While cautious in its public statements, however, the Soviet leadership authorized an increase in arms shipments to Cuba, some of them secretly intended for other destinations in Central America. According to US officials, more Soviet arms were sent to Cuba during the first eight months of 1981 than at any time since the missile crisis of 1962.
35
In May 1981 a Nicaraguan-Soviet-Cuban commission met in Managua to discuss the supply of Soviet arms to the Sandinista EPS. Following agreement in June, the first heavy weapons (tanks and artillery) began to arrive at Port Bluff in July.
36
Castro subsequently complained that, instead of continuing to discuss all their arms requirements with Cuba, the Sandinistas were now approaching the Soviet Union directly.
37
On 21 November Humberto Ortega and Marshal Ustinov signed an arms treaty in Moscow ratifying the agreement reached in Managua in June.
38
Within a few years the EPS was over 100,000 strong and had become the most powerful military force in Central American history.
Castro somewhat hysterically compared the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as US President in January 1981 to Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German Chancellor in January 1933. After Reagan’s election two months earlier, Castro had summoned the Cuban people to organize themselves into territorial militia to defend their fatherland against American attack. To pay for weapons, workers ‘volunteered’ to give up a day’s wages. The
Yanqui
invaders, Castro declared, would ‘face an anthill, an armed anthill . . . invincible and unyielding, and never, never surrendering!’ In addition to the private warnings which he instructed American diplomats to deliver, Alexander Haig publicly denounced Cuba and the Soviet Union for acting as both ‘tutors and arms suppliers’ to Central American revolutionaries. Cuba’s activities, he declared, were ‘no longer acceptable in this hemisphere’. The United States would ‘deal with this matter at source’. To Castro that appeared as an invasion threat.
39
Privately, he was annoyed that Moscow did not take a stronger line in public towards the new Reagan administration. According to a KGB report, he told a Soviet military delegation which visited Cuba in February, headed by the chief-of-staff of the Soviet armed forces, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, that the Soviet Union should toughen its policy towards the United States. In particular, it should refuse to accept the deployment of American cruise missiles in Europe. Castro made the extraordinary proposal that, if the deployment went ahead, Moscow should seriously consider re-establishing the nuclear missile bases in Cuba dismantled after the missile crisis nineteen years earlier. The new Cuban militia, he boasted, now numbered 500,000 men.
40
The KGB reported that Castro’s fears of American attack were strengthened by the crisis in Poland, where the authority of the Communist one-party state was being eroded by the groundswell of popular support for the Solidarity movement. Though he had no more (and probably even less) sympathy for Solidarity than he had had for the reformers of the Prague Spring in 1968, Castro told ‘a Soviet representative’ (probably a KGB officer) that if the Red Army intervened in Poland in 1981, as it had done in Czechoslovakia in 1968, there might be ‘serious consequences for Cuba in view of its immediate proximity to the USA’. Castro, in other words, was afraid that a Soviet invasion of Poland might provoke an American invasion of Cuba.
41
When General Wojciech Jaruzelski became Polish Party leader in October, Castro insisted on the need for him to take ‘decisive measures’ which would make Soviet intervention unnecessary: ‘Otherwise he will be finished both as a military leader and as a political figure.’ The only solution, Castro argued, was for Jaruzelski to declare martial law, even if Solidarity responded by calling a general strike: ‘One should not be afraid of strikes, since in themselves they are incapable of changing the government.’
42
Castro seems to have been aware that Moscow’s policy was essentially the same as his. Andropov told the Politburo that Soviet military intervention was too risky to undertake. The veiled threats of intervention, which Castro took seriously, were intended to persuade the irresolute Jaruzelski to declare martial law and outlaw Solidarity, which he duly did in December 1981.
43
Despite Castro’s impeccable ideological orthodoxy and denunciation of Polish revisionism, his delusions of grandeur as a major statesman on the world stage continued to cause concern in Moscow. The KGB reported in 1981 that the Cuban presence in Africa was giving rise to ‘complications’: ‘Leading personalities in Angola and Ethiopia doubt the desirability of the Cuban troops’ continuing presence on the territory of these countries. The Cubans’ efforts to influence internal processes in developing countries are turning into interference in their internal affairs.’
