment of his personal
requests.

In order to make more effective and beneficial use of
our contact with Allende, the following is suggested:

• help in strengthening Allende ’s position and
authority both within the country and on the Latin
American continent through the unofficial channels
available to us;

• broader use of Allende ’s ability to assess the
situation in Latin American countries, bearing in mind
that he can send his own emissaries to several of them;

• measures to obtain information through Allende on
the policies of the Chinese government, including the use
of the President’s trusted persons, whom he can send
there;

• material assistance to Allende for his work with
contacts in political and military circles, especially during
the pre-election period, up to the sum of $50,000 - taken
from funds allocated to the KGB via CPSU Central
Committee Resolution No. P-78/31, dated 13 February
1973.

The flaws in Andropov’s report were characteristic of
many similar documents. Its chief purpose was to impress
the Politburo with the KGB’s ability to gain clandestine
access to a foreign leader and exert influence on him.
Characteristically, it avoided mentioning any problems
which might take the gloss off the KGB’s success.
Privately, the Centre was increasingly worried about
Allende’s prospects of survival. Andropov, however, gave
no hint of those concerns to the Politburo. His
memorandum, including the request for additional
funding, was duly approved.—

Privately, the Centre was worried by the deficiencies of
Allende’s security and intelligence system, which
increased his vulnerability to a military coup. Once again,
it gave the political leadership a rose-tinted view of the
improvements which were under way. The Centre
reported to Brezhnev that on 17 February 1973 the KGB
operations officer responsible for liaison with the Chilean
security services (not identified in Mitrokhin’s notes) met
Allende secretly at a villa in the suburbs of Santiago:

Allende expressed certain of his views regarding the
reorganization of the security services. According to his
plan, an efficient apparatus with both intelligence and
counter-intelligence functions would be created to report

directly to him. As the basis for this apparatus, he planned
to use one component of the Servicio de Investigaciones
[the Chilean security service] and recruit reliable
personnel from the Socialist and Communist parties. The
main efforts of this organ would be directed at uncovering
and suppressing subversive activity on the part of
Americans and local reactionary forces, and in organizing
intelligence work within the armed forces, since the
position taken by the armed forces was a decisive factor
that would determine the fate of the Chilean revolutionary
process.

Allende is very much counting on Soviet assistance in
this matter.—

The attempted reorganization achieved little. The Servicio
de Investigaciones successfully intimidated some of the
regime’s opponents and gained a reputation for turning
the cellars at its headquarters into torture chambers.
Nathaniel Davis, the US ambassador, noted, however, that
the Servicio ‘was consumed by personal squabbles
between the Socialists and the Communists’. Any attempt
to strengthen the civilian intelligence community faced an
almost impossible dilemma. The measures necessary to
forestall a coup - in particular, any attempt to gather
intelligence on plotting within the armed services - were
likely to provoke the military into the very action they

were designed to prevent.—

In the March congressional elections Allende’s Unidad
Popular won 44 per cent of the vote as compared with the
opposition’s 56 per cent. Nathaniel Davis summed up the
result as ‘discouraging for both sides . . . Unidad Popular
found itself a continuing minority for the foreseeable
future, and the opposition found its majority insufficient
to force legitimate change’ .— There is no evidence that
the KGB tried to explain to the Politburo why its
‘confidential relations’ with leading Chilean politicians
across the political spectrum had failed to produce the UP
victory which it had led the Politburo to expect three
months earlier. Preferring as usual to concentrate on its
successes, it emphasized instead the President’s
willingness to provide further assistance to its operations.
Andropov wrote to Brezhnev to request approval for
funding intelligence collection by Allende in other South
American countries on the KGB’s behalf:

Our officer had a discussion with [Allende] about
receiving information on Latin America by enlisting the
President’s assistance. Allende showed an interest in this
matter and expressed several specific ideas of his own. In
particular, he expressed a willingness to send his own
trusted people to Latin American countries, where they
would be able to establish contacts with his friends and

political supporters, and obtain useful information from
them.

In the near future the President will be able to send his
emissary to Venezuela for the purpose of ascertaining the
situation in that country on the eve of the presidential
elections coming up in November of this year. Among his
trusted personal contacts, Allende named [Luis] Beltran
Prieto [Figueroa], the leader of the progressive
Venezuelan party called the People’s Election Movement
[Movimento Electoral del Pueblo].

In addition, the President is willing to co-operate in
obtaining information on Argentina and Ecuador, where
the situation is characterized by complexities and
contradictions.

Brezhnev wrote ‘Approved’ at the bottom of Andropov’s
request. —

Andropov, however, was increasingly pessimistic about
Allende’ s prospects of survival. One day in the spring of
1973, he made an unexpected visit to FCD headquarters at
Yasenevo. According to Nikolai Leonov:

He summoned everyone who had anything to do with
Latin America and put a single question to us: How did
we view the Chilean case? Did it have a chance or not?

Should we commit all our resources, or was it already too
late to risk them? The discussion was quite profound . . .
We came to the conclusion that the measure being
planned for making a cash loan - I believe 30 million US
dollars was being talked about - would be unable to
rescue the situation in Chile. It would be like putting a
patch on a worn-out tyre. In the KGB’s view, Allende’s
fundamental error was his unwillingness to use force
against his opponents. Without establishing complete
control over all the machinery of the state, his hold on
power could not be secure. ‘All our sympathies were with
[Allende’s] experiment’, recalls Leonov, ‘. . . but we did
not believe in its success. ’— Over the next few months
the Santiago residency reported what it considered
‘alarming signs of increased tension’. —

The first attempt to overthrow the regime was made by
activists of the extreme right-wing Patria y Libertad
movement, who hatched a plot with disaffected officers of
the Second Armoured Regiment to kidnap Allende on 27
June. The Santiago residency informed the Centre that it
had obtained intelligence on plans for the coup and
warned Allende.— Its achievement, however, was rather
less impressive than it probably appeared in Moscow. The
security of the coup plotters was so poor that their plans
leaked and the coup planned for the 27th was postponed.
On the 29th, however, three combat groups of tanks and
armoured cars with about a hundred troops left their

barracks and headed for the centre of Santiago. The coup
petered out in farce. As Nathaniel Davis noted, ‘the
column obeyed all the traffic lights and at least one tank
stopped to fill up at a commercial gas station’. The most
significant aspect of the failed coup was the apathetic
response to it by Chilean workers, the supposed bedrock
of Allende’s support. Allende broadcast an appeal for ‘the
people ... to pour into the centre of the city’ to defend his
government. They did not do so. That highly significant
fact was duly noted by the Army Chief of Staff, General
Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.—

The next ten weeks were a period of continuous
political, economic and military crisis. Since Allende’s
election in 1970, Chile’s currency had been devalued on
the open market by the staggering figure of 10,000 per
cent. David Holden headlined a report from Santiago,
‘Chile: Black Market Road to Socialism’, and reported
that, ‘Anyone who can afford the time to queue for petrol
legally can become a rich man by selling his daily intake
at 30 times the official price ... To an outsider, it seems a
mighty peculiar road to Socialism - or to anywhere else
for that matter.’—

In his unsuccessful appeal to Chilean workers on 29
July to come to the defence of the regime, Allende had
declared, ‘If the hour comes, the people will have arms’ -
his first public statement that he would mobilize left-wing

paramilitary groups if faced with military revolt. During
August the armed forces mounted an increasingly
intensive search for illegal arms dumps - predictably
concentrating on those held by the left.— The KGB later
complained that Allende paid too little attention to its
warnings of an impending coup.— When Pinochet and a
military junta launched the coup in the early hours of 1 1
September,— Corvalan and the Communist leadership,
who had also been kept informed by the KGB,— were
better prepared than Allende. The Communist Party
newspaper that morning carried the banner headline,
‘Everyone To His Combat Post!’ ‘Workers of city and
countryside’ were summoned to combat ‘to repel the rash
attempt of the reactionaries who are determined to bring
down the constitutional government’. While Corvalan and
the leadership moved underground. Communist factory
managers began to mobilize workers in the industrial belt.

Allende, however, failed to live up to his promise six
weeks earlier to summon the people to arms to defend his
regime. When the coup began on 1 1 September, instead
of seeking support in the working-class areas of Santiago,
he based himself in the presidential offices in La Moneda,
where he was defended by only fifty to sixty of his
Cuban-trained GAP and half a dozen officers from the
Servicio de Investigaciones. Allende ’s lack of preparation
to deal with the coup partly derived from his preference
for improvisation over advance planning. His French

confidant, Regis Debray, later claimed that he ‘never
planned anything more than forty-eight hours in advance’.
But Allende was also anxious to avoid bloodshed.
Convinced that popular resistance would be mown down
by Pinochet’s troops, he bravely chose to sacrifice himself
rather than his followers. Castro and many of Allende’ s
supporters later claimed that he was gunned down by
Pinochet’s forces as they occupied La Moneda. In reality,
it seems almost certain that, faced with inevitable defeat,
Allende sat on a sofa in the Independence Salon of La
Moneda, placed the muzzle of an automatic rifle (a
present from Castro) beneath his chin and blew his brains
out. —

Allende, wrote David Holden, was ‘instantly canonized
as the western world’s newest left-wing martyr’,
becoming overnight ‘the most potent cult figure since his
old friend, Che Guevara’. Devotees of the Allende cult
quickly accepted as an article of faith Castro’s insistence
that, instead of committing suicide, Allende had been
murdered in cold blood by Pinochet’s troops. The
Guardian declared on 17 September, ‘For Socialists of
this generation, Chile is our Spain . . . This is the most
vicious Fascism we have seen in generations.’ Pinochet’s
regime was as loathed in the 1970s as Franco’s had been
in the 1930s.—

As well as doing what it could to promote the Allende

cult, KGB active measures also sought to establish a
secondary cult around the heroic figure of the Communist
leader Luis Corvalan, who had been captured after the
coup and, together with some of Allende’s former
ministers, imprisoned in harsh conditions on Dawson
Island in the Magellan Straits. As well as seeking to
promote international appeals for Corvalan’ s release, the
KGB also tried to devise a method of rescuing him and
other prisoners from Dawson Island by a commando raid
organized by the FCD Special Actions Directorate V,
which was approved in principle by Andropov on 27
March 1974. — Satellite photographs were taken of
Dawson Island and used by Directorate V to construct a
model of the prison. The rescue plan eventually devised
was for a large commercial cargo vessel to enter the
Magellan Straits with three or four helicopters concealed
beneath its hatches. When the vessel was fifteen
kilometres from Dawson Island, the helicopters would
take off carrying commandos who would kill the
relatively small number of prison guards, rescue Corvalan
and other prisoners, and transfer them to a submarine
waiting nearby. The helicopters would then be destroyed
and sunk in deep water, thus leaving no incriminating
evidence to prevent the Soviet cargo vessel continuing on
its way. The rescue plan, however, was never
implemented. According to Leonov: ‘When this plan was
presented to the leadership, they looked at us as if we
were half-crazy, and all our attempts to persuade them to

study it in greater detail proved fruitless, although the
military did agree to provide the means to carry it out.’—

Schemes were also devised to kidnap a leading member
of the Chilean military government, or one of Pinochet’s
relatives, who could then be exchanged for Corvalan.—
These schemes too were abandoned and Corvalan was
eventually exchanged for the far more harshly persecuted
Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky.

For the KGB, Pinochet represented an almost perfect
villain, an ideal counterpoint to the martyred Allende.
Pinochet himself played into the hands of hostile
propagandists. Marxist books were burnt on bonfires in
Santiago as Pinochet spoke menacingly of cutting out the
‘malignant tumour’ of Marxism from Chilean life. The
Direccion de Investigaciones Nacionales (DINA) set out
to turn Pinochet’s rhetoric into reality. From 1973 to 1977
its Director, General Manuel Contreras Sepulveda,
reported directly to Pinochet. Official commissions
established by Chile’s civilian governments after the end
of military rule in 1990 documented a total of 3,197 extra-
judicial executions, deaths under torture and
‘disappearances’ during the Pinochet era. Since not all
could be documented, the true figure was undoubtedly
higher.— A Chilean government report in 2004
concluded that 27,000 people had been tortured or
illegally imprisoned.—

KGB active measures successfully blackened still
further DINA’s deservedly dreadful reputation. Operation
TOUCAN, approved by Andropov on 10 August 1976,
was particularly successful in publicizing and
exaggerating DINA’s foreign operations against left-wing
Chilean exiles. DINA was certainly implicated in the
assassination of Allende’s former Foreign Minister,
Orlando Letelier, who was killed by a car bomb in the
United States in 1976, and may also have been involved
in the murder of other former Allende supporters living in
exile. Operation TOUCAN thus had a plausible basis in
actual DINA operations. TOUCAN was based on a forged
letter from Contreras to Pinochet, dated 16 September
1975, which referred to expenditure involved in the
expansion of DINA’s foreign operations, chief among
them plans to ‘neutralize’ (assassinate) opponents of the
Pinochet regime in Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, the
United States, France and Italy. Service A’s forgers
carefully imitated authentic DINA documents in their
possession and the signature of its Director. The letter was
accepted as genuine by some major newspapers and
broadcasters in western Europe as well as the Americas
(see appendix, p. 88). The Western media comment which
caused most pleasure in the Centre was probably
speculation on links between DINA and the CIA. The
leading American journalist Jack Anderson, who quoted
from the KGB forgery, claimed that DINA operated freely

in the United States with the full knowledge of the CIA.
The Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, he reported, was
investigating DINA’s activities.—

Pinochet’s military government was far more
frequently denounced by Western media than other
regimes with even more horrendous human-rights
records. KGB active measures probably deserve some of
the credit. While operation TOUCAN was at the height of
its success, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were in the
midst of a reign of terror in Cambodia which in only three
years killed 1.5 million of Cambodia’s 7.5 million people.
Yet in 1976, the New York Times published sixty-six
articles on the abuse of human rights in Chile, as
compared with only four on Cambodia.— The difficulty
of obtaining information from Cambodia does not provide
a remotely adequate explanation for this extraordinary
discrepancy.

APPENDIX: THE SERVICE A FORGERY
USED IN OPERATION TOUCAN^

Secret to the Intelligence Service of Chile

To the Secretariat of the President of the Republic Copy 1
DINA /R/ No. 1795/1 07

Explanation of the request for an increase in estimated

expenditure

DINA Santiago 16 September 1975

From the Director of National Intelligence to the
President of the Republic

In accordance with our agreement with you, I am
giving the reasons for the request for the expenditure oj
DINA to be increased by 600,000 American dollars in the
current financial year.

1. An additional ten members of DINA are to be sent
to our missions abroad: two to Peru, two to Brazil, two to
Argentina, one to Venezuela, one to Costa Rica, one to
Belgium and one to Italy.

2. Additional expenditure is required to neutralize
the active opponents to the Junta abroad, especially in
Mexico, Argentine, Costa Rica, the USA, France and
Italy.

3. The expense of our operations in Peru supporting
our allies in the armed forces and the press (Equise and
Opinion Libre).

4. Maintenance costs for our workers taking a
course for anti-partisan groups at the SNI centre at
Manaus in Brazil.

Yours sincerely.

Colonel Manuel Contreras Sepulveda
Director of National Intelligence

Official stamp of DINA

5

Intelligence Priorities after Allende

In February 1974 the Politburo carried out what appears
to have been its first general review of Latin American
policy since the Chilean coup. It defined as the three main
goals of Soviet policy: ‘to steadily broaden and strengthen
the USSR’s position on the continent; to provide support
to the progressive, anti-American elements struggling for
political and economic independence; and to provide
active opposition to Chinese penetration’. Significantly,
there was no mention either of encouragement to
revolutionary movements in Latin America or of any
prospect, outside Cuba, of a new Marxist-led government
on the Allende model. The KGB’s main priorities were
‘to expose the plans of the US and its allies against the
progressive, patriotic forces and the USSR’; to provide
‘full and timely intelligence coverage’ of the whole of
Latin America (including what the Centre called ‘white
[blank] spots’ in those countries which had no diplomatic
relations with the Soviet Union); to expand the number of
confidential contacts in Latin American regimes without
resorting to the more risky process of agent recruitment;
and to maintain clandestine contact with nineteen
Communist parties, two-thirds of which were still illegal
or semi-illegal. -

The five main targets for KGB operations identified in
1974 were Cuba, Argentina, Peru, Brazil and Mexico.
Significantly, neither Nicaragua nor Chile any longer
ranked as a priority target. In Nicaragua, the prospects for
a Sandinista revolution were no longer taken seriously in
the Centre. In Chile the firm grip established by the
Pinochet military regime seemed to exclude any further
experience of ‘Socialism with red wine’ for the
foreseeable future.

As the only surviving Marxist regime in Latin America
after the overthrow of the Allende regime, Cuba ranked
clearly first in the KGB’s order of priorities. In the view
of both the Centre and the Politburo: ‘Cuba is taking on
an important role as a proponent of socialist ideas. F.
Castro’s reorientation in important political issues
(disclaiming the policy of exporting the revolution,
accepting a single form of socialism based on Marxist-
Leninist doctrine) is of great importance. ’-

At the Twenty-fourth Congress of the CPSU, held in
the great palace of the Kremlin in 1971, Fidel Castro had
received louder applause than any of the other fraternal
delegates - to the deep, though private, irritation of some
of them.- To many foreign Party bureaucrats in their
sober business suits, it must have seemed very unfair that,
after many years of never straying from the Moscow line,
they should arouse less enthusiasm than the flamboyant

Castro who had so recently dabbled in revisionism.

Castro’s popularity in Moscow was due partly to the
fact that he had established himself as the Soviet Union’s
most persuasive advocate in the Third World. He was the
star performer at the Fourth Conference of the Non-
Aligned Movement which met in Algiers in 1973, arguing
the Soviet case more eloquently than any Soviet
spokesman could have done. The host nation, Algeria,
supported the traditional non-aligned policy of
equidistance between East and West, arguing that there
were Two imperialisms’: one capitalist, the other
Communist. Castro insisted, however, that the countries
of the Soviet bloc were the natural and necessary allies of
the non-aligned:

How can the Soviet Union be labelled imperialist? Where
are its monopoly corporations? Where is its participation
in multinational companies? What factories, what mines,
what oilfields does it own in the underdeveloped world?
What worker is exploited in any country of Asia, Africa
or Latin America by Soviet capital?

. . . Only the closest alliance among all the progressive
forces of the world will provide us with the strength
needed to overcome the still-powerful forces of
imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism and racism, and
to wage a successful fight for the aspirations to peace and

justice of all the peoples of the world.

The delegates were at least partly persuaded. The
conference rejected the views of its Algerian hosts, failed
to brand the Soviet Union as imperialist and denounced
the ‘aggressive imperialism’ of the West as ‘the greatest
obstacle on the road toward emancipation and progress of
the developing countries

As well as proving an eloquent advocate of the Soviet
cause in the international arena, Cuba was also an
important intelligence ally. The Centre established what it
regarded as ‘good working relations’ with the head of the
DGI, Jose Mendez Cominches.- By 1973, if not earlier,
Mendez Cominches was attending conferences of the
intelligence chiefs of the Soviet bloc. At that time
seventy-eight Cuban intelligence officers were at KGB
training schools. Technical equipment valued by the
Centre at 2 million rubles was provided free of charge to
the DGI. The KGB liaison mission in Havana contained
experts in all the main ‘lines’ of intelligence operation
who provided the Cubans with ‘assistance in the planning
of their work’.- After the mass expulsion of Soviet
intelligence officers from London in 1971, the DGI’s
London station took over the running of some KGB
operations in Britain .- By, and probably before, 1973, the
KGB maintained ‘operational contact’ with the DGI in six

foreign capitals as well as in Havana.- During the 1970s
the KGB made increasing use of DGI assistance in
operations against the Main Adversary both inside and
outside the United States. In 1976, for example, the KGB
and DGI agreed on ‘joint cultivation’ of targets in the
National Security Agency, the Pentagon and US military
bases in Latin America and Spain. The DGI was thought
particularly useful in cultivating Hispanics and blacks.
Two of the five ‘talent- spotting leads’ in the United States
selected by the KGB for ‘joint cultivation’ with the DGI
in 1976 were African-American cipher clerks. -

In Latin America during the 1970s the DGI had fewer
legal residencies than the KGB, chiefly because of the
smaller number of states with which Cuba maintained
diplomatic relations. In 1976- 77 there appear to have
been DGI residencies only in Ecuador, Guyana, Jamaica,
Mexico, Panama, Peru and Venezuela.— Though
Mitrokhin’s notes provide only fragmentary information,
all appear to have assisted KGB operations in various
ways. In 1977 the DGI informed the KGB liaison office
in Havana that it had a series of agents in ‘high official
positions’ in Mexico, including the Interior Ministry and
police force, and suggested that they be run jointly.—
Mitrokhin’s notes do not mention whether this offer was
accepted.

The Centre seems to have been well informed about

even the most highly classified aspect of DGI activity - its
illegal operations. In the early 1970s the DGI had about
forty-five illegals, all of whom went on year-long KGB
training courses in Moscow.— Some KGB illegals with
bogus Latin American identities were sent to Cuba to
perfect their language skills and acclimatize themselves to
living in a Latin American environment before being
deployed to their final destinations. In 1976 a senior KGB
delegation including both the head and deputy head of the
FCD illegals directorate, Vadim Alekseyevich
Kirpichenko and Marius Aramovich Yuzbashyan, went to
Havana to discuss co-operation with their counterparts in
the DGI. Agreement was reached on the joint training of
several Latin American illegals for deployment against
US, Latin American, Spanish and Maoist targets. The
DGI agreed that the KGB could use its radio
communications system to relay messages to its illegals
operating in the United States and Latin America. During
a return visit to Moscow the following year, the head of
the DGI illegals directorate agreed to recruit two or three
illegals for the KGB.—

Cuba was also one of the most important bases for
KGB SIGINT operations, chiefly against US targets. The
KGB file on the 1979 running costs of intercept posts in
KGB residencies around the world shows that the Havana
post (codenamed TERMIT-S) had the third largest
budget; only the Washington and New York posts were

more expensive to operate.— An even larger intercept
post, also targeted on the United States, was situated in
the massive SIGINT base set up by the GRU at Lourdes
in Cuba in the mid-1960s to monitor US Navy
communications and other high-frequency
transmissions.— On 25 April 1975 a secret Soviet
government decree (No. 342-115) authorized the
establishment of a new KGB SIGINT station (codenamed
TERMIT-P) within the Lourdes base, which began
operations in December 1976. Run by the Sixteenth
Directorate, TERMIT-P had a fixed 12-metre dish
antenna and a mobile 7-metre dish antenna mounted on a
covered lorry, which enabled it to intercept microwave
communications ‘downlinked’ from US satellites or
transmitted between microwave towers. —

As well as co-operating closely with the DGI in a
variety of intelligence operations, the KGB maintained an
undeclared residency in Havana which kept close watch
on the Castro regime and the mood of the population; in
1974 it sent 205 reports by cable and sixty- four by
diplomatic bag. Its sources included sixty-three agents
and sixty-seven co-optees among the large Soviet
community. — The aspect of Cuban intelligence which
gave greatest concern to the Havana residency was its
internal security. Though brutal by Western standards,
Cuban internal surveillance struck the Centre as
unacceptably feeble. The department charged with

combating ideological subversion had a total
establishment of only 180, many of them - in the KGB’s
view - poorly qualified. According to a report from the
Havana residency in 1976, one Cuban anti- subversion
officer had recruited five out of fourteen members of a
Cuban orchestra simply ‘in case the orchestra went on
tour abroad’.— The Centre was particularly disturbed by
the fact that it could not persuade the DGI to share its own
obsession with Zionist ‘subversion’. The KGB liaison
office drew the DGI’s attention to the presence of
seventeen Zionist organizations in Cuba but complained
to the Centre that no action had been taken against any of
them.—

By Soviet standards, the Cuban surveillance
department was also seriously understaffed. With a total
of 278 staff in Havana and 112 in the provinces in 1976,
the KGB residency calculated that it could deploy only
about twelve surveillance groups of nine or ten people per
day. Because of the two-shift system, this meant that it
was able to keep full-time surveillance of only six moving
targets.— The KGB was also dissatisfied with the scale of
Cuban eavesdropping and letter-opening. The 260 people
employed to monitor telephone conversations and
eavesdropping devices listened in to a daily average of
only about 900 international phone calls.— Cuban
censorship monitored about 800 addresses on a full-time
basis and translated 300 to 500 foreign-language letters a

day.—

The Centre’s concern at the Cuban failure to reproduce
its own absurdly labour-intensive systems of surveillance
and obsessive pursuit of even the most trivial forms of
ideological subversion was most evident in the months
before Brezhnev’s visit to Cuba early in 1974. The
Havana residency was also worried by what it believed
was lax treatment of Cuban political prisoners. Of the
8,000 ‘sentenced for counter-revolutionary activity’,
many were reported to be allowed home once a month
and on public holidays. Particular concern was caused by
the fact that some of the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ given
this comparatively lenient treatment had in the past made
‘anti- Soviet statements’ and might be on the streets during
Brezhnev’s visit.—

No dissident, however, disturbed the stage-managed
welcome given to the vain and decrepit Soviet leader in
Havana’s Revolution Square by a crowd officially
estimated at over a million people. Castro’s own words of
welcome plumbed new depths of platitudinous
sycophancy. ‘No other foreign visitor to Cuba’, he
declared, ‘has ever been welcomed by our people so
joyfully or with such rapturous enthusiasm as was
Comrade Brezhnev.’ Castro eulogized Brezhnev’s own
stumbling banalities as ‘major political statements of
tremendous importance’ for the entire world:

It must be remembered that we attach paramount
importance to the history of the Soviet Union itself and to
the role played by the CPSU. I refer to both the USSR’s
role in the development of the history of all mankind and
to the role which the USSR and the CPSU have played in
the cause of solidarity with Cuba . . . For us, Comrade
Brezhnev - the most eminent Soviet leader - personifies,
as it were, the entire policy of the USSR and the CPSU.
And it was for this reason that our people looked forward
to his arrival and were eager to express their feelings of
friendship, profound respect and gratitude towards the
Soviet Union.—

Castro did not feel it necessary, however, to display the
same level of sycophancy to other Soviet bloc leaders.
The KGB reported that the visit to Cuba shortly after
Brezhnev’s by Erich Honecker, the East German leader,
had gone extremely badly. In private meetings Castro
accused East Germany and other ‘socialist countries’ of
doing little to help Cuba and ‘profiteering’ at Cuban
expense by refusing to pay a fair price for its sugar.
Honecker was said to have responded ‘in an angry and
intemperate manner’. ‘If I had known that Castro would
react in this manner to our visit’, he told his staff, ‘I
would not have gone.’ The atmosphere at Havana airport
on Honecker’ s departure was said to have been

‘extremely cold’. His entourage spent much of the flight
home trying to calm him down, fearful - according to the
KGB - that news of his row with Castro might leak to the
West.— Behind the scenes, however, the conflict
continued. In 1977 the East German Ministry of State
Security (Stasi) liaison officer in Havana, Johann Miinzel,
told one of his KGB colleagues that the Cuban leadership
were doing little to address their economic problems and
simply expected other socialist countries to bail them out
in the name of ‘proletarian internationalism’. The DGI
simultaneously complained to the KGB that Stasi officers
were inclined to lecture them rather than treat them as
colleagues.—

Moscow, however, judged Cuba’s private quarrels with
some member states of the Warsaw Pact in the mid-1970s
as of far less significance than its public contribution to
the establishment of new Marxist regimes in Africa. The
FCD declared in a report to Andropov in 1976, ‘Africa
has turned into an arena for a global struggle between the
two systems [communism and capitalism] for a long time
to come.’— Cuban assistance in that struggle was of
crucial importance. The nearly simultaneous break-up of
the Portuguese Empire and the overthrow of the Ethiopian
Emperor Haile Selassie brought to power self-proclaimed
Marxist regimes in Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia. In
Angola, the richest of Portugal’s colonies, the end of
Portuguese rule was followed in 1975 by a full-scale civil

war in which the Marxist Popular Movement for the
Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was opposed by the
National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and
the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola
(UNIT A). Though small-scale Soviet support for the
MPLA, led by Agostinho Neto, had begun a decade
earlier, the decisive factor in the struggle for power was
the arrival of Cuban troops beginning in the autumn of
1975. Disappointed by the declining prospects for
revolution in Latin America, Castro looked on 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.— According to
Castro’s friend, the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia
Marquez:

He personally had picked up the commanders of the
battalion of special forces that left in the first flight and
had driven them himself in his Soviet jeep to the foot of
the plane ramp. There was no spot on the map of Angola
that he hadn’t memorized. His concentration on the war
was so intense and meticulous that he could quote any
figure on Angola as if it were Cuba, and he spoke of
Angolan cities, customs and people as if he had lived
there his entire life.—

Though the initiative for intervention in Angola was
Cuban, from October 1975 it was enthusiastically
encouraged by Moscow. During the next three months,
the Soviet General Staff arranged the transport of over
12,000 Cuban troops to Africa by sea and air, as well as
supplying them with advanced military hardware.
Moscow was delighted with Castro’s willingness to
respect its political primacy in Angola. The Soviet charge
d’affaires in Luanda, G. A. Zverev, reported in March
1976, ‘Close [Soviet-Cuban] co-ordination in Angola
during the war has had very positive results.’ The Luanda
embassy demonstrated its missionary zeal by distributing
huge amounts of Soviet propaganda. By the summer it
had run out of portraits of Lenin and requested a further
airlift.—

The Centre was also delighted by the level of Cuban
intelligence collaboration. Castro sent the head of the
DGI, Mendez Cominches, to take personal charge of
intelligence operations in Angola, where, according to
KGB files, he regularly provided ‘valuable political and
operational intelligence’. Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head
of the FCD, gained Andropov’s approval to send Mendez
Cominches regular food parcels from Moscow, each
valued by the Centre at 500 rubles, to encourage his
continued co-operation.— Pedro Pupo Perez, the acting
head of the DGI in Havana during Mendez Cominches ’s
absence, also provided intelligence on Africa and Latin

America, and was rewarded with a gift valued at 350
rubles which was intended to ‘consolidate confidential
relations’.— Among the DGI operations in Angola carried
out to assist the KGB was a penetration of the Brazilian
embassy to obtain intelligence on its cipher system. A
technical specialist from the KGB’s Sixteenth (SIGINT)
Directorate flew out from Moscow with equipment which
enabled a DGI agent to photograph the wiring of the
embassy’s Swiss-made TS-803 cipher machine.— The
KGB regularly showed its appreciation to the Cuban
Interior Minister, Sergio del Valle, who was responsible
for the DGI, for keeping it informed about ‘important
political and operational questions’. During a visit to
Moscow in 1975, he was presented by Viktor Chebrikov,
Deputy Chairman (and future Chairman) of the KGB,
with a gift valued at 160 rubles.— In January 1977, during
another visit to Moscow, Andropov approved the
presentation to del Valle by Kryuchkov of a gift worth up
to 600 rubles ‘in return for information and in order to
consolidate relations’.— Del Valle’s relations with senior
KGB officers became so close that he was even willing,
on occasion, to complain to them about Castro’s delusions
of grandeur as a great international revolutionary leader.—

Late in 1977 Soviet-Cuban collaboration in Angola was
extended to Ethiopia in support of the vaguely Marxist
military junta headed by Lieutenant-Colonel Mengistu
Haile Mariam in its war against Somalia. During the

winter of 1977-78 Soviet military aircraft, as well as
shipping huge quantities of arms, transported 17,000
Cuban troops to Addis Ababa.— The Cuban forces
worked closely with Soviet military advisers to co-
ordinate troop movements and military tactics. Their
presence in Ethiopia, initially kept secret, was publicly
admitted by Castro on 15 March 1978. ‘The Cuban
internationalist fighters’, he declared, ‘stood out for their
extraordinary effectiveness and magnificent combat
ability.’ It was ‘really admirable’ to see ‘how many sons
of our people were capable of going to that distant land
and fighting there as if fighting in their own country’. In
both Moscow and Havana, Cuban military intervention
and the decisive defeat of the Somali forces were
celebrated as a triumph of proletarian internationalism.—
A joint report in April by the Soviet Foreign Ministry and
the International Department of the Central Committee
noted with satisfaction: ‘The Soviet Union and Cuba are
in constant contact aimed at co-ordination of their actions
in support of the Ethiopian revolution. ’—

The level of Cuban intelligence and military
collaboration during the mid- and late 1970s met and
probably exceeded the expectations of the Centre and the
Politburo during the policy review of 1974. A KGB
delegation to Cuba in 1978, headed by Deputy Chairman
Vadim Petrovich Pirozhkov, presented Fidel and Raul
Castro with PSM pistols and ammunition. Raul was also

given a dinner service and food parcel valued at 450
rubles.— By contrast, KGB operations in the other four
priority Latin American targets agreed in 1974 -
Argentina, Peru, Mexico and Brazil - failed to achieve as
much as the Centre had hoped.

In the immediate aftermath of the Pinochet coup in Chile,
the main opportunity identified by the KGB for the
expansion of Soviet influence in South America was in
Argentina. Twelve days after Allende’s death, Juan
Domingo Peron was elected President. Peron’s third wife,
Maria Estela (Isabel) Martinez, a confidential contact of
the KGB, became Vice-President. Peronist nationalism,
once regarded in Moscow as a ‘fascist’ phenomenon, now
fitted in well with the KGB strategy of undermining US
preponderance in Latin America by cultivating anti-
American leaders.

First elected as President of Argentina in 1946, Per6n
had been forced into exile in Spain and his under-age
mistress sent to a reformatory after a military coup in
1955. Eighteen years later his political fortunes revived
with the election in May 1973 of a Peronist candidate.
Hector Jose Campora, as President. The only foreign
heads of state to attend Campora’ s inauguration, which
was boycotted by most other political leaders, were Latin
America’s two Marxist presidents: Salvador Allende of
Chile and Osvaldo Dorticds of Cuba. Within a few days

Campora had established diplomatic relations with Cuba,
East Germany and North Korea. He also moved quickly
to legalize the previously outlawed Argentinian
Communist Party (CPA). Aware that Campora had been
elected chiefly to pave the way for Peron himself, the
Centre gained Brezhnev’s permission to use a Peronist
deputy, who had been recruited as a confidential contact
by the Buenos Aires residency, to approach Peron while
he was still in exile in Spain, sound him out on his policy
towards the Soviet Union and propose ‘unofficial contacts
with Soviet representatives’ once he became President.
Though Peron was not told, the ‘Soviet representatives’
were to be KGB officers.— Isabel Peron received a more
direct approach from the KGB. Vladimir Konstantinovich
Tolstikov (codenamed LOMOV), who had succeeded
Leonov as head of the Second (Latin American)
Department in 1971, travelled to Spain to make personal
contact with her, apparently posing as a representative of
the Soviet film export agency and bringing with him a
number of gifts.—

On 13 July Campora resigned the presidency in order
to make it possible for Peron to stand in new presidential
elections in September. The CPA immediately offered
him an electoral alliance. Though Peron rejected the offer
and purged Marxists from the Peronist movement, he
none the less received Communist support during the
campaign.— His inauguration as President in October was

attended by a Soviet delegation which included Tolstikov,
travelling under the alias Sergei Sergeyevich
Konstantinov. Rather than drawing attention to himself by
a direct approach to Vice-President Isabel Peron,
Tolstikov made indirect contact with her through the
leading Chilean exile in Argentina, General Carlos Prats
Gonzalez, a former commander-in-chief of the Chilean
army whom Allende had made Interior Minister a year
before the coup. Prats was given $10,000 from the funds
allocated by the Central Committee for ‘work with the
Chilean resistance and emigre community’ after the
overthrow of the Allende regime. At Tolstikov’ s request.
Prats reminded Isabel Peron of their meetings in Spain
and the gifts she had received from Tolstikov, and asked
her to arrange a meeting between him and her husband
after the departure of the rest of the Soviet delegation.
Tolstikov did not identify himself as a KGB officer.
Instead he posed as a senior Latin American specialist in
the Foreign Ministry who could henceforth provide a
direct confidential channel to the Soviet leadership. Isabel
Peron arranged for Tolstikov to be received by the
President at his private residence at 9 a.m. on 21 October.

The KGB had no illusion about the prospects of turning
Juan Peron into an Argentinian Allende. His secret
meeting with Tolstikov, however, confirmed his potential
as an ally against the Main Adversary. Peron denounced
the United States’ ‘predatory economic policy towards

Argentina’ and the high-handed behaviour of American
companies: ‘Like an infection, American capital
penetrates through all the cracks.’ He told Tolstikov not to
be misled by his public expressions of ‘friendship toward
the United States’: ‘If one is not in a position to defeat the
enemy, then one must try to deceive him.’ Peron also
subjected Tolstikov to an exposition of his confused
political philosophy, claiming that his ‘concept of
justicialismo, or a society based on fairness, differed very
little from socialism’. However, ‘the transformation of
society proceeds harmoniously and in stages, changing
the social structure gradually and not subjecting it to a
radical break, which causes great disruption and economic
ruin’. Tolstikov then had to listen patiently as Peron
subjected him to a rambling disquisition of his views on a
variety of other subjects. To the Centre, however, the
meeting between Tolstikov and Peron must have seemed
an important success. For the first time since Allende’s
death, the KGB had opened a direct, covert channel to the
President of a major South American state.—

Tolstikov also held talks with Peron’ s influential
Economics Minister, Jose Gelbard (codenamed BAKIN),
a confidential contact of the Buenos Aires residency since
1970 who would, the Centre hoped, ‘exert useful
influence’ on Peron. According to KGB files, Gelbard
was described by Castro as an undeclared Communist.
Together with two other Jewish businessmen, he secretly

helped to finance the Argentinian Communist Party and
held regular meetings with the KGB resident, Vasili
Mikhailovich Muravyev, in one of the businessmen’s
houses. Before each meeting the businessman picked up
the resident in his car at a pre-arranged location in Buenos
Aires, then drove him to his house to meet Gelbard, who
entered through the back door and supplied what the KGB
considered ‘important political and economic
information’. Meetings of the Communist leadership also
sometimes took place in the same house.—

In December 1973 Tolstikov reported to the Centre that
Gelbard was, as expected, ‘in favour of strengthening
political and economic relations with the USSR’. ‘He
believes that co-operation with the USSR in the fields of
hydro-electric energy, petrochemicals, ship-building, and
fishing will help put an end to Argentina’s dependence on
the US, and will reinforce progressive tendencies in
government policy. ’

Gelbard asked Tolstikov for a Soviet trade delegation
to be sent to Argentina. His request was reinforced by the
general secretary of the Argentinian Communist Party,
Amedo Alvarez, who told Tolstikov that the delegation
would reinforce Peron’s links with ‘democratic forces’.
Tolstikov’ s meeting with Gelbard was considered of such
importance that the Centre sent a report on it to Brezhnev,
who speedily approved the sending of a trade mission.—

Peron turned the arrival of the Soviet delegation in
January 1974 into a public relations circus which was in
striking contrast to the cool reception accorded to a US
delegation a few months later.— The Centre judged many
of the reports it received from the Buenos Aires residency
in 1974 ‘especially valuable’, and passed some of them on
to Brezhnev.—

In May 1974 Gelbard and a 140-strong Argentinian
trade delegation made a highly publicized return visit to
the Soviet bloc. The importance attached to the visit was
demonstrated by the numerous red carpets laid out for
Gelbard in Moscow, where he was successively received
in private audience by Brezhnev, Aleksei Kosygin, the
Prime Minister, and Nikolai Podgorny, the Soviet
President. Radio Moscow congratulated Argentina for
having ‘shown other countries in South America how to
strengthen their independence and how to free themselves
from the shackles of the multi-national corporation’.
While in Moscow, Gelbard signed trade and economic co-
operation agreements by which the Soviet Union agreed
to long-term credits of $600 million - about twice those
granted to Allende’s Chile. Similar agreements with other
countries in the Soviet bloc added long-term credits worth
another $350 million. There were advantages to both
sides in the agreements. The Soviet Union, obliged by the
failure of its collective agriculture to import massive
amounts of grain, had an obvious interest in increasing the

number of its suppliers and in particular to limit its
dependence on US imports. Argentina, faced with the
protectionism of the European Community and
contracting demand elsewhere as a result of the dramatic
oil price rise of 1973, was anxious to find new markets.—

The hopes raised in the Centre for its Argentinian
operations by Juan Peron’s election in September 1973,
however, declined rapidly after his sudden death from a
heart attack on 1 July 1974. Though his widow and
successor, Isabel, was a KGB confidential contact, she
lacked both the personal authority and political skill of
her husband. Gelbard was sacked as Economics Minister
in 1975. In March 1976 Isabel Per6n was ousted in a
right-wing military coup led by General Jorge Videla,
who began a campaign against Communist ‘subversion’.
Moscow did its best to salvage what it could of the
Argentinian connection. By refraining from public
denunciation of the Videla regime, the Argentinian
Communist Party managed to remain relatively
unmolested. The Soviet delegation at the United Nations
went to the extraordinary lengths of vetoing American
attempts to secure UN condemnation of the regime’s
appalling human-rights record. Politically, all that was
achieved was a face-saving exercise. There were,
however, real economic benefits. In 1980 80 per cent of
Argentina’s grain exports went to the Soviet Union.—

During the later 1970s, the KGB also lost much of the
foothold it had acquired in Peru earlier in the decade. In
1974 the Centre still considered many of the reports from
the Lima residency ‘especially valuable’, and passed
some of them to Brezhnev, no doubt in order to
demonstrate the continuing strength of its contacts with
the junta.— The junta’s economic policies, however,
despite their ideological appeal in Moscow, led to chronic
inflation, economic stagnation and repeated debt crises.
After a coup in August 1975 by General Francisco
Morales Bermudez, the military government drifted to the
right.— As in Argentina, Moscow tried to salvage what it
could of the relationship built up over the previous few
years. With Andropov’s approval, the KGB presented
Morales Bermudez with a Makarov pistol and 200
cartridges.— In December 1975 the Centre sent the
Peruvian intelligence service, SIN, a gift of operational
equipment valued at about $300,000.— In the following
year the new heads of SIN and Peruvian military
intelligence were each presented, like Morales Bermudez,
with Makarov pistols; they also received further gifts
valued, respectively, at 300 and 150 hard-currency rubles.
Ten SIN officers were trained, at the KGB’s expense, at
the FCD Red Banner Institute during 1976.—

Such gestures achieved little. In August 1976 Tolstikov
was informed by the Cuban ambassador to Peru and
Deputy Interior Minister Abrahantes that Morales

Bermudez had assured Castro that he was ‘a supporter of
revolutionary changes in Peru’ and prepared to
collaborate in the struggle against the CIA.
Simultaneously, however, he was removing ‘progressive’
officials and moving to the right. The Cuban regime
concluded that Morales Bermudez was not to be trusted
and suspended aid to Peru.— By 1976 Cuban intelligence
was pessimistic about the prospects for challenging
American influence in South America. Manuel Pineiro,
head of the Departamento de America, which was
responsible for the export of revolution, told Tolstikov in
August that since the tour of five Latin American states
earlier in the year by Henry Kissinger, ‘one can begin to
observe the onset of reaction and the fascistization of the
regimes there’. On the South American mainland, said
Pineiro, only Guyana was following ‘an anti-imperialist
course’: ‘[Forbes] Burnham, the Prime Minister of
Guyana, shares some of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism,
but for tactical reasons is forced to conceal this.’—

Mexico’s presence on the list of the KGB’s five priority
Latin American targets in 1974 was due both to its
strategic importance as a large state on the southern
border of the United States and to the apparent
opportunities created by the election as President in 1970
of Luis Echeverria Alvarez. Under the Mexican
constitution, Echeverria served for a non-renewable six-

year term, controlling during that period vast political
patronage and having the final word on all major policy
issues. Like his predecessors, though legitimized by a
presidential election, he owed his position as President to
a secret selection process within the Partido
Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which had dominated
Mexican politics for the past forty years.

Echeverria’s ultimate ambition (which he never came
close to realizing) was, the KGB believed, to follow his
term as President by becoming Secretary- General of the
United Nations. He thus sought to establish himself
during his presidency as a champion of Third World
causes, became the first Mexican President to visit Cuba,
was frequently publicly critical of the United States and in
1973 made a well-publicized trip to the Soviet Union. The
KGB did not succeed in establishing direct access to
Echeverria in the way that it did to Juan and Isabel Peron
in Argentina and to some members of the military junta in
Peru. From 1972 onwards, however, the Mexico City
residency claimed to have one agent and two confidential
contacts who provided ‘stable channels for exercising
influence on the President’. The agent, codenamed
URAN, was a former Chilean diplomat of the Allende era.
Of the two confidential contacts who were also said to
influence Echeverria’s foreign policy, MARTINA was the
Rector of a Mexican university and OLMEK a leading
member of the Partido Popular Socialista, one of a

handful of small parties usually prepared to do deals with
the ruling PRI. The Mexico City residency claimed the
credit for persuading Echeverria to break off relations
with the Pinochet regime, for much of his criticism of the
United States, and for his decision to recognize the
Marxist MPLA regime in Angola. It reported that its
contacts had told Echeverria that these actions would
strengthen his reputation in the Third World and enhance
his prospects of becoming UN Secretary-General. — In
1975 he signed a mutual co-operation agreement with
Comecon. In the same year, to the delight of Moscow,
Echeverria instructed the Mexican representative at the
UN to support an anti-Israeli resolution condemning
Zionism as a form of racism - though he had second
thoughts when this provoked Jewish leaders in the United
States to promote a tourist boycott of Mexico.—

The KGB may well have exaggerated its ability to
influence Echeverria’ s policy. When foreign statesmen or
media made pronouncements in line with Soviet policy, it
was quick to claim the credit for its own active measures.
The KGB probably also exaggerated its influence on the
press. In 1974, for example, the Mexico City residency
reported that it had planted 300 articles in Mexican
newspapers, among them Excelsior, then Mexico City’s
leading paper, the Diario de Mexico and Universal. —

One of the KGB’s most spectacular active measures.

however, backfired badly. In 1973 the CIA defector Philip
Agee (subsequently codenamed PONT by the KGB) had
approached the residency in Mexico City and offered
what the head of the FCD Counter-Intelligence
Directorate, Oleg Kalugin, described as ‘reams of
information about CIA operations’. The residency,
wrongly suspecting that he was part of a CIA deception,
turned him away. According to Kalugin, ‘Agee then went
to the Cubans, who welcomed him with open arms . . .
[and] shared Agee’s information with us.’— Service A,
the FCD active-measures department, claimed much of
the credit for the publication in 1975 of Agee’s
sensational memoir. Inside the Company: CIA Diary,
most of which was devoted to a denunciation of CIA
operations in Latin America, identifying approximately
250 of its officers and agents. Inside the Company was an
instant best-seller, described by the CIA’s classified in-
house journal as ‘a severe body blow to the Agency’.—

Before publication, material on CIA penetration of the
leadership of Latin American Communist parties was
removed at Service A’s insistence.— Service A seems to
have been unaware, however, that KGB residencies were
currently attempting to cultivate several of those publicly
identified in Inside the Company as CIA agents or
contacts. Among them was President Echeverria who,
while the minister responsible for internal security, was
alleged to have had the CIA codename LITEMPO-I4, to

have been in close contact with the CIA station in Mexico
City and to have revealed to it the undemocratic processes
by which, well in advance of his election in 1970, he had
been selected by the ruling PRI as the next President.—
The Mexican Foreign Minister told the Soviet ambassador
that President Echeverria had been informed of the
KGB’s involvement in the publication of Agee’s book
and regarded it as an unfriendly act against both Mexico
and the President personally. On instructions from
Andropov and Gromyko, the ambassador claimed
unconvincingly that the Soviet Union had no
responsibility for the book.—

Brazil owed its place in the KGB’s 1974 list of its five
priority targets in Latin America simply to its size and
strategic importance:

Special significance is ascribed to Brazil - a huge country
with great wealth and claims to becoming a major power
in the future, which is acquiring the characteristics of an
imperialist state and actively entering the international
arena. But the residency there is weak due to quota
limitations [by the Brazilian government on the size of the
Soviet embassy] and thus has modest capabilities.—

For most of its existence, the military regime which held

power from 1964 to 1985 made Brazil a relatively hostile
environment for KGB operations. There was little
prospect during the 1970s either of acquiring confidential
contacts within the government, as in Argentina and Peru,
or of finding contacts with direct access to the President,
as in Mexico. The KGB’s best intelligence on Brazil
probably came from its increasing ability to decrypt
Brazil’s diplomatic traffic. By 1979 the radio-intercept
post (codenamed KLEN) in the Brasilia residency was
able to intercept 19,000 coded cables sent and received by
the Foreign Ministry as well as approximately 2,000 other
classified official communications.—

SIGINT enabled the Centre to monitor some of the
activities of probably its most important Brazilian agent,
codenamed IZOT, who was recruited while serving as
Brazilian ambassador in the Soviet bloc.— As well as
providing intelligence and recruitment leads to three other
diplomats, IZOT also on occasion included in his reports
information (probably disinformation) provided by the
KGB. Assessed by the KGB as ‘adhering to an anti-
American line and liberal views concerning the
development of a bourgeois society’, IZOT was a paid
agent. His remuneration, however, took a variety of
forms, including in 1976 a silver service valued by the
Centre at 513 rubles. The Centre had increasing doubts
about IZOT’s reliability. On one occasion it believed that
he was guilty of ‘outright deception’, claiming to have

passed on information provided by the KGB to his
Foreign Ministry when his decrypted cables showed that
he had not done so.—

The presidency of Ernesto Geisel (1974-79) made the
first tentative moves towards democratization of the
authoritarian and sometimes brutal Brazilian military
regime. It remained, however, resolutely anti-Communist.
In 1976 the official censor banned even a TV broadcast of
a performance by the Bolshoi Ballet for fear of
Communist cultural contagion. When Geisel revoked the
banishment orders on most political exiles in 1978, he
deliberately excluded the long-serving Secretary-General
of the Brazilian Communist Party, Luis Carlos Prestes.—
The inauguration as President in March 1979 of General
Joao Batista Figueiredo, chief of the Service Nacional de
Informa^oes (SNI), Brazil’s intelligence service,
paradoxically made life somewhat easier than before for
both the Communist Party and the KGB residency. The
Brazilian intelligence community was divided between
reformers who favoured a gradual transition to democracy
and hard-liners who were preoccupied by the danger of
subversion. Figueiredo sided with the reformers. So, even
more clearly, did his chief political adviser and head of
his civilian staff. General Golbery do Couto e Silva, who
fifteen years earlier had been the chief architect and first
head of SNI.— Despite hard-line opposition, Figueiredo
issued an amnesty for most of Brazil’s remaining political

exiles, including Prestes and other leading Communists.—

While accepting that, in the East- West struggle, Brazil
was ultimately on the side of the ‘Giant of the North’,
Golbery argued publicly in favour of a pragmatic foreign
policy which avoided subordination to the United States:
‘It seems to us only just that [, like the US,] we should
also learn to bargain at high prices.’— That, Golbery
seems to have believed, involved dialogue with the Soviet
Union. In the spring of 1980 a Soviet parliamentary
delegation headed by Eduard Shevardnadze, then a
candidate (non-voting) member of the Politburo, visited
Brasilia. Unknown to their hosts, the plane (Special Flight
L-62) carried new radio interception equipment to
improve the performance of the residency’s SIGINT
station, and took the old equipment with it when it left.
Among the delegation was Brezhnev’s personal assistant,
Andrei Mikhailovich Aleksandrov. The detailed
instructions given to the resident on the entertainment of
Aleksandrov provide a good example of the pains taken
by the Centre to impress the political leadership. He was
told to ensure that the KGB officer selected to show
Aleksandrov the sights during his visit was smartly but
soberly dressed, had his hair neatly cut, and expressed
himself lucidly, concisely and accurately at all times.—

The pampered parliamentary delegation paved the way
for other, more covert contacts by the KGB with the

Brazilian leadership. In December 1980 Nikolai Leonov
travelled to Brazil for talks with General Golbery. Though
Leonov posed as an academic working as a Soviet
government adviser, Golbery’ s background in intelligence
makes it highly unlikely that he failed to identify him as a
senior KGB officer. In June 1981, with Figueiredo’s
approval, Golbery sent a member of his staff for further
discussions in Moscow, where it was agreed that a
‘counsellor’ (in fact a KGB officer) would be added to the
embassy staff in Brasilia, whose chief duty would be to
conduct regular ‘unofficial’ meetings with the President.—
Further, public evidence of a new era in Soviet-Brazilian
relations was the signing in 1981 of a series of trade
agreements worth a total of about $2 billion.—

The chief opposition to Golbery’ s support for
democratic reforms at home and better relations with the
Soviet bloc came from military hard-liners led by General
Octavio Aguiar de Medeiros, the current chief of SNI.
Golbery also opposed the austerity programme of the
Minister of Economy, Antonio Delfim Neto. In August
1981 he resigned in protest at the failure to prosecute
military extremists involved in bomb attacks against the
political opposition. Golbery was replaced as head of
Figueiredo’s civilian staff by Joao Leitao de Abreu, a
lawyer more acceptable to military hard-liners .— Since
the Brazilian files noted by Mitrokhin end in 1981, there
is no indication of whether or not the meetings arranged

by Golbery between Figueiredo and a KGB officer went
ahead.

The KGB sought to compensate for the declining success
of its operations against the priority targets established in
1974 by trying to make new ‘confidential contacts’
among ‘progressive’, anti-American political leaders.
Among its targets in the mid-1970s was Alfonso Lopez
Michelson (codenamed MENTOR), leader of the
Colombian Movimiento Revolucionario Liberal (MRL),
who was elected President in 1974, declared an economic
state of emergency and announced that Colombia would
henceforth reject US economic assistance because
‘foreign aid breeds an unhealthy economic dependency
and delays or undermines measures that should be taken
for development’.— In March 1975 the Politburo
approved a KGB operation, codenamed REDUT, aimed at
establishing ‘unofficial relations’ with President Lopez.—
A senior KGB officer was despatched to Bogota, met
Lopez on 29 May and gained his agreement to future
meetings. Though Mitrokhin’s notes do not identify the
officer concerned, he was almost certainly the head of the
FCD Second (Latin American) Department, Vladimir
Tolstikov, who also met Lopez on subsequent occasions.
As in his earlier meetings with Peron, Tolstikov identified
himself during visits to Bogota as Sergei Sergeyevich
Konstantinov, a senior Latin American specialist in the

Foreign Ministry, and claimed to be able to provide a
direct confidential channel to the Soviet leadership. At his
first meeting with Tolstikov, unaware of his KGB
connection, Lopez handed him an album of pictures of
Colombia which he asked to be presented to Brezhnev
with a personal message from himself - a minor
diplomatic gesture which was doubtless given an
enhanced significance when reported to Brezhnev.—

The Centre’s exaggerated hopes of establishing
‘unoffical relations’ with Lopez derived from his distrust
of the United States which, like many other Latin
Americans, he blamed for the economic exploitation of
Latin America. After Jimmy Carter’s election as US
President in November 1976, L6pez was reported to have
dismissed him as ‘a provincial politician with a
pathological stubbornness and the primitive reasoning of
a person who produces and sells peanuts - an accidental
figure on the American political horizon’.—

Operating under his diplomatic alias, Tolstikov
established good personal relations with L6pez, who in
1976 awarded ‘Sergei Sergeyevich Konstantinov’ the
Order of San Carlos ‘for active participation in
strengthening relations between the USSR and
Colombia’.— A rather more substantial achievement of
the Bogota residency was to establish covert contact at a
senior level with the Colombian intelligence service, the

Departamento Administrativo de Securidad (DAS) and, it
claimed, to influence its intelligence assessments.—

Alfonso Lopez was the first Colombian President to
visit the neighbouring Republic of Panama, which had
split from Colombia in 1903 after an uprising engineered
by the United States. The new Republic had promptly
been bullied into accepting a treaty leasing the Panama
Canal Zone in perpetuity to the United States. Lopez gave
public support to the campaign for the abrogation of the
treaty by the President of Panama, General Omar Torrijos
Herrera (codenamed RODOM by the KGB), and agreed
to Tolstikov’s request to arrange a meeting for him with
Torrijos.— In the event, the Centre selected for the
meeting an even more senior officer operating under
diplomatic cover, Nikolai Leonov, who over twenty years
earlier had been Castro’s first KGB contact and had since
risen to become head of FCD Service No. 1 (Analysis and
Reports). On 28 June 1977 Torrijos sent his personal
aircraft to Bogota to fly Leonov to a former US airbase in
Panama, where they continued discussions for four days.
Though Leonov brought with him gifts valued by the
Centre at 1,200 rubles, he initially found Torrijos in a
difficult mood. A few days earlier Guatemala had broken
off diplomatic relations with Panama after Torrijos had
incautiously told an American journalist that he rejected
Guatemalan claims to sovereignty over Belize. He told
Leonov angrily, T’m not going to receive any more

foreigners - not even the Pope!’

Torrijos’s anger, however, quickly refocused on the
United States. He told Leonov that he was determined to
restore Panama’s sovereignty over the Canal Zone and
eliminate every trace of the American presence. ‘This’, he
declared, ‘is the religion of my life!’ He gave Leonov a
film entitled The Struggle of the People of Panama for the
Canal which he asked him to pass on to Brezhnev. In
return Leonov presented Torrijos with a hunting rifle and
a souvenir selection of vodkas, and gave his wife an
enamel box. Torrijos declared his willingness to continue
‘unofficial contact’ with Soviet representatives and gave
Leonov the direct phone numbers of his secretary,
through whom future meetings could be arranged. He also
gave orders for Leonov to be given a visa allowing him to
visit Panama at any time over the next year. Leonov gave
Torrijos his home telephone number in Moscow - a
somewhat irregular proceeding which, as Leonov later
acknowledged, disconcerted both the Centre and those
members of his family who took calls from Torrijos.—
Shortly after he returned to Moscow, Torrijos phoned
him, said that he wanted to check that he had returned
safely and discussed with him the negotiation of a Soviet-
Panamanian trade treaty.— Torrijos believed his phone
conversations with Leonov were probably intercepted by
NS A, the American SIGINT agency, but - according to
Leonov - looked on them as a way of putting pressure on

the Carter administration, which he knew to be nervous
about his Soviet contacts.—

Despite the diplomatic cover used by Leonov, there is
no doubt that Torrijos realized that he was a KGB
officer.— After reviewing the results of Leonov’s mission,
the Centre decided to arrange meetings with Torrijos
every six to eight months, chiefly in an attempt to
influence his policy (mainly, no doubt, to the United
States). A KGB officer operating under cover as a
correspondent with Tass, the Soviet news agency, was
given responsibility for making the detailed arrangements
for these meetings. In order to flatter Torrijos another
operations officer, also under Tass cover, was sent to
deliver to him a personal letter from Brezhnev.— To
reinforce Torrijos’s suspicion of the Carter administration
he was also given a bogus State Department document
forged by Service A which discussed methods of dragging
out the Panama Canal negotiations and removing Torrijos
himself from power.—

On 7 September 1977 Torrijos and President Jimmy
Carter met in Washington to sign two treaties: a Canal
Treaty transferring the Canal Zone to Panamanian control
in stages to be completed by 2000 and a Neutrality Treaty
providing for joint US-Panamanian defence of the Canal’s
neutrality. At another meeting in Washington on 14
October, however. Carter told Torrijos that the

administration had only about fifty-five of the sixty-seven
Senate votes required for ratification of the treaties.— For
the next few months Torrijos had to spend much of his
time acting as a jovial host in Panama to US senators
whom he privately detested. According to the US
diplomat Jack Vaughn:

[Torrijos] had an uncanny ability, looking at a VIP, to
know whether he was the raunchy type who wanted girls
around or if he was prudish and straitlaced, or maybe he
wanted a more intellectual presentation. And, where do
you want to go, what can I show you? He’d take them in a
helicopter for short sightseeing trips, and they’d get off
and go around and meet the natives. A very carefully
orchestrated, devastatingly effective show . . . The effect
on a gringo politician was, ‘This guy has real power, he
can make things happen.’ He really did a job on the
Senate.—

Ratification remained in doubt until the last moment. At
the end of 1977, Torrijos asked for a meeting with
Leonov to discuss the state of the negotiations with the
United States. What probably most concerned him were
the charges by leading Republican senators opposed to
ratification that he was involved in drug trafficking.
Carter, however, was convinced that the charges were

false. In mid-February 1978 the Senate went into secret
session to hear evidence from the Senate Intelligence
Committee refuting the charges.— Ironically, the KGB
believed the charges which Carter and the Senate
Intelligence Committee dismissed.—

There is little doubt that the charges were correct.
According to Floyd Carlton Caceres, a notable drug
smuggler as well as personal pilot to Torrijos and his
intelligence chief, Manuel Noriega Morena (later
President), Torrijos had made contact with drug
traffickers almost as soon as he took power. By 1971 his
diplomat brother Moises ‘Monchi’ Torrijos was providing
drug couriers with official Panamanian passports to
enable them to avoid customs searches.— In 1992 Noriega
was to become the first foreign head of state to face
criminal charges in a US court; he was sentenced to forty
years’ imprisonment on eight counts of cocaine
trafficking, racketeering and money laundering.

Had the drug-trafficking charges against Torrijos stuck
in 1978, there would have been no prospect of ratifying
the treaties with the United States. On 16 March,
however, the Neutrality Act passed the Senate by one vote
more than the two-thirds majority required. Carter later
recalled, ‘I had never been more tense in my life as we
listened to each vote shouted out on the radio.’—
Apparently unknown to Carter and US intelligence.

Leonov arrived in Panama City on 22 March for six days
of talks with Torrijos, bringing with him presents for the
Torrijos family with a total value of 3,500 rubles. Torrijos
used the secret talks with Leonov partly to get off his
chest in private the loathing of the Yanquis which he
dared not express in public. ‘I hate the United States’, he
told Leonov, ‘but my position forces me to tolerate a great
deal. How I envy Fidel Castro!’

The biggest strain of all had been dealing with the US
Senate:

From November of last year up to March of this year,
there have been 50 senators in Panama at our invitation. I
worked with all of them personally, and it was a heavy
cross for me to bear. Almost all of the senators are crude,
arrogant, and unwilling to listen to any arguments from
the other side . . . They are cavemen whose thought
processes belong to the previous century.

Torrijos also had a personal scorn for Carter, whose
inadequacy as President was ‘a painful thing to see’.—
Carter, by contrast, had a somewhat naive admiration for
Torrijos. ‘No one’, he believed, ‘could have handled the
affairs of Panama and its people more effectively than had
this quiet and courageous leader. ’—

Though the KGB flattered Torrijos skilfully, they did
not share Carter’s unreciprocated respect for him.
Torrijos’s KGB file contains a description of him by
Allende as ‘a lecher’.— Given his own promiscuity,
Allende presumably intended to imply that Torrijos’s
sexual liaisons were conducted with less dignity than his
own. Torrijos’s current girlfriend at the time of his sudden
death in 1981 was a student friend of one of his own
illegitimate daughters.— The Torrijos file also includes
Cuban intelligence reports about his involvement, along
with some members of his family and inner circle, with
the drug trade and other international criminal
networks.— Torrijos’s Panama began to rival Batista’s
Cuba as a magnet for Mafia money-laundering, arms
smuggling and contraband.— The KGB regarded many
of Torrijos’s personal mannerisms as somewhat pathetic
imitations of Castro’s. Like Castro, he dressed in military
fatigues, carried a pistol and smoked Cuban cigars
(presented to him by Castro, each with a specially printed
band inscribed with his name). Also like Castro, he kept
his daily schedule and travel routes secret, and pretended
to make spontaneous gestures and decisions which were
in reality carefully premeditated. Torrijos regularly sought
Castro’s advice on his negotiations with the United States,
though the advice was so secret that it was concealed even
from the Panamanian ambassador in Havana. The KGB
reported that Noriega flew frequently to Havana in a

private aircraft. As the KGB was aware, however,
Noriega was also in contact with the CIA.—

On 18 April 1978 the Canal Treaty finally passed by
the US Senate by the same slim majority as the Neutrality
Act a month earlier. Doubtless after prior agreement with
the Centre, Leonov suggested to Torrijos that the best way
of depriving the United States of any pretext for claiming
special rights to defend the Canal would be to turn
Panama into ‘a permanently neutral state on the model of
Switzerland, Sweden, and Austria’. Torrijos was hostile to
the idea - chiefly, Leonov believed, because he feared the
effect of neutrality on his own authority. ‘Would [a
neutral] Panama be able to conduct its own foreign
policy?’ he asked Leonov. ‘Would it be possible to assist
the anti-imperialist movement? Would I become a
political eunuch?’— Though Torrijos was succeeded as
President in 1978 by Education Minister Aristedes Royo,
he retained real power as head of the National Guard,
resisting gentle pressure from Leonov to end military rule.
He gave three reasons for being reluctant to follow
Leonov’s advice to set up his own political party:

In the first place, I would then cease to be the leader of
the entire nation, and would be the leader of only a
political party. In the second place, after creating one
party, I would then have to permit the formation of other
opposition parties. And third, I do not want to do this

because this is what the Americans are always trying to
get out of me.—

Torrijos told Leonov he was none the less convinced that
by the year 2000 the majority of Latin American states
would have adopted ‘socialism in one form or another’.—
Within Panama the pro-Moscow Communist Partido del
Pueblo (PDP) was the only political party allowed to
operate; the rival Maoist Communist Party was brutally
persecuted and several of its leaders murdered.

In its early stages the corrupt, authoritarian Torrijos
regime had made reforms in land distribution, health care
and education. Progress towards Panamanian socialism,
however, was largely rhetorical. The PDP unconvincingly
declared the regime la yunta pueblo- gobierno - a close
union of people and government. The corrupt and brutal
National Guard became el brazo armado del pueblo, the
people’s weapon arm.— According to KGB reports, the
PDP leadership maintained ‘clandestine contact’ with two
ministers in the Torrijos government.— PDP influence
was particularly strong in the Education Ministry.
Communist- inspired educational reforms in 1979,
however, collapsed in the face of teachers’ strikes and
demonstrations. Economic bumbling and corruption
together left Panama with one of the highest per capita
national debts anywhere in the world.—

On 31 July 1981, while Torrijos was en route with his
girlfriend to a weekend retreat, his plane flew into the side
of a mountain killing all on board.— The KGB, always
prone to conspiracy theories, concluded that he was the
victim of a CIA assassination plot.— A few years earlier,
by resolving the great historic grievance against the
United States which dated back to the birth of the state,
Torrijos had given Panamanians a new sense of identity
and national pride. By the time he died, however, many
were pleased to see him go. The celebrations in some
cantinas which followed his plane crash became so
boisterous that they were closed down by the National
Guard. The KGB had little left to show for the effort it
had put into cultivating the Torrijos regime.

The same was true of most of the KGB’s efforts during
the 1970s to cultivate anti-American and ‘progressive’
regimes in Latin America. The series of short-term
successes which the Centre proudly reported to the
Politburo failed to establish a stable basis for the
expansion of Soviet influence in Latin America. The KGB
itself had lost confidence in the staying power of the
Allende regime well before it was overthrown. Covert
contacts with the ‘progressive’ junta in Peru, Torres in
Bolivia, Peron in Argentina and Torrijos in Panama lasted
only a few years until those leaders were deposed or died.
At the end of the decade, however, the KGB’s fortunes

suddenly revived. The revolution in Central America of
which it had been so hopeful in the early 1960s, and in
which it had subsequently lost faith, unexpectedly became
a reality at the end of the 1970s.

6

Revolution in Central America

For Fidel Castro 1979 was a year of both economic failure
and international triumph. After two decades in power, his
regime was as dependent as ever on large subsidies which
the ailing Soviet economy could ill afford. Popular
disaffection was more visible than ever before. Ten times
as many Cubans fled to Florida in small boats during
1979 as in the previous year.- Castro, however, seemed
more interested by increasing international recognition of
his role on the world stage, newly signalled by his
election as Chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement. The
KGB liaison office in Havana reported growing concern
at Castro’s delusions of grandeur:

The personal influence of F. Castro in [Cuba’s] politics is
becoming stronger. His prestige as an ‘outstanding
strategist and chief commander’ in connection with the
victories in Africa (Angola, Ethiopia), and as a far-sighted
politician and statesman, is becoming overblown. F.
Castro’s vanity is becoming more and more noticeable.

Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces are extolled.
Castro’s approval is needed on every issue, even
insignificant ones, and this leads to delays, red tape, and

the piling up of papers requiring Castro’s signature.
Everyone sees that this is an abnormal situation, but
everyone remains silent for fear that any remark could be
interpreted as an encroachment on the chiefs
incontestable authority. Cuba’s revolutionary spirit is
becoming more and more dissipated, while there is an
emergence of servility, careerism, and competition
between government agencies, and their leaders’ attempts
to prove themselves to Fidel in the best possible light.
There is competition between the MVD [Ministry of
Internal Affairs] and the RVS [Revolutionary Armed
Forces] within the government to challenge MVD
Minister Sergio del Valle’s subservient position with
respect to R. Castro. Their former friendly relationship
has cooled.

