Covert action

The intelligence operations that did most to embitter, rather than to stabilise, the Cold War involved the use of 'covert action’: secret attempts to manipulate the course of events by methods ranging fTom bribing opinion-formers to paramilitary operations. Covert action played a central role in the establishment of the Soviet bloc in Eastern and Central Europe. The East German Communist leader, Walter Ulbricht, announced to his inner circle after returning to Berlin from exile in Moscow on 30 April 1945, 'It’s got to look democratic, but we must have everything under our control. ’ Because a democratic facade had to be preserved in all the states of the new Soviet bloc, the open use of force to exclude non-Communist parties from power had, so far as possible, to be avoided. Instead, Communist-controlled security services, newly created in the image of the KGB (then known as the MGB) and overseen by Soviet 'advisers’, helped to implement the postwar transition to so-called 'people’s democracies’ by intimidation behind the scenes. Finally, the one-party Stalinist regimes, purged of all visible dissent, were legitimised as 'people’s democracies’ by huge and fraudulent Communist majorities in elections rigged by the new security services.628

The United States began covert action on a very much smaller scale with the attempt, by bribery and other 'influence operations’, to ensure the defeat of the Communists in the 1948 Italian general election. (Though the Italian Communists, who themselves received secret subsidies from Moscow via the KGB, did indeed lose the election, there is no evidence that US covert action had a significant influence on the outcome.) Within five years, the Korean War and the arrival of Eisenhower in the Oval Office had turned covert action into a major arm of US foreign policy. Between 1951 and 1975, there were, according to the 1976 Church Committee report, about 900 major covert actions, as well as many minor ones.

The apparent success of covert action in overthrowing supposedly proSoviet regimes in Iran and Guatemala during the first eighteen months of the Eisenhower administration led it to ignore the warning signs later left by other, less successful, operations. After a failed attempt to overthrow President Sukarno of Indonesia in 1958, the future CIA deputy director for intelligence (DDI), Ray Cline, wrote prophetically:

The weak point in covert paramilitary action is that a single misfortune that reveals CIA’s connection makes it necessary for the United States either to abandon the cause completely or convert to a policy of overt military intervention.629

Failure to learn that lesson led to humiliation at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. After the failed invasion by a CIA-backed 'Cuban brigade’ of anti-Castro exiles, President John F. Kennedy despairingly asked his special counsel, Theodore Sorensen, 'How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?’ The American people, however, rallied round the flag and the president. It did not occur to Congress to investigate the debacle.

Fourteen years later, in the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate, the mood had changed dramatically. The sensational disclosures during 1975, the 'Year ofIntelligence’, of CIA 'dirty tricks’ - among them assassination plots against foreign statesmen (notably Fidel Castro) and illegal spying on US citizens during Operation CHAOS - caused widespread public revulsion. Senator Frank Church, chairman of the Senate Select Committee set up to investigate the abuses, declared: 'The Agency may have been behaving like a rogue elephant on the rampage.’ A later congressional report concluded more accurately that the CIA, 'far from being out of control’, had been 'utterly responsive to the instructions of the President and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs’.630

Alongside revelations of the real abuses of US covert action, there emerged other ill-founded allegations of CIA dirty tricks which, by dint of fTequent repetition, became conventional wisdom and still appear in otherwise reliable Cold War histories. President Richard M. Nixon infamously told the CIA in 1970 to try to prevent the election of Chile’s Marxist president, Salvador Allende, and to make the Chilean economy 'scream’. But, as recent research by Kristian Gustafson has demonstrated, the regularly repeated claims that the CIA orchestrated Allende’s overthrow (and even his death) in 1973 and the rise of his successor, General Augusto Pinochet, are mistaken. The Chilean military’s amour propre would have been offended by the notion that they either needed the United States to run the coup for them or were taking instructions from the CIA. As Pinochet acknowledged after the coup, 'he and his colleagues, as a matter of policy, had not given any hints to the U. S. as to their developing resolve to act’.631

The 'Year ofIntelligence’ also gave rise to bestselling but woefully inaccurate conspiracy theories - chief among them the claim, which a majority of Americans believed and the KGB did its best to encourage, that the CIA was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. If the CIA had been involved in killing 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’ (covert action) successfully promoted the belief that the methods that the CIA had used to attempt to kill Castro and destabilise his regime were being employed against 'progressive’ governments around the world. Indira

Gandhi was one of a number of Third World leaders who became obsessed by supposed CIA plots against them. In November 1973, she told Fidel Castro, 'What they [the CIA] have done to Allende they want to do to me also.’ Tragically, Mrs Gandhi paid more attention to the imaginary menace of a CIA-supported assassination attempt than to the real threat from her own bodyguards, who murdered her in 1984.632

Just as the history of intelligence collection in the Cold War has been distorted by the neglect of SIGINT, so the history of covert action has been distorted by over-concentration on the US experience. No account of American Cold War policy in the Third World omits the role of the CIA. By contrast, covert action by the KGB passes almost unmentioned in most histories both of Soviet foreign relations and of developing countries. The result has been a curiously lopsided history of the secret Cold War in the Third World - the intelligence equivalent of the sound of one hand clapping. The admirable history of the Cold War by John Gaddis, for example, refers to CIA covert action in Chile, Cuba and Iran, but makes no reference to the extensive KGB operations in the same countries.

