The World Was Going Our Way (27 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
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The Middle East: Introduction
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For much of the Cold War, Soviet policy-makers believed they had an in-built advantage in the struggle with the Main Adversary and its allies for power and influence in the Middle East. If Latin America was the United States’ ‘backyard’, the Middle East was that of the Soviet Union. Israel’s special relationship with the United States made its Arab enemies, in Moscow’s view, the natural allies of the Soviet Union. Gromyko and Ponomarev jointly denounced Israel and international Zionism as ‘the main instrument of US imperialism’s assault on Arab countries’.
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Hatred of Israel multiplied hostility to the United States in the rest of the Middle East.
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The dramatic loss of America’s confidence in dealing with the Muslim world after the fall of its ally, the Shah of Iran, and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini was epitomized by the decision of the Carter administration not to send any congratulations to Muslim leaders to celebrate the 1,400th anniversary of Islam in 1979, for fear that it would somehow cause offence. The Soviet Union, by contrast, despite its official atheism, flooded Arab capitals with messages of congratulation.
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Hatred of Israel multiplied hostility to the United States in the rest of the Middle East.
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The dramatic loss of America’s confidence in dealing with the Muslim world after the fall of its ally, the Shah of Iran, and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini was epitomized by the decision of the Carter administration not to send any congratulations to Muslim leaders to celebrate the 1,400th anniversary of Islam in 1979, for fear that it would somehow cause offence. The Soviet Union, by contrast, despite its official atheism, flooded Arab capitals with messages of congratulation.
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The greatest volume of Soviet intelligence on the Middle East, as on much else of the Third World, came from SIGINT rather than HUMINT. By 1967 KGB codebreakers were able to decrypt 152 cipher systems used by a total of seventy-two states. Though no later statistics are available, the volume of decrypts doubtless continued to increase. Every day an inner circle within the Politburo - consisting in 1980 of Brezhnev, Andropov, Gromyko, Kirilenko, Suslov and Ustinov - were sent copies of the most important decrypts. The heads of the KGB’s First and Second Chief Directorates were sent a larger selection. Though none of the decrypts have yet been declassified, they will one day be a source of major importance for historians of Soviet foreign policy.
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The task of KGB and GRU codebreakers was greatly simplified by the vulnerability of Middle Eastern cipher systems, which was also exploited by British and American intelligence. During the Suez crisis of 1956 the British Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, wrote to congratulate GCHQ on both the ‘volume’ and the ‘excellence’ of the Middle Eastern decrypts it had produced and to say ‘how valuable’ they had proved to be.
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Soviet codebreakers also benefited from the KGB’s remarkable success in obtaining intelligence on cipher systems by penetrating Moscow embassies. Though Mitrokhin had no access to the decrypts themselves,
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he and other defectors have provided an important insight into the extent of these penetrations. Ilya Dzhirkvelov has revealed his part during the early 1950s in successful break-ins at the Egyptian, Syrian, Iranian, Turkish and other Middle Eastern embassies in Moscow for which he and his colleagues were rewarded with engraved watches and the title of ‘Honoured Chekist’.
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The files noted by Mitrokhin reveal that in the later stages of the Cold War, at least thirty-four KGB agents and confidential contacts took part in a highly successful operation to penetrate the Moscow embassy of Syria, then the Soviet Union’s main Middle Eastern ally. Middle Eastern states had little idea of the extent to which, because of the vulnerability of their cipher systems and embassy security, they were - so far as Moscow was concerned - conducting open diplomacy.
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Soviet codebreakers also benefited from the KGB’s remarkable success in obtaining intelligence on cipher systems by penetrating Moscow embassies. Though Mitrokhin had no access to the decrypts themselves,
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he and other defectors have provided an important insight into the extent of these penetrations. Ilya Dzhirkvelov has revealed his part during the early 1950s in successful break-ins at the Egyptian, Syrian, Iranian, Turkish and other Middle Eastern embassies in Moscow for which he and his colleagues were rewarded with engraved watches and the title of ‘Honoured Chekist’.
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The files noted by Mitrokhin reveal that in the later stages of the Cold War, at least thirty-four KGB agents and confidential contacts took part in a highly successful operation to penetrate the Moscow embassy of Syria, then the Soviet Union’s main Middle Eastern ally. Middle Eastern states had little idea of the extent to which, because of the vulnerability of their cipher systems and embassy security, they were - so far as Moscow was concerned - conducting open diplomacy.