MVD Minister Valle [whose responsibilities included
the DGI], in an outburst of open exasperation, told P. I.
Vasilyev, a representative of the KGB, the following:

‘You might think that I, as the Minister of Internal
Affairs and a member of the Politburo, can decide
everything, but I cannot - 1 cannot even give an apartment
to a Ministry employee. For this too, it is necessary to
have the approval of the Commander- in-Chief [Fidel
Castro]. ’-

Castro’s self-importance was further inflated by the long-

delayed spread of revolution in Central America. In
March 1979 the Marxist New Jewel Movement, led by
Maurice Bishop, seized control of the small Caribbean
island of Grenada. A month later fifty Cuban military
advisers arrived by ship, bringing with them large
supplies of arms and ammunition to bolster the new
regime. In September 400 Cuban regular troops arrived to
train a new Grenadan army. In December 300 Cubans
began the construction of a large new airport with a
runway capable of accommodating the largest Soviet and
Cuban military transport planes.- The once- secret
documents of the New Jewel Movement make clear that,
as well as being inspired by the Cuban example. Bishop’s
Marxism also had a good deal in common with the variety
once described by French student revolutionaries as ‘the
Groucho tendency’. Bishop, however, was determined to
stamp out opposition. As he told his colleagues: ‘Just
consider. Comrades . . . how people get detained in this
country. We don’t go and call for no votes. You get
detained when I sign an order after discussing it with the
National Security Committee of the Party or with a higher
Party body. Once I sign it - like it or don’t like it - it’s up
the hill for them. ’

Once satisfied that the Bishop regime was solidly
established, Moscow also began supplying massive
military aid. A Grenadan general, Hudson Austin, wrote
to Andropov as KGB Chairman early in 1982 to thank

him ‘once again for the tremendous assistance which our
armed forces have received from your Party and
Government’, and to request KGB training for four
Grenadan intelligence officers. Austin ended his letter ‘by
once again extending our greatest warmth and embrace to
you and your Party - Sons and Daughters of the heroic
Lenin

Of far greater significance than Bishop’s seizure of
power in Grenada was the ousting of the brutal and
corrupt Somoza regime in Nicaragua in July 1979 by the
Sandinistas. Until less than a year earlier the Frente
Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) had had few
major successes. On 25 August 1978, however, the
Terceristas (or ‘Insurrectional Tendency’), the dominant
faction within the FSLN, pulled off one of the most
spectacular coups in guerrilla history. Twenty-four
Terceristas, disguised as members of an elite National
Guard unit, seized control of the Managua National
Palace where the Somoza-dominated National Congress
was in session, and took all its members hostage. KGB
files reveal that the guerrillas had been trained and
financed by the Centre, which gave them the codename
ISKRA (‘Spark’) - the same as that of the Sandinista
sabotage and intelligence group founded by the KGB
fourteen years earlier. On the eve of the ISKRA attack on
the National Palace, Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the
FCD, was personally briefed on plans for the operation by

officers of Department 8 (‘Special Operations’) of the
Illegals Directorate S.- In return for the release of the
hostages, the Somoza regime was forced to pay a large
ransom and free fifty-nine Sandinista prisoners. On their
way to Managua airport, where a plane was waiting to
take them to Cuba, the guerrillas and the freed prisoners
were cheered by enthusiastic crowds. But though the
FSLN was winning the battle for hearts and minds,
Somoza still retained an apparently firm grip on power.
Urban insurrections by the Sandinistas in September were
brutally crushed by the National Guard. -

In Havana Castro and other Cuban leaders had a series
of meetings with the three most influential Sandinistas:
the Tercerista leaders Humberto and Daniel Ortega
Saavedra, and the only surviving founder of the FSLN,
Tomas Borge, who had been freed from a Nicaraguan
prison by the ISKRA operation. It was thanks largely to
Cuban pressure on them that the three factions of the
FSLN formally reunited by an agreement signed in
Havana in March 1979.- Simultaneously, the Cuban
Departamento America (DA) helped the Sandinistas set
up a base in Costa Rica from which to prepare an
offensive against the Somoza regime. At the end of May
FSLN forces crossed into Nicaragua. The arms and
tactical advice provided by the DA’s operations centre in
San Jose made a major contribution to the rapid
Sandinista victory. The former Costa Rican President,

Jose Figueres, said later that, but for arms from Cuba and
Costa Rican support for Sandinista operations, the victory
over Somoza ‘would not have been possible’. The speed
with which the resistance of Somoza’ s National Guard
crumbled took both the CIA and the KGB by surprise.
When the Sandinista offensive began, the CIA reported to
the White House that it had little prospect of success. On
19 July, however, dressed in olive-green uniforms and
black berets, the FSLN entered Managua in triumph.-

Cuban advisers quickly followed in the Sandinistas’
wake. The most influential of them, the former head of
the DA operations centre in San Jose, Julian Lopez Diaz,
was appointed Cuban ambassador in Managua. A week
after their seizure of power, a Sandinista delegation,
headed by their military commander, Humberto Ortega,
flew to Havana to take part in the annual 26 July
celebrations of the attack on the Moncada Barracks which
had begun Castro’s guerrilla campaign against the Batista
regime. Amid what Radio Havana described as mass
‘demonstrations of joy’, a female Sandinista guerrilla in
battle fatigues presented Cuba’s Maximum Leader with a
rifle captured in combat against Somoza’ s National
Guard.- Castro paid emotional tribute to ‘this
constellation of heroic, brave, intelligent and capable
commanders and combatants of the Nicaraguan
Sandinista National Liberation Front’:

They gained victory along a path similar to our path. They
gained victory the only way they, like us, could free
themselves of tyranny and imperialist domination - taking
up arms [applause], fighting hard, heroically. And we
must say and emphasize that the Nicaraguan revolution
was outstanding for its heroism, its perseverance, the
perseverance of its combatants - because it is not the
victory of a single day, it is a victory after twenty years of
struggle [applause], twenty years of planning
[applause].—

In early August CIA analysts correctly forecast that the
Sandinistas would seek Cuban help to ‘transform the
guerrilla forces into a conventional army’, the Ejercito
Popular Sandinista (EPS). According to the same
intelligence assessment, ‘The Cubans can also be
expected in the months ahead to begin using Nicaragua to
support guerrillas from countries in the northern tier of
Central America.

Castro’s apotheosis as an international statesman,
already enhanced by the Nicaraguan Revolution, came in
September 1979 at the Havana conference of the Non-
Aligned Movement. Active measures to exploit the
conference proceedings in the Soviet interest had been co-
ordinated in advance at meetings between Pedro Pupo
Perez of the DGI and Oleg Maksimovich Nechiporenko

and A. N. Itskov of the KGB.— In his opening speech as
Chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement, Castro
denounced not merely the ‘Yanqui imperialists’ but ‘their
new allies - the Chinese government’. He then paid
fulsome tribute to the Soviet Union:

We are thankful to the glorious October Revolution
because it started a new age in human history. It made
possible the defeat of fascism and created conditions in
the world which united the unselfish struggle of the
peoples and led to the collapse of the hateful colonial
system. To ignore this is to ignore history itself. Not only
Cuba, but also Vietnam, the attacked Arab countries, the
peoples of the former Portuguese colonies, the
revolutionary processes in many countries of the world,
the liberation movements which struggle against
oppression, racism, Zionism and fascism in South Africa,
Namibia, Zimbabwe, Palestine and in other areas have a
lot to be thankful for regarding socialist solidarity. I ask
myself if the United States or any country in NATO has
ever helped a single liberation movement in our world.

According to the official transcript of Castro’s speech,
this passage was followed by applause.— Though ninety-
two other heads of state were present, Castro was never
out of the spotlight. For the next three years he continued

as Chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement.

The first Soviet official to arrive in Managua in the
immediate aftermath of the Sandinista seizure of power
was the Centre’s senior Latin American specialist, Nikolai
Leonov, head of FCD Service No. 1 (Analysis and
Reports). ‘The city’, Leonov recalls, ‘was still smoking
and we had no embassy, but I was there under the cover
of a journalist.’— As after the Cuban Revolution twenty
years earlier, the KGB played a far more important role
than the Soviet Foreign Ministry in conducting relations
with the new regime. The Soviet ambassador from
another Latin American country who arrived in Managua
to conduct the formal procedures of establishing
diplomatic relations created an even worse impression
than the first Soviet ambassador to Castro’s Cuba.— On
arrival at the airport, the ambassador staggered down the
aircraft steps, his breath reeking of alcohol, and collapsed
into the arms of his aides in front of the outraged
Sandinista welcoming party. It was officially announced
that he had been ‘taken ill as a result of a difficult flight’,
and he was driven to hospital where attempts were made
to revive him in time for the official ceremonies which
were due to take place that evening on the stage of a
Managua theatre. The ambassador made it to the theatre
but collapsed once more and was forced to depart in the
middle of the speeches. His aides had scarcely taken off
his shoes and put him to bed when an irate Sandinista

minister arrived to demand an explanation. Leonov
attended a meeting next morning at the house of the
Cuban ambassador where senior Sandinistas sought to
register an official protest.

After giving my outraged hosts the opportunity to speak
their minds fiilly, I said as calmly as possible that I shared
their assessments and feelings. However, it was hardly
worth starting the history of our relations with a protest
and a diplomatic conflict. The ambassador was a human
being with weaknesses, illnesses, [infirmities of] age . . .
An official note of protest (which lay before me on the
desk) was unnecessary, because it did not reflect the real
climate of our relations but, on the contrary, might spoil
them. I gave a firm promise to inform the Politburo of
what had taken place, but would prefer to do this orally. It
would be awkward for me to accept the note since [as an
undercover KGB officer] I had no official status, and the
embassy was not yet open. I talked and talked, to buy
time for passions to cool down.

Leonov reported the incident to Andropov by a telegram
marked strictly ‘personal’, and Andropov informed
Gromyko, also on a personal basis. Before long, however,
it seemed to Leonov that half the Foreign Ministry knew
about the ambassador’s disgrace. Leonov as well as the
Sandinistas bore the brunt of the anger of the Ministry,

which, he was told, was ‘offended’ by his report and
refused to see him on his return to Moscow.—

After delivering a preliminary report in person to the
Centre, Leonov returned to Managua on 12 October for a
week of secret talks with the Ortega brothers and Borge,
the three dominating figures in the new regime, as well as
with five other leading Sandinistas.— Leonov reported to
the Centre that:

The FSLN leadership had firmly decided to carry out the
transformation of the FSLN into a Marxist-Leninist Party,
including within it other leftist parties and groups on an
individual basis. The centrist and bourgeois mini-parties
already existing in the country would be kept only
because they presented no danger and served as a
convenient facade for the outside world.

Daniel Ortega told Leonov:

We do not want to repeat Cuba’s mistakes with regard to
the United States, whereas the United States is clearly
avoiding a repetition of the mistakes it made with regard
to Cuba. Our strategy is to tear Nicaragua from the
capitalist orbit and, in time, become a member of the
CMEA [Comecon].

According to Leonov, Ortega ‘regarded the USSR as a
class and strategic ally, and saw the Soviet experience in
building the Party and state as a model to be studied and
used for practical actions in Nicaragua’. Ortega agreed to
‘unofficial contacts’ with Soviet representatives (a
euphemism for meetings with KGB officers) in order to
exchange information. He gave Leonov a secret document
outlining the FSLN’s political plans for transmission to
the CPSU Central Committee.— Though Mitrokhin did
not note its contents, this was, almost certainly, the so-
called ‘Seventy-Two-Hour Document’, officially entitled
the ‘Analysis of the Situation and Tasks of the Sandinista
People’s Revolution’, prepared by the Sandinista
leadership in two secret seventy-two-hour meetings in
September. It denounced ‘American imperialism’ as ‘the
rabid enemy of all peoples who are struggling to achieve
their definitive liberation’ and proclaimed the intention of
turning the FSLN into a Marxist-Leninist ‘vanguard
party’ which, in alliance with Cuba and the Soviet bloc,
would lead the class struggle not merely in Nicaragua but
across its borders in Central America.—

The first country to which the Sandinista leadership
hoped to export their revolution was El Salvador, the
smallest and most densely populated state in Latin
America, ruled by a repressive military government. The

KGB reported that a meeting of the Central Committee of
the Partido Comunista Salvadoreno (PCS) in August
1979, after discussing events in Nicaragua, had agreed to
make preparations for revolution. It was even thought
likely that, following the flight of the Nicaraguan dictator,
Anastasio Somoza, the Salvadoran President, General
Julio Rivera, might surrender power without a fight. In
September the PCS leader, Schafik Handal, visited
Nicaragua and was promised arms by the Sandinistas.—
Leonov also met Handal, probably soon after his own
talks with Sandinista leaders in October, and discussed
with him plans for Soviet bloc countries to supply
Western-manufactured arms in order to disguise their
support for the Salvadoran revolution.— These plans,
however, were overtaken by a coup in El Salvador led by
army officers anxious to maintain the dominant position
of the armed forces. The political situation stabilized
temporarily at the beginning of 1980 when the Christian
Democrat Party agreed to form a new junta with the
military and their exiled leader, Jose Napoleon Duarte.
But while Duarte’s government attempted to inaugurate a
programme of social reform, right-wing death squads
pursued a campaign of terror against their political
opponents.

The Soviet attitude towards the prospects for revolution
in Central America was ambivalent. The invasion of
Afghanistan in December 1979 made Moscow both wary

of further military commitments and anxious to repair the
damage to its international reputation by successes
elsewhere. Its desire to exploit the Sandinista revolution
was balanced by nervousness at the likely reaction of the
United States. The Carter administration, however,
though expressing concern at the Sandinistas’ left-wing
policies, none the less gave them economic aid. In an
attempt to diminish the risks inherent in the challenge to
US influence in Central America, Moscow was happy to
leave the most visible role to Fidel Castro.—

During the year after the Sandinista victory, Castro
flew secretly to Nicaragua on a number of occasions,
landing on the private airstrip at one of the estates of the
deposed dictator, Anastasio Somoza. In July 1980 he
made his first public visit to Managua to celebrate the first
anniversary of the revolution and was greeted at the
airport by the nine Sandinista comandantes, each in battle
fatigues virtually identical to his own. ‘Because you are a
profoundly revolutionary people’, he told a cheering
crowd, ‘we Cuban visitors feel as if we were in our own
fatherland!’— During the Sandinistas’ early years in
power, military and economic assistance to the new
regime was jointly discussed by tripartite Soviet-Cuban-
Nicaraguan committees. In May 1980 a Sandinista
delegation visited Moscow to ask for the large-scale
military aid required to turn the Ejercito Popular
Sandinista into the most powerful force in Central

America. Though the Soviet Union agreed to arm and
equip the EPS over the next few years, it cautiously left
the details to be decided by a tripartite committee which
was not due to convene in Managua for another year.—

El Salvador, meanwhile, was slipping into civil war.
During 1980 right-wing death squads carried out a series
of well-publicized atrocities, among them the killing of
Archbishop Oscar Amulfo Romero during a church
service, the assassination of several leading Christian
Democrats, and the rape and murder of three American
nuns and a church worker. In March the PCS decided to
support the ‘armed road’ to revolution.— Three months
later, at a secret meeting in Havana attended by Castro
and Humberto Ortega, Schafik Handal and the leaders of
El Salvador’s four other Marxist factions united as the
Direccion Revolucionaria Unida (DRU). The KGB
reported that the two dominating figures in the DRU were
Handal, the PCS leader, and a former PCS General-
Secretary, Cayetano Carpio, leader of a breakaway
movement.— The DRU was given a secure base in
Nicaragua and, in consultation with Ortega, agreed to
imitate the Sandinistas’ strategy against the Somoza
regime by seeking to create a military machine powerful
enough to defeat the army of the state.— Thousands of
Salvadoran revolutionaries were given rapid military
training in Cuba; several hundred more were trained in
Nicaragua.— The DRU agreed with its Cuban and

Sandinista allies on the importance of striking ‘a decisive
blow’ before the end of the Carter administration in
January 1981 for fear that, if Ronald Reagan were elected
President, he would provide more active military
assistance to the Duarte government (as indeed he decided
to do).—

In accordance with the strategy he had agreed with
Leonov, Handal toured the Soviet bloc and two of its
allies in June and July 1980 in search of arms and military
equipment of Western manufacture for use in El Salvador.
On Soviet advice, his first stop was in Hanoi where the
Communist Party leader Le Duan gave him an
enthusiastic welcome and provided enough US weapons
captured during the Vietnam War to equip three
battalions. Handal’ s next stop was East Berlin where
Honecker promised 3 million Ostmarks to pay for
equipment but was unable to supply any Western arms. In
Prague Vasil Bil’ak agreed to supply Czech weapons of
types available on the open market. The Bulgarian
Communist Party leader, Dimitur Stanichev, gave 300
reconditioned German machine guns from the Second
World War, 200,000 rounds of ammunition, 10,000
uniforms and 2,000 medical kits. Hungary had no
Western weapons but the Party leader, Janos Kadar,
promised 10,000 uniforms as well as medical supplies.
Handal’ s final stop was in Ethiopia whose army had been
completely re-equipped by the Soviet Union over the

previous few years. Lieutenant-Colonel Mengistu
promised to supply 700 Thompson automatic weapons
and other Western arms left over from the Haile Selassie
era.— According to a KGB report, Handal acknowledged
that the success of his arms mission had been possible
only because of Soviet support:

We are clearly aware of the fact that, in the final analysis,
our relations with the other countries in the socialist camp
will be determined by the position of the Soviet Union,
and that we will need the advice and recommendations of
the leadership of the CPSU Central Committee. We
cannot let out a war cry and lead trained personnel into
battle without being sure of the full brotherly support of
the Soviet Communists.

After HandaTs return to Central America, the various
guerrilla factions in El Salvador united as the Farabundo
Marti de Liberacion Nacional (FMLN). The KGB
reported that the Cubans were confident that revolution
would succeed in El Salvador by the end of the year.—
The Salvadoran government was regarded as so divided
and corrupt and its army as so poorly equipped and
motivated that the guerrilla victory appeared certain.—

In January 1981, however, a supposedly ‘final
offensive’ by the FMLN, approved by the Cubans, failed.

forcing the guerrillas to take refuge in the mountains.—
Simultaneously the new Reagan administration made
clear that it intended to take a much tougher line in
Central America. Using strikingly undiplomatic language,
Reagan’s first Secretary of State, Alexander Haig,
delivered a blunt warning to Moscow that ‘their time of
unrestricted adventuring in the Third World was over’.
‘Every official of the State Department, in every exchange
with a Soviet official’ was instructed to repeat the same
message.— Wary of publicly provoking the new
administration, Moscow sought to distance itself from the
bloodshed in El Salvador. At the Twenty-sixth Congress
of the CPSU in February, attended by Communist leaders
and other fraternal delegates from around the world,
Handal and the PCS were conspicuous by their absence -
no doubt on instructions from Moscow.

While cautious in its public statements, however, the
Soviet leadership authorized an increase in arms
shipments to Cuba, some of them secretly intended for
other destinations in Central America. According to US
officials, more Soviet arms were sent to Cuba during the
first eight months of 1981 than at any time since the
missile crisis of 1962.— In May 1981 a Nicaraguan-
Soviet-Cuban commission met in Managua to discuss the
supply of Soviet arms to the Sandinista EPS. Following
agreement in June, the first heavy weapons (tanks and
artillery) began to arrive at Port Bluff in July.— Castro

subsequently complained that, instead of continuing to
discuss all their arms requirements with Cuba, the
Sandinistas were now approaching the Soviet Union
directly.— On 21 November Humberto Ortega and
Marshal Ustinov signed an arms treaty in Moscow
ratifying the agreement reached in Managua in June.—
Within a few years the EPS was over 100,000 strong and
had become the most powerful military force in Central
American history.

Castro somewhat hysterically compared the
inauguration of Ronald Reagan as US President in
January 1981 to Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German
Chancellor in January 1933. After Reagan’s election two
months earlier, Castro had summoned the Cuban people
to organize themselves into territorial militia to defend
their fatherland against American attack. To pay for
weapons, workers ‘volunteered’ to give up a day’s wages.
The Yanqui invaders, Castro declared, would ‘face an
anthill, an armed anthill . . . invincible and unyielding,
and never, never surrendering!’ In addition to the private
warnings which he instructed American diplomats to
deliver, Alexander Haig publicly denounced Cuba and the
Soviet Union for acting as both ‘tutors and arms
suppliers’ to Central American revolutionaries. Cuba’s
activities, he declared, were ‘no longer acceptable in this
hemisphere’. The United States would ‘deal with this
matter at source’. To Castro that appeared as an invasion

threat.— Privately, he was annoyed that Moscow did not
take a stronger line in public towards the new Reagan
administration. According to a KGB report, he told a
Soviet military delegation which visited Cuba in
February, headed by the chief-of-staff of the Soviet armed
forces. Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, that the Soviet Union
should toughen its policy towards the United States. In
particular, it should refuse to accept the deployment of
American cruise missiles in Europe. Castro made the
extraordinary proposal that, if the deployment went
ahead, Moscow should seriously consider re-establishing
the nuclear missile bases in Cuba dismantled after the
missile crisis nineteen years earlier. The new Cuban
militia, he boasted, now numbered 500,000 men.—

The KGB reported that Castro’s fears of American
attack were strengthened by the crisis in Poland, where
the authority of the Communist one-party state was being
eroded by the groundswell of popular support for the
Solidarity movement. Though he had no more (and
probably even less) sympathy for Solidarity than he had
had for the reformers of the Prague Spring in 1968, Castro
told ‘a Soviet representative’ (probably a KGB officer)
that if the Red Army intervened in Poland in 1981, as it
had done in Czechoslovakia in 1968, there might be
‘serious consequences for Cuba in view of its immediate
proximity to the USA’. Castro, in other words, was afraid
that a Soviet invasion of Poland might provoke an

American invasion of Cuba.— When General Wojciech
Jamzelski became Polish Party leader in October, Castro
insisted on the need for him to take ‘decisive measures’
which would make Soviet intervention unnecessary:
‘Otherwise he will be finished both as a military leader
and as a political figure.’ The only solution, Castro
argued, was for Jamzelski to declare martial law, even if
Solidarity responded by calling a general strike: ‘One
should not be afraid of strikes, since in themselves they
are incapable of changing the government.’— Castro
seems to have been aware that Moscow’s policy was
essentially the same as his. Andropov told the Politburo
that Soviet military intervention was too risky to
undertake. The veiled threats of intervention, which
Castro took seriously, were intended to persuade the
irresolute Jamzelski to declare martial law and outlaw
Solidarity, which he duly did in December 1981.—

Despite Castro’s impeccable ideological orthodoxy and
denunciation of Polish revisionism, his delusions of
grandeur as a major statesman on the world stage
continued to cause concern in Moscow. The KGB
reported in 1981 that the Cuban presence in Africa was
giving rise to ‘complications’: ‘Leading personalities in
Angola and Ethiopia doubt the desirability of the Cuban
troops’ continuing presence on the territory of these
countries. The Cubans’ efforts to influence internal
processes in developing countries are turning into

interference in their internal affairs.’

Cuban interference was all the more resented because
its own mismanaged economy made it impossible for it to
offer economic aid. The KGB also reported that Castro
was in danger of being carried away by the prospects for
revolution in Central America:

The victory of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in
Nicaragua and of progressive forces in Grenada, the
increasing number of incidents in El Salvador, and the
mobilization of left-wing groups in Guatemala and
Honduras give some Cuban leaders the impression that
the historic moment has now come for a total revolution
in Central Latin America, and that this must be expedited
by launching an armed struggle in the countries of the
region.

Raul Castro reports that some members of the Central
Committee of the Cuban Communist Party - [Manuel]
Pineiro, head of the American Department [Departamento
America] and Secretary of the Central Committee,
together with [Jose] Abr [ah] antes, the First Deputy
Minister of Internal Affairs - are prompting Fidel Castro
to take ill-considered action and calling for the export of
revolution.—

Castro’s first target for ‘the export of revolution’

remained El Salvador. He told Ogarkov in February 1981
that he had called a secret meeting in Havana of DRU and
FMLN leaders in order to work out an agreed strategy for
continuing the revolutionary struggle after the failure of
what had been intended as the ‘final offensive’ in
January.— Though Mitrokhin’s notes do not record the
results of that meeting, Schafik Handal later informed a
KGB operations officer that the PCS had adopted a policy
of guerrilla warfare and sabotage operations, with the aim
of forcing the junta into negotiations with the DRU. In
October the DRU held a meeting in Managua with
representatives of the Sandinista regime and six
revolutionary groups from Honduras. They jointly agreed
to prepare for a guerrilla uprising in Honduras in case this
proved necessary to prevent action by the Honduran army
against FMFN guerrillas. According to KGB reports,
pressure had been put on the President of Honduras,
General Policarpo Paz Garcia, to prevent his troops from
being drawn into the civil war in El Salvador. Guerrilla
forces in Guatemala were also allegedly strong enough to
deter intervention by the Guatemalan army. Costa Rican
Communists were said to have 600 well-trained and
equipped guerrillas who were prepared to intervene on the
side of the FMFN. Colombian revolutionaries had
received over 1.2 million dollars’ worth of weapons and
ammunition via the Sandinistas and were reported to be
‘capable of initiating combat actions in Colombia upon
command’. The Fibyan leader. Colonel Qaddafi, was

providing large sums of money for the transport of
weapons to guerrilla groups.—

Late in 1981, the FMLN agreed with Castro on a
strategy designed to disrupt the elections due to be held in
El Salvador in March 1982. Soviet arms supplies
channelled by the Cubans through Honduras and Belize
were used to block roads, destroy public transport and
attack polling booths and other public buildings.—
Ogarkov, among others, appears to have believed that the
strategy might succeed. According to the Grenadan
minutes of his meeting in Moscow shortly before the
elections with the Chief of Staff of the People’s
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Grenada:

The Marshal [Ogarkov] said that over two decades ago
there was only Cuba in Latin America, today there are
Nicaragua, Grenada and a serious battle is going on in El
Salvador. The Marshal of the Soviet Union then stressed
that United States imperialism would try to prevent
progress but that there were no prospects for imperialism
to turn back history.—

The FMLN strategy, however, failed. The turnout at the
El Salvador elections, witnessed by hundreds of foreign
observers and journalists, was over 80 per cent.
Henceforth the DRU and FMLN were resigned to a

protracted ‘people’s war’ on the Vietnamese model,
epitomized by the slogan, ‘Vietnam Has Won! El
Salvador Will Win!’— Civil war continued in El Salvador
for another decade.

Since Moscow appears to have seen little prospect of
an early FMLN victory, the KGB’s main priority became
to exploit the civil war in active measures designed to
discredit US policy. In particular it set out to make
military aid to the El Salvador government (increased
more than five-fold by the Reagan administration between
1981 and 1984) so unpopular within the United States that
public opinion would demand that it be halted.
Mitrokhin’s notes on KGB active measures consist of
only a brief file summary: ‘Influence was exerted on US
public opinion: about 150 committees were created in the
United States which spoke out against US interference in
El Salvador, and contacts were made with US Senators.’—

As often happened, the Centre seems to have
exaggerated its ability to influence Western opinion. The
majority of US protesters required no prompting by the
KGB to oppose the policy of the Reagan administration in
El Salvador. Both the KGB and the Cuban Departamento
America, however, undoubtedly played a significant and
probably co-ordinated role in expanding the volume of
protest. A tour of the United States by Schafik Handal’s
brother, Farid, early in 1980 led to the founding of the

Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador
(CISPES), an umbrella group co-ordinating the work of
many local committees opposed to US involvement. Farid
Randal’s most important contacts in New York were
Alfredo Garcia Almedo, head of the DA’s North
American department, who operated under diplomatic
cover as a member of the Cuban Mission to the UN, and
the leadership of the Communist Party of the United
States, which was also in touch with the KGB.—

Soon after its foundation, CISPES disseminated an
alleged State Department ‘Dissent Paper on El Salvador
and Central America’, which purported to reflect the
concerns of many ‘current and former analysts and
officials’ in the National Security Council, State
Department, Pentagon and CIA. In reality, the document
was a forgery, almost certainly produced by FCD Service
A. It warned that continued military aid to the El Salvador
government would eventually force the United States to
intervene directly, and praised the political wing of the
FMLN as ‘a legitimate and representative political force’
with wide popular support. Among the journalists who
quoted the document were two columnists on the New
York Times. One, Flora Lewis, later apologized to her
readers for having been deceived by a forgery. The other,
Anthony Lewis (no relation), did not.—

Soviet caution about the ‘export of revolution’ in

Central America was reinforced by the increased risks of
confrontation with the United States. On 1 December
1981 Reagan authorized covert support for the ‘Contra’
opposition, initially approving the expenditure of $19
million to train 500 ‘resistance fighters’. Support for the
Contras rapidly ceased to be secret and turned into a
public relations disaster which KGB active measures
sought to exploit around the world.— As the ‘Great
Communicator’ later acknowledged in his memoirs, ‘One
of my greatest frustrations . . . was my inability to
communicate to the American people and to Congress the
seriousness of the threat we faced in Central America.’—
On 10 March 1982 the Washington Post revealed the
covert action programme approved three months earlier
and disclosed that the 500 Contras were being secretly
trained to destroy Nicaraguan power plants and bridges,
as well as to ‘disrupt the Nicaraguan arms supply line to
El Salvador’. Six months later the Contras numbered
almost 3,500. On 8 November the lead story in
Newsweek, headlined ‘America’s Secret War: Target
Nicaragua’, revealed the use of the Contras in a CIA
covert operation intended to overthrow the Nicaraguan
government and the involvement of the US ambassador to
Honduras in their training and organization. The Reagan
administration was forced to admit its secret backing for
the Contras, but claimed implausibly that the purpose was
merely to put pressure on, rather than to overthrow, the
Sandinistas.

Congress was unconvinced. On 8 December, by a
majority of 411 to 0, the House of Representatives passed
the ‘Boland Amendment’, prohibiting both the Defense
Department and the CIA from providing military
equipment, training or advice for the purpose of
overthrowing the Sandinista regime. The experience of
the US-backed attempt to overthrow the Castro regime by
the landing at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 should have made
clear that paramilitary operations on the scale planned
against the Sandinistas twenty years later in an era of
more investigative journalism could not reasonably be
expected to remain secret. ‘A covert operation’, writes
George Shultz, who succeeded Haig as Secretary of State
in 1982, ‘was being converted to overt by talk on Capitol
Hill and in the daily press and television news coverage.’
By the summer of 1983, the CIA favoured making public
American support for Contra operations, and transferring
management of it to the Defense Department. The
Pentagon, however, successfully resisted taking
responsibility for such a controversial programme.
Reagan’s covert action in Central America had thus
become riddled with contradictions which were easily
exploited by both his political opponents and Soviet
active measures. What had become in practice an overt
programme of support to the Contras was still being
implemented as a covert operation - with the result, as
Shultz complained, that ‘the administration could not

openly defend it’. Reagan himself added to the
contradictions by publicly proclaiming one policy while
secretly following another. The stated aim of support for
the Contras was to prevent the Sandinistas undermining
their neighbours ‘through the export of subversion and
violence’. ‘Let us be clear as to the American attitude
toward the Government of Nicaragua,’ the President told
a joint session of Congress on 27 April. ‘We do not seek
its overthrow.’ The KGB was well aware, however, that
Reagan’s real aim was precisely that - the overthrow of
the government of Nicaragua.—

Though Soviet commentators continued to express
‘unswerving solidarity’ with the Nicaraguan people and
‘resolute condemnation’ of US aggression towards them,
they failed to include Nicaragua on their list of Third
World ‘socialist-oriented states’ - a label which would
have implied greater confidence in, and commitment to,
the survival of the Sandinista revolution than Moscow
was willing to give. Both the Soviet Union and Cuba
made clear to Sandinista leaders that they would not
defend them against American attack. During Daniel
Ortega’s visit to Moscow in March 1983, he was obliged -
no doubt reluctantly - to assent to Andropov’s declaration
as Soviet leader that ‘the revolutionary government of
Nicaragua has all necessary resources to defend the
motherland’. It did not, in other words, require further
assistance from the Soviet Union to ‘uphold its freedom

and independence’.—

Ortega’s visit coincided with the beginning of the
tensest period of Soviet-American relations since the
Cuban missile crisis. Since May 1981 the KGB and GRU
had been collaborating in operation RYAN, a global
operation designed to collect intelligence on the presumed
(though, in reality, non-existent) plans of the Reagan
administration to launch a nuclear first strike against the
Soviet Union. For the next three years the Kremlin and
the Centre were obsessed by what the Soviet ambassador
in Washington, Anatoli Dobrynin, called a ‘paranoid
interpretation’ of Reagan’s policy. Residencies in Western
capitals, Tokyo and some Third World states were
required to submit time-consuming fortnightly reports on
signs of US and NATO preparations for nuclear attack.
Many FCD officers stationed abroad were much less
alarmist than the Centre and viewed operation RYAN
with scome scepticism. None, however, was willing to put
his career at risk by challenging the assumptions behind
the operation. RYAN thus created a vicious circle of
intelligence collection and assessment. Residencies were,
in effect, required to report alarming information even if
they were sceptical of it. The Centre was duly alarmed
and demanded more. Reagan’s announcement of the SDI
(‘Star Wars’) programme in March 1983, coupled with
his almost simultaneous denunciation of the Soviet Union
as an ‘evil empire’, raised Moscow’s fears to new heights.

The American people, Andropov believed, were being
psychologically prepared by the Reagan administration
for nuclear war. On 28 September, already terminally ill,
Andropov issued from his sickbed an apocalyptic
denunciation of the ‘outrageous military psychosis’
which, he claimed, had taken hold of the United States:
‘The Reagan administration, in its imperial ambitions,
goes so far that one begins to doubt whether Washington
has any brakes at all preventing it from crossing the point
at which any sober-minded person must stop.’—

The overthrow of the Marxist regime in Grenada a few
weeks later appeared to Moscow to provide further
evidence of the United States’ ‘imperial ambitions’. In
October 1983 a long-standing conflict between Prime
Minister Maurice Bishop and his deputy, Bernard Coard,
erupted in violence which culminated in the shooting of
Bishop, his current lover and some of his leading
supporters in front of a mural of Che Guevara. Ronald
Reagan and Margaret Thatcher disagreed in their
interpretation of the killings. The new regime, Mrs
Thatcher believed, though it contained more obvious
thugs, was not much different from its predecessor.
Reagan, like Bill Casey, his DCI, regarded the coup as a
serious escalation of the Communist threat to the
Caribbean. Grenada, he believed, was ‘a Soviet-Cuban
colony, being readied as a major military bastion to export
terror and undermine democracy’. Reagan was also

concerned at the threat to 800 American medical students
in Grenada. On 25 October a US invasion overthrew the
regime and rescued the students. The operation further
fuelled Soviet paranoia. Vice-President Vasili Kuznetsov
accused the Reagan administration of ‘making delirious
plans for world domination’ which were ‘pushing
mankind to the brink of disaster’. The Soviet press
depicted Reagan himself as a ‘madman’. The Sandinistas
feared that Nicaragua might be the next target for an
American invasion. So did the KGB.—

The impact of the Grenada invasion in Moscow was
heightened by the fact that it immediately preceded the
most fraught phase of operation RYAN. During the
NATO command-post exercise, Able Archer 83, held
from 2 to 11 November to practise nuclear release
procedures, paranoia in the Centre reached dangerous
levels. For a time the KGB leadership was haunted by the
fear that the exercise might be intended as cover for a
nuclear first strike. Some FCD officers stationed in the
West were by now more concerned by the alarmism of the
Centre than by the threat of Western surprise attack.
Operation RYAN wound down (though it did not end)
during 1984, helped by the death of its two main
protagonists, Andropov and Defence Minister Ustinov,
and by reassuring signals from London and Washington,
both worried by intelligence reports on the rise in Soviet
paranoia.—

The period of acute US-Soviet tension which reached
its peak late in 1983 left Moscow in no mood to raise the
stakes in Central America. The Soviet-Nicaraguan arms
treaty of 1981 had provided for the delivery of a squadron
of MiG-2 Is in 1985. Moscow was well aware, however,
that the supply of MiG-2 1 s would be strongly opposed by
the United States. Early in 1984 Castro began trying to
persuade the Sandinista leadership that they should accept
a squadron of helicopters instead. Humberto Ortega
reacted angrily, telling a meeting of the Sandinista
National Directorate: Tt doesn’t seem at all unlikely to me
that the Soviets, lining up their international interests,
have asked Castro to persuade us to give up the MiG-2 Is.
But we must never renounce them, nor must we allow
Cuba to continue being an intermediary between
ourselves and the Soviets.’ The MiG-2 Is, however, were
never delivered.— In the mid-1980s Soviet bloc support
for the Nicaraguan economy fluctuated between $150 and
$400 million a year, all in bilateral trade credits rather
than hard-currency loans - a significant drain on Soviet
resources but a small fraction of the aid it gave to Cuba.—

For different reasons. Central America turned into a
major policy failure for both the United States and the
Soviet Union. The disorganized Contras (whose numbers,
even on the most optimistic estimate, were never more
than one-fifth those of the EPS) had no prospect of

defeating the Sandinistas. Their inept guerrilla campaign
served chiefly to discredit themselves and their American
supporters. On 24 May 1984 the House voted another
Boland Amendment, more drastic than the first. Signed
into law by Reagan in October, Boland II (as it became
known) prohibited military or paramilitary support for the
Contras by the CIA, Defense ‘or any other agency or
entity involved in intelligence activities’ for the next year.
The Deputy Director for Intelligence (and future DCI),
Robert Gates, wrote to the DCI, Bill Casey, on 14
December 1984:

The course we have been on (even before the funding cut-
off) - as the last two years will testify - will result in
further strengthening of the regime and a Communist
Nicaragua which, allied with its Soviet and Cuban friends,
will serve as the engine for the destabilization of Central
America. Even a well-funded Contra movement cannot
prevent this; indeed, relying on and supporting the
Contras as our only action may actually hasten the
ultimate unfortunate outcome.

The only way to bring down the Sandinistas, Gates
argued, was overt military assistance to their opponents,
coupled with ‘air strikes to destroy a considerable portion
of Nicaragua’s military buildup’. Covert action could not
do the job. Neither Casey nor Reagan was willing to face
up to this uncomfortable truth.—

The attempt to circumvent the congressional veto on
aid to the Contras led the White House into the black
comedy of Tran-Contra’ - an illegal attempt to divert to
the Contras the profits of secret arms sales to Iran,
followed by an attempted cover-up. Though the word
‘impeachment’ was probably never uttered either by the
President himself or by his advisers in their conversations
with him during the Iran-Contra crisis, it was in all their
minds after the affair became public knowledge at a press
conference on 25 November 1986. White House
reporters, Reagan’s chief-of-staff believed, were ‘thinking
a single thought: another Presidency was about to destroy
itself. That evening Vice-President George Bush dictated
for his diary a series of staccato phrases which summed
up the despondency in the White House: ‘The
administration is in disarray - foreign policy in disarray -
cover-up - Who knew what when?’ US support for the
Contras had proved hopelessly counterproductive,
handing a propaganda victory to the Sandinistas and
reducing the Reagan presidency to its lowest ebb.—

Though the failures of US policy in Central America
were eagerly exploited by Soviet active measures,
however, Moscow was beginning to lose patience with
the Sandinistas. In May 1986, despite the fact that
Nicaragua already owed the Soviet Union $1.1 billion, the
Politburo was still willing ‘to supply free of charge
uniforms, food and medicine to seventy thousand

servicemen of the Sandinista army’.— By 1987, with
economic problems mounting at home, Gorbachev was
increasingly reluctant to throw good money after bad in
Central America. The Nicaraguan Minister of External
Cooperation, Henry Ruiz, ruefully acknowledged that
Soviet criticism of the Sandinistas’ chronic economic
mismanagement was ‘legitimate’. — The economic
pressure created by the decline of Soviet bloc support was
heightened by a simultaneous US embargo. According to
the secretary-general of the Sandinista Foreign Ministry,
Alejandro Bendana, Moscow told Managua bluntly that it
was ‘time to achieve a regional settlement of security
problems’. After three years of tortuous negotiations,
continued conflict and missed deadlines, a peace plan
chiefly devised by the Costa Rican President, Oscar Arias
Sanchez, finally succeeded. According to Bendana, ‘It
wasn’t the intellectual brilliance of Oscar Arias that did it.
It was us grabbing frantically onto any framework that
was there, trying to cut our losses.’— As part of the peace
plan, the Sandinistas agreed to internationally supervised
elections in February 1990, and - much to their surprise -
lost to a broad-based coalition of opposition parties.

With the demise of the Sandinistas, Cuba was, once
again, the only Marxist-Feninist state in Fatin America.
During the later 1980s, however, there was a curious
inversion of the ideological positions of Cuba and the
Soviet Union. Twenty years earlier, Castro had been

suspected of heresy by Soviet leaders. In the Gorbachev
era, by contrast, Castro increasingly saw himself as the
defender of ideological orthodoxy against Soviet
revisionism. By 1987 the KGB liaison mission in Havana
was reporting to the Centre that the DGI was increasingly
keeping it at arm’s length. The situation was judged so
serious that the KGB Chairman, Viktor Chebrikov, flew
to Cuba in an attempt to restore relations. He appears to
have had little success.— Soon afterwards the Cuban
resident in Prague, Florentino Aspillaga Lombard,
defected to the United States and publicly revealed that
the DGI had begun to target countries of the Soviet bloc.
He also claimed, probably correctly, that Castro had a
secret Swiss bank account ‘used to finance liberation
movements, bribery of leaders and any personal whim of
Castro’.— At the annual 26 July celebration in 1988 of the
start of Castro’s rebellion thirty-five years earlier, the
Soviet ambassador was conspicuous by his absence. In his
speech Castro criticized Gorbachev publicly for the first
time. Gorbachev’s emphasis on glasnost and perestroika
was, he declared, a threat to fundamental socialist
principles. Cuba must stand guard over the ideological
purity of the revolution. Gorbachev’s visit to Cuba in
April 1989 did little to mend fences.

The rapid disintegration of the Soviet bloc during the
remainder of the year, so far from persuading Castro of
the need for reform, merely reinforced his conviction that

liberalization would threaten the survival of his regime.
Gorbachev, he declared in May 1991, was responsible for
‘destroying the authority of the [Communist] Party’.
News of the hard-line August coup was greeted with
euphoria by the Cuban leadership. One Western diplomat
reported that he had never seen Castro’s aides so happy.
The euphoria, however, quickly gave way to deep dismay
as the coup collapsed. The governments of the Russian
Federation and the other states which emerged on the
former territory of the Soviet Union quickly dismantled
their links with Cuba. The rapid decline of Soviet bloc aid
and trade had devastating consequences for the Cuban
economy. Castro declared in 1992 that the disintegration
of the Soviet Union was ‘worse for us than the October
[Missile] Crisis’.— Never, even in his worst nightmares,
had he dreamt that Cuba would be the only Marxist-
Leninist one-party state outside Asia to survive into the
twenty- first century.

The Middle East

The Middle East in the Later Cold War

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7

The Middle East: Introduetion-

For much of the Cold War, Soviet policy-makers believed
they had an in-built advantage in the struggle with the
Main Adversary and its allies for power and influence in
the Middle East. If Latin America was the United States’
‘backyard’, the Middle East was that of the Soviet Union.
Israel’s special relationship with the United States made
its Arab enemies, in Moscow’s view, the natural allies of
the Soviet Union. Gromyko and Ponomarev jointly
denounced Israel and international Zionism as ‘the main
instrument of US imperialism’s assault on Arab
countries’.- Hatred of Israel multiplied hostility to the
United States in the rest of the Middle East.- The dramatic
loss of America’s confidence in dealing with the Muslim
world after the fall of its ally, the Shah of Iran, and the
rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini was epitomized by the
decision of the Carter administration not to send any
congratulations to Muslim leaders to celebrate the 1 ,400th
anniversary of Islam in 1979, for fear that it would
somehow cause offence. The Soviet Union, by contrast,
despite its official atheism, flooded Arab capitals with
messages of congratulation. -

The greatest volume of Soviet intelligence on the

Middle East, as on much else of the Third World, came
from SIGINT rather than HUMINT. By 1967 KGB
codebreakers were able to decrypt 152 cipher systems
used by a total of seventy-two states. Though no later
statistics are available, the volume of decrypts doubtless
continued to increase. Every day an inner circle within the
Politburo - consisting in 1980 of Brezhnev, Andropov,
Gromyko, Kirilenko, Suslov and Ustinov - were sent
copies of the most important decrypts. The heads of the
KGB’s First and Second Chief Directorates were sent a
larger selection. Though none of the decrypts have yet
been declassified, they will one day be a source of major
importance for historians of Soviet foreign policy .-

The task of KGB and GRU codebreakers was greatly
simplified by the vulnerability of Middle Eastern cipher
systems, which was also exploited by British and
American intelligence. During the Suez crisis of 1956 the
British Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, wrote to
congratulate GCHQ on both the ‘volume’ and the
‘excellence’ of the Middle Eastern decrypts it had
produced and to say ‘how valuable’ they had proved to
be.- Soviet codebreakers also benefited from the KGB’s
remarkable success in obtaining intelligence on cipher
systems by penetrating Moscow embassies. Though
Mitrokhin had no access to the decrypts themselves,- he
and other defectors have provided an important insight
into the extent of these penetrations. Ilya Dzhirkvelov has

revealed his part during the early 1950s in successful
break-ins at the Egyptian, Syrian, Iranian, Turkish and
other Middle Eastern embassies in Moscow for which he
and his colleagues were rewarded with engraved watches
and the title of ‘Honoured Chekist’.- The files noted by
Mitrokhin reveal that in the later stages of the Cold War,
at least thirty-four KGB agents and confidential contacts
took part in a highly successful operation to penetrate the
Moscow embassy of Syria, then the Soviet Union’s main
Middle Eastern ally. Middle Eastern states had little idea
of the extent to which, because of the vulnerability of
their cipher systems and embassy security, they were - so
far as Moscow was concerned - conducting open
diplomacy

SIGINT provided only a partial insight into the
secretive policy-making of the region. Because of the
autocratic nature of Middle Eastern regimes, the
decrypted telegrams of their diplomats did not always
disclose their real intentions. Anwar al- Sadat was one of a
number of rulers in the region whose secret diplomacy
was sometimes at variance with his country’s official
foreign policy. The KGB, however, may well have been
able to break his presidential cipher as well as to decrypt
Egyptian diplomatic traffic. It remains unclear whether
the KGB discovered his secret contacts with the Nixon
administration from SIGINT or HUMINT - or both. The
discovery caused serious alarm within the Politburo.-

Penetrating the inner circles of the mostly suspicious
rulers of the Middle East was more difficult than
penetrating their Moscow embassies and diplomatic
ciphers. The KGB, none the less, had close links with the
intelligence services of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Soviet
Union’s first major Middle Eastern ally. His main
intelligence adviser, Sami Sharaf, was profuse in his
protestations of gratitude and friendship to ‘Comrade
Brezhnev’, and claimed to be convinced that, as the
disciple of ‘the great leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, he
occupies a special position in relation to his Soviet
friends’. Probably the KGB’s longest-serving agent in
Syria was the diplomat and lawyer Tarazi Salah al-Din
(codenamed IZZAT), who had been recruited by the KGB
in 1954, became Director-General of the Foreign Ministry
in the early 1970s, and was a member of the International
Tribunal in The Hague at the time of his accidental death
in 1980. The KGB also claimed for a time to be able to
influence President Asad’s youngest brother, Rifat, who
commanded Asad’s elite ‘Defence Companies’, the best
armed and trained units in the Syrian army, as well as the
hit squads who operated against Syrian dissidents abroad.
Despite, or perhaps partly because of, Saddam Hussein’s
fascination with the career of Joseph Stalin, he seems to
have made Baghdad a more difficult operating
environment for the KGB than Cairo or Damascus.—

In the Middle East, unlike Latin America, there was no

realistic prospect of the emergence of a major Marxist-
Leninist regime which would act as a role model for the
Arab world and spread revolution through the region.
Though the People’s Democratic Republic of [South]
Yemen claimed to be such a regime, its almost continuous
and frequently homicidal internal power struggles made
it, from Moscow’s point of view, more of a liability than
an asset. Moscow thus sought to base its strategy in the
Middle East on alliance with one of the leading
‘progressive’ Arab powers which, it was hoped, would
progress gradually to Marxism-Leninism. Its main hopes
from 1955 to 1970 were pinned on Nasser, by far the most
charismatic Arab leader of the Cold War as well as ruler
of the largest Middle Eastern state. During the halcyon
years of Nasser’s special relationship with Moscow, he
was one of the most eloquent advocates of the Soviet role
in the Middle East. ‘[The Russians]’, he told an American
interviewer in 1957, ‘helped us survive. Yes, and they
helped us escape domination by the West.’— After
Nasser’s sudden death in 1970, Moscow was never able to
find an Arab ally of remotely equal stature. His successor,
Sadat, expelled all Russian advisers and opted instead for
a special relationship with the United States and peace
with Israel. Though Iraq became in the mid-1970s the
chief recipient of Soviet military aid to the Third World,
Saddam Hussein’s suspicions of Soviet policy - despite
his admiration for Stalin - ensured that the Soviet
bridgehead in Baghdad was never secure. All that

remained thereafter was an alliance with Asad’s Syria,
increasingly notorious as a state sponsor of terrorism as
well as an increasing drain on the Soviet economy. No
wonder that even the usually unsentimental Gromyko
looked back nostalgically at the end of his long career on
the special relationship with Nasser, arguing
unconvincingly that, had he lived only ‘a few years
longer’, the subsequent history of the Middle East might
have been very different.—

During the Cold War, the KGB maintained secret links
with, and channelled secret subsidies to, most if not all
Middle Eastern Communist parties. None of these parties,
however, possessed a popular charismatic leader to
compare with Castro, Guevara, Allende or the leading
Sandinistas, and all were liable to be sacrificed to Soviet
strategic interests. In 1965, at a time when Moscow was
pursuing its courtship of Nasser, the Egyptian Communist
Party was persuaded to dissolve itself and tell its members
to join the ruling Arab Socialist Union.— When
Khrushchev made Nasser a Hero of the Soviet Union, one
of his Presidium privately complained that he was
honouring a leader who ‘drove Communists into
concentration camps’.— In 1972 Moscow put pressure on
a somewhat reluctant Iraqi Communist Party to reach an
accommodation with the Ba‘th regime. When thousands
of Party members were imprisoned and many tortured at
the end of the decade, however, Moscow stayed silent for

fear of antagonizing Baghdad at a time when it was at the
forefront of the Arab campaign to prevent the United
States brokering a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.
In Syria there was a growing breach between the long-
serving Party leader and dogmatic neo- Stalinist, Khalid
Bakdash, and the majority of the Party Politburo who
resented both Bakdash’ s autocratic leadership and
Moscow’s support for the equally autocratic Asad.—

Since the Soviet Union was itself a Middle Eastern
power bordering some of the other main states of the
region, the Middle East was a greater preoccupation of
Gromyko and the Foreign Ministry than Latin America.
For that reason the role played by KGB residencies in
most major Middle Eastern states, though important, was
less central than that of Soviet embassies. The main
exception was Israel, with which - to the subsequent
dismay of the Foreign Ministry - the Soviet Union broke
off diplomatic relations in 1967. Soviet policy to Israel
thereafter became entangled with and was often driven by
the KGB’s anti-Zionist obsessions. ‘Zionist subversion’
was a particular obsession of Yuri Andropov who, as
KGB Chairman, interpreted every protest by Jewish
‘refuseniks’ who were denied the right to emigrate to
Israel as part of an international Zionist conspiracy
against the Soviet Union. In a stream of reports to the
Politburo he insisted on the need for resolute action to
‘neutralize’ the most minor protests. Even Brezhnev

occasionally complained about the lack of proportion
evident in the KGB campaign against refuseniks. After
one wearisome discussion in the Politburo in 1973, he
complained, ‘Zionism is making us stupid’. Gromyko
washed his hands of much of the anti-Zionist campaign,
telling his staff ‘not to bother him with . . . such “absurd”
matters’.— Moscow none the less considered its role in
1975 in the adoption of UN Resolution 3379 denouncing
Zionism as a form of racism as a major diplomatic
victory, which demonstrated the Soviet Union’s
‘enormous support for the struggle of the Arab peoples’.—
The Zionist obsession of the KGB leadership came close
to, and at times arguably crossed, the threshold of
paranoid delusion. A KGB conference concluded
absurdly in 1982 that ‘virtually no major negative
incidents took place [anywhere] in the socialist countries
of Europe without the involvement of Zionists’.
Andropov insisted that even the sending of matsos
(unleavened bread) from the West to Soviet Jews for their
Passover celebrations represented a potentially serious act
of ideological sabotage.—

The unexpected surge of international terrorism in the
early 1970s and the precedent set a few years before by
the KGB’s use of Sandinista guerrillas against US targets
in Central and North America — encouraged the Centre to
consider the use of Palestinian terrorists as proxies in the
Middle East and Europe. In 1970 the KGB began secret

arms deliveries to the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).— The secret was
remarkably well kept. Though there were a series of
Western press reports on support for the PFLP from Syria,
Iraq and Libya, there were none of any significance on its
Soviet connection. The KGB’s willingness to use other
terrorist proxies was inhibited by fear that the proxies
would fail to conceal its involvement— - just as during the
second half of the Cold War it failed to implement any of
its numerous and detailed plans for the assassination of
KGB defectors for fear that it would be blamed for their
demise.— After the death of the two main Soviet agents
within the PFLP in 1978, the KGB’s direct connection
with it appears to have died away.— Nor does the KGB
seem to have established a connection with any other
Palestinian terrorist group which was nearly as close as
that with the PFLP for most of the 1970s. The Centre
appears to have regarded the two most active terrorist
leaders of the later 1970s and 1980s, Ilich Ramirez
Sanchez (better known as ‘Carlos the Jackal’) and Sabri
al-Banna (better known as ‘Abu Nidal’), as mavericks
with whom it was prudent to avoid all direct connection.
Its judgement proved right in both cases. Carlos was a
champagne terrorist with a passion for killing, high living
and self-important revolutionary rhetoric.— As well as
attacking European and US targets, the increasingly
paranoid Abu Nidal became obsessed with the hunt for

mostly imaginary Palestinian traitors, whom he subjected
to horrific torture and execution.— While refusing to deal
directly with either Carlos or Abu Nidal, however,
Andropov was content for other Soviet bloc intelligence
agencies to do so. With Andropov’s knowledge (and
doubtless his blessing). East Germany became what its
last interior minister, Peter-Michael Diestel, later called
‘an Eldorado for terrorists’.— By the mid-1980s, however,
both Carlos and Abu Nidal had become such an
embarrassment to their Soviet bloc hosts that their east
European bases were closed down. Both continued to
receive assistance from the Soviet Union’s main Middle
Eastern ally, Hafiz al-Asad. Carlos later claimed, in a
characteristic transport of semi-reliable rhetoric, to be ‘a
senior officer of the Syrian secret service’.— Abu Nidal
died in Baghdad in 2002, allegedly by his own hand, more
probably murdered on the instructions of his former
protector, Saddam Hussein.—

The KGB’s dealings with Yasir Arafat and the PLO
were ambivalent. Moscow gave strong support to an Arab
initiative in the UN General Assembly recognizing the
PLO as the lawful representative of Palestinian Arabs and
giving it observer status at the UN. A Palestinian
delegation to Moscow in 1975, headed by Arafat,
expressed profound gratitude to the Soviet Union ‘for its
unfailing support of the just struggle of the Palestinian
people for their national aspirations, against the intrigues

of imperialism, Zionism and reaction’.— But despite
Moscow’s public praise for the PLO and the secret
training for its guerrillas provided by the KGB, Arafat
never gained the trust of either the Kremlin or the Centre.
When PLO forces in Lebanon were defeated by an Israeli
invasion in 1982, the Soviet Union offered no assistance.
Though Moscow was embarrassed by the homicidal feud
which broke out between Asad and Arafat in 1983, the
closeness of its alliance with Syria was unaffected by it.
In the final years of the Cold War Arafat was almost as
unpopular in Moscow as in Washington.—

8

The Rise and Fall of Soviet Influence in

Egypt

The first Arab leader to be courted by the Kremlin was
Gamal Abdel Nasser, who in 1954, at the age of only
thirty- six, became the first native Egyptian ruler of an
independent Egypt since Persian invaders had overthrown
the last of the pharaohs almost 2,500 years earlier.
Nasser’s campaign against imperialism went back to his
childhood protests against the British occupation of
Egypt. ‘When I was a little child’, he recalled, ‘every time
I saw aeroplanes flying overhead I used to shout:

“O God Almighty, may
A calamity overtake the English! ” ' -

Despite his hostility to the British, neither the Kremlin nor
the Centre immediately warmed to Nasser. As
Khrushchev later acknowledged: ‘We were inclined to
think that Nasser’s coup was just another one of those
military take-overs which we had become so accustomed
to in South America. We didn’t expect much to come of
it.’- Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov, who became KGB

Chairman in 1954, knew so little about Egypt that he
believed Egyptians were black Africans rather than Arabs.
His Middle Eastern specialists appear to have been too
embarrassed by his ignorance to point his error out to
him.-

Moscow began to pay serious attention to Nasser when,
only six months after taking power, he successfully put
pressure on the British to withdraw their troops from the
Suez Canal zone. Two months later, in December 1954,
the youthful FCD high flier, Vadim Kirpichenko, arrived
in Cairo as head of political intelligence with the principal
ambition of penetrating Nasser’s entourage. He had an
early success, though neither Kirpichenko ’s memoirs
(unsurprisingly) nor the files noted by Mitrokhin reveal
the identity of the individual involved. Kirpichenko
identifies him only as ‘a firm friend [who] provided
interesting information’, without making clear whether he
was an agent or a confidential contact. Given that
Nasser’s entourage was aware that the individual was
sometimes in contact with Kirpichenko, it seems more
likely that he was a confidential contact. At a time when
the Soviet ambassador in Cairo, Daniil Semenovich
Solod, was still inclined to dismiss Nasser as a reactionary
nationalist, Kirpichenko ’s contact provided the first
reliable evidence of ‘where Nasser intended to lead his
country’ - towards a special relationship with the Soviet
Union.- In September 1955 Nasser delighted Moscow and

shocked the West by signing an agreement to purchase
large quantities of Soviet arms via Czechoslovakia - an
agreement concluded in such secrecy that even the
Egyptian ambassador in Moscow was kept in ignorance of
negotiations for it.-

Kirpichenko’s contact also proved his worth during the
visit to Cairo of Khrushchev’s private envoy (shortly to
become his foreign minister), Dmitri Shepilov, on a fact-
finding mission in May 1956. After Solod had tried and
failed for several days to arrange a meeting between
Shepilov and Nasser, Kirpichenko went round to his
contact’s house at 1 a.m., failed to find him in but
eventually tracked him down around dawn. At 9.30 a.m.
the contact rang to say that a presidential motorcade
would shortly arrive to conduct Shepilov to a meeting
with Nasser at 10 o’clock.- Two Soviet defectors, the
KGB officer Vladimir Kuzichkin and the diplomat
Vladimir Sakharov (a KGB co-optee), both Middle
Eastern specialists, later identified Kirpichenko ’s
confidential contact or agent as Sami Sharaf, a pot-bellied
man with a drooping moustache and the flattering
codename ASAD (‘Lion’) who in 1959, as Director of the
President’s Office of Information, was to become
Nasser’s chief intelligence adviser.- Kirpichenko insists
that ‘Sami Sharaf was never our agent, and I did not even
know him’.- He does, however, acknowledge that Sharaf
was an ‘ardent supporter’ of Egyptian-Soviet friendship

who, after Nasser’s death, had repeated unauthorized
discussions of official business at the Soviet embassy- -
the kind of man, in other words, whom the KGB would
almost certainly have attempted to recruit as at least a
‘confidential contact’. When Sharaf finally met Brezhnev
a year after Nasser’s death, he was profuse in his
protestations of gratitude and friendship:

I must thank Comrade Brezhnev for giving me this
opportunity to see him in spite of all his preoccupations. I
am sure . . . that this is a special favour for me personally.
I trust relations between us will be everlasting and
continuous, and that the coming days and the positions
which we adopt will be taken as a sincere witness to the
friendship which exists between [Egypt] and the Soviet
Union, parties, peoples and governments ... I firmly
believe that, since Sami Sharaf is the son of the great
leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, he occupies a special
position in relation to his Soviet friends.—

In July 1956 Nasser caused an international sensation by
nationalizing the Suez Canal, hitherto a concession run by
the Paris-based Suez Canal Company - in Arab eyes, the
supreme symbol of Western imperialist exploitation. He
then urgently sought Soviet advice on how to respond to
Western opposition.— The black comedy of the failed
Anglo-French attempt, in collusion with Israel, to reclaim

control of the Suez Canal by force of arms in November
played into the hands of both Khrushchev and Nasser.
Within the Middle East the balance of power shifted
decisively against the conservative, pro-Western regimes
in Iraq and Jordan and in favour of the radical forces led
by Egypt. Nasser emerged as the hero of the Arab world.
Suez also drove him closer to Moscow and to the KGB.
On the eve of the Anglo-French invasion Nasser received
intelligence about plans to assassinate him, apparently
drawn up by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)
on the orders of the temporarily unbalanced British Prime
Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, who was obsessed by his
determination to ‘knock Nasser off his perch’.—
Kirpichenko received a request from his contact in
Nasser’s entourage for help in improving his personal
security. Two senior officers of the KGB Ninth
(Protective Security) Directorate flew to Cairo and,
together with Kirpichenko, were invited to lunch with
Nasser in what Kirpichenko calls ‘a very warm domestic
setting’. Subsequent investigation quickly revealed that
Nasser’s only security consisted of a group of
bodyguards. There was no alarm system in any of the
buildings where he lived and worked. His cook bought
bread at a bakery opposite the presidential residence, and
meat and vegetables at the nearest market. Having
rectified these security failings, the KGB advisers were
then asked to provide protection against radiation and
poison gas. The best method, they explained, was to keep

a caged bird on all premises used by Nasser. If any of the
birds died, the building concerned should be evacuated.
Egyptian intelligence asked in vain for higher-tech
systems of detection which the KGB was reluctant to
provide.—

In 1958 Nasser received a hero’s welcome on his
arrival in Moscow for a triumphal three-week tour of the
Soviet Union which both the Kremlin and the Centre
intended to cement the special relationship with him. The
entire Soviet leadership turned out to welcome Nasser at
the airport and made him guest of honour at the annual
May Day parade, standing beside a beaming Khrushchev
on the reviewing platform above the Lenin mausoleum.
The important role the KGB had assumed in Soviet-
Egyptian relations was shown by the choice of
Kirpichenko, rather than a diplomat, as interpreter during
Nasser’s trip - much as Leonov was later chosen to
interpret for Castro. Kirpichenko found Nasser already
tired when he arrived in Moscow and felt increasingly
sorry for him as he worked his way through the long list
of official engagements prepared for his visit. Since,
however, all the engagements had been approved by
Khrushchev, Kirpichenko felt powerless to cut any of
them. Khrushchev, unlike his guest, was in ebullient form
throughout the visit. During an evening at the Bolshoi
Ballet to see Swan Lake, when the evil black swan
appeared on stage Khrushchev exclaimed, ‘That’s Dulles

[US Secretary of State]! But don’t worry, Comrade
Nasser, don’t worry! At the end of the act we’ll break his
wings . . .’ Kirpichenko duly translated.— Nasser seems to
have been impressed as well as exhausted by the series of
effusive welcomes to which he was subjected during his
visit. On his return to Cairo, he told a huge, cheering
crowd that the Soviet Union was ‘a friendly country with
no ulterior motive’ which held the Arab nation ‘in great
esteem’.—

The main advantage derived by the KGB from the state
visit was the liaison established between Kirpichenko and
the head of the main Egyptian intelligence service, Salah
Muhammad Nasr, who accompanied Nasser on his tour.
‘Salah Nasr’, writes Kirpichenko, ‘was attentive to me
and tried in all sorts of ways to show that he assigned
important significance to our contact. ’ It was agreed that,
after their return to Cairo, Kirpichenko would renew
contact under the pseudonym ‘George’. The female
receptionist to whom he spoke on arrival at Nasr’s office,
however, told him, ‘ “Mister George”, we all know who
you are. You were interpreting for our president. You
were in the newsreels every day in all the cinemas!’
Despite this minor contretemps, Kirpichenko and Nasr
maintained good personal and working relations for the
next nine years until Nasr was arrested for plotting against
Nasser.—

The special relationship with Nasser had moments of
tension, due chiefly to his persecution of Communists in
Egypt and in Syria (during the union of the two countries
in the United Arab Republic from 1958 to 1961), and his
denunciation of Communists in Iraq caused serious
friction. By the early 1960s, however, Khrushchev and
the Centre, though not all of the Presidium, were
convinced that a new ‘correlation of forces’ existed in the
Middle East which had to be exploited in the struggle
against the Main Adversary. The aggressive global grand
strategy devised by KGB Chairman Aleksandr Shelepin
and approved by Khrushchev in the summer of 1961
envisaged the use of national liberation movements as the
basis of a forward policy in the Third World.— Castro’s
victory in Cuba also encouraged the new policy of allying
with anti-imperialist but ideologically unorthodox Third
World nationalists, instead of relying simply on orthodox
Communist parties which unfailingly toed the Moscow
line. As well as supporting Cuba and the Sandinistas,
Shelepin also conceived a remarkable scheme to support a
Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq and tell Nasser through
‘unofficial’ (probably KGB) channels that, if the rebellion
succeeded, Moscow ‘might take a benign look at the
integration of the non-Kurdish part of Iraqi territory with
the UAR [United Arab Republic] on the condition of
Nasser’s support for the creation of an independent
Kurdistan’.— Unrealistic though the scheme was,
particularly during the final months of the UAR’s

existence, the hugely ambitious plan for a Nasserite union
of Egypt, Syria and the greater part of Iraq which
Shelepin put to Khrushchev gives some sense of the
Centre’s hopes for exploiting both his enormous prestige
as the most popular Arab leader of the twentieth century
and his willingness to enter a special relationship with the
Soviet Union.

Throughout the 1960s more Soviet hopes were pinned
on Nasser than on any other Third World leader outside
Latin America. Soviet ideologists devised the terms ‘non-
capitalist path’ and ‘revolutionary democracy’ to define a
progressive, intermediate stage between capitalism and
socialism. Nasser’s decision to nationalize much of
Egyptian industry in 1961 provided encouraging evidence
of his own progress along the ‘non-capitalist path’.—
Among the Soviet agents in the media who eulogized his
achievements was the former SIS officer Kim Philby,
who until his defection to Moscow early in 1963 was the
Beirut correspondent for the Observer and The
Economist. In an article entitled ‘Nasser’s Pride and
Glory’ on the tenth anniversary of the Egyptian
Revolution in the summer of 1962, Philby declared that
he had successfully turned Egypt into a ‘co-operative
socialist democracy’: ‘It is now as difficult to conceive an
Egypt without Nasser as a Yugoslavia without Tito or an
India without Nehru - and Nasser is still a young man.’—
Of all Soviet aid to the Third World between 1954 and

1961 43 per cent went to Egypt. In 1964 Nasser was made
a Hero of the Soviet Union, the USSR’s highest
decoration. A year later, the Egyptian Communist Party
dissolved itself and its members applied for membership
of the ruling Arab Socialist Union.—

By the mid-1960s the majority view among Moscow’s
Middle Eastern experts was that Soviet equipment and
training had transformed the Egyptian armed forces. They
were sadly disillusioned by the humiliating outcome of
the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War in 1967. The Israeli attack
on Egypt at 8.45 a.m. (Cairo time) on 5 June took the
Centre as well as Nasser by surprise. The Soviet news
media learned of the attack before the KGB, which only
discovered the outbreak of war from intercepted
Associated Press reports.— The war was virtually decided
during the first three hours when Israeli air-raids
destroyed 286 of 340 Egyptian combat aircraft on the
ground, leaving the Egyptian army without air cover
during the ensuing land battles in the Sinai desert.

On 28 June 1967, in one of his first speeches as KGB
Chairman, Yuri Andropov addressed KGB Communist
Party activists on the subject of ‘The Soviet Union’s
Policy regarding Israel’s Aggression in the Near East’. In
order to avoid similar intelligence failures in future and
have ‘timely information and forecasts of events’, the
KGB ‘must draw highly qualified specialists into

intelligence work from a variety of academic fields’.—
Among the Soviet journalists and academic experts sent
on missions to increase the Centre’s understanding of the
Middle East was Yevgeni Primakov, codenamed MAKS
(later head of the post-Soviet foreign intelligence agency,
the SVR, and one of Boris Yeltsin’s prime ministers). In
the late 1960s Primakov succeeded in getting to know
both Hafiz al-Asad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in
Iraq.— Intelligence analysis, which had scarcely existed
hitherto in a KGB frightened of offering opinions
uncongenial to the political leadership, made modest -
though always politically correct - strides during the
Andropov era.

In public, the Kremlin stood by Nasser and the Arab
cause after the humiliation of the Six-Day War,
denounced imperialist aggression and (to its subsequent
regret) broke off diplomatic relations with Israel.
Privately, however, there was savage criticism of the
incompetence of the Arab forces and outrage at the
amount of Soviet military equipment captured by the
Israelis. Within the Centre there was grudging admiration
for both the Israelis’ military skill and the success of
Israeli propaganda which sought to create an impression
of Arab cowardice in battle by photographing Egyptian
PoWs in their underwear and other unheroic poses
standing next to undamaged Soviet tanks.— The debacle
of the Six-Day War left Moscow with only two options:

either to cut its losses or to rebuild the Arab armies. It
chose the second. President Podgomy visited Egypt with
an entourage which included Marshal Matvei Zakharov,
chief of the Soviet general staff, Kirpichenko, then
working at the Centre, and Primakov.— Zakharov stayed
on to advise on the reorganization and re-equipment of
the Egyptian army. Desperate to resurrect his role as the
hero of the Arab world, Nasser proved willing to make
much larger concessions in return for Soviet help than
before the Six-Day War. He told Podgorny:

What is important for us is that we now recognize that our
main enemy is the United States and that the only possible
way of continuing our struggle is for us to ally ourselves
with the Soviet Union . . . Before the fighting broke out,
we were afraid that we would be accused by the Western
media of being aligned [with the Soviet Union], but
nothing of that sort concerns us any longer. We are ready
to offer facilities to the Soviet fleet from Port Said to
Salloum and from al-Arish to Gaza.—

Soviet advisers in Egypt eventually numbered over
20,000. In 1970, at Nasser’s request, Soviet airbases,
equipped with SAM-3 missiles and combat aircraft with
Russian crews, were established to strengthen Egyptian
air defences.

Nasser’s most striking political gifts were his powerful
rhetoric and charismatic stage presence, which enabled
him to survive the military humiliation of 1967, for which
he bore much of the responsibility, and inspired the Arab
street with a seductive but unrealizable vision of Pan-
Arab unity which would restore the pride and honour of
which imperialism had robbed them. He left behind few
practical achievements. The celebrated Aswan Dam and
vast Helwan steel works, both financed by the Soviet
Union and praised as models of socialist construction,
were built in defiance of local conditions. Egyptian
socialism had failed. As Nasser once admitted, ‘The
people can’t eat socialism. If they weren’t Egyptian
they’d beat me with their shoes [almost the ultimate Arab
humiliation].’ The main growth area during Nasser’s
eighteen years in power was the civil service, which
increased from 325,000 to 1.2 million mostly inefficient
bureaucrats. Cairo, built to accommodate 3 million
people, was close to meltdown with a population almost
three times as large. Water pipes and sewage systems
regularly collapsed, flooding parts of the city. Politically,
Nasser left behind him a one-party state with an ailing
economy built on the twin foundations of rigged elections
and concentration camps to terrorize his opponents.—

The vast Soviet investment in Nasser’s Egypt during
the 1950s and 1960s rested on a far more precarious base
than Moscow was willing to acknowledge. The influx of

Soviet advisers served only to underline the gulf between
Soviet and Egyptian society. Russians and Egyptians
rarely visited each other’s homes. Though almost half of
the 15,000 Arabs who studied in the United States during
the late 1950s and 1960s married Americans, marriage
between Soviet advisers and their Egyptian hosts was
virtually unknown.— Resentment at the aloofness of the
advisers was compounded by the arrogance of the Soviet
ambassador, Vladimir Mikhailovich Vinogradov. ‘The
Soviet Union’, complained Vice-President Anwar al-
Sadat, ‘had begun to feel that it enjoyed a privileged
position in Egypt - so much so that the Soviet ambassador
had assumed a position comparable to that of the British
High Commissioner in the days of the British occupation
of Egypt.’—

With Nasser’s sudden death in September 1970 and his
replacement by Sadat, the imposing but fragile edifice of
Soviet influence in Egypt began to crumble. Almost two
decades later, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei
Gromyko, was still insisting that ‘had [Nasser] lived a few
years longer, the situation in the region might today be
very different’.— Aleksei Kosygin, the Soviet Prime
Minister, told Sadat soon after he became President, ‘We
never had any secrets from [Nasser], and he never had
any secrets from us.’— The first half of the statement, as
Kosygin was well aware, was nonsense; the second half,
thanks to Sami Sharaf and others, may at times have been

close to the truth. On his first day as President, Sadat had
an immediate confrontation with Sharaf in his office.
According to Sadat:

He had a heap of papers to submit to me. ‘What is this?’ I
asked.

