Encouraged by the Lima residency’s contacts with the junta, the KGB proposed formal co-operation with its Peruvian counterpart, the Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional (SIN), codenamed KONTORA. Negotiations between KGB and SIN representatives produced a draft agreement providing for an exchange of intelligence, co-operation in security measures, KGB training for SIN officers and the provision to SIN of KGB ‘operational technical equipment’. In June 1971 the CPSU Central Committee approved the draft agreement. Two operations officers and one technical specialist were stationed in Lima to liaise with SIN. Meetings between Soviet and Peruvian intelligence officers took place about once a week, usually in SIN safe apartments. The Lima residency noted with satisfaction that one of the immediate consequences of the agreement was the ending of SIN surveillance of the embassy and other Soviet offices.
18
With KGB assistance, SIN set up a surveillance post near the US embassy which secretly photographed all those entering and leaving, and recorded their names in a card index. SIN later used KGB equipment to record embassy phone calls and intercept radio messages.
19
The Centre claimed that co-operation with SIN led to ‘the neutralization of an American agent network in the [Peruvian] trade unions and the liquidation of an American intelligence operational technical group’. It also claimed the credit for ‘the exposure of the conspiratorial activity’ of the Minister of Internal Affairs, General Armando Artola, who appears to have opposed the Soviet connection and was sacked in 1971.
20
Initially, KGB liaison officers found some members of SIN ‘guarded’ in their dealings with them. According to KGB files, however, many were won over by items of current intelligence, gifts, birthday greetings, ‘material assistance’, invitations to visit the Soviet Union and other friendly gestures.
21
Mitrokhin concluded from his reading of KGB files that intelligence both from ‘confidential contacts’ in the junta and from SIN was ‘highly valued’ in the Centre.
22
In 1973 the new head of SIN, General Enrique Gallegos Venero, visited Moscow for discussions with Andropov, Fyodor Mortin, head of the FCD, and other senior KGB officers. During his visit it was agreed to extend intelligence co-operation to include Peruvian military intelligence (codenamed SHTAB by the KGB).
23
Though apparently satisfied with the results of Gallegos’s visit, the Centre took a somewhat censorious view of the behaviour of SIN officers, ranging in rank from captain to lieutenant-colonel, who were invited to Moscow at its expense (air travel included) to take part in FCD training courses. One KGB report primly concluded:
The Peruvians who were studying at the special P-2, P-3, and P-4 departments at the FCD’s Red Banner [later Andropov] Institute were active in making contact with girls and women of loose behaviour in Moscow, and had intimate relations with them, after which these acquaintances were handed over to another group of students for intimate relations. The students did not heed the attempts of the course supervisors to enlighten them.
24
In general, however, the Centre congratulated itself on the success of intelligence collaboration with Peru. A 1975 report gave the work of the Lima residency ‘a positive evaluation’.
25
Intelligence on ‘the situation in Peru’s ruling circles’, some of it passed on to the Politburo, was assessed as ‘especially valuable’.
26
KGB co-operation with SIN against US targets led to the expulsion of a series of CIA officers and the curtailment of Peace Corps activities and US-sponsored English-language courses.
27
A relative of President Velasco’s wife, occupying ‘a high position’ in the administration, was exposed as, allegedly, a CIA agent.
28
The Lima residency also carried out ‘wide-ranging active measures’ against US targets.
29
‘Operational technical’ experts were sent from the Centre to instruct SIN officers in the use of KGB surveillance, eavesdropping and photographic equipment in operations against the US, Mexican and Chilean embassies in Lima.
30
With financial assistance from the KGB, SIN agents were sent to carry out KGB assignments in Chile, Argentina and other parts of Latin America.
31
From 1973 onwards Peru made a series of massive Soviet arms purchases, totalling more than $1.6 billion over the next twelve years. In the Western hemisphere only Cuba received more.
32
The Centre’s claims that it also succeeded in ‘increasing the progressive measures of Velasco’s government’,
33
however, were probably made chiefly to impress the Soviet leadership. The KGB’s influence on the military government’s security, defence and foreign policy did not extend to its domestic reform programme. In 1972, for example, the Interior Minister, General Pedro Richter Prado, was dismayed by much of what he saw on a tour of collective farms in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Soviet bloc agriculture, he told Alistair Horne, was ‘going backwards’. The junta publicly declared that, ‘Peru stands for neither Communism nor Capitalism’. Horne concluded that, by this time, its confused ideological preferences lay somewhere between Tito’s Yugoslavia and Gaullist France. Its heavy-handed economic mismanagement was compounded by the problems of financing the imports of Soviet arms. Almost a quarter of the national budget went on the armed forces, double the proportion in neighbouring Colombia. The revenues from the massive newly discovered oil reserves in the Amazon basin were frittered away.
34
The Centre did not usually make reports to the Politburo which undermined its own previous claims to be able to influence foreign leaders. It is therefore unlikely that it reported to the political leadership on the declining prospects of the ‘progressive’ Peruvian junta as it struggled to cope with the consequences of its economic mismanagement. The coup toppling Velasco in August 1975, led by General Francisco Morales Bermúdez, began a more conservative phase of military rule.
35
The KGB was, however, able to claim an apparently striking victory over Peruvian Maoism. In June 1975 the Lima residency made ‘operational contact’ with one of the leaders of the pro-Chinese Marxist-Leninist Party of Peru, codenamed VANTAN. The KGB claimed the credit for disrupting, with VANTAN’s assistance, the Party’s 1976 Congress. According to a file summary noted by Mitrokhin: ‘At its Congress, the Party sharply criticized Peking’s policy, including its line of splitting the Communist and Workers’ movement, and decided to break with Maoism and to dissolve itself. This operation produced great repercussions in Latin-American countries.’
