Castro’s popularity in Moscow was due partly to the fact that he had established himself as the Soviet Union’s most persuasive advocate in the Third World. He was the star performer at the Fourth Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement which met in Algiers in 1973, arguing the Soviet case more eloquently than any Soviet spokesman could have done. The host nation, Algeria, supported the traditional non-aligned policy of equidistance between East and West, arguing that there were ‘two imperialisms’: one capitalist, the other Communist. Castro insisted, however, that the countries of the Soviet bloc were the natural and necessary allies of the non-aligned:
How can the Soviet Union be labelled imperialist? Where are its monopoly corporations? Where is its participation in multinational companies? What factories, what mines, what oilfields does it own in the underdeveloped world? What worker is exploited in any country of Asia, Africa or Latin America by Soviet capital?
. . . Only the closest alliance among all the progressive forces of the world will provide us with the strength needed to overcome the still-powerful forces of imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism and racism, and to wage a successful fight for the aspirations to peace and justice of all the peoples of the world.
The delegates were at least partly persuaded. The conference rejected the views of its Algerian hosts, failed to brand the Soviet Union as imperialist and denounced the ‘aggressive imperialism’ of the West as ‘the greatest obstacle on the road toward emancipation and progress of the developing countries’.
4
As well as proving an eloquent advocate of the Soviet cause in the international arena, Cuba was also an important intelligence ally. The Centre established what it regarded as ‘good working relations’ with the head of the DGI, José Méndez Cominches.
5
By 1973, if not earlier, Méndez Cominches was attending conferences of the intelligence chiefs of the Soviet bloc. At that time seventy-eight Cuban intelligence officers were at KGB training schools. Technical equipment valued by the Centre at 2 million rubles was provided free of charge to the DGI. The KGB liaison mission in Havana contained experts in all the main ‘lines’ of intelligence operation who provided the Cubans with ‘assistance in the planning of their work’.
6
After the mass expulsion of Soviet intelligence officers from London in 1971, the DGI’s London station took over the running of some KGB operations in Britain .
7
By, and probably before, 1973, the KGB maintained ‘operational contact’ with the DGI in six foreign capitals as well as in Havana.
8
During the 1970s the KGB made increasing use of DGI assistance in operations against the Main Adversary both inside and outside the United States. In 1976, for example, the KGB and DGI agreed on ‘joint cultivation’ of targets in the National Security Agency, the Pentagon and US military bases in Latin America and Spain. The DGI was thought particularly useful in cultivating Hispanics and blacks. Two of the five ‘talent-spotting leads’ in the United States selected by the KGB for ‘joint cultivation’ with the DGI in 1976 were African-American cipher clerks.
9
In Latin America during the 1970s the DGI had fewer legal residencies than the KGB, chiefly because of the smaller number of states with which Cuba maintained diplomatic relations. In 1976- 77 there appear to have been DGI residencies only in Ecuador, Guyana, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Peru and Venezuela.
10
Though Mitrokhin’s notes provide only fragmentary information, all appear to have assisted KGB operations in various ways. In 1977 the DGI informed the KGB liaison office in Havana that it had a series of agents in ‘high official positions’ in Mexico, including the Interior Ministry and police force, and suggested that they be run jointly.
11
Mitrokhin’s notes do not mention whether this offer was accepted.
The Centre seems to have been well informed about even the most highly classified aspect of DGI activity - its illegal operations. In the early 1970s the DGI had about forty-five illegals, all of whom went on year-long KGB training courses in Moscow.
12
Some KGB illegals with bogus Latin American identities were sent to Cuba to perfect their language skills and acclimatize themselves to living in a Latin American environment before being deployed to their final destinations. In 1976 a senior KGB delegation including both the head and deputy head of the FCD illegals directorate, Vadim Alekseyevich Kirpichenko and Marius Aramovich Yuzbashyan, went to Havana to discuss co-operation with their counterparts in the DGI. Agreement was reached on the joint training of several Latin American illegals for deployment against US, Latin American, Spanish and Maoist targets. The DGI agreed that the KGB could use its radio communications system to relay messages to its illegals operating in the United States and Latin America. During a return visit to Moscow the following year, the head of the DGI illegals directorate agreed to recruit two or three illegals for the KGB.
13
Cuba was also one of the most important bases for KGB SIGINT operations, chiefly against US targets. The KGB file on the 1979 running costs of intercept posts in KGB residencies around the world shows that the Havana post (codenamed TERMIT-S) had the third largest budget; only the Washington and New York posts were more expensive to operate.
14
An even larger intercept post, also targeted on the United States, was situated in the massive SIGINT base set up by the GRU at Lourdes in Cuba in the mid-1960s to monitor US Navy communications and other high-frequency transmissions.
15
On 25 April 1975 a secret Soviet government decree (No. 342-115) authorized the establishment of a new KGB SIGINT station (codenamed TERMIT-P) within the Lourdes base, which began operations in December 1976. Run by the Sixteenth Directorate, TERMIT-P had a fixed 12-metre dish antenna and a mobile 7-metre dish antenna mounted on a covered lorry, which enabled it to intercept microwave communications ‘downlinked’ from US satellites or transmitted between microwave towers.
16
As well as co-operating closely with the DGI in a variety of intelligence operations, the KGB maintained an undeclared residency in Havana which kept close watch on the Castro regime and the mood of the population; in 1974 it sent 205 reports by cable and sixty-four by diplomatic bag. Its sources included sixty-three agents and sixty-seven co-optees among the large Soviet community.