‘The text of tapped telephone conversations between
certain people being watched. ’

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t like to read such rubbish . . .
And, anyway, who gave you the right to have the
telephones of these people tapped? Take this file away.’ I
swept it off my desk.—

There were times when Sadat took a greater interest in
‘such rubbish’ than he cared to admit to Sharaf.
Kirpichenko, who returned to Cairo as resident in 1970,
discovered that Sadat was ‘listening in’ to the
conversations of a group of pro-Soviet plotters against
him: chief among them Vice-President Ali Sabry, Interior
Minister Sha’rawi Gum ’a. War Minister Muhammad
Fawzi and Minister for Presidential Affairs Sami Sharaf.
The group, which Sadat privately called the ‘crocodiles’
(an expression adopted by the Cairo residency), had
frequent meetings with Vinogradov and, in Kirpichenko ’s
euphemistic phrase, ‘shared with him their apprehensions

regarding Sadat’s line’— - in other words their plans to
overthrow him.— The plotters sought Vinogradov’s
support but, according to Nikolai Leonov, the ambassador
was ‘overcome by fear’ and gave no reply.—

The reports from Cairo which most alarmed the
Politburo were what Kirpichenko claims was ‘reliable’
intelligence on Sadat’s secret contacts with President
Nixon, raising the suspicion that he was planning to
loosen Egyptian links with the Soviet Union and move
closer to the United States. — In January 1971 Fawzi,
whose responsibilities included Cairo security, received a
report of unauthorized radio transmissions. The
triangulation techniques used to locate the source of the
transmissions revealed that they came from Sadat’s house.
Further investigation showed that he was exchanging
secret messages with Washington - despite the fact that
diplomatic relations with the United States had been
broken off by Nasser. According to Fawzi, he confronted
Sadat, who told him that the secret contacts were no
business of his. Fawzi allegedly retorted that it was the
business of intelligence services to discover such things.—
Kirpichenko may well have been informed of the
confrontation between Fawzi and Sadat either by one of
the ‘crocodiles’ or by one of his informants within
Egyptian intelligence. It is equally likely that Sadat’s
radio messages to and from Washington were intercepted
by the SIGINT station (codenamed ORION)— in the

Cairo residency. The KGB’s remarkable success with
Third World ciphers made its codebreakers better able to
decrypt Sadat’s presidential cipher than any Egyptian
intelligence agency. — Given the anxieties aroused in
Moscow by Sadat’s policies, decrypting his
communications must have had a particularly high
priority. Just as worrying from Moscow’s point of view
were the secret conversations in Cairo during March and
April between the US diplomat Donald Bergus and
Sadat’s emissaries. Tapes of the conversations, recorded
without Sadat’s knowledge by a section of Egyptian
intelligence, were passed on to the ‘crocodiles’ and,
almost certainly, revealed by them to the Soviet
embassy.—

On 28 April 1971, for the only time in Kirpichenko’s
career as a foreign intelligence officer, he was suddenly
summoned back to Moscow, together with Vinogradov
and the senior military adviser in Egypt, General Vasili
Vasilyevich Okunev, to give his assessment of Sadat’s
intentions direct to a meeting of the Politburo.
Vinogradov was criticized by Suslov for what he claimed
were the contradictions between the ‘quite optimistic’
tone of his oral assessment (which was similar to that of
Okunev) and some of the evidence contained in his
diplomatic despatches. Kirpichenko, by contrast, bluntly
declared that Sadat was deceiving the Soviet Union.
Andropov told him afterwards, ‘Everything you said was

more or less correct, but a bit sharply expressed. ’ He was
also informed that President Podgomy had said of his
comments on Sadat, ‘It’s not at all appropriate ... to
speak of presidents in such a manner!’ What also stuck in
Kirpichenko’s memory was the fact that while the table
around which the Politburo sat had on it red and black
caviar and a selection of fish delicacies, he and those
seated around the walls were offered only sausage and
cheese sandwiches.—

The events of the next few weeks fully justified
Kirpichenko’s pessimism. On 11 May a young police
officer brought Sadat a tape recording showing, according
to Sadat, that the ‘crocodiles’ ‘were plotting to overthrow
me and the regime’.— (Though Sadat’s memoirs do not
mention it, he had doubtless received similar tapes
before.) At a meeting with Vinogradov, the chief plotters
had sought Soviet support for a plot to overthrow Sadat
and establish ‘socialism in Egypt’. Moscow, however,
dared not take the risk of promising support and Sadat
struck first.— The timing of the arrest of the ‘crocodiles’
on the evening of 13 May took the Cairo residency by
surprise. Kirpichenko spent the evening, like many other
Soviet representatives, at a reception in their honour in the
garden of the East German embassy. At the high point of
the evening, just as suckling pigs appeared on the table,
news arrived of the arrests, forcing Kirpichenko to
abandon the meal and return to his embassy.—

Sadat, however, still went to great lengths to conceal
his real intentions from the Russians. Only a fortnight
later, he signed with President Podgomy in Cairo a
Soviet-Egyptian Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation.
His main motive, as he later acknowledged, was ‘to allay
the fears of the Soviet leaders’ by seeking to persuade
them that he was engaged in an internal power struggle
rather than a reorientation of Egyptian foreign policy
away from Moscow. As he saw Podgorny off at the
airport, Sadat appealed to him to tell the Politburo, ‘Please
have confidence in us! Have confidence! Confidence!

His disingenuous pleading had little effect. The Centre’s
confidence in Sadat was already almost gone. The Cairo
residency had little doubt that he ‘was aiming to cut down
Soviet-Egyptian relations and would take active steps to
curtail the activity of Soviet Intelligence in Egypt’.— For
the moment, however, Moscow did not voice its
suspicions, fearing that open opposition to Sadat would
only undermine still further its remaining influence and
huge investment in Egypt.

The Centre’s irritation at its declining influence in
Cairo was balanced by its hope of a Communist take-over
in Khartoum. The leaders of the Sudanese Communist
Party were considered by the KGB to be the most loyal
and dedicated in the Middle East.— In July 1971 a coup
by Sudanese army officers, supported by the Communists,

briefly succeeded in toppling President Gaafar
Muhammad al-Nimeiri. Vinogradov called on Sadat to
urge him to recognize the new regime. An angry
argument followed during which Sadat declared, ‘I cannot
allow a Communist regime to be established in a country
sharing my borders.’— With Sadat’s assistance, the coup
was brutally suppressed and Nimeiri restored to power.
Among those executed for their part in the coup was the
General Secretary of the Sudanese Communist Party,
Abdel Maghoub. Simultaneously the Centre discovered
that a Soviet diplomat in the Middle East co-opted by the
KGB, Vladimir Nikolayevich Sakharov, was working for
the CIA. Alerted by a pre-arranged signal - a bouquet
placed by the Agency on the back seat of his Volkswagen
- Sakharov defected just in time. Among the secrets he
had betrayed to the CIA was Sharaf s involvement with
the KGB. 52

As Soviet influence declined under Sadat’s rule,
Egyptian Communists increasingly regretted the decision
to dissolve their Party in 1965. In 1971 the Soviet
embassy in Cairo, probably through the KGB residency,
paid the relatively modest sum of 1 ,000 Egyptian pounds
to a leading Egyptian Communist, codenamed
SOYUZNIK (‘Ally’), to support left-wing candidates for
the People’s Assembly.— Moscow, however, remained
anxious not to provoke Sadat by reviving the defunct
Egyptian Communist Party and discouraged attempts to

do so. In April 1972 the three main underground Marxist
groups united and began producing critical reports on the
current state of Egypt under the name Ahmad ‘Urabi al-
Misri.— SOYUZNIK and the other leaders of the newly
unified underground movement secretly asked the Soviet
embassy in Cairo to put them in contact with the
leadership of the Soviet Communist Party. Moscow
replied that the time was not yet ripe for setting up an
open Marxist organization in Egypt. SOYUZNIK
responded that the Soviet comrades plainly did not
understand the real state of affairs in Egypt but that the
new movement would none the less count on financial aid
from fraternal Communist parties.— Two years later the
KGB began channelling money to SOYUZNIK via the
Iraqi Communist Party.—

By the summer of 1972, Sadat had secretly decided to
expel all Soviet military advisers. On 8 July he summoned
the Soviet ambassador to see him. According to
Vinogradov, ‘Sadat suddenly announced that our military
advisers could return home, as they were “very tired”! I
was absolutely furious. “Tired, Mr President!” I then
challenged [him], “If you don’t need them any more, then
say it more directly!” ’— According to Sadat’s version of
the same episode, he simply announced that he had
‘decided to dispense with the services of all Soviet
military experts’, and ordered them to leave within a
week.— Moscow, however, still could not bring itself to

sacrifice what remained of its hard-won position in Egypt
by an open breach with Sadat. The Soviet leadership
concluded that it had no choice but to continue political
and military support for Egypt for fear that Sadat might
otherwise throw in his lot with the United States. It
therefore opted for a face-saving official statement which
claimed improbably that, ‘After an exchange of views, the
[two] sides decided to bring back the military personnel
that had been sent to Egypt for a limited period.’
Relations with Egypt, the statement maintained, continued
to be ‘founded on the solid basis of the Soviet-Egyptian
Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation in the joint
struggle for the elimination of the results of Israeli
aggression’. After a brief interruption Soviet arms
supplies to Egypt resumed. Sadat declared in April 1973,
‘The Russians are providing us now with everything
that’s possible for them to supply. And I am now quite
satisfied.’—

Sadat’s arrest of the pro-Soviet faction within the
Egyptian leadership and the expulsion of Soviet advisers
damaged the morale of the KGB agent network and
complicated the work of the Cairo residency. Fearful of
discovery, a number of Egyptian agents began to distance
themselves from their case officers.— In January 1973, as
a security measure, the Centre ordered the residency to
cease operations against Egyptian targets ‘from agent
positions’.— Its existing agents, however, though

downgraded to ‘confidential contacts’, continued in some
instances to provide significant intelligence on Sadat’s
military planning.

Like Western intelligence agencies, the KGB was
confused about Sadat’s intentions towards Israel. On
twenty-two occasions in 1972- 73 Egyptian forces were
mobilized for periods of four or five days, then sent home.
In the spring of 1973 war appeared to be imminent and
Israel mobilized its forces. On Andropov’s instructions,
the FCD prepared a report on the crisis in the Middle East
which was submitted to the Politburo on 7 May:

According to available information, steps are being taken
in the Egyptian army to raise its battle readiness. To raise
morale, Sadat and the top military leadership are going
out to visit the troops. The General Staff of the Arab
Republic of Egypt Armed Forces has drawn up an
operational plan to force [cross] the Suez Canal.

Similar measures are being taken in Syria, whose
leadership has taken a decision to prepare for aggressive
military operations against Israel together with the
Egyptian army.

The military intentions of Egypt and Syria are known,
not only to the leading circles of other Arab countries, but
also in the West, and in Israel.

According to available information, the Americans and
the British are inclined to believe that the statements of
Egyptian and Syrian leaders about the forthcoming
confrontation with Israel are intended for internal
consumption, but also aim to exert a certain psychological
effect on Western countries and Israel. At the same time,
they do not rule out the possibility that Sadat will carry
out specific military operations.

Analysis of the available information indicates that the
actions of Sadat with the support of [Colonel] Qaddafi [of
Libya] and [President] Asad [of Syria] could lead to an
uncontrolled chain of events in the Near East.

It is not impossible that with the aim of involving world
opinion in the Near East problem and exerting pressure on
the USSR and the USA, Sadat might opt to resume
limited military operations on the eve of the forthcoming
meeting between Comrade Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev and
Nixon.—

It was of supreme importance that no Middle Eastern
conflict interfere with Brezhnev’s visit to Washington in
June. To Brezhnev, notorious for his love of pomp and
circumstance, his reception on the immaculately groomed
South Lawn of the White House was, according to
Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, ‘the
moment of his highest triumph. What could be greater

than his being placed on a footing equal to the American
president . . . ?’— ‘In order to influence Sadat in our
favour’ and dissuade him from going to war with Israel,
the KGB suggested sending a senior Soviet representative
to hold talks with both him and Asad, as well as delaying
the despatch to Egypt of missiles which the Soviet Union
had agreed to supply. It also proposed using ‘unofficial
channels’, in particular the head of the CIA station in
Cairo, to persuade the Americans ‘that the resumption of
military operations in the Near East at the present time
would not be in the interests of either the Soviet Union or
the USA’ and that they should bring pressure to bear on
Israel.—

In the event, no conflict in the Middle East disturbed
Brezhnev’s Washington apotheosis as a world leader.
‘Even the brilliant sunshine’, Dobrynin nostalgically
recalled, ‘seemed to accentuate the importance of the
event’: ‘The solemn ceremony, with both countries’
national anthems and a guard of honor, the leader of the
Soviet Communist Party standing side by side with the
American president for the whole world to see - all this
was for the Soviet leadership the supreme act of
recognition by the international community of their power
and influence.’—

The war scare of May 1973 none the less served
Sadat’s purpose. Even more than previous false alarms, it

persuaded both the American and Israeli intelligence
communities that his repeated mobilizations and threats of
war were bluff. The simultaneous attack by Egyptian and
Syrian forces on 6 October 1973, the Jewish holy day of
Yom Kippur, caught Israel as well as the United States off
guard.— The future DCI, Robert Gates, recalled that day
as ‘my worst personal intelligence embarrassment’. While
he was briefing a senior US arms negotiator on the
improbability of conflict, the news of the outbreak of war
was broadcast over the radio. Gates ‘slunk out of his
office’. The KGB did very much better. Still conscious of
having been caught out by the previous Arab-Israeli War
six years earlier, it was able to provide advance warning
to the Politburo before Yom Kippur - probably as a result
of intelligence both from SIGINT and from penetrations
of the Egyptian armed forces and intelligence
community.—

After the humiliation of the six-day defeat in 1967, the
early successes of the Yom Kippur War restored Arab
pride and self-confidence. Militarily, however, though the
war began well for Egypt and Syria, it ended badly with
Israeli forces sixty miles from Cairo and twenty from
Damascus. Sadat drew the conclusion that, because of its
influence on Israel, only the United States could mediate a
peace settlement. While Soviet influence declined, Henry
Kissinger became the dominating figure in the peace
process. Until his visit to the Middle East in November

1973 the globe-trotting Kissinger had never visited a
single Arab state. Over the next two years of shuttle
diplomacy he made eleven further visits and conducted
four major rounds of negotiations. The Centre tried
desperately to devise active measures to persuade Sadat
that Kissinger would double-cross him. In operation IBIS,
Service A in the FCD forged a despatch from the Swiss
ambassador in Washington to his foreign ministry,
reporting that he had been told by a Middle Eastern
specialist in the State Department that the United States
would not infringe any of Israel’s interests. The forgery
was shown to Sadat late in 1973 but had no discernible
influence on him.—

The Centre’s anxiety at its loss of Middle Eastern
influence to the United States was reflected in instructions
from Andropov to the FCD on 25 April 1974 to devise
active measures to prevent any further worsening in
Soviet- Arab relations, force anti-Soviet Arab politicians
onto the defensive and undermine the influence of the
West and China, which was currently increasing at Soviet
expense.— The Centre was particularly outraged by
Sadat’s links with the CIA. It reported in October 1974
that the Director of Central Intelligence, William Colby,
had visited Egypt as Sadat’s personal guest. The KGB set
out to take revenge on the thirty-year-old Presidential
Secretary for Foreign Relations, Ashraf Marwan (Nasser’s
son-in-law), who it believed had overall charge of the

Egyptian intelligence community and was responsible for
liaison with the Agency.— Section A devised an active-
measures campaign which was designed to portray
Marwan as a CIA agent. The Centre attached such
importance to the campaign that in May 1975 it sent the
head of the First (North American) Directorate, Vladimir
Kazakov, to oversee final preparations for its
implementation at the Cairo residency.— Articles
denouncing Marwan’ s alleged links with the CIA were
placed in Lebanese, Syrian and Libyan newspapers. — In
the course of the KGB disinformation campaign against
him, Marwan was accused of taking bribes and
embezzling large sums of money given to Egypt by Saudi
Arabia and Kuwait for arms purchases. The Cairo
residency also planted rumours that Marwan was having
an affair with Sadat’s wife, Jihan, and reported that these
had reached Sadat himself. Predictably, the KGB claimed
the credit in 1976 when Sadat replaced Marwan as his
Secretary for Foreign Relations. —

Service A’s active measures against Sadat made much
of his early enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler.— Sadat himself
acknowledged in his autobiography that, as a fourteen-
year-old when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he
had been inspired by the way the Fiihrer set out to
‘rebuild his country’: ‘I gathered my friends and told
them we ought to follow Hitler’s example by marching
forth ... to Cairo. They laughed and went away. ’—

During the Second World War Sadat was also a great
admirer of Rommel’s campaign against the British in the
Western Desert, and later established a museum in his
memory at El-Alamein. As late as 1953 he said publicly
that he admired Hitler ‘from the bottom of my heart’.—
The KGB claimed the credit for inspiring publications
with titles such as ‘Anwar Sadat: From Fascism to
Zionism’, which portrayed him as a former Nazi agent
who had sold out to the CIA.— Sadat’s control of the
press meant that within Egypt active measures against
him were mostly confined to spreading rumours and
leaflets. In other Arab countries the KGB claimed to be
able to inspire press articles denouncing Sadat as an
accomplice in the attempts of both the United States and
Israel to keep the occupied territories under Israeli
control. Among the allegations fabricated by Service A
was the claim that Sadat’s support had been purchased by
secret accounts in his name in Jewish-controlled banks.—
Other Soviet-bloc intelligence agencies collaborated in
the active-measures campaign. In an operation codenamed
RAMZES, the Hungarian AVH forged a despatch to the
State Department from the US ambassador in Cairo
containing a psychological evaluation of Sadat which
concluded that he was a drug addict who no longer had
sexual relations with his wife and was exhibiting a
marked deterioration in his mental faculties.—

Despite the priority given to active measures against

Sadat in and beyond the Arab world during the years after
the Yom Kippur War, the KGB remained extremely
cautious about operations in Egypt itself. Its caution
extended to the illegal Egyptian Communist Party which
on May Day 1975 announced its rebirth in fraternal
messages to other Communist parties around the world.—
Andropov instructed the Centre to inquire into the
leadership and composition of the Party, then prepare
jointly with the International Department of the CPSU
Central Committee a proposal for giving it financial
assistance. ‘Handing over money directly to the Egyptian
Communist Party’, he added, ‘is dangerous for us because
of the possibility of a leak.’ It was therefore decided to
continue passing money to the Egyptian Communists via
the Iraqi Party.— Sadat’s introduction of a limited form of
multi-party democracy in 1976 made it somewhat easier
for leading members of the still-illegal Communist Party
to campaign in public - and easier also for the KGB to
maintain contact with them. Three opposition ‘platforms’
were allowed to contest the general election of that year -
among them the left-wing National Progressive Unionist
Party (NPUP)— headed by the Communist leader, Khaled
Mohieddin, to whom the KGB gave the codename
LYUBOMIR. In 1976 the Cairo residency handed over to
a Communist contact two sums of $50,000 (slightly more
than 18,000 Egyptian pounds): one for the Communist
Party, one for the NPUP election campaign.—

At a meeting with Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kulik,
Kirpichenko’s successor as Cairo resident, and the
leadership of the FCD Eighteenth (Arab States)
Department in 1975, Andropov reaffirmed the ban on
running Egyptian agents in Egypt itself He also gave
instructions that documents were not to be accepted from
confidential contacts - probably for fear that KGB officers
might be caught in the act of receiving them. There is
little doubt that the Cairo residency was frustrated by the
restrictions imposed on it. In May 1976 Vladimir
Kryuchkov and N. A. Dushin, head of the KGB Third
(Military Counter-Intelligence) Directorate, signed a joint
submission to Andropov requesting permission to recruit
a senior Egyptian military intelligence officer, codenamed
GERALD. Andropov replied, ‘By order of the highest
authority [Instantsii\ it is forbidden to carry on agent
work in the Arab Republic of Egypt. ’ GERALD remained
a confidential contact.— FCD files noted by Mitrokhin
contain a number of examples of former Egyptian agents,
downgraded to confidential contacts, who broke contact
with the Cairo residency - among them, in 1976, FEDOR,
a colonel in the Egyptian army recruited in Odessa in
1972,— and MURTARS, an employee of the Presidential
Office recruited in Moscow in 1971.— A Centre report in
1977 concluded that the Cairo residency had no sources in
‘most targets of penetration’. Later in the year it was
discovered that KHASAN, an employee of the Soviet

Cultural Centre in Cairo whom the residency had used to
channel disinformation to Egyptian intelligence, had in
reality been operating under Egyptian control.—

Sadat’s unilateral denunciation of the Soviet-Egyptian
Friendship Treaty in March 1976 caused little surprise but
predictable indignation in the Centre. The FCD claimed
that this indignation was more widely shared. It reported
in November, probably with some exaggeration,
‘According to information from Egyptian business circles,
the curtailment of relations with the USSR is creating
dissatisfaction in a considerable section of the Egyptian
bourgeoisie . . .’: Tn an effort to lessen the dissatisfaction
in the country with its biased policy towards the West, the
Egyptian leadership is taking certain steps which are
intended to give the impression that it is interested in the
normalization of relations with the Soviet Union.’
However, the FCD quoted with approval the opinion of
the former Egyptian Prime Minister, Aziz Sidqi
(codenamed NAGIB, ‘Baron’): ‘The readiness of Sadat to
seek a reconciliation with the USSR is a mere manoeuvre
based on expediency.’ Sadat, the Centre believed, was
bent on moving closer to the United States.—

Though the Centre sought to improve the appearance of
its Middle Eastern reports by quoting from confidential
conversations with prominent Egyptians, the intelligence
access of the Cairo residency had diminished

considerably since the early 1970s. One sign of its
limitations was the fact that it was taken by surprise by
the mass popular protests in January 1977 against the
reduction of government subsidies on basic foodstuffs and
cooking gas. — In two days of rioting 160 were killed and
hundreds more wounded before the army restored order.
Sadat’s government blamed the riots on an ‘odious
criminal plot’ by ‘leftist plotters’. ‘Many Communist
elements’, it charged, had infiltrated the NPUP and tried
to use it to ‘overthrow the government and install a
Communist regime’. Over a period of three months, 3,000
Egyptians were arrested and charged with ‘subversive
conspiracy’.— During the campaign against ‘leftist
plotters’ a counsellor at the Soviet embassy, O. V.
Kovtunovich, visited its main Communist contact in his
office. Fearing that his office was bugged, the contact said
little but wrote on a sheet of paper, ‘About 35 members of
our organization have been arrested, and 17 are in hiding.
The printing press of the organization has not been
affected, nor have most of the district leaders of the
organization. Assistance must be given to the families of
those who have been arrested or are in hiding. We need
urgent material assistance, amounting to 3,000 Egyptian
pounds.’ Apparently afraid even to hand over the note in
his office, the contact waited until Kovtunovich was
leaving, then passed it to him in a corridor.— Probably as
a result of this and similar experiences, three Egyptian

Communists were sent for counter-intelligence training in
the Soviet Union to enable them to set up a Party security
service.— The Cairo residency’s main Communist contact
sent his thanks to the Soviet leadership. Only their
support, he told them, had kept the Party afloat during
1977.^

On 1 October 1977, the Soviet Union and the United
States signed a joint statement on the need to resolve the
Arab-Israeli conflict. Moscow believed that it had
recovered much of the diplomatic ground it had lost in the
Middle East since the Yom Kippur War and at last
secured US recognition of the Soviet role in peace
negotiations. Almost immediately, however, according to
an official history of Soviet foreign policy, ‘Under
pressure from Israel, the [US] Carter Administration
treacherously violated the agreement.’— Only seven
weeks after the agreement was signed, Sadat travelled to
Jerusalem to begin a dialogue with the Israelis. His visit
was one of the most stunning diplomatic coups de theatre
of modem times. As Sadat stepped off the plane at Tel
Aviv airport on 20 November, an Israeli radio reporter
gasped over the air, ‘President Sadat is now inspecting a
guard of honour of the Israeli Defence Force. I’m seeing
it, but I don’t believe it!’ The former Israeli Prime
Minister, Golda Meir, said of Sadat and the current Israeli
Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, at the end of the visit,
‘Never mind the Nobel Peace Prize [which Sadat and

Begin were to be awarded a year later]. Give them both
Oscars!’

With its habitual tendency to conspiracy theory, never
more marked than in its attitude to Zionism and the
Jewish lobby in the United States, the Centre interpreted
Sadat’s visit less as a piece of theatre than as a deep-laid
plot. Sadat, it believed, had arranged the trip with the
Americans, who had known that it was imminent even
when treacherously signing the agreement with the Soviet
Union. The ‘Framework for Peace in the Middle East’
signed by Sadat, Begin and Carter at Camp David in
September 1978 was instantly denounced by Pravda as ‘a
sell-out transacted behind the back of the Arab nation, one
which serves the interests of Israel, America, imperialism
and the Arab reactionaries’. The Centre believed that
Carter and the CIA had lured Sadat into an American-
Zionist plot intended to oust Soviet influence from the
Middle East. It responded with an intensified active-
measures campaign accusing Sadat of being a CIA agent
with a villa in Montreux waiting for him with round-the-
clock Agency protection when he was finally forced to
flee from the wrath of the Arab nation he had betrayed.—

In March 1979 Sadat returned to the United States to
sign a peace treaty with Israel in a ceremony on the South
Lawn of the White House attended by distinguished
guests and television reporters from around the world. As
after the Camp David agreement six months earlier, Sadat

was welcomed on his return to Cairo by huge enthusiastic
crowds convinced that they were witnessing the dawn of a
new era of peace and prosperity. There were authenticated
reports of Egyptian taxi drivers offering free rides to
Israeli visitors. Initially the opposition of the NPUP
leadership to Camp David caused resentment even among
some of its own rank and file. In much of the Arab world,
however, Sadat was treated as a pariah who had sold out
to Israel. Egypt was expelled from the Arab League,
which moved its headquarters from Cairo to Tunis.
Perhaps as many as 2 million Egyptians working in other
Arab countries were sent home. Within Egypt, as the new
era of prosperity failed to arrive, euphoria gave way to
disillusion.— Though an Israeli- Egyptian peace treaty
was signed in March 1979, the plans made at Camp David
for a broader settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict came
to nothing. Sadat’s opponents accused him of having
betrayed the Palestinian people and reinforced Israeli
control of the occupied territories.

The Cairo residency claimed that during 1979, thanks
to its Communist contacts, it had been able to inspire
press articles, public meetings and questions in the
People’s Assembly.— The trials in 1978-79 of those
accused of complicity in the ‘conspiracy’ of January 1977
offered the NPUP a platform for attacks on the Sadat
regime which it would not otherwise have been able to
voice publicly. Mohieddin announced that the NPUP

constituted ‘a democratic committee for the defence of
liberties, including lawyers who were non-party members,
coming together around the principle of providing all the
guarantees of legal defence to those imprisoned for their
opinions and supporting their families’. The evidence
against most of those arrested was too flimsy even for
them to be brought to trial. In most other cases,
defendants were found not guilty or received lenient
sentences. There were only twenty jail sentences, none
longer than three years. Mohieddin himself successfully
sued the pro-government press when he was accused of
unpatriotic behaviour because of his opposition to Sadat’s
peace policy with Israel, and was awarded damages of
20,000 Egyptian pounds.—

As well as receiving at least $100,000 a year for the
Egyptian Communist Party, the Cairo residency’s main
Communist contact also requested - and probably
received - a similar annual sum for the NPUP .— One of
its leaders privately acknowledged in 1978 that, without
$100,000 a year from Moscow, the NPUP ‘was in danger
of falling apart. The fate of the left-wing movement in
Egypt depended on this money.’— The Centre had
grandiose plans for the formation of an ‘anti-Sadat front’,
based on the NPUP, which, it believed, would organize
popular opposition to his ‘pro-imperialist’ policies.— Its
plans, however, achieved nothing of significance. Despite
tactical successes, the NPUP was incapable of mobilizing

mass support. At the elections to the People’s Assembly
in 1983 it gained only 4 per cent of the vote.—

Probably no other Third World leader inspired as much
loathing in Moscow as Sadat. While stationed at the
Centre at the end of the 1970s, Oleg Gordlevsky heard a
number of outraged KGB officers say that he should be
bumped off. Though there is no evidence that the Centre
was ever implicated in such a plot, it was aware that some
of its contacts were. In December 1977 it received
information that a secret meeting in Damascus between
leaders of Syrian intelligence and the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine had discussed plans for
assassinating both Sadat and Ashraf Marwan.— On 6
October 1981, the anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom
Kippur War, Sadat was assassinated by fundamentalist
fanatics while reviewing a military parade. Though there
is no indication in files noted by Mitrokhin that the KGB
had advance warning of the assassination plot, the news
that it had succeeded was greeted with jubilation in the
Centre— - and doubtless in the Kremlin.

Almost a decade after Sadat’s death, Gromyko could
still barely contain his hatred of him: ‘He has been called
the “Egyptian darkness”, after the biggest dust cloud in
human history which settled on Egypt 3,500 years ago
when the volcanic island of Santorini erupted . . . All his
life he had suffered from megalomania, but this acquired

pathological proportions when he became President.’—
Underlying Gromyko’s cry of rage was his consciousness
that the Sadat era had witnessed the complete failure of
Soviet policy in Egypt and the loss of the largest military,
economic and political investment Moscow had made in
any Third World country - extending to the unprecedented
lengths of approving in 1965 the dissolution of the
Egyptian Communist Party. But the political system
which had made it possible for Sadat to carry out what he
termed the ‘corrective revolution’ of the early 1970s and
remove the pro- Soviet group from positions of power had
been put in place by Hero of the Soviet Union Gamal
Abdel Nasser. The presidential system developed by
Nasser was a thinly disguised structure of personal rule
which survived virtually intact into the twenty-first
century. The main effect of the supposedly democratic
reforms introduced by Sadat and by his successor, former
Vice-President Hosni Mubarak, was to reinforce the
clientelism on which presidential rule was based. Even the
NPUP, on which in the early 1980s Moscow had pinned
its hopes for a return to the Soviet-Egyptian alliance,
eventually succumbed to the clientelism of the Mubarak
regime. The NPUP’s move from confrontation to co-
operation was epitomized in 1995 by Mubarak’s
appointment of one of its leaders, Rifa‘at al-Sa‘id, to the
Consultative (Shura) Council. ‘It was’, declared Sa‘id,
‘crazy to isolate ourselves from the system of which we
are part.’—

9

Iran and Iraq

During the Second World War the Red Army, together
with forces from its Western allies, had occupied Iran.
Soviet intelligence used the occupation to establish its
largest presence so far beyond its borders with nearly
forty residencies and sub-residencies. The main residency
in Tehran had 115 operations officers. Their principal
task, as in neighbouring areas of the Soviet Union, was
the identification, abduction and liquidation of those
whom Stalin considered ‘anti- Soviet’ elements.- Only
strong post-war pressure from both the United States and
Britain persuaded the Soviet Union to end its military
occupation in 1946. For almost two decades thereafter
Moscow hoped, and the West feared, that an Iranian
revolution would bring a pro- Soviet regime to power.
Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, who had become Shah in 1941
shortly before his twenty- second birthday, remained
uneasy on the ‘peacock throne’. In 1949 a group of Tudeh
(Communist) Party members in the Iranian officer corps
made an attempt on his life.- Though the Shah survived,
his authority was weakened two years later when he
yielded to public pressure and appointed the eccentric
nationalist. Dr Muhammad Mossadeq, as his Prime

Minister. Mossadeq promptly nationalized the oil industry
- to the outrage of the British government which owned
50 per cent of the shares in the Iranian Oil Company.

Both Britain and, still more, the United States greatly
exaggerated Mossadeq’ s susceptibility to Communist
influence. When Dwight D. Eisenhower became President
in January 1953, Sir Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary
in Winston Churchill’s government, found him ‘obsessed
by the fear of a Communist Iran’. Six months later the
CIA and SIS jointly organized a coup which overthrew
Mossadeq, and restored the authority of the Shah.
According to Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA officer chiefly
responsible for planning the coup, an emotional Shah told
him afterwards, ‘I owe my throne to God, my people, my
army - and to you!’ He then reached into his inside pocket
and presented Roosevelt with a large gold cigarette case.
On his way back to Washington, Roosevelt called at
London to brief Churchill in person. He found the Prime
Minister propped up in bed, recovering from a stroke but
eager to hear a first-hand account of the coup. ‘Young
man,’ said Churchill, when Roosevelt had finished his
briefing, ‘if I had been but a few years younger, I should
have loved nothing better than to have served under your
command in this great venture!’ Eisenhower was equally
enthusiastic. He wrote in his diary that Roosevelt’s
exciting report ‘seemed more like a novel than a historical
fact’. The short-term success of the coup, however, was

heavily outweighed by the long-term damage to American
and British policy in Iran.- It was easy for KGB active
measures to encourage the widespread Iranian belief that
the CIA and SIS continued to engage in sinister
conspiracies behind the scenes. Even the Shah from time
to time suspected the Agency of plotting against him. The
Centre tried hard to encourage his suspicions.

For a quarter of a century after the 1953 coup, none the
less, the CIA’s influence in Tehran comfortably exceeded
that of the KGB. The banning of the Tudeh Party and the
exile of its leadership meant that the Centre was unable to
rely in Iran on the assistance it received from fraternal
Party leaders in a number of other Middle Eastern
countries. In 1957, in order to both monitor and intimidate
domestic opposition, the Shah created with help from
both the CIA and Mossad a new state security and
intelligence organization, better known by its acronym
SAVAK, which rapidly acquired a fearsome reputation
for brutality. Two years after its foundation, Iran and
Israel signed a secret agreement on intelligence and
military co-operation.-

The KGB retaliated with a series of active measures to
which it seems to have attached exaggerated importance.
Late in 1957 the head of the Soviet department of the
Iranian Foreign Office was trapped by a KGB agent into -
allegedly - changing money illegally during a visit to

Moscow and reported to the Iranian ambassador.
According to a KGB report, he was dismissed on the
personal orders of the Shah and replaced by a less anti-
Soviet successor.- The Centre’s most effective tactic,
however, was to exploit the Shah’s continuing sense of
insecurity and recurrent fears of US double-dealing. In
February 1958, Service A forged a letter from the
American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, to his
ambassador in Tehran, belittling the Shah’s ability and
implying that the United States was plotting his
overthrow. The Tehran residency circulated copies of the
letter to influential Iranian parliamentarians and editors in
the confident expectation that one would come to the
attention of the Shah - which it duly did. According to the
KGB file on the operation, the Shah was completely taken
in by the fabricated Dulles letter and personally instructed
that a copy be sent to the US embassy with a demand for
an explanation. Though the embassy dismissed it as a
forgery, the Tehran residency reported that its denials
were disbelieved. Dulles’s supposedly slighting
references to the Shah were said to be a frequent topic of
whispered conversation among the Iranian elite.- The
impact of these insults on the Shah’s insecure personality
was all the greater because of the court culture of
‘shadulation’ which normally protected him from any hint
of criticism.

The Shah’s irritation with the United States was

increased by its failure to provide as much military aid as
he wanted. During 1959 he flirted with the idea of signing
a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union unless his
demands were met by Washington. Dulles privately
complained that the Shah was coming close to ‘blackmail
tactics’ .- Friction between Tehran and Washington was
skilfully exacerbated by the Centre. In 1960 Service A
fabricated secret instructions from the Pentagon ordering
US missions in Iran and other Third World countries to
collaborate in espionage operations against the countries
to which they were accredited and to assist in operations
to overthrow regimes of which Washington disapproved.
Copies of the forged instructions were sent in November
to the Tehran embassies of Muslim states by a supposedly
disaffected Iranian working for the US military mission.
Once again, as the Centre had intended, the forgery was
believed to be genuine by the Iranian government and
came to the attention of the Shah. The US ambassador
was summoned by the Iranian foreign minister and asked
for an explanation. As a result of the active measures,
according to the Tehran residency, in 1961 the Shah
personally ordered the replacement of a number of pro-
American Iranian officers .-

The KGB also claimed to have influenced the Shah’s
choice of his third (and last) wife, the twenty-one-year-old
Farah Diba, whom it wrongly believed had Communist
sympathies. The Centre boasted that, while Ms Diba was

an architecture student in Paris, a KGB agent had
persuaded the Iranian cultural attache, Djahanguir
Tafazoli, to introduce her to the Shah.- Though she was
unaware of the KGB’s interest in her, Farah Diba’s
correspondence with her mother shows that there was
some truth to the Centre’s boast. Her first meeting with
the Shah took place at a reception at the Iranian embassy
during his visit to Paris in the spring of 1959. Tafazoli
took Ms Diba’s hand and tried to take her to meet the
Shah. The shy Ms Diba hung back but when the Shah
spoke to her later in the reception, she told her mother
that, ‘Tafazoli added immediately, “Mademoiselle is a
very good student. She is first in her class and she speaks
French very well.” ’ Ms Diba added that it was ‘very nice
of [Tafazoli] to have said so many nice things about me’.
A cousin who was at the reception told her that the Shah
clearly liked her and had his eyes on her as she left the
room. ‘Of course’, wrote Ms Diba, ‘all of that is just
talk.’— Only a few months later, however, she and the
Shah became engaged. The KGB’s misplaced interest in
the future Empress appears to have derived from the fact
that she had a circle of Communist student friends within
the Paris Left Bank cafe society which she frequented. A
friend who persuaded her to attend a demonstration in
support of Algerians ‘fighting French imperialism’ was
later imprisoned in Iran as a member of the Tudeh
Party.— The Centre was also encouraged by the fact that.

unknown to Farah Diba, one of her relatives was a KGB
agent codenamed RION.— The KGB, however, failed to
realize that she remained, as she had been brought up, a
convinced royalist.

Though Farah Diba went to the pro- Algerian
demonstration to counter taunts that she lacked the
courage to do so, she recalls finding the world-view of her
Communist and fellow-traveller friends ‘grim and deeply
depressing’: ‘They were so young, but already they
seemed to be against the whole world, extremely sour and
bitter. You would have thought that, in their view, there
was nothing worth keeping on this planet apart from the
Soviet Union.’—

As soon as Farah Diba became Empress of Iran in
December 1959, it became clear that the KGB had
misjudged her. The new Empress’s radicalism showed
itself not in her politics but in her artistic tastes. Farah
Diba scandalized both Shia clergy and conservative
Iranians by her patronage of avant-garde Western art. At a
time when, as one Iranian businessman put it, ‘we were
only just beginning to listen to Bach’, the Empress’s
interest in Stockhausen seemed shocking.—

For some years after his marriage to Farah Diba the
Shah’s position still appeared far from secure. At his
summit meeting with John F. Kennedy in Vienna in 1961,
Khrushchev confidently predicted that Iran would fall like

a rotten fruit into Soviet hands. The CIA also thought that
an Iranian revolution was on the cards. A National
Intelligence Estimate of 1961 concluded, ‘Profound
political and social change in one form or another is
virtually inevitable.’ Among those plotting against the
Shah was the brutal head of SAVAK, General Teimur
Bakhtiar, whom the Shah sacked after receiving a warning
from the CIA.— The Shah also had to endure several
further assassination attempts. According to the KGB
defector, Vladimir Kuzichkin, one of the attempts was
organized by the KGB and personally approved by
Khrushchev. In February 1962 a Volkswagen Beetle
packed with explosive by a KGB illegal was parked on
the route taken by the Shah as he drove to the Majlis (the
Iranian parliament). As the Shah’s motorcade passed the
VW, the illegal pressed the remote control but the
detonator failed to explode.— There was no further plot
by the KGB to assassinate the Shah, due in large part to a
dramatic scaling down of its foreign assassinations after
the damaging international publicity given to the trial in
West Germany later in the year of one of the Centre’s
leading assassins, Bogdan Stashinsky.—

During the Khrushchev era sabotage replaced
assassination as the most important of the ‘special
actions’ for which the FCD was responsible. At the heart
of its sabotage planning was the identification of foreign
targets, mostly in the West, and preparations for their

destruction in time of war or other crises by Soviet
sabotage and intelligence groups (diversionnye
razvedyvatelnye gruppy or DRGs) operating with local
Communist or other partisans.— Greater preparations for
sabotage were made in Iran than in any other non-
Westem country. Between 1967 and 1973 a series of
landing sites, bases and arms dumps for DRGs in Iranian
Kurdistan, Iranian Azerbaijan and Abadan were selected,
photographed and reconnoitred in detail, mostly by KGB
illegals. The Azerbaijani, Kazakh and Kyrgyz KGBs were
ordered to assist in recruiting illegals who could pass as
members of one of Iran’s ethnic groups and help in setting
up illegal residencies on Iranian territory.— Following
Andropov’s call in 1967 for a new ‘offensive to paralyse
the actions of our enemies’, the main priority of FCD
Department V became the planning of ‘special actions of
a political nature’ - the peacetime use of sabotage and
other forms of violence in the furtherance of Soviet
policy. Line F officers in residencies, who reported to
Department V, were instructed to show greater ingenuity
in devising ‘special actions’ in which the hand of the
KGB would be undetectable. — In Tehran alone detailed
preparations were made for the bombing of twenty-three
major buildings (among them royal palaces, major
ministries, the main railway station, police and SAVAK
headquarters, TV and radio centres) as well as key points
in the electricity supply system and fifteen telephone

exchanges.— None of these elaborate schemes, however,
ever proceeded beyond the planning stage. In September
1971 the defection of a Line F officer in the London
residency, Oleg Adolfovich Lyalin, compromised many
of Department V’s plans and led to the recall of most
other Line F officers. Though the planning of ‘special
actions of a political nature’ by the KGB continued, they
never again had the same priority.—

During the later 1960s the Shah’s regime seemed to
stabilize. The United States, whose military aid was on a
much larger scale than a decade earlier, saw partnership
with Iran and Saudi Arabia as the key to preserving
Western access to the oil of the Persian Gulf. The Shah
acquired the image in the West of an enlightened despot
gallantly pursuing liberal reforms in the teeth of bigoted
opposition. Washington and other Western capitals
preferred to turn a blind eye when the Shah used SAVAK
to crush protests from left-wing militants, independent-
minded liberals and Islamic activists, chief among them
the Ayatollah Khomeini.— A brief for President Lyndon
Johnson before the visit to Washington in 1968 by the
Iranian Prime Minister, Amir Abbas Hoveyda, warned,
‘Queries about party politics should be avoided because
the Iranian parliament is a one-party body, hand-picked
by the Shah in an effort at “guided democracy”. Freedom
of the press is similarly a touchy subject.’— Though the
Soviet Union maintained a tone of official cordiality in its

relations with Iran, it was well aware that it was losing the
struggle for influence in Tehran to the United States. The
appointment in 1973 of the former Director of Central
Intelligence, Richard Helms, as US ambassador in Tehran
seemed to demonstrate that the special relationship
between the Shah and the CIA had survived disruption by
KGB active measures. The Soviet ambassador, Vladimir
Yerofeyev, said sneeringly to Hoveyda, ‘We hear the
Americans are sending their Number One spy to Iran.’
‘The Americans are our friends,’ Hoveyda retorted. ‘At
least they don’t send us their Number Ten spy!’—

During the early 1970s the Soviet Union’s most reliable
major ally in the Middle East increasingly appeared to be
Iran’s main regional opponent, Iraq. The preoccupation of
the Ba‘thist regime in Baghdad with plots against it,
probably even greater than that of the Shah, was skilfully
exploited by the KGB, which claimed much of the credit
for alerting President Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr and other
Iraqi leaders to a conspiracy against them in January
1970. The Iraqi government declared that the conspirators
had been acting in collusion with ‘the reactionary
government in Iran’, with which it had a serious border
dispute over the Shatt el- Arab waterway, and expelled the
Iranian ambassador. In December Iran in turn accused
Iraq of plotting to overthrow the Shah. Diplomatic
relations between the two states were broken off in the
following year. The Baghdad residency reported with

satisfaction that, as a result of its active measures, many
‘reactionary’ army officers and politicians had been
arrested and executed - among them a former military
governor of Baghdad whom it blamed for a massacre of
Iraqi Communists seven years earlier.— In 1972 another
active-measures operation, codenamed FEMIDA,
compromised further Iraqi ‘reactionaries’ who were
accused of contact with SAVAK and SIS.—
Simultaneously Moscow put pressure on a somewhat
reluctant Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) to reach an
accommodation with the Ba‘th regime.— In April 1972
the Soviet Union and Iraq signed a fifteen-year Treaty of
Friendship and Co-operation. A month later two
Communists entered the Iraqi cabinet. In July 1973 the
Ba‘th and ICP joined in a Ba‘th-dominated Progressive
National and Patriotic Front (PNPF).—

Simultaneously the KGB maintained covert contact in
northern Iraq with the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic
Party (KDP), Mullah Mustafa Barzani (codenamed
RAIS), who had spent over a decade in exile in the Soviet
Union after the Second World War. From 1968 to 1972
the KGB carried out twenty-three operations to pass funds
to Barzani.— In 1973, after a series of clashes with Iraqi
forces, Barzani publicly accused the Baghdad government
of duplicity and double-dealing. Forced to choose
between the Ba‘th regime and the Kurds, Moscow opted
for the Ba‘th. Betrayed by the Soviet Union, Barzani

turned instead to Iran, the United States and Israel, who
provided him with covert support. In 1974 full-scale war
broke out between the Kurds and the Ba‘th regime. At its
peak, 45,000 Kurdish guerrillas succeeded in pinning
down over 80,000 Iraqi troops, 80 per cent of the total.
According to a UN report, 300,000 people were forced to
flee their homes. The war ended in victory for Baghdad in
1975 when Iran and Iraq settled their differences and the
Shah withdrew support for the Kurds. Barzani was forced
into exile in the United States, where he died four years
later. In July 1975 Iraq became the first Middle Eastern
country to be admitted to Comecon with the status of
observer.—

Since 1969, the British embassy in Baghdad had
correctly identified Saddam Hussein as President Bakr’s
‘heir apparent’. The embassy found him a ‘presentable
young man’ with ‘an engaging smile’ who, despite his
reputation as a ‘Party extremist’, might ‘mellow’ with
added responsibility. Speaking ‘with great warmth and
what certainly seemed sincerity’, Saddam assured the
British ambassador that Iraq’s relationship with the Soviet
bloc ‘was forced upon it by the central problem of
Palestine’, and expressed an apparently ‘earnest’ hope for
improved ties with Britain and the United States. The
ambassador summed up Saddam as ‘a formidable, single-
minded and hard-headed member of the Ba‘athist
hierarchy, but one with whom, if only one could see more

of him, it would be possible to do business’.— Moscow,
however, was impressed by a quite different side of the
Iraqi heir apparent’s devious personality. Saddam
Hussein’s fascination with the career of Joseph Stalin
appeared to offer an unusual opportunity to strengthen
Soviet-Iraqi relations. Saddam’s henchmen had frequently
to listen to his tedious descriptions of Stalin’s powers of
dictatorial leadership. A Kurdish politician. Dr Mahmoud
Othman, who visited his private apartments, was struck
not merely by the crates of Johnnie Walker whisky but
also by his bookshelf of works on Stalin translated into
Arabic. ‘You seem fond of Stalin,’ Othman told him.
‘Yes,’ replied Saddam, ‘I like the way he governed his
country.’ The KGB arranged secret visits by Saddam to
all the villas which had been reserved for Stalin’s private
use along the Black Sea coast. Stalin’s biographer, Simon
Sebag Montefiore, has plausibly argued that among the
qualities which Saddam so admired was Stalin’s sadistic
pleasure in disposing of his enemies. ‘My greatest
delight’, Stalin once admitted, ‘is to mark one’s enemy,
avenge oneself thoroughly, then go to sleep.’ Saddam
shared a similar mindset.—

Moscow’s hopes of turning Iraq into its major Middle
Eastern bridgehead were reflected in its growing military
investment. From 1974 to 1978 Iraq was the chief
recipient of Soviet military aid to the Third World. The
Soviet bridgehead in Baghdad, however, was always

insecure. With Kurdish resistance apparently broken in
1975, the brutal Ba‘th regime had less need thereafter of
Communist support and set about achieving the complete
subordination of the ICP. Desperate to avoid an open
breach with Baghdad, Moscow made no public protest at
the open persecution of Iraqi Communists which began in
1977. The Iraqi leader most suspicious of the Soviet-ICP
connection was probably Saddam Hussein, whose
admiration for Stalin did not extend to sympathy for Iraqi
Communists. Saddam’s suspicions of a plot to prepare a
Communist take-over in Iraq were fuelled by Soviet
support for a coup in Afghanistan in April 1978 which
brought to power a Marxist regime headed by Nur
Muhammad Taraki. The Ba‘th regime in Iraq swiftly
denounced the ICP’s ‘subservience to Moscow’. Twenty-
one Party members were executed on charges of ‘forming
secret groups inside the Iraqi armed forces’. ‘The Soviet
Union’, declared Saddam Hussein, ‘will not be satisfied
until the whole world becomes Communist. ’—

With the Party forced into an underground existence,
an ICP Politburo member, Zaki Khayri (codenamed
SEDOY, ‘Bald’), asked the KGB resident in Baghdad to
take the Party archives into safe-keeping. In an elaborate
operation on 18 August 1978 approved by the Centre, an
ICP car containing three trunks of Party documents
followed a pre-arranged route through Baghdad, kept
under surveillance by KGB officers, to a secret

rendezvous where the archives were transferred to a
residency car.— In November, A. A. Barkovsky, the
Soviet ambassador to Iraq, reported to Moscow that three
of the seven-man Politburo, including the general
secretary, Aziz Muhammad (codenamed GLAVNY,
‘Head’), had gone abroad some months earlier. According
to the ambassador, their absence had aroused great
suspicion within the Ba‘th regime, which doubtless
suspected that a plot was being hatched.— Its suspicions
would have been all the greater had it known that
Muhammad was in exile in Moscow and communicating
with the ICP via the Baghdad residency.—

Early in 1979 the purge of ICP members intensified.
Writing in the March issue of the World Marxist Review,
the Iraqi Communist Nazibah Dulaymi declared that, in
addition to executions of Party militants, ‘more than
10,000 persons have been arrested and subjected to
mental and physical torture’. She naively expressed her
confidence that ‘fraternal Communist and workers’
parties’ would demand ‘an immediate end to the
repression against Communists and their friends in Iraq’.
The Soviet Communist Party, however, remained silent.
At a time when Iraq was at the forefront of the Arab
campaign to prevent the Carter administration brokering a
peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, Moscow was
cravenly anxious not to antagonize Baghdad. The torture
and execution of Iraqi Communists counted for less in

Soviet eyes than Iraqi attempts to disrupt the Middle
Eastern peace process.—

The brutal persecution of Iraqi Communists in 1978-79
coincided with the rapid decline and fall of the Shah in
Iran. Like Western intelligence agencies, the KGB was
taken by surprise. During Hoveyda’s twelve years as
Prime Minister (1965-77), the Tehran residency had
limited success in penetrating the regime. Its two most
important Iranian agents during this period. General
Ahmad Mogarebi, codenamed MAN,— and a relative of
Hoveyda, codenamed ZHAMAN, had both been
recruited, apparently as ideological agents, in the early
years of the Cold War. Mogarebi was responsible during
the final years of the Shah’s rule for arms purchases from
the United States and other Western states. According to
Vladimir Kuzichkin, who later defected from the Tehran
residency, he was ‘regarded as the Residency’s best
agent’ and had ‘innumerable connections in various
spheres of Iranian life, including the court of the Shah, the
government and SAVAK’.— Mogarebi became an
increasingly mercenary agent whose growing importance
was reflected in his monthly salary, raised in 1972 from
150-200 to 330 convertible rubles a month and in 1976 to
500 rubles. In 1976 he was awarded the Order of the Red
Banner. Because of the shortage of high-grade
intelligence from other sources, in 1976-77 the residency
breached normal security procedures by contacting

Mogarebi every two weeks.— The habitual method of
contact was by radio communication from a residency car,
usually parked within 1,500 metres of his home.— For
meetings with his controller, Boris Kabanov (remembered
by Kuzichkin as ‘Everybody’s favourite, with a sense of
humour, good natured, quiet, always smiling . . .’),—
Mogarebi would leave his house and rendezvous with the
nearby car. The fact that a residency car with diplomatic
number plates was to be seen in the vicinity of
Mogarebi ’s house every fortnight might well have led to
his arrest by SAVAK in September 1977.—

The KGB found ZHAMAN far less reliable than
Mogarebi. When recruited as an ideological agent in
1952, he eulogized the Soviet Union as ‘the stronghold of
progress in the struggle against Imperialism and Anglo-
American dominance in Iran’. His KGB file, however,
complains that he was sometimes ‘uncontrollable’. In
1956 he shocked his controller by condemning the Soviet
suppression of the Hungarian Uprising. By the time his
relative Amir Abbas Hoveyda became Prime Minister,
ZHAMAN’ s ideological commitment to the Soviet cause
had faded away. Though his file claims that he adopted a
more pro- Western outlook for careerist reasons, it also
acknowledges that he became genuinely devoted to the
Shah, to whom he owed his career in the official
bureaucracy. The Tehran residency reported that, because
of his personal wealth, it had no means of putting

financial pressure on him. In the mid-1970s, ZHAMAN
none the less took part in KGB active-measures
operations, passing disinformation prepared by Service A
to the Shah as well as to American, Egyptian, Pakistani
and Somali contacts. In 1977 ZHAMAN was presented
by the KGB with a thousand-dollar pair of cufflinks for
his assistance in promoting Soviet active measures. —

In the summer of 1977 economic crisis and growing
discontent at rising prices and daily power cuts in Tehran
led to the resignation of Hoveyda as Prime Minister. Over
the next year the newly arrived Soviet ambassador,
Vladimir Vinogradov, formerly stationed in Cairo, paid
regular calls on Hoveyda at home. SAVAK, predictably,
took a close interest in his movements. On one occasion
Hoveyda told Vinogradov that he had seen a SAVAK
report to the Shah complaining that they were having
Tong political discussions’.— As unrest spilled into the
Tehran streets, the slogans used by demonstrators were
mostly religious rather than political: Allahu Akhbar!,
then increasingly Allahu Akhbar! Khomeini Rakhbar!
(‘God is Great! Khomeini is Our Leader!’). The
Mujahidin and Fedayin, left-wing groupings who
organized demonstrations and strikes, chose the same
slogans to win popular support. — The KGB residency
failed to take seriously the religious fervour of the Tehran
demonstrations and pinned its hopes instead on the
prospect of a left-wing revolution sweeping the Shah from

power. The Centre was much less optimistic about the
prospects of the Iranian left. ‘The most likely alternative
to the Shah if he were to leave the political stage’, it
believed, ‘would be the military. The opposition to the
regime in Iran is weak and uncoordinated. In general the
opposition in Iran is not a threat to the present regime . .

It did not yet occur either to the KGB or to most
Western intelligence services that the seventy- five-year-
old Shi’ite fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini, who had
lived in exile for the past thirteen years, represented any
serious threat to the Shah.— Gary Sick, the desk officer
for Iran in the US National Security Council, noted in
retrospect, ‘The notion of a popular revolution leading to
the establishment of a theocratic state seemed so unlikely
as to be absurd.’ On that point both the White House and
the Kremlin were agreed. Visiting Tehran at the beginning
of 1978, President Jimmy Carter declared in a New Year
toast, ‘Iran is an island of stability in one of the more
troubled parts of the world.’ Only a year later, the Shah
was forced to abdicate. —

The well-publicized arrest of Mogarebi in September
1977 produced what Kuzichkin described as ‘an
intelligence vacuum’ in the Tehran residency. As a
security precaution, it was ordered to suspend agent
operations and prepare a damage assessment. With
ZHAMAN abroad, the residency had in any case no other
agent capable of providing high-grade intelligence during

this critical period.— The residency’s problems were
compounded by the Iranian refusal to grant visas for a
number of FCD officers whom the Centre had intended to
station in Tehran. During a visit to Hoveyda’s house in
February 1978, Vinogradov asked if he could intervene
with the authorities to help obtain the visas. Hoveyda
declined. ‘I will tell you frankly what is happening,’ he
replied. ‘The point is that SAVAK does not want to let the
KGB into Iran.’— By this time, operating conditions in
Tehran had become so difficult and the surveillance of the
Soviet embassy so tight that the residency appealed to the
Centre to retaliate against the Iranian embassy in
Moscow. Its suggestions for the harassment of Iranian
embassy personnel included draining the brake fluid from
their cars and slashing their tyres.—

Though operations officers under diplomatic cover in
the Tehran residency were barely able to operate, KGB
illegals succeeded in 1977 in hiding a secret weapons
cache of twenty-seven Walther pistols and 2,500 rounds
of ammunition in a dead letter-box (DLB) in the Tehran
suburbs.— In accordance with common KGB practice, the
DLB was probably fitted with a Molniya (‘Lightning’)
booby-trap which was intended to destroy the contents if
any attempt was made to open it by non-KGB personnel.
Since the KGB is unlikely to have taken the risk of trying
to retrieve the arms later, the cache may still be there and
in a dangerous condition. (A booby-trapped KGB

communications equipment cache in Switzerland whose
location was identified by Mitrokhin exploded when fired
on by a water cannon. According to the Swiss Federal
Prosecutor’s Office, ‘Anyone who tried to move the
container [in the cache] would have been killed.’)—
Though the purpose of the arms cache is not recorded in
Mitrokhin’ s brief note on the illegal operation which put
it in place, the arms were probably intended for use in the
event of a popular rising against the Shah’s regime. In the
spring of 1978 a Line PR officer at the Tehran residency
under diplomatic cover, Viktor Kazakov, confidently told
an American contact that the Shah would be toppled by
‘oppressed masses rising to overthrow their shackles’.—
The still banned Tudeh (Communist) Party, operating
through front organizations, began to show renewed signs
of life, distributing anti-Shah leaflets and a news-sheet
covertly produced with the help of the Tehran residency
and Tass, the Soviet news agency.— During the summer
of 1978, however, most Middle Eastern experts in the
Centre still believed that the Shah’s regime was too strong
to be overthrown in the foreseeable future.— In July 1978,
at a meeting in Moscow with the Tehran resident, Ivan
Anisimovich Fadeykin, Andropov was less concerned by
the possible consequences of toppling the Shah than by
the threat posed to the southern borders of the Soviet
Union by the Shah’s alliance with the United States.
Andropov instructed Fadeykin to step up active measures

designed to destabilize the Shah’s regime and to damage
its relations with the United States and its allies.—

As the Shah’s position worsened, he increasingly
resorted to conspiracy theories to account for his
misfortunes. KGB active measures probably had at least
some success in strengthening his suspicions of the
United States. ‘Why do [the Americans] pick on me?’ he
plaintively asked his advisers in the summer of 1978.—
The KGB fed disinformation to the Shah that the CIA was
planning to create disturbances in Tehran and other cities
to bring him down and that Washington was searching for
a successor who could stabilize the country after his
overthrow with the help of the army and SAVAK.—
There were moments when the Shah did indeed fear that
Washington intended to abandon him and turn instead to
Islamic fundamentalism to build a barrier against Soviet
influence in the Middle East. Not all the Shah’s
conspiracy theories, however, conformed to those devised
by Service A. At times he feared that the United States
and the Soviet Union were jointly conspiring to divide
Iran between them. Some of the Shah’s family had even
more bizarre theories. According to his son and heir,
Reza, the Americans bombarded the Shah with radiation
which brought on the malignant lymphoma that
eventually killed him.—

The Tehran residency remained resolutely hostile to

Khomeini. He had, it reported, denounced Iranian
Communists as unpatriotic puppets of Moscow and was
incensed by the Communist coup in Afghanistan in April
which he believed had cut short its transformation into an
Islamic regime. Though noting increasing popular support
for Khomeini, the residency believed that he did not plan
to step into the shoes of the Shah himself.— It was badly
mistaken. Though Khomeini had started his revolt against
the Shah without political ambitions of his own, fourteen
years of exile had changed his mind. His aim now was to
preside over Iran’s transformation into an Islamic republic
ruled by Shia religious scholars.— The KGB’s failure to
understand Khomeini’s intentions derived not from any
lack of secret intelligence but from the fact that it had not
bothered to study his tape-recorded sermons which drew
such an emotional response in Iranian mosques. The CIA
made the same mistake.— The middle-class Iranian
liberals who had wanted to be rid of the autocracy and
corruption of the Shah’s regime were equally surprised by
the consequences of his overthrow.

On 16 January 1979 the Shah left Iran for Egypt, vainly
hoping that the military would take control and enable
him to return. Instead, on I February Khomeini returned
in triumph from exile in Paris to a delirious welcome from
3 million supporters who thronged the airport and streets
of Tehran. Within a week Khomeini’s supporters had
taken control of the police and administration in a number

of cities across the country. On 9 February a pro-
Khomeini mutiny began among air-force technicians and
spread to other sections of the armed forces. The Tehran
residency was able to follow the dramatic transfer of
allegiance to the new Islamic regime by monitoring the
radio networks of the police and armed services. While on
duty in the residency’s IMPULS radio interception station
on 10 February, Kuzichkin listened to government and
rebel-controlled police stations exchanging sexual insults
over the air. Next day, it became clear that the rebels had
won. The government resigned and Khomeini’s nominee,
Mehdi Bazargan, became acting Prime Minister.—
Among the most prominent early victims of Khomeini’s
revolution was Amir Abbas Hoveyda, who was sentenced
to death by a revolutionary tribunal headed by the
‘Hanging Ayatollah’, Hojjat al-Islam Khalkhali, in May
1979. Khalkhali kept the pistol used to execute Hoveyda
as a souvenir. The front pages of Tehran newspapers
carried gruesome pictures of his bloodstained corpse.—
The FCD officer who closed Hoveyda’ s file in the Centre
wrote on it, ‘A pity for the poor man. He was harmless
and useful for us.’—

The Ayatollah Khomeini (codenamed KHATAB by the
KGB)— was even more prone than the Shah to conspiracy
theories. All opposition to the Islamic revolution was, he
believed, the product of conspiracy, and all Iranian
conspirators were in the service of foreign powers. He

denounced those Muslims who did not share his radical
views as ‘American Muslims’ and many left-wingers as
‘Russian spies’. Since Khomeini claimed to be installing
‘God’s government’, his opponents were necessarily
enemies of God Himself: ‘Revolt against God’s
government is a revolt against God. Revolt against God is
blasphemy. ’— At least during the early years of the new
Islamic Republic, the KGB found Iran even more fertile
ground for active measures than under the Shah. Its chief
targets included both the US embassy in Tehran and
members of the new regime who were judged to have
‘anti-Soviet tendencies’.— KGB operations against the US
embassy, however, paled into insignificance by
comparison with those of the new regime. On 4
November 1979 several thousand officially approved
militants, claiming to be ‘students following the Imam
[Khomeini] ’s line’, overran the American embassy,
declared it a ‘den of spies’, and took hostage over fifty US
diplomatic personnel. But if the United States was
denounced as the ‘Great Satan’ by Iran’s fundamentalist
revolutionaries, the Soviet Union was the ‘Small Satan’.
After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of the
year, Leonid Shebarshin (codenamed SHABROV), who
had become Tehran resident a few months earlier,—
feared an attack on the Soviet embassy. A first incursion
on New Year’s Day 1980 did little damage and was
repulsed by the local police. By the time a second attack

took place on the first anniversary of the invasion of
Afghanistan, so many bars and metal doors had been
fitted to the embassy that it resembled, in Shebarshin’s
view, ‘something between a zoo and a prison’. No
hostages were taken and no documents seized.— The
world’s attention remained focused on the American
hostages, who were finally freed in January 1981.

The large cache of diplomatic and CIA documents
discovered in the US embassy, many painstakingly
reassembled by the Iranians from shredded fragments,
provided further encouragement both for the new
regime’s many conspiracy theorists and for Service A.
Among the victims of the conspiracy theorists was the
relatively moderate first President of the Islamic
Republic, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, one of Khomeini’s
former companions in exile. Captured CIA cables and
reports showed that the Agency had given him the
codename SDLURE-1 and tried to ‘cultivate and recruit’
him in both Tehran and Paris. Though there was no
evidence that Bani-Sadr ever had any conscious dealings
with the CIA, the mere fact of its interest in him damned
him in the eyes of many militants.— Bani-Sadr was
simultaneously a target for KGB active-measures
operations. — Though Mitrokhin’s notes give no details,
the purpose of the operations was probably to reinforce
suspicions that he had been a US agent. Bani-Sadr was
forced to step down as President in June 1981.

Not content with the compromising documents
plundered by Iranian militants from the US embassy, the
KGB conducted a joint operation (codenamed TAYFUN,
‘Typhoon’) with the Bulgarian intelligence service during
1980, using a series of far more sensational forgeries
purporting to come from a (fictitious) underground
Military Council for Salvation plotting the overthrow of
Khomeini and the restoration of the monarchy. The
Centre claimed that the Khomeini regime was taken in by
the forgeries and blamed the non-existent Military
Council for a number of attacks on its supporters. Further
disinformation on plots against the Islamic revolution
(including an alleged attempt to assassinate Khomeini) by
the CIA, SIS, Mossad, the French SDECE and the
German BND was fed by the KGB resident in Beirut,
codenamed KOLCHIN,— to the leader of the PLO, Yasir
Arafat. According to KGB reports, Arafat personally
passed the disinformation on to Khomeini. Service A
fabricated a report to the CIA from a fictitious Iranian
agent providing further apparent evidence of an Agency-
sponsored attempt on Khomeini’s life.—

Among the chief targets of KGB active measures
within the Khomeini regime, besides Bani-Sadr, was
Sadeq Qotbzadeh, who had also been in Khomeini’s inner
circle during his years in exile and became Foreign
Minister soon after the occupation of the US embassy. In

the spring of 1980 Qotbzadeh told Moscow that if it failed
to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, Iran would give
military assistance to the Mujahidin. In July he ordered
the Soviet embassy in Tehran to cut its staff.— Though
neither of these episodes was mentioned in the Soviet
press, Moscow took a secret revenge. Service A forged a
letter to Qotbzadeh from US Senator Harrison Williams,
who had met him twenty years earlier while Qotbzadeh
was a student in the United States. The letter advised
Qotbzadeh not to release the American hostages in the
immediate future and also contained information intended
to compromise Qotbzadeh personally. In July 1980 the
Iranian ambassador in Paris was fed further
disinformation alleging that Qotbzadeh was plotting with
the Americans to overthrow Khomeini. Qotbzadeh was
also said to have received a bribe of $6 million for
helping to smuggle out of Iran six American diplomats
who had taken refuge in the Canadian embassy in
Tehran.— Though proof is lacking, these active measures
probably helped to bring about Qotbzadeh’ s dismissal in
August.

The KGB considered Qotbzadeh such an important
target that its attempt to discredit him continued even after
he ceased to be Foreign Minister. Fabricated evidence
purporting to show that he was a CIA agent probably
contributed to his arrest in April 1982 on a charge of
plotting to assassinate Khomeini. Service A continued to

forge documents incriminating him after his arrest. The
Tehran residency regarded as the ‘final nail in his coffin’
a bogus CIA telegram prepared by Service A in an easily
broken code and addressed to an agent readily identifiable
as Qotbzadeh.— He and about seventy army officers
accused of conspiring with him were shot in September.
Another target of KGB active measures, Grand Ayatollah
Kazem Shari ’atmadari,— a senior religious scholar seen as
a rival by Khomeini, was also accused of complicity in
the plot. Threatened with the execution of his son,
Shari ’atmadari was forced to humiliate himself on
television and plead for Khomeini’s forgiveness.
Subsequently he became the first Ayatollah ever to be
defrocked, and spent the last four years of his life under
house arrest.—

Despite its success in incriminating a number of senior
figures in the new Islamic Republic, however, the KGB
had only a minor influence on the bloodletting as a whole.
The impact of the bogus conspiracies devised by Service
A was far smaller than that of the actual attempt to
overthrow the Khomeini regime in June 1981 by the
Iranian Mujahidi yi Khalq (Holy Warriors), who drew
their inspiration from both Islam and Marxism. Of the
2,665 political prisoners executed by the Revolutionary
Tribunals between June and November 1981, 2,200 were
Mujahidi and about 400 members of various left-wing
groups - a total seven times as great as that of the

monarchists, real and alleged, executed over the previous
sixteen months. The Mujahidi death toll continued to
mount over the next few years.—

The KGB’s intelligence collection in the early years of
the Khomeini era had less impact than its active measures.
When Shebarshin became Tehran resident in 1979, he
criticized some of his operations officers for lack of
energy in trying to cultivate contacts among the army and
the mullahs, and for attempting to conceal their lack of
high-grade sources. Ironically, one of those in whom he
had most confidence was Vladimir Kuzichkin, who, as he
later discovered, made secret contact in Tehran with SIS.
Shebarshin ’s problems were compounded when the head
of the residency’s Line PR was arrested in 1981 while
meeting a foreign businessman whom he had targeted for
recruitment; next day he was expelled from Iran. In the
residency reorganization which followed, Kuzichkin was
promoted. After his defection in the following year,
Shebarshin concluded that the head of Line PR had been
deliberately compromised by Kuzichkin to assist his own
promotion.—

Shebarshin also had problems with the special
commission on Iran set up by the Politburo after the fall
of the Shah, nominally chaired by Brezhnev but with
Andropov as its most influential member.— The Tehran
residency sent what Shebarshin considered valuable

reports from four non-Russian FCD officers whose ethnic
origins - Armenian, Azeri, Turkmen and Uzbek - allowed
them daily to mingle undetected with the local population.
The Politburo Commission, however, was not satisfied
with the residency’s lack of high-level sources in the
Khomeini regime and its coverage of the hostage crisis in
the American embassy. On 24 April 1980 (a day
remembered by President Jimmy Carter as ‘one of the
worst of my life’) a secret US attempt to rescue the
hostages was aborted after a series of mechanical failures
and accidents to the helicopters and aircraft involved in
the rescue mission. At 1 a.m. Washington time on the
25th, the White House announced the failure of the rescue
attempt. Shebarshin was severely reprimanded by the
Centre when he failed to send a report until the following
day. He reasonably believed that the residency should not
be expected to compete with the immediacy of the media
reporting, and that it was better to wait twenty-four hours
before producing a considered assessment. On several
occasions Shebarshin also - probably unwittingly -
committed the politically incorrect error of sending a
report which contradicted Andropov’s misguided views
on Iran. He reported correctly that news of the Shah’s
death in exile in July 1980 had no significant impact on
the still-fervent popular support for Khomeini, and that
the monarchist cause was dead. Andropov made clear his
disapproval of the report. In Shebarshin ’s view, he, like a
number of others on the Politburo who had met the Shah,

‘greatly overestimated his significance’.—

The fall of the Shah and Khomeini’s rise to power in
Iran were swiftly followed by the triumph of Saddam
Hussein in Iraq. On 16 July 1979, at the climax of a long-
prepared coup, Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council
relieved President Bakr of all his offices and installed
Saddam, his former deputy, in his place. Six days later
Saddam celebrated his conquest of power by arranging a
filmed conference of senior Ba‘thist officials which might
have been conceived as a tribute to his role model, Joseph
Stalin. The proceedings began with the announcement of
‘a painful and atrocious plot’ and a rehearsed, fabricated
confession, reminiscent of Stalin’s show trials, by one of
Saddam’s opponents, Muhi al-Din ‘Abd al-Husain
Mashhadi, who declared that for the past four years he
had been part of a Syrian plot aimed at removing Bakr
and Saddam. Saddam, however, took a more direct role in
the proceedings than Stalin had ever done. After
Mashhadi had completed his confession, Saddam read out
the names of sixty-six supposed traitors, all present at the
conference, pausing occasionally to light his cigar. As
those he had named were led away to be executed by their
Party comrades, the audience erupted into hysterical
chants of support for Saddam and demands of death for
traitors. — Much of the energy of Saddam’s intelligence
services, like those of Stalin, was to be expended on the
hunting down of ‘traitors’ both at home and abroad.

