The World Was Going Our Way (10 page)
Read The World Was Going Our Way Online
Authors: Christopher Andrew
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Accounts, #Espionage, #History, #Europe, #Ireland, #Military, #Intelligence & Espionage, #Modern (16th-21st Centuries), #20th Century, #Russia, #World
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, Raúl 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.
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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.
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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 . . .’
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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.
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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.
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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 . . .’
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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.
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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 débâcle, 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.’
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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 Liberación 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.
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The FSLN leader, Carlos Fonseca Amador, codenamed GIDROLOG (‘Hydrologist’), was a trusted KGB agent.
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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.’
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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.’
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Within weeks of the victory of Castro’s guerrillas in January 1959, Tomás 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 Rubén Darío. Fonseca was later married in Torres’s house in Mexico City.
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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 Rubén Darío. Fonseca was later married in Torres’s house in Mexico City.
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Shelepin reported to Khrushchev in July 1961:
In Nicaragua . . . at the present time - via KGB agents and confidential contacts
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PIMEN, GIDROLOG and LOT
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- [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.
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PIMEN, GIDROLOG and LOT
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- [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.
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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 Ramón de Jesus Andara y Ubeda (codenamed PRIM), a Nicaraguan surgeon working in Mexico.
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On 22 November 1961 Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD, reported to Semichastny, the KGB Chairman:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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