In reality, fTom at least the early 1960s onwards, the KGB played an even more active global role than the CIA. The belief that the Cold War could be won in the Third World transformed the agenda ofSoviet intelligence. In 1961, the youthful and dynamic chairman of the KGB, Aleksandr Shelepin, won Khrushchev’s support for the use of national liberation movements and other anti-imperialist forces in an aggressive new grand strategy against the 'Main Adversary’ (the United States) in the Third World. Though Khrushchev was soon to replace Shelepin with the more compliant and less ambitious Vladimir Semichastnyi, the KGB’s grand strategy survived. It was enthusiastically embraced by Iurii Andropov from the moment he succeeded Semichastnyi as KGB chairman in 1967. 633

By contrast, the long-serving Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, as his almost equally long-serving ambassador in Washington, Anatolii Dobrynin, recalls, had limited interest in the Third World.634 At most of the main moments of Soviet penetration of the Third World, from the alliance with the first Communist 'bridgehead’ in the western hemisphere (to quote the KGB’s codename for Castro’s Cuba) in the early 1960s to the final, disastrous defence of the Communist regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the KGB, usually supported by the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee, had greater influence than the Foreign Ministry. Castro preferred the company of Soviet intelligence officers to that of Soviet diplomats, telling the first KGB resident in Havana, Aleksandr Alekseev, that their meetings were a way of 'bypassing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and every rule of protocol’. In 1962, largely at Castro’s insistence, Alekseev replaced the unpopular Soviet ambassador. Other Latin American leaders who, like Castro, preferred KGB officers to Soviet diplomats included Allende in Chile, Juan Jose Torres in Bolivia, Omar Torrijos (not to be confused with his son) in Panama and Jose Figueres in Costa Rica. The first Soviet contact with Juan and Isabel Peron before their return to Argentina in 1973 was also made by the KGB rather than by a diplomat. KGB support for the Sandinistas began almost two decades before their conquest of power in Nicaragua in 1979.

In Asia, Africa and the Middle East, the main initiatives in Soviet policy during the 1960s and 1970s were also more frequently taken by the KGB than by the Foreign Ministry. India, the world’s largest democracy, was described by General Oleg Kalugin, who in the mid-1970s was the youngest general in Soviet foreign intelligence, as 'a model of KGB infiltration of a Third World government’. As in India, most of the KGB’s Third World operations led to transitory successes rather than enduring influence. That, however, was not how it seemed in the 1970s. Vladimir Kriuchkov, head of the KGB First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate (FCD) from 1974 to 1988, described the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) as 'our natural allies’. In 1979, the NAM elected the unmistakably aligned Fidel Castro as its chairman - prompting a complaint fTom the KGB Havana residency that, 'F. Castro’s vanity is becoming more and more noticeable.’ Only a decade before the Soviet Union fell apart, the KGB leadership remained rashly optimistic about the success of its Third World operations. Andropov boasted in 1980 that the 'liberation’ of Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Afghanistan demonstrated that 'the

30. lurii Vladimirovich Andropov, a water engineer bom in the Caucasus, was chairman of the KGB from 1967 to 1982.

Soviet Union is not merely talking about world revolution but is actually assisting it.’635

Just as the KGB’s enthusiasm for Castro a generation earlier had helped to launch the Soviet forward policy in the Third World, so the disastrous military intervention in Afghanistan, for which the KGB leadership bore much of the responsibility, was to bring it to an end. CIA covert action, in particular its supply of shoulder-launched Stinger missiles to the mujahedin beginning in the summer of 1986, probably hastened the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. During 1986, the CIA station in Islamabad co-ordinated the provision of over 60,000 tons of arms and other supplies to the mujahedin along more than 300 infiltration routes by trucks and mules. The station chief,

31. WiUiam Casey, a corporate lawyer from New York, was director of US Central Intelligence from 1981 to 1987.

Milton Bearden, complained that the agency 'needed more mules than the world seemed prepared to breed’.636

American covert action against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, first authorised by President Ronald Reagan in December 1981, was far less successful than against the Russians in Afghanistan. Secret CIA support for the inept Contra guerrilla campaign against the Sandinistas was revealed by the US media and banned by Congress. Robert Gates, then the CIA DDI (head of analysis), reported to the director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, in December 1984 that covert support for the Contras was counterproductive and would 'result in further strengthening of the regime and a Communist Nicaragua’. The only way to overthrow the Sandinistas would be overt military support for the Contras combined with US airstrikes. Neither Casey nor Reagan was willing to face up to this uncomfortable truth. The attempt to circumvent the congressional ban led the White House into the black comedy of 'Iran-Contra’ - an illegal attempt to divert to the Contras the proceeds of secret arms sales to Iran. The revelation of the Iran-Contra scandal in November 1986 provoked the most serious crisis of the Reagan presidency. Vice President George Bush dictated for his diary a sequence of staccato phrases which summed up the despondency in the White House: 'The administration is in disarray - foreign policy in disarray - cover-up - Who knew what when?’21