Saddam’s admiration for Stalin as a role model, however,
did not diminish his suspicion of current Soviet policy.
Among the victims of his first purge were those he
suspected of favouring close ties with the Soviet Union,
chief among them Murtada Sa’d ‘Abd al-Baqi, Iraqi
ambassador to Moscow.—

By the time Saddam Hussein seized power, the ICP had
been driven underground. Though Moscow remained
anxious to avoid an open breach with Baghdad, the
Politburo agreed on secret support to the Party to enable it
to organize opposition to Saddam. In April 1979 a
member of the ICP Politburo codenamed STOGOV had
two secret meetings in Tehran with the deputy head of the
FCD Eighth (Iran and the non- Arab Middle East)
Department, Lev Petrovich Kostromin, to report on the
measures taken by the Party to prepare for ‘armed
struggle’.— A camp for 100 partisans had been set up in
the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan with the help of the
Marxist-oriented Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)
headed by Jalal Talabani. STOGOV claimed that three
more partisan groups were in the process of formation and
that talks were being held with Talabani in the hope of
forming a united front against the Iraqi regime.— On 19
July the Soviet Politburo authorized the KGB to supply
the ICP with the equipment for a secret radio station at its
base in Iraqi Kurdistan. Free training for three Iraqis
chosen to operate the station was provided in the Soviet

Union.— At a meeting with the deputy head of the FCD
Eighteenth (Arab states) Department, G. P. Kapustyan, on
19 October, the ICP leader, Aziz Muhammad, reported
that calls for resistance to Saddam were being broadcast
by the two Kurdish movements, the PUK and the
nationalist Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), headed by
Mas’ud Barzani (son of the KDP’s founder. Mullah
Mustafa Barzani). Muhammad asked for ten relay stations
to extend the station’s broadcasting range.—

Soviet hostility to Saddam Hussein was reinforced by
his immediate denunciation of the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan in December 1979. The following month
Czechoslovakia secretly agreed to supply the ICP base in
Kurdistan with 1,000 anti-tank rockets and several
thousand Skorpion sub-machine guns with ammunition.—
Further military supplies followed from the Soviet Union
and Hungary.— Apart from acting as a conduit for Soviet-
bloc arms, however, the ICP added little to the strength of
Kurd resistance. Aziz Muhammad admitted to a KGB
contact that Party organization inside Iraq had largely
broken down. His plan to move the ICP Politburo to
Kurdistan was being resisted by ‘some leading comrades’
who preferred to stay in exile in the Soviet bloc.
Muhammad acknowledged that the Party needed to
rectify the Tow level of its ideological work’, resolve
internal differences, reorganize its security and
intelligence system, and improve central direction.—

The outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in September 1980
reduced Soviet-Iraqi relations to their lowest point since
the establishment of the Ba‘th regime. Saddam’s invasion
of Iran, whose immediate pretext was the long-running
border dispute over the Shatt al-Arab waterway, was
motivated by a mixture of fear and aggression: fear that
Khomeini would rouse Iraq’s Shia majority to revolt,
combined with a desire to take advantage of the confusion
in the Iranian armed forces brought about by the Islamic
revolution. Moscow declared its neutrality in the conflict
and cut off all military supplies to Iraq, including those
due under existing contracts. Saddam’s delusions of
grandeur made him confident, none the less, of an easy
victory. A popular joke put Iraq’s population at 28
million: 14 million Iraqis and 14 million portraits of
Saddam Hussein. Oil export revenues, which had risen
from $1 billion in 1972 to $21 billion in 1979, fed
Saddam’s ambitions. Traq’, he boasted, ‘is as great as
China, as great as the Soviet Union and as great as the
United States.’— Among the greatest of Saddam’s
delusions was his absurd belief, despite his complete lack
of military experience, in his own military genius.— His
inept generalship helped to ensure that, instead of ending
in a quick victory, the war with Iran was to drag on for
eight years and end with fighting inside Iraq.

The Kurds, as well as the Iranians, benefited from

Saddam’s military incompetence. At the end of 1980 Aziz
Muhammad sent an optimistic message to the Soviet
Politburo via the KGB resident in Damascus. War with
Iran had forced Saddam to reduce his forces in Kurdistan.
The ICP, Muhammad reported, was making progress in
bringing together the Kurdish factions into a unified
military campaign to overthrow Saddam’s dictatorship.
Armed ICP partisan units in Iraqi Kurdistan, including
some members of the Central Committee, were ready to
join the armed struggle. Significantly, however,
Muhammad spoke not of thousands but only of
‘hundreds’ of Communist partisans. In reality, though
Muhammad refused to recognize it, the ICP units had no
prospect either of posing a significant threat to Saddam
Hussein or of providing leadership for the much more
numerous Kurdish detachments. ‘You, dear Comrades’,
he told the Soviet Politburo, ‘remain our main support and
hope.’ He asked for $500,000 to support ‘the struggle of
our partisan detachments and the work of our Party within
Iraq’ during the coming year.—

Soviet support for Kurdish partisans in Iraq remained
secret. During the Twenty-sixth Congress of the CPSU in
the spring of 1981 Aziz Muhammad denounced the
campaign of ‘savage repression’ conducted against the
ICP and the Kurdish people by the Iraqi Ba‘th regime.
But, at least in the Pravda version of his speech, he was
allowed to make no reference to the partisan war to

overthrow Saddam Hussein. Muhammad was permitted
only to say, vaguely, that the ICP was employing ‘diverse
methods for the struggle for the establishment of a
democratic regime and autonomy for the Kurdish
people’.— In the last resort Moscow was unwilling to give
large-scale support to the Kurds for fear of helping
Khomeini achieve victory in the Iran-Iraq War.

In the summer of 1981, having lost hope of a quick
victory over Iran, Saddam abandoned his opposition to
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union
responded by inconspicuously ending its arms embargo.
Soviet arms deliveries during the remainder of the year,
however, fell far short of Iraqi requirements. In 1982 the
tide of war shifted in favour of Tehran. During the spring
Iran recovered almost all the territory lost since the
beginning of the conflict. In June Iraq announced a
unilateral withdrawal from Iranian territory. Iran,
however, failed to respond to Saddam’s peace moves and
carried the war onto Iraqi territory. Anxious to prevent an
Iranian victory, Moscow resumed large-scale arms
exports to Iraq for the first time since the start of the war.
In return Saddam declared a general amnesty for Iraqi
Communists and released many from jail.— The Soviet
Union no longer had any illusions about the prospects of
turning Iraq into its main Middle Eastern bridgehead. The
prospect of an Iranian victory over Iraq, however,
followed by a triumphant Khomeini inciting Soviet

Muslims to revolt, was totally unacceptable. The scale of
Soviet military supplies to Baghdad was thus carefully
calculated to prevent decisive victory by either side.
Kissinger’s celebrated comment, ‘What a pity they can’t
both lose!’, probably evoked some sympathy in Moscow.

The partial mending of bridges between Moscow and
Baghdad coincided with a Soviet intelligence disaster in
Tehran. On 5 June 1982 Shebarshin was on holiday at a
KGB sanatorium re-reading War and Peace when he
received an urgent summons to Moscow, where he was
told that Kuzichkin had disappeared from Tehran three
days earlier. A KGB investigation eventually concluded,
correctly, that Kuzichkin had been working for SIS and
had fled across the Turkish border using a British
passport. The next two months, Shebarshin wrote later,
were ‘the most difficult, the most bitter period of my life’:
‘It is painful for me to recall that I had once got on well
with [Kuzichkin] and facilitated his promotion.’
Shebarshin was forced to return to Tehran to close down
agent networks which Kuzichkin might have
compromised.

The final humiliation, so far as Shebarshin was
concerned, was an order from the Centre to call on the
head of the British diplomatic mission, Nicholas
Barrington (later knighted), to ask how a British passport
had come into Kuzichkin’ s possession: ‘The absurdity of
this plan was clear to me, but someone in the Centre had

imagined that the Englishman would reveal the whole
truth to me. This was one of those stupid orders which I
was forced to carry out periodically throughout the entire
course of my service in the KGB.’—

Shebarshin and Barrington had been on friendly terms
since they had met while on diplomatic postings in
Pakistan in the mid-1960s before Shebarshin joined the
KGB - though Barrington’s wide range of Pakistani
contacts had led Shebarshin to conclude wrongly that he
was an SIS officer. On leaving the Soviet embassy in
Tehran for the appointment made by his secretary with
Barrington in the summer of 1982, Shebarshin had only to
cross the road to enter the British embassy. Since the
beginning of the hostage crisis at the US embassy,
however, the Swedish, not the Union, flag had flown over
the embassy. To protect those of its staff who remained in
Tehran, it had become the British interests section of the
Swedish embassy. Instead of following the Centre’s
absurd instructions to ask Barrington about the British
passport given to Kuzichkin to help him escape across the
Turkish frontier, a question which no British diplomat
would have dreamt of answering, Shebarshin merely
reported that Kuzichkin had disappeared and asked if
Barrington had any news. The two men then had a general
discussion on the dangers of diplomatic life in
Khomeini’s Iran.— ‘Barrington’, Shebarshin later
recalled, ‘was courteous, even sympathetic, and promised

to consult London.

During his debriefing in Britain, Kuzichkin provided
voluminous information on Soviet intelligence operations
in Iran, which SIS shared with the CIA. Early in 1983 the
CIA passed much of it on to Tehran. The Khomeini
regime reacted swiftly, expelling Shebarshin and
seventeen other Soviet intelligence officers, and arresting
200 leading Tudeh militants, including the entire Central
Committee, on charges of spying for Moscow.— On May
Day the KGB residency was further embarrassed to see
both the Tudeh secretary general, Nureddin Kianuri, and
its leading ideologue, Ehsan Tabari, make grovelling
televised confessions of ‘treason’, ‘subversion’ and other
‘horrendous crimes’, later repeated in even greater detail
at show trials where they obsequiously thanked the
authorities for their ‘humane treatment’. Though both
were spared, largely because of the propaganda value of
their regular acts of public contrition, many other Party
militants were executed or imprisoned. Tudeh
disintegrated as a significant force in Iranian politics.
Tehran newspaper headlines declared, ‘Members of the
Central Committee Confess to Spying for the KGB’,
‘Tudeh Created for the Sole Purpose of Espionage’ and
‘Confessions Unprecedented in World History’.—

KGB operations in both Iran and Iraq thus ended in
strategic failure. Their main priority for what remained of

the Soviet era was damage limitation. In the final stages
of the Iran-Iraq War, Gorbachev agreed to supply Iraq
with the Scud-B missiles whose use in rocket attacks on
Iranian cities helped to persuade Khomeini in 1988 to, as
he put it, ‘drink poison’ and agree to a cease-fire. Despite
the loss of perhaps a million lives, the Iran-Iraq border
remained precisely where it had been when Saddam
began the war eight years before.

Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990 - the
first international crisis of the post-Cold War era -
produced a sharp division of opinion among Gorbachev’s
advisers. Next day Eduard Amrosievich Shevardnadze,
the Soviet Foreign Minister, and James Baker, the US
Secretary of State, jointly condemned the invasion and
called on ‘the rest of the international community to join
with us in an international cut-off of all arms supplies to
Iraq’. A fortnight later Gorbachev made a televised
defence of Soviet co-operation with the United States:
‘For us to have acted in a different way would have been
unacceptable since the [Iraqi] act of aggression was
committed with the help of our weapons, which we had
agreed to sell to Iraq to maintain its defence capability -
not to seize foreign territories . . . ’

On 25 August the United States began a naval blockade
of Iraq, an implied warning that it was prepared to go to
war unless Saddam withdrew from Kuwait. The Centre,
however, was deeply concerned that co-operation with the

United States would weaken Soviet influence in the
Middle East. With the support of the KGB Chairman
Vladimir Kryuchkov and the Defence Minister Dmitri
Yazov, Yevgeni Primakov, the Middle Eastern expert on
Gorbachev’s Presidential Council whose links with the
KGB went back thirty years, persuaded Gorbachev to
send him on a mission to Baghdad. James Baker was
impressed by Primakov’s ‘skill and cunning’ as well as
his knowledge of Arab history, but regarded him as ‘an
apologist for Saddam Hussein’. Primakov’s declared aim
was to find a compromise which would leave Saddam
with two disputed islands and an oil field in return for his
withdrawal from the rest of Kuwait and the promise of an
international conference on the Palestinian question. In
Baker’s view, Primakov’s proposals were ‘more
capitulation than compromise’. ‘And he had abetted
Saddam’s strategy to weaken the Arab coalition [against
him] by linking the Kuwaiti crisis with the larger Arab-
Israeli conflict.’— Like Baker, the CIA was deeply
suspicious of Primakov’s ‘game of footsie’ with
Saddam.— So too was Shevardnadze, who privately
communicated his suspicions to Baker. In October
Shevardnadze told Primakov, in the presence of
Gorbachev and Kryuchkov, that his proposals would be
disastrous both for the Middle East and for Soviet foreign
policy. Primakov, as he later acknowledged, lost his
temper, ridiculing the Foreign Minister’s knowledge of
Iraq. ‘How dare you,’ he sneered, ‘a graduate of a

correspondence course from a teachers’ college in
Kutaisi, lecture me on the Middle East, the region I’ve
studied since my student days!’ ‘Yevgeni,’ interrupted
Gorbachev, ‘stop right now!’— ‘Shevardnadze’, writes
Baker, ‘felt betrayed by Primakov and humiliated by
Gorbachev, who by allowing Primakov to peddle a peace
initiative, had permitted him to usurp Shevardnadze’s
authority as Foreign Minister.’— In December 1990,
deeply depressed at the increasing power of the Moscow
hard-liners, whom he rightly suspected of planning a
coup, Shevardnadze resigned as Foreign Minister,
publicly declaring his support for Gorbachev but calling
his resignation ‘my protest against the onset of
dictatorship’.—

Primakov’s mission to Baghdad, however, achieved
little. Saddam had become so deeply distrustful of Soviet
intentions that he failed to show much interest in the
lifeline which Primakov was trying to throw him. He told
his advisers that Primakov’s warning that Iraq faced
attack by a multinational coalition if there was no
negotiated settlement was simply a Soviet attempt to
intimidate him. Saddam refused to believe, until the last
minute, that the US-led air attack would be followed by a
ground offensive.— His suspicions of Soviet policy also
led him to disregard intelligence of great importance. Just
before the beginning of the ground offensive, operation
DESERT STORM, in February 1991, satellite imagery

shown by Soviet military experts to the Iraqi leadership
provided convincing evidence that coalition forces were
about to launch a flanking attack (the so-called ‘Hail
Mary’ strategy) instead of - as was widely expected - an
amphibious operation directly against the occupying army
in Kuwait. Saddam, however, interpreted this intelligence
as an attempted Soviet deception agreed with the United
States, and made no attempt to reinforce his positions
against the flanking attack.— Partly as a result, his forces
were routed in only a hundred hours of ground warfare.

10

The Making of the Syrian Alliance

The Ba‘th regime in Syria, dominated by Hafiz al-Asad
from 1970 until his death thirty years later, emerged
during the 1970s as the Soviet Union’s only reliable ally
among the major states of the Middle East. In the
immediate aftermath of the coup d’etat, masquerading as
a ‘revolution’, which had brought the Ba‘th party to
power in March 1963, Moscow had viewed the new
regime with deep suspicion - despite its declared
commitment to socialism as well as Arab unity. Syria’s
new rulers publicly pledged to crush the Communist Party
and ‘other enemies of the Revolution’. Moscow retaliated
in kind. The Soviet New Times dismissed the Ba‘th Party
as ‘a synonym for brutality cloaked by shameless
demagogy’. By the spring of 1964, however, encouraged
by the nationalization of the main Syrian textile factories
and other large industries, Moscow had begun to
distinguish between ‘progressive’ and right-wing forces in
the new regime. It was also attracted by the Ba‘th’s
uncompromisingly anti-Western rhetoric. Despite the
continuing ban on the Syrian Communist Party, the Soviet
Union agreed to supply Syria with both arms and military
advisers.-

The KGB had from the outset significant penetrations
of the new regime’s foreign service and intelligence
community. The diplomat and lawyer Tarazi Salah al-Din
(codenamed IZZAT) had been recruited by the KGB in
1954 and went on to become one of its longest- serving
Soviet agents. By the early 1970s he was Director-
General of the Foreign Ministry.- A further senior official
in the Foreign Ministry, codenamed KARYAN, was
recruited in 1967. Files noted by Mitrokhin also identify
one major penetration of Syrian intelligence: KERIM,
who had been recruited by the KGB in East Berlin in the
early 1960s. The Damascus residency claimed the credit
for helping him obtain a job in the main Syrian civilian
intelligence agency, the Bureau of National Security
(BNS), after his return to Syria. In 1964 KERIM played
the central role in operation RUCHE Y during which the
KGB successfully bugged some of the BNS offices.-

Just as KGB active measures in Iran were able to
exploit memories of CIA and SIS covert action during the
1953 coup to overthrow Mossadeq and restore the
authority of the Shah, so they benefited in Syria from the
deep suspicions left by abortive CIA/SIS attempts during
1956-57 to promote a coup in Damascus to undermine the
growing influence of the Ba‘th.- In Damascus, as in other
Middle Eastern capitals, the prevailing culture of
conspiracy theory also offered fertile ground for Service
A’s fabrications. The KGB’s first major disinformation

success after the Ba‘th ‘revolution’ was operation
PULYA (‘Bullet’): a series of active measures during
1964-65 designed to unmask a supposed plot by the CIA,
in collusion with the West German BND, to undermine
the Ba‘th regime. In the summer of 1964 the Soviet
military attache in Damascus visited General Amin al-
Hafiz, the commander-in-chief of the Syrian army and
increasingly the dominating figure in the Ba‘th regime, to
show him a forged BND intelligence report which
purported to identify Syrian army officers in contact with
both the BND and the CIA, as well as the CIA officers
involved in their recruitment. The attache was given strict
instructions not to leave the report in Hafiz’s possession
on the pretext of protecting the security of his sources - in
reality in order to prevent the forgery being exposed.
However, he allowed Hafiz to write down the names of
the Syrian officers and CIA personnel mentioned in it. It
does not seem to have occurred to Hafiz to challenge the
authenticity of the report. Instead, he assured the attache
that he would keep the existence of the document secret
and take ‘effective measures’ against those named in it.
Soon afterwards the KGB residency sent an anonymous
letter to the Bureau of National Security, purporting to
give information on the activities of the CIA Damascus
station. Posing as an American well-wisher, a residency
operations officer also made an anonymous telephone call
to a pro-American Syrian army officer to warn him that
his links with the United States were about to be exposed.

Shocked by the warning, the officer asked whether he
should go into hiding or visit the US embassy to seek
political asylum. As the KGB had expected, the whole
telephone conversation was monitored by the BNS. The
officer was removed from the staff of a Syrian military
delegation which was about to visit Moscow.- His
subsequent fate, however, is not recorded in Mitrokhin’s
notes.

The KGB claimed the credit for the announcement by
the Ba‘th regime in February 1965 of the discovery of ‘an
American spy organization . . . whose assignment was to
gather information on the Syrian army and several kinds
of military equipment’. Soon afterwards, against the
background of furious denunciations of American policy
by the Syrian media and angry demonstrations outside the
US embassy, two Syrians were tried and executed on
charges of spying for the CIA. A State Department protest
was rejected by the Ba‘th regime on the grounds that
‘American policy in Syria is based on espionage and the
creation of conspiracy and sabotage networks in the
country’.- The KGB also believed that its active measures
convinced the regime in 1966 that the US ambassador
was preparing a coup, and led it to make over 200 arrests
in mid-September.-

On 23 February 1967 a military coup, publicly praised
by Moscow as the work of ‘patriotic forces’, brought to

power a left-wing Ba‘th regime headed by the austere
Salah Jadid, who rarely appeared in public. High on the
list of Soviet aid sought by the new regime was finance
for the construction of the Euphrates Dam. Moscow
appears to have set three conditions, all quickly accepted
by Damascus: the return to Syria of the exiled Communist
leader Khalid Bakdash; the inclusion of a Communist in
the cabinet; and permission for the Syrian Communist
Party to publish a daily newspaper. - With the Party once
again able to function, though not yet formally legalized,
the Damascus residency made arrangements for regular
clandestine contact with it. The Communist intermediary,
codenamed RASUL, selected by the Party leadership was
sent for training in Moscow, where he was taught various
forms of secret communication, radio transmission,
document photography, use of dead letter-boxes, how to
signal danger and arrange emergency meetings with the
Damascus residency. He was given a small radio signal
transmitter, codenamed ISKUL-2, concealed in a
briefcase, which enabled him to send secret signals to the
residency from up to 500 metres away. From 1968 until at
least the early 1980s a residency operations officer met
RASUL once or twice a month.-

The humiliation of the Six-Day War in June 1967,—
less than four months after the February coup, dealt a
shattering blow to the prestige of the Jadid regime. Amid
the recriminations which followed, the Defence Minister

and future Syrian leader, Hafiz al-Asad, kept his portfolio
only because he had the support of the brutal and much-
feared head of the BNS, ‘Abd al-Karim al-Jundi.— A
serious rift followed between Asad and Jadid. Jadid’s
main concern remained the internal Ba‘th ‘revolution’.
For Asad, by contrast, the overwhelming priority was the
conflict with Israel and the recovery of the Golan Heights,
lost in the Six-Day War. Syria had entered the war with
poorly trained forces equipped with out-of-date weaponry
being phased out of the Red Army. It had no air-defence
missiles to protect it against the crack Israeli air force and
only half its 500 tanks were operational. Asad was well
aware that, to take on Israel, Syria required not merely far
better-trained troops but also massive arms supplies from
the Soviet Union.—

During the clash between Jadid and Asad, KERIM
continued to operate as a KGB agent inside the BNS.
Among the operations recorded in KGB files in which
KERIM took part was a secret nighttime entry into the
West German embassy in Damascus to abstract (and
presumably photograph) classified documents. The
operation, which began at 10 p.m. on 20 April 1968 and
was concluded at 4 a.m. the following day, was assisted
by a Syrian BNS agent inside the embassy. On 24 April
the German embassy was burgled again in a similar
operation probably also involving KERIM.—

In November 1970, with the support of both the army
and security forces, Asad deposed Salah Jadid and seized
power. ‘I am the head of the country, not of the
government,’ Asad used to claim. In reality, the fear of
taking any decision which might displease him meant that
even the most trivial issues were frequently referred to
President Asad for a decision. The KGB seems to have
found his immediate entourage difficult to penetrate.
Within the inner circle of his authoritarian regime Asad
placed a premium on personal loyalty. Even the clerks
and coffee makers on his presidential staff were rarely
changed. The key members of his regime - his foreign and
defence ministers, chief of the general staff and
intelligence chief - remained in power for a quarter of a
century or more.— During the early 1970s Muhammad al-
Khuly, previously head of air-force intelligence, built up
what was in effect a presidential intelligence service
answerable only to Asad, who began each day with
security and intelligence briefings.— The fact that Asad,
like a majority of his high command and intelligence
chiefs, came from the ‘Alawi sect (whose beliefs fused
Shi’ite doctrine with elements of nature worship), in
defiance of the tradition that power was held by Sunni
Muslims, strengthened his anxiety for regular intelligence
reports on the mood in the country. (Even Jadid, an
‘Alawi like Asad, had chosen a Sunni to act as nominal
President.) Asad eventually had fifteen different security
and intelligence agencies, all relatively independent of

each other, with a total personnel of over 50,000 (one
Syrian in 240) and an even larger number of informers.
Each agency reported to the President alone and was
instructed by the deeply suspicious Asad to keep watch on
what the others were up to. Though brutal and above the
law, routinely abusing, imprisoning and torturing its
victims, Asad’s security system was also cumbersome. A
Human Rights Watch investigation concluded:

A casual visitor to Damascus cannot fail to notice the
confusion at airport immigration, the piles of untouched
official forms, and the dusty, unused computer terminal.
Local security offices convey the same disorderly
impression with their yellowing stacks of forms piled on
tables and officials chatting on the phone while
supplicants wait anxiously to be heard. The atmosphere is
one of chaos mixed with petty corruption and the exercise
of bureaucratic power, not of a ruthlessly efficient police
state.—

The disorderly appearance of Syrian security offices was,
however, somewhat misleading. Very few dissidents
escaped their huge network of surveillance. Obsessed
with his own personal security, Asad was protected by a
presidential guard of over 12,000 men. Though his image
was ubiquitous - on the walls of public buildings, on
trucks, trains and buses, in offices, shops and schools -

Asad’s leadership style became increasingly remote. By
the 1980s most cabinet ministers met him only at their
swearing in.— Only a handful of key figures had the right
to telephone him directly. Foremost among them were his
security chiefs. As British ambassador in Damascus in the
mid-1980s, Sir Roger Tomkys once had occasion to ring
up the head of one of the Syrian intelligence agencies,
who replied half an hour later, having just spoken to
Asad.—

During the early 1970s the KGB residency in
Damascus succeeded in establishing what it claimed was
‘semi-official contact’ with Asad’s youngest brother,
Rifat, codenamed MUNZIR, who was a member of his
inner circle until the early 1980s. Rifat’s importance in
the KGB’s view, according to a report of 1974, was that
he commanded Asad’s elite ‘Defence Brigades’, the best
armed and trained units in the Syrian army, as well as - it
believed - having a leading role in the intelligence
community.— Unlike his relatively reclusive and austere
elder brother, Rifat al-Asad acquired a taste for foreign
travel and Western luxuries, acting with little regard for
the law and using his position to accumulate private
wealth. Under his command the Defence Brigades held a
weekly market in Damascus to sell black-market goods
smuggled in from Lebanon. Rifat was sometimes
referred to by the Lebanese as ‘King of the Oriental
Carpets’ because of the frequent confiscation of these

prized objects by his personal Lebanese militia, popularly
known as the ‘Pink Panthers’ Access to the corrupt,
high-living Rifat was thus very much easier than to the
reclusive Asad. The KGB claimed in 1974 that, through
its active measures, it succeeded in using Rifat
‘unconsciously’, but Mitrokhin’s brief note on the report
does not indicate how it did so.— A further KGB report of
1974 also identifies as a confidential contact a relative of
Asad (codenamed KARIB) with Communist sympathies
who was a senior official in the Syrian Council of
Ministers. According to KARIB ’s file, he provided
‘valuable and reliable’ intelligence on Asad’s entourage
as well as on his policies.— KGB files also claim that
SAKR, a department head in military intelligence
recruited in 1974, was used to channel disinformation to
Asad and the Syrian high command.—

Other KGB contacts in, or close to, the Syrian
government during the early years of the Asad regime
continued to include the long-standing agent IZZAT,
Tarazi Salah al-Din, director-general of the Syrian foreign
ministry and later a member of the International Tribunal
in The Hague.— Other KGB contacts included two
generals in the Syrian army, OFITSER and REMIZ;—
SARKIS, an air- force general;— PREYER and NIK, both
Syrian ministers;— PATRIOT, adviser to Asad’s first
Prime Minister, ‘Abd al-Ra’hman Khulayfawi (1970-

74);— SHARLE (‘Charles’), adviser to Asad’s second
Prime Minister, Mahmud al-Ayyubi (1974-76);—
VATAR, who provided copies of cipher telegrams
obtained by Syrian intelligence from the US embassy in
Beirut;— BRAT, an intelligence operations officer;—
FARES and GARGANYUA, both proprietors and
editors-in-chief of Syrian newspapers;— VALID, a senior
official in the Central Statistical Directorate;— and
TAGIR, a leading official of the Syrian Arab Socialist
Union.— There is no indication, however, that any had
significant direct access to Asad. Mitrokhin’s brief notes
on them also give very little indication of the intelligence
which they supplied and whether most were agents or
confidential contacts. —

The KGB’s best opportunities to penetrate Asad’s
entourage almost certainly came during his travels to the
Soviet Union, which he visited six times during his first
three years as Syrian leader. ‘He might look slightly
ineffectual’, Andrei Gromyko later recalled, ‘but in fact
he was highly self-controlled with a spring-like inner
tension. ’— While in Moscow, Asad was housed in
luxurious apartments in the Kremlin which were
inevitably bugged - ‘with a view’, according to a report to
Andropov by Grigori Fyodorovich Grigorenko, head of
the KGB Second Chief Directorate, ‘to obtaining
information about the plans and reactions of Hafiz Asad

and his entourage’. — The information of most interest to
the KGB probably concerned Asad’s response to the
pressure put on him to sign a Friendship Treaty. Though
anxious for Soviet arms, Asad wished to avoid the
appearance of becoming a Soviet client. It may well have
been from bugging Asad’s Kremlin apartment during his
visit in July 1972 that the KGB discovered that he was so
annoyed by Brezhnev’s pressure for a Friendship Treaty
that he had ordered his delegation to pack their bags.
Alerted to his imminent departure, Brezhnev visited Asad
in his apartment and assured him that there would be no
further mention of the treaty during their talks. On the last
day of Asad’s visit, Brezhnev admitted that, despite the
Soviet-Egyptian Friendship Treaty, Egypt had just
expelled all Soviet advisers: ‘I know you will tell me that
our treaty with Egypt has not saved us from
embarrassment there.’ Asad resisted pressure from Sadat
to expel Soviet advisers from Syria also, declaring
publicly, ‘They are here for our own good.’—

Though unwilling to sign a Friendship Treaty, Asad
had given the still-illegal Syrian Communist Party two
posts in his cabinet. In March 1972 the Party was allowed
to join the Ba‘th-dominated National Progressive Front,
thus giving it de facto legality, and permitted to publish a
fortnightly newspaper, Nidal al-Sha'b (‘The People’s
Struggle’). Membership of the Front, however,
strengthened the growing breach between Khalid Bakdash

(codenamed BESHIR by the KGB), a dogmatic Soviet
loyalist who had been Party leader for the past forty years,
and the majority of the Party Politburo who resented both
Bakdash’s autocratic leadership and Moscow’s support
for Asad. In April 1972 Bakdash’s critics within the Party
leadership took advantage of his temporary absence in
Moscow for medical treatment to pass resolutions
accusing him of Stalinist methods. In July pro- and anti-
Bakdash factions were summoned to Moscow to resolve
their differences at a meeting hosted by senior officials of
the CPSU International Department. Though one of
Bakdash’s critics complained that he had created a
personality cult and suffered from ‘ideological sclerosis’
which made him ‘unable to identify the new phenomena
in our Arab Syrian society’, Pravda announced that the
meeting had taken place in ‘a warm, friendly atmosphere’
and had agreed on the importance of ‘the ideological,
political and organizational unity of the Syrian
Communist Party’. Bakdash outmanoeuvred his
opponents by playing the role of a loyal supporter both of
the Soviet Union and of the Asad regime. The ‘Moscow
Agreement’ papered over the cracks within the Party, and
lauded both Soviet- Arab friendship and Syria’s
achievements under Asad’s leadership. For the remainder
of the Soviet era, however, the conflict between Bakdash
and his Party critics continued to complicate Soviet policy
towards Syria.—

The most successful KGB penetration during the Asad

era recorded in the files noted by Mitrokhin was of the

Syrian embassy in Moscow. As well as bugging the

ambassador’s office and several other parts of the

embassy, the KGB regularly intercepted diplomatic bags

in transit between the embassy and Damascus, and

opened, among other official correspondence, personal

letters from Asad’s first ambassador in Moscow, Jamil

Shay a, to the Foreign Minister, ‘Abd al-Halim Khaddam,

marked ‘MOST SECRET, ADDRESSEE ONLY’. As

usual, the KGB’s letter-openers paid meticulous attention

to replicating the glues, adhesive tapes and seals used on

the envelopes and packets in the diplomatic bag. Though

Shaya asked for all his envelopes to be returned to him so

that he could check personally for signs that they had

been tampered with, he seems to have detected nothing
40

amiss.—

Mitrokhin ’s notes from KGB files include the
codenames (and a few real names) of thirty-four agents
and confidential contacts used in the penetration of the
Syrian embassy. Though this total may well be
incomplete, it is sufficient to indicate the considerable
scale of KGB operations. The majority of the agents used
were Soviet citizens; only six can be clearly identified as
Syrian. The operational methods were similar to those
employed against many other Moscow embassies. As in
the case of other embassy penetrations, the agents were

tasked to report on the personalities as well as the
opinions of the diplomats. Ambassador Shaya’s file, for
example, recorded that he was somewhat lax in his
Islamic observance and contained such trivial details as a
report from Agent MARIYA that he was planning to send
a piano he had purchased in Moscow back to Damascus.
Soviet female employees of the embassy from interpreters
to maids were expected to assess the vulnerability of
Syrian diplomats to sexual seduction. Agent
SOKOLOVA, who worked in the chancery, reported that
the ambassador was showing interest in her.
VASILYEVA was planted on Shaya at a reception in the
Egyptian embassy in the hope, according to a KGB
report, that she would ‘be of interest to the ambassador as
a woman’. Though there is no evidence in the files noted
by Mitrokhin that any Syrian ambassador (unlike a
number of his Moscow colleagues) fell for the KGB’s
‘honey trap’, one KGB ‘swallow’ so successfully seduced
another Syrian diplomat that they began living together.
Unofficial currency exchange was another common
method of compromising foreign diplomats. NASHIT
reported that an official of the Syrian military
procurement office in Moscow had illegally changed
$300 for Shaya on the black market. The KGB drew up
plans to arrest and expel the official, probably as a means
of putting pressure on the ambassador.

One of the KGB officers involved in operations against

the Syrian embassy had the responsibility of organizing
hunting expeditions for the ambassador and other senior
diplomats. The KGB’s hospitality was elaborate. On one
expedition to the Bezborodovsky State Hunting Ground,
Shaya had the opportunity to shoot elk, wild boar and
hares. The entertainment concluded with a visit to a dacha
and sauna situated in an orchard on the Volga. The
purpose of these expeditions was two-fold: both to ensure
that the ambassador was away from the embassy during
‘special operations’ such as the photography of classified
documents and to encourage confidential discussions with
his hunting companions. One undercover KGB officer
codenamed OSIPOV, who accompanied Shaya on
hunting expeditions, reported that on 12 September 1973
the ambassador had confided in him that the Arab states
had no prospect of destroying the state of Israel for at
least ten, perhaps fifteen years. However, within the next
few years they would launch an attack on Israel with the
more limited aim of destroying the myth of Israeli
invincibility and deterring both foreign investment and
Jewish immigrants. The KGB subsequently concluded
that Shaya had had advance knowledge of the outbreak of
the Yom Kippur War less than a month later on 6
October.—

Asad was deeply dissatisfied with the performance of
Syria’s MiG- 19s and MiG-2 Is during the Yom Kippur
War, and angry that the Soviet Union had refused to

supply the more advanced MiG-23. He showed his
displeasure by declining to send the usual congratulations
to Moscow on the anniversary of the October
Revolution.— A visit to Syria in February 1974 by Air
Marshal A. Pokryshkin to assess Syria’s military needs
failed to resolve the friction with Moscow. An official
communique after Asad’s visit to Moscow in April
described the atmosphere as one of ‘frankness’ (a
codeword for serious argument) as well as, less
convincingly, ‘mutual understanding’. Moscow’s desire
to settle the dispute with Asad, however, was greatly
increased by Sadat’s apostasy and turn towards the United
States. A week after Asad’s April visit. Marshal Viktor
Kulikov, chief-of-staff of the Soviet armed forces, flew to
Damascus to carry out a fresh assessment of Syrian needs.
In the course of 1974 Syria was supplied with over 300
Soviet fighter aircraft, including 45 MiG-23 s with Cuban
and North Korean pilots, over 1,000 tanks, 30 Scud
missiles (with a range of up to 300 kilometres), 100
shorter-range Frog missiles and other military equipment.
By the end of the year 3,000 Soviet military advisers had
been despatched to Syria and training had begun in the
Soviet Union for Syrian pilots of MiG-23 s.—

In June 1975 the head of the International Department
of the CPSU, Boris Ponomarev, told a Ba‘th delegation in
Moscow ‘how much the Soviet people and its Party
valued the existence in Syria of a progressive national

front with the participation of the Syrian Communist
Party’.— Simultaneously, however, without Asad’s
knowledge, the KGB was using the Bakdash wing of the
Party leadership to recruit illegals. At a meeting in
Moscow with P. D. Sheyin, a senior officer in the FCD
Illegals Directorate S on 19 March 1975, Bakdash and a
close associate (codenamed FARID) agreed to begin the
search for suitable candidates as soon as they returned to
Damascus.— They were given the following criteria to
guide their selection:

[Candidates] were to be dedicated and reliable members
of the Communist Party, firmly holding Marxist-Leninist
Internationalist positions, with experience of illegal Party
work, not widely known within the country as belonging
to the Communist Party, bold, determined, resourceful,
with organizational aptitude, highly disciplined and
industrious, in good physical health, preferably
unmarried, aged between 25 and 45. They were to have a
good understanding of international affairs, and be
capable of analysing and summarizing political
information.

These candidates were intended for work in Saudi
Arabia and Iran. Besides a native command of English or
Persian (for Iran), they had to have a real possibility of
obtaining an entry visa for Saudi Arabia or Iran on their

own, for the purpose of working and long-term
settlement; they had to have a qualification which was
needed in the above countries (such as engineer, or
technician in the petro-chemical field, in civil engineering
related to road construction or housing construction, water
and gas supply, electronics, civil aviation, or service
industries).

It was desirable that the candidates should have
relatives or personal contacts who could help them to
enter the country and settle by finding a job or starting
their own trading or production businesses; or that they
should have the possibility of getting a job in their own
country or in a third country with a company or enterprise
which was represented in or had a branch in Saudi Arabia
or Iran, and could thus go out to work there. Only the
[Party] General Secretary or a trusted assistant of his
should be aware of the use to which these people were
being put.

Bakdash probably welcomed the KGB’s request as a
reaffirmation of the special relationship with the Soviet
leadership which his rivals within the Syrian Communist
Party leadership lacked.—

In his keynote address to the Twenty-fifth CPSU
Congress in February 1976, Brezhnev singled out Syria as
the Soviet Union’s closest Middle Eastern ally and

declared that the two countries ‘act in concert in many
international problems, above all in the Middle East’.—
Asad was unaware that ‘through agent channels’ the KGB
was simultaneously planting on him Service A forgeries
designed to reinforce his suspicion of Sadat and the
United States. Among them was a bogus despatch from
the French Foreign Ministry to its embassies in Arab
capitals in 1976 reporting that Sadat’s decision to
terminate the Soviet-Egyptian Friendship Treaty had been
taken under US pressure and was part of his strategy to
solicit American investment and turn Egypt into a conduit
for US influence in the oil-producing countries of the
Middle East.—

The public celebration of Soviet- Syrian amity suffered
a serious setback in June 1976 when Syria intervened in
the Lebanese civil war in favour of the Maronite
Christians against their PLO and left-wing opponents,
with some of whom the KGB had close contacts. The left-
wing leader, Kamal Jumblatt, was one of only a handful
of Arabs to have been awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.
Talks in Moscow in July between Khaddam, the Syrian
Foreign Minister, and his Soviet counterpart, Gromyko,
ended in such disarray that no joint communique was
issued. Pravda declared that Syria was plunging ‘a knife
into the back’ of the Palestinian movement.— Asad would
have been further outraged had he known that the KGB
residency in Damascus was secretly providing funds to

support the Lebanese Communist Party which opposed
Syrian intervention. On 26 July a KGB Buick Apollo
motor car with diplomatic number plates set out from
Damascus to the Lebanese border ostensibly to collect
correspondence and foodstuffs sent by the Soviet embassy
in Beirut. In reality it was carrying $50,000 concealed
between a tyre-wall and inner tube for transmission to the
Lebanese Communist Party.— Two months later a further
$100,000 was handed over.—

The main practical effect of the Soviet-Syrian quarrel
during the second half of 1976 was an apparently drastic
cutback in Soviet arms supplies. Asad retaliated by
refusing an invitation to visit Moscow and by expelling
about half the Soviet military advisers (then more
numerous in Syria than anywhere else in the world). In
January 1977 he instructed the Soviet navy to remove its
submarines and support craft from the port of Tartus.
Over the next few months, however, the winding down of
Syrian involvement in the Lebanese civil war made
possible the mending of the rift with Moscow. After the
assassination of Kamal Jumblatt in March 1977, his son
and successor Walid called on Asad at the end of the
forty-day period of mourning - despite widespread and
apparently well-founded suspicions that Asad had ordered
his father’s death. In April Asad decided to mend his
fences with the Soviet Union and flew to Moscow where
he was greeted personally at the airport by Brezhnev. At a

banquet in the Kremlin, Asad declared that Soviet- Syrian
relations had ‘overcome all the difficulties in their way’:
‘We have always been convinced that the relations
between our two countries are based on identity of
principled outlook and on friendship and common
interests . . During 1977 Soviet arms exports to Syria
totalled $825 million. In the following year they exceeded
$1 billion for the first time.—

Asad’s extreme hostility to both Sadat’s visit to
Jerusalem in November 1977 (a day of national mourning
in Syria) and the Camp David Agreement of September
1978— reinforced his desire for Soviet support, and even
produced a short-lived reconciliation between Syria and
Iraq. Asad later admitted that, when Sadat visited him in
Damascus shortly before his visit to Jerusalem, he thought
briefly of locking him up to prevent him going to Israel.—
KGB files reveal that in December 1977 Asad authorized
a secret meeting in Damascus between his intelligence
chiefs and the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP) which discussed plans for assassinating
Sadat.—

In the later 1970s, Moscow once again made the
mistake of trying to force the pace in strengthening its
alliance with Asad. In an obvious reference to renewed
Soviet proposals for a Treaty of Friendship and Co-
operation, Brezhnev told him during a Moscow banquet

in his honour in October 1978 that the Soviet Union was
prepared to expand co-operation with Syria still further,
‘particularly in the field of politics’. A month later, during
a visit to Moscow by the Chief of the Syrian General
Staff, General Hikmat Shihabi, there was an attempt to
pressure him to conclude a trilateral pact with the Soviet
Union and Iraq. He was also told that, to avoid the risk of
exposing further Syrian MiG-27s to Israeli surprise attack,
they would be better stationed in Iraq. Shihabi took deep
offence and returned home two days ahead of schedule.
Soon afterwards the Syrian ambassador in Moscow was
recalled to Damascus.—

Once again, however, the rift was mended, due chiefly
to the common Soviet and Syrian opposition to both
Camp David and Israeli support for the Maronite
Phalangists in southern Lebanon. Encouraged by KGB
active measures— which played on his own penchant for
conspiracy theory, Asad saw the Camp David agreements
as part of a gigantic US-Israeli conspiracy. In March 1980
Asad publicly accused the CIA of encouraging ‘sabotage
and subversion’ in Syria in order to bring ‘the entire Arab
world under joint US-Israeli domination’.— Asad
repeatedly claimed and almost certainly believed that a
central part of the plan for the subjection of ‘the entire
Arab world’ was a secret Zionist conspiracy, with
American support, to create a greater Israel. His close
friend and Defence Minister, Mustafa Talas, later claimed

absurdly that, ‘Had it not been for Hafiz al-Asad, Greater
Israel would have been established from the Nile to the
Euphrates.’—

During 1979 Moscow supplied more MiG-27s and
other advanced weaponry, as well as writing off 25 per
cent of Syria’s estimated $2 billion military debt. After
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December, Asad
was one of the very few leaders outside the Soviet bloc
not to join the world-wide chorus of condemnation. His
Foreign Minister, Khaddam, told an interviewer: ‘We
have studied the situation and have come to the
conclusion that the fuss about Afghanistan is meaningless
theatrics, designed to reshuffle the cards in the Arab
region, to end Sadat’s isolation, and to assist in bringing
success to the Camp David agreements.’

In January 1980, in a further attempt to please Moscow,
Asad included two members of the Bakdash faction of the
Syrian Communist Party in his new government. He also
allowed the exiled leader of the Iraqi Communist Party,
Aziz Muhammad,— to base himself in Syria. In October,
Asad finally agreed to sign a twenty-year Treaty of
Friendship and Co-operation with the Soviet Union.
During 1980 Syrian arms imports from the Soviet bloc
exceeded $3 billion.—

While reinforcing its alliance with Asad, Moscow
secretly strengthened its covert relationship with Bakdash.

In 1978 Bakdash had assured one of his KGB contacts
that, while he remained Party leader, ‘there would never
be a Carrillo or even a Marchais’ - in other words, that the
Party would remain uncompromisingly loyal to Moscow
and ideologically orthodox.— He told the Party Congress
in 1980: ‘I firmly believe that it is not enough [merely] to
declare friendship for the Soviet Union. Rather, we must
support every action in Soviet foreign policy which has
always been, still is, and always will be in harmony with
the interests of all people.’—

Bakdash also benefited from the support of Asad.
Immediately after the signature of the Friendship Treaty
in October 1980, Asad began a campaign of intimidation
and terror against a Communist breakaway group, led by
Bakdash’ s opponent, Riyadh al-Turk. Most of al-Turk’s
supporters were jailed, forced to leave the Party, driven
underground or went into exile. Some were tortured.
According to reports by Amnesty International and
human rights groups during the 1980s, al-Turk was
systematically tortured throughout the decade, and was
rushed to hospital at least six times on the verge of death
to be resuscitated for further abuse, which included
breaking bones in all his limbs.—

During 1978 108 Syrian Communists went on training
courses (doubtless at Soviet expense) in the Soviet Union.
The KGB noted that most were the friends or relatives of

Party leaders.— During 1979 the KGB Damascus
residency made five payments to the Party leadership
totalling $275,000.— Bakdash informed the residency that
over $50,000 had been spent on setting up an
underground printing press and requested an additional
allocation.— Payments in 1980 amounted to at least
$329,000 and were probably higher.— Far more
substantial sums, however, were paid to the Party as a
result of lucrative Soviet contracts with trading companies
controlled by the Party. In 1982, for example, the
Damascus residency reported that one of the companies
set up with Party funds would contribute during the year
1,200,000 Syrian pounds to the Party.— At Bakdash’ s
personal request, the Damascus residency also secretly
supplied the Party with arms: 150 Makarov pistols and
ammunition were handed over in June 1980. As a security
precaution, in case the arms were subsequently
discovered, they were wrapped in Syrian packaging
obtained by the KGB on the black market.— A further
consignment of seventy-five Makarov pistols with
ammunition was handed over in March 1981. Bakdash
thanked the KGB for ‘their fraternal assistance and
constant concern for the needs of the Syrian Communist
Party’.— At a meeting in a safe apartment a year later with
two operations officers from the Damascus residency,
Bakdash enumerated one by one the residents with whom
he had established close and friendly collaboration over

the quarter of a century since he had returned from exile.
He ended by eulogizing the KGB: ‘You are the only
Soviet authority with which we have always enjoyed, and
still enjoy, full mutual understanding on the most varied
issues. Please convey to Comrade Andropov the profound
gratitude of our Party.’—

The KGB, however, was increasingly concerned by the
growing divisions within the Syrian Communist Party.
Late in 1982 Nikolai Fyodorovich Vetrov of the
Damascus residency had a series of meetings with
Bakdash, then seventy years old, who had been Party
leader for half a century. Bakdash complained that ‘not all
Party members were totally dedicated to the Marxist-
Leninist cause’, and that his age and poor health made it
increasingly difficult for him to keep full control over all
Party activities. Bakdash was also becoming increasingly
suspicious of his associate FARID. He told Vetrov that,
though a good Party official, FARID ‘had been unable to
break finally with the petit-bourgeois environment from
which he came’. Bakdash’s real objection to FARID,
however, was fear that he was plotting against him. He
told Vetrov that, as well as ‘promoting people who were
personally loyal to him’, FARID had become corrupt,
borrowing 50,000 Syrian pounds (which he had not
repaid) to buy a house in Damascus from a businessman
who had made a fortune from Soviet contracts but had
ceased to support the Party.— By the mid-1980s, however.

Bakdash caused the Centre greater concern than FARID.
For all his past protestations of Soviet loyalism, Bakdash
was unable to adapt to the new era of glasnost and
perestroika. As the Soviet Union fell apart, Bakdash
defended Stalin and denounced Gorbachev.—

Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 in an
unsuccessful attempt to destroy the PLO and strengthen
its Maronite allies caused a new crisis in Syrian-Soviet
relations. From 9 to 1 1 June Israel and Syria fought one of
the largest air battles of the twentieth century over the
Biqa’ valley. The Israeli air force destroyed all Syria’s
SAM-6 missile sites on both sides of the Syrian-Lebanese
border and shot down twenty-three Syrian MiGs without
losing a single aircraft.— When further SAM sites were
installed in the course of the summer the Israelis
demolished those too. Behind the scenes the Syrians
blamed their defeat on the shortcomings of Soviet
equipment, while the Russians blamed Syrian
incompetence in using it. Both sides, however, needed
each other. ‘Asad needed arms’, writes Patrick Seale,
‘while the Russians needed to restore the reputation of
their high-performance weapons as well as their overall
political position in the Arab world.’ Asad’s visit to
Moscow for Brezhnev’s funeral in November 1982
provided an opportunity to mend fences with the new
Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov. Despite opposition from
both Gromyko and Ustinov, the Defence Minister,

Andropov agreed to provide Syria with advanced
weapons systems which were supplied to no other Third
World country, some of them operated by Soviet
personnel.—

The memoirs of Vadim Kirpichenko, one of the
Centre’s leading Middle Eastern experts, contain a
curiously fulsome tribute to Asad. During two meetings
and five hours of discussions on security and intelligence
matters, in the course of which Asad asked many detailed
questions about the structure and functions of the KGB,—
Kirpichenko claims to have found him ‘a good-natured,
mild, proper and attentive person. No neurosis
whatsoever, no haste, no posing whatsoever.’ Asad
strongly reminded Kirpichenko of the legendary KGB
officer Ivan Ivanovich Agayants, who had been wartime
resident in Tehran and post-war resident in Paris: ‘Old
intelligence hands still remember this good-natured and
wise man.’ (Kirpichenko does not mention that Agayants
was a specialist in deception, also a strong interest of
Asad’s.)—

Kirpichenko ’s rose-tinted recollections give some sense
of the cosmetically enhanced view of Asad’s Syria passed
on to the Soviet leadership at the time of the conclusion of
the Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation. In reality,
Asad was, by any standards, an unattractive ally. The
signing of the treaty coincided with the beginning of the

most homicidal period of Asad’s rule. During the early
1980s his regime killed at least 10,000 of its own citizens
and jailed thousands more in usually atrocious conditions.
Most of the Sunni stronghold of Hama, Syria’s most
beautiful city and a centre of opposition to the ‘Alawi
regime, was destroyed, its magnificent Great Mosque
reduced to rubble. Many Lebanese from Syrian-controlled
areas of Lebanon disappeared into Syrian prisons never to
re-emerge. — Like Saddam Hussein and Muammar al-
Qaddafi, Asad also used his intelligence agencies to hunt
down his enemies abroad. As well as becoming notorious
for providing safe haven for some of the Middle East’s
most ruthless terrorists, his regime also failed to cover its
tracks when carrying out its own terrorist operations
against emigre dissidents and other Arab critics. Early in
1981 a Syrian hit squad, operating on the orders of Asad’s
brother Rifat, whom the KGB had once claimed to be
able to influence,— entered Jordan with instructions to
assassinate the Jordanian Prime Minister, Mudar Badran,
whom Asad had publicly condemned for being in league
with Americans, Zionists and Syrian dissidents. The
entire group was caught and made a humiliating three-
hour public confession on Jordanian television, which
could be seen by many Syrian viewers. Despite this
embarrassment, Rifat declared publicly that ‘enemies’
who had fled abroad would be dealt with. In March 1982
there were reports in the British press, based on briefings
by ‘Western diplomatic sources in Damascus’, that six

well-armed ‘hit squads’ had been despatched to Europe to
assassinate dissidents. One such three-man squad arrested
in Stuttgart, Germany, was found to be carrying sub-
machine guns and explosives. A month later a bomb
attack on the Paris offices of an Arab newspaper well
known for its hostility to the Asad regime killed a
pregnant woman passing by and injured sixty-three
others, twelve seriously. The French government, which
made little secret of its belief that the Asad regime was
responsible, promptly expelled two Syrian ‘diplomats’ for
‘unacceptable activities’.— It is highly unlikely that
Brezhnev’s final years were disturbed by reports of such
embarrassing bad behaviour by a regime with which he
had just signed, after years of persuasion, a Friendship
Treaty.

Unattractive though Syria had become as an ally, all
other Soviet options for alliance with a major Middle
Eastern power had disappeared. Syria’s attempt over the
next few years to achieve strategic parity with Israel made
it more dependent than ever before on advanced Soviet
weaponry, among them fighter planes, surface-to-air and
surface-to-surface missiles, and electronic and air-control
battle systems. General Dmitri Volkogonov, then of the
GRU, later recalled: ‘No country ever had as many
Russian-speaking advisers as Syria . . . Everyone lived in
a state of half-war, half-peace. The Soviet Union and its
ideology were not wanted by anyone there, but its tanks.

guns and technicians were highly valued.

By the end of 1985 the Syrian economy was collapsing
under the weight of a military budget which accounted for
half the gross national product. With Gorbachev unwilling
to bail him out, Asad reluctantly accepted in 1986 that
strategic parity with Israel was beyond Syria’s reach. The
British ambassador in Damascus, Sir Roger Tomkys,
found Asad brutally realistic about the changed balance of
power in the Middle East. ‘If I were Prime Minister of
Israel,’ Asad told him, ‘with its present military
superiority and the support of the world’s number one
power, I would not make a single concession.’—

During the later 1980s, Moscow rejected most Syrian
requests for advanced weaponry. Asad none the less
regarded the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the
Soviet Union as a disaster. Despite all his disputes with
Moscow over the previous two decades, he had come to
regard the Soviet alliance as essential to Syria’s security.
A senior Damascus official said mournfully as power in
the Kremlin passed from Gorbachev to Yeltsin at the end
of 1991, ‘We regret the Soviet collapse more than the
Russians do.’—

11

The People’s Democratic Republic of

Yemen

The Soviet Union’s closest ideological ally in the Arab
world was the People’s Democratic Republic of [South]
Yemen (PDRY), founded in 1970, three years after
gaining independence from Britain. As in Cuba, the ruling
National Liberation Front (NLF) gained power as the
result of a guerrilla campaign and thereafter declared
itself a Marxist-Leninist party. As the Soviet presence in
the Indian Ocean expanded during the 1970s, the Soviet
fleet also made increasing use of port facilities at Aden
and Socotra Island.- According to the Soviet ambassador
to the PDRY, O. G. Peresypkin:

We proceeded from the assumption that scientific
socialism was a universal theory and we wanted to prove
that a small underdeveloped Arab country, a former
British colony, would advance with seven-league strides
towards the bright future provided it was armed with the
slogans of scientific socialism.

The slogans failed. The Soviet advisers seconded to

Yemeni ministries imbued them with the cumbersome
inefficiency of the command economy in which they had
been trained. Aleksandr Vassiliev, one of the Soviet
officials who visited the PDRY, noted later: ‘When I
visited Aden before collectivization . . . the Aden market
and all the waterfronts were full of fish and fish products.
When the fishermen were subjected to [collectivization],
the fish immediately disappeared. ’ In retrospect,
Peresypkin was ‘inclined to forgive the South Yemeni
leaders who brought their country to deadlock. They were
simply following blindly along behind their “elder
brothers” who had “built socialism” . . . ’-

Despite its early hopes of turning the PDRY into an
Arab beacon of ‘scientific socialism’, Moscow found
South Yemen an almost constant headache. One of the
main tasks of the Aden residency was to monitor the
nearly continuous intrigues and power struggles which
rent the NLF and its successor (from October 1978), the
Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP). It could do little to control
them. From 1969 to 1978 there was a prolonged power
struggle between ‘Abd al-Fattah Isma’il, the staunchly
pro-Soviet leader of the NLF, and Salim Rubai’ Ali, the
more pro-Chinese head of state. In June 1978, with Soviet
and Cuban assistance, Isma’il led a successful coup
against Rubai’ Ali, who was executed on charges of
plotting an armed coup of his own with the support of the
West and Saudi Arabia.-

The main supporters of the PDRY within the Centre
during the mid-1970s were Nikolai Leonov and Service 1
(Intelligence Analysis). In 1975 Leonov submitted a
report to Andropov arguing that the Soviet Union was
getting a poor return for its vast investment in the Middle
East. Egypt, Syria and Iraq had no intention of paying
their huge debts. Egypt had ceased to be a reliable ally,
the Iraqi connection was insecure and Syria was then
unwilling to commit itself to a Friendship Treaty. Service
1 therefore proposed concentrating on the PDRY, which
did not require large amounts of aid. Its regime was The
most Marxist-Leninist’, Aden was of major strategic
significance, and its oil distillery could meet the needs of
both the Soviet navy and the air force. The report cited the
way in which the British Empire had used Aden as one of
the key points in its global strategy. The PDRY was also
well away from the main Middle Eastern conflict zones.
Its only - achievable - strategic need was to make peace
with North Yemen. Service Us revival of the idea of
turning the PDRY into an Arab beacon of ‘scientific
socialism’ found little favour with Andropov. After
keeping the report for several days, he returned it with a
request for it to be shortened. Then he returned the
shortened version asking for all the proposals to be
deleted, leaving only the information it contained on the
current position in the PDRY. In Leonov’s view, all that
was of interest in the original document had now been

removed from it. He had no doubt that Andropov’s
demands for cuts derived from his personal discussions of
its proposals with Politburo members who disliked the
idea of increasing contact with a regime cursed with
apparently ineradicable internecine warfare.-

From 1972 onwards, however, the Centre maintained
close links with the PDRY intelligence service, which
proudly called its officers ‘Chekists’ in honour of its
Soviet allies.- On 12 May 1972 Andropov had a meeting
in Moscow with the Yemeni Interior Minister,
Muhammad Salih Mutiya, during which the KGB agreed
to provide free training for PDRY intelligence officers
and cipher personnel. The fact that Mutiya also accepted
an offer of free Soviet ciphers presumably enabled the
FCD Sixteenth Directorate to decrypt PDRY intelligence
radio traffic.- From July 1973 a KGB liaison officer was
stationed in Aden (in addition to the undeclared staff of
the Aden residency). In May 1974 the KGB and PDRY
intelligence agency signed a secret agreement on
collaboration in intelligence operations against the United
States, United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. As part of the
agreement the PDRY was supplied with ‘special
equipment’, probably for use in bugging and surveillance
operations. In 1976 the two agencies collaborated in
operation KHAMSIN to bug the Saudi Arabian embassy
in Aden.-

Just as the Politburo disliked dealing with the divided
Yemeni regime, however, so the KGB despised some of
its PDRY intelligence allies. A prime example was a
senior Yemeni intelligence officer codenamed AREF,-
who was given a free holiday in 1978 at the Dubovaya
Roscha Sanatorium at Zheleznovodsk, where he was
diagnosed as suffering from cardiac insufficiency,
diabetes, insomnia, nervous and physical exhaustion, as
well as from excessive alcohol consumption. These
ailments were not AREF’s main concern. His first
priorities were treatment for incipient baldness and plastic
surgery to improve his appearance. His Soviet doctor
concluded that many of his problems stemmed from
obsessive masturbation and a ‘passive’ homosexual
relationship with a senior Yemeni minister which had
produced nervous and sexual debility. AREF, however,
turned out to be bisexual and pestered his interpreter, V.
Konavalov, a KGB operations officer, to persuade a
woman he had met at the clinic to have sexual relations
with him. When Konavalov refused, saying that his duties
were limited to providing translation and arranging
medical treatment, AREF replied, ‘Comrade
“Aleksandrov” [Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD] paid
for the tickets, gave me a free pass to the Sanatorium, and
I am convinced that he would not object to my having
women.’ When Konavalov still refused, AREF accused
him of being a racist. Konavalov also reported that,
though AREF had brought with him some of the works of

Marx and Lenin, he did not read them and used them only
for display purposes. -

In Kirpichenko’s view, the PDRY ‘Chekists’ also
became increasingly demanding:

[They] were often aggressive in their conduct of
negotiations, especially when they needed to hammer out
various kinds of material-technological assistance from
us. ‘Since we’re in the same boat (the beloved argument
of our Arab allies), then you must help us.’ We provided,
of course, the minimum, mostly operational technology,
and taught the Yemeni free of charge at our short courses
. . . But the South Yemen partners sometimes

demonstrated immoderate appetites. In the final years
they insistently asked us to build them a Ministry for State
Security building in Aden, buildings for security services
in all the provincial centres and even a prison.—

The KGB’s main concern, however, was the [North]
Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) rather than the PDRY.— In
July 1972 the YAR became the first member of the Arab
League to resume the diplomatic relations with the United
States which had been broken off after the Six-Day War
five years earlier. Moscow’s anxieties increased when a
military regime headed by the pro-Saudi Lieutenant
Colonel Ibrahim al-Hamdi took power in June 1974 and

sought arms from the United States, paid for by the oil-
rich Saudis. Al-Hamdi was dissatisfied with the American
response. As the US military attache in the YAR capital,
Sana’a, reported to Washington, Saudi Arabia wanted a
North Yemen that was ‘strong enough but not too strong’.
The United States, in turn, was anxious not to offend its
main ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, by meeting all al-
Hamdi’s requests for military assistance.— The
relationship of the al-Hamdi regime with Washington and
Riyadh thus never became as close as the Centre feared.
The KGB none the less embarked on a prolonged active-
measures campaign designed to discredit the three men it
saw as the main pro-American and pro-Saudi influences
within the YAR government: ‘Abd Allah al-Asnadji,
Minister of Foreign Affairs, M. Khamis, Minister of
Internal Affairs and Chief of the Central National Security
Directorate, and Muhammad Salim Basindawa, Minister
of Culture and Information. In 1976 the KGB sent an
anonymous letter to al-Hamdi, accusing Khamis of being
a CIA agent and enclosing a forged document
acknowledging his receipt of American money. Khamis,
however, succeeded in persuading al-Hamdi that the
receipt was a forgery, though - according to KGB files -
he blamed the forgery on the Saudis or rebellious sheikhs
rather than on the KGB.—

On 12 October 1977 al-Hamdi was assassinated in
circumstances which still remain obscure.— KGB active

measures sought to persuade his successor, Ahmad al-
Gashmi, that Khamis was responsible for al-Hamdi’s
assassination. Soviet agents informed al-Gashmi that
Khamis was also plotting his overthrow and conspiring to
seize power himself— On 24 June 1978 al-Gashmi was
assassinated, though not by Khamis. The previous day
President Salim Rubai’ Ali of the PDRY had telephoned
al-Gashmi to tell him he was despatching a special envoy
to meet him in Sana’a on the following day. When the
envoy arrived in al-Gashmi ’s office he opened a briefcase
which exploded, killing both men. Two days later Salim
Rubai’ Ali was executed in Aden, ostensibly for
organizing the assassination of al-Gashmi and plotting a
coup in the PDRY with the support of the West and Saudi
Arabia. Rubai’ Ali’s supporters later claimed that the
explosive had been put in the briefcase on orders from his
pro-Soviet rival, ‘Abd al-Fattah Isma’il, who later in the
year succeeded him as President.— Moscow immediately
began a propaganda offensive in support of Isma’il,
denouncing an alleged Saudi and American threat to the
PDRY and flying in Cuban troops from Ethiopia to
support the new regime while Soviet warships patrolled
the Gulf of Aden.—

Al-Gashmi ’s successor as President of the YAR, Ali
Abdullah Salih, survived an assassination attempt a few
days after taking power.— One of the objectives of Soviet
policy was to exploit President Salih’s discontent with

what he considered was the inadequate level of US arms
supplies to the YAR. In November 1978 and January
1979, Salih held well-publicized talks with the Soviet
ambassador on ‘ways to strengthen relations’ - including
the supply of Soviet arms.— Soviet attempts to cultivate
Salih, however, were complicated by an attack on the
YAR in late February 1979 by the PDRY, which for some
time had cast envious eyes over its wealthier and more
populous neighbour. A leading South Yemeni Communist
told the Soviet ambassador, doubtless to Moscow’s
displeasure, ‘Yes, it’s us who’ve started the war. If we
win, we’ll create Great Yemen. If we lose, you’ll
intervene and save us.’— The war, however, ended
bizarrely on 27 March with a meeting in Kuwait between
Presidents Salih and Isma’il which concluded with a
hopelessly optimistic agreement to produce within four
months a draft constitution for the unification of North
and South Yemen.— (Unification did not actually occur
until 1990.)

Immediately after his meeting with Isma’il, Salih
announced the dismissal of his Foreign Minister, al-
Asnadji, and the Minister of Culture and Information,
Basindawa. The Centre claimed the credit for both
dismissals, which - it reported - had been strongly
opposed by Saudi Arabia. Ever since Salih had become
President, the KGB had been using its agents and
confidential contacts to feed him disinformation that a

pro-Saudi group, led by al-Asnadji and including
Basindawa, had been plotting his overthrow with Saudi
and American support and planning his assassination.—
The KGB’s victory, however, was far from complete.
Despite his dismissal as Foreign Minister, al-Asnadji
remained one of Salih’s chief political advisers. In June
1979 al-Asnadji visited Washington to appeal for ‘a more
direct US military role in the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf
Region’ and the despatch of senior US military advisers
to train YAR armed forces.—

In April 1980 Soviet policy in Yemen suffered another
setback when a coup in the PDRY overthrew its staunch
ally. President Isma’il. Among the causes of the coup was
dissatisfaction with the amount of Soviet aid - far smaller
than that given to other ideological allies in the Third
World. Power cuts in Aden were blamed by Yemenis on
the Soviet failure to complete the construction of a
promised power station. Unlike his immediate
predecessor, Isma’il survived his overthrow. Probably due
to the intervention of the Soviet ambassador, he was
allowed to go into exile in Moscow instead of being
executed or imprisoned as his main opponents had
intended. The Soviet Union was quick to mend its fences
with the new regime in the PDRY, inviting Isma’il’s
successor, Ali Nash Muhammad, on a state visit to
Moscow only a month after the coup. The visit led to a
new agreement on Soviet economic aid (including

construction of the promised power station) and a joint
communique condemning US policy in the Middle East
and supporting the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan.—

In September 1980 the KGB obtained from agents in
the YAR intelligence services a copy of a tape recording
of a confidential discussion between Presidents Salih and
Muhammad which had been made without their
knowledge on Khamis’s instructions. The tape was then
handed to Salih as evidence of Khamis’s treachery.
Attempts were also made to persuade Salih that Khamis
had links with the CIA. Khamis was dismissed in October
and, according to KGB files, ‘physically eliminated’ in
January 1981. The KGB also passed reports to Salih
alleging that al-Asnadji was having an affair with a
woman in the US Peace Corps, had $30 million in a
London bank account and also owned a hotel and three
houses in the London suburbs. In March 1981 al-Asnadji
and some of his supporters were arrested on charges of
preparing a coup. Salih seems to have been influenced by
KGB active measures suggesting that the plotters had
conspired with the CIA. He told his advisory council on
21 March that ‘if an improper role on the part of the
Americans in organizing the conspiracy is confirmed,
then questions will be raised about the American presence
in Northern Yemen’. The KGB also claimed the credit for
persuading Salih to order the expulsion of an American
military adviser on a charge of espionage.—

The KGB’s tactical successes in the YAR, however,
had little strategic significance. From 1982 onwards the
discovery of oil fields in North Yemen led to a series of
concessions to US companies. In April 1986 President
Salih and Vice-President George Bush attended the
ceremonial opening of the YAR’s first oil refinery.
Collaboration in oil production, Bush declared, meant
greater US ‘partnership with the Yemeni people’.— The
PDRY, meanwhile, was in turmoil. On 13 January 1986
several of President Muhammad’s opponents were
machine-gunned in the Politburo meeting room. The
Aden residency appears to have given no advance
warning of the renewed bloodshed. In the fortnight’s civil
war which followed thousands of YSP members, militia
and armed forces were killed. The cost of the damage
done to buildings and the economic infrastructure in Aden
was estimated at $140 million. Muhammad lost power
and was forced to flee with some thousands of his
supporters to the YAR. — The Soviet Commander- in-
Chief Ground Forces, General Yevgeni Ivanovsky, who
was despatched to Aden on a ‘peacemaking’ mission,
reported that about one third of the Yemeni officers killed
in the fighting had been trained at Soviet military
academies.— A few weeks later, representatives of the
YSP attended the Twenty- seventh Congress of the Soviet
Communist Party in Moscow. Fidel Castro is said to have
put to the Yemeni delegation a question which summed

up much of the frustration of Soviet policy to the PDRY
over the previous quarter of a century. ‘When’, he
reportedly asked, ‘are you people going to stop killing
each other?’—

In May 1990, after prolonged negotiations, the PDRY
and YAR finally merged as the Republic of Yemen,
whose 1 6 million inhabitants accounted for more than half
the population of the Arabian peninsula. In April 1 994 the
more powerful Northern leadership launched an attack on
the South which brought the whole of a still-unstable
country under Northern control.

12

Israel and Zionism

‘Zionist subversion’ was one of the KGB’s most enduring
conspiracy theories. The Stalinist era bequeathed to the
KGB a tradition of anti-semitism masquerading as anti-
Zionism still clearly visible even in the mid-1980s. In
1948, however, the Soviet Union had been the first to
recognize the state of Israel, seeing its creation as a blow
to British imperialism in the Middle East inflicted by
‘progressive’ Jews of Russian and Polish origin. Moscow
also counted on Zionist gratitude for the leading role of
the Red Army in defeating Hitler. The arms supplied to
the Zionists from Czechoslovakia with Moscow’s
blessing during the first Arab-Israeli War (known to
Israelis as the War of Independence and to Arabs as al-
Nakbah, ‘the Disaster’), as well as Soviet diplomatic
support, were of crucial importance to the birth of Israel.
Within the new state the left-wing Mapam (United
Workers) Party described itself on its foundation in 1948
as ‘an inseparable part of the world revolutionary camp
headed by the USSR’. Dr Moshe Sneh, member of the
Mapam executive committee and head of the Israeli
League for Friendly Relations with the USSR, said in his
speech of welcome on the arrival of the Soviet legation in
Tel Aviv:

Our people love the Soviet Union and trust the Soviet
Union, which has supported us and never let us down. For
our part, we swear that we shall never let the Soviet
Union down, and shall devote all our energies to
strengthening the friendship and unbreakable alliance
with our great friend and the defender of mankind - the
Soviet Union.-

Late in 1947 Andrei Mikhailovich Otroshchenko, head of
the Middle and Far Eastern Department of the Committee
of Information (KI), which then ran foreign intelligence,
called an operational conference to announce that Stalin
had given the KI the task of ensuring that Israel became
an ally of the Soviet Union. To counter American
attempts to exploit Israeli links with the Jewish
community in the United States, the KI was to ensure that
large numbers of its agents were included in the ranks of
the Soviet Jews allowed to leave for Israel. The head of
the Illegals Directorate in the KI (and later in the FCD),
Aleksandr Mikhailovich ‘Sasha’ Korotkov, who had a
Jewish wife, was put in charge of the selection of agents.
His chief assistant, Vladimir Vertiporokh, was appointed
as the first resident in Israel in 1948 under diplomatic
cover with the alias ‘Rozhkov’. Vertiporokh told one of
his colleagues that he was anxious about his new posting -
partly because he disliked the ‘crafty Jews’, partly

because he doubted whether he could fulfil the mission
entrusted to the KI by Stalin of turning Israel into a Soviet
ally: ‘The work the residency will have to do is so serious
and important that, quite simply, I am afraid of not being
able to cope with it, and you know what that would
mean.’-

Probably the most successful of the first generation of
Soviet agents infiltrated into Israel was the epidemiologist
Avraham Marcus Klingberg, who, at the age of thirty, was
recruited by Israel’s first Prime Minister in April 1948 to
work on chemical and biological weapons. Klingberg was
later one of the founders and deputy director of the Israel
Institute of Biological Research in Ness Ziona, south-east
of Tel Aviv. He continued to work for Soviet and East
German intelligence for the remarkable period of thirty-
five years.- Soviet-bloc intelligence services co-operated
with the KI in the agent penetration of the new state of
Israel; thirty-six of the Jews who left Bulgaria for Israel in
the period 1947-50, for example, were Bulgarian agents.
Though Mitrokhin’s notes on KGB files give very little
detail on their activities, it is clear that they achieved at
least a few significant successes. KHAIMOV, for
example, obtained a job in the secretariat of Israel’s first
President, Chaim Weizmann.- Contact with another
Bulgarian agent, PERETS, whose role is not recorded,
continued until 1975.-

Satisfaction in the Centre at the early successes of agent
penetration in Israel, however, was overshadowed by
alarm at the enthusiasm of Soviet Jews for the new state
and at the evidence of Israel’s growing links with the
United States. Within a year of Israel’s foundation, there
had been a volte-face in Soviet policy. Henceforth,
Zionism was officially condemned as part of an
imperialist plot to subvert the Soviet Union. Much of
Vertiporokh’s work as resident in Tel Aviv appears to
have been taken up by the pursuit of anti-Zionist
conspiracy theories rather than by conventional
intelligence collection. In 1949 he had three lengthy
meetings with Yitzhak Rabinovich, formerly a member of
the Jewish Agency’s Soviet Liaison Committee, to
discuss in detail the nature of Zionism. A year later
Rabinovich produced, at Vertiporokh’s request, a fifty-
page summary of the main points covered in their
conversations. -

During the final years of Stalinist rule the anti-semitic
campaign against imaginary Zionist conspiracies in
Russia spread throughout the Soviet bloc. In
Czechoslovakia the trial in 1952 of the ‘Leadership of the
Anti-State Conspiratorial Centre’, led by a former Party
leader, Rudolf Slansky, identified eleven of the fourteen
defendants, including Slansky himself, as ‘of Jewish
origin’. The simultaneous purge of Jews from the Soviet
nomenklatura was nowhere more energetically pursued

than at the Centre. By early 1953 all had been removed
from the MGB (predecessor of the KGB), save for a small
number of ‘hidden Jews’: people of partly Jewish origin
who were registered as members of other ethnic groups.
In the winter of 1952- 53 the MGB crushed a non-existent
‘Jewish doctors’ plot’ to murder Stalin and the Soviet
leadership, denouncing a group of innocent doctors as
‘monsters and murderers’ working for a ‘corrupt Jewish
bourgeois nationalist organization’ in the service of
Anglo-American intelligence. Following the fabrication
of the doctors’ plot, the Tel Aviv legation complained that
‘anti-Soviet hysteria’ had reached unprecedented heights.
Since the legation could not admit the reality of Soviet
anti-semitism, it absurdly blamed the ‘hysteria’ on the
Israeli government’s desire both to convince the United
States that it could count on Israeli support for its
‘aggressive plans’ and ‘continue to use Israel as a centre
of espionage in the countries of the socialist camp’, and
‘to divert the attention of the Israeli population from the
economic difficulties’ at home.-

Though the level of anti-Zionist and anti-semitic
paranoia in the Centre dropped sharply after Stalin’s death
in March 1953, it did not disappear. None of the Jews
sacked from the MGB at the height of the anti-semitic
witch-hunt was reinstated. Over forty years later, at the
beginning of the Gorbachev era, Jews were still excluded
(along with a number of other minorities) from the KGB.