36
The next Latin American state after Peru to acquire what the KGB considered a ‘progressive’ military government was Bolivia, its landlocked southern neighbour. Bolivia’s turbulent political history had been punctuated by more military coups than anywhere else in the world. At the beginning of the 1970s the presidential palace in La Paz (at 12,000 feet, the highest on the continent) was still pockmarked with bullet holes from previous coups which, given the likelihood of further violent regime changes, were not thought worth repairing. In front of the palace was a lamp-post with an inscription recording that a president had been hanged from it in 1946.
The leader of the junta which took power in April 1969, General Alfredo Ovando Candía, had been commander-in-chief of the Bolivian army at the time of Che Guevara’s capture and death eighteen months earlier. It was widely believed, however, that he had since been at least partly seduced by the Che revolutionary myth and felt a deep sense of guilt at having ordered his execution. Once in power, Ovando followed the Peruvian example, nationalizing American-owned companies, establishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and seeking support from workers, peasants and students. In October 1970, following a failed coup by right-wing army officers and riots by left-wing university students, Ovando was overthrown by the vociferously anti-imperialist General Juan José Torres González, who had been sacked as commander-in-chief for what Ovando considered his excessive adulation of Fidel Castro.
37
The resident in La Paz, Igor Yevgenievich Sholokhov, was instructed to gain access to Torres (codenamed CAESAR by the KGB) ‘in order to use him to carry out measures to rally anti-American forces in Bolivia’.
38
In the excitable aftermath of the ‘October Revolution’ which had brought Torres to power, students at San Andrés University in La Paz led violent demonstrations against American imperialism. Torres took no action as US offices were broken into and pillaged and the
Yanqui
community was reduced to living in a state of semi-siege. US diplomats removed the CD plates from their cars for fear of attack; even the Clínica América in La Paz was forced to change its name to Clínica Metodista.
39
The KGB was encouraged by Torres’s close relations with the Communists as well as by his hostility to the
Yanquis
. Soon after he became President, the First Secretary of the Bolivian Communist Party, Jorge Kolle Cueto, reported to Sholokhov that Torres was ‘taking steps to involve the Left in co-operation with the government’, and had offered to help the Communists establish paramilitary groups to meet the threat of a right-wing coup.
40
In July Andropov wrote to Brezhnev:
Considering the progressive nature of the change occurring in Bolivia, Torres’s desire to develop multifaceted co-operation with the USSR, and the Bolivian friends’ [Communists’] positive attitude towards the President, it would be worthwhile examining the possibility of supplying arms to Bolivia, as well as providing Torres with economic aid . . . , for the purpose of increasing his influence in the army and assisting in frustrating the conspiratorial plans of the reactionaries, thus gaining the time needed by the country’s democratic forces to strengthen their position.
41
Andropov’s assessment, however, proved far too optimistic. By the time he wrote his report Torres’s prospects of survival were already slim. ‘Progressive change’ in Bolivia was rapidly collapsing into anarchy. The army was deeply divided between right- and left-wing factions. In June 1971 the unoccupied Congress building next to the presidential palace was seized by the various factions of the left who declared themselves the Asamblea del Pueblo and began to function as a parallel government. Inevitably the factions quickly fell out among themselves, with the Communist Party denouncing the Maoists as ‘petit bourgeois dedicated to leading the working class on a new adventure’. The extravagant if confused revolutionary rhetoric of the Assembly and Torres’s apparent impotence in the face of it helped to provoke in August 1971 Bolivia’s 187th coup, led by the right-wing Colonel Hugo Banzer Suárez, who had been sacked by Torres as commandant of the Military Academy. After the discovery of the large quantities of arms from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia despatched at Torres’s request, Banzer ordered a mass expulsion of Soviet diplomats and intelligence officers.
42
Despite the disappointment of Torres’s overthrow, the KGB continued to seek opportunities to cultivate other Latin American leaders. Before the 1970 presidential election in Costa Rica, it had secret discussions with the successful candidate, José Figueres Ferrer (codenamed KASIK).
43
Figueres was the leading Costa Rican politician of his generation. As head of the founding junta of the post-war Second Republic, he had taken the lead in abolishing the army and turning Costa Rica into an unarmed democracy - a unique event in the history of the Americas. Figueres’s first contact with Soviet intelligence, though he did not realize it, went back to 1951, when he had unwittingly appointed as envoy in Rome (and non-resident envoy in Belgrade) a KGB illegal, Iosif Grigulevich, posing as Teodoro Castro, the illegitimate son of a dead (and, in reality, childless) Costa Rican notable. Unknown to Figueres, early in 1953 Grigulevich had been given a highly dangerous mission to assassinate Marshal Tito. When his mission was aborted after Stalin’s death in March, ‘Teodoro Castro’ disappeared - so far as Figueres was concerned - into thin air, beginning a new life in Moscow under his real name, Grigulevich, as an academic expert on Latin America.
44
Figueres was first elected President in 1953, serving until 1958. His long-running feud with the US-backed Somoza dictatorship in neighbouring Nicaragua, which continued after his presidency, appears to have attracted the favourable attention of the KGB. When President Luis Somoza challenged him to a duel, Figueres agreed - provided it was fought on the deck of a Soviet submarine which Somoza falsely claimed to have captured.
45
Despite his anti-militarism, Figueres became a strong supporter of the Sandinistas. Before the 1970 presidential election the KGB secretly transmitted to him via the Costa Rican Communist Party a ‘loan’ of US $300,000 to help finance his campaign in return for a promise, if elected, to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Once reinstalled as President, Figueres kept his promise.
46
In 1971 the CPSU Central Committee authorized A. I. Mosolov, head of the newly established San José residency, to establish contact with him.
47