The World Was Going Our Way (60 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
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’.
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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.
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A KGB active measure also fabricated evidence that Pakistani intelligence was planning to recruit Afghan refugees to assassinate her.
35
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 31 October she was shot dead by two Sikh guards in the garden of her house.
36
Predictably, some conspiracy theorists were later to argue that the guards had been working for the CIA.
37
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.
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A KGB active measure also fabricated evidence that Pakistani intelligence was planning to recruit Afghan refugees to assassinate her.
35
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 31 October she was shot dead by two Sikh guards in the garden of her house.
36
Predictably, some conspiracy theorists were later to argue that the guards had been working for the CIA.
37
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.
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Rajiv Gandhi’s first foreign visit after succeeding his mother as Prime Minister was to the Soviet Union for the funeral 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,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
41
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.
42
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.
43
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.
43
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.
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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’.
1
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.
2
The SPC was kept going by an annual Soviet subsidy delivered by the KGB which by the mid-1970s amounted to $25-30,000.
3
Another small Communist underground in East Pakistan also received covert funding.
4
In addition, a number of SPC leaders made what the KGB considered handsome profits from privileged trading contracts with the Soviet Union.
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Moscow, however, had realistically low expectations of the SPC which, it believed, tended to exaggerate its support.
6
1
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.
2
The SPC was kept going by an annual Soviet subsidy delivered by the KGB which by the mid-1970s amounted to $25-30,000.
3
Another small Communist underground in East Pakistan also received covert funding.
4
In addition, a number of SPC leaders made what the KGB considered handsome profits from privileged trading contracts with the Soviet Union.
5
Moscow, however, had realistically low expectations of the SPC which, it believed, tended to exaggerate its support.
6
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.
7
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.
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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.
8
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.
9
The only KGB agent in the Foreign Ministry whose identity can be revealed is Abu Sayid 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.
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9
The only KGB agent in the Foreign Ministry whose identity can be revealed is Abu Sayid 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.
10
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
14
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.
15
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. I. 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.
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