The only exceptions were a handful of recruits with
Jewish mothers and non-Jewish fathers, registered as
members of other ethnic groups. Even the Central
Committee was less rigid than the KGB about rejecting
applicants of Jewish origin.

Despite the anti-semitic paranoia of Stalin’s final years,
the Israeli security service. Shin Bet, suspected that
Mapam was passing classified material to the Soviet
Union and placed a bugging device with a battery-
operated radio transmitter beneath the desk of the Party’s
general secretary. In January 1953 two Shin Bet officers
were caught red-handed breaking into the Mapam
headquarters to change the radio batteries.- Shin Bet’s
suspicions were, however, fully justified. The files of the
Soviet Foreign Ministry show that two leading Mapam
politicians in the Knesset were providing the Soviet
embassy with classified material. Yaakov Riftin, who
served on the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security
Committee and was described by Prime Minister David
Ben-Gurion as ‘a preacher from the Cominform’,
regularly supplied the embassy with Committee
documents, including those from sessions held in camera.
Moshe Sneh provided a probably smaller amount of
intelligence on Israeli foreign policy. The material
furnished by Riftin and Sneh served to reinforce Soviet
suspicion of Israel’s special relationship with the United
States. In August 1952, for example, the Tel Aviv

legation reported to Moscow that, according to Sneh,
Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett had declared ‘that Israel’s
situation was such that it must follow the US without any
preliminary conditions or reservations

By the mid-1950s, if not earlier, the KGB had an agent
group inside Mapam, codenamed TREST (one of the
most prestigious codenames in KGB history, originally
used in the 1920s for a highly successful deception
operation against White Russian emigres and Western
intelligence services—). In 1956 a courier codenamed
BOKER was recruited to maintain contact with the group.
The fact that he had three successive controllers over the
years which followed indicates that the operation was
considered of some importance. — Though Mitrokhin’s
notes do not identify the members of the agent group,
they probably included Aharon Cohen, Mapam’ s main
expert on Arab affairs. Cohen’s contacts with the Tel
Aviv residency were discovered after a car with
diplomatic number plates, registered in the name of a
known KGB operations officer, Viktor Sokolov, was
spotted by a policeman outside the main gate of Cohen’s
kibbutz near Haifa in April 1958. Shin Bet surveillance of
further meetings between Cohen and KGB officers led to
his arrest. Though Cohen claimed that his dealings with
the Russians were limited to academic discussions, he
was sentenced to five years in jail for unauthorized
contacts with a foreign agent; he was released after

serving seventeen months. Isser Harel, the head of Israel’s
foreign intelligence service, Mossad, declared
dramatically that Mapam had been ‘bom with a malignant
growth in its belly - the Soviet Dybbuk [evil spirit]’.—

Mossad itself, however, suffered one serious Soviet
penetration in the mid-1950s. Potentially the most
important KGB agent during Israel’s first decade was
Ze’ev Avni, bom Wolf Goldstein, a multilingual
economist and ardent Communist who had spent the
Second World War in Switzerland where in 1943 he had
been recmited by the GRU. Avni was a committed
ideological agent. ‘There was no doubt in my mind’, he
wrote later, ‘that I belonged not only to the vanguard of
the revolution, but to its very elite.’ In 1948 he emigrated
to Israel, joined a kibbutz and contacted the Soviet
embassy to try to renew his links with the GRU. He was
disappointed to receive a lukewarm, non-committal
welcome - possibly because of his lack of security at the
kibbutz, where he had made no secret of his Communist
convictions and told a senior Mapam member that he
would be happy to help the Party establish ‘a direct link to
Moscow’. In 1950 Avni entered the Israeli Foreign
Ministry, where he behaved with much greater discretion.
A later security enquiry ‘had no difficulty finding people
who had known Avni as a militant Communist’ at his
kibbutz but found ‘practically universal admiration’ for
him among his fellow diplomats, who were entirely

unaware that his real loyalty was to the Soviet Union.

In 1952 Avni had his first foreign posting as Israeli
commercial attache in Brussels, where he was also
appointed security officer and given the keys to the
legation’s only safe, in which classified documents were
kept. Having successfully renewed contact with the GRU,
he began photographing the contents of the safe. After his
arrest four years later, he admitted to his interrogator, ‘I
gave them everything I had.’ Remarkably, Avni’s
enthusiasm for the Soviet Union survived even the
paranoia of the ‘Jewish doctors’ plot’. He later told his
interrogator that Stalin had been a ‘genius’ and initially
refused to believe that Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ of
1956 denouncing Stalin was genuine.—

While in Brussels, Avni also began to be employed by
Mossad, using his fluent German to pose as a German
businessman and make contact with former Nazis. Late in
1953, Avni was offered both a full-time position in
Mossad and the post of commercial attache in Belgrade
and Athens. It was agreed that during his next posting he
would combine espionage for Mossad with work as
commercial attache, based chiefly in Belgrade, and
thereafter move to a permanent position in Mossad. Once
in Belgrade, Avni was assigned a new controller
operating under diplomatic cover as first secretary at the
Soviet embassy.— Though he believed himself still to be

working for the GRU, he had - without his knowledge -
been transferred to the KGB with the codename CHEKH.
His KGB file identifies him, while in Belgrade, as acting
head of Mossad operations in West Germany and
Greece.— Among the operations which he personally
conducted for Mossad, using his cover as a German
businessman, was to penetrate the ranks of the former
Wehrmacht officers employed by Gamal Abdel Nasser,
after his 1954 coup, as military advisers in Egypt.— In
1955-56 Avni supplied the KGB residency in Belgrade
with the ciphers used by Mossad for communications with
its Belgrade and Athens stations (probably enabling them
to be decrypted), as well as details of Mossad personnel
(probably both officers and agents) in France, Germany,
Greece, Italy, Switzerland and Yugoslavia.— As in
Brussels, he gave his controller ‘everything I had’.

Avni was caught early in 1956 and sentenced to
fourteen years’ imprisonment. When he finally came to
terms with the fact that Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’
denouncing Stalin was not - as he initially believed - a
fabrication, he lost the uncompromising Communist faith
which had inspired him since the age of fifteen. His
experience, he recalls, closely resembled that memorably
described by Arthur Koestler: ‘I went to Communism as
one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism
as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the
wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the

drowned.’—

Probably at about the time of Avni’s arrest, the KGB
made initial contact with Yisrael Beer, Professor of
Military History at Tel Aviv University as well as a well-
known military commentator and lieutenant colonel in the
Israeli Defence Force (IDF) reserves, who was
subsequently recruited as a Soviet agent. Beer had arrived
in Palestine from Austria on the eve of the Anschluss in
1938, claiming to have been a member of the Schutzbund,
the paramilitary defence organization of the Austrian
Social Democratic Party, and to have taken part in the
1934 Viennese workers’ rising against the pro-Nazi
Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss. In 1936 the Party had,
allegedly, sent him to fight in the International Brigades
in the Spanish Civil War, where he had taken the
pseudonym Jose Gregorio and risen to the rank of colonel,
subsequently receiving further military training in
Moscow at the Frunze Military Academy. Beer claimed
that early in 1938 he had picked up by chance a biography
of the founder of modem Zionism, Theodor Herzl: ‘I read
it the whole night without stopping, and in the morning I .
. . decided to go to Palestine.’ After his arrest in 1961,
Beer’s account of his early career turned out to be wholly
fraudulent. He had never been a member of the
Schutzbund, fought in the Spanish Civil War or enrolled
at the Fmnze Military Academy. In reality, before leaving
for Palestine in 1938 he had been only a clerk in the

Austrian Zionist Federation.— During Beer’s
interrogation by Shin Bet, the British embassy in Tel Aviv
reported to London that there was ‘some doubt about
whether Beer really is a Jew, since he is uncircumcised, a
feature uncommon even in assimilated Jewish circles in
Austria’

There has since been speculation that Beer’s bogus
autobiography was a ‘legend’ fabricated for him by Soviet
intelligence. It is inconceivable, however, that the KGB or
its predecessors would have devised a cover story which
could be so easily disproved. Beer’s fantasy career in the
Schutzbund and the International Brigades was his own,
rather than Moscow’s, invention. The fact that Beer’s
claims went unchallenged during the twenty-three years
between his arrival in Palestine in 1938 and his arrest in
1961 reflected, as the British embassy told the Foreign
Office, ‘the perpetual problem of security which Israel by
its very nature is bound to face’: ‘It is a country of
immigrants about whose origins and past in many cases
nothing is known except for what they themselves reveal.
It has been pointed out that hundreds of people in
responsible positions in theory offer the same kind of risk
as Beer.’—

On his arrival in Palestine in 1938, Beer had succeeded
in joining the Jewish settlement police. Soon afterwards
he became a member of the Planning Bureau of the

Haganah (the forerunner under the British mandate of the
IDF), distinguishing himself in the first Arab- Israeli War
and becoming a founder member of Mapam.— The British
military attache later reported that Beer had become ‘a
fairly close friend of Shimon Peres’, the ambitious young
Deputy Minister of Defence.— Among the most important
intelligence provided by Beer early in his career as a KGB
agent was information on Peres’s secret attempts in 1957
to obtain military assistance from West Germany and buy
reconditioned German submarines. When the news was
leaked to the press, possibly by Beer, there was such a
public outcry that the Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion,
with whom Beer had also established a close relationship,
threatened to resign. Shin Bet burgled Beer’s Tel Aviv
apartment but failed to find incriminating evidence.

It has been plausibly suggested that Shin Bet was slow
to follow up its suspicions about Beer after 1957 because
of his links with the Prime Minister. Early in 1961,
however, a surveillance team took up residence opposite
Beer’s apartment. On 30 March he was observed
apparently handing over a briefcase to Viktor Sokolov,
previously identified as one of Aharon Cohen’s case
officers. By the time a warrant had been obtained and
Beer had been arrested in the early hours of the following
morning, the briefcase was back in his possession. Inside,
doubtless photographed by the Tel Aviv residency, were a
classified military report and extracts from Ben-Gurion’ s

diary. It was later discovered that the Prime Minister’s
diary for the period January to July 1956 was missing.
The probability is that this had been among the first
documents supplied by Beer to the KGB.— The British
embassy informed the Foreign Office that, ‘Not only was
Beer closely concerned with the Ministry of Defence but
he was also a friend of many people in high positions in
the Government. The Police have already interviewed
over one hundred persons and many of them have
admitted that they have spoken to him more freely than
they should have done.’— Beer was sentenced to fifteen
years’ imprisonment in 1962 and died in jail four years
later.

None of the Israeli agents recruited in the mid-1960s
whose files were noted by Mitrokhin appears to have
compared in importance with either Avni or Beer.— The
best indication of the KGB’s lack of high-level Israeli
sources was its complete surprise at the outbreak of the
Six-Day War in June 1967. Before the war, the Soviet
embassy had been contemptuous of Israel’s capacity to
take on its Arab neighbours. In May one of the embassy’s
leading informants, Moshe Sneh, formerly a Mapam
politician but now leader of the Israeli Communist Party,
told the Soviet ambassador, Dmitri Chubakhin, that if
there was another Arab-Israeli war, Israel would win.
Chubakhin replied scornfully, ‘Who will fight [for
Israel]? The espresso boys and the pimps on Dizengoff

[Tel Aviv’s main] Street?’— The Centre first discovered
the Israeli surprise attacks on Egyptian, Jordanian and
Syrian targets early on 5 June not from the Tel Aviv
residency but from intercepted news reports by
Associated Press.— In the immediate aftermath of the
stunning Israeli victory, the residency itself seemed
stunned. According to a Shin Bet officer responsible for
the surveillance of residency personnel:

They were like scared mice. They didn’t understand what
was going on, had no idea how this attack had fallen on
them from out of the clear blue sky, or who was up
against whom. They made a few attempts to leave the
embassy to meet with their agents and ascertain what
Israel’s goals were. They didn’t get a thing. This was the
position until they were pulled out.—

Moscow’s decision (which it later regretted) to break off
diplomatic relations with Israel and thus to close the legal
residency in the legation caused further disruption to
KGB operations. Since 1964 the Centre had had plans to
base a group of operations officers at the Russian
Orthodox Church mission in Jerusalem.— After the
closure of the Soviet embassy. Shin Bet quickly realized
that the KGB residency had moved to the mission.— But
the mission offered a much smaller and less secure base

for KGB operations than the legation. The fact that its
budget was only a fraction of those of the major Middle
Eastern residencies is testimony to the decline of
intelligence operations inside Israel after 1967.— The
KGB lost contact with a number of the agents it had
recruited before the Six-Day War.—

In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, Markus Wolf, the
head of the East German HVA, found the KGB, despite
the decline in its operations inside Israel, ‘fixated on
Israel as an enemy’.— The Centre, like the Politburo, was
particularly alarmed by the effect of the war on Jewish
communities in the Soviet Union. One Russian Jew,
Anatoli Dekatov, later wrote in an article which he dared
to send for publication in the Jerusalem Post

The victory of the tiny Israeli state over the hosts of the
Arab enemies sent a thrill through the hearts of the Jews
in Russia, as it did, I suppose, for Jews all over the world.
The feeling of deep anxiety for the fate of Israel with
which Soviet Jewry followed the events was succeeded by
boundless joy and an overpowering pride in our people.
Many, and especially the young, realized their Jewish
identity for the first time . . . The anti-Israel campaign in
the Soviet mass media served only to spread further
Zionist feeling among the Jews.—

Immediately following the Six-Day War, Moscow banned

all emigration to Israel. A year later, however, irritated by
Western denunciations of the ban as a breach of Jewish
human rights, Andropov and Gromyko jointly proposed to
the Politburo a limited resumption of emigration ‘in order
to contain the slanderous assertions of Western
propaganda concerning discrimination against the Jews in
the Soviet Union’. The KGB, they added, would continue
to use this emigration ‘for operational goals’ - in other
words to infiltrate agents into Israel.— In 1969 a record
number of almost 3,000 Jews were allowed to emigrate.
Though the number fell to little more than 1,000 in 1970,
it rose sharply to 13,000 in 1971 - more than in the whole
of the previous decade. In both 1972 and 1973 over
30,000 Jews were allowed to leave for Israel.—

The sharp rise in exit visas, however, fell far short of
keeping pace with demand. The unprecedented surge in
Jewish applications for permits to emigrate to Israel was
confronted with bureaucratic obstructionism and official
persecution. All applicants from technical professions,
even those employed as clerks, were dismissed from their
jobs. Students whose families applied for exit visas were
expelled from their universities and required to perform
three years’ military service, after which they could not
apply for visas for another five years. The KGB reviewed
every application and was usually responsible for
deciding the outcome. In the case of individuals well
known either in the Soviet Union or in the West, the

decision taken always carried Andropov’s personal
signature. In August 1972 a ‘diploma tax’ was introduced,
obliging all those emigrants who had received higher
education to refund the cost. All applicants for exit visas
were branded in effect as enemies of the Soviet Union.—

During the early 1970s the ‘refuseniks’, those who had
been denied exit visas, formed themselves into groups,
contacted Western journalists and organized a series of
protests ranging from demonstrations to hunger strikes.
The KGB sent a stream of reports, often signed personally
by Andropov, to the Politburo and the Central Committee,
reporting the resolute action taken to ‘neutralize’ even the
most minor protests. Every protest was interpreted as part
of an international Zionist conspiracy against the Soviet
Union:

With the growing aggressiveness of international
imperialism, the data received indicate that subversive
activity by foreign Zionist centres against the socialist
countries has substantially increased. At the present time,
there are more than 600 Zionist centres and organizations
in the capitalist states, possessing significant propaganda
resources. Since Israel’s aggression against the Arab
countries in June 1967, it has begun a campaign of
widespread and open provocation against the Soviet
Union and other socialist countries.

Zionist circles, in trying to deflect the attention of
world public opinion away from the aggressive actions of
the US in Indochina and of Israel in the Middle East, and
toward the non-existent ‘problem’ of the Jews in the
USSR, have unleashed on our country a broad campaign
of slander, and to this end are organizing abroad anti-
Soviet meetings, assemblies, conferences, marches and
other hostile acts.

. . . Along with the cultivation of anti-Soviet world
opinion, the Zionists are striving to exert ideological
influence on the Jewish population of the Soviet Union, in
order to provoke negative manifestations and create a
nationalist underground in our country.

. . . The KGB organs have been focusing on operations
for curtailing hostile and specially organized activity of
Jewish nationalists, in particular methods of dismantling,
separating and dividing groups, compromising their
spiritual leaders and isolating deluded individuals from
them.—

Soviet policy oscillated between the desire to deter Jewish
emigration to Israel and intermittent anxiety at the impact
on foreign opinion of the persecution of the refuseniks.
Brezhnev was in a particularly nervous mood for several
months before his visit to Washington in June 1973. He
told the Politburo in March, ‘In the last few months.

hysteria has been whipped up around the so-called
education tax on individuals emigrating abroad. I have
thought a lot about what to do.’ Unusually he criticized
Andropov by name for failing to implement his
instructions to end collection of the tax. ‘It was my fault
that we delayed implementing your instructions for six
days,’ Andropov confessed. ‘It was simply the
unwieldiness of our apparatus.’ As Brezhnev carried on
complaining, his tone became increasingly self-pitying.
‘On Saturday and Sunday I didn’t even go outside’, he
told the Politburo, ‘and now I will have to devote even
more time to these questions.’ He concluded the
discussion with a bizarre, rambling monologue which
epitomized the broader confusion of Soviet policy:

Why not give [the Jews] some little theatre with 500 seats
for a Jewish variety show that will work under our
censorship with a repertoire under our supervision? Let
Auntie Sonya sing Jewish wedding songs there. I’m not
proposing this. I’m just talking ... I’m speaking freely
because I still have not raised my hand for anything I’m
saying. For now. I’m simply keeping my hands at my
sides and thinking things over, this is the point . . .
Zionism is making us stupid, and we [even] take money
from an old lady who has received an education.—

The outbreak of the Yom Kippur War enabled Andropov

to recoup some of his personal prestige within the
Politburo. The simultaneous attack by Egyptian and
Syrian forces on 6 October 1973 caught Israel and the
United States, but not the KGB, off guard. Still conscious
of having been caught out by the beginning of the Six-
Day War six years earlier, the KGB was able to provide
advance warning to the Politburo before Yom Kippur -
probably as a result of intelligence from its penetrations of
the Egyptian armed forces and intelligence community.—

The KGB appears to have achieved no similar
penetration of the Israeli Defence Force and intelligence
agencies, despite the inclusion of large numbers of agents
among those allowed to emigrate to Israel. According to
Oleg Kalugin, head of FCD Counter Intelligence:

Many promised to work for us abroad, but almost
invariably forgot their pledges as soon as they crossed the
Soviet border. A few did help us, keeping the KGB
informed about the plans and activities of Jewish emigre
and refusenik groups. Our ultimate goal was to place
these Jewish emigres, many of whom were scientists, into
sensitive positions in Western government, science or the
military-industrial complex. But we enjoyed little success,
and by the time I stepped down as head of Foreign
Counter-Intelligence in 1980 I didn’t know of a single
valuable [Jewish emigre] mole in the West for the KGB

42

Other Soviet-bloc intelligence services were probably no
more successful than the KGB. Markus Wolf later
acknowledged that during his thirty-three years as head of
the East German HVA, ‘We never managed to penetrate
Israeli intelligence.’—

The KGB found it far easier to infiltrate agents into
Israel than to control them once they were there. The
small residency in the Russian Orthodox Church mission
in Jerusalem, which was kept under close surveillance by
Shin Bet, could not cope with the demands made of it by
the Centre. In October 1970 the Centre approved a plan to
expand intelligence operations in Israel by sending a
series of illegals on short-term missions as well as
preparing the establishment of a permanent illegal
residency.— Among the illegals despatched to Israel in
1971-72 both to contact existing agents and to cultivate
potential new recruits were KARSKY, PATRIYA, RUN
and YORIS, posing as - respectively - Canadian, Spanish,
Mexican and Finnish nationals.— In 1972 an illegal
residency in Israel also began operating, run by the thirty-
four-year-old Yuri Fyodorovich Finov (codenamed
KRAVCHENKO), posing as the Austrian Karl-Bemd
Motl. Plans were made to give Finov control of a network
of five agents:— FEON, a medical researcher with Israeli

intelligence contacts who had been recruited in 1966
while on a visit to the Soviet Union;— KIM, a bogus
Jewish refugee sent to Israel in 1970, where he enrolled at
the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to penetrate
organizations such as the Prisoners of Zion Association
which campaigned for the release of Jewish refuseniks in
the Soviet Union;— PETRESKU, another KGB Jewish
agent who arrived in Israel in 1970;— GERDA, an
employee of the German embassy;— and RON, a foreign
ambassador in Israel.—

Linov’s new illegal residency, however, survived for
only a year. The first danger signal, the significance of
which was apparently not appreciated by the Centre, was
KIM’s sudden unauthorized appearance in West Berlin in
February 1973, where he complained to the KGB that
Shin Bet was showing an interest in him.— A month later
Linov was arrested while in the middle of an intelligence
operation. The Centre concluded that he had been
betrayed by LEON, who may well have been a double
agent controlled by Shin Bet.— PETRESKU was also
suspected of having been turned by Israeli intelligence.—
Though contact with RON (and probably GERDA)
continued, the Centre noted that RON was ‘inclined to be
extortionate’ in his financial demands.—

Following Linov’s arrest, the Centre shelved plans for
an illegal residency and cancelled all visits by illegals to

Israel.— Plans by the Hungarian AVH to send their illegal
YASAI to Israel posing as a French-bom Jew were also
shelved after he refused to be circumcised. — Two FCD
officers, V. N. Okhulov and I. F. Khokhlov, took part in
protracted secret negotiations with Israeli intelligence
officers to secure Linov’s release. Throughout the
negotiations he was referred to by his Austrian alias
‘MotF. The Israelis requested in exchange the release of
Heinrich Speter, a Bulgarian Jew sentenced to death on a
probably spurious charge of espionage, and of sixteen
Soviet Jews imprisoned for an alleged attempt to hijack a
Soviet aircraft. The KGB insisted at first on a straight
swap of Linov for Speter, claiming that both men had
been found guilty on similar charges of espionage. In the
end, however, the Centre also agreed to free Silva
Zalmonson, one of the alleged hijackers, and to allow two
of her companions to emigrate to Israel at the end of their
prison sentences. As a condition of the exchange, the
Israeli negotiators insisted that no mention be made in
public of the release of ‘MotF - probably to avoid the
impression that Israel was willing to exchange captured
Soviet spies for persecuted Jews in the Soviet bloc.

The arrival in Israel of Speter and Zalmonson in
September 1974 was thus interpreted by some Western
observers as evidence that the Kremlin had decided on a
more conciliatory policy towards Jewish emigration. Time
magazine’s Moscow correspondent saw their release as a

Soviet attempt to influence the US Congress by making a
humanitarian gesture. Andropov appeared delighted with
the outcome of the negotiations for Linov’s release and
presented Okhulov and Khokhlov with formal letters of
congratulation.— The Centre was less pleased with Linov.
Officers in the FCD Illegals Directorate believed that he
had given away more than he should have done under
Israeli interrogation.—

During the mid-1970s Soviet policy towards Jewish
emigration hardened once again. The immediate cause
was the passage through Congress in 1974 of the Jackson-
Vanik and Stevenson amendments to the 1972 US/Soviet
Trade Agreement, making most-favoured-nation status
dependent on the relaxation of curbs on emigration. The
numbers of exit visas given in the mid-1970s declined
from the record numbers of over 30,000 a year in 1972-73
to 20,000 in 1974 and less than 15,000 a year in 1975-76.
Andropov continued to take a close, even obsessive,
personal interest in the surveillance of would-be Jewish
emigrants and all contacts between Soviet Jews and their
foreign supporters.— He regarded even the sending of
matsos (unleavened bread) from the West to Soviet Jews
for the seder (the Passover meal) as an issue of such grave
importance that it needed to be brought to the attention of
the Politburo, writing in March 1975:

From the experience of previous years, it is clear that the
delivery of such parcels [of matsos] to the addressees
gives rise to negative processes among the Jewish
population of the USSR, and reinforces nationalist and
pro-emigration feelings.

In view of this, and in view of the fact that at the
present time Jewish communities are fully supplied with
locally baked matsos, the Committee of State Security
considers it essential for parcels containing matsos sent
from abroad to be confiscated . .

The claim that Soviet Jews were already well supplied
with Passover matsos was disinformation designed to pre-
empt opposition to Andropov’s proposal from those
Politburo members who, like Brezhnev, occasionally
grasped that the obsession with Zionist conspiracy was
‘making us stupid’. Andropov regarded foreign telephone
calls as an even greater danger than imported matsos, in
view of the politically incorrect tendency of Soviet Jews
to complain to foreigners about the various forms of
persecution to which they were subject. In June 1975 he
reported personally to the Politburo on the success of
KGB measures ‘to prevent the use of international
communications channels for the transfer abroad of
tendentious and slanderous information’ by Soviet Jews.
During the previous two years over a hundred telephone
lines used by ‘Jewish nationalists’ to make phone calls

abroad had been disconnected, ‘thereby inflicting a
noticeable blow on foreign Zionist organizations’. More
recently, however, Jews had taken to using telephone
booths in telegraph offices, giving the staff non-Jewish
names in order not to arouse suspicion, and direct-dial
international telephone lines where there was no operator
to keep track of them.—

Zionism was second only to the United States (‘the
Main Adversary’) as a target for KGB active measures.
For some conspiracy theorists in the Centre and elsewhere
in Moscow, the two targets were in any case closely
linked. Arkadi Shevchenko, the Soviet Under Secretary-
General of the United Nations in the mid-1970s, was
struck by the puzzlement in Moscow at how the United
States functioned with such technological efficiency
despite so little apparent regulation: ‘Many are inclined
towards the fantastic notion that there must be a secret
control centre somewhere in the United States.’— The
power behind the scenes, they believed, was monopoly
capital which, in turn, was largely identified in some
Soviet imaginations with the Jewish lobby.

The Centre devoted enormous energy to anti-Zionist
active measures within the United States which, it was
hoped, would also discredit the Jewish lobby. Probably
the Centre’s most successful tactic was to exploit the
activities of the extremist Jewish Defense League (JDL),

founded by a Brooklyn rabbi, Meir Kahane, whose
inflammatory rhetoric declared the need for Jews to
protect themselves by ‘all necessary means’ - including
violence. The JDL so perfectly fitted the violent, racist
image of Zionism which the KGB wished to project that,
had it not existed. Service A might well have sought to
invent a similarly extremist US-based underground
movement. In September 1969, six Arab missions at the
UN received threatening telegrams from the League,
claiming that they were ‘legitimate targets’ for revenge
attacks for terrorist acts committed by Arabs.— A year
later, on 4 October 1970, KGB officers in New York
posted forged letters containing similar threats, purporting
to come from the JDL and other Zionist extremists, to the
heads of Arab missions. The Centre calculated that these
letters would provoke protests by the missions to both U
Thant, the UN Secretary-General, and the US
government.—

In the early hours of 25 November 1970 there was a
bomb attack on the Manhattan offices of the Soviet airline
Aeroflot, followed by an anonymous phone call to
Associated Press by a caller who claimed responsibility
for the bombing and used the JDL slogan, ‘Never again!’
Another bomb attack on 8 January 1971, this time outside
a Soviet cultural centre in Washington, was followed by a
similar phone call and the use of the same slogan. A
spokesman for the JDL denied the League’s involvement

in the bombing but refused to condemn it. Once again, the
Centre decided to imitate the example of the League. On
25 July the head of the FCD First (North American)
Department, Anatoli Tikhonovich Kireyev, instructed the
New York residency to implement operation PANDORA:
the planting of a delayed-action explosive device in ‘the
Negro section of New York’, preferably ‘one of the Negro
colleges’. After the explosion, the residency was ordered
to make anonymous phone calls to black organizations,
claiming responsibility on behalf of the JDL. PANDORA
was merely the most dramatic in a series of active
measures designed to stir up racial hostility between the
black and Jewish communities. Simultaneously Andropov
approved the distribution of bogus JDL leaflets fabricated
by Service A, which denounced the crimes perpetrated by
‘black mongrels’. Sixty letters were sent to black student
and youth groups giving lurid accounts of fictitious JDL
atrocities and demanding vengeance. Other anti- Semitic
pamphlets, circulated in the name of a non-existent ‘Party
of National Rebirth’, called on whites to save America
from the Jews.—

The main data base used by Service A in its active-
measures campaigns against Zionist targets from 1973
onwards was obtained during operation SIMON, carried
out by an agent of the Viennese residency codenamed
CHUB (‘Forelock’) against the Paris headquarters of the
World Jewish Congress (WJC). Preliminary

reconnaissance by CHUB established that the premises
were unguarded at night and had no burglar alarm. Using
a duplicate key to the main entrance, he entered the WJC
Paris offices on the night of 12- 13 February 1972 and
removed the entire card index listing names and addresses
of the WJC’s 20,000 French supporters together with
details of their financial contributions, address plates
giving the 30,000 addresses in fifty-five countries to
which the WJC French-language periodical Information
Juive was despatched, finance files relating to the
activities of the WJC European Executive and details of
the financing of a book on anti-semitism in Poland. At 1 1
a.m. on 14 June CHUB delivered ah this material, which
filled two suitcases and a shopping bag, to the Soviet
consulate in Paris, then returned to Vienna using a false
passport. —

Service A spent much of the next year planning the
production of forgeries based on the format of the stolen
documents which were designed to discredit the WJC and
Zionism. On 4 January 1973, N. A. Kosov, the head of
Service A, submitted a large-scale plan for active
measures based on the forgeries which was approved by
Andropov on the following day. Many of the fabricated
documents were posted to addresses in Europe and North
America over the next few years in the name of a
fictitious ‘Union of Young Zionists’: among them a letter
from one of the leaders of the French branch of the WJC

containing compromising information on the World
Zionist Organization (WZO), which, through its executive
arm, the Jewish Agency, was responsible for Jewish
emigration to Israel; financial documents purporting to
show that WJC leaders had embezzled large sums of
money which had been collected to provide aid for Israel;
evidence that a series of newspapers had been bribed to
publish pro-Israeli propaganda; and material designed to
show that the WJC had links with Jewish extremists who
were secretly trying to provoke outbreaks of anti-
semitism in order to encourage emigration to Israel.—
There is no evidence, however, that this elaborate
disinformation exercise had any significant impact. No
KGB active-measures campaign was capable of
countering the adverse publicity generated by the
persecution of the refuseniks. The Centre’s obsession with
the menace of Zionist subversion also introduced into the
campaign an element of sometimes absurd exaggeration.
It decided, for example, to exploit the murder in October
1973 of a female relative of the future French President,
Valery Giscard d’Estaing, by distributing in the name of a
fictitious French Israeli support group a ludicrous
fabrication declaring that she had been killed by Zionists
in revenge for Giscard’ s part in the prosecution some
years earlier of a group of Jewish financiers. So far from
grasping the pointlessness of this dismal active measure,
the Centre was unaccountably proud of it.—

Though estimating the impact of KGB anti-Zionist and
anti-Israeli active measures in Europe is inevitably
difficult, they appear to have achieved no more than
marginal successes. Among these marginal successes was
the visit to the Soviet Union of the British Chief Rabbi,
Immanuel (later Lord) Jakobovits, in December 1975. On
his return he was greeted by the headline in the Jerusalem
Post. ‘Jakobovits “Duped” by Soviets, Say Those Who
Have Lived There’. Though the headline was
exaggerated, the Chief Rabbi had shown a degree of
naivety when subjected during his visit to a succession of
carefully prepared active measures. Even when he wrote
an account of his visit in his memoirs nine years later, it
seems not to have occurred to him that the Russian Jews
with whom he had lengthy discussions during his visit
inevitably included a series of well-trained KGB agents.—
Mitrokhin’s notes contain the codenames of eleven of
them; their task included ‘conveying slanted information
about the situation in the Soviet Union’.—

Though Jakobovits met dissidents as well as official
representatives during his visit, he returned with an
inadequate grasp of the numbers who wished to emigrate,
telling a packed audience in the St John’s Wood
Synagogue: ‘Even if the doors of the Soviet Union were
freely opened to emigration, the most optimistic estimate
is that only about half a million Jews would avail
themselves of the opportunity, while some believe that the

figure would not be much above 100,000.’

The fact that Jakobovits even mentioned the highly
implausible hypothesis that as few as 100,000 Soviet Jews
might wish to emigrate strongly suggests that he had been
influenced by the ‘slanted information’ passed on to him
by KGB agents. In fact, within twenty years of his visit
the total number of emigrants had risen to over a million.
Convinced that ‘the bulk of Soviet Jewry’ did not wish to
emigrate, the Chief Rabbi placed as much emphasis on
improving the conditions of Jewish life in the Soviet
Union as on supporting the refuseniks.— But if Jakobovits
showed a degree of naivety, so too did the KGB. Agent
SHCHERBAKOV was given the impossible task of
cultivating the executive director of the Chief Rabbi’s
office, Moshe Davis, with a view to his recruitment by the
KGB.^

Probably the greatest success of the Soviet anti-Zionist
campaign was its role in promoting the passage in the UN
General Assembly by sixty-seven to fifty-five votes (with
fifteen abstentions) of Resolution 3379, denouncing
Zionism as a form of racism, in November 1975. In
Jakobovits ’s view, ‘UN resolutions hostile to Israel had
been commonplace, but none could compare in virulence
to this one. Its impact on Jews everywhere was
devastating . . . ’— The anti-Western majority which
voted for Resolution 3379, however, was achieved as

much by the lobbying of the Arab states as by the Soviet
bloc. Though the KGB officers operating under
diplomatic cover in New York and elsewhere doubtless
played their part in the lobbying, there is no indication in
any of the files noted by Mitrokhin that the KGB made a
substantial contribution to the success of the vote. Soviet
diplomacy appears to have contributed far more than
Soviet intelligence to the passage of Resolution 3379.

In 1977 the Soviet Union began a gradual increase in
the number of exit visas granted to would-be Jewish
emigrants in an attempt to demonstrate its compliance
with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Accords
of 1975.— Almost 29,000 Jews emigrated in 1978,
followed by a record 51,000 in 1979.— KGB pressure on
the refuseniks, however, was unrelenting. In March 1977
the leading refusenik, Anatoli (Natan) Shcharansky, was
arrested. For the next year he resisted all the attempts of
his KGB interrogators to bully and cajole him into co-
operating in his own show trial by admitting working for
the CIA. Andropov refused to admit defeat. In June 1978
he falsely informed the Politburo that, ‘Shcharansky
admits his guilt; we have caught him in his espionage
activities and can present the appropriate materials.’ How
long a sentence Shcharansky received, Andropov added,
would ‘depend on how he behave [d] himself in court. —
The trial, though almost unpublicized inside the Soviet
Union, ended in a moral victory for Shcharansky, who

made a movingly defiant final address:

For two thousand years the Jewish people, my people,
have been dispersed all over the world and seemingly
deprived of any hope of returning. But still, each year
Jews have stubbornly, and apparently without reason, said
to each other, ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’ And today, when
I am further than ever from my dream, from my people
and from my [wife] Avital, and when many difficult years
of prisons and camps lie ahead of me, I say to my wife
and to my people, ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’

And to the court, which has only to read a sentence that
was prepared long ago - to you I have nothing to say.—

Shcharansky was sentenced to thirteen years in prison and
camps on trumped-up charges of espionage and betrayal
of the motherland. There is little doubt that Andropov was
personally responsible for his persecution. Despite their
conspiracy theories about Zionism, some - perhaps most -
other members of the Politburo barely knew the name
either of Shcharansky or of any other refusenik. In
September President Jimmy Carter raised the
Shcharansky case at a meeting with Gromyko in the
White House. Gromyko replied that he had never heard of
Shcharansky. Dobrynin, who was present at the meeting,
believed at the time that Gromyko ‘had shown great

diplomatic skill in handling such a sensitive subject by
feigning ignorance of it’. After the meeting, however,
Dobrynin discovered to his surprise that Gromyko’s
ignorance was genuine: ‘He had instructed his
subordinates in Moscow not to bother him with what he
called such “absurd” matters.’—

With the breakdown in East- West relations which
followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December
1979, there was a sharp cut-back in the number of exit
visas given to Jewish emigrants. Emigrants fell from
51,000 in 1979 to 25,000 in 1980 - many probably on
visas issued before the change in Soviet policy. In 1981
there were fewer than 10,000, in 1982 under 5,000, and
for each of the next four years fewer than 2,000.— During
the first half of the 1980s the refuseniks, like the rest of
the dissident movements within the Soviet Union, seemed
at their lowest ebb since their emergence in the late 1960s.
Those who remained at liberty were under constant KGB
surveillance. Andropov and his successors as KGB
Chairman, Fedorchuk and Chebrikov, took pride in
reporting to the Politburo and Central Committee on the
success of their efforts to disrupt the refuseniks’ ‘anti-
Soviet’ activities. On a number of occasions, the KGB
exploited popular anti-semitism in order to intimidate the
refuseniks. Andropov reported in May 1981, for example,
that an attempt by ‘Jewish nationalists’ to hold a meeting
in a forest near Moscow to commemorate the Holocaust

and protest against the refusal of exit visas had been
prevented ‘with the active participation of the Soviet
public’.—

Andropov’s term as Soviet leader from 1982 to 1984
witnessed the tensest period in Soviet- American relations
since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. — The Centre’s
conspiracy theories about Zionist- American collaboration
to subvert the Soviet bloc gave added impetus to KGB
operations against Zionist targets. In 1982 the KGB held a
high-level in-house conference in Leningrad devoted to
‘The main tendencies of the subversive activity of Zionist
centres abroad and Jewish nationalists within the country,
and topical questions relating to increasing the
effectiveness of KGB agencies in combating this
[activity] in present-day conditions.’ Meeting soon after
the suppression of the Polish Solidarity movement (whose
minority of Jewish leaders attracted disproportionate
interest in the Centre), the conference agreed that
‘virtually no major negative incidents took place in the
socialist countries of Europe without the involvement of
Zionists’. A number of speakers claimed that the Zionists’
penetration of the political leadership of much of the West
had given them a major influence over Western policy
which was exacerbating both East- West tension and
‘treasonable tendencies’ among Soviet Jews.— In the
summer of 1982, probably as a result of this conference,
residents were sent a detailed four-year ‘Plan for Work

against Zionism in 1982-1986’, warning them that the
Soviet bloc was threatened by ‘all kinds of subversive
operations’ organized by Zionists in league with Israel
and ‘imperialist intelligence services’, especially the CIA.
These had to be countered by a major increase in
intelligence collection on ‘the plans, forms and methods
of Zionist subversion’ as well as by a wide range of active
measures designed to weaken and divide the Zionist
movement.—

In a review of foreign operations early in 1984,
Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD, claimed that
during the previous two years, ‘The subversive activity of
emigre, nationalist and Zionist organizations and
associations abroad has shown a marked increase. ’— The
FCD ‘Plan of Work’ for 1984 put first on its list of
counter-intelligence targets: ‘Plans for subversive action
or secret operations by the adversary’s special services
and by centres for ideological diversion and nationalists,
especially Zionists and other anti-Soviet organizations,
against the USSR and other countries of the socialist
community.’—

At the beginning of the Gorbachev era, there were still
many in the Centre who believed that the American
‘military-industrial complex’ was dominated by the
Jewish lobby. Proponents of even more extreme Zionist
conspiracy theories included L. P. Zamoysky, deputy

head of the FCD Directorate of Intelligence Information.
Despite his reputation as one of the Centre’s ablest
analysts, Zamoysky maintained that Zionism had behind
it not merely Jewish finance capital but also the occult
power of Freemasonry whose rites, he maintained, were
of Jewish origin. It was, he insisted, a ‘fact’ that
Freemasons were an integral part of the Jewish
conspiracy.—

During his early career, Mikhail Gorbachev absorbed at
least some of the anti-Zionist prejudices which were part
of the mindset of the CPSU. Those prejudices were
clearly apparent at a Politburo meeting on 29 August
1985 which discussed the case of the leading dissident,
Andrei Sakharov, and his Jewish wife, Elena Bonner,
both of whom had been banished to Gorky five years
earlier. Chebrikov, the KGB Chairman, declared
(inaccurately) that Bonner had ‘one hundred per cent
influence’ over her husband and dictated his actions.
‘That’s what Zionism does for you!’ joked Gorbachev. It
was Gorbachev, none the less, who over the next four
years played the leading role in resolving the problem of
the refuseniks. Gorbachev realized that neither democratic
reform nor the normalization of East- West relations could
continue so long as Sakharov’s exile and the persecution
of other dissidents continued. Because of the opposition
of the KGB and the old guard within the Politburo,
however, he was forced to proceed cautiously. It was not

till December 1986, twenty-one months after he became
General Secretary, that he judged that the Politburo was
ready to accept Sakharov’s and Bonner’s return from
internal exile.— The rearguard action against ending the
persecution of the refuseniks was even stronger than in
the case of non- Jewish dissidents. The release of Natan
Shcharansky from the gulag in 1986 and his departure for
Israel, where he arrived to a hero’s welcome, none the
less marked a turning point in the struggle for Jewish
emigration.

In August 1987, at the request of the KGB leadership,
the Politburo agreed to a propaganda campaign designed
to deter would-be Jewish emigrants to Israel, as well as
measures such as the foundation of Jewish cultural
associations which would provide positive incentives to
remain in the Soviet Union.— By this time, Gorbachev’s
own policy was to remove the obstacles to the emigration
of the refuseniks while encouraging as many other Soviet
Jews as possible to remain. Though he saw the departure
of Jewish professionals as ‘a brain drain’ which
threatened to slow the progress of perestroika, he
abandoned the attempt to hold on to those who were
determined to depart. Of the 8,000 Jewish emigrants in
1987, 77 per cent had previously been denied exit visas.—

The new Jewish cultural associations were subjected to
a series of anti-semitic attacks. In 1988, for example, the

refusenik Judith Lurye arrived for a meeting of one of the
associations to find the door of the meeting hall
padlocked and guarded by two KGB officers. A notice
nailed to the door declared: ‘Why do we - the great,
intelligent, beautiful Slavs - consider it a normal
phenomenon to live with Yids among us? How can these
dirty stinking Jews call themselves by such a proud and
heroic name as “Russians”?’—

In 1989, with the campaign to deter Jewish emigration
in visible disarray, the floodgates were opened at last.
That year 71,000 Jews left the Soviet Union, followed
over the next two years by another 400,000.— To the old
guard in the KGB, bitterness at the collapse of the Soviet
Union was compounded by what they saw as the triumph
of Zionist subversion.

13

Middle Eastern Terrorism and the

Palestinians

The precedent set by the KGB’s use of Sandinista
guerrillas against US targets in Central and North
America during the later 1960s- encouraged the Centre to
consider the use of Palestinian terrorists as proxies in the
Middle East and Europe. The man chiefly responsible for
exporting Palestinian terrorism to Europe was Dr Wadi
Haddad, deputy leader and head of foreign operations of
the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PEEP), codenamed KHUTOR,- headed by Dr
George Habash. On the day Israeli forces destroyed his
family home in Galilee, Haddad had sworn that he would
pursue the Israelis for the rest of his life.

Convinced of the futility of attacking Israeli military
targets after the humiliation of the Six-Day War, Haddad
devised a new strategy of aircraft hijacking and terrorist
attacks on ‘Zionist’ targets in Europe which made front-
page news across the world and attracted the favourable
attention of the Centre. ‘To kill a Jew far from the
battlefield’, he declared, ‘has more effect than killing
hundreds of Jews in battle.’ The first hijack organized by
Haddad was in July 1968 on board an El A1 Boeing 707

bound for Tel Aviv which two PFLP hijackers renamed
‘Palestinian Liberation 007’ and forced to land in Algiers.
Though Israel had publicly declared that it would never
negotiate with terrorists, Haddad forced it to do just that.
After more than a month’s negotiations, the Israeli
passengers on board were exchanged for sixteen
Palestinians in Israeli jails.- It was probably in the
aftermath of the hijack that the KGB made its first contact
with Haddad.- The KGB remained in touch with him
during the spate of PFLP hijackings and attacks on Jewish
targets in European capitals over the next few years.

In 1970 Haddad was recruited by the KGB as Agent
NATSIONALIST. Andropov reported to Brezhnev in
May:

The nature of our relations with W. Haddad enables us to
control the external operations of the PFLP to a certain
degree, to exert influence in a manner favourable to the
Soviet Union, and also to carry out active measures in
support of our interests through the organization’s assets
while observing the necessary conspiratorial secrecy .-

Haddad’s career as a KGB agent very nearly ended only a
few months after it began. On the evening of 1 1 July, he
had a meeting in his Beirut apartment with one of the
PFLP hijackers, the twenty- four-year-old Laila Khalid,
whose photogenic appearance had caught the attention of

the media and helped to make her the world’s best-known
female terrorist. While they were talking, six Soviet-made
Katyushka rockets - launched, almost certainly by
Mossad, from the flat opposite - hit his apartment.
Amazingly, Haddad and Khalid suffered only minor
injuries. -

One of Haddad’s reasons for becoming a KGB agent
was probably to obtain Soviet arms for the PFLP. With
Brezhnev’s approval, an initial delivery of five RPG-7
hand-held anti-tank grenade launchers in July was
followed by the elaborately planned operation VOSTOK
(‘East’), during which a large consignment of arms and
ammunition were handed over to the PFLP at sea near
Aden under cover of darkness. To prevent any of the arms
and ammunition being traced back to the KGB if they
were captured, the shipment consisted of fifty West
German pistols (ten with silencers) with 5,000 rounds of
ammunition; fifty captured MG-ZI machine guns with

10.000 rounds of ammunition; five British-made Sterling
automatics with silencers and 36,000 rounds of
ammunition; fifty American AR-16 automatics with

30.000 rounds of ammunition; fifteen booby-trap mines
manufactured from foreign materials; and five radio-
activated ‘SNOP’ mines, also assembled from foreign
materials. The two varieties of mine were among the most
advanced small weapons in the extensive Soviet arsenal,
and, like some of the silencers, had never been previously

supplied even to other members of the Warsaw Pact.-

The first use of Haddad as a KGB proxy was in
operation VINT: the attempt, personally approved by
Brezhnev, to kidnap the deputy head of the CIA station in
Lebanon, codenamed VIR, and ‘have him taken to the
Soviet Union’. Andropov assured Brezhnev that no
suspicion would attach to the KGB:

Bearing in mind that the Palestinian guerrilla
organizations have recently stepped up their activities in
Lebanon against American intelligence and its agents, the
Lebanese authorities and the Americans would suspect
Palestinian guerrillas of carrying out the [VINT]
operation. The ultimate purpose of the operation would
only be known to NATSIONALIST [Haddad], on the
foreign side, and to the KGB officers directly involved in
planning the operation and carrying it out, on the Soviet
side.

Despite elaborate preparations, operation VINT failed.
VIR varied his daily routine and Haddad’s gunmen found
it impossible to abduct him. A later KGB plan for the
gunmen to assassinate him also failed.-

A number of other PFLP operations against Mossad
and CIA targets succeeded. In 1970 an individual
codenamed SOLIST, who was being cultivated by the

KGB residency in Beirut, came under suspicion of
working for the Israelis after his brother was arrested in
Cairo, charged with being a Mossad agent. SOLIST was
kidnapped by a PFLP snatch squad, headed by Ahmad
Yunis (also known as Abu Ahmad), chief of the PFLP
security service in Lebanon, and brought to the Beirut
residency for interrogation. Soon afterwards Yunis
became a KGB confidential contact (though not, like
Haddad, a fully recruited agent) with the codename
TARSHIKH.S

The KGB was complicit in a number of other
abductions by Yunis. In August 1970 his security service
kidnapped a US academic. Professor Hani Korda, whom
it, and apparently the KGB, believed - quite possibly
wrongly - to be a deep-cover CIA officer operating in
Lebanon against Palestinian targets. In his Beirut
apartment they found a notebook with the names and
addresses of his contacts in Arab countries. Korda was
smuggled across the Lebanese border to a PFLP base in
Jordan, but, though brutally interrogated, refused to
confess and succeeded in committing suicide.— In
October the PFLP kidnapped Aredis Derounian, an
Armenian-bom American journalist in Beirut suspected of
having links with the CIA. Though Derounian was best
known for his attacks on US fascist sympathizers written
under the pseudonym John Roy Carlson, the PFLP
considered his work pro-Zionist and anti- Arab. In his

apartment the PFLP found two passports and a mass of
documents which it passed on to the KGB. Derounian was
more fortunate than Korda. After being held prisoner for
several days in a refugee camp in Tripoli, he managed to
escape and take refuge in the US embassy.—

KGB collaboration with Haddad was even closer than
with Yunis. To conceal his contacts with the Beirut
residency from his colleagues, Haddad would send his
secretary by car to rendezvous with a KGB operations
officer who followed him, also by car, to a location
chosen by Haddad, which was never the same from one
meeting to the next.— The main purpose of these
meetings for the KGB was to encourage Haddad to
undertake ‘special actions’ proposed or approved by the
KGB and to prevent PFLP operations which ran counter
to Soviet interests.— Thanks to Haddad, the KGB almost
certainly had advance notice of all the main PFLP terrorist
attacks.

The most dramatic operation organized by Haddad in
1970 was a plan for the almost simultaneous hijack of
four airliners bound for New York on 6 September and
their diversion to a remote former RAF airbase in Jordan
known as Dawson’s Field. The most difficult assignment
was given to Laila Khalid, still photogenic despite plastic
surgery to change her appearance since her previous
hijack, and the Nicaraguan- American Patrick Arguello.

The pair posed as a newly married couple. Their aircraft,
an El A1 Boeing 707 departing from Tel Aviv, was the
only one of the four which, as a result of previous PFLP
hijacks, carried an armed air marshal. Though Khalid and
Arguello succeeded in smuggling both handguns and
grenades aboard, the hijack failed. Arguello was shot by
the air marshal and Khalid, who was prevented by other
passengers from removing the grenades hidden in her bra,
was arrested after the plane made an emergency landing at
Heathrow. The hijackers aboard a TWA Boeing 707 and a
Swissair DCS, however, successfully diverted them to
Dawson’s Field, which they promptly renamed
Revolution Airstrip. A hijacked Pan Am Boeing 747,
which was discovered to be too large to land at the
airstrip, landed instead at Cairo where passengers and
crew were hastily evacuated and the aircraft blown up. A
fifth plane, a BOAC VC 10, was hijacked three days later
and flown to Revolution Airstrip to provide British
hostages to barter for Khalid. There the passengers were
eventually exchanged for Khalid and Palestinian terrorists
imprisoned in West Germany and Switzerland, and the
aircraft were destroyed by the hijackers.—

Mitrokhin’s material gives no indication of what advice
FCD ‘special actions’ experts gave Haddad about the
PFFP hijacks. Proof that they did advise him on terrorist
attacks, however, is provided by the file on operation
NASOS: an attack on the Israeli tanker Coral Sea while it

was carrying Iranian crude oil under a Liberian flag of
convenience to Eilat. The KGB advised Haddad on both
the method and location of the attack in the straits of Bab
al-Mandab close to the island of Mandaran. On 13 June
1971 two PFLP terrorists, codenamed CHUK and GEK
by the KGB, boarded a speed-boat on the coast of South
Yemen and launched an attack on the tanker using three
of the RPG-7 hand-held anti-tank grenade launchers
supplied by the KGB in the previous year. According to
the KGB post-operation report, between seven and nine
rockets were fired, of which five hit their target. Though
the Coral Sea was set on fire, however, it did not sink.
CHUK and GEK made their escape to the coast of North
Yemen. The head of the FCD, Fyodor Mortin, was
sufficiently encouraged by the partial success of operation
NASOS to recommend to Andropov afterwards that the
KGB ‘make more active use of NATSIONALIST and his
gunmen to carry out aggressive operations aimed directly
against Israel’.— Relations with Haddad were complicated
by turmoil within the PFLP. In 1972, Habash, as leader of
the PFLP, publicly renounced international terrorism,
provoking a bitter row with Haddad, who set up a new
headquarters in Baghdad where he founded a PFLP
splinter group, the Special Operations Group.— KGB
support for Haddad, however, continued.

Moscow showed rather less interest in the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO, codenamed KARUSEL

),— the umbrella organization for all Palestinian
movements which was based in Jordan until 1970, than in
Haddad’s faction of the PFLP. Disguised as an Egyptian
technician, the PLO chairman, Yasir Arafat (initially
codenamed AREF),— had accompanied Nasser on a visit
to the Soviet Union in 1968 and, probably as a result of
Nasser’s backing, received a promise of weapons.— For
the next few years, Arafat was cultivated without
conspicuous success by an FCD officer, Vasili
Fyodorovich Samoylenko.— Arafat, however, was
unaware that since 1968 the KGB had had an agent,
codenamed GIDAR, in the office of his personal
intelligence chief and most trusted adviser, Hani al-
Hasan.—

In September 1970 King Hussein of Jordan, infuriated
by the recent PFLP hijacking of aircraft to a Jordanian
airfield and by the emergence of the PLO as a virtually
independent state within his kingdom, used his army to
drive it out. Thousands of Palestinians were killed in what
became known as Black September. A shadowy terrorist
organization of that name was set up within Arafat’s
Fatah movement at the heart of the PLO when it
regrouped in Lebanon. Among the atrocities committed
by Black September, for which Arafat disingenuously
disclaimed responsibility, was an attack on Israeli athletes
competing in the August 1972 Munich Olympics, in
which eleven were killed.

In 1972 Arafat paid his first official visit to Moscow at
the head of a PLO delegation but failed to impress the
Centre, which distrusted the ‘slanted’ nature of the
information he provided and found him anxious to
maintain contact with ‘reactionary Arab regimes’ as well
as with the Soviet bloc.— Though Mitrokhin’s notes do
not mention it, the Centre was also doubtless well aware
that Arafat’s claims to have been bom in Jemsalem were
fraudulent; in reality, though his parents were Palestinian
and he was deeply committed to the Palestinian cause, he
had been bom in Cairo and had spent his first twenty-
eight years in Egypt. The Centre also knew that during the
Suez War of 1956, when Arafat claimed to have been an
officer in the Egyptian army fighting to defend Port Said,
he had actually been attending a Communist-sponsored
student conference in Czechoslovakia.— The fact that
Arafat had friendly relations with the deviant Communist
dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceau§escu, strengthened
Moscow’s suspicion of him. Arafat was franker with
Ceau§escu than with the Kremlin. According to the
Romanian foreign intelligence chief. Ion Pacepa, during a
visit to Bucharest in October 1972 Arafat claimed that
Hani al-Hasan, who accompanied him, had been behind
the Black September attack at the Munich Olympics.—

Arafat’s visit to Bucharest led to the establishment of a
close liaison between the PLO and the Romanian foreign

intelligence service. Probably in response to the Centre’s
desire not to be upstaged by the Romanians, a Politburo
resolution of 7 September 1973 instructed the KGB to
maintain secret liaison with Arafat’s intelligence service
through the Beirut residency.— Arafat’s international
prestige, and hence Moscow’s interest in him, increased
in the following year after he became the first head of a
non-govemmental organization to be invited to address a
plenary session of the United Nations. ‘I have come
bearing an olive branch in one hand and a freedom
fighter’s gun in the other,’ Arafat declared. ‘Do not let the
olive branch fall from my hand. ’ During a visit by Arafat
to Moscow in 1974 an official communique recognized
the PLO as ‘the sole legitimate representative of the Arab
people of Palestine’. In the course of the visit,
Samoylenko, the KGB officer who had been cultivating
Arafat since the later 1960s, was photographed with him
at a wreath-laying ceremony.— Moscow officially
announced that it was authorizing the PLO to establish a
Moscow office - though it was another two years before it
allowed the office to open. The only other national
liberation movement given similar status in the Soviet
Union was the National Liberation Front of Vietnam.—

The Centre, however, retained much greater confidence
in Haddad than in Arafat. Soviet policy remained to
distance itself from terrorism in public while continuing
in private to promote Palestinian terrorist attacks. When

seeking Politburo approval for Haddad’s terrorist
operations, Andropov misleadingly referred to them
instead as ‘special’ or ‘sabotage’ operations. ‘W.
Haddad’, he reported, ‘is clearly aware of our negative
attitude in principle towards terrorism and he does not
raise with us matters connected with this particular line of
PFLP activity.’ There was, however, no coherent dividing
line between the terrorist attacks which ‘in principle’ the
Soviet leadership opposed and the ‘sabotage operations’
which it was willing in practice to support. On 23 April
1974 Andropov informed Brezhnev that Haddad had
requested further ‘special technical devices’ for his future
operations:

At the present time [Haddad’s section of] the PFLP is
engaged in preparing a number of special operations,
including strikes against major petroleum reservoirs in
various parts of the world (Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf,
Hong Kong and elsewhere); the destruction of tankers and
supertankers; operations against American and Israeli
representatives in Iran, Greece, Ethiopia and Kenya; a
raid on the building of the Tel Aviv diamond centre,
among other [targets].

Andropov repeated his earlier assurances that, through
Haddad, the KGB retained the ability ‘to control to some
extent the activities of the PFLP foreign operations

department, [and] to influence it in ways favourable to the
Soviet Union’. Three days later Brezhnev authorized the
supply of ‘special technical devices’ to Haddad.— In June
1974 Andropov approved detailed arrangements for the
secret supply of weaponry to Haddad and the training of
PFLP Special Operations Group instructors in the use of
mines and sabotage equipment. In September, Haddad
visited Russia, staying with his wife, son and daughter in
a KGB dacha (codenamed BARVIKHA-I). During
discussions on his future operations he agreed to allocate
two or three of his men to the hunting down of Soviet
defectors. The weapons supplied to Haddad included
foreign-manufactured pistols and automatics fitted with
silencers together with radio-controlled mines constructed
from foreign materials, at a cost of $50,000, in order to
conceal their Soviet manufacture.— Further KGB arms
shipments to Haddad, approved by the Politburo, included
one in May 1975 of fifty-three foreign-produced
automatics, fifty pistols (ten with silencers) and 34,000
rounds of ammunition. Brezhnev was informed that
Haddad was the only non-Russian who knew the source
of the arms, which, as in the first weapons delivery to the
PFLP five years earlier, were handed over at sea near
Aden under cover of darkness.— Among other assistance
given by the KGB to Haddad during 1975 was $30,000.—

Through the Beirut residency the KGB also established
contact with two other terrorist groups which gained

publicity after attacks on Israeli civilians in the spring of
1974: the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(DFLP), led by Nayif Hawatmeh (codenamed
INZHENER),— a Greek Orthodox Christian; and the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General
Command (PFLP-GC), a breakaway from the PFLP
headed by a former Syrian army officer, Ahmad Jibril
(codenamed MAYOROV).— The Beirut residency
arranged meetings with Hawatmeh two or three times a
month (for how long is unclear) and planted Service A
disinformation in the DFLP journal Hurriya at a cost of
700 Lebanese pounds per page.— Mitrokhin’s notes
contain no details of KGB contacts with Jibril.—

The most spectacular terrorist operation of the mid-
1970s, of which the KGB was almost certainly given
advance notice by Haddad, was a PFLP Special
Operations Group raid on a meeting of OPEC oil
ministers at its Vienna headquarters in December 1975 by
a group of Palestinian and German gunmen led by Ilich
Ramirez Sanchez, better known as ‘Carlos the Jackal’.—
Carlos was the spoiled son of a millionaire Venezuelan
Communist who had named his three sons Vladimir, Ilich
and Lenin in honour of the leader of the October
Revolution. The KGB had first encountered Carlos when
he was given a place in 1968, with his brother Lenin, at
the Lumumba University in Moscow for students from the
Third World. According to a Venezuelan Communist

leader, Carlos paid little attention to his studies: ‘There
was no control over him. He received a lot of money, he
played the guitar, and he ran after young women.’— The
KGB, it is safe to conclude, did not regard him as a
suitable recruit.— In 1970 he and his brother were
expelled from Lumumba University for ‘anti- Soviet
provocation and indiscipline’. After his expulsion Carlos
flew to Jordan and joined the PFLP, later becoming one
of its leading hitmen in London and Paris. Though he
claimed to be a Marxist revolutionary, his passion for
terrorism derived chiefly from his own vanity and
bravado as ‘the great Carlos’. ‘Revolution’, he declared in
a characteristic transport of self-indulgent rhetoric, ‘is my
supreme euphoria. ’—

The early stages of Carlos’s attack on the poorly
defended Vienna OPEC headquarters in December 1975
went remarkably smoothly. All the oil ministers were
taken hostage and the Austrian government gave in to
Carlos’s demands for a plane to fly them out of the
country. Haddad had instructed Carlos to fly around the
world with the hostages, liberating most of the oil
ministers one by one in their respective capitals in return
for declarations of support for the Palestinian cause, but
gave orders that the Saudi Arabian and Iranian ministers
were to be executed as ‘criminals’. Carlos, however,
failed to kill either and freed both in exchange for a large
ransom. An outraged Haddad told Carlos that he had

disobeyed orders, and dismissed him from his
‘operational teams’.

Over the next two years, Haddad suffered two
humiliating defeats. In July 1976 PFLP Special
Operations Group terrorists hijacked an Air France Airbus
with over a hundred Israelis on board to the Ugandan
airport of Entebbe. The hostages, however, were rescued
and the terrorists killed in a daring Israeli commando raid.
In October 1977 a Lufthansa Boeing 737 was hijacked to
Mogadishu and its eighty- six passengers taken hostage.
Though the captain was killed by the mentally unstable
leader of the hijackers during a stop-over in South
Yemen, the plane was stormed at Mogadishu by West
German commandos and the remaining hostages freed.—

Despite these debacles, Haddad remained in close
contact with the KGB. In 1976 ten of his terrorists were
sent on a three-month course at the FCD Red Banner
Institute (later known as the Andropov Institute), which
included training in intelligence, counter-intelligence,
interrogation, surveillance and sabotage. Further courses
were run in 1977-78.— In March 1977 Haddad visited
Moscow for operational discussions with the head of the
FCD ‘special tasks’ department, Vladimir Grigory evich
Krasovsky, and his deputy, A. F. Khlystov. The assistance
given to Haddad included $10,000 and ten Walther pistols
fitted with silencers. At the KGB’s request, Haddad

agreed to act as intermediary in making contact with the
Provisional IRA representative in Algiers, codenamed
IGROK (‘Gambler’), who was believed to have useful
information on British intelligence operations.— From
1974 the KGB had a second agent within the PFLP
leadership, Ahmad Mahmud Samman (codenamed
VASIT), an Arab bom in Jemsalem in 1935. Mitrokhin’s
brief notes on Samman’ s file record that he supplied the
KGB with information on PFLP operations, but give no
details.—

In 1978 the Centre lost both its main agents within the
PFLP. Haddad died of a brain haemorrhage while staying
in East Germany. His KGB file records that, despite their
earlier quarrel, the PFLP leader George Habash declared
in an emotional oration at Haddad’s funeral in Baghdad,
‘Let our enemies know that he did not die, but is alive; he
is in our hearts, and his name is in our hands; he is
organically bound to our people and to our revolution.’—
Samman, according to Mitrokhin’s note on his file, was
‘liquidated by the PFLP as the result of internal
dissension [probably following Haddad’s death] and the
activities of the Syrian special services’.— The Beimt
residency also lost probably its most important
confidential contact in the PFLP, Ahmad Yunis, head of
the PFLP security service in Lebanon. In 1978 Yunis was
found guilty by a PFLP tribunal of the murder of one of
his colleagues and the attempted murder of another, and

executed.—

The final entry in Haddad’s file noted by Mitrokhin
was a decision by the Centre to make contact with his
successor. — Mitrokhin found no evidence, however, that
the KGB ever again established links with any major
Palestinian terrorist as close as those which it had
maintained with Haddad. Carlos, who had been expelled
by Haddad from the PFLP Special Operations Group,
used Haddad’s death as an opportunity to found his own
terrorist group, the Organization of Arab Armed Struggle,
composed of Syrian, Lebanese, West German and Swiss
militants, and to pursue his quest for international stardom
as the world’s leading revolutionary practitioner of terror.
He obtained a diplomatic passport from the Marxist-
Leninist regime of the People’s Democratic Republic of
[South] Yemen in the name of Ahmad Ali Fawaz, which
showed his place of birth as Aden, and increased his
credit with the Yemeni authorities by falsely claiming that
he was a fully trained KGB officer operating on missions
approved by the Centre. In February 1979, according to
his KGB file, Carlos also began regular contact with the
security agency of the PLO. During the remainder of the
year he went on an extraordinary tour of the Soviet bloc,
beginning in the spring in East Berlin, in order to make
contact with the local intelligence agencies. Though
Carlos was allowed to set up bases in East Berlin and
Budapest, however, he was held at arm’s length by the

KGB. When Erich Mielke, the East German Minister of
State Security, passed on to Moscow Carlos’s claims, as
reported to him by his South Yemeni counterpart, that he
was working for the KGB, he received an official denial
from Mikhail Andreyevich Usatov, the deputy head of the
FCD, and Yakov Prokofyevich Medyanik, then head of
the African Department.— Carlos eventually became an
embarrassment to his Soviet-bloc hosts. According to
Markus ‘Mischa’ Wolf, the head of the HVA, the Stasi’s
foreign intelligence arm, ‘Carlos was a big mouth, an
uncontrollable adventurer. He spent his nights in bars,
with a gun hanging at his belt, surrounded by girls and
drinking like a fish. ’ He was eventually expelled from his
East Berlin and Budapest bases in 1985 and moved to
Damascus in Syria, the most steadfast of his Arab allies.—

Moscow had also become cautious about collaborating
with the Libyan leader. Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi,
probably the most active state sponsor of terrorist groups
ranging from the PEEP to the Provisional IRA. In 1979 a
secret Soviet-Libyan agreement had been signed on
intelligence and security, followed by the posting of an
FCD liaison officer to the Tripoli embassy. The KGB
provided training for Libyan intelligence officers in
Moscow, gave advice on security and surveillance inside
Libya, and supplied intelligence on US activities in the
eastern Mediterranean. In return, Libya provided
intelligence on Egypt, North Africa and Israel, as well as

assisting the KGB in targeting Western diplomatic
missions in Tripoli. Collaboration, however, steadily
declined as Moscow became increasingly concerned by
QaddafTs reputation as the godfather of international
terrorism. QaddafTs first visit to Moscow in 1981 further
lowered his reputation. In the Centre his flamboyant
posturing and extravagant uniforms were interpreted as an
attempt to contrast his own virility with Brezhnev’s
visible decrepitude. At a private briefing for Soviet
diplomats and KGB officers in London in 1984,
Aleksandr Bovin, chief political commentator of Izvestia,
denounced Qaddafi as ‘a criminal and a fascist’ .—

By the early 1980s the Centre seems to have abandoned
the hopes it had placed a decade earlier in collaboration
with the PFLP and its breakaway groups. Its contacts with
the PLO (in particular with Arafat’s dominant Fatah
group), however, had somewhat improved. In June 1978
Abu lyad (codenamed KOCHUBEY), a member of the
Fatah Central Committee and head of Arafat’s
intelligence service, visited Moscow for talks with the
KGB and the International Department.— Abu lyad
complained of the blunt, tactless behaviour of Lev
Alekseyevich Bausin, the KGB officer under diplomatic
cover at the Beirut residency who was responsible for
contacts with the PLO and other Palestinian groups.
Unusually, the Centre showed its desire for better
relations by recalling Bausin and replacing him with

Nikolai Afanasy evich Kuznetsov, who at his first meeting
with Arafat identified himself as a KGB officer.—

Moscow welcomed Arafat’s increasing attempts to win
international respectability. In 1979 he was invited to a
meeting of the Socialist International in Vienna and began
a successful European diplomatic offensive. By 1980 the
countries of the European Community, though not the
United States, had agreed that the PLO must be party to
peace negotiations in the Middle East. The British
Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, declared: ‘The PLO
as such is not a terrorist organization.’ Arafat’s success in
driving a wedge between the United States and its
European allies further enhanced the Centre’s interest in
him.—

The military training courses provided by Moscow for
the PLO, however, caused some ill feeling on both sides.
A report on a course in 1981 for 194 officers from ten
different PLO factions suggests serious deficiencies in
both Soviet training and the quality of many PLO recruits.
According to the PLO commander. Colonel Rashad
Ahmad, ‘The participants in the courses did not correctly
understand the political aspects of sending military
delegations abroad. As a result, the upper echelon of the
delegation, namely the participants in the battalion officer
courses, refused to study and asked to return, using all
sorts of illogical excuses.’ Ahmad reported that he had

been forced to expel thirteen officers from the training
course for offences which included alcoholism, passing
counterfeit money and sexual ‘perversion’. Had he
enforced the code of conduct strictly, he would, he
claimed, have been forced to send home more than half
the officers. Ahmad appealed for a higher standard of
recruits for future courses in the Soviet Union.— East
Germany provided additional training for the PLO in the
use of explosives, mines and firearms with silencers.—

In 1981 Brezhnev at last gave the PLO formal
diplomatic recognition. The limitations of Soviet support,
however, were graphically illustrated in the following
year when Israel invaded Lebanon in an attempt to
destroy the PLO as an effective force and establish a new
political order headed by its Maronite Christian allies.
Moscow, complained Abu lyad, responded with ‘pretty
words’ but no practical assistance.— In the early stages of
the Israeli assault, the Soviet embassy and the Beirut
residency were almost unable to function. According to
Markus Wolf:

With Beirut in ruins, there was an interval during which
Moscow lost contact with its embassy and its KGB
officers in the Lebanese capital. Our officers were the
only ones able to maintain radio and personal contact with
the leaders of the PLO and, acting as Moscow’s proxies.

our men were instructed to pass on the PLO’s reaction to
events. They ventured forth, risking their lives among the
shooting and the bombings to meet their Palestinian
partners. —

There were no clear winners in the war. After seventy-
five days of savage fighting, the PLO was forced to leave
Lebanon and establish a new base in Tunisia on the
periphery of the Arab world. Israel, however, failed to
achieve its aim of establishing a new pro-Israeli political
order in Lebanon. By the time its troops withdrew in the
summer of 1983, the war had weakened Israel’s
government, divided its people, and lowered its
international standing. An official Israeli commission
concluded that Israel bore indirect responsibility for the
massacre of Palestinians by Christian militia in the
Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Far from
relegating the Palestinian problem to the sidelines, as
Israel had intended, the war focused international
attention on the need to find a solution. —

Finding a solution, however, ranked low in the Soviet
order of priorities. Moscow’s difficulties in dealing with
the PLO were compounded by the homicidal feud which
broke out in 1983 between its main Middle Eastern ally,
Asad, and Arafat. Asad expelled Arafat from Damascus,
backed an unsuccessful armed rebellion within Fatah

against his leadership, and actively supported the
assassination campaign against Arafat’s lieutenants being
conducted by his sworn Palestinian enemy, Abu Nidal, an
unstable terrorist who habitually referred to Arafat as ‘the
Jewess’s son’.— Arafat, the great survivor, kept his
position as leader of the PLO but failed to recover the
confidence of Moscow. For Soviet as for many Western
diplomats, his credibility was undermined by a
deviousness bom of ceaseless manoeuvring between the
different factions within the PLO.— During the remainder
of the Soviet era, Moscow was only peripherally involved
in the search for a Palestinian settlement. Though Arafat
eventually succeeded in gaining an invitation to Moscow
in 1988, Gorbachev was reluctant to receive him. ‘So
what’s the point in my meeting with him?’ Gorbachev
asked his aides. When persuaded to agree to a meeting, he
told Arafat bluntly that the Arab-Israeli dispute was no
longer linked to Soviet- American rivalry, and that armed
conflict would do terrible damage to the Palestinian cause.
The communique at the end of the meeting made no
reference to the founding of a Palestinian state. ‘The
talks’, wrote Gorbachev’s aide, Anatoli Chemyaev,
‘didn’t really yield any results ... It just gave Arafat the
chance to stmt all the more.’—

Asia

14

Asia: Introduction

By far the greatest advances of Communism during the
Cold War were in Asia, where it conquered the world’s
most populous state, China, its neighbour North Korea,
the whole of former French Indo-China (Vietnam north
and south, Laos and Cambodia) and Afghanistan.
Ironically, however, it was the heartland of Asian
Communism which from the early 1960s onwards became
the hardest target for Soviet foreign intelligence
operations. Mao Zedong and Kim II Sung turned their
brutalized countries into security-obsessed societies where
the KGB found it as difficult to operate as Western
intelligence agencies had done in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Even the ‘sickly suspicious’ Stalin (as Khrushchev
correctly called him) seems never to have imagined that
Mao and Kim would one day dare to reject Moscow’s
leadership of world Communism.- When Mao visited
Moscow late in 1949 after the declaration of the Chinese
People’s Republic (PRC), he won a standing ovation for
delivering a deferential eulogy at Stalin’s seventieth-
birthday celebrations in the Bolshoi.- Kim II Sung, though
impatient to invade South Korea, did not launch his attack
until Stalin gave him permission. Stalin allowed the

Korean War to begin in June 1950 largely because he had
misjudged US policy. Intelligence from the United States,
following its failure to intervene to prevent the
Communist victory in China, indicated, he believed, that
‘the prevailing mood is not to interfere’ in Korea. That
erroneous conclusion seems to have been based on his
misinterpretation of a US National Security Council
document (probably supplied by the KGB agent Donald
Maclean), which excluded the Asian mainland from the
American defence perimeter. Having thus misinterpreted
US policy, Stalin was prepared for the first time to allow
Kim to attack the South.-

The Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s brought to an
acrimonious end the deference from the PRC which Stalin
had taken for granted. The first public attack on Moscow
was made by Mao’s veteran security chief, Kang Sheng,
whose ferocious purges during Mao’s Great Leap
Forward were largely modelled on techniques he had
learned in Moscow during the Great Terror.- On the
Soviet side, the ideological dispute with China was
compounded by personal loathing for Mao - the ‘Great
Helmsman’ - and a more general dislike of the Chinese
population as a whole. Khrushchev ‘repeatedly’ told a
Romanian delegation shortly before his overthrow in
1964 that ‘Mao Zedong is sick, crazy, that he should be
taken to an asylum, etc.’- An assessment of Chinese
national character circulated to KGB residencies by the

Centre twelve years later claimed that the Chinese were
‘noted for their spitefulness

What most outraged both the Kremlin and the Centre
was Beijing’s impudence in setting itself up as a rival
capital of world Communism, attempting to seduce other
Communist parties from their rightful allegiance to the
Soviet Union. Moscow blamed the horrors of Pol Pot’s
regime (on which it preferred not to dwell in detail) on the
take-over of the Cambodian Communist Party by an ‘anti-
popular, pro-Beijing clique’.- The decision by Asia’s
largest non-ruling Communist party in Japan to side with
the PRC deprived the KGB of what had previously been
an important intelligence asset and turned it into a hostile
target. The Japanese Communist Party complained that its
minority pro-Moscow faction was being assisted by
Soviet spies and informants.- The Centre was so put out
by the number of portraits of Mao appearing on public
display in some African capitals that it ordered counter-
measures such as the fly-posting of pictures of the Great
Helmsman defaced with hostile graffiti on the walls of
Brazzaville. -

To most Western observers, the least problematic of the
Soviet Union’s relations with the Asian Communist
regimes appeared to be with the Democratic Republic of
[North] Vietnam. As well as providing Hanoi with a
majority of its arms during the Vietnam War,— Moscow

was lavish in public praise for its ‘heroic resistance’ to
American imperialism and support for the Vietcong
guerrillas in the south: ‘With determined military support
from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the patriots in
South Vietnam struck at the Saigon regime of generals,
bureaucrats and landowners with such force that it could
not be saved by the deep involvement in the war of the
strongest imperial power.’

