During the later 1970s, the KGB also lost much of the foothold it had acquired in Peru earlier in the decade. In 1974 the Centre still considered many of the reports from the Lima residency ‘especially valuable’, and passed some of them to Brezhnev, no doubt in order to demonstrate the continuing strength of its contacts with the junta.
51
The junta’s economic policies, however, despite their ideological appeal in Moscow, led to chronic inflation, economic stagnation and repeated debt crises. After a coup in August 1975 by General Francisco Morales Bermúdez, the military government drifted to the right.
52
As in Argentina, Moscow tried to salvage what it could of the relationship built up over the previous few years. With Andropov’s approval, the KGB presented Morales Bermúdez with a Makarov pistol and 200 cartridges.
53
In December 1975 the Centre sent the Peruvian intelligence service, SIN, a gift of operational equipment valued at about $300,000.
54
In the following year the new heads of SIN and Peruvian military intelligence were each presented, like Morales Bermúdez, with Makarov pistols; they also received further gifts valued, respectively, at 300 and 150 hard-currency rubles. Ten SIN officers were trained, at the KGB’s expense, at the FCD Red Banner Institute during 1976.
55
Such gestures achieved little. In August 1976 Tolstikov was informed by the Cuban ambassador to Peru and Deputy Interior Minister Abrahantes that Morales Bermúdez had assured Castro that he was ‘a supporter of revolutionary changes in Peru’ and prepared to collaborate in the struggle against the CIA. Simultaneously, however, he was removing ‘progressive’ officials and moving to the right. The Cuban regime concluded that Morales Bermúdez was not to be trusted and suspended aid to Peru.
56
By 1976 Cuban intelligence was pessimistic about the prospects for challenging American influence in South America. Manuel Piñeiro, head of the Departamento de América, which was responsible for the export of revolution, told Tolstikov in August that since the tour of five Latin American states earlier in the year by Henry Kissinger, ‘one can begin to observe the onset of reaction and the fascistization of the regimes there’. On the South American mainland, said Piñeiro, only Guyana was following ‘an anti-imperialist course’: ‘[Forbes] Burnham, the Prime Minister of Guyana, shares some of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, but for tactical reasons is forced to conceal this.’
57
Mexico’s presence on the list of the KGB’s five priority Latin American targets in 1974 was due both to its strategic importance as a large state on the southern border of the United States and to the apparent opportunities created by the election as President in 1970 of Luis Echeverría Alvarez. Under the Mexican constitution, Echeverría served for a non-renewable six-year term, controlling during that period vast political patronage and having the final word on all major policy issues. Like his predecessors, though legitimized by a presidential election, he owed his position as President to a secret selection process within the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which had dominated Mexican politics for the past forty years.
Echeverría’s ultimate ambition (which he never came close to realizing) was, the KGB believed, to follow his term as President by becoming Secretary-General of the United Nations. He thus sought to establish himself during his presidency as a champion of Third World causes, became the first Mexican President to visit Cuba, was frequently publicly critical of the United States and in 1973 made a well-publicized trip to the Soviet Union. The KGB did not succeed in establishing direct access to Echeverría in the way that it did to Juan and Isabel Perón in Argentina and to some members of the military junta in Peru. From 1972 onwards, however, the Mexico City residency claimed to have one agent and two confidential contacts who provided ‘stable channels for exercising influence on the President’. The agent, codenamed URAN, was a former Chilean diplomat of the Allende era. Of the two confidential contacts who were also said to influence Echeverría’s foreign policy, MARTINA was the Rector of a Mexican university and OLMEK a leading member of the Partido Popular Socialista, one of a handful of small parties usually prepared to do deals with the ruling PRI. The Mexico City residency claimed the credit for persuading Echeverría to break off relations with the Pinochet regime, for much of his criticism of the United States, and for his decision to recognize the Marxist MPLA regime in Angola. It reported that its contacts had told Echeverría that these actions would strengthen his reputation in the Third World and enhance his prospects of becoming UN Secretary-General.
58
In 1975 he signed a mutual co-operation agreement with Comecon. In the same year, to the delight of Moscow, Echeverría instructed the Mexican representative at the UN to support an anti-Israeli resolution condemning Zionism as a form of racism - though he had second thoughts when this provoked Jewish leaders in the United States to promote a tourist boycott of Mexico.
59
The KGB may well have exaggerated its ability to influence Echeverría’s policy. When foreign statesmen or media made pronouncements in line with Soviet policy, it was quick to claim the credit for its own active measures. The KGB probably also exaggerated its influence on the press. In 1974, for example, the Mexico City residency reported that it had planted 300 articles in Mexican newspapers, among them
Excelsior
, then Mexico City’s leading paper, the
Diario de México
and
Universal
.
60
One of the KGB’s most spectacular active measures, however, backfired badly. In 1973 the CIA defector Philip Agee (subsequently codenamed PONT by the KGB) had approached the residency in Mexico City and offered what the head of the FCD Counter-Intelligence Directorate, Oleg Kalugin, described as ‘reams of information about CIA operations’. The residency, wrongly suspecting that he was part of a CIA deception, turned him away. According to Kalugin, ‘Agee then went to the Cubans, who welcomed him with open arms . . . [and] shared Agee’s information with us.’
61
Service A, the FCD active-measures department, claimed much of the credit for the publication in 1975 of Agee’s sensational memoir,
Inside the Company: CIA Diary
, most of which was devoted to a denunciation of CIA operations in Latin America, identifying approximately 250 of its officers and agents.
Inside the Company
was an instant best-seller, described by the CIA’s classified in-house journal as ‘a severe body blow to the Agency’.
62
Before publication, material on CIA penetration of the leadership of Latin American Communist parties was removed at Service A’s insistence.
