The Third World War - The Untold Story (50 page)

‘We have nevertheless determined on the most courageous action in support of our socialist cause. This action will take three forms. First, we will accelerate our aircraft lifts of ammunition, supplies and some soldiers to selected spots on the mainland of Central America already under socialist or guerrilla control. Secondly, we will alert air squadrons and missiles on our airfields, and be ready to attack American shipping and US convoys bound for Europe. We are sure that you recognize, however, that this assault must be launched at the appropriate moment, when we can strike most violently and effectively. If we strike prematurely, before the really vital targets are at sea, we may be destroyed by American nuclear missiles; and our great usefulness to the common cause - as the independent socialist country nearest to the heartland of capitalism - could be wiped out in five minutes. Thirdly, as our most immediate contribution, all Cuba has been mobilized for war. Our armed forces are concentrating against the Americans’ Guantanamo naval base. An assault will be launched upon this at the moment when our attack on American shipping begins.’

This Atropos coded message was read, after decoding, by two very different generals, one in Moscow and one in Miami.

Army General I. P. Seriy of the Second Main Directorate (military intelligence) of the Army General Staff (the GRU) accurately minuted for the Soviet High Command: ‘Cuba is clearly deserting us as disgracefully as Mussolini deserted Hitler in 1939. The Cubans will join the war only when they think we have won it. After Soviet victory we should treat their renegade leader far less kindly than the sentimental Hitler would have treated Mussolini if he had won in 1945.’

The United States had broken the Atropos code even before Japan’s all-conquering Fujitsu computer company signed a joint-venture agreement with America’s biggest computer company in 1984. Before General Seriy had received his decoded message, Lieutenant General Henry J. Irving, Chief of Staff of the Rapid Deployment Force (known to his friends as ‘Humdinger Hank’), had got his. Minuted General Irving: ‘It is clear from decoded messages that Cuban communist forces, while pretending to lie low, will attack US convoys with missiles and aircraft as soon as they put to sea, and that attacks (possibly with biological weapons, probably with nuclear and chemical) will start against Guantanamo at that delayed moment. It is essential that America’s non-nuclear war plan be launched against Cuba from this moment, well before the Cubans strike.’

The US plan was activated. From military airports in Florida, and from the decks of Atlantic Fleet carriers, attacks were made against military and industrial targets in Cuba, with devastating effect. The weight of the attack wholly overwhelmed the Cuban air defences and caused very many casualties. A total naval blockade was imposed, cutting Cuba off from the rest of the world. US forces (particularly Cuban émigrés and Filipino mercenaries) massed to invade the island.

The United States had not anticipated the reaction of the rest of Latin America. The Secretary-General of the OAS sent an urgent message to the US President on 10 August: ‘Although all my members are in principle on America’s side in its global confrontation with the Soviet Union, I must tell you that there is general opposition and revulsion among them against the possibility of the US killing more civilians in Cuba. The Cubans have not yet launched any warlike actions against you, but you are bombing them. I beseech you to send me an instant assurance that in no circumstances will American nuclear weapons be used against Cuba, and that civilian casualties there will be kept to a minimum.’

‘Humdinger Hank’ regarded this message as appalling impudence. Fortunately, the speed of events in Europe cooled his actions before invasion of Cuba could actually take place. On the day when it became evident that the Soviet Union was breaking up, Cuba’s Economics Minister minuted to the premier: ‘Our great Soviet ally has lost this war, so let us be as sensible as General Franco was when Hitler was defeated in 1945. We have an advantage that Franco did not have in a totally de-Nazified Europe in 1945. Many of our fellow Latin American countries are allies of the US, but they are not blind servants of US national interests. They will see the Soviet defeat as a mixed blessing. They will fear that the US, free from the limitations previously imposed by Soviet power, may try to gain rigid control over its Latin American area of influence. Previous fears of “subversion from the Soviet Union and Cuba” in Latin America may now be replaced by fear of US neo-colonialism.

‘In these next few critical days we should therefore tell our volunteer troops still fighting at the side of guerrillas on the Central American mainland to surrender to Latin American governments, asking perhaps for Mexican and Venezuelan protection. But we should not accept any US ultimatum for unconditional surrender by Cuba itself, and we should say that any US invasion of Cuba will be met by our armed forces fighting to the last man.’

This was agreed. Some of the remaining Cuban troops on the mainland were anyway isolated and running out of supplies. Most of them surrendered, coming in together with guerrilla troops through November 1985. Only small pockets of about platoon size still kept fighting, but no peace treaty had yet been signed between Cuba and the US.

The Secretary-General of the O AS sent another urgent telex to the US President in late November: ‘Let me be very frank. The Government and people of Cuba still expect an invasion from the victorious US. Nearly all my members think such an invasion would be a great mistake. Bluntly, I must give you a warning that will distress you. If you continue with an aggressive stance towards Cuba, then the Mexican (and possibly the Venezuelan) Presidents will fly to Havana to sign with Cuba a treaty of assistance for the provision of food and oil. In helping Cuba, countries such as Mexico and Venezuela will be protecting their own freedom of action.