Even more than American attempts to topple Fidel
Castro, the Vietnam War united most of the Third World
as well as what Moscow called ‘progressives in all
nations’, the United States included, in vocal opposition
to US imperialism.— Both Presidents Kennedy and
Johnson made the mistake of seeing the mainspring of the
Vietnam War less in Hanoi than in Moscow. Johnson’s
conspiracy theories of manipulation by Moscow extended
even to the US Senate. He claimed absurdly that Senators
William Fulbright and Wayne Morse, two of the leading
opponents of his Vietnam policy, were ‘definitely under
the control of the Soviet embassy’ - by which he
undoubtedly meant the KGB’s Washington residency.—

In reality, the strongly nationalist Ho Chi-Minh (whose
name was chanted in anti-American demonstrations
around the world) and the North Vietnamese regime were
determined not to be dictated to by either Moscow or
Beijing. Despite paying lip service to fraternal co-

operation with its Soviet ally, the North Vietnamese
intelligence service held the KGB somewhat at arm’s
length. As KGB chairman in the mid-1960s, Vladimir
Semichastny was never satisfied with the opportunities
given to his officers to question American PoWs. On
several occasions, interrogations were curtailed just as
they seemed to be producing useful results. Semichastny
was also frustrated by the reluctance of the North
Vietnamese to allow Soviet weapons experts access to
captured US military technology. On several occasions he
raised the ‘ticklish issue’ of access to American prisoners
and weaponry when the North Vietnamese Interior
Minister (who was responsible for intelligence) came to
visit his daughter who was studying in Moscow. Hanoi’s
only response was to present him with a couple of war
souvenirs, one of which was a comb made from a
fragment of a shot-down American bomber.—

The Kremlin was acutely aware of its lack of influence
on North Vietnamese policy. In 1968 an Izvestia
correspondent in Hanoi sent a report to the CPSU Central
Committee on a conversation with a Vietnamese
journalist, who had mockingly asked him: ‘Do you know
what is the Soviet Union’s share of the total assistance
received by Vietnam and what is the share of Soviet
political influence there (if the latter can be measured in
percentages)? The figures are, respectively, 75-80 per cent
[for the former] and 4-8 per cent [for the latter].’ The

Izvestia correspondent thought the first figure was
probably 15-20 per cent too high but that the estimate of
Soviet influence in North Vietnam was about right.— As
well as conducting fraternal liaison, the KGB residency in
Hanoi carried out much the same hostile operations as in a
Western capital. In 1975 it was running a network of
twenty-five agents and sixty confidential contacts tasked
to collect intelligence on Vietnamese military
installations, the internal situation and the frontier with
China.— As in Western capitals, the residency contained
an IMPULS radio station which monitored the
movements of Vietnamese security personnel and their
systems of surveillance in an attempt to ensure that these
did not interfere with its KGB contacts or its agent
network.— Though far less hostile than Beijing and
Pyongyang, Hanoi was none the less a difficult operating
environment. The highest-level Vietnamese source
identified by Mitrokhin, ISAYEYEV, a senior
intelligence officer probably recruited while he was
stationed in Moscow, provided classified information on
his intelligence colleagues in return for payment but
refused to make any contact while in Hanoi for fear of
detection.—

The Asian intelligence successes of which the Centre
was most proud were in India, the world’s second most
populous state and largest democracy. It was deeply
ironic that the KGB should find democratic India so much

more congenial an environment than Communist China,
North Korea and Vietnam. Oleg Kalugin, who in 1973
became the youngest general in the FCD, remembers
India as both a prestige target and ‘a model of KGB
infiltration of a Third World government’. The openness
of India’s democracy combined with the streak of
corruption which ran through its media and political
system provided numerous opportunities for Soviet
intelligence. In addition to what Kalugin termed ‘scores of
sources throughout the Indian government - in
Intelligence, Counterintelligence, the Defence and
Foreign Ministries, and the police’, successful
penetrations of Indian embassies (replicated in operations
against Japan, Pakistan and other Asian countries)
assisted the decryption of probably substantial - though as
yet unquantifiable - amounts of Indian diplomatic
traffic.—

The Soviet leadership regarded a special relationship
with India as the foundation of its South Asian policy.
Growing concern in both Moscow and New Delhi with
the threat from China gave that relationship added
significance. Gromyko and Ponomarev jointly declared:
‘The Soviet Union and India march side by side in the
struggle for detente, for peace and world security . . .
India has always relied on Soviet assistance on the
international scene in safeguarding its rights against
colonial schemes.’—

The primary purpose of KGB active measures in India
was to encourage support for the special relationship and
strengthen suspicion of the United States. According to
Leonid Shebarshin, who served in the New Delhi
residency in the mid-1970s, ‘The CIA’s hand could be
detected in material published in certain Indian
newspapers. We, of course, paid them back in the same
coin . . . Like us, [the CIA] diligently and not always
successfully did what they had to do. They were
instruments of their government’s policy; we carried out
the policy of our State. Both sides were right to do so.’—

Though the KGB tended to exaggerate the success of
its active measures, they appear to have been on a larger
scale than those of the CIA. By the early 1980s there were
about 1,500 Indo-Soviet Friendship Societies as compared
with only two Indo- American Friendship Societies.— The
Soviet leadership seems to have drawn the wrong
conclusions from this apparently spectacular, but in
reality somewhat hollow, success. American popular
culture had no need of friendship societies to secure its
dominance over that of the Soviet bloc. No subsidized
film evening in an Indo-Soviet Friendship Society could
hope to compete with the appeal of either Hollywood or
Bollywood. Similarly, few Indian students, despite their
widespread disapproval of US foreign policy, were more
anxious to win scholarships to universities in the Soviet

bloc than in the United States.

In India, as elsewhere in the Third World, KGB active
measures were intended partly for Soviet domestic
consumption - to give the Soviet people, and in particular
their leaders, an exaggerated notion of the international
esteem in which the USSR was held. The New Delhi
residency went to considerable lengths to give the Soviet
political leadership an inflated sense of its own popularity
in India. Before Brezhnev’s official visit in 1973, recalls
Shebarshin,

Together with the Embassy, the ‘Novosti’ [news agency]
representatives and the Union of Soviet Friendship
Societies, the Residency took steps to create a favourable
public atmosphere in the country immediately before and
during the visit, and to forestall possible hostile incidents
by the opposition and the secret allies of our long-
standing Main Adversary.

We had extensive contacts within political parties,
among journalists and public organizations. All were
enthusiastically brought into play.—

The priority given to KGB operations in India is indicated
by the subsequent promotion of some of the leading
officers in the New Delhi residency. A decade after
Shebarshin left India, he became head of the FCD.

Vyacheslav Trubnikov, who also served in New Delhi in
the 1970s,— went on to become head of the post-Soviet
foreign intelligence service, the SVR, with direct access
to President Yeltsin.— He later also became a confidant of
President Putin, serving successively as Deputy Foreign
Minister and, from August 2004, as Russian ambassador
in New Delhi. Trubnikov’ s return to India was attributed
by Russian press commentators to the mutual desire of
Russia and India ‘to upgrade their strategic partnership’.—

Within the Muslim areas of Asia, the KGB’s chief
priority before the Afghan War was to monitor the loyalty
to Moscow of the Soviet republics with predominantly
Muslim populations. From the Second World War
onwards the cornerstone of Soviet policy to its Muslim
peoples, as to the Russian Orthodox Church,— was the
creation of a subservient religious hierarchy. Despite the
KGB’s extensive penetration of and influence over the
official hierarchy of Soviet Islam, however, the greater
part of Muslim life remained outside the Centre’s control.
Islam was less dependent than Christianity and Judaism
on official clergy. Any Muslim who could read the Quran
and follow Islamic rites could officiate at ceremonies such
as marriage and burial. Soviet rule in the Muslim
republics was a politically correct facade which concealed
the reality of a population which looked far more to
Mecca than to Moscow, ruled by a corrupt political elite
whose Marxism-Leninism was often little more than skin-

deep. Even the local KGB headquarters were, in varying
degree, infected by the corruption. The war in
Afghanistan, as well as turning world-wide Muslim
opinion against the Soviet Union, also undermined
Moscow’s confidence in the loyalty of its Muslim
subjects. The Central Asian press switched from
propaganda celebration of the supposed ‘friendship’
between Soviet Muslims and their Russian ‘Elder
Brother’ to emphasizing the ability of the ‘Elder Brother’
to eliminate ‘traitors’ and maintain law and order.—

The decision to invade Afghanistan in December 1979
to ensure the survival of the Communist regime there was
essentially taken by the four-man Afghanistan
Commission - Andropov, Gromyko, Ponomarev and the
Defence Minister, Marshal Ustinov - which obtained the
consent of the ailing Brezhnev at a private meeting in his
Kremlin office. Gromyko’s influence on the decision,
however, was clearly inferior to that of Andropov and
Ustinov. KGB special forces played a more important role
in the invasion than in any previous conflict and were
charged with the assassination of the supposedly
traitorous President Hafizullah Amin.— ‘The Kremlin
fantasy’, recalls one senior KGB officer, ‘was that a great
breakthrough [in Afghanistan] would demonstrate
[Soviet] effectiveness, showing the world that
communism was the ascendant political system.’— The
fantasy, however, originated with Andropov rather than

with Brezhnev.

Andropov’s emergence as the most influential member
of the Politburo was demonstrated by his election as Party
leader in 1982 after Brezhnev’s death. By then, however,
Afghanistan had become, in the words of one KGB
general, ‘our Vietnam’: ‘We are bogged down in a war we
cannot win and cannot abandon.’— In the end, as
Gorbachev recognized, abandonment was the only
solution. But, whereas the US defeat in Vietnam had
resulted in only a temporary loss of American self-
confidence in world affairs, the Afghan war helped to
undermine the foundations of the Soviet system. Many
Soviet citizens took to referring to Afghanistan as ‘Af-
gavni-stan’ ( ‘ Af- shit- s tan’).— Disastrous though the war
was, it demonstrated, once again, the central role of the
KGB in Soviet Third World policy. Just as the KGB’s
enthusiasm a generation earlier for Fidel Castro had
helped to launch the Soviet forward policy in the Third
World, so the disastrous military intervention in
Afghanistan, for which the KGB leadership bore much of
the responsibility, brought it to a halt.

15

The People’s Republic of China From
‘Eternal Friendship ’ to ‘Eternal Enmity ’

Collaboration between Soviet intelligence and the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) went back to the 1920s.
A police raid on the Soviet consulate at Beijing in 1927
uncovered a mass of documents on Soviet espionage in
China, the involvement of the CCP and instructions to it
from Moscow ‘not to shrink from any measures, even
including looting and massacres’ when promoting clashes
between Westerners and the local population.- The arrest
in 1931 of the Comintern representative in Shanghai,
Jakov Rudnik (alias ‘Hilaire Noulens’), led to the capture
of many more files on Soviet intelligence operations and
the Communist underground. A British intelligence report
concluded that the files ‘afforded a unique opportunity of
seeing from the inside, and on unimpeachable
documentary evidence, the working of a highly developed
Communist organization of the illegal order’. Among the
documents which attracted particular attention were a
large number of letters from ‘the notorious Annamite
Communist, Nguyen Ai Quae’, later better known as Ho
Chi-Minh. But the ‘most outstanding’ document, in the
view of British intelligence, was a CCP report on the

killing of members of the family of an alleged Communist
traitor, Ku Shun-chang, carried out under the direction of
Mao Zedong’s future Prime Minister, Zhou Enlai.- In
1933 Mao’s security chief, Kang Sheng, arrived in
Moscow as deputy head of the Chinese delegation to the
Comintern and spent the next four years learning from the
example of the NKVD during its most paranoid phase.
Kang proved an apt pupil. During the Great Terror, he
founded an Office for the Elimination of Counter-
Revolutionaries and purged the emigre Chinese
Communist community with exemplary zeal for its
mostly imaginary crimes. Late in 1937 he returned on a
Soviet plane to the base established by Mao after the
Long March in Yan’an, where he continued the witch-
hunt he had started in Moscow and began the creation of
China’s gulag, the laogai (an abbreviation of laodong
gaizao, ‘reform through labour’). To his subordinates he
became the ‘Venerable Kang’; to others he was ‘China’s
Beria’. Though a connoisseur of traditional Chinese art
and a skilful, ambidextrous calligrapher, Kang surpassed
even Beria in personal depravity, taking sadistic pleasure
in supervising the torture of supposed counter-
revolutionaries.- As well as helping Mao polish his poetry
and prose, Kang also contributed to his personal
collection of erotica.-

Nikolai Leonov later claimed that during the 1930s and
1940s Soviet intelligence had built up ‘a very extensive

and well-formed information network on Chinese soil’.-
In the summer of 1949, however, on the eve of the victory
of Mao’s forces over the Nationalist Kuomintang, led by
Chiang Kai-shek, a high-level CCP delegation in Moscow
complained, probably with considerable exaggeration,
that a large part of that network had been penetrated by
Chiang and the Americans. Due at least in part to his
addiction to conspiracy theory, Stalin took the complaint
seriously. ‘The situation’, he declared, ‘requires us to
unify the efforts of our intelligence bodies, and we are
ready to start this immediately . . . Let us act as a united
front.’- On Stalin’s instructions, the names of all those in
the Soviet intelligence network in China were given to the
CCP leadership.- Simultaneously the CCP demanded that
all Chinese who had worked for Soviet intelligence
should declare themselves to the Party.-

Yuri Tavrosky, a leading Sinologist in the International
Department of the CPSU Central Committee, later
described Sino- Soviet relations during the generation after
the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)
in October 1949 as falling into two starkly contrasting
phases: a decade of ‘eternal friendship’ between the
world’s two largest socialist states, followed from the
early 1960s by the era of ‘eternal enmity’.- For most of
the decade of ‘eternal friendship’ there was close
collaboration between Soviet and Chinese intelligence.
On Khrushchev’s instructions, the KGB continued to

provide its Chinese allies with details of its Chinese
intelligence networks.— Until 1957 a series of KGB
illegals of Chinese, Mongolian, Turkic and Korean ethnic
origin were given false identities in the PRC, mostly with
the co-operation of the Chinese Ministry of Public
Security, before being sent on their first foreign
missions.— Khrushchev’s visit to Beijing in 1958,
however, witnessed a visible chill in the ‘eternal
friendship’. Though Mao had to a degree been prepared to
defer to Stalin, he was not in awe of Khrushchev, whose
revolutionary experience he regarded as inferior to his
own. As his Chinese hosts were doubtless aware,
Khrushchev was a non-swimmer and he was made to look
foolish during ‘photo opportunities’ in Mao’s swimming
pool. More importantly, Khrushchev’s proposals for a
joint Russian-Chinese fleet under a Russian admiral and
for Russian listening posts on Chinese soil were angrily
rejected.— The future KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov,
then responsible for relations with foreign Communist
parties, later complained to the Chinese that they had
failed to warn Khrushchev during his visit that they had
decided to begin shelling two off-shore islands in the
Taiwan Straits still held by Chiang Kai-shek almost as
soon as he left Beijing.—

By the later 1950s Kang Sheng, who had suffered a
temporary eclipse during the earlier part of the decade,
apparently due to mental illness, had re-emerged as a

close adviser of (and procurer of teenage girls for) Mao.
The purge of ‘right deviationists’ during the ‘Great Leap
Forward’ begun in 1958 replicated many of the horrors of
the Great Terror in which Kang had enthusiastically
participated in Moscow two decades earlier. According to
Mao’s doctor, ‘Kang Sheng’s job was to depose and
destroy his fellow party members, and his continuing
“investigations” in the early 1960s laid the groundwork
for the attacks of the Cultural Revolution to come.’—
Between 1958 and 1962 perhaps as many as 10 million
‘ideological reactionaries’, real and imagined, were
imprisoned in the laogai; millions more Chinese citizens
died as a result of famine. —

Kang was the first to bring the Sino- Soviet quarrel out
into the open. At a Warsaw Pact conference in February
1960, he made a speech attacking Soviet policy, then had
a heated exchange with Khrushchev. ‘You don’t have the
qualifications to debate with me,’ Khrushchev shouted at
Kang. ‘I am General Secretary of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union . . .’ ‘Your credentials are much more
shallow than mine!’ Kang retorted in ungrammatical
Russian. According to one of the Soviet participants,
‘[Kang] could freeze you with his stare. Everyone was
afraid of him. On the Soviet side we compared him to
Beria. You could see at first glance that he was a very evil
and ruthless person.’ Though Kang’s speech was not
published in Moscow, it appeared in full in Beijing.— In

April a series of articles in the Chinese People's Daily
and Red Flag on the ninetieth anniversary of Lenin’s birth
effectively accused Moscow of ‘revising, emasculating
and betraying’ Lenin’s teaching. Khrushchev replied in
June by publicly denouncing Mao as ‘an ultra-leftist, an
ultradogmatist and a left revisionist’.—

A month later all Soviet experts in China were
withdrawn. Over the next few years many of the China
specialists in the KGB and the Soviet Foreign Ministry
tried to transfer to other work for fear that a continuing
reputation as Sinologists would blight their careers.—
Moscow, however, still hoped to prevent the quarrel with
Beijing turning into a major schism which would divide
the Communist world. During the early 1960s the USSR
and PRC usually limited themselves to attacking each
other by proxy. While Moscow denounced Albanian hard-
liners, Beijing condemned Yugoslav revisionists. Moscow
made a final attempt to paper over the Sino- Soviet cracks
by proposing a meeting between senior Party delegations
in July 1963. The CCP delegation, led by the future
Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, showed no interest in
reaching a settlement. The most vitriolic attacks on the
Soviet leadership came once again from Kang Sheng,
who made an impassioned defence of Stalin against the
‘curses and swear words’ with which he claimed that
Khrushchev had defamed his memory:

Can it really be that the CPSU, which for a long time had
the love and respect of the revolutionary peoples of the
whole world, had a ‘bandit’ as its great leader for several
decades? From what you have said it appears as if the
ranks of the international Communist movement which
grew and became stronger from year to year were under
the leadership of some sort of ‘shit’.

Kang then dared to say what perhaps no meeting of senior
Communists in Moscow had ever heard said aloud since
Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ of 1956. He taunted
Khrushchev by quoting some of his numerous past
eulogies of Stalin as ‘a very great genius, teacher, great
leader of humanity’, and recalled Khrushchev’s active
participation (along with Kang) in the attempt during the
Great Terror ‘to wipe all the Trotskyist-rightist carrion
from the face of the earth’.— The impact of Kang’s
extraordinary speech on his shocked Soviet listeners was
heightened by the fact that he delivered it through
ferociously clenched teeth.—

The acrimonious collapse of the Moscow talks in the
summer of 1963 was followed by the most strident
polemics in the history of the international Communist
movement. In April 1964 a senior Soviet official even
accused Beijing of a racist attempt to set yellow and black
races ‘against the whites’ - a policy which, he claimed.

was ‘no different from Nazism’. The PRC was also
accused of selling drugs to finance the Great Leap
Forward. The virulence of Soviet attacks reflected the
deep indignation generated in Moscow by the Sino- Soviet
schism. For almost half a century after the Bolshevik
Revolution the Soviet Union had been able to depend on
the unconditional loyalty of other Communist parties
around the world. Now it stood accused of heresy by the
Communist rulers of the world’s most populous state.
Moscow’s alarm was heightened by Beijing’s charm
offensive in the Third World. In Asia the PRC established
close links with Pakistan, Burma and Indonesia. During
1964 Beijing established diplomatic relations with
fourteen African states, all of whom ceased to recognize
the Chinese Nationalist regime on Taiwan, to which the
PRC laid claim.— The Centre was outraged by reports
that in some of these states pictures of Soviet-bloc leaders
had been displaced or overshadowed by huge portraits of
Mao, and demanded that a record be kept of when and
where every such portrait appeared. Markus Wolf, the
long-serving head of the East German HVA, complained
that, at the request of the KGB, he was forced to conduct
the ‘senseless exercise’ of counting the number of
portraits of the Great Helmsman on public display in each
of the African countries where his service operated.— The
successful test of China’s first atomic bomb in October
1964 both enhanced its international prestige in the Third
World and dramatically increased the threat which China

posed to the Soviet Union.

Once ‘eternal friendship’ had given way to ‘eternal
enmity’, residencies in many parts of the world were told
to regard Line K (K for Kitay, the Russian word for
China) as a major operational priority, second only to
operations against the ‘Main Adversary’ and its leading
allies. Within China itself, however, Stalin’s earlier
decision to reveal the identities of the entire Soviet
intelligence network to the CCP leadership had crippled
KGB intelligence collection. Throughout the remainder of
the Soviet era the Centre was left with what Nikolai
Leonov called ‘an unbridgeable gap in our information
sources on China’.— Most of the KGB’s former Chinese
agents whose names had been given to the Ministry of
State Security were executed or left to rot in the laogai.—
The fact that the Beijing Ministry of Public Security knew
the real names of the illegals given false Chinese
identities in the PRC during the 1950s made it impossible
to use them against Chinese targets. As a result most Line
K operations were conducted outside the PRC. Chinese
officials stationed abroad, however, were under strict
instructions to go out only in groups of two or more. As a
result, recalls one retired Western intelligence officer,
‘You could never meet any of them alone.’ Line K thus
spent much of its time trying to recruit non-Chinese
citizens with access to PRC officials. Among its leading
agents during the 1960s was the Finnish businessman

Harri Ilmari Hartvig (codenamed UNTO), who was on the
committee of the Finnish-Chinese Friendship Society and
had frequent meetings with the Chinese ambassador and
other PRC diplomats. Meetings between the Friendship
Society committee and PRC diplomats took place in
Hartvig ’s department, which, without his knowledge, had
been bugged by a KGB listening device concealed in his
sideboard. Extracts from the transcript of at least one
meeting attended by the Chinese ambassador which
discussed Sino-Soviet relations and PRC policy to
Scandinavia and Yugoslavia were passed to the
Politburo.— The fact that the intelligence obtained
through Hartvig was accorded such importance, despite
the fact that it appears to have included no classified
documents, is further evidence of the general weakness of
KGB intelligence collection on the PRC.

The ‘Cultural Revolution’ (officially ‘A Full-Scale
Revolution to Establish a Working-Class Culture’)
launched by Mao in 1966 made China a more difficult
and dangerous place for the KGB to operate than
anywhere else on earth. In an extraordinary attempt to re-
fashion Chinese society on a utopian revolutionary model,
Mao unleashed a general Terror. Millions of youthful,
fanatical Red Guards were urged to root out revisionist
and bourgeois tendencies wherever they found them - and
they found them almost everywhere. Veteran Communist
officials and intellectuals were paraded in dunces’ hats.

abused, imprisoned and in some cases driven to suicide.
The leadership of the Soviet Union were denounced as
‘the biggest traitors and renegades in history’. As during
the Stalinist Great Terror thirty years earlier, most of the
enemies of the people unmasked and persecuted by the
Red Guards had committed only imagined crimes. And,
as in Stalin’s Russia, the bloodletting was accompanied
by a repellent form of Emperor-worship. Mao was hailed
as the ‘Great Helmsman’, ‘the Reddest Red Sun in Our
Hearts’. Each day began with a ‘loyalty dance’: ‘You put
your hand to your head and then to your heart, and you
danced a jig - to show that your heart and mind were
filled with boundless love for Chairman Mao.’ Rival
factions outdid themselves in terrorizing the Great
Helmsman’s imagined enemies, each claiming to be more
Maoist than the others.—

Agent recruitment within China during the Cultural
Revolution was, as KGB Chairman Semichastny later
acknowledged, ‘an impossible task’. In Beijing, ‘Every
one of our men, from diplomats to drivers, was as
conspicuous as an albino crow.’— A September 1967
directive by Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD,
noted that the Beijing residency was being forced to
operate under siege conditions.— Soviet contact with
Chinese officials was minimal and closely supervised.
The spy-mania and xenophobia of the Red Guards made it
difficult for diplomats even to walk round Beijing.

Owners of foreign books were forced to crawl on their
knees through the streets in shame; those caught listening
to foreign broadcasts were sent to prison. As an official
Chinese report later acknowledged, ‘The ability to speak a
foreign language or a past visit to a foreign country
became “evidence” of being a “secret agent” for that
country.’ The road leading to the beleaguered Soviet
embassy was renamed ‘Anti-Revisionist Lane’. The
families of Soviet diplomats and KGB officers were
manhandled as they left Beijing airport for Moscow in
1967.

The best first-hand reporting to reach the Centre from
Beijing during the Cultural Revolution came from KGB
officers of Mongolian or Central Asian extraction who
could pass as Chinese citizens and were smuggled out of
the Soviet embassy compound after dark in the boots of
diplomatic cars. Let out unobserved when the opportunity
arose, they mingled with the vast crowds roaming through
a city festooned with slogans, read the day’s wall posters
(which were declared off-limits for foreigners), attended
political rallies and purchased ‘little newspapers’ with
news from across China. Late in 1967 they saw the first
wall posters denouncing the Head of State, Liu Shaoqi, as
the ‘Number One person in authority taking the capitalist
road’. After Liu was jailed in the following year, more
than 22,000 people were arrested as his alleged
sympathizers. Even a night-soil collector, who had been

photographed being congratulated by Liu at a model
workers’ conference, was paraded through the streets with
an accusing placard around his neck and maltreated until
he lost his reason. Acting on the principle that
‘Revolutionaries’ children are heroes, reactionaries’
children are lice’. Red Guards killed one of Liu’s children
by laying him in the path of an oncoming train. Brutally
ill-treated and suffering from pneumonia and diabetes for
which he was denied medical treatment, Liu himself died
naked on a prison floor in 1969.

Deng Xiaoping, Party General Secretary and ‘Number

Two person in authority taking the capitalist road’, was

dismissed and sent to do manual labour but - probably on

Mao’s personal instructions - allowed to survive. The Red

Guards took revenge on his eldest son, a physics student,

by throwing him from a second-floor window at Peking

University.— No fellow student dared to come to his aid,

and no doctor was willing to operate on him. He was left

paralysed from the waist down. Fed with a relentless

series of reports of chaos and atrocity, the Centre

interpreted the Cultural Revolution not as a convulsion in

the life of a one-party state but as a peculiarly Chinese

descent into oriental barbarism. Though perhaps 30

million Chinese were persecuted during the Cultural

Revolution, however, the numbers killed (about a million)

were fewer than the victims of the Stalinist Great Terror.
30

The FCD plan for intelligence operations in the PRC
and Hong Kong during 1966-67, approved by
Semichastny as KGB Chairman in April 1966, made no
reference to the hopeless task of recruiting agents in most
of mainland China. Instead it concentrated on proposals
for the use of illegals and agent infiltration across China’s
northern frontiers with the Soviet Union and the Soviet-
dominated Mongolian People’s Republic. Plans were
made for the establishment of an illegal residency in
Hong Kong and for short-term visits by illegals to the
PRC (some of them in collaboration with the Mongolian
intelligence agency), but it was recognized that planning
for an illegal KGB residency in the PRC could not go
beyond a preliminary stage. The most ambitious part of
the plan for 1966-67 concerned preparations for cross-
border operations in collaboration with KGB units in
frontier regions and the Mongolian security service.—

The most vulnerable area for KGB penetration was the
remote, sparsely populated Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous
Region (XUAR) in north-west China, a vast expanse of
mountain and desert on the borders of the Kazakh and
Kyrgyz republics and Mongolia, with which it had far
closer ethnic, cultural and religious ties than with the rest
of the PRC. Though covering one-sixth of China’s
territory (an area the size of western Europe), the XUAR
still accounts for only 1.4 per cent of the Chinese
population (17 million out of 1.2 billion). Even today over

half its population is composed of non-Chinese Muslim
ethnic groups, by far the largest of which are the Muslim
Uighurs. Before the foundation of the PRC the proportion
was much larger. In 1944 a Uighur-led movement in
northern Xinjiang had established the independent state of
East Turkestan. Though its independence ended when it
was forcibly incorporated by the PRC in 1950, Beijing
remained concerned by the threat of XUAR separatism
for the remainder of the century. Han Chinese
immigration, promoted by Beijing and deeply resented by
the Uighurs, increased their numbers from only 6 per cent
of the population in 1949 to 40 per cent thirty years later.
The leading Communist Party officials at almost all levels
in the XUAR were, and remain, Chinese.— The horrors of
the Cultural Revolution were arguably even worse for the
non-Chinese minorities in the XUAR, Inner (Chinese)
Mongolia and Tibet, whose whole way of life was
threatened, than for the Han Chinese who constituted 94
per cent of the PRC population. The deputy director of
religious affairs in Kashgar, one of the most devoutly
Muslim cities of the XUAR, later admitted:

During the Cultural Revolution, I saw with my own eyes,
before the Great Mosque in Kashgar, piles of Korans and
other books being burnt. Some people ordered the
Muslims to bum these copies themselves ... I also saw
people trying to pull down the minarets beside the Great

Mosque. The masses were very indignant, but they could
do nothing.

Mosques in most of the XUAR were closed. Some were
used as pork warehouses and Uighur families were forced
to rear pigs.— The suffering of Tibetan Buddhists was
even greater than that of Muslims in the XUAR, but Tibet
was too remote and difficult of access for significant KGB
operations (though the Centre investigated the possibility
of penetrating the entourage of the exiled Dalai Lama).—
The XUAR, by contrast, had a 1,000-mile frontier with
Kazakhstan and one of 600 miles with Mongolia.

In 1968 the Kazakhstan KGB was instructed to set up
an illegal residency in Urumqi, the capital of the XUAR,
and agent groups in a number of other areas, including the
Lop Nor nuclear test site.— The Politburo also authorized
the KGB to provide arms and training in Kazakhstan for
the underground resistance to Chinese rule in the XUAR,
which in Russian took the politically correct name of the
Voenno-Trudovaya Narodnaya Revolyutsionnaya Partly a
(Military-Labour People’s Revolutionary Party) or
VTNRP, codenamed PATRIOTY. The Kazakhstan KGB
was instructed to print anti-Chinese newspapers in
Uighur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Dungan and the other XUAR
languages to be smuggled across the border.— Sherki
Turkestan Evasi (‘The Voice of Eastern Turkestan’),

published in Alma Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, called
on Uighurs ‘to unite against Chinese chauvinism and to
proclaim the establishment of “an independent free state”
based on the principles of self-determination and the
constitutional law of the United Nations’. Broadcasts by
Radio Alma Ata and Radio Tashkent sought to convince
XUAR Uighurs that living conditions for Soviet Uighurs
were vastly superior to their own.—

In April 1968 the Politburo also approved a further
reinforcement of Soviet forces along its 4,000-mile
frontier with China, the longest armed border in the
world.— About one third of Soviet military power was
eventually deployed against the PRC.— Mao, Moscow
feared, was intent on regaining large tracts of territory
ceded to Tsarist Russia under the ‘unequal treaties’ of the
nineteenth century. — During 1969 there were a series of
armed clashes along the border. The first, on a remote
stretch of the Ussuri river 250 miles from Vladivostok,
does not seem to have been planned by either Beijing or
Moscow. The trouble began when soldiers on the Chinese
side of the river, offended by the allegedly aggressive
behaviour of a Soviet lieutenant on the opposite bank,
turned their backs, dropped their trousers and ‘mooned’ at
the Soviet border guards. During the next ‘mooning’
episode, the Soviet soldiers held up pictures of Mao, thus
leading the Chinese troops inadvertently to show grave
disrespect to the sacred image of the Great Helmsman.

These and other episodes led on 2 March to the Chinese
ambush of a Soviet patrol on the small, disputed island of
Damansky in the Ussuri river.— Twenty-three of the
patrol were killed. Both Moscow and Beijing responded
with a furious denunciation of the other. This was the first
occasion on which either side had reported an armed clash
along the border. On 7 March a reported 100,000
Muscovites attacked the Chinese embassy and smashed
its windows. Not to be outdone, Beijing Radio claimed
that 400 million Chinese, half the country’s population,
had taken part in protest demonstrations.—

In mid- April 1969 there was fighting 2,500 miles
farther west on the Kazakh-XUAR border, followed by
further sporadic clashes in the same area over the next
four months. Henry Kissinger, recently appointed as
President Nixon’s National Security Advisor, was
originally inclined to accept Soviet claims that these
clashes were started by the Chinese. When he looked at a
detailed map of the frontier region, however, he changed
his mind. Since the clashes occurred close to Soviet
railheads and several hundred miles from any Chinese
railway, Kissinger concluded that ‘Chinese leaders would
not have picked such an unpropitious spot to attack’.—
His conclusion that Soviet forces were the aggressors is
strengthened by the evidence in KGB files. On 4 June two
KGB agents in the VTNRP, codenamed NARIMAN and
TALAN, both based in Kazakhstan, crossed secretly into

the XUAR to make contact with the underground Party
leadership. On their return on 9 July, they reported,
probably with considerable exaggeration, that the VTNRP
had 70,000 members and a Presidium of forty-one (ten of
whom were ‘candidate’, non- voting members). But it had
not been a wholly successful mission. Within a few days
of their arrival in the XUAR, the agents’ automatic
weapons and radio telephones had been stolen by
TALAN’s relatives. NARIMAN and TALAN also
explained that they had been unable to set up a dead
letter-box in an agreed location because of the presence of
nomadic herdsmen. They reported that many former
members of the VTNRP Presidium were in prison. The
Mongolian security service concluded that the VTNRP
was not ready for ‘active operations’ but should
concentrate instead on strengthening its underground
organization. Though Mitrokhin’s notes do not record the
Centre’s assessment, it must surely have reached the same
conclusion.—

In August and September Moscow began sounding out
both Washington and European Communist parties on
their reaction to the possibility of a Soviet pre-emptive
strike against Chinese nuclear installations before they
were able to threaten the Soviet Union. A series of articles
in the Western press by a journalist co-opted by the KGB,
Victor Louis (bom Vitali Yevgenyevich Lui), mentioned
the possibility of a Soviet air strike against the Lop Nor

nuclear test site in the XUAR. Louis claimed that a
clandestine radio station in the PRC had revealed the
existence of anti-Mao forces (probably a reference to the
XUAR) which might ask other socialist countries for
‘fraternal help’. Even the KGB officers who spread such
rumours were uncertain whether they were engaged
simply in an active measure designed to intimidate the
Chinese or warning the West of proposals under serious
consideration by the Soviet general staff. In retrospect, the
whole exercise looks more like an active-measures
campaign.— Though the Soviet Defence Minister,
Marshal Andrei Grechko, appears to have proposed a plan
to ‘get rid of the Chinese threat once and for all’, most of
his Politburo colleagues were not prepared to take the
risk.—

As a result of the lack of any high-level Soviet
intelligence source in Beijing, Moscow seems to have
been unaware of the dramatic secret response by Mao to
its campaign of intimidation after the border clashes. Mao
set up a study group of four marshals whom he instructed
to undertake a radical review of Chinese relations with the
Soviet Union and the United States. Marshals Chen Yi
and Ye Jianying made the unprecedented proposal that the
PRC respond to the Soviet threat by playing ‘the United
States card’ .— Fear of a pre-emptive Soviet strike seems
to have been a major reason for the Chinese decision to
enter the secret talks with the United States which led to

Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972 and a Sino-American
rapprochement which only a few years earlier would have
seemed inconceivable.— During Nixon’s visit, Kissinger
gave Marshal Ye Jianying an intelligence briefing on
Soviet force deployments at the Chinese border which, he
told him, was so highly classified that even many senior
US intelligence officials had not had access to it.—

There was prolonged discussion in the Centre in the
early 1970s as to whether the PRC now qualified for the
title ‘Main Adversary’, hitherto applied exclusively to the
United States. In the end it was relegated in official KGB
jargon to the status of ‘Major Adversary’, with the United
States retaining its unique ‘Main Adversary’ status.— For
China, by contrast, it was clear that the Soviet Union had
become the Main Adversary. Mao’s suspicions of
Moscow deepened as reports began to reach him of a plot
by his heir apparent, Lin Biao. By the summer of 1970,
according to his doctor, Li Zhisui, ‘Mao’s paranoia was in
full bloom.’ Li was afraid even to tell Mao that he had
pneumonia for fear of being accused of being part of Lin
Biao’s conspiracy. ‘Lin Biao wants my lungs to rot,’ Mao
told him. In August 1971 Mao was told that Lin’s son had
set up a ‘secret spy organization in the air force’ to
prepare a coup. On the evening of 12 September Mao was
informed that Lin Biao had fled by air from Shanhaiguan
airport. Li noted that ‘Mao’s face collapsed at the news.’
Lin’s plane had taken off with such haste that it had not

been properly fuelled and had no navigator, radio operator
or co-pilot on board. It was also clear, since the aircraft
had struck a fuel truck during the take-off and lost part of
its landing gear, that it would have difficulty landing. As
Chinese radar tracked Lin’s plane, it first flew west across
Inner Mongolia, then turned abruptly north across the
frontier of the Mongolian People’s Republic in the
direction of the Soviet Union. Next day Mao received
news that the plane had crashed before it reached the
Soviet border, killing all on board.— Had the aircraft
reached the Soviet Union, the public quarrel between
Beijing and Moscow would doubtless have scaled new
heights of hysteria. Even after the crash, there were
Chinese charges of Soviet complicity in Lin Biao’s
treason.— Mao never admitted that the Cultural
Revolution had been a disastrous mistake. ‘But’,
according to Li, ‘Lin Biao’s perfidy convinced him that
he needed to change his strategy. He put Zhou Enlai in
charge of rehabilitating many of the leaders who had been
overthrown.’—

For the remainder of the Soviet era the KGB sought,
without much apparent success, to compensate for its
inability to penetrate the government in Beijing by two
other strategies: cross-border agent infiltration,
particularly from Kazakhstan to the XUAR, and the
penetration of PRC groups outside China. In 1969 the
Kazakhstan KGB was given an additional fifty-five

operations officers, followed by another eighty-one in
1970.— To assemble an appropriate wardrobe for KGB
agents, clothes were taken from Chinese refugees crossing
the Kazakhstan border.— In 1970 operation ALGA,
mounted by the Kazakhstan KGB in collaboration with
‘special actions’ officers from the Centre, set out to create
a sabotage base in the XUAR with caches to conceal arms
and explosives. After a preliminary cross-border
expedition by two agents ran into difficulty, however, the
operation was suspended as premature and plans to
infiltrate an armed group of seven or eight refugees back
into the XUAR were cancelled.—

Over the next few years there were a series of other
failed penetrations. Among them was the Chinese refugee
MITOU, former head of the Department of Chinese
Literature at a technical institute, who had fled to the
Soviet Union in 1968 at the height of the Cultural
Revolution when centres of higher education were closed
for several years. After being recruited as a KGB agent
and trained in the use of dead letter-boxes (DLBs), radio
communication, ciphers and photography, he was
smuggled into the XUAR across the Mongolian frontier in
August 1971. Though MITOU collected money and food
coupons which had been left for him in a DLB, no more
was heard from him. His file concludes that he was
probably too frightened to carry on working as an agent.—
LIVENTSOV was another Chinese agent infiltrated into

the XUAR through Mongolia. In 1972 he was used for
operation STRELA which was intended to carry out
visual reconnaissance of nuclear and defence industry
plants. He was taught to distinguish different kinds of
smoke and effluents from factory chimneys, take soil and
water samples and make careful notes of what he
observed. As in the case of MITOU, however,
LIVENTSOV’s deployment ended in complete failure.—

Probably because of the high failure rate among
Chinese agents infiltrated over the border, the KGB
devised an unusual method of testing their reliability
under operational conditions. In operation ZENIT the
agents being tested were told they would be crossing the
Chinese border in an area near the Ussuri river first to
locate a DEB and replace a malfunctioning radio which
had been left in it with a working model, then to meet an
agent operating inside China at a pre-arranged location in
order to pass on instructions. The agents being tested,
however, were unaware that the area where they were
carrying out these operations was actually inside the
Soviet Union and that they were being closely observed
from surveillance posts equipped with night-vision
equipment and tape recorders. ZENIT was one of five
border zones in which similar tests took place. In 1974
sixty-six agents were put through their paces; in 1975
their number rose to 107.— In addition to sending agents
on foot across remote areas of China’s northern borders.

the KGB also investigated two other methods of
infiltration: by sea using inflatable dinghies which could
be hidden after landing and, more ingeniously, by
concealing an agent in the ventilation pipe of the mail
carriages of trains crossing the Chinese border. The latter
method was thought to be practicable only in summer
because of the danger in winter that the agent would
freeze to death.— The files seen by Mitrokhin do not
make clear whether either of these methods was actually
used.

Operational conditions in the PRC were simply too
difficult for cross-border infiltration by any route to
achieve significant success. As Jung Chang was later to
write in Wild Swans, ‘The whole of China was like a
prison. Every house, every street was watched by the
people themselves. In this vast land there was nowhere to
hide.’— Strangers and strange behaviour quickly aroused
suspicion. A Chinese agent smuggled across the Amur
river in the Soviet Far East after a ten-year absence from
the PRC discovered that the cigarettes he had been given
to take with him were now available only in hard-
currency shops reserved for foreigners. He made the
further mistake, when out of cigarettes, of asking
strangers for a smoke - a habit he had picked up in the
Soviet Union which immediately attracted attention in the
PRC. Having become accustomed to the metric system,
the agent also ran into difficulties with Chinese weights

and measures and found himself hesitating in mid-
sentence while he attempted the necessary mental
arithmetic. Even asking for directions caused problems. In
Russia he had learned to think in terms of ‘left’ and
‘right’, instead of referring to points of the compass as
was usual in China. On one occasion, when told that the
entrance to an eating place was the south door, he asked
where the south door was - only to be informed that it was
opposite the north door.—

Probably late in 1973 the Centre sent a directive to
residencies around the world entitled ‘Measures designed
to improve work against China from third countries’
during the period 1974-78. Residencies were instructed to
cultivate PRC citizens living abroad, as well as members
of the Chinese diaspora, Taiwanese citizens and
foreigners with contacts in the PRC. They were also told
to penetrate Maoist groups and centres of Chinese studies,
to plant ‘operational devices’ (bugs) on appropriate
cultivation targets, identify active-measures channels and
report on agents who could be sent on missions to the
PRC.— The KGB residency in Prague reported in 1975
that it was using thirty agents to cultivate the Chinese
embassy. Of seventy-two Czechoslovak citizens who
attended a reception at the embassy in October 1975 to
mark the anniversary of the foundation of the PR C,
twenty-three were agents of the KGB or the Czechoslovak
StB.— There is no evidence in any of the files noted by

Mitrokhin that either this or any similar cultivation
achieved any significant results. Most Chinese embassies
appear to have proved as difficult targets as the PRC
itself

Unsurprisingly, the files seen by Mitrokhin do not
identify a single KGB agent in Beijing with access to
classified Chinese documents. The Beijing residency did,
however, obtain some material from a senior disaffected
North Korean diplomat codenamed FENIKS, who was
privately critical of the Mao cult (and, no doubt, the even
more preposterous cult of Kim II Sung in North Korea). A
Line PR officer under diplomatic cover, A. A.
Zhemchugov, began cultivating FENIKS at diplomatic
receptions and in the course of other routine diplomatic
contacts. On several occasions Zhemchugov arranged for
them to meet in his apartment. The residency reported that
FENIKS showed great skill in disguising the purpose of
his contacts with Zhemchugov, maintained careful
security and appeared confident and calm during their
meetings, which gradually increased in frequency. Due to
the close relations between the Beijing and Pyongyang
regimes in the mid-1970s, the North Korean embassy was
given copies of a series of secret Chinese Central
Committee documents, some of which were passed on by
FENIKS. Among other material which he provided was a
letter from the Politburo member Yao Wenyuan, later to
become infamous after Mao’s death as one of the

disgraced ‘Gang of Four’. Though documents supplied by
FENIKS were cited in a number of KGB reports to the
Politburo, he made clear to Zhemchugov that he wished to
preserve his freedom of action and was not prepared to
become a KGB agent. None the less, because of his
willingness to supply classified material and from 1976 to
have clandestine contact with a case officer, FENIKS was
classed from that year as a confidential contact. From
November 1976 he passed material to Zhemchugov
during brush contacts in a Beijing department store. —

In the summer of 1976, with Mao’s death correctly
judged to be imminent, the Politburo set up a high-level
commission to assess the future of Sino- Soviet relations.
Chaired by the chief Party ideologist, Mikhail Suslov
(then considered Brezhnev’s most likely successor), the
commission also included Gromyko, the Foreign
Minister, Ustinov, the Defence Minister, Andropov, the
KGB Chairman, and Konstantin Chernenko, then head of
the Central Committee General Department which,
despite its innocuous name, controlled the Party’s secret
archives. Following Mao’s death on 9 September, Soviet
press attacks on China were suspended until the policy of
his successors had been clarified. KGB residencies around
the world were instructed to report any sign of changed
attitudes towards the Soviet Union by Chinese officials—
and sent a lengthy brief ‘On certain national-
psychological characteristics of the Chinese and their

evaluation in the context of intelligence work’ which was
intended to improve the dismal level of agent recruitment:

Experience has shown that success in agent-operational
work with persons of Chinese nationality depends to a
large extent on the possession by intelligence personnel of
a sound knowledge of their national-psychological
peculiarities. A sound appreciation of the traits of the
Chinese national character is essential for the study of
potentially interesting sources of information, for progress
towards a satisfactory recruitment, and for agent running.

Though emphasizing the importance of ‘establishing a
solid, friendly relationship with the Chinese based on
respect for the individual and Chinese culture’, the brief
simultaneously made clear the Centre’s loathing for the
citizens of the PRC. They were, the brief reported, deeply
imbued with an egocentric view of the world; became
‘uncontrollable’ when their pride was hurt; were
‘distinguished by their hot temper, great excitability, and
a tendency to sudden changes from one extreme to
another’; possessed an innate ability to dissemble which
made them ‘a nation of actors’; had characters in which,
in most cases, ‘the negative qualities of perfidiousness,
cruelty and anger are inherent’; were ‘noted for their
spitefulness’; and were indifferent to the misery and
misfortunes of other people. Because of the obsession

with ‘loss of face’, however, ‘the use of compromising
material is a strong lever to make a Chinese
collaborate’.— Similar views, enlivened by the swear
words in which the Russian language is unusually rich,
were common in conversations about China at the Centre.
Underlying the KGB’s attitude to the PRC was thinly
disguised racial loathing as well as ideological and
strategic rivalry.

Less than a month after Mao’s death, his widow Jiang
Qing and her main radical associates, the so-called ‘Gang
of Four’, were arrested and denounced as traitors in the
service of the Chinese Nationalists. KGB officers must
privately have recalled the equally absurd claim in
Moscow after Beria’s arrest and execution that he had
been a British agent. Over the next few years, as the
Cultural Revolution was finally brought to a conclusion,
the Gang of Four became convenient if improbable
scapegoats for all the horrors of the Mao regime which
could be publicly acknowledged. As the BBC
correspondent, Philip Short, noted:

Every Chinese official knew that the ‘Gang of Four’ had
been Mao’s closest followers; and every Chinese official
without exception depicted them as Mao’s most vicious
enemies . . . Every official conversation began with the
words, ‘Because of the interference and sabotage of the
Gang of Four . . .’ - followed by a litany of the sins they

were alleged to have committed.—

Service A attempted to cause confusion among Maoist
parties outside China by fabricating a final testament from
Mao to Jiang Qing calling on her to ‘continue the work I
had started’. The forgery was circulated in the name of
supporters of the Gang of Four, calling on Marxist-
Leninists everywhere to condemn the betrayal of Mao’s
legacy by the current regime.—

Though Moscow welcomed the disgrace of the Gang of
Four, it remained pessimistic about the prospects for
reconciliation with Mao’s successors. The Centre’s list of
intelligence requirements for 1977 concluded that ‘the
ruling circle in China remains, as before, nationalistic,
hegemonistic and anti-Soviet’. China, it admitted,
remained a ‘conundrum’. The FCD wanted intelligence
on power struggles within the Party leadership and the
People’s Liberation Army, the future prospects of Deng
Xiaoping (the most senior survivor of those purged in the
Cultural Revolution) and policy changes in the post-Mao
era. While it saw no prospect of major improvements in
Sino-Soviet relations, it hoped for a ‘gradual overhaul of
Maoism and for a partial abstention from its more odious
aspects’, leading to ‘a more sober approach’ to China’s
dealings with the Soviet Union. —

In July 1977 a red wall poster sixty feet long with black

characters two feet high placed on an official building
announced that the Central Committee had reinstated
Deng Xiaoping. The broadcast of an official communique
confirming his reinstatement was followed by the sound
of firecrackers across Beijing and jubilant flag-waving,
gong-banging, drum-beating demonstrations in
Tiananmen Square. Though the demonstrations were
orchestrated, the jubilation was genuine. To the
demonstrators the diminutive figure of Deng, the shortest
of the major world leaders, represented the hope of a
better life after the horrors of the past.— Deng’s
rehabilitation and subsequent emergence as the dominant
Chinese leader caused mixed feelings in the Centre.
Though he was believed to be a pragmatist rather than an
ideological fanatic, his past record suggested that he was
also strongly anti-Soviet. The FCD concluded that Deng
had two main foreign objectives: first, to gain concessions
from the United States; second, to make a show of
improving relations with the Soviet Union in order to
blame Moscow for the lack of real progress. His
economic modernization programme, with its initially
heavy reliance on Western technology, capital and
expertise, caused further distrust in Moscow.

In January 1978 KGB residents were informed by a
circular from the Centre that the Deng regime was on ‘a
collision course with the USSR’, and that the
modernization of Chinese armed forces with Western help

represented ‘a particular danger’. Intelligence operations
against the PRC, however, were seriously hampered by
‘the continuous intensification of the counter-intelligence
measures in Beijing’. It was therefore urgently necessary
to compensate for the weakness of intelligence collection
within the PRC by stepping up operations against Chinese
targets abroad. Though some ‘residencies in third
countries’ were said to have achieved ‘positive’ results,
the ‘lack of the essential agent apparatus’ remained a
severe handicap. Residents were admonished for their
lack of energy in Line K work and ordered to redouble
their efforts. —

The Centre gave particular emphasis to increasing
operations against PRC targets in Hong Kong. In April
1978 residents were sent a detailed target list:

There has been a marked increase in the number of PRC
official missions in Hong Kong over the past few years
and, equally, of various local organizations and
undertakings which are under the control of Beijing.
Thus, the PRC controls more than forty Hong Kong
banks, a large number of trading and industrial firms,
together with a number of local newspapers. Chinese
influence is also strong in the Hong Kong trades unions.

Additional targets included foreign missions in Hong

Kong, British and American intelligence posts, and
scientific institutions whose students were regarded as
potential Line X agents. Though some of the potential
targets were shrewdly chosen, there were also some
curious omissions which suggested significant gaps in the
KGB’s information on Hong Kong. Its references to the
Hong Kong newspapers ‘best informed on the Chinese
scene’, for example, made no mention of the Ming Pao,
which was considered by some Western Sinologists to be
the best informed of all.—

Active measures as well as intelligence collection
proved more difficult against Chinese than against
Western targets. The KGB’s failure to recruit agents able
to provide authentic documents from the Chinese
Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Defence and Public
Security, for example, made it impossible for Service A to
produce plausible fabrications of material from these
ministries comparable to its forgeries of CIA, State
Department and Pentagon documents. The Centre
complained in January 1978 that, ‘The future
improvement of the level and efficiency of active
measures on China is adversely affected by the lack of
essential agent apparatus.’— The Party documents
provided by FENIKS (and perhaps by others), however,
enabled Service A to imitate the format of speeches by
Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders at closed Party
meetings. In operation AUT transcripts of speeches

supposedly made by Deng and a Deputy Foreign Minister
in Beijing on 29 September 1977 to leading supporters of
the PRC among the Chinese diaspora, which emphasized
their role as the ‘connecting link of world revolution’ in
undermining the ‘reactionary regimes’ of South-East
Asia, were sent to the embassies of Indonesia, Thailand
and Malaysia in Singapore.— To compensate for its lack
of official Chinese documents to use as templates for
forgeries. Service A also frequently fabricated hostile
reports on the PRC from those foreign intelligence
agencies and foreign ministries of which it had sample
documents on file. In August 1978, for example, a bogus
Malaysian intelligence report, purporting to contain
details of the subversive activities of Chinese agents sent
to Malaysia and Thailand by Beijing, was given to the
ambassador of Thailand in Kuala Lumpur.— A month
later further disinformation was fed to President Asad of
Syria (apparently in the form of an Iranian report on talks
with a Chinese delegation), supposedly revealing a secret
meeting between the Chinese Foreign Minister, Huang
Hua, and an emissary of the Israeli Prime Minister,
Menachem Begin. Asad was reported to have been
completely deceived. ‘I always treat the Chinese with
suspicion’, he told his Soviet informant, ‘but, even so, I
didn’t expect this of them.’—

The Centre also used active measures in an attempt to
disrupt China’s relations with Communist regimes outside

the Soviet bloc. In 1967 it devised an operation to channel
to the Romanian leader, Nicolae Ceau§escu, a bogus
version of Zhou Enlai’s private comments after his return
from a visit to Bucharest in the previous year. Zhou was
said to have praised the ability of the Romanian Prime
Minister, Ion Gheorge Maurer, ‘the real leader of the
Party and government’, his deputy Emil Bodnara§, who
‘hates Ceau§escu’, and several other members of the
Romanian Presidium. He dismissed Ceau§escu, by
contrast, as ‘an uncultured upstart’ who, despite his
notorious vanity, ranked only fifth in influence in the
Presidium. The Centre had no doubt that Ceau§escu
would be so outraged at this personal insult that there
would be a ‘sharp change in [Romanian] relations with
the Chinese People’s Republic’.—

Service A also attempted to drive a wedge between
China and North Korea. In 1978, during the visit of
General Zia ul-Haq to Beijing, the North Korean embassy
in Islamabad was sent a forged Pakistani document
produced by Service A reporting that he had been told
that the Chinese leadership had informed the US
Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, that they accepted the
need for American troops to remain in South Korea.— As
the Centre had hoped, Chinese-North Korean relations
deteriorated sharply at the end of the decade. The reasons,
however, had far less to do with KGB active measures
than with North Korean distrust of the Sino-American

rapprochement. On 1 January 1979 the United States and
the PRC commenced full diplomatic relations. In
February Chinese forces invaded the Soviet Union’s ally,
Vietnam, and for the next month waged the world’s first
war between ‘socialist’ states. Soviet arms supplies to
North Korea, which had been suspended in 1973, resumed
during 1979. On Red Army Day in February 1980,
Pyongyang celebrated anew the ‘militant friendship’
between Soviet and North Korean forces.

The agent of influence who carried most authority in
the KGB active-measures campaign in the West against
the PRC during the later 1970s was probably Jean
Pasqualini, also known as Bao Ruowang. The son of a
Corsican father and a Chinese mother, Pasqualini was
arrested in 1957, charged with imaginary ‘counter-
revolutionary activities’ as ‘an agent of the imperialists
and a loyal running dog of the Americans’, and spent the
next seven years in the laogai. He first came to the
attention of the Paris residency in the early 1970s while
writing, in collaboration with an American journalist, a
memoir of his harrowing experiences in labour camp.
Prisoner of Mao. ‘Over the years’, wrote Pasqualini,
‘Mao’s police have perfected their interrogation methods
to such a fine point that I would defy any man, Chinese or
not, to hold out against them. ’ Though he later recovered
from his brainwashing, at the time he was sentenced he
felt that he ‘truly loved Mao, his police and the People’s

Courts’. The KGB was doubtless impressed by the fact
that, despite being ‘employed as slave labour’, Pasqualini
did not emerge from the laogai as an anti-Communist.
Though hostile to Mao’s regime, he admired ‘the honesty
and dedication of most of the Communist cadres’ and
insisted that his book was not intended to give aid and
comfort to the CIA.— First published in the United States
in 1973, Prisoner of Mao was published in Britain two
years later and translated into Chinese, French, German,
Spanish and other languages. It remains a classic and is
still listed prominently on the booklists of campaigners
against the laogai. Pasqualini was first contacted by the
Paris residency in 1972 and became a KGB agent in 1975
with the codename CHAN, paid 1,500 francs a month. As
well as teaching at the Paris Ecole des Langues
Orientates, he was invited to give a series of lectures at
Oxford University in 1978 on the abuse of human rights
in the PRC. As in his Oxford lectures, Pasqualini proved
willing to add to his authentic experience of the laogai
information passed to him by the KGB, which included -
according to his file - a number of Service A fabrications.
Between June 1977 and December 1978 he had forty-
eight meetings with his case officer, who was convinced
of his ‘sincerity’. In 1979, however, the KGB discovered
that Pasqualini was under surveillance by the DST, the
French security service.— The breach of security which
led to the surveillance was probably the fault of the Paris
residency. In June 1979 the residency’s most important

agent of influence, Pierre-Charles Pathe, was arrested
while meeting his case officer, who had been tailed by the
DST.— Mitrokhin’s notes on Pasqualini’s file end in
1979, and it is unclear whether his contact with the KGB
was later resumed.—

For the Chinese people the most dramatic indications of
the new era which followed Deng’s victory in the
succession struggle after Mao’s death were the
posthumous rehabilitation of the most celebrated victim
of the Cultural Revolution, Liu Shaoqi, in February 1980,
followed in November by the beginning of the two-month
trial of the Gang of Four. Liu was declared the victim of
the ‘biggest frame-up in the history of our Party’ and
given a belated state funeral. At their trial, to preserve the
memory of Mao as unsullied as possible, the Gang of
Four were made responsible for this and all other
atrocities of the Cultural Revolution. It is probably a sign
of the lack of high-grade Soviet intelligence on these
political convulsions that a French Foreign Ministry
report on President Giscard d’Estaing’s visit to the PRC
in October 1980, provided by Agent SEN in Paris, was
forwarded to the Politburo as a document of special
importance.—

In a report early in 1984 on KGB operations during the
previous two years, Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the
FCD, claimed that: ‘Beijing is blocking normalization of

Sino-Soviet relations . . . Beijing is counting on deriving
political advantages for itself by manoeuvring between
the West and the socialist countries, and trying to
blackmail the West with the prospect of an improvement
of relations with the Soviet Union. ’

In general, Kryuchkov was dissatisfied with the
performance of Line K:

The [FCD] has achieved some useful results over the past
two years in its work against China, but the successes
have been in general in the nature of isolated episodes.
Many residencies are still slow in dealing with the
specific tasks posed by [agent] recruitment. Insufficient
attention is being given to promising categories of
Chinese nationals abroad such as specialists, students and
trainees. Little effort is being made to select agents for
prolonged periods in the PRC or in Hong Kong or
Taiwan.

Residencies must step up their endeavour to achieve
solid results in recruiting Chinese nationals. The most
highly trained officers and experienced agents must be
directed into this work. We must not let slip the
opportunities created by the changeover in personnel in
the Chinese state administration, the process of
discrediting Maoist ideology and the purge carried out in
the Party.

Nowhere more than in working against China do we
require circumspection, patience, endurance and accurate
appreciation of the particular characteristics of the
Chinese.—

The FCD Plan for 1984 ordered active-measures
operations to ‘counter the military and political
rapprochement between the PRC and the USA and other
imperialist countries on an anti-Soviet basis’.— Among
them were active measures intended to disrupt Anglo-
Chinese relations over the future of Hong Kong. In the
‘Joint Declaration’ signed in December 1984, Britain and
the PRC agreed that Hong Kong would return to full
Chinese sovereignty after the expiry of the British lease
on the bulk of the colony in 1997 but that for the next
half-century the capitalist system would continue in Hong
Kong under the formula, ‘One Country, Two Systems’.
The KGB sought, without striking success, to disseminate
through the media the ‘thesis’ that weak-kneed Britain
had suffered a major humiliation at the hands of the
Chinese. —

At the beginning of the Gorbachev era the KGB
continued to find the PRC the most difficult of its major
targets to penetrate. In April 1985 a review of operations
against China by Directorate T (Scientific and
Technological Espionage), one of the FCD’s most

successful sections, disclosed serious and persistent
‘shortcomings’. Of the S&T collected by residencies only
1 per cent related to China and its quality was considered
‘low’. Residents were informed of these findings during
May in a circular which berated them for ‘a number of
negligences’ - chief among them their lack of Chinese
contacts, which was described as ‘a source of extreme
anxiety’.— This anxiety extended to all aspects of
intelligence collection against Chinese targets. As Nikolai
Leonov acknowledged after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, ‘We had an unbridgeable gap in our information
sources on China. ’—

One conundrum, however, remains. Mitrokhin had no
access to the SIGINT archives of the KGB Eighth and
Sixteenth Directorates, which house diplomatic
decrypts.— The files noted by him contain few clues
about the KGB’s ability to intercept and decrypt PRC
communications. As in other major capitals, the Beijing
residency contained a SIGINT station, codenamed
KRAB. Its budget for 1979, a fraction of that for the US
residencies and significantly lower than that for the main
European capitals, does not suggest, by KGB standards, a
high level of activity.— Probably in the early to mid-
1970s operation ALPHA succeeded in ‘the technical
penetration of the People’s Republic of China embassy
and other Chinese establishments in Ulan Bator’, but
Mitrokhin’ s notes give no indication of the intelligence

which this generated.— Viktor Makarov, a former KGB
officer who worked in the Sixteenth Directorate from
1980 to 1986, believes that the significance of Chinese
SIGINT declined in the early 1980s. From 1981 he was
permitted to enter the office used by Chinese
cryptanalysts, which had hitherto been out of bounds.
Makarov deduced, probably correctly, that its current
success rate no longer merited the unusually high level of
security previously accorded to the office within the
directorate.— Though Chinese communications were also
intercepted by other sections of the vast KGB and GRU
SIGINT network, on present evidence it seems unlikely
that cryptanalysis was able to compensate adequately for
the relative failure of agent recruitment.

16

Japan

With the exception of Kim Philby, the most celebrated of
all Soviet spies was the German GRU illegal Richard
Sorge, who was stationed in Tokyo in 1933, posing so
successfully as a Nazi newspaper correspondent for the
next eight years that a Japanese journalist described him
as ‘a typical, swashbuckling arrogant Nazi . . . quick-
tempered, hard-drinking’. He was also, according to the
female Soviet agent Hede Massing, ‘startlingly good-
looking’. As well as penetrating the German embassy in
Tokyo and seducing the ambassador’s wife, Sorge also
ran a Japanese spy ring headed by an idealistic young
Marxist from a wealthy family, Hotsumi Osaki, a member
of the brains trust of the leading statesman. Prince
Konoye. Sorge correctly forecast both the Japanese
invasion of China in 1937 and the German invasion of the
Soviet Union in 1941, sending crucial reassurance on both
occasions that the Japanese did not intend to invade
Siberia. Until the Wehrmacht began its attack on 22 June
1941, Stalin refused to believe all intelligence warnings of
the German invasion, dismissing Sorge as a lying ‘shit
who has set himself up with some small factories and
brothels in Japan’. Shortly before his arrest in October
1941, however, Sorge received a belated message of

thanks from Moscow. In 1964, twenty years after his
execution by the Japanese, he was made a Hero of the
Soviet Union, honoured by a series of officially approved
hagiographies and - most unusually for a foreign agent - a
special issue of postage stamps. Though Sorge had
worked for the rival GRU, the Centre regarded him as the
ideal role model to inspire a new generation of KGB
illegals. At the Twenty-fourth CPSU Congress in Moscow
in 1971, senior KGB officers approached a series of
Western Communist Party leaders to seek help in
recruiting illegals from their countries. In each case, as an
indication of the kind of recruit they were looking for,
they gave the example of Richard Sorge.- At that very
moment, however, a series of agents in the Tokyo Foreign
Ministry were providing a greater volume of classified
documents on Japanese foreign policy (albeit at a less
critical time in Soviet- Japanese relations) than Sorge ’s
spy ring had obtained a generation earlier. Their names,
unlike that of Sorge, have never been made public. -

Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War in August 1945 was
followed by an American military occupation which
imposed on it a new democratic constitution. In
September 1951 a peace treaty signed in the improbable
setting of the San Francisco Opera House provided for the
occupation to end in the following April. A US -Japanese
Security Treaty signed on the same day, however,
approved the maintenance of American military bases not

merely to defend Japan from foreign attack and assist in
maintaining the peace and security of the Far East but
also, if requested by the Japanese government, to help
‘put down large-scale internal riots and disturbances in
Japan, caused through instigation or intervention of an
outside Power or Powers’.- The Soviet Union refused to
sign the San Francisco peace treaty and condemned the
security treaty. Its refusal to give up the four islands in the
southern chain of the Kuriles north of Hokkaido (known
in Japan as the ‘Northern Territories’), which it had
occupied at the end of the war, made it impossible for the
remainder of the century to conclude a peace treaty with
Japan. A Soviet offer in 1956 to return the two
southernmost islands (Shikotan and the Habomais-) in
return for a peace treaty on its own terms failed to break
the deadlock and was later withdrawn.

