The World Was Going Our Way (80 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
Nkomo conducted most of the negotiations for Soviet arms supplies to ZAPU’s armed wing, the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), through the Soviet ambassador in Lusaka, Vasili Grigoryevich Solodovnikov, who, as Nkomo later acknowledged in his memoirs, was generally believed to be ‘associated with the KGB’. Solodovnikov was one of the leading Soviet experts on Africa but appears to have been only an occasional co-opted collaborator of the KGB, rather than an intelligence officer. According to Nkomo, ‘He was a very nice fellow, and we got on very well on the personal level. Moreover, he was entirely professional about his work, and if you discussed a request with him you could be sure that it would soon get on to the agenda of the right committee in Moscow, and the decision would come back without much delay.’ Nkomo had ‘extensive correspondence’ and at least one meeting with Andropov, at which he discussed the ‘training of [ZAPU] security operatives’. The Cuban DGI also provided ZAPU with intelligence advisers.
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Moscow’s inside information and influence on ZAPU, however, proved of little avail because it urged on ZIPRA a mistaken strategy which diminished its influence in favour of its ZANU rival, the Zimbabwe African Liberation Army (ZANLA). On Soviet advice, ZIPRA attempted to turn itself into a conventional force capable of launching a cross-border invasion which would gain control of enough Rhodesian territory to give it major political leverage in determining the peace settlement. In so doing, however, it set up military camps in Zambia, Tanzania and Angola which were far easier targets for attack by Rhodesian security forces than more mobile and elusive guerrilla groups. In a series of cross-border raids in the spring and summer of 1979, the Rhodesian army and air force destroyed ZIPRA’s capacity to operate effectively inside Rhodesia before the cease-fire at the end of the year.
ZANLA, by contrast, had much greater success with a strategy based on infiltrating guerrilla groups from its Mozambique bases across the Rhodesian border and winning support in the countryside. Though militarily superior, the Rhodesian security forces lost control of the rural population and with it the war. As one observer noted, ‘The real problem is that the Rhodesian military have misunderstood the nature of the war which they are fighting. They have failed to realize that the war is essentially political rather than military and that the guerrillas have no immediate need to be militarily efficient.’
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During 1977, wrote the Rhodesian intelligence chief Ken Flower, ‘The country had passed the point of no return in its struggle against African nationalism - no political settlement, no answer to the war.’ For the white-settler government of Ian Smith, Flower’s intelligence ‘was unwelcome because it was unpalatable’.
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In 1979, however, Rhodesia’s white minority finally accepted the inevitable and voted for majority rule. To the dismay of both Moscow and the ANC, Mugabe’s ZANU rather than Nkomo’s ZAPU won an outright victory at the 1980 elections. On the eve of the elections, Nkomo’s intelligence chief, Dumiso Dabengwa, had written to Andropov to request his continued backing against ZANU.
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After Zimbabwe became independent in April 1980, however, the Centre was fearful that Mugabe would bear a grudge over the support it had given to his rival. It sent circular telegrams to residencies in Africa, London and elsewhere calling for detailed intelligence on his policy to the Soviet Union.
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In 1979, however, Rhodesia’s white minority finally accepted the inevitable and voted for majority rule. To the dismay of both Moscow and the ANC, Mugabe’s ZANU rather than Nkomo’s ZAPU won an outright victory at the 1980 elections. On the eve of the elections, Nkomo’s intelligence chief, Dumiso Dabengwa, had written to Andropov to request his continued backing against ZANU.
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After Zimbabwe became independent in April 1980, however, the Centre was fearful that Mugabe would bear a grudge over the support it had given to his rival. It sent circular telegrams to residencies in Africa, London and elsewhere calling for detailed intelligence on his policy to the Soviet Union.
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Zimbabwean independence left the apartheid regime in South Africa and its colony in South-West Africa (in theory a League of Nations mandate conferred in 1919)
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as the continent’s only remaining white minority regime. After the MPLA victory in 1975, the South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) was able to set up guerrilla bases in Angola which were supplied with Soviet arms and training. In 1976 the SWAPO leader, Sam Nujoma (later the first President of independent Namibia), paid two visits to Moscow.