‘It is believed among my members that the US is now confronted by both a great danger and a great opportunity. The danger is that the US, free from the limitations previously imposed by Soviet power, may try to encroach upon the independent policies of other American countries. The opportunity is that of creating a united Latin American front, including a tamed Cuba, willing to play a more assertive role in world affairs.’

Hardliners in the US, as General Irving’s memoirs* show, were far from pleased by this message. The President and his close advisers wisely accepted the advice it contained.

* Much use has been made in the preceding few pages of material to be found in Lieutenant General Henry J. Irving’s memoirs, entitled Line of Duty (Grosset and Dunlop, New York 1986), see particularly pp. 263, 264-5, 271, 279. We have not been able wholly to endorse General Irving’s approach but are grateful for the source material his book so freely makes available.

A decisive influence was that of Brazil, now one of the principal promoters of Latin American unity. This country - together with Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela - soon began to play a significant role in providing the food and oil urgently required on the other side of the Atlantic, which gave Latin America leverage with a US Government facing a situation of unprecedented international change and turmoil. The US agreed to suspend the blockade against Cuba on the condition that all the few remaining Cuban troops in Central America surrendered, and that Cuba stopped all military and political activities in support of subversion in Latin America. This was quickly accepted. As this book is being written, Cuba is already moving towards far-reaching reforms in its internal policies.

The crucial new factor is Latin America’s unity and its will to preserve its freedom of action in the international arena. The US has survived a war against the Soviet empire, but this has not solved the structural problems of Latin America, still less has it done anything to reduce social and political unrest.

At the inter-state level, a new situation is being created, in which, Latin American governments are acting on the basis of common policies towards the US. Cuba is being incorporated into this new grouping, on the understanding that its foreign and internal policies will profoundly change. The domination of the communist party in Cuba is about to disappear in fact as well as in name. The end of the Third World War, however, did not bring an end to crisis in Latin America, and the situation there may yet turn into another period of what will be called anti-colonialist confrontation with the advanced, triumphant Western powers. We believe this will not happen, for there is evidence of a truly profound change in attitudes in the US towards Latin America.

We have dealt at some length with the struggles with which the US freed itself from the trap into which the Soviets wished it to fall because of the importance of what has been a profoundly educational and sobering process, whose consequences will be felt far outside the-Americas. In its perceptions, orientation, judgment and method the foreign policy of the United States is unlikely, after the experiences in Central America and the Caribbean in the first half of the 1980s, ever to be the same again. This looks like being particularly relevant to US relations with other countries in the Americas. It will probably become more and more apparent in US policies in other regions too, in ASEAN for instance, and in South-West Asia, and in the Third World generally. The world is likely, whatever else may happen, to become on that account alone in some degree a safer place.

In the Middle East, not unfittingly for a region where violence and conflict had so long been the order of the day, it was first the threat of general war and then that war itself which at length brought about peace. Indeed, had it not been for strong, effective action by the United Nations in the summer of 1984, the Third World War might well have started a year earlier, and started moreover in the Middle East itself. As we look back from this year 1987, only two years after the brief but cataclysmic clash between the superpowers, we may recall that during the early 1980s events in Arabia, in South-West Asia and in Africa too, moved along lines which brought closer the very circumstances and confrontations that the Western nations had been seeking to diminish or avoid. Among such events might be included the fighting in Afghanistan, Iran’s agony, the Gulf war, Libya’s expansionism, Israeli strikes against Iraq and Lebanon together with colonization of the West Bank and annexation of Golan, South Africa’s action in Namibia and Angola, and a worrying disparity of view between the United States and Western Europe. At the same time, other events made for further stability and international understanding, such as UN and EEC initiatives on Palestine and Namibia, the relatively harmonious developments in Zimbabwe, US and Soviet attempts to discuss arms control, the general urge to relieve Third World poverty and the workings of the Gulf Council for Co-operation.

These developments, whether disruptive or otherwise, had in common not only the areas in which they took place. They also illustrated a cardinal point of both Soviet and US policy, that whereas their struggle for influence and gain in the Middle East and Africa could be and was waged by proxy, they did not wish themselves as the two principals to become directly and personally engaged in confrontation and conflict. This policy was easier to realize in southern Africa than it was in the Middle East, for although these two areas shared many features in common, there was one very important difference.

Both areas contained a nation at bay, people fiercely dedicated to their own survival, striking out against those neighbours who threatened their destruction, withstanding the pressure of United Nations Security Council resolutions which called upon them to surrender territory in order to move towards peaceful solutions. Both areas were and are of great strategic moment, both were fertile markets for arms dealers, both provoked Soviet troublemaking and Western ambivalence. In neither was the Soviet Union or the United States content to allow the other to gain an upper hand. Indeed it seemed as if the two superpowers looked then on the Middle East and southern Africa as arenas, not for co-operation, but for competition. This last similarity underlined the crucial difference. Whereas in southern Africa the prospects of a direct Soviet-American confrontation seemed small, in the Middle East they had been growing more likely and more dangerous month by month. There were clear reasons for this - the greater strategic prizes of the Middle East, its close vicinity to vital areas of military power already deployed or readily deployable by the two rivals and, perhaps most marked of all, the immense complexity of the Middle East problem.