Throughout the Cold War one of the main priorities of
the Tokyo residency’s active measures was to drive a
wedge between Japan and the United States. Its first
major opportunity came with the negotiation of a revised
security treaty in January I960.- A campaign against
ratification of the treaty begun by the Japanese Socialist
Party (JSP), the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), the
Trades Union General Council (Sohyo) and the Student
Federation (Zengakuren) turned into the biggest mass
movement in Japanese political history. At the height of
the protest in May and June 1960, several million people

in Tokyo and the main cities took part in street
demonstrations and work stoppages, attended meetings
and signed petitions. There were brawls in the Diet and
riots in the streets, during which a female Tokyo
University student was trampled to death.- As usually
happened with protest movements of which it approved,
the KGB claimed excessive credit for it.- The Tokyo
residency, however, at least partly inspired a number of
anti-American incidents - among them an airport
demonstration by Communist students in the Zengakuren
against the arrival of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s
press secretary, James Hagerty. In June the Liberal
Democratic Party (LDP) government of Nobusuke Kishi
suffered the humiliation of having to cancel a forthcoming
visit by Eisenhower himself on the grounds that his
personal safety could not be guaranteed. ‘Viewed from
any angle’, wrote Eisenhower later, ‘this was a
Communist victory.’- The Centre, predictably, claimed
the ‘victory’ for itself.- The Tokyo residency also
succeeded in publicizing bogus secret annexes to the
security treaty concocted by Service A, which purported
to continue the 1951 agreement on the use of US troops to
quell civil unrest and to extend US- Japanese military co-
operation throughout the Far East from the Soviet Pacific
to the Chinese coast.—

The KGB’s tactical successes, however, had little
strategic significance. A few days after the cancellation of

Eisenhower’s visit, the US- Japanese Security Treaty was
ratified by the Japanese Diet. The resignation of the Kishi
government shortly afterwards took the steam out of the
protest movement. The left failed to make the treaty a
major issue in the November elections at which the ruling
LDP, which dominated Japanese politics from 1955 until
1993, gained another comfortable majority. The JCP
received less than 3 per cent of the vote and won only
three seats.—

The degree to which Japan was seen by the Centre as
effectively a NATO member is indicated by the extensive
activity during the 1960s by Line F (‘special actions’) at
the Tokyo residency. In the event of war with NATO,
Moscow planned a massive campaign of sabotage and
disruption behind enemy lines. Each year residencies in
NATO and some neutral European countries were
expected to draw up detailed plans for the sabotage of
four to six major targets.— The same applied in Japan,
where both Japanese and US installations were targeted.
In 1962, for example. Line F made preparations for the
sabotage of four major oil refineries in different areas of
Japan— as well as of US bases on Okinawa.— As in
NATO countries. Line F in Tokyo was also instructed to
reconnoitre possible wartime bases in remote parts of
Japan for Soviet sabotage and intelligence groups
(DRGs). In 1970, for example. Line F identified four
possible DRG landing sites on the north-west coast of the

island of Hokkaido.— As well as containing precise map
references and detailed descriptions of the terrain, each
file on a possible DRG base used a standardized coded
jargon. Each DRG landing area was known as a
DOROZHKA (‘runway’); each site for a DRG base was
termed a ULEY (‘beehive’).

The Tokyo residency also made plans for peacetime
acts of sabotage intended to damage US- Japanese
relations. In Line F jargon each act of sabotage was
termed a ‘lily’ {lily a), the explosive device a ‘bouquet’
(buket), the detonator a ‘little flower’ (tsvetok), the
explosion of the device a ‘splash’ (zaplyv), and the
saboteur the ‘gardener’ (sadovnik).— Among the sabotage
plans devised by Line F was operation VULKAN, an
attack on the library of the American Cultural Center in
Tokyo which was planned to coincide with
demonstrations against the Vietnam War in October 1965.
The illegal agent NOMOTO was to place a book bomb in
a bookcase in the library shortly before it closed one
evening, together with a detonator concealed in a pack of
American cigarettes which was timed to go off in the
early hours of the morning. In order to conceal the KGB’s
hand in the operation. Service A was to prepare leaflets
purporting to come from Japanese nationalist extremists
calling for attacks on US property.— The most dramatic
scheme devised by Line F to cause a major crisis in US-
Japanese relations was a 1969 plan to scatter radioactive

material in Tokyo Bay in the expectation that it would be
blamed on US nuclear submarines using the Yokosuka
naval base and cause a national outcry. Though supported
by the Tokyo resident, the plan was turned down by the
Centre because of the difficulty of obtaining suitable
radioactive material from the United States and the danger
that the source of Soviet material might be detected.—
Two years later KGB plans for ‘special actions’ were
drastically scaled down after some of them were
compromised by the defection in London of the Line F
officer, Oleg Lyalin.—

The main problem encountered by Line PR during the
1960s was the loss of what had hitherto been its main
intelligence asset, the assistance of the JCP, Asia’s largest
non-ruling Communist party. As the Sino-Soviet split
developed, the Japanese Communist leadership sided
more with Beijing than with Moscow. In 1964 Moscow,
already engaged with Beijing in the most vitriolic
polemics in the history of international Communism,
accused the JCP of kowtowing to the Chinese Communist
Party and declaring war on the CPSU. The JCP retaliated
by denouncing the CPSU’s ‘brazen and unpardonable’
attempts to dictate to its Japanese comrades: ‘The chief
cause for the disunity in the international Communist
movement and the socialist camp today is precisely your
self-conceit and the flagrant interference with, and attacks
on, the fraternal parties unleashed brazenly by you as a

result of this self-conceit. ’

The JCP also complained of ‘the destructive activities
against our Party of Soviet Embassy staff members and
special correspondents’ - doubtless with the activities of
the Tokyo residency particularly in mind. It correctly
accused Moscow of using spies and informants to
maintain contact with, and promote the interests of, those
Japanese Communists pursuing ‘anti-party [pro-Moscow]
activities’.— The Chairman of the JCP Central
Committee, Hakamadi Satomi, boasted of burning CPSU
literature to heat his ofuro (Japanese bath).— In the space
of a few years the JCP had changed from an important
KGB intelligence asset into a hostile target.—

The Centre’s Japanese operations suffered another
major blow in 1963 with the loss of what seems to have
been the main illegal KGB residency in Tokyo run by a
veteran pro- Soviet Chinese Communist, JIMMY, who,
with assistance from Communist Chinese intelligence,
had succeeded in setting up an export-import company
based in Hong Kong and Tokyo and in procuring bogus
Hong Kong identity papers for other KGB illegals. When
JIMMY failed to return from a visit to China to see his
relatives after the Sino-Soviet split, the Centre decided to
wind up his residency, probably fearing that it had been
compromised.— The Tokyo residency’s lack of major
Japanese intelligence sources during the mid-1960s was

reflected in the fact that its most productive agent from
1962 to 1967 was a journalist on the Tokyo Shimbun,
codenamed KOCHI, who appears to have had access to
high-level gossip from the cabinet and Foreign Ministry
but probably not to classified documents.—

Line PR’s main strategy after the breach with the JCP
was to recruit leading members from the left wing of the
main opposition party, the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP),
which it codenamed KOOPERATIVA,— and to use them
as agents of influence. On 26 February 1970 the Politburo
approved the payment by the KGB of a total of 100,000
convertible rubles (35,714,000 yen) to a number of
leading figures in the JSP and to subsidize the party
newspaper.— Similar subsidies seem to have been paid
each year.— Probably by the time the Politburo approved
secret subsidies to the JSP, five influential party members
had already been recruited as KGB agents: Seiichi
Katsumata (codenamed GAVR), runner-up in the 1966
election for the post of JSP General Secretary, who in
1974 was given 4 million yen to strengthen his position in
the party;— Tamotsu Sato (transparently codenamed
ATOS), leader of a Marxist faction in the JSP, who was
used to place active-measures material in four party
periodicals;— ALFONS, who was paid 2.5 million yen in
1972, and used to place articles in the JSP daily Shakai
Shimpo;— DUG, a JSP official close to the Party
Chairman, who was given 390,000 yen in 1972 for his

election campaign;— and DIK, paid 200,000 yen in 1972
to publish election leaflets and posters.— Other recruits in
the 1970s included JACK, a JSP deputy and prominent
trade unionist;— Shigero Ito (codenamed GRACE), also a
deputy and a member of the party’s Central Committee,—
and DENIS, who had been a close aide of the former JSP
Chairman Saburo Eda.— KGB confidential contacts
included a former Communist codenamed KING, who
had become one of the leading figures in the JSP,— and
KERK, a member of Katsumata’s JSP faction in the
Diet.— Mitrokhin’s notes on the files of DENIS and
GRACE record that their motivation was both ideological
and financial.— The same was probably true of most of
the KGB’s other agents in the JSP. The KGB’s influence
operations in the Diet were also assisted by the academic
YAMAMOTO, who was described in his file as being
‘ideologically close’ to Moscow. After being recruited as
an agent in 1977, he successfully prompted at least two
parliamentary questions in each session of the Diet,
which, according to the residency’s possibly optimistic
assessment, had a significant impact.—

Of the politicians recruited by the KGB outside the
JSP, the most important was Hirohide Ishida (codenamed
HOOVER), a prominent parliamentary deputy of the
ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), formerly Minister
of Labour. In February 1973 Ishida became Chairman of

the newly founded Parliamentary Japanese- Soviet
Friendship Association (codenamed LOBBY),— and led a
delegation to the Soviet Union from 27 August to 6
September, shortly before the visit of Kakuei Tanaka, the
first by a Japanese Prime Minister for seventeen years. On
this and subsequent visits to Moscow, Ishida was publicly
feted at the request of the Centre by Brezhnev, President
Nikolai Podgomy, Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin and
other notables.— The KGB also went to great pains to
flatter Ishida and assure him of the high regard in which
he was held by the Soviet leadership. The leading
Japanese newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, on which the KGB
had at least one well-placed agent, reported after Ishida’ s
visit to Moscow in the summer of 1973: ‘The Soviet
Union today said it would immediately release all forty-
nine Japanese fishermen detained on charges of violating
Soviet territorial waters. The announcement was made by
the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet
during his meeting with Hirohide Ishida, head of a
visiting Japanese parliamentary delegation.’

According to Stanislav Levchenko, then working on the
FCD Japanese desk, the Japanese fishermen released in
honour of Ishida were among those ‘routinely shanghaied
and held for use as bargaining chips’. Ishida was also co-
opted into the network of global flattery which the KGB
used to service Brezhnev’s voracious appetite for world-
wide recognition. He was persuaded by Vladimir

Pronnikov, head of Line PR at the Tokyo residency, to
show his appreciation for the liberation of the fishermen
by presenting Brezhnev with a maroon Nissan limousine
to add to his considerable collection of luxury foreign
cars. Levchenko, who suspected - probably correctly -
that the Nissan had been purchased with KGB funds, was
put in personal charge of the car, which was delivered in a
crate to FCD headquarters, in order to prevent parts being
stolen before its formal presentation to Brezhnev.— In
1974, already a KGB confidential contact, Ishida was
recruited as an agent by Pronnikov, who was rewarded
with the Order of the Red Banner.— Ishida became one of
the Tokyo residency’s leading agents of influence.

The priority attached by the Centre to operations in
Japan in the early 1970s was reflected in the fact that the
budget for them in 1973 was almost as large as for India
and almost three times as large as for any of the eleven
other Asian states which were then the responsibility of
the FCD Seventh Department.— KGB active measures
before and during Tanaka’s visit to Moscow in 1973 were
intended to promote a peace treaty and agreement on
Japanese- Soviet relations on the lines agreed by the
Politburo on 16 August. If progress was made during the
negotiations, Tanaka was to be offered the return of the
Habomais and Shikotan as well as concessions on fishing
rights in return for the abrogation of the US- Japanese
Security Treaty and the closure of US military bases.—

Though Tanaka was not expected to accept these terms, it
was hoped to increase Japanese public support for an
agreement on these lines.— The visit, however, achieved
little. Tanaka insisted that return of all the Northern
Territories was the pre-requisite for economic cooperation
and other forms of improved relations with the Soviet
Union.—

During the remainder of the 1970s, Ishida continued to
be used as an agent of influence within both the LDP and
the Parliamentary Japanese-Soviet Friendship
Association. In 1977, at the request of the KGB, he
complained personally to the LDP Prime Minister, Takeo
Fukuda, that the Japanese ambassador in Moscow and his
wife had made themselves unwelcome by their contacts
with dissidents and to hint that it was time for him to be
recalled.— During the 1970s there were at least two
further recruitments within the LDP: FEN, a confidant of
Kakuei Tanaka,— and KANI, a deputy whose career the
Tokyo residency claimed to be actively promoting. — The
key to the KGB’s penetration of conservative politics was
the corruption endemic in some factions of the LDP and
other parts of Japanese society. Tanaka owed much of his
phenomenal success in rising through the ranks to become
a cabinet minister at the age of only thirty-nine, despite
never having finished secondary school, to the
consummate mastery of the politics of the pork barrel
which helped to raise his remote prefecture of Niigata

‘from rural obscurity to contemporary affluence’. All
those who won contracts for the numerous public works
in Niigata were expected to contribute handsomely to
Tanaka’s political war chest. In December 1974 he was
forced to resign, allegedly on health grounds, after some
details of his corruption appeared in the press. In 1976
much more damning evidence emerged that the US
aircraft company Lockheed had paid Tanaka and other
prominent LDP politicians large bribes to win a contract
to supply its Tri-star planes to All Nippon Airways.
Lockheed followed in an already long tradition of bribery
by foreign firms.— The KGB, though able to exploit that
tradition, was never able to compete financially with the
kick-backs on offer from such major players as Lockheed
and, partly for that reason, never truly penetrated the
commanding heights of Japanese conservative politics.

Most KGB agents in the media probably also had
mainly mercenary motives. Files noted by Mitrokhin
identify at least five senior Japanese journalists (other
than those on JSP publications) who were KGB agents
during the 1970s: BLYUM on the Asahi Shimbun,—
SEMYON on the Yomiuri Shimbun,— KARL, (or
KARLOV) on the Sankei Shimbun,— FUDZIE on the
Tokyo Shimbun— and ODEKI, identified only as a senior
political correspondent on a major Japanese newspaper.—
The journalist ROY, who, according to his file, regarded
his work for the KGB simply as ‘a commercial

transaction’, was valuable chiefly for his intelligence
contacts and was instrumental in the recruitment of
KHUN, a senior Japanese counter-intelligence officer
who provided intelligence on China. — Not all the paid
agents in the Japanese media, however, were willing
recruits. Mitrokhin’s summary of SEMYON ’s file notes
that, during a visit to Moscow in the early 1970s, ‘He was
recruited on the basis of compromising material’:
changing currency on the black market (probably in an
ambush prepared for him by the SCD) and ‘immoral’
behaviour (doubtless one of the many variants of the
KGB ‘honey trap’). During his six years as a Soviet agent,
SEMYON tried frequently to persuade the KGB to release
him. The Centre eventually broke contact with him after
he had been caught passing disinformation. —

Stanislav Levchenko later identified several other
journalists used for KGB active measures,— of whom the
most important seems to have been Takuji Yamane
(codenamed KANT), assistant managing editor and
personal adviser to the publisher of the conservative daily
Sankei Shimbun. According to Levchenko, one of his
controllers, Yamane skilfully concealed his pro-Soviet
sympathies beneath a veneer of anti-Soviet and anti-
Chinese nationalism and became one of the Tokyo
residency’s leading agents of influence. Among the
Service A forgeries which he publicized was a bogus
‘Last Will and Testament’ of Zhou Enlai concocted soon

after his death in 1976, which contained numerous
references to the in-fighting and untrustworthiness of the
rest of the Chinese leadership and was intended to disrupt
negotiations for a Sino-Japanese peace treaty. The Centre
doubtless calculated that the forgery would make more
impact if published in a conservative rather than a JSP
paper. It believed that even Beijing, which tried
frantically to discover the origin of the document, was not
at first sure whether or not the document was genuine.—
After a detailed investigation, however, the Japanese
intelligence community correctly identified Zhou’s will as
a forgery. — This and other active measures failed to
prevent the signing on 12 August 1978 of a Sino-Japanese
peace treaty which, to the fury of Moscow, contained a
clause committing both signatories to opposing attempts
by any power to achieve hegemony (a phrase intended by
Beijing as a coded reference to Soviet policy).—

By the autumn of 1979 Line PR at the Tokyo residency
had a total of thirty-one agents and twenty-four
confidential contacts.— These statistics and examples of
KGB disinformation planted in the media were doubtless
used by the Centre to impress the Soviet political
leadership - especially since the Japanese were the
world’s most avid newspaper readers.— The evidence of
opinion polls demonstrates, however, that the KGB
active-measures offensives in Japan against both the
United States and China, though achieving a series of

tactical successes, ended in strategic defeat. During the
1960s around 4 per cent of Japanese identified the Soviet
Union as the foreign country they liked most. Despite the
combined efforts of Service A, Line PR in Tokyo and a
substantial network of agents of influence in both the JSP
and the media, Soviet popularity actually declined during
the 1970s, dipping below 1 per cent after the invasion of
Afghanistan and never rising significantly above 2 per
cent even during the Gorbachev era. By contrast, the
percentage naming the United States as their favourite
nation was usually over 40 per cent, save for a dip in the
early 1970s due to the Vietnam War. After the
normalization of Tokyo’s relations with Beijing in 1972,
China too, though never rivalling the appeal of the United
States, was far more popular than the Soviet Union.—

Intelligence collection in Japan had much greater
success than active measures. The Tokyo residency’s
most successful penetration was probably of the Foreign
Ministry. From the late 1960s at least until (and perhaps
after) Levchenko’s defection in 1979, two Japanese
diplomats, codenamed RENGO and EMMA, provided
large amounts of classified material in both Tokyo and
their foreign postings. Their files describe both as
‘valuable agents’. Early in her career EMMA’s controller
gave her a handbag fitted with a concealed Minox camera
which she regularly took to work to photograph
diplomatic documents. RENGO also acted as a talent

spotter.— The diplomat OVOD, who was the victim of
two honey traps during postings in Moscow six years
apart, was a far more reluctant recruit. On the second
occasion, after he had been seduced by Agent
MARIANA, who was employed as his language teacher,
and - following usual KGB practice - had probably been
confronted with photographs of their sexual encounter,
OVOD gloomily told his case officer, ‘Now I shall never
be rid of the KGB for the rest of my diplomatic career.’—

The KGB’s most successful diplomatic honey trap
involving a Japanese target recruitment was almost
certainly the seduction of the cipher clerk MISHA by the
KGB ‘swallow’ LANDYSH while he was stationed in
Moscow during the early 1970s.— MISHA is probably
identical with the cipher clerk who in the late 1970s was
working at the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo under the new
KGB codename NAZAR.— NAZAR’ s intelligence was
considered so important that his case officers in Tokyo,
first Valeri Ivanovich Umansky, then Valentin
Nikolayevich Belov, were taken off all other duties. For
security reasons NAZAR rarely met either case officer,
leaving his material in a dead letter-box or passing it on
by brush contact. Whenever he was due to make a
delivery, operations officers ringed the DLB or brush-
contact location to ensure that it was not under
surveillance and, if necessary, act as decoys if any
suspicious intruder approached the area. The diplomatic

telegrams supplied by NAZAR, which included traffic
between Tokyo and its Washington embassy, were
sometimes so voluminous that the residency found it
difficult to translate them all before forwarding to the
Centre. The assistance given to the Centre’s codebreakers
by NAZAR’ s cipher material was probably rated even
more highly than his copies of Japanese diplomatic
traffic.— There must have been moments when, thanks to
NAZAR and Soviet codebreakers, the Japanese Foreign
Ministry was, without knowing it, practising something
akin to open diplomacy in its dealings with the Soviet
Union.—

The other most striking success of the Tokyo residency
during the 1970s was the increased collection of scientific
and technological intelligence (S&T) by Line X which
reported in the Centre to FCD Directorate T. During the
1960s Japan’s annual growth rate had averaged over 10
per cent. The value of exports increased from $4. 1 billion
in 1960 to $19.3 billion a decade later. By 1970 Japan had
the largest ship-building, radio and television industries in
the world. Its consumer industries far outstripped those of
the Soviet Union. In less than a decade Japan had passed
from the era of the ‘Three Sacred Treasures’ (washing
machine, refrigerator, black and white TV) to that of the
‘Three C’s’ (car, cooler, colour TV).— In 1971 the
Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) set
out a new high-tech agenda for the Japanese economy.

based on a shift to ‘knowledge-intensive’ industries such
as semi-conductors and integrated circuits.—

In June 1971 Agent TONDA, the head of a high-tech
company in the Tokyo region, supplied the residency with
two volumes of secret documents on a new micro-
electronic computer system intended for US air and
missile forces.— Among the most highly rated of the
agents who provided intelligence on, and samples of,
Japanese and US semi-conductors was TANI, the owner
of a company which specialized in semi-conductor
design. TANI told his case officer that he regarded
himself not as working for the KGB but as simply
engaging in industrial espionage which, he seemed to
imply, was a fact of modern business life.— Some, if not
most. Line X agents probably took a similarly cynical
view. Among the other agents who provided intelligence
on state-of-the-art semi-conductor production was
LEDAL, director of semi-conductor research in a
Japanese university.— Mitrokhin’s notes on KGB files
identify a total of sixteen agents with senior positions in
Japanese high-tech industry and research institutes during
the 1970s.— This list, which does not include confidential
contacts, is doubtless far from comprehensive. Even the
equipment used by the KGB residency to monitor the
communications exchanged between Tokyo police
surveillance teams and their headquarters was based on
technology stolen from Japan.—

According to Levchenko, it was not unusual for the
fortnightly consignments sent by Line X to Moscow via
diplomatic couriers ‘to weigh as much as a ton’. They
were transported to Aeroflot flights leaving Tokyo airport
in an embassy minibus.— The statistics for S&T
collection in 1980, provided by a French agent in
Directorate T, tell a less dramatic story. Though Japan
was the fifth most important source of S&T, it came far
behind the United States.— In 1980 61.5 per cent of S&T
came from American sources (not all in the US), 10.5 per
cent from West Germany, 8 per cent from France, 7.5 per
cent from Britain and 3 per cent from Japan. Though
producing advanced technology used for military
purposes, Japan did not possess the large defence
industries which were the chief target of Directorate T.
Even 3 per cent of the vast global volume of Soviet S&T,
however, indicates that Japanese material benefited
approximately 100 Soviet R&D projects during 1980.—
That statistic understates the significance of S&T
operations in Japan. Japan was a major source for US as
well as Japanese S&T. The Directorate T ‘work plan’ for
1978-80 instructed Line X officers:

• to cultivate and recruit American citizens in Japan;

• to cultivate and recruit Japanese working in
American establishments in Japan, and in American
organizations involved in Japanese/ American co-
operation in the scientific, technical and economic fields;

• to cultivate Japanese and individuals of other
nationalities engaged in industrial espionage in the USA
on behalf of Japanese monopolies;

• to train agent-recruiters and agent talent- spotters
capable of working on American citizens in Japan and in
the USA;

• to penetrate the Japanese colony in the USA;

• to obtain information of American origin;

• systematically to seek out, cultivate and recruit
Japanese with the object of deploying them to the USA,
and also to act as support agents.—

Line X also devised ways of evading the Co-ordinating
Committee for East-West Trade (COCOM) embargo
maintained by NATO and Japan on the export to the
Soviet Union of technology with military applications.
Directorate T regarded as a major coup the successful
negotiation in 1977 of a major contract with a Japanese
shipbuilder, Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries, for a
floating dock with a capacity of over 80,000 tonnes,
supposedly for the exclusive use of the Soviet fishing
fleet. Levchenko found it difficult to ‘believe the Japanese
were so naive as to accept those assurances as the literal
truth’. It is possible that MITI, which approved the
contract, simply turned a blind eye to the military
significance of the floating dock in order not to lose a
large export order. The Japanese Defence Ministry, which

would doubtless have taken a different view, did not learn
of the contract until after it was signed. Within a few
months of its delivery in November 1978 to Vladivostok,
the main base of the Soviet Pacific Fleet, the dry dock
was being used to carry out repairs to nuclear submarines
and the aircraft carrier Minsk.—

The Tokyo resident, Oleg Aleksandrovich Guryanov,
told his staff in the late 1970s: ‘The proceeds from the
operations these [Line X] officers carry out each year
would cover the expenses of our entire Tokyo residency
with money still left over. In fact, worldwide, technical
intelligence all by itself covers all the expenses of the
whole KGB foreign intelligence service.’—

The dynamic and ambitious head of Directorate T,
Leonid Sergeyevich Zaitsev, made similar claims and
campaigned unsuccessfully for his directorate to become
independent of the FCD.— Though S&T was of crucial
importance in preventing Soviet military technology
falling seriously behind the West, however, it made a
much smaller contribution to the Soviet economy as a
whole. The real economic benefit of Western and
Japanese scientific and technological secrets, though put
by Directorate T at billions of dollars, was severely
restricted by the incurable structural failings of the
command economy. Hence the great economic paradox of
the 1970s and 1980s that, despite possessing large

numbers of well-qualified scientists and engineers and a
huge volume of S&T, Soviet technology fell steadily
further behind that of the West and Japan.—

The defection of Stanislav Levchenko in the autumn of
1979 did major damage to KGB operations in Japan,
particularly those of Line PR. Soon after 8 p.m. on the
evening of 24 October, Levchenko approached a US
naval commander in the Hotel Sanno near the US
embassy in Tokyo and asked him to arrange an urgent
meeting with a CIA officer. By dawn the next day
Levchenko had a US visa in his passport and a first-class
ticket on a Pan Am flight to Washington. After
Levchenko refused to meet representatives of the Soviet
embassy, he and his CIA escort, surrounded by Japanese
policemen, made their way across the tarmac at Narita
airport to a waiting aircraft.— The Centre, meanwhile,
embarked on an immediate damage limitation exercise.
Contact with a series of the Tokyo residency’s agents was
suspended— and planning begun for the creation of a new
Line PR network.— The most important of the agents
compromised by the defection was probably NAZAR. He
and the other agents put on ice by the residency must have
spent the next few years nervously wondering if they
would be publicly exposed. The difficulties encountered
by the Tokyo residency in finding replacements for the
Line PR agents compromised by Levchenko was reflected
in the directives sent in 1980 to residencies in twelve

other countries instructing them to cultivate likely
Japanese recruits.—

The disruption of the political intelligence network
coincided with a worsening of Soviet-Japanese relations
following an increase in the numbers of Soviet SS-20
medium-range missiles stationed in the Far East, the
construction of new military bases on the Kuriles
(‘Northern Territories’) and the beginning of the war in
Afghanistan. Prime Minister Kenko Suzuki declared in
1980, ‘If the Soviet Union wants to improve its relations
with Japan, it must fulfil Japan’s two requests for a
withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan and the
reversion of the Northern Territories.’ He later added a
third request for the removal of Soviet SS-20s from the
Soviet Far East.— On 7 February 1981 the Suzuki
government inaugurated an annual Northern Territories
Day to promote public support for the return of the four
islands.—

When Suzuki and his Foreign Minister, Yoshio
Sakurauchi, visited Moscow to attend Brezhnev’s funeral
in November 1982, they invited Gromyko to visit Tokyo
for talks aimed at improving relations but were firmly
rebuffed. The Kuriles, Gromyko declared, were Soviet
territory and ‘the timing and atmosphere’ were not right
for a visit.— The atmosphere was further damaged in
December by Levchenko’s first public revelations of

KGB operations in Japan since his defection three years
earlier, among them the sensational disclosure that
‘Among the most efficient [KGB] agents were a former
member of the Japanese government, several leading
functionaries of the Socialist Party of Japan, one of the
most eminent Sinologists with close contacts with
government officers, and several members of the Japanese
Parliament.’— Though the Centre had doubtless been
expecting such revelations, they were none the less a
public relations disaster which undermined much of its
active-measures offensive.

Given the US military bases in Japan, it was inevitable
that Soviet relations with Tokyo in the early 1980s should
suffer from the fear of both the Centre and the Kremlin
that the Reagan administration was making preparations
for a nuclear first strike. The main priority of the Tokyo
residency, as of residencies in the West, was to collect
intelligence on these non-existent preparations as part of
operation RYAN.— Meanwhile, even the JSP, which only
a few years earlier had been regarded by the Centre as an
important vehicle for active measures, had become
alarmed by the Soviet arms buildup in the Far East. In
1983 the JSP leadership officially informed the CPSU that
the SS-20 missile bases in Soviet Asia were ‘the cause of
great concern to the Japanese people and to those in other
regions of Asia’.— According to opinion polls the
proportion of Japanese people concerned by ‘a military

threat coming from the Soviet Union’ grew from 55 per
cent in 1981 to 80 per cent in 1983.—

The foreign intelligence ‘work plan’ for 1984,
circulated to Tokyo and other residencies in November
1983 at the height of operation RYAN, declared, ‘The
threat of an outbreak of nuclear war is reaching an
extremely dangerous position. The United States is
involving its NATO allies and Japan in pursuing its
aggressive designs.’ Japan was elevated, along with the
United States, its NATO allies and China, to the status of
one of the ‘main targets’ for KGB agent penetrations.
Residencies were instructed to embark on an active-
measures offensive ‘exacerbating contradictions between
the USA, Western Europe and Japan’.—

While the dawn of the Gorbachev era dissipated the
dangerous tension of the early 1980s, it did little to bring
closer the long-delayed peace treaty with Japan. As
Gorbachev embarked on ‘new thinking’ in foreign policy,
Georgi Arbatov, the Director of the US-Canada Institute,
tried to persuade him that the Soviet Union ‘should give
back two or even all four of the [Kurile] islands to the
Japanese, otherwise we’d never get anywhere with
them’.— Gorbachev did not listen. In April 1991, eight
months before the collapse of the Soviet Union, he
complained during a speech in the Soviet Far East, on the
eve of his first visit to Tokyo, ‘Everybody keeps asking

me . . . how many islands I am planning to give away.’
When voices in the audience shouted, ‘Don’t give away a
single one!’ Gorbachev replied, ‘I feel the same as

Despite the damage to the Line PR agent network as a
result of Levchenko’s defection. Line X appears to have
been little affected and may well have expanded its
activities at least until the spring of 1987. In May of that
year, it was revealed that a Toshiba subsidiary had joined
with a Swedish firm to sell to the Soviet Union
sophisticated machine tools and computers which made it
possible to manufacture submarine propellers whose low
noise emissions made them difficult to detect. Almost
simultaneously a Japanese spy ring working for Soviet
intelligence was discovered to have supplied secret
documents on AW ACS technology to Soviet intelligence.
The Japanese government responded by expelling an
officer from the Tokyo residency. Moscow retaliated by
expelling the Japanese naval attache and a Mitsubishi
executive.—

Though the KGB offensive in Japan generated many
tactical operational successes, it ended in strategic failure.
The enormous quantity of S&T collected by Line X from
the West and Japan could not save the Soviet system from
economic collapse. Nor were KGB active measures able
to persuade Tokyo to sign a peace treaty acceptable to

Moscow. At the beginning of the twenty-first century
Russia and Japan were the only major combatants in the
Second World War that had not yet ‘normalized’ their
relations.

17

The Special Relationship with India

Part 1: The Supremacy of the Indian
National Congress

The Third World country on which the KGB eventually
concentrated most operational effort during the Cold War
was India. Under Stalin, however, India had been
regarded as an imperialist puppet. The Great Soviet
Encyclopedia dismissed Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi,
who led India to independence in 1947, as ‘a reactionary .

. . who betrayed the people and helped the imperialists
against them; aped the ascetics; pretended in a demagogic
way to be a supporter of Indian independence and an
enemy of the British; and widely exploited religious
prejudice’.- Despite his distaste for Stalinist attacks
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent
India, ‘had no doubt that the Soviet revolution had
advanced human society by a great leap and had lit a
bright flame which could not be smothered’ . Though later
eulogized by Soviet writers as ‘a leader of international
magnitude’ who ranked ‘among the best minds of the
twentieth century’,- Nehru was well aware that until

Stalin’s death in 1953 he, like Gandhi, was regarded as a
reactionary. During the early years of Indian
independence, secret correspondence from Moscow to the
Communist Party of India (CPI) was frequently
intercepted by the Intelligence Branch (IB) in New Delhi
(as it had been when the IB was working for the British
Raj). According to the head of the IB, B. N. Mullik, until
the early 1950s ‘every instruction that had issued from
Moscow had expressed the necessity and importance [for]
the Indian Communist Party to overthrow the
“reactionary” Nehru Government’.- Early in 1951 Mullik
gave Nehru a copy of the latest exhortations from
Moscow to the CPI, which contained a warning that they
must not fall into government hands. Nehru ‘laughed out
loud and remarked that Moscow apparently did not know
how smart our Intelligence was’.-

Neither Nehru nor the IB, however, realized how
thoroughly the Indian embassy in Moscow was being
penetrated by the KGB, using its usual varieties of the
honey trap. The Indian diplomat PROKHOR was
recruited, probably in the early 1950s, with the help of a
female swallow, codenamed NE VEROV A, who
presumably seduced him. The KGB was clearly pleased
with the material which PROKHOR provided, which
included on two occasions the embassy codebook and
reciphering tables, since in 1954 it increased his monthly
payments from 1,000 to 4,000 rupees.- Another Indian

diplomat, RADAR, was recruited in 1956, also with the
assistance of a swallow, who on this occasion claimed
(probably falsely) to be pregnant.- A third KGB swallow
persuaded a cipher clerk in the Indian embassy, ARTUR,
to go heavily into debt in order to make it easier to
compromise him. He was recruited as an agent in 1957
after being trapped (probably into illegal currency
dealing) by a KGB officer posing as a black-marketeer .-
As a result of these and other penetrations of the embassy,
Soviet codebreakers were probably able to decrypt
substantial numbers of Indian diplomatic
communications .-

As KGB operations in India expanded during the 1950s
and 1 960s, the Centre seems to have discovered the extent
of the IB’s previous penetration of the CPI. According to
a KGB report, an investigation into Promode Das Gupta,
who became secretary of the Bengal Communist Party in
1959, concluded that he had been recruited by the IB in
1947.- Further significant IB penetrations were
discovered in the Kerala and Madras parties.— By the
1960s KGB penetration of the Indian intelligence
community and other parts of its official bureaucracy had
enabled it to turn the tables on the IB.— After the KGB
became the main conduit for both money and secret
communications from Moscow, high-level IB penetration
of the CPI became much more difficult. As in other
Communist parties, this secret channel was known only to

a small inner circle within the leadership. In 1959 the PCI
General Secretary, Ajoy Gosh, agreed with the Delhi
residency on plans to found an import-export business for
trade with the Soviet bloc, headed by a senior Party
member codenamed DED, whose profits would be
creamed off for Party funds. Within little more than a
decade its annual profits had grown to over 3 million
rupees.— The Soviet news agency Novosti provided
further subsidies by routinely paying the CPI publishing
house at a rate 50 per cent above its normal charges.—

Moscow’s interest in Nehru was greatly enhanced by
his emergence (together with Nasser and Tito) as one of
the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement, which began
to take shape at the Bandung Conference in 1955. An
exchange of official visits in the same year by Nehru and
Khrushchev opened a new era in Indo-Soviet relations.
On his return from India in December, Khrushchev
reported to the Presidium that he had received a warm
welcome, but criticized the ‘primitive’ portrayal of India
in Soviet publications and films which demonstrated a
poor grasp of Indian culture. Khrushchev was, however,
clearly pleased with the intelligence and personal security
provided by the KGB during his trip and proposed that the
officers concerned be decorated and considered for salary
increases.—

American reliance on Pakistan as a strategic

counterweight to Soviet influence in Asia encouraged
India to turn to the USSR. In 1956 Nehru declared that he
had never encountered a ‘grosser case of naked
aggression’ than the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt, but
failed to condemn the brutal Soviet suppression of the
Hungarian Uprising in the same year. India voted against
a UN resolution calling for free elections in Hungary and
the withdrawal of Soviet forces. The Kremlin increasingly
valued Indian support as, with growing frequency, the
Non-Aligned Movement tended to vote in the UN with
the Soviet bloc rather than the West. During the 1960s
India and the Soviet Union found further common cause
against Mao’s China.—

Within Nehru’s Congress Party government the KGB
set out to cultivate its leading left-wing firebrand and
Nehru’s close adviser, Krishna Menon, who became
Minister of Defence in 1957 after spending most of the
previous decade as, successively, Indian High
Commissioner in London and representative at the United
Nations. To the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei
Gromyko, Tt was . . . plain that [Menon] was personally
friendly to the Soviet Union. He would say to me
heatedly: “You cannot imagine the hatred the Indian
people felt and still feel to the colonialists, the British . . .
The methods used by American capital to exploit the
backward countries may be oblique, but they’re just as
harsh.”

In May 1962 the Soviet Presidium (which under
Khrushchev replaced the Politburo) authorized the KGB
residency in New Delhi to conduct active-measures
operations designed to strengthen Menon’s position in
India and enhance his personal popularity, probably in the
hope that he would become Nehru’s successor.— During
Menon’s tenure of the Defence Ministry, India’s main
source of arms imports switched from the West to the
Soviet Union. The Indian decision in the summer of 1962
to purchase MiG-218 rather than British Lightnings was
due chiefly to Menon. The British High Commissioner in
New Delhi reported to London, ‘Krishna Menon has from
the beginning managed to surround this question with
almost conspiratorial official and ministerial secrecy
combined with a skilful putting about of stories in favour
of the MiG and against Western aircraft.’— Menon’s
career, however, was disrupted by the Chinese invasion of
India in October 1962. Having failed to take the prospect
of invasion seriously until the eve of the attack, Menon
found himself made the scapegoat for India’s
unpreparedness. Following the rout of Indian forces by
the Chinese, Nehru reluctantly dismissed him on 31
October. A fortnight later, the Presidium authorized active
measures by the Delhi residency, including secret finance
for a newspaper which supported Menon, in a forlorn
attempt to resuscitate his political career.— Though
similar active measures by the KGB in Menon’s favour

before the 1967 election— also had little observable
effect, a secret message to Menon from the CPSU Central
Committee (probably sent by its International
Department) expressed appreciation for his positive
attitude to the Soviet Union.—

KGB support did little to revive Menon ’s fortunes.
Before he became Defence Minister, most of his political
career had been spent outside India - including twenty-
eight years in Britain, where he had served for more than
a decade as a Labour councillor in London. As a result,
despite the personal support of some ardent disciples
within the Congress Party (at least one of whom received
substantial KGB funding),— Menon lacked any real
popular following in India itself. By the time he returned
to India from foreign exile, the only language he spoke
was English, he could no longer tolerate spicy Indian food
and he preferred a tweed jacket and flannel trousers to
traditional Indian dress. After failing to be renominated by
Congress in his existing Bombay constituency for the
1967 election, Menon stood unsuccessfully as an
independent. Two years later, with Communist support,
he was elected as an independent in West Bengal. Some
of the issues on which he campaigned suggest that he had
been influenced by KGB active measures - as, for
example, in his demand that American troops in Vietnam
be tried for genocide and his claim that they were slitting
open the wombs of pregnant women to expose their

unborn babies.— Well before his death in 1974, however,
Menon had ceased to be an influential voice in Indian
politics.

Following Menon’s political eclipse, Moscow’s
preferred candidate to succeed Nehru after his death in
May 1964 was Gulzarilal Nanda, Home Minister and
number two in the cabinet. The Delhi residency was
ordered to do all it could to further his candidature but to
switch support to Lai Bahadur Shastri, also a close
associate of Nehru, if Nanda’ s campaign failed.— There is
no indication in the files noted by Mitrokhin that the KGB
was in contact with either Nanda or Shastri. Moscow’s
main reason for supporting them was, almost certainly,
negative rather than positive - to prevent the right-wing
Hindu traditionalist Morarji Desai, who began each day
by drinking a glass of his own urine (a practice extolled in
ancient Indian medical treatises), from succeeding Nehru.
In the event, after Desai had been persuaded to withdraw
reluctantly from the contest, Shastri became Prime
Minister with the unanimous backing of Congress.
Following Shastri ’s sudden death in January 1966, the
cabal of Congress leaders (the ‘Syndicate’) chose Nehru’s
daughter, Indira Gandhi (codenamed VANO by the
KGB), as his successor in the mistaken belief that she
would prove a popular figurehead whom they could
manipulate at will.—

The KGB’s first prolonged contact with Indira Gandhi
had occurred during her first visit to the Soviet Union a
few months after Stalin’s death in 1953. As well as
keeping her under continuous surveillance, the Second
Chief Directorate also surrounded her with handsome,
attentive male admirers.— Unaware of the orchestration of
her welcome by the KGB, Indira was overwhelmed by the
attentions lavished on her. Though she did not mention
the male admirers in letters to her father, she wrote to
him, ‘Everybody - the Russians - have been so sweet to
me ... I am being treated like everybody’s only daughter
- 1 shall be horribly spoilt by the time I leave. Nobody has
ever been so nice to me.’ Indira wrote of a holiday
arranged for her on the Black Sea, ‘I don’t think I have
had such a holiday for years.’ Later, in Leningrad, she
told Nehru that she was ‘wallowing in luxury’.— Two
years later Indira accompanied her father on his first
official visit to the Soviet Union. Like Nehru, she was
visibly impressed by the apparent successes of Soviet
planning and economic modernization exhibited to them
in carefully stage-managed visits to Russian factories.
During her trip, Khrushchev presented her with a mink
coat which became one of the favourite items in her
wardrobe - despite the fact that a few years earlier she had
criticized the female Indian ambassador in Moscow for
accepting a similar gift.—

Soviet attempts to cultivate Indira Gandhi during the

1950s were motivated far more by the desire to influence
her father than by any awareness of her own political
potential. Like both the Congress Syndicate and the CPI,
Moscow still underestimated her when she became Prime
Minister. During her early appearances in parliament, Mrs
Gandhi seemed tongue-tied and unable to think on her
feet. The insulting nickname coined by a socialist MP,
‘Dumb Doir, began to stick.— Moscow’s strategy during
1966 for the Indian elections in the following year was
based on encouraging the CPI and the breakaway
Communist Party of India, Marxist (CPM) to join
together in a left-wing alliance to oppose Mrs Gandhi and
the Congress government.— As well as subsidizing the
CPI and some other left-wing groups during the 1967
election campaign, the KGB also funded the campaigns of
several agents and confidential contacts within Congress.
The most senior agent identified in the files noted by
Mitrokhin was a minister codenamed ABAD, who was
regarded by the KGB as ‘extremely influential’.—

During the election campaign, the KGB also made
considerable use of active measures, many of them based
on forged American documents produced by Service A.
An agent in the information department of the US
embassy in New Delhi, codenamed MIKHAIL, provided
examples of documents and samples of signatures to
assist in the production of convincing forgeries.— Among
the operations officers who publicized the forgeries

produced for the 1967 election campaign was Yuri
Modin, former controller of the Cambridge ‘Magnificent
Five’. In an attempt to discredit S. K. Patil, one of the
leading anti-Communists in the Congress Syndicate,
Modin circulated a forged letter from the US consul-
general in Bombay to the American ambassador in New
Delhi referring to Patil’ s ‘political intrigues with the
Pakistanis’ and to the large American subsidies
supposedly given to him. Though Patil was one of the
most senior Congress politicians defeated at the election,
it remains difficult to assess how much his defeat owed to
KGB active measures.— Modin also publicized a bogus
telegram to London from the British High Commissioner,
John Freeman, reporting that the United States was giving
vast sums to right-wing parties and politicians. The fact
that the KGB appears to have had no agent like
MIKHAIL in the High Commission, however, led Service
A on this occasion to make an embarrassing error. Its
forgery mistakenly described the British High
Commissioner as Sir John Freeman.—

Other Service A fabrications had much greater success.
Among them was a forged letter purporting to come from
Gordon Goldstein of the US Office of Naval Research
and revealing the existence of (in reality non-existent)
American bacteriological warfare weapons in Vietnam
and Thailand. Originally published in the Bombay Free
Press Journal, the letter was reported in the London

Times on 7 March 1968 and used by Moscow Radio in
broadcasts beamed at Asia as proof that the United States
had spread epidemics in Vietnam. The Indian weekly Blitz
headlined a story based on the same forgery, ‘US Admits
Biological and Nuclear Warfare’. Goldstein’s signature
and official letterhead were subsequently discovered to
have been copied from an invitation to an international

scientific symposium circulated by him the previous

35

year.—

After the elections of February 1967, the KGB claimed,
doubtless optimistically, that it was able to influence 30 to
40 per cent of the new parliament.— Congress lost 21 per
cent of its seats. The conflict between Indira Gandhi and
her chief rival Morarji Desai made its forty-four-seat
majority precarious and obliged her to accept Desai as
Deputy Prime Minister. By 1968 Desai and Kamaraj, the
head of the Syndicate, were agreed on the need to replace
Mrs Gandhi.— Congress was moving inexorably towards
a split.

During 1969 there were major policy reorientations in
both Moscow and Delhi. The growing threat from China
persuaded the Kremlin to make a special relationship with
India the basis of its South Asian policy. Simultaneously,
Mrs Gandhi set out to secure left-wing support against the
Syndicate. In July 1969 she nationalized fourteen
commercial banks. Desai was sacked as Finance Minister

and resigned as Deputy Prime Minister. Encouraged by
Moscow, the CPI swung its support behind Mrs Gandhi.
By infiltrating its members and sympathizers into the left-
wing Congress Forum for Socialist Action (codenamed
SECTOR by the KGB), the CPI set out to gain a position
of influence within the ruling party.— In November the
Syndicate declared Mrs Gandhi guilty of defiance of the
Congress leadership and dismissed her from the party,
which then split in two: Congress (O), which followed the
Syndicate line, and Congress (R), which supported Mrs
Gandhi. The Syndicate hinted that Mrs Gandhi intended
to ‘self India to the Soviet Union and was using her
principal private secretary, Parmeshwar Narain Haksar, as
a direct link with Moscow and the Soviet embassy.—

From 1967 to 1973 Haksar, a former protege of
Krishna Menon, was Mrs Gandhi’s most trusted adviser.
One of her biographers, Katherine Frank, describes him as
‘a magnetic figure’ who became ‘probably the most
influential and powerful person in the government’ as
well as ‘the most important civil servant in the country’.
Haksar set out to turn a civil service which, at least in
principle, was politically neutral into an ideologically
‘committed bureaucracy’. His was the hand that guided
Mrs Gandhi through her turn to the left, the
nationalization of the banks and the split in the Congress
Party. It was Haksar also who was behind the transfer of
control of the intelligence community to the Prime

Minister’s Secretariat.— His advocacy of the leftward turn
in Mrs Gandhi’s policies sprang, however, from his
socialist convictions rather than from manipulation by the
KGB. But both he and Mrs Gandhi ‘were less fastidious
than Nehru had been about interfering with the
democratic system and structure of government to attain
their ideological ends’.— The journalist Inder Malhotra
noted the growth of a ‘courtier culture’ in Indira Gandhi’s
entourage: ‘The power centre in the world’s largest
democracy was slowly turning into a durbar.'—

At the elections of February 1971 Mrs Gandhi won a
landslide victory. With seventy seats more than the
undivided Congress had won in 1967, her Congress (R)
had a two-thirds majority. The Congress Forum for
Socialist Action had the support of about 100 MPs in the
new parliament. Mrs Gandhi made its most vocal
spokesman, the former Communist Mohan
Kumaramangalam, Minister of Mines; one of his first acts
was the nationalization of the coal industry.
Kumaramangalam seemed to be implementing a ‘thesis’
which he had first argued in 1964: that since the CPI
could not win power by itself, as many of its members
and sympathizers as possible should join the Congress,
make common cause with ‘progressive’ Congressmen and
compel the party leadership to implement socialist
policies.— Another leading figure in the Congress Forum
for Socialist Action was recruited in 1971 as Agent

RERO and paid about 100,000 rupees a year for what the
KGB considered important political intelligence as well as
acting as an agent recruiter. His controllers included the
future head of the FCD, Leonid Shebarshin (codenamed
VERNOV).^

In August 1971 Mrs Gandhi signed a Treaty of Peace,
Friendship and Co-operation with the Soviet Union.
According to the Permanent Secretary at the Indian
Foreign Office, T. N. Kaul, ‘It was one of the few closely
guarded secret negotiations that India has ever conducted.
On [the Indian] side, hardly half a dozen people were
aware of it, including the Prime Minister and the Foreign
Minister. The media got no scent of it.’— A delighted
Gromyko declared at the signing ceremony, ‘The
significance of the Treaty cannot be over-estimated.’ Mrs
Gandhi’s popularity among the Soviet people, he later
claimed, was demonstrated by the ‘large number of Soviet
babies who were given the unusual name Indira’.— The
Soviet Union seemed to be guaranteed the support of the
leading power in the Non-Aligned Movement. Both
countries immediately issued a joint communique calling
for the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam. India was
able to rely on Soviet arms supplies and diplomatic
support in the conflict against Pakistan which was already
in the offing. According to Leonid Shebarshin, who was
posted to New Delhi as head of Line PR (political
intelligence) at a time when ‘Soviet military technology

was flowing into India in an endless stream’, the Centre -
unlike many in the Foreign Ministry - concluded that war
was inevitable. Shebarshin realized that war had begun
when the lights went out in the middle of a diplomatic
reception at the Soviet embassy on 2 December. Looking
out of the window, Shebarshin saw that the power cut
affected the whole of the capital. Leaving the embassy
hurriedly, he drove to a phone box some way away to ring
a member of the residency’s agent network who
confirmed that hostilities had started. — Another member
of the network arranged a meeting between Shebarshin
and a senior Indian military commander:

It would be an understatement to say that the general’s
mood was optimistic. He knew precisely when and how
the war would end: on 16 December with the surrender of
Dacca [later renamed Dhaka] and capitulation of the
Pakistani army [in East Pakistan] . . . They were in no
state to resist and would not defend Dacca, because they
had no one from whom to expect help. ‘We know the
Pakistani army’, my interlocutor said. ‘Any professional
soldiers would behave the same way in their place.’—

Despite diplomatic support from both the United States
and China, Pakistan suffered a crushing defeat in the
fourteen-day war with India. East Pakistan gained

independence as Bangladesh. West Pakistan, reduced to a
nation of only 55 million people, could no longer mount a
credible challenge to India. For most Indians it was Mrs
Gandhi’s finest hour. A Soviet diplomat at the United
Nations exulted, ‘This is the first time in history that the
United States and China have been defeated together!’—

In the Centre, the Indo-Soviet special relationship was
also celebrated as a triumph for the KGB. The residency
in New Delhi was rewarded by being upgraded to the
status of ‘main residency’. Its head from 1970 to 1975,
Yakov Prokofyevich Medyanik, was accorded the title of
‘main resident’, while the heads of Lines PR (political
intelligence), KR (counter-intelligence) and X (scientific
and technological intelligence) were each given the rank
of resident - not, as elsewhere, deputy resident. Medyanik
also had overall supervision of three other residencies,
located in the Soviet consulates at Bombay, Calcutta and
Madras. In the early 1970s, the KGB presence in India
became one of the largest in the world outside the Soviet
bloc. Indira Gandhi placed no limit on the number of
Soviet diplomats and trade officials, thus allowing the
KGB and GRU as many cover positions as they wished.
Nor, like many other states, did India object to admitting
Soviet intelligence officers who had been expelled by less
hospitable regimes.— The expansion of KGB operations
in the Indian subcontinent (and first and foremost in
India) during the early 1970s led the FCD to create a new

department. Hitherto operations in India, as in the rest of
non-Communist South and South-East Asia, had been the
responsibility of the Seventh Department. In 1974 the
newly founded Seventeenth Department was given charge
of the Indian subcontinent.—

Oleg Kalugin, who became head of FCD Directorate K
(Counter-Intelligence) in 1973, remembers India as ‘a
model of KGB infiltration of a Third World government’:
‘We had scores of sources throughout the Indian
government - in intelligence, counter-intelligence, the
Defence and Foreign Ministries, and the police.’— In
1978 Directorate K, whose responsibilities included the
penetration of foreign intelligence and security agencies,
was running, through Fine KR in the Indian residencies,
over thirty agents - ten of whom were Indian intelligence
officers.— Kalugin recalls one occasion on which
Andropov personally turned down an offer from an Indian
minister to provide information in return for $50,000 on
the grounds that the KGB was already well supplied with
material from the Indian Foreign and Defence Ministries:
Tt seemed like the entire country was for sale; the KGB -
and the CIA - had deeply penetrated the Indian
government. After a while neither side entrusted sensitive
information to the Indians, realizing their enemy would
know all about it the next day. ’

The KGB, in Kalugin’s view, was more successful than

the CIA, partly because of its skill in exploiting the
corruption which became endemic under Indira Gandhi’s
regime.— As Inder Malhotra noted, though corruption was
not new in India:

People expected Indira Gandhi’s party, committed to
bringing socialism to the country, to be more honest and
cleaner than the old undivided Congress. But this turned
out to be a vain hope. On the contrary, compared with the
amassing of wealth by some of her close associates, the
misdeeds of the discarded Syndicate leaders, once looked
upon as godfathers of corrupt Congressmen, began to
appear trivial.

Suitcases full of banknotes were said to be routinely taken
to the Prime Minister’s house. Former Syndicate member
S. K. Patil is reported to have said that Mrs Gandhi did
not even return the suitcases.—

The Prime Minister is unlikely to have paid close
attention to the dubious origins of some of the funds
which went into Congress’s coffers. That was a matter
which she left largely to her principal fundraiser, Lalit
Narayan Mishra, who - though she doubtless did not
realize it - also accepted Soviet money. — On at least one
occasion a secret gift of 2 million rupees from the
Politburo to Congress (R) was personally delivered after

midnight by the head of Line PR in New Delhi, Leonid
Shebarshin. Another million rupees were given on the
same occasion to a newspaper which supported Mrs
Gandhi.— Short and obese with several chins, Mishra
looked the part of the corrupt politician he increasingly
became. Indira Gandhi, despite her own frugal lifestyle,
depended on the money he collected from a variety of
sources to finance Congress (R). So did her son and
anointed heir, Sanjay, whose misguided ambition to build
an Indian popular car and become India’s Henry Ford
depended on government favours. When Mishra was
assassinated in 1975, Mrs Gandhi blamed a plot involving
‘foreign elements’, a phrase which she doubtless intended
as a euphemism for the CIA.— The New Delhi main
residency gave his widow 70,000 rupees from its active-
measures budget.—

Though there were some complaints from the CPI
leadership at the use of Soviet funds to support Mrs
Gandhi and Congress (R),— covert funding for the CPI
seems to have been unaffected. By 1972 the import-
export business founded by the CPI a decade earlier to
trade with the Soviet Union had contributed more than 10
million rupees to Party funds. Other secret subsidies,
totalling at least 1.5 million rupees, had gone to state
Communist parties, individuals and media associated with
the CPI.— The funds which were sent from Moscow to
Party headquarters via the KGB were larger still. In the

first six months of 1975 alone they amounted to over 2.5
million rupees.—

In the mid-1970s Soviet funds for the CPI were passed
by operations officers of the New Delhi main residency to
a senior member of the Party’s National Council
codenamed BANKIR at a number of different locations.
The simplest transfers of funds occurred when KGB
officers under diplomatic cover had a pretext to visit
BANKIR’ s office, such as his briefings for visiting press
delegations from the Soviet bloc. Other arrangements,
however, were much more complex. One file noted by
Mitrokhin records a fishing expedition to a lake not far
from Delhi arranged to provide cover for a transfer of
funds to BANKIR. Shebarshin and two operations
officers from the main residency left the embassy at 6.30
a.m., arrived at about 8 a.m. and spent two and a half
hours fishing. At 10.30 a.m. they left the lake and headed
to an agreed rendezvous point with BANKIR, making
visual contact with his car at 11.15. As the residency car
overtook his on a section of the road which could not be
observed from either side, packages of banknotes were
passed through the open window of BANKIR’ s car.—
Rajeshwar Rao, general secretary of the CPI from 1964 to
1990, subsequently provided receipts for the sums
received. Further substantial sums went to the
Communist-led All-India Congress of Trade Unions,
headed by S. A. Dange.—

India under Indira Gandhi was also probably the arena
for more KGB active measures than anywhere else in the
world, though their significance appears to have been
considerably exaggerated by the Centre, which
overestimated its ability to manipulate Indian opinion.
According to KGB files, by 1973 it had ten Indian
newspapers on its payroll (which cannot be identified for
legal reasons) as well as a press agency under its
‘control’.— During 1972 the KGB claimed to have
planted 3,789 articles in Indian newspapers - probably
more than in any other country in the non-Communist
world. According to its files, the number fell to 2,760 in
1973 but rose to 4,486 in 1974 and 5,510 in 1975.— In
some major NATO countries, despite active-measures
campaigns, the KGB was able to plant little more than 1
per cent of the articles which it placed in the Indian
press.—

Among the KGB’s leading confidential contacts in the
press was one of India’s most influential journalists,
codenamed NOK. Recruited as a confidential contact in
1976 by A. A. Arkhipov, NOK was subsequently handled
by two Line PR officers operating under journalistic
cover: first A. I. Khachaturian, officially a Trud
correspondent, then V. N. Cherepakhin of the Novosti
news agency. NOK’s file records that he published
material favourable to the Soviet Union and provided

information on the entourage of Indira Gandhi. Contact
with him ceased in 1980 as a result of his deteriorating
health Though not apparently aware of the KGB’s
involvement in the active-measures campaign, P. N. Dhar
believed that the left was ‘manipulating the press ... to
keep Mrs Gandhi committed to their ideological line’.—
India was also one of the most favourable environments
for Soviet front organizations. From 1966 to 1986 the
head of the most important of them, the World Peace
Council (WPC), was the Indian Communist Romesh
Chandra. In his review of the 1960s at the WPC-
sponsored World Peace Congress in 1971, Chandra
denounced ‘the US-dominated NATO’ as ‘the greatest
threat to peace’ across the world: ‘The fangs of NATO
can be felt in Asia and Africa as well [as Europe] . . . The
forces of imperialism and exploitation, particularly NATO
. . . bear the responsibility for the hunger and poverty of
hundreds of millions all over the world.’—

The KGB was also confident of its ability to organize
mass demonstrations in Delhi and other major cities. In
1969, for example, Andropov informed the Politburo,
‘The KGB residency in India has the opportunity to
organize a protest demonstration of up to 20,000 Muslims
in front of the US embassy in India. The cost of the
demonstration would be 5,000 rupees and would be
covered in the . . . budget for special tasks in India. I
request consideration.’ Brezhnev wrote ‘Agreed’ on

Andropov’s request.— In April 1971, two months after
Mrs Gandhi’s landslide election victory, the Politburo
approved the establishment of a secret fund of 2.5 million
convertible rubles (codenamed DEPO) to fund active-
measures operations in India over the next four years.—
During that period KGB reports from New Delhi claimed,
on slender evidence, to have assisted the success of
Congress (R) in elections to state assemblies.—

Among the most time-consuming active measures
implemented by Leonid Shebarshin as head of Line PR
were the preparations for Brezhnev’s state visit in 1973.
As usual it was necessary to ensure that the General
Secretary was received with what appeared to be
rapturous enthusiasm and to concoct evidence that his
platitudinous speeches were hailed as ‘major political
statements of tremendous importance’.— Since Brezhnev
was probably the dreariest orator among the world’s
major statesmen this was no easy task, particularly when
he travelled outside the Soviet bloc. Soviet audiences
were used to listening respectfully to his long-winded
utterances and to bursting into regular, unwarranted
applause. Indian audiences, however, lacked the
experience of their Soviet counterparts. Brezhnev would
have been affronted by any suggestion that he deliver
only a short address, since he believed in a direct
correlation between the length of a speech and the
prestige of the speaker. His open-air speech in the great

square in front of Delhi’s famous Red Fort, where Nehru
had declared Indian independence twenty- six years
earlier, thus presented a particular challenge. According to
possibly inflated KGB estimates, 2 million people were
present - perhaps the largest audience to whom Brezhnev
had ever spoken. As Shebarshin later acknowledged, the
speech was extraordinarily long winded and heavy going.
The embassy had made matters even worse by translating
the speech into a form of high Hindi which was
incomprehensible to most of the audience. As the speech
droned on and night began to fall, some of the audience
started to drift away but, according to Shebarshin, were
turned back by the police for fear of offending the Soviet
leader. Though even Brezhnev sensed that not all was
well, he was later reassured by the practised sycophants in
his entourage. Shebarshin was able to persuade both
himself and the Centre that the visit as a whole had been a
great success.— The KGB claimed much of the credit for
‘creating favourable conditions’ for Brezhnev’s Indian
triumph.—

Leonid Shebarshin’ s perceived success in active
measures as head of Line PR almost certainly helps to
explain his promotion to the post of main resident in 1975
and launched him on a career which in 1988 took him to
the leadership of the FCD. In a newspaper interview after
his retirement from the KGB, Shebarshin spoke
‘nostalgically about the old days, about disinformation -

forging documents, creating sensations for the press’. It
was doubtless his days in India which he had chiefly in
mind. — Among the KGB’s most successful active
measures were those which claimed to expose CIA plots
in the subcontinent. The Centre was probably right to
claim the credit for persuading Indira Gandhi that the
Agency was plotting her overthrow. — In November 1973
she told Fidel Castro at a banquet in New Delhi, ‘What
they [the CIA] have done to Allende they want to do to
me also. There are people here, connected with the same
foreign forces that acted in Chile, who would like to
eliminate me.’ She did not question Castro’s (and the
KGB’s) insistence that Allende had been murdered in
cold blood by Pinochet’s US-backed troops. The belief
that the Agency had marked her out for the same fate as
Allende became something of an obsession. In an obvious
reference to (accurate) American claims that, in reality,
Allende had turned his gun on himself during the
storming of his palace, Mrs Gandhi declared, ‘When I am
murdered, they will say I arranged it myself’—

Mrs Gandhi was also easily persuaded that the CIA,
rather than the mistakes of her own administration, was
responsible for the growing opposition to her government.
Early in 1974 riots in Gujarat, which killed over 100
people, led to 8,000 arrests and caused the dissolution of
the State Assembly, reinforced her belief in an American
conspiracy against her.— Irritated by a series of speeches

by Mrs Gandhi denouncing the ever-present menace of
CIA subversion, the US ambassador in New Delhi, Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, ordered an investigation which
uncovered two occasions during her father’s premiership
when the CIA had secretly provided funds to help the
Communists’ opponents in state elections, once in Kerala
and once in West Bengal. According to Moynihan:

Both times the money was given to the Congress Party
which had asked for it. Once it was given to Mrs Gandhi
herself, who was then a party official.

Still, as we were no longer giving any money to her, it
was understandable that she should wonder to whom we
were giving it. It is not a practice to be encouraged.—

A brief visit to India by Henry Kissinger in October 1974
provided another opportunity for a KGB active-measures
campaign. Agents of influence were given further
fabricated stories about CIA conspiracies to report to the
Prime Minister and other leading figures in the
government and parliament. The KGB claimed to have
planted over seventy stories in the Indian press
condemning CIA subversion as well as initiating letter-
writing and poster campaigns. The Delhi main residency
claimed that, thanks to its campaign, Mrs Gandhi had
raised the question of CIA operations in India during her
talks with Kissinger. —

On 28 April 1975 Andropov approved a further Indian
active-measures operation to publicize fabricated
evidence of CIA subversion. Sixteen packets containing
incriminating material prepared by Service A on three
CIA officers stationed under diplomatic cover at the US
embassy were sent anonymously by the Delhi residency
to the media and gave rise to a series of articles in the
Indian press. According to KGB files, Mrs Gandhi sent a
personal letter to the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka,
Sirimavo Bandaranaike, enclosing some of the KGB’s
forged CIA documents and a series of articles in Indian
newspapers which had been taken in by them. The same
files report that Mrs Bandaranaike concluded that CIA
subversion posed such a serious threat to Sri Lanka that
she set up a committee of investigation. —

One of Mrs Gandhi’s critics, Piloo Moody, ridiculed
her obsession with CIA subversion by wearing around his
neck a medallion with the slogan, ‘I am a CIA agent’.—
For Mrs Gandhi, however, the Agency was no laughing
matter. By the summer of 1975 her suspicions of a vast
conspiracy by her political opponents, aided and abetted
by the CIA, had, in the opinion of her biographer
Katherine Frank, grown to ‘something close to paranoia’.
Her mood was further darkened on 12 June by a decision
of the Allahabad High Court, against which she appealed,
invalidating her election as MP on the grounds of

irregularities in the 1971 elections. A fortnight later she
persuaded both the President and the cabinet to agree to
the declaration of a state of emergency. In a broadcast to
the nation on India Radio on 26 June, Mrs Gandhi
declared that a ‘deep and widespread conspiracy’ had
‘been brewing ever since I began to introduce certain
progressive measures of benefit to the common man and
woman of India’. Opposition leaders were jailed or put
under house arrest and media censorship introduced. In
the first year of the emergency, according to Amnesty
International, more than 1 10,000 people were arrested and
detained without trial.—

Reports from the New Delhi main residency, headed
from 1975 to 1977 by Leonid Shebarshin, claimed
(probably greatly exaggerated) credit for using its agents
of influence to persuade Mrs Gandhi to declare the
emergency.— The CPI Central Executive Committee
voiced its ‘firm opinion that the swift and stem measures
taken by the Prime Minister and the government of India
against the right-reactionary and counter-revolutionary
forces were necessary and justified. Any weakness
displayed at this critical moment would have been fatal.’
Predictably, it accused the CIA of supporting the counter-
revolutionary conspiracy. — KGB active measures
adopted the same line.— The assassination of Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman and much of his family in Bangladesh
on 14 August further fuelled Mrs Gandhi’s conspiracy

theories. Behind their murders she saw once again the
hidden hand of the CIA.—

According to Shebarshin, both the Centre and the
Soviet leadership found it difficult to grasp that the
emergency had not turned Indira Gandhi into a dictator
and that she still responded to public opinion and had to
deal with opposition: ‘On the spot, from close up, the
embassy and our [intelligence] service saw all this, but for
Moscow Indira became India, and India - Indira.’ Reports
from the New Delhi residency which were critical of any
aspect of her policies received a cool reception in the
Centre. Shebarshin thought it unlikely that any were
forwarded to Soviet leaders or the Central Committee.
Though Mrs Gandhi was fond of saying in private that
states have no constant friends and enemies, only constant
interests, ‘At times Moscow behaved as though India had
given a pledge of love and loyalty to her Soviet friends.’
Even the slightest hiccup in relations caused
consternation.— During 1975 a total of 10.6 million rubles
was spent on active measures in India designed to
strengthen support for Mrs Gandhi and undermine her
political opponents.— Soviet backing was public as well
as covert. In June 1976, at a time when Mrs Gandhi
suffered from semi-pariah status in most of the West, she
was given a hero’s welcome during a trip to the Soviet
Union. On the eve of her arrival a selection of her
speeches, articles and interviews was published in

Russian translation.— She attended meetings in her
honour in cities across the Soviet Union.— The visit
ended, as it had begun, in a mood of mutual self-
congratulation.

The Kremlin, however, was worried by reports of the

dismissive attitude to the Soviet Union of Indira’s son and

anointed heir, Sanjay, an admirer of Ferdinand Marcos,

the corrupt anti-Communist President of the Philippines.—

Reports reached P. N. Dhar (and, almost certainly, the

New Delhi main residency) that one of Sanjay’ s cronies

was holding regular meetings with a US embassy official

‘in a very suspicious manner’. Soon after his mother’s

return from her triumphal tour of the Soviet Union,

Sanjay gave an interview in which he praised big

business, denounced nationalization and poured scorn on

the Communists. Probably annoyed by complaints of his

own corruption, he said of the CPI, ‘I don’t think you’d

find a richer or more corrupt people anywhere.’ By her

own admission, Indira became ‘quite frantic’ when his

comments were made public, telling Dhar that her son had

‘grievously hurt’ the CPI and ‘created serious problems

with the entire Soviet bloc’. Sanjay was persuaded to

issue a ‘clarification’ which fell well short of a retraction.
95

The emergency ended as suddenly as it had begun. On
18 January 1977 Mrs Gandhi announced that elections
would be held in March. Press censorship was suspended

and opposition leaders released from house arrest. The
New Delhi main residency, like Mrs Gandhi, was
overconfident about the outcome of the election. To
ensure success it mounted a major operation, codenamed
KASKAD, involving over 120 meetings with agents
during the election campaign. Nine of the Congress (R)
candidates at the elections were KGB agents.— Files
noted by Mitrokhin also identify by name twenty-one of
the non-Communist politicians (four of them ministers)
whose election campaigns were subsidized by the KGB
.— The Soviet media called for ‘unity of action of all the
democratic forces and particularly the ruling Indian
National Congress and the Communist Party of India’.—
Repeated pressure was put on the CPI leadership by both
the New Delhi main residency and Moscow to ensure its
support for Mrs Gandhi. The CPI General Secretary,
Rajeshwar Rao, and the Secretary of the Party’s National
Council, N. K. Krishna, were summoned to the Soviet
embassy on 12 February to receive a message of
exhortation from the CPSU Central Committee. Further
exhortations were delivered in person on 15 February by a
three-man Soviet delegation. KGB files report Rao and
Krishna as saying that they greatly appreciated the advice
of their Soviet colleagues and were steadfast in their
support for Mrs Gandhi.— Their appreciation also
reflected the unusually high level of Soviet subsidies
during the CPI election campaign - over 3 million rupees

in the first two months of 1977.—

Agent reports reinforced the New Delhi main
residency’s confidence that Indira Gandhi would secure
another election victory. Reports that she faced the
possibility of defeat in her constituency were largely
disregarded.— In the event Mrs Gandhi suffered a
crushing defeat. Janata, the newly united non-Communist
opposition, won 40 per cent of the vote to Congress (R)’s
35 per cent. One of the KGB’s betes noires, Morarji
Desai, became Prime Minister. When the election result
was announced, writes Mrs Gandhi’s biographer,
Katherine Frank, ‘India rejoiced as it had not done since
the eve of independence from the British thirty years
before.’ In Delhi, Mrs Gandhi’s downfall was celebrated
with dancing in the streets. —

18

The Special Relationship with India

Part 2: The Decline and Fall of Congress

The result of the Indian elections of March 1977 caused
shock and consternation in both the Centre and the New
Delhi main residency. Leonid Shebarshin, the main
resident, was hurriedly recalled to Moscow for
consultations.- As well as fearing the political
consequences of Mrs Gandhi’s defeat, the Centre was also
embarrassed by the way the election demonstrated to the
Soviet leadership the limitations of its much-vaunted
active-measures campaigns and its supposed ability to
manipulate Indian politics. The FCD report on its
intelligence failure was largely an exercise in self-
justification. It stressed that an election victory by Mrs
Gandhi had also been widely predicted by both Western
and Indian observers (including the Indian intelligence
community), many of whom had made even greater errors
than itself. The report went on to explain the FCD’s own
mistakes by claiming that the extreme diversity of the
huge Indian electorate and the many divisions along

family, caste, ethnic, religious, class and party lines made
accurate prediction of voting behaviour almost
impossible. This was plainly special pleading. The
complexities of Indian politics could not provide a
credible explanation for the failure by the KGB (and other
observers) to comprehend the collapse of support for Mrs
Gandhi in the entire Hindi belt, the traditional Congress
stronghold, where it won only two seats, and its reduction
to a regional party of South India, where it remained in
control.