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At about this time, the KGB succeeded in recruiting two major agents inside SWAPO: a relative of Nujoma codenamed KASTONO, who later also operated as a Cuban agent;
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and a member of the SWAPO Central Committee codenamed GRANT, who was recruited in Zambia and paid for intelligence on liberation movements in southern Africa, and on the activities of the Chinese and Western countries in the region.
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In 1977 Nujoma received a hero’s welcome and the usual revolutionary bear hug from Castro during two visits to Cuba. SWAPO was allowed to open an office in Havana and the Cubans provided military training in both Cuba and Angola. In 1981 Nujoma attended the CPSU Congress in Moscow.
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as the continent’s only remaining white minority regime. After the MPLA victory in 1975, the South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) was able to set up guerrilla bases in Angola which were supplied with Soviet arms and training. In 1976 the SWAPO leader, Sam Nujoma (later the first President of independent Namibia), paid two visits to Moscow.
56
At about this time, the KGB succeeded in recruiting two major agents inside SWAPO: a relative of Nujoma codenamed KASTONO, who later also operated as a Cuban agent;
57
and a member of the SWAPO Central Committee codenamed GRANT, who was recruited in Zambia and paid for intelligence on liberation movements in southern Africa, and on the activities of the Chinese and Western countries in the region.
58
In 1977 Nujoma received a hero’s welcome and the usual revolutionary bear hug from Castro during two visits to Cuba. SWAPO was allowed to open an office in Havana and the Cubans provided military training in both Cuba and Angola. In 1981 Nujoma attended the CPSU Congress in Moscow.
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There was an authoritarian ring to Nujoma’s assertion of SWAPO’s right to rule. He declared in 1978: ‘We are not fighting even for majority rule. We are fighting to seize power in Namibia, for the benefit of the Namibian people. We are revolutionaries. We are not counter-revolutionaries.’
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From 1976 onwards there were recurrent purges of mostly innocent SWAPO members suspected of treachery by Nujoma and others in the leadership. As one authoritative study concludes, ‘More and more of the movement’s brightest and most critical minds disappeared from their posts.’
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At the military level, SWAPO was no match for the South African Defence Force. Namibia owed its independence less to the guerrilla war than to changes within South Africa which eroded Pretoria’s will to retain control of it.
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From 1976 onwards there were recurrent purges of mostly innocent SWAPO members suspected of treachery by Nujoma and others in the leadership. As one authoritative study concludes, ‘More and more of the movement’s brightest and most critical minds disappeared from their posts.’
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At the military level, SWAPO was no match for the South African Defence Force. Namibia owed its independence less to the guerrilla war than to changes within South Africa which eroded Pretoria’s will to retain control of it.
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In June 1976 riots in the Soweto townships outside Johannesburg, brutally put down by police firing live ammunition, made South Africa’s racial tensions front-page news around the world. So far from being organized by the ANC, however, the Soweto rising was a spontaneous protest begun by schoolchildren demonstrating against government orders that half their lessons should be in Afrikaans. The anger of young urban blacks, frustrated by the third-rate education and dismal job prospects to which they were condemned by the racist regime in Pretoria, boiled over. Only Durban among South African cities escaped the riots which spread across the country and led to over 600 deaths. The authority of the apartheid state never quite recovered its previous self-assurance.
The ANC’s guerrilla war took four more years before it was able to dent the confidence of the South African security forces. The SACP sought to maintain the morale of the Party underground by circulating secret pamphlets which declared that ‘Secrecy has helped us outwit the enemy’:
The enemy tries to give the impression that it is impossible to carry out illegal work. The rulers boast about all our people they have killed and captured. They point to the freedom fighters locked up in the prisons. But a lot of that talk is sheer bluff. Of course it is impossible to wage a struggle without losses. The very fact, however, that the South African Communist Party and African National Congress have survived years of illegality is proof that the regime cannot stop our noble work. It is because we have been mastering secret work that we have been able, more and more, to outwit the enemy.