17
The aspect of Cuban intelligence which gave greatest concern to the Havana residency was its internal security. Though brutal by Western standards, Cuban internal surveillance struck the Centre as unacceptably feeble. The department charged with combating ideological subversion had a total establishment of only 180, many of them - in the KGB’s view - poorly qualified. According to a report from the Havana residency in 1976, one Cuban anti-subversion officer had recruited five out of fourteen members of a Cuban orchestra simply ‘in case the orchestra went on tour abroad’.
18
The Centre was particularly disturbed by the fact that it could not persuade the DGI to share its own obsession with Zionist ‘subversion’. The KGB liaison office drew the DGI’s attention to the presence of seventeen Zionist organizations in Cuba but complained to the Centre that no action had been taken against any of them.
19
By Soviet standards, the Cuban surveillance department was also seriously understaffed. With a total of 278 staff in Havana and 112 in the provinces in 1976, the KGB residency calculated that it could deploy only about twelve surveillance groups of nine or ten people per day. Because of the two-shift system, this meant that it was able to keep full-time surveillance of only six moving targets.
20
The KGB was also dissatisfied with the scale of Cuban eavesdropping and letter-opening. The 260 people employed to monitor telephone conversations and eavesdropping devices listened in to a daily average of only about 900 international phone calls.
21
Cuban censorship monitored about 800 addresses on a full-time basis and translated 300 to 500 foreign-language letters a day.
22
The Centre’s concern at the Cuban failure to reproduce its own absurdly labour-intensive systems of surveillance and obsessive pursuit of even the most trivial forms of ideological subversion was most evident in the months before Brezhnev’s visit to Cuba early in 1974. The Havana residency was also worried by what it believed was lax treatment of Cuban political prisoners. Of the 8,000 ‘sentenced for counter-revolutionary activity’, many were reported to be allowed home once a month and on public holidays. Particular concern was caused by the fact that some of the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ given this comparatively lenient treatment had in the past made ‘anti-Soviet statements’ and might be on the streets during Brezhnev’s visit.
23
No dissident, however, disturbed the stage-managed welcome given to the vain and decrepit Soviet leader in Havana’s Revolution Square by a crowd officially estimated at over a million people. Castro’s own words of welcome plumbed new depths of platitudinous sycophancy. ‘No other foreign visitor to Cuba’, he declared, ‘has ever been welcomed by our people so joyfully or with such rapturous enthusiasm as was Comrade Brezhnev.’ Castro eulogized Brezhnev’s own stumbling banalities as ‘major political statements of tremendous importance’ for the entire world:
It must be remembered that we attach paramount importance to the history of the Soviet Union itself and to the role played by the CPSU. I refer to both the USSR’s role in the development of the history of all mankind and to the role which the USSR and the CPSU have played in the cause of solidarity with Cuba . . . For us, Comrade Brezhnev - the most eminent Soviet leader - personifies, as it were, the entire policy of the USSR and the CPSU. And it was for this reason that our people looked forward to his arrival and were eager to express their feelings of friendship, profound respect and gratitude towards the Soviet Union.
24
Castro did not feel it necessary, however, to display the same level of sycophancy to other Soviet bloc leaders. The KGB reported that the visit to Cuba shortly after Brezhnev’s by Erich Honecker, the East German leader, had gone extremely badly. In private meetings Castro accused East Germany and other ‘socialist countries’ of doing little to help Cuba and ‘profiteering’ at Cuban expense by refusing to pay a fair price for its sugar. Honecker was said to have responded ‘in an angry and intemperate manner’. ‘If I had known that Castro would react in this manner to our visit’, he told his staff, ‘I would not have gone.’ The atmosphere at Havana airport on Honecker’s departure was said to have been ‘extremely cold’. His entourage spent much of the flight home trying to calm him down, fearful - according to the KGB - that news of his row with Castro might leak to the West.
25
Behind the scenes, however, the conflict continued. In 1977 the East German Ministry of State Security (Stasi) liaison officer in Havana, Johann Münzel, told one of his KGB colleagues that the Cuban leadership were doing little to address their economic problems and simply expected other socialist countries to bail them out in the name of ‘proletarian internationalism’. The DGI simultaneously complained to the KGB that Stasi officers were inclined to lecture them rather than treat them as colleagues.
26
Moscow, however, judged Cuba’s private quarrels with some member states of the Warsaw Pact in the mid-1970s as of far less significance than its public contribution to the establishment of new Marxist regimes in Africa. The FCD declared in a report to Andropov in 1976, ‘Africa has turned into an arena for a global struggle between the two systems [communism and capitalism] for a long time to come.’
27
Cuban assistance in that struggle was of crucial importance. The nearly simultaneous break-up of the Portuguese Empire and the overthrow of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie brought to power self-proclaimed Marxist regimes in Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia. In Angola, the richest of Portugal’s colonies, the end of Portuguese rule was followed in 1975 by a full-scale civil war in which the Marxist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was opposed by the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Though small-scale Soviet support for the MPLA, led by Agostinho Neto, had begun a decade earlier, the decisive factor in the struggle for power was the arrival of Cuban troops beginning in the autumn of 1975. Disappointed by the declining prospects for revolution in Latin America, Castro looked on Angola as an opportunity both to establish himself as a great revolutionary leader on the world stage and to revive flagging revolutionary fervour at home.
28
According to Castro’s friend, the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez:
He personally had picked up the commanders of the battalion of special forces that left in the first flight and had driven them himself in his Soviet jeep to the foot of the plane ramp. There was no spot on the map of Angola that he hadn’t memorized. His concentration on the war was so intense and meticulous that he could quote any figure on Angola as if it were Cuba, and he spoke of Angolan cities, customs and people as if he had lived there his entire life.
29