Cuban interference was all the more resented because its own mismanaged economy made it impossible for it to offer economic aid. The KGB also reported that Castro was in danger of being carried away by the prospects for revolution in Central America:
The victory of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua and of progressive forces in Grenada, the increasing number of incidents in El Salvador, and the mobilization of left-wing groups in Guatemala and Honduras give some Cuban leaders the impression that the historic moment has now come for a total revolution in Central Latin America, and that this must be expedited by launching an armed struggle in the countries of the region.
Raúl Castro reports that some members of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party - [Manuel] Piñeiro, head of the American Department [Departamento América] and Secretary of the Central Committee, together with [José] Abr[ah]antes, the First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs - are prompting Fidel Castro to take ill-considered action and calling for the export of revolution.
44
Castro’s first target for ‘the export of revolution’ remained El Salvador. He told Ogarkov in February 1981 that he had called a secret meeting in Havana of DRU and FMLN leaders in order to work out an agreed strategy for continuing the revolutionary struggle after the failure of what had been intended as the ‘final offensive’ in January.
45
Though Mitrokhin’s notes do not record the results of that meeting, Schafik Handal later informed a KGB operations officer that the PCS had adopted a policy of guerrilla warfare and sabotage operations, with the aim of forcing the junta into negotiations with the DRU. In October the DRU held a meeting in Managua with representatives of the Sandinista regime and six revolutionary groups from Honduras. They jointly agreed to prepare for a guerrilla uprising in Honduras in case this proved necessary to prevent action by the Honduran army against FMLN guerrillas. According to KGB reports, pressure had been put on the President of Honduras, General Policarpo Paz García, to prevent his troops from being drawn into the civil war in El Salvador. Guerrilla forces in Guatemala were also allegedly strong enough to deter intervention by the Guatemalan army. Costa Rican Communists were said to have 600 well-trained and equipped guerrillas who were prepared to intervene on the side of the FMLN. Colombian revolutionaries had received over 1.2 million dollars’ worth of weapons and ammunition via the Sandinistas and were reported to be ‘capable of initiating combat actions in Colombia upon command’. The Libyan leader, Colonel Qaddafi, was providing large sums of money for the transport of weapons to guerrilla groups.
46
Late in 1981, the FMLN agreed with Castro on a strategy designed to disrupt the elections due to be held in El Salvador in March 1982. Soviet arms supplies channelled by the Cubans through Honduras and Belize were used to block roads, destroy public transport and attack polling booths and other public buildings.
47
Ogarkov, among others, appears to have believed that the strategy might succeed. According to the Grenadan minutes of his meeting in Moscow shortly before the elections with the Chief of Staff of the People’s Revolutionary Armed Forces of Grenada:
The Marshal [Ogarkov] said that over two decades ago there was only Cuba in Latin America, today there are Nicaragua, Grenada and a serious battle is going on in El Salvador. The Marshal of the Soviet Union then stressed that United States imperialism would try to prevent progress but that there were no prospects for imperialism to turn back history.
48
The FMLN strategy, however, failed. The turnout at the El Salvador elections, witnessed by hundreds of foreign observers and journalists, was over 80 per cent. Henceforth the DRU and FMLN were resigned to a protracted ‘people’s war’ on the Vietnamese model, epitomized by the slogan, ‘Vietnam Has Won! El Salvador Will Win!’
49
Civil war continued in El Salvador for another decade.
Since Moscow appears to have seen little prospect of an early FMLN victory, the KGB’s main priority became to exploit the civil war in active measures designed to discredit US policy. In particular it set out to make military aid to the El Salvador government (increased more than five-fold by the Reagan administration between 1981 and 1984) so unpopular within the United States that public opinion would demand that it be halted. Mitrokhin’s notes on KGB active measures consist of only a brief file summary: ‘Influence was exerted on US public opinion: about 150 committees were created in the United States which spoke out against US interference in El Salvador, and contacts were made with US Senators.’