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SIGINT provided only a partial insight into the secretive policy-making of the region. Because of the autocratic nature of Middle Eastern regimes, the decrypted telegrams of their diplomats did not always disclose their real intentions. Anwar al-Sadat was one of a number of rulers in the region whose secret diplomacy was sometimes at variance with his country’s official foreign policy. The KGB, however, may well have been able to break his presidential cipher as well as to decrypt Egyptian diplomatic traffic. It remains unclear whether the KGB discovered his secret contacts with the Nixon administration from SIGINT or HUMINT - or both. The discovery caused serious alarm within the Politburo.
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Penetrating the inner circles of the mostly suspicious rulers of the Middle East was more difficult than penetrating their Moscow embassies and diplomatic ciphers. The KGB, none the less, had close links with the intelligence services of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Soviet Union’s first major Middle Eastern ally. His main intelligence adviser, Sami Sharaf, was profuse in his protestations of gratitude and friendship to ‘Comrade Brezhnev’, and claimed to be convinced that, as the disciple of ‘the great leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, he occupies a special position in relation to his Soviet friends’. Probably the KGB’s longest-serving agent in Syria was the diplomat and lawyer Tarazi Salah al-Din (codenamed IZZAT), who had been recruited by the KGB in 1954, became Director-General of the Foreign Ministry in the early 1970s, and was a member of the International Tribunal in The Hague at the time of his accidental death in 1980. The KGB also claimed for a time to be able to influence President Asad’s youngest brother, Rif’at, who commanded Asad’s élite ‘Defence Companies’, the best armed and trained units in the Syrian army, as well as the hit squads who operated against Syrian dissidents abroad. Despite, or perhaps partly because of, Saddam Hussein’s fascination with the career of Joseph Stalin, he seems to have made Baghdad a more difficult operating environment for the KGB than Cairo or Damascus.
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In the Middle East, unlike Latin America, there was no realistic prospect of the emergence of a major Marxist-Leninist regime which would act as a role model for the Arab world and spread revolution through the region. Though the People’s Democratic Republic of [South] Yemen claimed to be such a regime, its almost continuous and frequently homicidal internal power struggles made it, from Moscow’s point of view, more of a liability than an asset. Moscow thus sought to base its strategy in the Middle East on alliance with one of the leading ‘progressive’ Arab powers which, it was hoped, would progress gradually to Marxism-Leninism. Its main hopes from 1955 to 1970 were pinned on Nasser, by far the most charismatic Arab leader of the Cold War as well as ruler of the largest Middle Eastern state. During the halcyon years of Nasser’s special relationship with Moscow, he was one of the most eloquent advocates of the Soviet role in the Middle East. ‘[The Russians]’, he told an American interviewer in 1957, ‘helped us survive. Yes, and they helped us escape domination by the West.’
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After Nasser’s sudden death in 1970, Moscow was never able to find an Arab ally of remotely equal stature. His successor, Sadat, expelled all Russian advisers and opted instead for a special relationship with the United States and peace with Israel. Though Iraq became in the mid-1970s the chief recipient of Soviet military aid to the Third World, Saddam Hussein’s suspicions of Soviet policy - despite his admiration for Stalin - ensured that the Soviet bridgehead in Baghdad was never secure. All that remained thereafter was an alliance with Asad’s Syria, increasingly notorious as a state sponsor of terrorism as well as an increasing drain on the Soviet economy. No wonder that even the usually unsentimental Gromyko looked back nostalgically at the end of his long career on the special relationship with Nasser, arguing unconvincingly that, had he lived only ‘a few years longer’, the subsequent history of the Middle East might have been very different.
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After Nasser’s sudden death in 1970, Moscow was never able to find an Arab ally of remotely equal stature. His successor, Sadat, expelled all Russian advisers and opted instead for a special relationship with the United States and peace with Israel. Though Iraq became in the mid-1970s the chief recipient of Soviet military aid to the Third World, Saddam Hussein’s suspicions of Soviet policy - despite his admiration for Stalin - ensured that the Soviet bridgehead in Baghdad was never secure. All that remained thereafter was an alliance with Asad’s Syria, increasingly notorious as a state sponsor of terrorism as well as an increasing drain on the Soviet economy. No wonder that even the usually unsentimental Gromyko looked back nostalgically at the end of his long career on the special relationship with Nasser, arguing unconvincingly that, had he lived only ‘a few years longer’, the subsequent history of the Middle East might have been very different.