The main training in ‘secret work’ was provided by the KGB, as is indicated by the instructions on underground operations circulated within Umkhonto we Sizwe, which followed classic Soviet intelligence tradecraft. Success in the underground war, it was emphasized, required ‘everyone [to] strictly follow the organizational and personal rules of behaviour’ set out in the instructions. Infiltrators must be ‘eliminated - where they pose serious danger to the survival of comrades and there is no other way’.
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In June 1980 the Umkhonto we Sizwe Special Operations force, commanded by Joe Slovo, a Moscow loyalist who six years later became Secretary-General of the SACP,
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launched four simultaneous attacks on oil storage tanks and a refinery, causing huge fires which blazed for a week and were visible for miles around. The team which led the attack was commanded by another SACP member, Motso Mokgabudi (better known by his alias Obadi), who had received extensive military training in the Soviet Union and ran an ANC sabotage training camp in Angola, assisted by Soviet advisers.
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As in the case of other liberation movements, the KGB (and doubtless the GRU) used the military training courses for the ANC in the Soviet Union as an opportunity to try to recruit confidential contacts and agents. The pressure it exerted on at least some of the potential recruits proved, as on ZAPU training courses, to be counterproductive. Mitrokhin made brief notes of the files of two ANC members recruited while being trained at Simferopol, ALEKS
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and POET.
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Both broke contact with the KGB after leaving the Soviet Union.
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launched four simultaneous attacks on oil storage tanks and a refinery, causing huge fires which blazed for a week and were visible for miles around. The team which led the attack was commanded by another SACP member, Motso Mokgabudi (better known by his alias Obadi), who had received extensive military training in the Soviet Union and ran an ANC sabotage training camp in Angola, assisted by Soviet advisers.
65
As in the case of other liberation movements, the KGB (and doubtless the GRU) used the military training courses for the ANC in the Soviet Union as an opportunity to try to recruit confidential contacts and agents. The pressure it exerted on at least some of the potential recruits proved, as on ZAPU training courses, to be counterproductive. Mitrokhin made brief notes of the files of two ANC members recruited while being trained at Simferopol, ALEKS
66
and POET.
67
Both broke contact with the KGB after leaving the Soviet Union.
Though anxious to recruit agents among non-Communist members of the ANC, the KGB was forbidden to do so in the SACP. Relations with the SACP, as with other fraternal parties, were the primary responsibility of the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee. The KGB, however, was used to transmit funds to both the ANC and the SACP. Oleg Gordievsky, who was posted to the London residency in the summer of 1982, personally handed to Yusuf Dadoo, the SACP Secretary-General, over the next six months the equivalent in US dollars of £118,000 for the ANC and £54,000 for the SACP. Instead of putting the money in a briefcase, Dadoo stuffed it into all the pockets of his suit and overcoat. Gordievsky watched as Dadoo’s thin frame filled out with dollar bills before he left the Soviet embassy on foot, apparently unconcerned with the risk of being robbed on his way home. Like the rest of the SACP leadership, Dadoo was a committed Moscow loyalist, untainted by Euro-Communist heresy, who had supported the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 but was also totally devoted to the liberation struggle in southern Africa.
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After Dadoo’s death in 1983, the London residency ceased to handle the transmission of funds to the ANC and SACP. The main west European capital where the KGB maintained contact with its ANC agents and confidential contacts was Stockholm, where the ANC had its largest office outside Africa and received both public support and generous funding from the Swedish Social Democratic Party for its struggle against apartheid. As the West gradually became less feeble in its opposition to apartheid, the Centre became afraid that the ANC might increasingly be tempted to turn westwards. By the early 1980s KGB residencies in Stockholm, London, New York, Paris, Rome and those African capitals where the ANC maintained offices were regularly bombarded with instructions to monitor Western contacts with the ANC leadership and threats to SACP influence. The Centre was quick to show alarm at the slightest ideological shift. In 1982, for example, the London office of the ANC started showing resistance to the tedious articles supplied to it by a KGB officer working under cover as a Novosti news agency correspondent for publication in African newspapers. Unwilling to accept that the problem lay in the pedestrian quality of the articles it produced, the Centre instructed the London residency to redouble its efforts to track down the source of increasing Western influence within the ANC.