The FCD also argued, in its own defence, that Mrs
Gandhi’s previous determination to hold on to power had
made it reasonable to expect that she would refuse to
surrender it in March 1977, and would be prepared if
necessary either to fix the election results or to declare
them null and void (as, it alleged, Sanjay’s cronies were
urging). Indeed the FCD claimed that on 20 March, when
the results were announced, Mrs Gandhi had tried to
prevent the Janata Party taking power but had been
insufficiently decisive and failed to get the backing of the
army high command.- There was no substance to these
claims, which probably originated in the Delhi rumour
mill, then working overtime, and were passed on to the
KGB by its large network of agents and confidential
contacts. Contrary to reports to Moscow from the New
Delhi main residency, the transfer of power after the
election was swift and orderly. In the early hours of 21

March Mrs Gandhi summoned a short and perfunctory
cabinet meeting, where she read out her letter of
resignation, which was approved by the cabinet with only
minor changes. At 4 a.m. she was driven to the home of
the acting President, B. D. Jatti, and submitted her
resignation. Jatti was so taken aback that, until prompted
by Dhar, he forgot to ask Mrs Gandhi to stay on as acting
Prime Minister until the formation of the next
government. -

The tone of the Soviet media changed immediately
after the Indian election. It blamed the defeat of Mrs
Gandhi, hitherto virtually free from public criticism, on
‘mistakes and excesses’ by her government. Seeking to
exempt the CPI from blame, a commentator in Izvestia
claimed, ‘It is indicative that Congress Party candidates
were most successful in places where a pre-election
arrangement existed between the Congress and the
Communist Party of India, or where the Communist
Party, with no official encouragement, actively supported
progressive candidates of the Congress Party.’ In reality
the election was a disaster for the CPI as well as for
Congress. Dragged down by the unpopularity of the
Indira Gandhi regime, it lost all but seven of the twenty-
five seats it had won in 1971, while its rival, the
breakaway Communist Party of India, Marxist (CPM),
won twenty- two. The Centre responded cautiously to the
landslide victory of a CPM-led coalition in state elections

in West Bengal in June 1977. Though Andropov was
eager to set up covert communications with the new state
government, he was anxious not to offend the CPI. It was
therefore agreed after discussions between Shebarshin
(recently promoted to become deputy head of the FCD
Seventeenth Department) and a senior CPSU official that,
though KGB officers could make contact with CPM
leaders, they must claim to be doing so on a purely
personal basis. According to FCD files, ‘important
information’ about CPM policy was obtained by the Delhi
main residency from its contacts with Party leaders. -

The KGB’s main priority during the early months of
the Janata government was damage limitation. In the
course of the campaign Morarji Desai had charged Mrs
Gandhi with doing ‘whatever the Soviet Union does’ and
declared that, under a Janata government, the Indo- Soviet
treaty might ‘automatically go’.- The Centre feared ‘a
reinforcement of reactionary anti-Soviet forces’.- On 24
March the Politburo approved an FCD directive ‘On
measures in connection with the results of the
parliamentary elections in India’, whose main objectives
were to preserve the Friendship Treaty and to deter Janata
from seeking a rapprochement with the United States and
China.- Though the Desai government did set out to
improve relations with the United States and China, the
Indo-Soviet treaty survived. A joint communique after a
visit by Gromyko to New Delhi in April committed both

countries to ‘the further strengthening of equal and
mutually beneficial co-operation in the spirit of the Indo-
Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Co-operation’.- In
August the Politburo approved a directive on KGB active
measures entitled ‘On measures to influence the ruling
circles of India in new conditions to the advantage of the
USSR’.^

The ‘new conditions’ of Janata rule made active-
measures campaigns more difficult than before. Articles
planted by the KGB in the Indian press declined sharply
from 1,980 in 1976 to 411 in 1977.— The Centre,
however, continued to make exaggerated claims for the
success of its active measures in making the Janata
government suspicious of American and Chinese policy.—
The New Delhi main residency also claimed in June 1978
that it had succeeded in discrediting the Home Minister,
Charan Singh, Indira Gandhi’s most outspoken opponent
in the Janata government, and forcing his dismissal. — In
reality, Singh’s dismissal was due to the fact that he had
accused Desai and other ministers of being ‘a collection
of impotent men’ because of their failure to bring Mrs
Gandhi to trial.— He was later to return to the government
and briefly succeeded Desai as Prime Minister in the later
months of 1979.

The March 1977 KGB directive approved by the
Politburo had instructed the Delhi main residency to

‘influence [Mrs] Gandhi to renew the Indian National
Congress on a democratic [left-wing] basis’. In order not
to offend the Janata government, the Soviet embassy was
wary of maintaining official contact with Mrs Gandhi
after her election defeat.— Instead, the Delhi main
residency re-established covert contact with her through
an operations officer, Viktor Nikolayevich Cherepakhin
(codenamed VLADLEN), operating under cover as a
Trud correspondent, though there is no evidence that she
realized he was from the KGB. The residency also set up
an active-measures fund codenamed DEPO in an attempt
to buy influence within the Committee for Democratic
Action founded by Mrs Gandhi and some of her
supporters in May 1977. Though there is no evidence that
Mrs Gandhi knew of its existence, the fund had available
in July 275,000 convertible rubles.— On New Year’s Day
1978 Mrs Gandhi instigated a second split in the Congress
Party. She and her followers, the majority of the party,
reconstituted themselves as Congress (I) - I for Indira.
Though she eventually admitted that things ‘did get a
little out of hand’ during the emergency, she continued to
insist that Janata’ s election victory owed much to ‘foreign
help’. ‘The movement against us’, she declared, ‘was
engineered by outside forces.’— As usual, Mrs Gandhi
doubtless had the CIA in mind.

Janata’ s fragile unity, which had been made possible
during the 1977 election campaign only by common

hostility to Indira Gandhi, failed to survive the experience
of government. At the general election in January 1980
Congress (I) won 351 of the 542 seats. ‘It’s Indira All The
Way’, declared the headline in the Times of India. Soon
after her election victory, Mrs Gandhi tried to renew
contact with Cherepakhin, only to discover that he had
been recalled to Moscow.— While welcoming Mrs
Gandhi’s return to power, the Centre was apprehensive
about the future. The power of Sanjay, whom it strongly
distrusted, was at its zenith, his role as heir apparent
appeared unassailable, and - despite the presence,
unknown to Sanjay, of an agent codenamed PURI in his
entourage— - the KGB seems to have discovered no
significant means of influence over him. Though Sanjay’s
death in an air crash in June 1980 left Mrs Gandhi
distraught, it was doubtless welcomed in the Centre.

Mrs Gandhi’s relations with Moscow in the early 1980s
never quite recaptured the warmth of her previous term in
office. She particularly resented the fact that she could no
longer count on the support of the CPI. During
Brezhnev’s state visit to India in December 1980, she said
pointedly at a reception in his honour, ‘Understandably,
we face an onslaught from the “right” and, not so
understandably, from the “left”.’— According to KGB
reports, some of the CPI attacks were personal. Indian
Communist leaders spread rumours that Mrs Gandhi was
taking bribes both from state ministers and from the

French suppliers of the Mirage fighters which she decided
to purchase for the Indian air force. During visits to India
by both Brezhnev and the Soviet Defence Minister,
Marshal Ustinov, she asked for Soviet pressure to bring
the CPI into line.— When the pressure failed to
materialize, Mrs Gandhi took her revenge. In May 1981
she set up a new Congress (I)-sponsored association, the
Friends of the Soviet Union, as a rival to the CPI-
sponsored Indo-Soviet Cultural Society - declaring that
the time had come to liberate Indo-Soviet friendship from
those who had set themselves up as its ‘custodians’. It
was, she said, the ‘professional friends and foes of the
Soviet Union who created problems for us’. She also set
up a ‘world peace and solidarity’ organization to break the
monopoly of the World Peace Council, headed by an
Indian Communist and much used as a vehicle for Soviet
active measures.—

Moscow’s failure to bring the CPI into line, however,
continued to rankle with Mrs Gandhi. In June 1983 she
sent a secret letter to the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov,
attacking the CPI for having ‘ganged up’ against her with
right-wing reactionaries. The letter was entrusted to
Yogendra Sharma, a member of the Party Politburo who
disagreed with Rajeshwar Rao’s opposition to Mrs
Gandhi. Once in Moscow, however, Sharma had second
thoughts and ‘confessed all’ to a Party comrade. When the
story was made public in India, Indira’s critics accused

her of ‘inviting Soviet interference in India’s internal
affairs’. Mrs Gandhi refused to comment.— Though
somewhat tarnished, however, the Indo- Soviet special
relationship survived. When Mrs Gandhi visited Moscow
for Brezhnev’s funeral, she was the first non-Communist
leader to be received by Yuri Andropov.—

The KGB continued to make large claims for the
success of its active measures. When the Indian
government refused in July 1981 to give an entry visa to
an American diplomat named Griffin, who was due to
take up a post as political counsellor at the US embassy,
the KGB claimed that the decision was due to its success
over the previous six months in linking him with the CIA.
Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD, reported to the
Politburo:

According to information received, the initiative in
making this decision came from I[ndira] Gandhi herself.
A significant role was also played by anti-American
articles which we inspired in the Indian and foreign press,
which cited various sources to expose the dangerous
nature of the CIA’s subversive operations in India.
Attempts by representatives of the USA and of the
American press to justify the methods and to pretend that
Griffin had been the victim of a Soviet ‘disinformation’
campaign were decisively rejected by the Minister for

Foreign Affairs, N[arasimha] Rao, who stated that ‘this
action was taken independently and was in no way
prompted by another country’. —

The greatest successes of Soviet active measures in India
remained the exploitation of the susceptibility of Indira
Gandhi and her advisers to bogus CIA conspiracies
against them. In March 1980 Home Minister Zail Singh
blamed the USA and China for fomenting unrest in
Assam and the tribal areas of the north-east. Shortly
afterwards Home Ministry officials claimed to have
‘definite information’ that the CIA was ‘pumping money’
into the region through Christian missionaries. Mrs
Gandhi herself repeatedly referred to the ‘foreign hand’
behind this and other outbreaks of domestic unrest.
Though she rarely identified the ‘foreign hand’ in public,
it was clear that she meant the CIA.—

One of the main aims of KGB active measures in the
early 1980s was to manufacture evidence that the CIA
and Pakistani intelligence were behind the growth of Sikh
separatism in the Punjab.— In the autumn of 1981 Service
A launched operation KONTAKT based on a forged
document purporting to contain details of the weapons
and money provided by Pakistani Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) to the militants seeking to bring about
the creation of an independent Sikh state of Khalistan. In

November the forgery was passed to a senior Indian
diplomat in Islamabad. Shortly afterwards the Islamabad
residency reported to the Centre that, according to
(possibly optimistic) agents’ reports, the level of anxiety
in the Indian embassy about Pakistani support for Sikh
separatists indicated that KONTAKT was having the
alarmist effect that Service A had hoped for.

In the spring of 1982 the New Delhi residency reported
that Agent ‘S’ (apparently a recent recruit) had direct
access to Mrs Gandhi and had personally presented to her
another forged ISI document fabricated by Service A,
which purported to demonstrate Pakistani involvement in
the Khalistan conspiracy.— Though there is no convincing
evidence that Agent ‘S’ or the forgeries channelled
through him had any significant influence on Mrs Gandhi,
the Centre succumbed to one of its recurrent bouts of
wishful thinking about its ability to manipulate Indian
policy. On 5 May it congratulated the recently installed
main resident, Aleksandr Iosifovich Lysenko (codenamed
BOGDAN), on the supposed success of Agent ‘S’— and
informed him that the Centre proposed to use ‘S’ as a
major channel for feeding future disinformation to Mrs
Gandhi. Before the agent’s meeting with Mrs Gandhi, the
Centre sent the following detailed instructions:

a. During meetings [with ‘S’], acquaint the agent
with the contents of the [latest forged] document and
show interest in his opinion regarding the importance and

relevance of the information contained in it for the Indian
authorities. Also it should be explained to the agent that
the document is genuine, obtained by us through secret
channels.

b. Work out a detailed story of how ‘S’ obtained the
document. (This will involve organizing a short trip to
Pakistan for the agent.)

c. Inform ‘S’ that, in accordance with the terms laid
down by the source [of the document], he must not leave
the document with VANO [Mrs Gandhi]. Recommend to
the agent that he acts in the following way in order not to
arouse a negative reaction in VANO. If VANO insists that
the document is left with her, then ‘S’ should leave a
previously prepared copy of the document, without the
headings which would indicate its origin. Instruct ‘S’ to
observe VANO’s reaction to the document.

d. Point out to the agent that it is essential that he
builds on his conversation with VANO in order that he
can drop hints on what she can expect from ‘S’ in the
future and what information would be of special interest
to her.

‘S’ reported that he had shown the document to Mrs
Gandhi on 13 May 1982. The fact that she did not ask for
a copy suggests that she did not attach much significance
to it. The KGB, however, preferred to credit the self-
serving claims made by ‘S’ about his supposed influence

on the Prime Minister.—

Shortly after succeeding Brezhnev as Soviet leader in
November 1982 Yuri Andropov approved a proposal by
Kryuchkov to fabricate a further Pakistani intelligence
document detailing ISI plans to foment religious
disturbances in Punjab and promote the creation of
Khalistan as an independent Sikh state. The Centre
believed that the Indian ambassador in Pakistan, to whom
this forgery was sent, would consider it so important that
he was bound to forward it to Mrs Gandhi.— The KGB
appeared by now supremely confident that it could
continue to deceive her indefinitely with fabricated
reports of CIA and Pakistani conspiracies against her.

Mrs Gandhi’s importance as one of the Third World’s
most influential leaders was further enhanced, in
Moscow’s eyes, by her election as Chair of the Non-
Aligned Movement in succession to Fidel Castro. The
Indian press published photographs of a beaming Castro
embracing her in a bear hug as he handed over to her in
March 1983 at the seventh summit of the Movement in
Delhi. On the eve of the summit the Delhi main residency
succeeded in planting in the Indian press a forged secret
memorandum in the name of the US representative at the
United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, which gave further
bogus details of American plans to foster divisions in the
Third World and undermine Indian influence.— Under

Mrs Gandhi’s chairmanship, the Non-Aligned summit
devoted little time to the war in Afghanistan and
concentrated instead on issues of disarmament and
economic development, which offered ample scope for
attacks on the United States. The post-summit
communique condemned the United States fifteen times;
the Soviet Union, by contrast, was only once bracketed
with the United States as sharing responsibility for the
arms race. Moscow was predictably delighted. Pravda
declared that ‘the Non-Aligned Movement has displayed
devotion to its basic principles of struggle against
imperialism, colonialism, racism and war’.—

The next stage in the Soviet cultivation of the Gandhi
dynasty was the visit to Moscow in July 1983 by Indira’s
elder son, Rajiv, who had reluctantly entered politics at
his mother’s insistence after Sanjay’s death and was being
groomed by her for the succession. The high-level
meetings and glittering receptions laid on for Rajiv
showed, according to one Indian observer, that he had
been ‘virtually anointed by the Soviet commissars as the
unquestioned successor to Mrs Gandhi’. During his visit
Rajiv was plainly persuaded by his hosts that the CIA was
engaged in serious subversion in the Punjab, where Sikh
separatism now posed the most serious challenge to the
Congress government. He declared on his return that there
was ‘definite interference from the USA in the Punjab
situation’.—

In early June 1984 Mrs Gandhi sent troops into the
Punjab where they stormed the Sikh holy of holies, the
Golden Temple at Amritsar. The Soviet Union, like the
CPI, quickly expressed ‘full understanding of the steps
taken by the Indian government to curb terrorism’. Once
again, Mrs Gandhi took seriously Soviet claims of secret
CIA support for the Sikhs.— A KGB active measure also
fabricated evidence that Pakistani intelligence was
planning to recruit Afghan refugees to assassinate her.—
Though Mrs Gandhi, thanks largely to the KGB,
exaggerated the threat from the United States and
Pakistan, she tragically underestimated the threat from the
Sikhs in her own bodyguard, countermanding as a matter
of principle an order from the head of the IB that they be
transferred to other duties. India, she bravely insisted,
‘was secular’. One of the principles by which she had
lived was soon to cost her her life. On 3 1 October she was
shot dead by two Sikh guards in the garden of her
house.— Predictably, some conspiracy theorists were later
to argue that the guards had been working for the CIA.—
Though the Centre probably did not originate this
conspiracy theory, attempting to implicate the Agency in
the assassination of Mrs Gandhi became one of the chief
priorities of KGB active measures in India over the next
few years.—

Rajiv Gandhi’s first foreign visit after succeeding his

mother as Prime Minister was to the Soviet Union for the
fimeral of Konstantin Chernenko in March 1985. He and
Chernenko’s successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, established
an immediate rapport, which was reinforced during
Rajiv’s first official visit two months later. The KGB,
meanwhile, pursued active-measures operations designed
to persuade Rajiv that the CIA was plotting against him.
Its fabrications, however, which included a forged letter
in 1987 from the DCI, William Casey, on plans for his
overthrow,— seem to have had little effect. The personal
friendship between Rajiv and Gorbachev could not
disguise the declining importance of the Indian special
relationship for the Soviet Union. Part of Gorbachev’s
‘new thinking’ in foreign policy was the attempt to
extricate the Soviet Union from India’s disputes with
China and Pakistan. At a press conference during his visit
to India in November 1986, Gorbachev was much more
equivocal than his predecessors about Soviet support in a
military conflict between India and China.—

The winding down of the Cold War also greatly
decreased the usefulness of India as an arena for KGB
active measures. One of the most successful active
measures during Gorbachev’s first two years in power
was the attempt to blame Aids on American biological
warfare. The story originated on US Independence Day
1984 in an article published in the Indian newspaper
Patriot, alleging that the Aids virus had been

‘manufactured’ during genetic engineering experiments at
Fort Detrick, Maryland. In the first six months of 1987
alone the story received major media coverage in over
forty Third World countries. Faced with American
protests and the denunciation of the story by the
international scientific community, however, Gorbachev
and his advisers were clearly concerned that exposure of
Soviet disinformation might damage the new Soviet
image in the West. In August 1987 US officials were told
in Moscow that the Aids story was officially disowned.
Soviet press coverage of the story came to an almost
complete halt.— In the era of glasnost, Moscow also
regarded the front organizations as a rapidly declining
asset. In 1986 Romesh Chandra, the Indian Communist
President of the most important of them, the World Peace
Council, felt obliged to indulge in self-criticism. ‘The
criticisms made of the President’s work’, he
acknowledged, ‘require to be heeded and necessary
corrections made.’ The main ‘correction’ which followed
was his own replacement.—

Rajiv Gandhi lost power in India at elections late in
1989 just as the Soviet bloc was beginning to disintegrate.
New Delhi was wrong-footed by the final collapse of the
Soviet Union two years later. On the outbreak of the hard-
line coup in Moscow of August 1991 which attempted to
overthrow Gorbachev, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao
declared that it might serve as a warning to those who

attempted change too rapidly. Following the collapse of
the coup a few days later, Rao’s statement was held
against him by both Gorbachev and Yeltsin. When
Gorbachev rang world leaders after his release from house
arrest in the Crimea, he made no attempt to contact Rao.
The Indian ambassador did not attend the briefing given
by Yeltsin to senior members of the Moscow diplomatic
corps after the coup collapsed.— The Indo-Soviet special
relationship, to which the KGB had devoted so much of
its energies for most of the Cold War, was at an end.

19

Pakistan and Bangladesh

The Soviet Union’s special relationship with India
drastically limited its influence in Pakistan. Gromyko
complained of ‘the insidious [Western] web into which
Pakistan fell almost at the outset of her existence as an
independent state’.- The KGB also found the authoritarian
military regimes which governed Pakistan for most of the
Cold War more difficult to penetrate than India’s ruling
Congress Party. The Communist Party of Pakistan,
officially banned in 1951, was of much less significance
than its large and influential Indian counterpart.
According to KGB files, about twenty leading Karachi
and Hyderabad Communists set up a small underground
party with the cover name ‘Sindh Provincial Committee’
(SPC) which maintained secret contact with the KGB
Karachi residency.- The SPC was kept going by an annual
Soviet subsidy delivered by the KGB which by the mid-
1970s amounted to $25-30,000.- Another small
Communist underground in East Pakistan also received
covert funding.- In addition, a number of SPC leaders
made what the KGB considered handsome profits from
privileged trading contracts with the Soviet Union.-
Moscow, however, had realistically low expectations of

the SPC which, it believed, tended to exaggerate its
support.-

Despite the KGB’s apparent inability to penetrate the
entourage of Pakistan’s first military ruler, Ayub Khan
(1958-69), it was well informed on his foreign policy,
chiefly as a result of a series of agents in the Pakistani
Foreign Ministry and Diplomatic Corps: among them
GNOM, KURI, GREM and GULYAM. For seven years
GNOM (‘Gnome’) provided both ciphered and
deciphered diplomatic cables which he was taught to
photograph with a miniature camera. He was recruited in
1960 under a ‘false flag’ by an English-speaking Russian
KGB agent posing as the representative of a US
publishing company who claimed to be collecting
material for a book on international relations. In 1965 he
was finally told (though he may well have realized this
much earlier) that he was working for a foreign
intelligence agency and signed a document
acknowledging that he had received a monthly salary
from it for the past five years. When GNOM returned to
Pakistan in 1967 after a series of foreign postings,
however, he broke contact with his controller.- Like
GNOM, the cipher clerk KURI was recruited under a
false flag. In 1961 the KGB agent SAED, claiming to
represent a large Pakistani company, persuaded KURI to
supply Foreign Ministry documents on the pretext that
these would help its commercial success in foreign

markets. Again like GNOM, KURI probably realized
subsequently that he was working for the KGB but
continued to provide cipher material and other ‘valuable
documents’ from both Pakistani embassies (including
Washington) and the Foreign Ministry at least until the
1970s. His file also notes that he became ‘very
demanding’ - presumably as regards the payment which
he expected for his material.-

The most senior Pakistani diplomat identified in the
files noted by Mitrokhin was GREM, who was recruited
in 1965 and later became an ambassador. He is said to
have provided ‘valuable information’. The fact that, when
he became ambassador, his controller was the local KGB
resident is a further indication of his importance.- The
only KGB agent in the Foreign Ministry whose identity
can be revealed is Abu Say id Hasan (codenamed
GULYAM) who was recruited in 1966. At the time of, or
soon after, his recruitment, he worked in the Soviet
section of the Ministry. During the 1970s he worked
successively as Third Secretary in the High Commission
in Bombay, Second Secretary in Saudi Arabia and section
chief in the Ministry Administration Department. In 1979,
a year before his death, he moved to the Ministry of
Culture, Youth and Sport.—

As a result of the KGB’s multiple penetrations of the
Pakistani Foreign Ministry and embassies abroad, the

codebreakers of the Eighth, and later the Sixteenth,
Directorate were almost certainly able to decrypt
substantial amounts of Pakistan’s diplomatic traffic.—
Thanks in part to the recruitment of ALI, who held a
senior position in the military communications centre in
Rawalpindi, Soviet codebreakers were probably also able
to decrypt some of the traffic of the Pakistani high
command. ALI was recruited under false flag in 1965 by
G. M. Yevsafyev, a KGB operations officer masquerading
as a German radio engineer working for a West German
company, and provided details of the high command’s
cipher machines. He later noticed the diplomatic number
plates on Yevsafyev ’s car and realized that he was
working for the KGB. The fact that a decade later ALI
was still working as a Soviet agent, with the Karachi
resident, S. S. Budnik, as his controller indicates the
importance attached to his intelligence.—

The main purpose of KGB active measures in Pakistan
both during and after the Ayub Khan era was to spread
suspicion of the United States. At the outbreak of
Pakistan’s short and disastrous war with India over
Kashmir in September 1965, the United States suspended
military assistance to it. The KGB set out to exploit the
bitterness felt at the American abandonment of Pakistan
in its hour of need. The main target of its influence
operations was Ayub Khan’s flamboyant Foreign
Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Four years earlier, Bhutto,

then Minister for Natural Resources, had invited the
Soviet ambassador, Mikhail Stepanovich Kapitsa, and his
wife to visit his family estate. With the Kapitsas, to act as
translator, went a young Urdu- speaking diplomat, Leonid
Shebarshin, who three years later was to transfer to the
KGB. Bhutto made clear that he saw himself as a future
foreign minister and that his ultimate ambition (also
realized) was to become Prime Minister and President.
Shebarshin found Bhutto’s conversation ‘desperately bold
and even reckless’. He appeared obsessed with ending
American influence in Pakistan and wanted Soviet
assistance in achieving this.— Operation REBUS in the
spring of 1966 was principally designed to reinforce
Bhutto’s hostility to the United States by passing to the
Pakistani government forged documents produced by
Service A which purported to show that the US
ambassador, Walter McConaughy, was plotting the
overthrow of Ayub Khan, Bhutto and other ministers.—
The operation seems to have had some effect, at least on
Bhutto, who was convinced for the rest of his life that his
removal from office in June 1966 was the result of
American pressure. —

Operation REBUS was followed in July 1966 by
operation SPIDER, an active measure designed to
convince Ayub Khan that the United States was using the
West German Tarantel press agency to attack his
government and its close links with China. A bogus

agency report including an insulting anti-Ayub cartoon,
prepared by Service A on genuine Tarantel office
stationery, was posted by the Karachi residency to
newspapers and opposition figures. To ensure that it came
to the authorities’ attention. Service A also prepared
forged letters supposedly written by outraged Pakistanis
to the police chiefs in Lahore and Karachi, enclosing
copies of the agency report. The bogus letter from Lahore
claimed that two named members of the US Information
Service were distributing the Tarantel material. The
covering letter sent with the Service A forgeries to the
Karachi residency on 9 June by the head of the South
Asian Department, V. 1. Startsev (unusually copied in its
entirety by Mitrokhin), serves as an illustration both of the
remarkably detailed instructions sent to residencies
involved in active measures, even including repeated
reminders to affix the correct postage, and of the Centre’s
high expectations of what such operations were likely to
achieve:

We hope that the two [forged] letters from well-wishers
enclosing the Tarantel Press Agency information will
serve as further proof to Pakistani counter-intelligence
that the Americans are using this agency to spread anti-
government material in the country. In order that
operation SPIDER may be completed, you are requested
to carry out the following operations:

1. Packet no. 1 contains envelopes containing
Tarantel press agency material. They are to be sent to
addresses of interest to us [newspapers and opposition
figures]. You must stick on stamps of the correct value
and post them in various post boxes in Karachi. This is to
be done on July 21 or 22 this year. We are presuming that
some of these addresses are watched by the police. We
took most of them from the list of addresses used by the
Tarantel press agency.

2. Packet no. 2 contains a letter from a well-wisher to
the police headquarters in Karachi. You must stick a
stamp of the correct value on the envelope and post it on
July 23 this year.

3. Packet no. 3 contains a letter from a well-wisher to
the police headquarters in Lahore. You must stick a stamp
of the right value on this envelope too and post it in
Lahore on August 2 or August 3 this year. We chose this
date so that you would have time to arrange a trip to
Lahore.

All these requests must be carried out, of course, with the
utmost care and secrecy as otherwise the action could be
turned against us. I would like you to inform us when the
SPIDER actions have been carried out. We would also
like you to observe the reactions of the Pakistani
authorities to this action and to inform us accordingly. We
consider it possible that the Pakistani government may

make a protest to the West German embassy that anti-
government material is being distributed by Tarantel press
agency or that it might take some kind of action against
the USA. The Pakistanis might even expel the Americans
mentioned in our material. The local authorities might
resort to organizing some kind of action against American
institutions, such as demonstrations, disturbances, fires,
explosions etc. For your personal information we are
sending the texts of the SPIDER material in Russian and
English in Packet no. 4. After reading them, we request
you to destroy them.—

What effect, if any, operation SPIDER had on the Ayub
Khan regime remains unknown. The Centre’s hope that
Pakistani authorities might bomb American buildings in
revenge for US involvement in the circulation of ‘anti-
government material’ was, however, based on little more
than wishful thinking.

While operations REBUS and SPIDER were in full
swing, the Karachi residency was in turmoil as a result of
the appointment at the beginning of the year of a new and
incompetent resident, codenamed ANTON, a veteran of
the South Asian section. ANTON was one of those
intelligence officers with severe drinking problems who
were deployed by the FCD from time to time in Third
World countries. According to Shebarshin, who had the
misfortune to serve under him, he appeared not to have

read a book for years, ‘was incapable of focusing on an
idea, appraising information, or formulating an
assignment in a literate manner’. He was also frequently
drunk and persistently foul-mouthed. Residency officers
tried to avoid him. ANTON’ s one redeeming feature, in
Shebarshin’s view, was that he rarely interfered in their
work. Eventually, after he collapsed at an embassy
reception, the Soviet ambassador, M. V. Degtiar, insisted
on his recall to Moscow. To the dismay of Shebarshin and
his colleagues, however, ANTON continued working in
the FCD. Within the often heavy-drinking culture of the
Centre, alcoholism rarely led to dismissal.—

Late in 1967 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto took the initiative in
founding the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) under the
populist slogan, ‘Islam is our faith, democracy is our
polity, socialism is our economic policy; all power to the
people.’ ‘To put it in one sentence’, declared one of the
PPP’s founding documents, ‘the aim of the Party is the
transformation of Pakistan into a socialist society.’—
During the winter of 1968-69, the PPP under Bhutto’s
charismatic leadership co-ordinated a wave of popular
protest which in March 1969 finally persuaded Ayub
Khan to surrender power. He did so, however, not, as the
1962 constitution required, to the Speaker of the
Assembly but to the commander-in-chief of the armed
forces. General Yahya Khan, who promptly abrogated the
constitution and declared martial law.—

The Centre immediately embarked on a series of active
measures designed to make Yahya Khan suspicious of
both China and the United States. Operation RAVI was
based on two Service A forgeries: a ‘Directive’ dated 3
June 1969 supposedly sent from the Central Committee of
the Chinese Communist Party to the Chinese charge
d’affaires in India and a Chinese Foreign Ministry
document outlining plans to turn Kashmir into a pro-
Chinese independent state. On 28 June copies of both
forgeries were sent to the Pakistani ambassadors in Delhi
and Washington, doubtless in the hope that their contents
would be reported to Yahya Khan.— Simultaneously,
another active-measures operation, codenamed ZUBR,
spread reports that Americans had lost faith in Yahya
Khan’s ability to hold on to power and were afraid that he
would be replaced by a left-wing government which
would nationalize the banks and confiscate their deposits.
The United States embassy was said to have reported to
Washington that Yahya Khan’s regime was hopelessly
corrupt and would squander any foreign aid given to it.
The Karachi residency also claimed the credit for
organizing a demonstration against the Vietnam War.—

After RAVI and ZUBR came operation PADMA,
which was designed to persuade the Yahya Khan regime
that the Chinese were inciting rebellion in East Pakistan.
Service A fabricated a Chinese appeal to ‘Bengali

revolutionaries’, urging them to take up arms against ‘the
Punjabi landowners and the reactionary regime of Yahya
Khan’. The original intention was to write the appeal in
Bengali but, since no KGB officer was sufficiently fluent
in the language and the operation was considered too
sensitive to entrust to a Bengali agent, it was written in
English. A copy was posted to the Indian ambassador in
November 1969 in the knowledge that it would be opened
by Pakistani intelligence before arrival and thus come to
the knowledge of the Pakistani authorities. A further copy
was sent to the US ambassador in the hope that he too
would personally bring it to the attention of the
Pakistanis. Simultaneously, KGB agents in Kabul warned
Pakistani diplomats of Chinese subversion in East
Pakistan. The Pakistani representative in the UN was
reported to be taking similar reports seriously. A post-
mortem on PADMA concluded that the operation had
been a success. The supposed Chinese appeal to Bengali
revolutionaries was said to have become common
knowledge among foreign diplomats in Pakistan. The
Centre concluded that even the Americans did not suspect
that the appeal was a KGB fabrication.—

New entrants to the FCD South Asian Department were
often told that, when shown a map of the divided
Pakistani state after the partition of India in 1947, Stalin
had commented, ‘Such a state cannot survive for long.’—
By the late 1960s the Kremlin seems to have come to the

conclusion that the separation of Pakistan’s western and
eastern wings would be in Soviet, as well as Indian,
interests.— The KGB therefore set out to cultivate the
leader of the autonomist Awami League, Sheik Mujibur
Rahman (‘Mujib’). Though Mujib was unaware of the
cultivation, the KGB claimed that it succeeded in
persuading him that the United States had been
responsible for his arrest in January 1968, when he had
been charged with leading the so-called ‘Agartala
conspiracy’, hatched during meetings with Indian officials
at the border town of Agartala to bring about the
secession of East Pakistan with Indian help. Through an
intermediary, Mujib was told in September 1969 that the
names of all the conspirators had been personally passed
to Ayub by the US ambassador. According to a KGB
report, Mujib was completely taken in by the
disinformation and concluded that there must have been a
leak to the Americans from someone in his entourage.—

Late in 1969 Yahya Khan announced that, though
martial law remained in force, party politics would be
allowed to resume on 1 January 1970 in preparation for
elections at the end of the year. The Centre’s main
strategy during the election campaign was to ensure the
victory of Bhutto’s PPP in the West and Mujib ’s Awami
League in the East.— In June 1970 V. 1. Startsev, head of
the FCD South Asian Department, jointly devised with N.
A. Kosov, the head of Service A, an elaborate active-

measures campaign designed to discredit all the main
opponents of the PPP and Awami League. The President
of the Qaiyum Muslim League, Abdul Qaiyum Khan,
who had been Chief Minister from 1947 to 1953, was to
be discredited by speeches he had allegedly made before
1947 opposing the creation of an independent Pakistan.
The founder and leader of the religious party, Jamaat-i-
Islami, Maulana Syed Abul Ala Maudidi, was to be
exposed as a ‘reactionary and CIA agent’. The head of the
Council Muslim League, Mian Mumtaz Daultana, was to
be unmasked as a veteran British agent (presumably
because of his past residence in London) and accomplice
in political murders. The leader of the Convention
Muslim League, Fazal Ilahi Chaudhry, was also to be
implicated in past political murders as well as in plans to
murder Bhutto. (Ironically, in 1973 he became President
of Pakistan with Bhutto’s backing.) The President of the
Pakistan Democratic Party, Nurul Amin, in order to
discredit him in West Pakistan, was to be unmasked as a
leading figure in the ‘Agartala conspiracy’.—

Though the elections of December 1970 produced the
result for which the KGB had covertly campaigned, there
is no evidence that active measures had any significant
impact on the outcome. It would, however, have been out
of character if the Centre had failed to claim substantial
credit when reporting on the election to the Politburo. The
PPP won 81 of the 138 seats allocated to West Pakistan;

the runner-up in the West, the Qaiyum Muslim League,
won only nine seats. In the East, the Awami League won
an even more sweeping victory with 160 of the 162 seats.
Though Mujib had failed to contest a single seat in West
Pakistan, he thus won an overall majority in the National
Assembly and was entitled to become Prime Minister.
Bhutto colluded with Ayub and the army in refusing to
allow Mujib to take power. On 25 March 1971 Yahya
Khan ordered Mujib ’s arrest and began savage military
repression in East Pakistan. The Centre reported to the
Central Committee that the end of Pakistani unity was
imminent.— While Bhutto naively - or cynically -
declared, ‘Pakistan has been saved’, Bengal was
overwhelmed by a bloodbath which compared in its
savagery with the intercommunal butchery which had
followed Indian independence in 1947. India provided a
safe haven for Bengali troops resisting the Pakistani army.
In November the civil war between East and West
Pakistan turned into an Indo-Pakistani war. On 16
December Dhaka fell to Indian troops and East Pakistan
became independent Bangladesh.

The political transformation of the Indian subcontinent
caused by the divorce between East and West Pakistan
suited Moscow’s interests. The Indo-Soviet special
relationship had been enhanced and Indira Gandhi’s
personal prestige raised to an all-time high. Pakistan had
been dramatically weakened by the independence of

Bangladesh. Moscow’s preferred candidates (given the
impossibility of Communist regimes) took power in both
Islamabad and Dhaka. After defeat by India, Yahya Khan
resigned and handed over the presidency to Bhutto. On 10
January 1972, Mujib returned from captivity in West
Pakistan to a hero’s welcome in Dhaka.

Despite the fact that Bhutto nationalized over thirty
large firms in ten basic industries in January 1972 and
visited Moscow in March, the Kremlin had far more
reservations about him (initially as President, then, after
the 1973 elections, as Prime Minister) than about Mujib.
The most constant element in Bhutto’s erratic foreign
policy was friendship with China, which he visited almost
as soon as he succeeded Yahya Khan. At his request,
China vetoed Bangladesh’s admission to the United
Nations until it had repatriated all Pakistani personnel
captured after the war (some of whom it was considering
putting on trial for war crimes). China also helped to set
up Pakistan’s first heavy-engineering plants as well as
supplying arms.

Somewhat incongruously in view of his largely
Western lifestyle, Bhutto took to imitating Mao Zedong’s
clothes and cap. In 1976 he even had a book of his own
sayings published in the various languages spoken in
Pakistan, much in the manner of Mao’s Little Red Book.—
Mildly absurd though Bhutto’s neo-Maoist affectations
were, Moscow was not amused. As one of Bhutto’s

advisers, Rafi Raza, later acknowledged: ‘The lack of

importance attached by the Soviet Union to ZAB[hutto]

was evidenced by the fact that no significant Soviet

dignitary visited Pakistan during his five and a half years

in government, despite his own two visits [to Moscow] . .
’30

So far as Moscow was concerned, Mujib’s relations
with China, in contrast to Bhutto’s, were reassuringly
poor. Bangladesh and China did not establish diplomatic
relations until after Mujib’s death. As in India and
Pakistan, the KGB was able to exploit the corruption of
newly independent Bangladesh. For politicians,
bureaucrats and the military there were numerous
opportunities to cream off a percentage of the foreign aid
which flooded into the country.— Mujib once asked
despairingly: ‘Who takes bribes? Who indulges in
smuggling? Who becomes a foreign agent? Who transfers
money abroad? Who resorts to hoarding? It’s being done
by us - the five per cent of the people who are educated.
We are the bribe takers, the corrupt elements . . .’—

Though overwhelmingly the most popular person in
Bangladesh, Mujib was in some ways curiously isolated.
Irritated by the personality conflicts within the Awami
League, he increasingly saw himself as the sole
personification of Bangladesh - the Bangabandbu. He
was, it has been rightly observed, ‘a fine Bangabandbu

but a poor prime minister’.— The Dhaka residency
acknowledged in its annual report for 1972, after
Bangladesh’s first year of independence, that it had failed
to recruit any agent close to Mujib.— Among its successes
during that year, however, was the recruitment of three
agents in the Directorate of National Security (codenamed
KOMBINA T).— The KGB also succeeded in gaining
control of one daily newspaper (to which it paid the
equivalent of 300,000 convertible rubles to purchase new
printing presses) and one weekly.— On 2 February 1973
the Politburo instructed the KGB to use active measures
to influence the outcome of Bangladesh’s forthcoming
first parliamentary elections. — The KGB helped to fund
the election campaigns of Mujib ’s Awami League as well
as its allies, the Communist Party and the left-wing
National Awami Party. Probably with little justification, it
claimed part of the credit for the predictable landslide
victory of the Awami League.—

In June 1975, doubtless to the delight of Moscow,
Mujib transformed Bangladesh into a one-party state
whose new ruling party, BAKSAL, incorporated the three
parties hitherto secretly subsidized by the KGB (Awami
League, National Awami Party and Communist Party)
and one other left-wing party.— By this time the Dhaka
residency had recruited a senior member of Mujib ’s
secretariat, MITRA, two ministers, SALTAN and KALIF,
and two senior intelligence officers, MAKHIR and SHEF.

All were used against US targets.—

The FCD’s analytical department, Service 1, had
forecast after the 1973 elections that the Awami League
would retain power for the full five-year term and that the
main opposition to it would come from the pro-Chinese
left (always a bete noire of the KGB). A series of Service
A forgeries were used in an attempt to persuade both
Mujib and the Bangladeshi media that the Chinese were
conspiring with the left-wing opposition.— The real threat
to Mujib, however, came not from Maoists but from his
opponents within the armed forces. On 15 August 1975 a
group of army officers murdered both him and much of
his family. The KGB immediately began an active-
measures campaign, predictably inspiring newspaper
articles in a series of countries claiming that the coup was
the work of the CIA.— Within twenty- four hours of
Mujib ’s murder, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto became the first to
recognize the new military regime - deluding himself into
believing that Bangladesh might now be willing to form a
federation with Pakistan. Bhutto was later to repent of his
early enthusiasm as it became clear that Bangladesh’s
links with New Delhi would remain far closer than those
with Islamabad. It also dawned upon him that the coup in
Bangladesh might set a bad example to the Pakistani
military - as indeed it did.—

During the mid-1970s the KGB substantially increased

its influence in the Pakistani media. In 1973, according to
KGB statistics, it placed thirty-three articles in the
Pakistani press - little more than 1 per cent of the number
in India.— By 1977 the number had risen to 440,— and the
KGB had acquired direct control of at least one
periodical.— The main aim of active-measures operations
was, once again, to increase Pakistani distrust of the
United States. Disinformation fed to Bhutto’s government
claimed that the United States considered Pakistan too
unreliable an ally to deserve substantial military aid.
Washington was, allegedly, increasingly distrustful of
Bhutto’s government and regarded the Shah of Iran as its
main regional ally. The Shah was said to be determined to
become the leader of the Muslim world and to regard
Bhutto as a rival. He was also reported to be scornful of
Bhutto’s failure to deal with unrest in Baluchistan and to
be willing to send in Iranian troops if the situation
worsened. —

By 1975 the KGB was confident that active measures
were having a direct personal influence on Bhutto.— On
16 November the Soviet ambassador informed him that,
in view of ‘the friendly and neighbourly relations between
our two countries’, he had been instructed to warn him
that the Soviet authorities had information that a terrorist
group was planning to assassinate him during his
forthcoming visit to Baluchistan. Bhutto was profuse in
his thanks for the ambassador’s disinformation:

I was planning to fly to Baluchistan tonight or tomorrow
morning for a few days. I shall now cancel the visit to get
to the bottom of this matter in order not to put my life at
risk. I am particularly conscious of the genuine and
friendly relations between our countries at this difficult
stage in the political life of Pakistan which is also difficult
for me personally. I am doubly grateful to your country
and its leaders.—

The KGB reported that Bhutto had also been successfully
deceived by disinformation claiming that Iran was
planning to detach Baluchistan from Pakistan and had
stated as fact supposed Iranian plans to destabilize
Pakistan which, in reality, had been fabricated by Service
A.^ Agent DVIN was reported to have direct access to
Bhutto to feed him further fabrications.—

Despite Bhutto’s susceptibility to Soviet
disinformation, however, Moscow continued to regard
him as a loose cannon. As one of Bhutto’s ministers and
closest advisers, Rafi Raza, later acknowledged, ‘Neither
superpower considered him reliable.’ Among the
initiatives by Bhutto which annoyed the Kremlin was his
campaign for a ‘new economic world order ... to redress
the grave injustice to the poorer nations of the world’.
Kept out of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) by what
amounted to an Indian veto, Bhutto appeared to challenge

its authority. On the eve of the NAM summit in Colombo
in August 1976, Bhutto published an article entitled
‘Third World - New Direction’, calling for a Third World
summit in Islamabad in the spring of 1976 to discuss
global economic reform.— The Centre feared that, by
bringing in non-NAM members under Bhutto’s
chairmanship, such a summit would damage the prestige
of the NAM, which it regarded as an important vehicle for
KGB active measures. Following a Politburo resolution
condemning Bhutto’s proposal,— the Centre devised an
active-measures operation of almost global dimensions.
KGB agents were to inform the current Chair of the
NAM, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, and other Sri Lankan
politicians that Bhutto’s aim was to undermine her
personal authority as well as to divide NAM members and
weaken the movement’s commitment to anti-imperialism.
Disinformation prepared by Service A designed to
discredit Bhutto’s initiative was to be forwarded by the
local KGB residencies to the governments of Somalia,
Nigeria, Ghana, Cyprus, Yemen, Mexico, Venezuela,
Iraq, Afghanistan and Nepal. The Centre was also
confident that its active measures would persuade
President Boumedienne of Algeria to spread the message
that an Islamabad conference would weaken the NAM
and diminish the influence of ‘progressive’ leaders in the
movement. Delegates attending a NAM planning
conference in Delhi were to be given statements by Indian
groups prepared under KGB guidance condemning

Bhutto’s initiative as a threat to the unity of the NAM.—

In the event the Islamabad conference failed to
materialize and on 5 July 1977 Bhutto was overthrown in
a military coup led by the commander-in-chief of the
army, General Zia ul-Haq. On 3 September Bhutto was
charged with conspiracy to murder the father of a
maverick PPP politician. By now, most of the popular
enthusiasm which had swept him to power seven years
earlier had been dissipated by his autocratic manner and
the corruption of his regime. As one of his most fervent
supporters noted in December, ‘It was painful to see that
while Bhutto stood trial for murder in Lahore, the people
of the city were showing greater interest in the Test match
being played there.’— Bhutto was sentenced to death on
18 March 1978 following a trial of dubious legality and
executed on 4 April 1979 after the sentence had been
narrowly upheld by the Supreme Court. KGB active
measures predictably blamed Bhutto’s overthrow and
execution, like that of Mujib, on a CIA conspiracy.—

Neither General Ziaur Rahman (better known as Zia),
who by the end of 1976 had emerged as the dominant
figure in Bangladesh (initially as Chief Martial Law
Administrator and from 1977 as President), nor Zia ul-
Haq (also, confusingly, better known as Zia) was
favourably regarded in the Kremlin. Both, in the Centre’s
view, were far better disposed to Washington than to

Moscow. One of Ziaur Rahman’s first actions was to
change the constitution by replacing ‘socialism’ as a
principle of state with a vaguer commitment to ‘economic
justice and equality’. His economic policy was based on
encouraging the private sector and privatizing public
enterprise. The increased foreign aid desperately needed
by Bangladesh, Zia believed, could only be obtained by
moving closer to the West (especially the United States),
the Muslim world and China. Moscow was visibly
affronted. Izvestia complained in 1977 that right-wing and
Maoist forces in Bangladesh were conducting a campaign
of ‘provocation and vilification against the Soviet Union’
.— The KGB claimed the credit for organizing a series of
protest demonstrations in September and October 1978
against an agreement signed by the Zia regime with
Washington permitting the US Peace Corps to operate in
Bangladesh.—

According to KGB statistics, active measures in
Bangladesh increased from ninety in 1978 to about 200 in
1979, and involved twenty agents of influence. The KGB
claimed that in 1979 it planted 101 articles in the press,
organized forty-four meetings to publicize disinformation
and on twenty-six occasions arranged for Service A
forgeries to reach the Bangladesh authorities.— The
dominant theme of the forgeries was CIA conspiracy
against the Ziaur Rahman regime. Operation ARSENAL
in 1978 brought to the attention of the Directorate of

National Security the supposed plotting of a CIA officer
(real or alleged) named Young with opposition groups.—
Service A drew some of the inspiration for its forgeries
from real plots by the President’s Bangladeshi opponents.
During Zia’s five and a half years in power he had to deal
with at least seventeen mutinies and attempted coups. In
August 1979, for example, a group of officers were
arrested in Dhaka and accused of plotting to overthrow
him. Two months later Andropov approved an FCD
proposal for Service A to fabricate a letter supporting the
plotters from Air Vice-Marshal Muhammad Ghulam
Tawab, whom Zia had sacked as head of the air force.
Other material planted in the Bangladeshi, Indian and Sri
Lankan press purported to unmask Tawab as a long-
standing CIA agent.— Service A also forged a letter from
a CIA officer in Dhaka to the former Deputy Prime
Minister, Moudud Ahmad, assuring him of US support for
the right-wing opposition to Zia.— In 1981 another
disinformation operation purported to show that the
Reagan administration was plotting Zia’s overthrow and
had established secret contact with Khondakar Mustaque
Ahmad, who had briefly become President after the
assassination of Mujib and had been imprisoned by Zia
from 1976 to 1980.— There is no evidence that KGB
active measures had any success in undermining the Zia
regime. At the 1979 general election, which was generally
considered to have been fairly conducted, Zia’s

Bangladesh National Party won 207 of the 300 seats. Zia,
however, never succeeded in resolving the problems
posed by unrest in the armed forces. After several narrow
escapes, he was assassinated while on a visit to
Chittagong during an attempted coup led by the local
army commander on 29 May 1981.—

Whatever successes were achieved by active-measures
campaigns in Pakistan and Bangladesh during the late
1970s were more than cancelled out by the hostile
reaction in both countries to the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan in December 1979 and the brutal war which
followed. Hitherto Zia ul-Haq had been widely
underestimated in both West and East. In the summer of
1978 The Economist had dismissed him as a ‘well-
intentioned but increasingly maladroit military ruler’,
while the Guardian declared that, ‘Zia’s name has a
death-rattle sound these days. There’s a feeling he can’t
last much longer.’ Once war began in Afghanistan,
however, it seemed to Zia ul-Haq ’s chief of army staff.
General Khalid Mahmud Arif, that:

All eyes were focused on Pakistan. Would she buckle
under pressure and acquiesce in superpower aggression?
The Western countries quickly changed their tune. The
arch critics of the autocratic military ruler of Pakistan
began to woo him. They suddenly discovered Zia’s
hitherto unknown ‘sterling qualities’ and the special

importance of Pakistan in the changed circumstances.—

Zia began pressing the Carter administration to provide
arms and assistance to the mujahideen insurgents against
the Communist regime in Afghanistan even before the
Soviet invasion. The Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence
Directorate (ISI) made similar approaches to the CIA. In
February 1980 President Jimmy Carter’s National
Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, visited Pakistan
to agree with Zia US covert assistance to the Afghan
mujahideen across the Pakistan border.— The meeting
between Zia and Brzezinski inaugurated what was in
effect a secret US-Pakistani alliance for covert
intervention in Afghanistan which lasted for the
remainder of the war. The KGB almost certainly deduced,
even if they did not obtain detailed intelligence on, the
purpose of Brzezinski ’s visit. After Brzezinski ’s departure
from Islamabad, Gromyko declared that Pakistan was
putting its own security at risk by acting as a ‘springboard
for further aggression against Afghanistan’. —

Andropov simultaneously approved an elaborate series
of active measures designed to deter Zia from providing,
or allowing the Americans or Chinese to provide,
assistance to the mujahideen. The head of the Pakistani
intelligence station in Moscow was to be privately warned
that if Pakistan was used as a base for ‘armed struggle

against Afghanistan’, the Oriental Institute (then headed
by Yevgeni Primakov) would be asked to devise ways of
assisting Baluchi and Pushtun separatist movements on
the North-West Frontier in order to seal off the Afghan
border.— The CIA concluded that there was a serious
‘possibility of large-scale Soviet aid to the Baluchi’.—
KGB active measures also sought to persuade Zia that
some of his own senior officers, who opposed his Afghan
policy, were plotting against him. Service A prepared
leaflets in English and Urdu on Pakistani paper purporting
to come from a secret opposition group to Zia within the
Pakistani army. On the night of 28 February to 1 March
1980 KGB officers drove round Islamabad, Rawalpindi
and Karachi distributing copies of the leaflets from a
device attached to their cars. According to a KGB report,
the leaflets were taken seriously by Pakistani security,
which began an immediate investigation and wrongly
incriminated the deputy army chief-of-staff, Lieutenant-
General Muhammad Iqbal Khan (remembered by a
British diplomat who knew him well as ‘a decent and
straightforward man’). The KGB claimed that this
investigation provoked an unsuccessful coup by Iqbal
Khan on 5 March, which led in turn to the removal or
retirement of a series of senior officers and to the
expulsion of two members of the US consulate in Lahore
who had been in contact with them. On 25 March
Andropov was informed that operation SARDAR had led
the Zia regime to believe that the United States was

conspiring with dissidents in the Pakistani army.
Andropov approved the continuation of the operation.
Several similar leaflets were distributed over the next

70

year.—

Letters fabricated by Service A in the names of various
informants and bogus conspirators were sent to American
organizations and other addresses in Pakistan whose mail
was believed to be intercepted by the local security
services, as well as to the Pakistani ambassador in
Washington, in order to spread the fiction of a CIA plot to
overthrow the Zia regime. Disinformation planted on the
Pakistani ambassador in Bangkok reported that the State
Department regarded the regime as an unpopular,
incompetent dictatorship which should be replaced as
soon as possible.— Another active-measures operation
sought to persuade the Pakistani authorities that the CIA
was plotting with separatists in Baluchistan, promising to
support their campaign for autonomy in return for help in
conducting covert cross-border operations against the
Khomeini regime. Among the more ingenious
fabrications devised by Service A as part of this operation
was a wallet containing a compromising document
allegedly lost by a CIA officer operating under diplomatic
cover. The wallet, supposedly found by a member of the
Pakistani public, was handed in at a police station to
ensure that it came to the attention of the authorities.—
Simultaneously, the KGB orchestrated a large-scale

campaign in the Pakistani and foreign press attacking
Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan.— During the first
eight months of the war the KGB claimed to have planted
527 articles in Pakistani newspapers. —

The Centre also went to elaborate lengths to exacerbate
popular resentment against the Afghan refugees flooding
across the border by planting agents in their midst with a
mission to discredit them.— Its active measures, however,
had no effect on Zia’s policy. The Afghan refugee camps
quickly became recruitment centres for the mujahideen.
The ISI channelled the recruits into seven Islamic
resistance groups, all with bases in Pakistan which
directed operations across the Afghan border. The Hizb-i-
Islami (Islamic Party) led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the
most important of the fundamentalist mujahideen groups,
had particularly close links with the Zia ul-Haq regime. In
1978, in an attempt to bolster support for the regime, Zia
had taken five members of the Pakistani wing of Hizb-i-
Islami into his government. With Zia’s support, the ISI
replaced the Foreign Ministry as the main policy-making
body on Afghanistan.—

Zia ul-Haq was well aware, even if he did not know
many of the details, that the KGB was conducting a major
active-measures offensive against him. Though the details
remain classified, from an early stage in the war he
received intelligence from the CIA as well as from his

own agencies. — His response to the KGB offensive
appears to have taken the Centre by surprise. In August
and September 1980 Pakistan carried out the biggest
expulsion of Soviet intelligence and other personnel since
Britain had excluded 105 KGB and GRU officers in
1971.— Kryuchkov reacted to the expulsion and the
problems created by the dramatic reduction in the size of
the Pakistani residencies by setting up an
interdepartmental working group within the FCD chaired
by one of his deputies, V. A. Chukhrov, to try to devise
ways of working with Pakistani opposition forces to
destabilize and eventually overthrow the Zia regime.—

The most violent of Zia’s opponents was Murtaza
Bhutto, elder son of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who founded a
small terrorist group, initially claiming to be the armed
wing of the PPP, to avenge his father’s death. While in
jail, Bhutto senior had famously remarked, ‘My sons are
not my sons if they do not drink the blood of those who
dare shed my blood today.’— In May 1979, a month after
his father’s execution, Murtaza visited Kabul to seek the
help of the Taraki government in setting up a base in
Afghanistan from which his guerrillas could launch
attacks against the Zia regime.— Murtaza was allowed to
receive a large arms shipment from Yasir Arafat and to
house a small band of apprentice guerrillas, his so-called
‘revolutionary army’, in a derelict building which the
volunteers called ‘Dracula House’. His first attempt to

smuggle some of his arms cache into Pakistan ended in
disaster when the man chosen to take them across the
border turned out to be a Pakistani agent. Murtaza was
reduced to scouring Pakistani newspapers and claiming to
his Afghan hosts that accidents and fires reported in them
were the work of his guerrillas. After the Soviet invasion,
however, Murtaza established a close relationship with
Muhammad Najibullah, head of KHAD, the newly
founded Afghan intelligence service, who as a goodwill
gesture paid the costs of Murtaza’ s wedding to a young
Afghan woman.—

Murtaza and Najibullah had a series of discussions on
joint covert operations against Pakistan.— Since KHAD
was operating under KGB direction, there is no doubt that
their discussions were fully approved by the Centre.—
Given the risks of operating with the volatile Murtaza,
however, the Centre preferred to deal with him at one
remove through KHAD. Murtaza may never have realized
that, in his dealings with him, KHAD was acting as a
KGB surrogate.— His first successful operations inside
Pakistan, agreed with Najibullah, were a bomb attack on
the Sindh high court and the destruction of a Pakistan
International Airlines (PIA) DC- 10 aircraft at Karachi
airport in January 1981. He also planned to disrupt the
visit of Pope John Paul II to Pakistan in February by
exploding a bomb during the pontiffs address in a
Karachi stadium. But the bomb went off prematurely at

the entrance to the stadium, killing the bomber and a
policeman.—

In December Murtaza Bhutto and Najibullah decided
on what was to be their most spectacular joint operation,
codenamed ALAMGIR (‘Swordbearer’) by the KGB.— It
was agreed that Murtaza ’s guerrillas would hijack a PI A
airliner over Pakistan and divert it to Damascus or Tripoli.
The three novice hijackers who boarded a plane at
Karachi on 2 March 1981, however, made the mistake of
choosing an internal flight which had insufficient fuel to
reach Damascus or Tripoli. The leading hijacker,
Salamullah Tipu, ordered the pilot to land at Kabul
instead. As the plane landed, Tipu informed the control
tower that he was a member of the armed wing of the
PPP, which was fighting for the restoration of democracy
in Pakistan, and wished to speak to ‘Dr Salahuddin’,
Murtaza’ s codename in Kabul. Murtaza, who chose the
occasion to rename his terrorist group Al-Zulfikar (‘The
Sword’), came to meet Tipu at the bottom of the aircraft
steps— and was joined by Najibullah, who was disguised
in the clothes of an airport worker. Both the KGB mission
and the Kabul residency advised Najibullah on the best
methods of using the hijack to discredit the Zia regime.—
On 4 March Anahita Ratebzad, President of the Afghan-
Soviet Friendship Association and Minister of Education,
who was a ‘confidential contact’ of the KGB,— came to
the airport surrounded by TV cameras, to express support

for the ‘just demands’ of the hijackers and to ask for the
release of the women and children on the aircraft to mark
International Women’s Day. In a pre-arranged gesture,
Tipu announced that he was happy to accede to
Ratebzad’s request. On 5 March the Afghan leader and
long-standing KGB agent, Babrak Karmal, who had just
returned from Moscow, conducted a live televised phone
conversation with Tipu from the control tower. Like
Ratebzad, Karmal gave strong backing to the hijackers’
‘just demands’. Tipu replied in an emotional voice that
Karmal was the greatest man in the whole of Asia.—

Among the hijackers’ demands was the release of over
fifty ‘political prisoners’ from Pakistani jails. When Zia
refused, one of the passengers was beaten, shot and
thrown onto the tarmac, where he writhed in agony as he
lay dying. The victim, Tariq Rahim, was a devoted former
ADC to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, but the paranoid tendencies
of both Tipu and Murtaza convinced them that Rahim had
really been in league with Zia.— This gruesome episode
may well have persuaded the KGB that it was time for the
aircraft to move on. Before the plane was refuelled for a
flight to Syria, then the Soviet Union’s closest major ally
in the Middle East, further arms were taken on board
unseen by the TV cameras. The three hijackers, who had
arrived in Kabul armed only with pistols, left equipped
with Kalashnikovs, grenades, explosives, a timing device
and $4,500.— After the aircraft landed in Damascus, Zia

initially continued to refuse to release political prisoners
but was eventually persuaded to do so by Washington in
order to save the lives of American hostages on board.
Murtaza hailed the freeing of fifty-four PPP members
from Pakistani jails as a triumph for Al-Zulfikar. KHAD
and the KGB appeared to agree. Al-Zulfikar’s base was
moved from the derelict ‘Dracula House’ to new palatial
headquarters, which received a steady stream of refugees
from Zia’s regime anxious to become guerrillas and fight
for its overthrow.—

As well as supporting Al-Zulfikar, KHAD was also
used by the KGB to channel arms to separatist and
dissident groups in the Pakistani provinces of Baluchistan
and Sindh. At the end of 1980 the leader of a Baluchi
separatist group based in Afghanistan had secret talks
with Najibullah who promised to provide the separatists
with arms, 400 military instructors and three training
camps. After talks between another Baluchi leader and the
Afghan President, Babrak Karmal, in April 1982, KHAD
opened two more camps to train Baluchi guerrillas to
fight the Pakistani and Iranian regimes.—

The huge influx of Afghan refugees in Pakistan
(eventually numbering perhaps as many as 3.5 million)
offered numerous opportunities for agent infiltration.
Since the agents were usually Afghan, in most instances
the KGB used KHAD as its surrogate. According to

statistics in FCD files, acting as a KGB surrogate, in the
early 1980s KHAD’s foreign intelligence directorate had
107 agents and 115 ‘trainee’ agents operating inside
Pakistan, mostly within the Afghan refugee community.—
The FCD interdepartmental working group headed by
Chukhrov made penetration of the mujahideen a major
priority.— Twenty-six KHAD agents were said to have
access to the headquarters of the rival mujahideen groups;
fifteen were members of the Pakistani armed forces,
intelligence community and official bureaucracy.— Their
main achievement was to increase the existing tension and
mistrust between the rival groups. Though this
achievement did not change the course of the war in
Afghanistan, it significantly diminished the effectiveness
of mujahideen operations.—

The Centre also attempted to disrupt the links between
Zia and the mujahideen groups in Pakistan by active
measures designed to brand him as a traitor to Islam. On
18 April 1981 Kryuchkov submitted to Andropov a new
proposal for disinformation designed ‘to cause a
deterioration in Pakistani-Iranian relations and to
exacerbate the political situation in Pakistan’:

1. Using [Service A’s] samples in the Centre, leaflets
should be written in Urdu by a fictitious opposition group
calling for the overthrow of the regime of Zia ul-Haq and
an Islamic Revolution in Pakistan. A large number of the
leaflets should be printed and distributed in Pakistan. The

text of the leaflet must make it clear that the writers are
under the strong influence of Khomeini. The leaflet
should quote Khomeini’s criticisms of Zia ul-Haq and the
present regime in Pakistan. The leaflet should be
distributed by the residencies in Islamabad and Karachi
and by our Afghan friends.

2. The residencies in Bangladesh and India should
get the press in these countries to publish articles about a
powerful opposition organization in Pakistan which was
set up by the Iranian special services and which is actively
working to overthrow Zia ul-Haq.

We await your approval.

Andropov gave his approval on 21 April.— Service A’s
leaflets attacking Zia as a traitor to Islam (operation
ZAKHIR) took several forms. Some, such as the
following example (unusually copied in its entirety by
Mitrokhin), were intended to appear to be the work of
Shi’ite groups inspired by Khomeini’s example:

In the name of Allah, merciful and kind! Glory to Allah
who made us Muslims and said in his Holy book: ‘Is there
anyone better than the man who calls on Allah to do good
and says that he is obedient to him?’ (S.41, A.33) Blessed
is the prophet, his family and associates.

Brothers in faith!

Our enemies are not only those who openly oppose
Islam, but also those who, under the cover of Islamism,
do their dirty deeds. For it is written: ‘Do not be afraid of
your enemies, but of the day when you turn your back on
Islam and the mosques.’

Zia ul-Haq is a hypocrite like the former Shah of Iran.
He also prayed with Muslims, went on a pilgrimage to the
Holy places and knew how to talk about the Holy Quran.

We are calling on the army and the people to rise up
against the despot Zia ul-Haq, the servant of Satan - the
United States of America - and to prepare him for the fate
of the Shah. Satan is frightened that the Islamic
Revolution, started in Iran, will spread to Pakistan. This is
why Satan is generously supplying Zia ul-Haq with arms
with which to kill believers. Zia ul-Haq has flooded our
country with various unbelieving Americans and impure
Chinese who are teaching him how to kill pure Muslims.
He believes in their advice more than in the teachings of
Allah. Zia ul-Haq is a mercenary dog who is living on
Satan’s dollars. He has ordered Zia ul-Haq to establish a
cruel and bloody regime and to crush the Muslim people
who are now living with no rights.

At the same time corruption and hypocrisy are eating
away at our society. Crime is increasing. The reason is not
only a lack of true belief, but the increasing gap between
the rich and poor. As All-powerful Allah teaches us: ‘A

man will only receive when he is zealous.’ Our prophet
Muhammad, may Allah bless him, called on us Muslims
to work honestly and hard in respect of the Almighty.
This means that a Muslim must only receive what he has
earned by his own labours. But Zia ul-Haq and his clique
are unlawfully making themselves rich from other
people’s work. Even the Zekat [obligatory alms to the
needy - one of the pillars of Islam] has become a thing of
personal gain to them. Taking advantage of the fact that
no one can control them, they award a large part of the
Zekat. But the Most High ordered us that: ‘Charity is for
the poor and beggars, for the deliverance of slaves, for
those in debt, for actions in the name of Islam and for
travellers as declared by Allah. He is knowing and wise.’
And our prophet Muhammad, and may He rest in peace,
taught us that the Zekat must all be used for the needs of
the poor, orphans and widows. Ask our poor people
whether they have received much charity from the Zekat.
Collecting the Zekat by force, Zia ul-Haq and his clique
are not only insulting true Muslims. They are shamelessly
ignoring the teachings of Islam. And they manage to hide
their own money from the Zekat. All Muslims should
know that Zia ul-Haq recently stole millions. He keeps his
riches abroad as did the former Shah of Iran, knowing that
sooner or later he will be forced to flee. He is hoping that
Satan will protect him from the anger of the people.
Meanwhile he is serving Satan faithfully by ensuring
favourable conditions for the dominance of non-believers.

He knows that this will lead to further theft from
Muslims.

The clique of Zia ul-Haq has carried out a census of the
population and its housing. This was also inspired by
Satan as a way to introduce new taxes and labour
conditions in contradiction of the teachings of
Muhammad, may Allah bless him, for he said that anyone
who oppresses a Muslim is not his follower.

Zia ul-Haq is leading the country to disaster. He wants
to ride on the atomic devil and become a despot over all
Muslims.

But Allah is great and just. Only dust remains from the
enemies of Islam, but the warriors for the true faith are
remembered for ever.

Everyone must join the fight in the name of Islam
against the bloody dictator Zia ul-Haq.

Allah is great!—

Other Service A leaflets purported to come from dissident
Islamic officers, condemning Zia as a hypocritical traitor
who, while professing friendship for Iran, was secretly
plotting with the Americans to bring down the Islamic
Republic. The Service A forgers threatened Zia with
assassination. ‘Next time’, they told him, ‘you will pay

for it as Sadat did.’—

Murtaza Bhutto, meanwhile, with the assistance of
Najibullah, acting as a KGB surrogate, was preparing a
real plot to assassinate Zia. Though the evidence comes
exclusively from former Al-Zulfikar sources, it appears
that Zia narrowly escaped two assassination attempts
early in 1982. The weapon in both cases was a Soviet
SAM-7 (surface-to-air) missile. On the first occasion, in
January, two Al-Zulfikar terrorists carried a SAM missile
in the boot of a car to a deserted hillside in sight of
Islamabad airport and awaited the arrival of a Falcon jet
bringing Zia home from a visit to Saudi Arabia. But the
poorly trained terrorist who fired the SAM did not wait
for the red signal in his viewfinder to turn green,
indicating that the missile had locked on to its target, and
the attack failed. A few weeks later the Pakistani press
revealed that on the morning of 7 February Zia would be
arriving at Lahore aboard his personal plane. The two
terrorists drove to a public park beneath Zia’s flight path
with another SAM in their boot, waited for the Falcon jet
to come into view and fired the missile. Once again,
however, they ignored some of the instructions in the
SAM-7 manual. This time the terrorist who fired the
missile waited for the green signal but failed to follow the
manual’s advice that the aircraft should be watched
through the viewfinder until it was hit. The missile missed
its target, though on this occasion the Falcon pilot saw the

SAM-7 being launched and took what turned out to be
unnecessary evasive action. The strict censorship imposed
by Zia’s regime prevented any mention of the
assassination attempt appearing in the Pakistani press.
The two terrorists escaped back to Kabul.— Two more
SAM-7 missiles smuggled into Pakistan for a further
attempt on Zia’s life later in the year were seized by the
police before they could be used. As Murtaza’s paranoid
strain became more pronounced, he suspected a bizarrely
improbable plot between the Afghan regime and Zia to
exchange him for the mujahideen leader, Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, and moved to New Delhi.—

Without any credible strategy to bring Zia down, the
Centre could do little more than continue to publicize
imaginary plots against him, chiefly from a supposedly
secret Islamic opposition within the Pakistani armed
forces. Some of Service A’s fabrications appear to have
deceived the Indian press. In 1983, for example, the Delhi
Patriot published a text allegedly prepared by a
clandestine cell calling itself the Muslim Army
Brotherhood (Fauji Biradiri), which denounced the Zia
regime as ‘a despicable gang of corrupt generals . . . more
interested in lining their own pockets than in defending
the nation’, who had ‘betrayed the ideas of Pakistan’s
founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and were leading the
country to ruin’. A recent history of Pakistan concludes:
‘Nothing resembling the Muslim Army Brotherhood

materialized in the more than ten years that Zia remained
at the helm of state affairs, and it would appear to have
been the invention of fertile minds in the neighbouring
state [India].’—

In all probability, however, the ‘fertile minds’ were
those not of the Indians but of Service A. Allegations of
the Zia regime’s corruption were also a regular theme in
KGB disinformation. Zia was said to have large amounts
of money in Swiss bank accounts, into which American
arms manufacturers paid 10 per cent commission on their
sales to Pakistan. KGB disinformation also claimed that
Zia had a special plane in continual readiness in case he
and his family had to flee the country.—

In Pakistan, as in India, some of the most effective
active measures were based on fabricated evidence of US
biological and chemical warfare. — Operation
TARAKANY (‘Cockroaches’) centred on the claim that
American specialists in this field had set up a base in the
US bacteriological laboratory at the Lahore medical
centre, which was secretly experimenting on Pakistani
citizens. Outbreaks of bowel disease in the districts of
Lishin, Surkhab and Muslim Bag and the neighbouring
areas of Afghanistan, as well as epidemics and cattle
deaths in Punjab, Haryana, Jammu, Kashmir and
Rajasthan in western India were alleged to be the result of
the movement across the Pakistani border of people and

cattle infected by American germ-warfare specialists. On
11 February 1982 the Karachi Daily News reported that
Dr Nellin, the American head of a research group at the
Lahore medical centre, had been expelled by the Pakistani
authorities. The Pakistani newspaper Dawn reported on
23 February:

Following the expulsion from Pakistan of Dr Nellin for
dangerous experiments on the spread of infectious
diseases, an American delegation of doctors is paying an
urgent visit to Islamabad. Their aim is to hush up the
scandal over the work of the Lahore medical centre and to
put pressure on Pakistan not to make known the work
which was carried out at the centre . . . The fact that a
group of American doctors has made such an urgent visit
to Pakistan confirms that Washington is frightened that
the dangerous experiments on new substances for
weapons of mass destruction might be revealed. It
supports the conclusion that Pakistan intends to allow the
Americans to continue to carry out dangerous
experiments, probably because these new weapons could
be used against India, Iran and Afghanistan.

In May 1982 the KGB succeeded in taking the story a
stage further by planting reports in the Indian press,
allegedly based on sources in Islamabad, that the United
States had stockpiled chemical and bacteriological

weapons in Pakistan:

According to information received from local military
sources, chemical reagents have recently been sent to
Pakistan from the American chemical weapons arsenals
on Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean and in Japan.
They will be positioned in areas not far from Islamabad,
Karachi, Lahore, Quetta and Peshawar. According to the
sources, these reagents are the same as those used by the
Americans during the Vietnam War. According to the
same reports, the reserve of American chemical and
bacteriological weapons in Pakistan is intended for
possible use by American rapid-deployment forces
throughout South and South-West Asia. Agreement on the
stationing of chemical and bacteriological weapons in
Pakistan was reached between Washington and Islamabad
as early as August 1980 when the agreement on the
stationing of the American bacteriological service on
Pakistani territory was officially prolonged. Point 2 of
Article 5 of this agreement gives the Americans, in the
form of the International Development Agency of the
USA, the right to evaluate periodically the work and make
suggestions for its improvement. In practice this means
that the Americans have full control over all aspects of the
work in Pakistan on new forms of chemical,
bacteriological and biological weapons. This makes it
possible for the USA independently to establish how

chemical reagents must be stored and used in Pakistan.
Confirmation of this is the well-known work in the
medical centre in Lahore where American specialists have
invented new forms of bacteriological and chemical
weapons.

Within the Centre, Operation TARAKANY was
considered such a success that Andropov made a special
award to the resident in Pakistan.—

Anti-American black propaganda, however, failed to
disrupt the increasing co-operation between Zia and
Washington. Though Zia spumed the offer in 1980 of a
$400-million economic and military aid package from