50
As often happened, the Centre seems to have exaggerated its ability to influence Western opinion. The majority of US protesters required no prompting by the KGB to oppose the policy of the Reagan administration in El Salvador. Both the KGB and the Cuban Departamento América, however, undoubtedly played a significant and probably co-ordinated role in expanding the volume of protest. A tour of the United States by Schafik Handal’s brother, Farid, early in 1980 led to the founding of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), an umbrella group co-ordinating the work of many local committees opposed to US involvement. Farid Handal’s most important contacts in New York were Alfredo García Almedo, head of the DA’s North American department, who operated under diplomatic cover as a member of the Cuban Mission to the UN, and the leadership of the Communist Party of the United States, which was also in touch with the KGB.
51
Soon after its foundation, CISPES disseminated an alleged State Department ‘Dissent Paper on El Salvador and Central America’, which purported to reflect the concerns of many ‘current and former analysts and officials’ in the National Security Council, State Department, Pentagon and CIA. In reality, the document was a forgery, almost certainly produced by FCD Service A. It warned that continued military aid to the El Salvador government would eventually force the United States to intervene directly, and praised the political wing of the FMLN as ‘a legitimate and representative political force’ with wide popular support. Among the journalists who quoted the document were two columnists on the
New York Times
. One, Flora Lewis, later apologized to her readers for having been deceived by a forgery. The other, Anthony Lewis (no relation), did not.
52
Soviet caution about the ‘export of revolution’ in Central America was reinforced by the increased risks of confrontation with the United States. On 1 December 1981 Reagan authorized covert support for the ‘Contra’ opposition, initially approving the expenditure of $19 million to train 500 ‘resistance fighters’. Support for the Contras rapidly ceased to be secret and turned into a public relations disaster which KGB active measures sought to exploit around the world.
53
As the ‘Great Communicator’ later acknowledged in his memoirs, ‘One of my greatest frustrations . . . was my inability to communicate to the American people and to Congress the seriousness of the threat we faced in Central America.’
54
On 10 March 1982 the
Washington Post
revealed the covert action programme approved three months earlier and disclosed that the 500 Contras were being secretly trained to destroy Nicaraguan power plants and bridges, as well as to ‘disrupt the Nicaraguan arms supply line to El Salvador’. Six months later the Contras numbered almost 3,500. On 8 November the lead story in
Newsweek
, headlined ‘America’s Secret War: Target Nicaragua’, revealed the use of the Contras in a CIA covert operation intended to overthrow the Nicaraguan government and the involvement of the US ambassador to Honduras in their training and organization. The Reagan administration was forced to admit its secret backing for the Contras, but claimed implausibly that the purpose was merely to put pressure on, rather than to overthrow, the Sandinistas.
Congress was unconvinced. On 8 December, by a majority of 411 to 0, the House of Representatives passed the ‘Boland Amendment’, prohibiting both the Defense Department and the CIA from providing military equipment, training or advice for the purpose of overthrowing the Sandinista regime. The experience of the US-backed attempt to overthrow the Castro regime by the landing at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 should have made clear that paramilitary operations on the scale planned against the Sandinistas twenty years later in an era of more investigative journalism could not reasonably be expected to remain secret. ‘A
covert
operation’, writes George Shultz, who succeeded Haig as Secretary of State in 1982, ‘was being converted to
overt
by talk on Capitol Hill and in the daily press and television news coverage.’ By the summer of 1983, the CIA favoured making public American support for Contra operations, and transferring management of it to the Defense Department. The Pentagon, however, successfully resisted taking responsibility for such a controversial programme. Reagan’s covert action in Central America had thus become riddled with contradictions which were easily exploited by both his political opponents and Soviet active measures. What had become in practice an overt programme of support to the Contras was still being implemented as a covert operation - with the result, as Shultz complained, that ‘the administration could not openly defend it’. Reagan himself added to the contradictions by publicly proclaiming one policy while secretly following another. The stated aim of support for the Contras was to prevent the Sandinistas undermining their neighbours ‘through the export of subversion and violence’. ‘Let us be clear as to the American attitude toward the Government of Nicaragua,’ the President told a joint session of Congress on 27 April. ‘We do not seek its overthrow.’ The KGB was well aware, however, that Reagan’s real aim was precisely that - the overthrow of the government of Nicaragua.
55