The World Was Going Our Way (6 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
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.
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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’.
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Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, headed ‘America - A Helpless Giant’.
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Identifying the United States with the Western colonial powers, despite strong American support for decolonization after the Second World War,
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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 . . .’
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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 . . .’
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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.
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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’t 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.
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 modern 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.
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Though Soviet writers contributed little of significance by comparison with Western Marxists to the serious study of imperialism during the Cold War,
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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:
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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.
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The final stages of the Vietnam War were, ironically, accompanied by an unprecedented level of détente 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 détente 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.
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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 détente with the United States.
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The advocates of the offensive, Andropov probably chief among them, won the argument.
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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 détente with the United States.
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The advocates of the offensive, Andropov probably chief among them, won the argument.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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At a summit in Vienna in 1979 the future DCI, Robert Gates, ‘couldn’t get over how feeble Brezhnev was’:
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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.
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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.
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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, NSA], and I were trapped in a narrow walkway at one point, and as the KGB half-carried Brezhnev by we were nearly steamrollered.
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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, NSA], and I were trapped in a narrow walkway at one point, and as the KGB half-carried Brezhnev by we were nearly steamrollered.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If, as most of the world as well as most Americans continued to believe,
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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.
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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.
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If, as most of the world as well as most Americans continued to believe,
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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.
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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.
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