In the first place, I would then cease to be the leader of the entire nation, and would be the leader of only a political party. In the second place, after creating one party, I would then have to permit the formation of other opposition parties. And third, I do not want to do this because this is what the Americans are always trying to get out of me.
105
Torrijos told Leonov he was none the less convinced that by the year 2000 the majority of Latin American states would have adopted ‘socialism in one form or another’.
106
Within Panama the pro-Moscow Communist Partido del Pueblo (PDP) was the only political party allowed to operate; the rival Maoist Communist Party was brutally persecuted and several of its leaders murdered.
In its early stages the corrupt, authoritarian Torrijos regime had made reforms in land distribution, health care and education. Progress towards Panamanian socialism, however, was largely rhetorical. The PDP unconvincingly declared the regime
la yunta pueblo-gobierno
- a close union of people and government. The corrupt and brutal National Guard became
el brazo armado del pueblo
, the people’s weapon arm.
107
According to KGB reports, the PDP leadership maintained ‘clandestine contact’ with two ministers in the Torrijos government.
108
PDP influence was particularly strong in the Education Ministry. Communist-inspired educational reforms in 1979, however, collapsed in the face of teachers’ strikes and demonstrations. Economic bumbling and corruption together left Panama with one of the highest per capita national debts anywhere in the world.
109
On 31 July 1981, while Torrijos was
en route
with his girlfriend to a weekend retreat, his plane flew into the side of a mountain killing all on board.
110
The KGB, always prone to conspiracy theories, concluded that he was the victim of a CIA assassination plot.
111
A few years earlier, by resolving the great historic grievance against the United States which dated back to the birth of the state, Torrijos had given Panamanians a new sense of identity and national pride. By the time he died, however, many were pleased to see him go. The celebrations in some
cantinas
which followed his plane crash became so boisterous that they were closed down by the National Guard. The KGB had little left to show for the effort it had put into cultivating the Torrijos regime.
The same was true of most of the KGB’s efforts during the 1970s to cultivate anti-American and ‘progressive’ regimes in Latin America. The series of short-term successes which the Centre proudly reported to the Politburo failed to establish a stable basis for the expansion of Soviet influence in Latin America. The KGB itself had lost confidence in the staying power of the Allende regime well before it was overthrown. Covert contacts with the ‘progressive’ junta in Peru, Torres in Bolivia, Perón in Argentina and Torrijos in Panama lasted only a few years until those leaders were deposed or died. At the end of the decade, however, the KGB’s fortunes suddenly revived. The revolution in Central America of which it had been so hopeful in the early 1960s, and in which it had subsequently lost faith, unexpectedly became a reality at the end of the 1970s.
6
Revolution in Central America
For Fidel Castro 1979 was a year of both economic failure and international triumph. After two decades in power, his regime was as dependent as ever on large subsidies which the ailing Soviet economy could ill afford. Popular disaffection was more visible than ever before. Ten times as many Cubans fled to Florida in small boats during 1979 as in the previous year.
1
Castro, however, seemed more interested by increasing international recognition of his role on the world stage, newly signalled by his election as Chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement. The KGB liaison office in Havana reported growing concern at Castro’s delusions of grandeur:
The personal influence of F. Castro in [Cuba’s] politics is becoming stronger. His prestige as an ‘outstanding strategist and chief commander’ in connection with the victories in Africa (Angola, Ethiopia), and as a far-sighted politician and statesman, is becoming overblown. F. Castro’s vanity is becoming more and more noticeable.
Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces are extolled. Castro’s approval is needed on every issue, even insignificant ones, and this leads to delays, red tape, and the piling up of papers requiring Castro’s signature. Everyone sees that this is an abnormal situation, but everyone remains silent for fear that any remark could be interpreted as an encroachment on the chief’s incontestable authority. Cuba’s revolutionary spirit is becoming more and more dissipated, while there is an emergence of servility, careerism, and competition between government agencies, and their leaders’ attempts to prove themselves to Fidel in the best possible light. There is competition between the MVD [Ministry of Internal Affairs] and the RVS [Revolutionary Armed Forces] within the government to challenge MVD Minister Sergio del Valle’s subservient position with respect to R. Castro. Their former friendly relationship has cooled.
MVD Minister Valle [whose responsibilities included the DGI], in an outburst of open exasperation, told P. I. Vasilyev, a representative of the KGB, the following:
‘You might think that I, as the Minister of Internal Affairs and a member of the Politburo, can decide everything, but I cannot - I cannot even give an apartment to a Ministry employee. For this too, it is necessary to have the approval of the Commander-in-Chief [Fidel Castro].’
2
Castro’s self-importance was further inflated by the long-delayed spread of revolution in Central America. In March 1979 the Marxist New Jewel Movement, led by Maurice Bishop, seized control of the small Caribbean island of Grenada. A month later fifty Cuban military advisers arrived by ship, bringing with them large supplies of arms and ammunition to bolster the new regime. In September 400 Cuban regular troops arrived to train a new Grenadan army. In December 300 Cubans began the construction of a large new airport with a runway capable of accommodating the largest Soviet and Cuban military transport planes.
3
The once-secret documents of the New Jewel Movement make clear that, as well as being inspired by the Cuban example, Bishop’s Marxism also had a good deal in common with the variety once described by French student revolutionaries as ‘the Groucho tendency’. Bishop, however, was determined to stamp out opposition. As he told his colleagues: ‘Just consider, Comrades . . . how people get detained in this country. We don’t go and call for no votes. You get detained when I sign an order after discussing it with the National Security Committee of the Party or with a higher Party body. Once I sign it - like it or don’t like it - it’s up the hill for them.’