63
Service A seems to have been unaware, however, that KGB residencies were currently attempting to cultivate several of those publicly identified in
Inside the Company
as CIA agents or contacts. Among them was President Echeverría who, while the minister responsible for internal security, was alleged to have had the CIA codename LITEMPO-14, to have been in close contact with the CIA station in Mexico City and to have revealed to it the undemocratic processes by which, well in advance of his election in 1970, he had been selected by the ruling PRI as the next President.
64
The Mexican Foreign Minister told the Soviet ambassador that President Echeverría had been informed of the KGB’s involvement in the publication of Agee’s book and regarded it as an unfriendly act against both Mexico and the President personally. On instructions from Andropov and Gromyko, the ambassador claimed unconvincingly that the Soviet Union had no responsibility for the book.
65
Brazil owed its place in the KGB’s 1974 list of its five priority targets in Latin America simply to its size and strategic importance:
Special significance is ascribed to Brazil - a huge country with great wealth and claims to becoming a major power in the future, which is acquiring the characteristics of an imperialist state and actively entering the international arena. But the residency there is weak due to quota limitations [by the Brazilian government on the size of the Soviet embassy] and thus has modest capabilities.
66
For most of its existence, the military regime which held power from 1964 to 1985 made Brazil a relatively hostile environment for KGB operations. There was little prospect during the 1970s either of acquiring confidential contacts within the government, as in Argentina and Peru, or of finding contacts with direct access to the President, as in Mexico. The KGB’s best intelligence on Brazil probably came from its increasing ability to decrypt Brazil’s diplomatic traffic. By 1979 the radio-intercept post (codenamed KLEN) in the Brasilia residency was able to intercept 19,000 coded cables sent and received by the Foreign Ministry as well as approximately 2,000 other classified official communications.
67
SIGINT enabled the Centre to monitor some of the activities of probably its most important Brazilian agent, codenamed IZOT, who was recruited while serving as Brazilian ambassador in the Soviet bloc.
68
As well as providing intelligence and recruitment leads to three other diplomats, IZOT also on occasion included in his reports information (probably disinformation) provided by the KGB. Assessed by the KGB as ‘adhering to an anti-American line and liberal views concerning the development of a bourgeois society’, IZOT was a paid agent. His remuneration, however, took a variety of forms, including in 1976 a silver service valued by the Centre at 513 rubles. The Centre had increasing doubts about IZOT’s reliability. On one occasion it believed that he was guilty of ‘outright deception’, claiming to have passed on information provided by the KGB to his Foreign Ministry when his decrypted cables showed that he had not done so.
69
The presidency of Ernesto Geisel (1974-79) made the first tentative moves towards democratization of the authoritarian and sometimes brutal Brazilian military regime. It remained, however, resolutely anti-Communist. In 1976 the official censor banned even a TV broadcast of a performance by the Bolshoi Ballet for fear of Communist cultural contagion. When Geisel revoked the banishment orders on most political exiles in 1978, he deliberately excluded the long-serving Secretary-General of the Brazilian Communist Party, Luis Carlos Prestes.
70
The inauguration as President in March 1979 of General João Batista Figueiredo, chief of the Serviço Nacional de Informações (SNI), Brazil’s intelligence service, paradoxically made life somewhat easier than before for both the Communist Party and the KGB residency. The Brazilian intelligence community was divided between reformers who favoured a gradual transition to democracy and hard-liners who were preoccupied by the danger of subversion. Figueiredo sided with the reformers. So, even more clearly, did his chief political adviser and head of his civilian staff, General Golbery do Couto e Silva, who fifteen years earlier had been the chief architect and first head of SNI.
71
Despite hard-line opposition, Figueiredo issued an amnesty for most of Brazil’s remaining political exiles, including Prestes and other leading Communists.
72
While accepting that, in the East-West struggle, Brazil was ultimately on the side of the ‘Giant of the North’, Golbery argued publicly in favour of a pragmatic foreign policy which avoided subordination to the United States: ‘It seems to us only just that [, like the US,] we should also learn to bargain at high prices.’
73
That, Golbery seems to have believed, involved dialogue with the Soviet Union. In the spring of 1980 a Soviet parliamentary delegation headed by Eduard Shevardnadze, then a candidate (non-voting) member of the Politburo, visited Brasilia. Unknown to their hosts, the plane (Special Flight L-62) carried new radio interception equipment to improve the performance of the residency’s SIGINT station, and took the old equipment with it when it left. Among the delegation was Brezhnev’s personal assistant, Andrei Mikhailovich Aleksandrov. The detailed instructions given to the resident on the entertainment of Aleksandrov provide a good example of the pains taken by the Centre to impress the political leadership. He was told to ensure that the KGB officer selected to show Aleksandrov the sights during his visit was smartly but soberly dressed, had his hair neatly cut, and expressed himself lucidly, concisely and accurately at all times.
74
The pampered parliamentary delegation paved the way for other, more covert contacts by the KGB with the Brazilian leadership. In December 1980 Nikolai Leonov travelled to Brazil for talks with General Golbery. Though Leonov posed as an academic working as a Soviet government adviser, Golbery’s background in intelligence makes it highly unlikely that he failed to identify him as a senior KGB officer. In June 1981, with Figueiredo’s approval, Golbery sent a member of his staff for further discussions in Moscow, where it was agreed that a ‘counsellor’ (in fact a KGB officer) would be added to the embassy staff in Brasilia, whose chief duty would be to conduct regular ‘unofficial’ meetings with the President.
75
Further, public evidence of a new era in Soviet-Brazilian relations was the signing in 1981 of a series of trade agreements worth a total of about $2 billion.
76