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In an attempt to exacerbate African suspicions of the West, the Centre maintained a stream of active measures designed to demonstrate that the United States and its allies were giving aid and comfort to the apartheid regime. Operation CHICORY in 1981 used Service A forgeries designed to demonstrate that the US arms embargo was a sham and spread the sensational fiction that the CIA and West German intelligence were plotting to supply South Africa with nuclear weapons. Operation GOLF in 1982, which also fabricated evidence of secret American arms supplies, was based on a forged letter to the US ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick, from a counsellor at the South African embassy in Washington conveying ‘best regards and gratitude’ from the head of South African military intelligence, purporting to accompany a birthday present sent ‘as a token of appreciation from my government’. The use of the word ‘priviously’ [
sic
] in the letter indicates that, as sometimes happened with its forgeries, Service A had forgotten to check its English spelling. The letter was none the less published by the Washington correspondent of the
New Statesman
, Claudia Wright, who used it as the centrepiece of an article attacking Jeane Kirkpatrick, entitled ‘A Girl’s Best Friend’.
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Among Service A’s fabrications in 1983 was a bogus memorandum by President Mobutu’s Special Adviser in the Zaire National Security Council reporting on a secret meeting between US and South African envoys to discuss ways, with Mobutu’s assistance, of destabilizing the MPLA Angola government. As well as being sent to the ANC and SWAPO, the forgery was widely circulated to the media and successfully deceived some Western as well as African journalists, becoming the centrepiece of a story in the
Observer
, headlined ‘US and S. Africa in Angola Plot’. Though reporting American claims that the document was fabricated, the
Observer
gave greater weight to supposed evidence for its authenticity.
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Further Service A forgeries purporting to reveal covert collaboration between Washington and Pretoria continued into the Gorbachev era, among them a 1989 letter from the South African Foreign Minister, ‘Pik’ Botha, referring to a (non-existent) secret agreement concluded with the United States.
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Apart from fabricating secret links between Washington and the apartheid regime, the most successful Soviet active measure in Africa was to blame the devastating Aids epidemic sweeping through the continent on a secret American biological warfare offensive.
73
sic
] in the letter indicates that, as sometimes happened with its forgeries, Service A had forgotten to check its English spelling. The letter was none the less published by the Washington correspondent of the
New Statesman
, Claudia Wright, who used it as the centrepiece of an article attacking Jeane Kirkpatrick, entitled ‘A Girl’s Best Friend’.
70
Among Service A’s fabrications in 1983 was a bogus memorandum by President Mobutu’s Special Adviser in the Zaire National Security Council reporting on a secret meeting between US and South African envoys to discuss ways, with Mobutu’s assistance, of destabilizing the MPLA Angola government. As well as being sent to the ANC and SWAPO, the forgery was widely circulated to the media and successfully deceived some Western as well as African journalists, becoming the centrepiece of a story in the
Observer
, headlined ‘US and S. Africa in Angola Plot’. Though reporting American claims that the document was fabricated, the
Observer
gave greater weight to supposed evidence for its authenticity.
71
Further Service A forgeries purporting to reveal covert collaboration between Washington and Pretoria continued into the Gorbachev era, among them a 1989 letter from the South African Foreign Minister, ‘Pik’ Botha, referring to a (non-existent) secret agreement concluded with the United States.
72
Apart from fabricating secret links between Washington and the apartheid regime, the most successful Soviet active measure in Africa was to blame the devastating Aids epidemic sweeping through the continent on a secret American biological warfare offensive.
73
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