Once satisfied that the Bishop regime was solidly established, Moscow also began supplying massive military aid. A Grenadan general, Hudson Austin, wrote to Andropov as KGB Chairman early in 1982 to thank him ‘once again for the tremendous assistance which our armed forces have received from your Party and Government’, and to request KGB training for four Grenadan intelligence officers. Austin ended his letter ‘by once again extending our greatest warmth and embrace to you and your Party - Sons and Daughters of the heroic Lenin’.
4
Of far greater significance than Bishop’s seizure of power in Grenada was the ousting of the brutal and corrupt Somoza regime in Nicaragua in July 1979 by the Sandinistas. Until less than a year earlier the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) had had few major successes. On 25 August 1978, however, the Terceristas (or ‘Insurrectional Tendency’), the dominant faction within the FSLN, pulled off one of the most spectacular coups in guerrilla history. Twenty-four Terceristas, disguised as members of an élite National Guard unit, seized control of the Managua National Palace where the Somoza-dominated National Congress was in session, and took all its members hostage. KGB files reveal that the guerrillas had been trained and financed by the Centre, which gave them the codename ISKRA (‘Spark’) - the same as that of the Sandinista sabotage and intelligence group founded by the KGB fourteen years earlier. On the eve of the ISKRA attack on the National Palace, Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD, was personally briefed on plans for the operation by officers of Department 8 (‘Special Operations’) of the Illegals Directorate S.
5
In return for the release of the hostages, the Somoza regime was forced to pay a large ransom and free fifty-nine Sandinista prisoners. On their way to Managua airport, where a plane was waiting to take them to Cuba, the guerrillas and the freed prisoners were cheered by enthusiastic crowds. But though the FSLN was winning the battle for hearts and minds, Somoza still retained an apparently firm grip on power. Urban insurrections by the Sandinistas in September were brutally crushed by the National Guard.
6
In Havana Castro and other Cuban leaders had a series of meetings with the three most influential Sandinistas: the Tercerista leaders Humberto and Daniel Ortega Saavedra, and the only surviving founder of the FSLN, Tomás Borge, who had been freed from a Nicaraguan prison by the ISKRA operation. It was thanks largely to Cuban pressure on them that the three factions of the FSLN formally reunited by an agreement signed in Havana in March 1979.
7
Simultaneously, the Cuban Departamento América (DA) helped the Sandinistas set up a base in Costa Rica from which to prepare an offensive against the Somoza regime. At the end of May FSLN forces crossed into Nicaragua. The arms and tactical advice provided by the DA’s operations centre in San José made a major contribution to the rapid Sandinista victory. The former Costa Rican President, José Figueres, said later that, but for arms from Cuba and Costa Rican support for Sandinista operations, the victory over Somoza ‘would not have been possible’. The speed with which the resistance of Somoza’s National Guard crumbled took both the CIA and the KGB by surprise. When the Sandinista offensive began, the CIA reported to the White House that it had little prospect of success. On 19 July, however, dressed in olive-green uniforms and black berets, the FSLN entered Managua in triumph.
8
Cuban advisers quickly followed in the Sandinistas’ wake. The most influential of them, the former head of the DA operations centre in San José, Julián López Díaz, was appointed Cuban ambassador in Managua. A week after their seizure of power, a Sandinista delegation, headed by their military commander, Humberto Ortega, flew to Havana to take part in the annual 26 July celebrations of the attack on the Moncada Barracks which had begun Castro’s guerrilla campaign against the Batista regime. Amid what Radio Havana described as mass ‘demonstrations of joy’, a female Sandinista guerrilla in battle fatigues presented Cuba’s Maximum Leader with a rifle captured in combat against Somoza’s National Guard.
9
Castro paid emotional tribute to ‘this constellation of heroic, brave, intelligent and capable commanders and combatants of the Nicaraguan Sandinista National Liberation Front’:
They gained victory along a path similar to our path. They gained victory the only way they, like us, could free themselves of tyranny and imperialist domination - taking up arms [
applause
], fighting hard, heroically. And we must say and emphasize that the Nicaraguan revolution was outstanding for its heroism, its perseverance, the perseverance of its combatants - because it is not the victory of a single day, it is a victory after twenty years of struggle [
applause
], twenty years of planning [
applause
].
10
In early August CIA analysts correctly forecast that the Sandinistas would seek Cuban help to ‘transform the guerrilla forces into a conventional army’, the Ejército Popular Sandinista (EPS). According to the same intelligence assessment, ‘The Cubans can also be expected in the months ahead to begin using Nicaragua to support guerrillas from countries in the northern tier of Central America.’
11
Castro’s apotheosis as an international statesman, already enhanced by the Nicaraguan Revolution, came in September 1979 at the Havana conference of the Non-Aligned Movement. Active measures to exploit the conference proceedings in the Soviet interest had been co-ordinated in advance at meetings between Pedro Pupo Pérez of the DGI and Oleg Maksimovich Nechiporenko and A. N. Itskov of the KGB.
12
In his opening speech as Chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement, Castro denounced not merely the ‘
Yanqui
imperialists’ but ‘their new allies - the Chinese government’. He then paid fulsome tribute to the Soviet Union:
We are thankful to the glorious October Revolution because it started a new age in human history. It made possible the defeat of fascism and created conditions in the world which united the unselfish struggle of the peoples and led to the collapse of the hateful colonial system. To ignore this is to ignore history itself. Not only Cuba, but also Vietnam, the attacked Arab countries, the peoples of the former Portuguese colonies, the revolutionary processes in many countries of the world, the liberation movements which struggle against oppression, racism, Zionism and fascism in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Palestine and in other areas have a lot to be thankful for regarding socialist solidarity. I ask myself if the United States or any country in NATO has ever helped a single liberation movement in our world.