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During the Cold War, the KGB maintained secret links with, and channelled secret subsidies to, most if not all Middle Eastern Communist parties. None of these parties, however, possessed a popular charismatic leader to compare with Castro, Guevara, Allende or the leading Sandinistas, and all were liable to be sacrificed to Soviet strategic interests. In 1965, at a time when Moscow was pursuing its courtship of Nasser, the Egyptian Communist Party was persuaded to dissolve itself and tell its members to join the ruling Arab Socialist Union.
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When Khrushchev made Nasser a Hero of the Soviet Union, one of his Presidium privately complained that he was honouring a leader who ‘drove Communists into concentration camps’.
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In 1972 Moscow put pressure on a somewhat reluctant Iraqi Communist Party to reach an accommodation with the Ba‘th regime. When thousands of Party members were imprisoned and many tortured at the end of the decade, however, Moscow stayed silent for fear of antagonizing Baghdad at a time when it was at the forefront of the Arab campaign to prevent the United States brokering a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. In Syria there was a growing breach between the long-serving Party leader and dogmatic neo-Stalinist, Khalid Bakdash, and the majority of the Party Politburo who resented both Bakdash’s autocratic leadership and Moscow’s support for the equally autocratic Asad.
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When Khrushchev made Nasser a Hero of the Soviet Union, one of his Presidium privately complained that he was honouring a leader who ‘drove Communists into concentration camps’.
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In 1972 Moscow put pressure on a somewhat reluctant Iraqi Communist Party to reach an accommodation with the Ba‘th regime. When thousands of Party members were imprisoned and many tortured at the end of the decade, however, Moscow stayed silent for fear of antagonizing Baghdad at a time when it was at the forefront of the Arab campaign to prevent the United States brokering a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. In Syria there was a growing breach between the long-serving Party leader and dogmatic neo-Stalinist, Khalid Bakdash, and the majority of the Party Politburo who resented both Bakdash’s autocratic leadership and Moscow’s support for the equally autocratic Asad.
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Since the Soviet Union was itself a Middle Eastern power bordering some of the other main states of the region, the Middle East was a greater preoccupation of Gromyko and the Foreign Ministry than Latin America. For that reason the role played by KGB residencies in most major Middle Eastern states, though important, was less central than that of Soviet embassies. The main exception was Israel, with which - to the subsequent dismay of the Foreign Ministry - the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations in 1967. Soviet policy to Israel thereafter became entangled with and was often driven by the KGB’s anti-Zionist obsessions. ‘Zionist subversion’ was a particular obsession of Yuri Andropov who, as KGB Chairman, interpreted every protest by Jewish ‘refuseniks’ who were denied the right to emigrate to Israel as part of an international Zionist conspiracy against the Soviet Union. In a stream of reports to the Politburo he insisted on the need for resolute action to ‘neutralize’ the most minor protests. Even Brezhnev occasionally complained about the lack of proportion evident in the KGB campaign against refuseniks. After one wearisome discussion in the Politburo in 1973, he complained, ‘Zionism is making us stupid’. Gromyko washed his hands of much of the anti-Zionist campaign, telling his staff ‘not to bother him with . . . such “absurd” matters’.
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Moscow none the less considered its role in 1975 in the adoption of UN Resolution 3379 denouncing Zionism as a form of racism as a major diplomatic victory, which demonstrated the Soviet Union’s ‘enormous support for the struggle of the Arab peoples’.
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The Zionist obsession of the KGB leadership came close to, and at times arguably crossed, the threshold of paranoid delusion. A KGB conference concluded absurdly in 1982 that ‘virtually no major negative incidents took place [anywhere] in the socialist countries of Europe without the involvement of Zionists’. Andropov insisted that even the sending of
matsos
(unleavened bread) from the West to Soviet Jews for their Passover celebrations represented a potentially serious act of ideological sabotage.
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Moscow none the less considered its role in 1975 in the adoption of UN Resolution 3379 denouncing Zionism as a form of racism as a major diplomatic victory, which demonstrated the Soviet Union’s ‘enormous support for the struggle of the Arab peoples’.
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The Zionist obsession of the KGB leadership came close to, and at times arguably crossed, the threshold of paranoid delusion. A KGB conference concluded absurdly in 1982 that ‘virtually no major negative incidents took place [anywhere] in the socialist countries of Europe without the involvement of Zionists’. Andropov insisted that even the sending of
matsos
(unleavened bread) from the West to Soviet Jews for their Passover celebrations represented a potentially serious act of ideological sabotage.
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The unexpected surge of international terrorism in the early 1970s and the precedent set a few years before by the KGB’s use of Sandinista guerrillas against US targets in Central and North America
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encouraged the Centre to consider the use of Palestinian terrorists as proxies in the Middle East and Europe. In 1970 the KGB began secret arms deliveries to the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
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The secret was remarkably well kept. Though there were a series of Western press reports on support for the PFLP from Syria, Iraq and Libya, there were none of any significance on its Soviet connection. The KGB’s willingness to use other terrorist proxies was inhibited by fear that the proxies would fail to conceal its involvement
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- just as during the second half of the Cold War it failed to implement any of its numerous and detailed plans for the assassination of KGB defectors for fear that it would be blamed for their demise.
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After the death of the two main Soviet agents within the PFLP in 1978, the KGB’s direct connection with it appears to have died away.
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Nor does the KGB seem to have established a connection with any other Palestinian terrorist group which was nearly as close as that with the PFLP for most of the 1970s. The Centre appears to have regarded the two most active terrorist leaders of the later 1970s and 1980s, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (better known as ‘Carlos the Jackal’) and Sabri al-Banna (better known as ‘Abu Nidal’), as mavericks with whom it was prudent to avoid all direct connection. Its judgement proved right in both cases. Carlos was a champagne terrorist with a passion for killing, high living and self-important revolutionary rhetoric.
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As well as attacking European and US targets, the increasingly paranoid Abu Nidal became obsessed with the hunt for mostly imaginary Palestinian traitors, whom he subjected to horrific torture and execution.
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While refusing to deal directly with either Carlos or Abu Nidal, however, Andropov was content for other Soviet bloc intelligence agencies to do so. With Andropov’s knowledge (and doubtless his blessing), East Germany became what its last interior minister, Peter-Michael Diestel, later called ‘an Eldorado for terrorists’.
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By the mid-1980s, however, both Carlos and Abu Nidal had become such an embarrassment to their Soviet bloc hosts that their east European bases were closed down. Both continued to receive assistance from the Soviet Union’s main Middle Eastern ally, Hafiz al-Asad. Carlos later claimed, in a characteristic transport of semi-reliable rhetoric, to be ‘a senior officer of the Syrian secret service’.
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Abu Nidal died in Baghdad in 2002, allegedly by his own hand, more probably murdered on the instructions of his former protector, Saddam Hussein.
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encouraged the Centre to consider the use of Palestinian terrorists as proxies in the Middle East and Europe. In 1970 the KGB began secret arms deliveries to the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
20
The secret was remarkably well kept. Though there were a series of Western press reports on support for the PFLP from Syria, Iraq and Libya, there were none of any significance on its Soviet connection. The KGB’s willingness to use other terrorist proxies was inhibited by fear that the proxies would fail to conceal its involvement
21
- just as during the second half of the Cold War it failed to implement any of its numerous and detailed plans for the assassination of KGB defectors for fear that it would be blamed for their demise.
22
After the death of the two main Soviet agents within the PFLP in 1978, the KGB’s direct connection with it appears to have died away.
23
Nor does the KGB seem to have established a connection with any other Palestinian terrorist group which was nearly as close as that with the PFLP for most of the 1970s. The Centre appears to have regarded the two most active terrorist leaders of the later 1970s and 1980s, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (better known as ‘Carlos the Jackal’) and Sabri al-Banna (better known as ‘Abu Nidal’), as mavericks with whom it was prudent to avoid all direct connection. Its judgement proved right in both cases. Carlos was a champagne terrorist with a passion for killing, high living and self-important revolutionary rhetoric.
24
As well as attacking European and US targets, the increasingly paranoid Abu Nidal became obsessed with the hunt for mostly imaginary Palestinian traitors, whom he subjected to horrific torture and execution.
25
While refusing to deal directly with either Carlos or Abu Nidal, however, Andropov was content for other Soviet bloc intelligence agencies to do so. With Andropov’s knowledge (and doubtless his blessing), East Germany became what its last interior minister, Peter-Michael Diestel, later called ‘an Eldorado for terrorists’.
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By the mid-1980s, however, both Carlos and Abu Nidal had become such an embarrassment to their Soviet bloc hosts that their east European bases were closed down. Both continued to receive assistance from the Soviet Union’s main Middle Eastern ally, Hafiz al-Asad. Carlos later claimed, in a characteristic transport of semi-reliable rhetoric, to be ‘a senior officer of the Syrian secret service’.
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Abu Nidal died in Baghdad in 2002, allegedly by his own hand, more probably murdered on the instructions of his former protector, Saddam Hussein.
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