The KGB’s intelligence collection in the early years of the Khomeini era had less impact than its active measures. When Shebarshin became Tehran resident in 1979, he criticized some of his operations officers for lack of energy in trying to cultivate contacts among the army and the mullahs, and for attempting to conceal their lack of high-grade sources. Ironically, one of those in whom he had most confidence was Vladimir Kuzichkin, who, as he later discovered, made secret contact in Tehran with SIS. Shebarshin’s problems were compounded when the head of the residency’s Line PR was arrested in 1981 while meeting a foreign businessman whom he had targeted for recruitment; next day he was expelled from Iran. In the residency reorganization which followed, Kuzichkin was promoted. After his defection in the following year, Shebarshin concluded that the head of Line PR had been deliberately compromised by Kuzichkin to assist his own promotion.
84
Shebarshin also had problems with the special commission on Iran set up by the Politburo after the fall of the Shah, nominally chaired by Brezhnev but with Andropov as its most influential member.
85
The Tehran residency sent what Shebarshin considered valuable reports from four non-Russian FCD officers whose ethnic origins - Armenian, Azeri, Turkmen and Uzbek - allowed them daily to mingle undetected with the local population. The Politburo Commission, however, was not satisfied with the residency’s lack of high-level sources in the Khomeini regime and its coverage of the hostage crisis in the American embassy. On 24 April 1980 (a day remembered by President Jimmy Carter as ‘one of the worst of my life’) a secret US attempt to rescue the hostages was aborted after a series of mechanical failures and accidents to the helicopters and aircraft involved in the rescue mission. At 1 a.m. Washington time on the 25th, the White House announced the failure of the rescue attempt. Shebarshin was severely reprimanded by the Centre when he failed to send a report until the following day. He reasonably believed that the residency should not be expected to compete with the immediacy of the media reporting, and that it was better to wait twenty-four hours before producing a considered assessment. On several occasions Shebarshin also - probably unwittingly - committed the politically incorrect error of sending a report which contradicted Andropov’s misguided views on Iran. He reported correctly that news of the Shah’s death in exile in July 1980 had no significant impact on the still-fervent popular support for Khomeini, and that the monarchist cause was dead. Andropov made clear his disapproval of the report. In Shebarshin’s view, he, like a number of others on the Politburo who had met the Shah, ‘greatly overestimated his significance’.
86
The fall of the Shah and Khomeini’s rise to power in Iran were swiftly followed by the triumph of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. On 16 July 1979, at the climax of a long-prepared coup, Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council relieved President Bakr of all his offices and installed Saddam, his former deputy, in his place. Six days later Saddam celebrated his conquest of power by arranging a filmed conference of senior Ba‘thist officials which might have been conceived as a tribute to his role model, Joseph Stalin. The proceedings began with the announcement of ‘a painful and atrocious plot’ and a rehearsed, fabricated confession, reminiscent of Stalin’s show trials, by one of Saddam’s opponents, Muhi al-Din ‘Abd al-Husain Mashhadi, who declared that for the past four years he had been part of a Syrian plot aimed at removing Bakr and Saddam. Saddam, however, took a more direct role in the proceedings than Stalin had ever done. After Mashhadi had completed his confession, Saddam read out the names of sixty-six supposed traitors, all present at the conference, pausing occasionally to light his cigar. As those he had named were led away to be executed by their Party comrades, the audience erupted into hysterical chants of support for Saddam and demands of death for traitors.
87
Much of the energy of Saddam’s intelligence services, like those of Stalin, was to be expended on the hunting down of ‘traitors’ both at home and abroad. Saddam’s admiration for Stalin as a role model, however, did not diminish his suspicion of current Soviet policy. Among the victims of his first purge were those he suspected of favouring close ties with the Soviet Union, chief among them Murtada Sa’d ‘Abd al-Baqi, Iraqi ambassador to Moscow.
88
By the time Saddam Hussein seized power, the ICP had been driven underground. Though Moscow remained anxious to avoid an open breach with Baghdad, the Politburo agreed on secret support to the Party to enable it to organize opposition to Saddam. In April 1979 a member of the ICP Politburo codenamed STOGOV had two secret meetings in Tehran with the deputy head of the FCD Eighth (Iran and the non-Arab Middle East) Department, Lev Petrovich Kostromin, to report on the measures taken by the Party to prepare for ‘armed struggle’.
89
A camp for 100 partisans had been set up in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan with the help of the Marxist-oriented Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) headed by Jalal Talabani. STOGOV claimed that three more partisan groups were in the process of formation and that talks were being held with Talabani in the hope of forming a united front against the Iraqi regime.
90
On 19 July the Soviet Politburo authorized the KGB to supply the ICP with the equipment for a secret radio station at its base in Iraqi Kurdistan. Free training for three Iraqis chosen to operate the station was provided in the Soviet Union.
91
At a meeting with the deputy head of the FCD Eighteenth (Arab states) Department, G. P. Kapustyan, on 19 October, the ICP leader, Aziz Muhammad, reported that calls for resistance to Saddam were being broadcast by the two Kurdish movements, the PUK and the nationalist Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), headed by Mas’ud Barzani (son of the KDP’s founder, Mullah Mustafa Barzani). Muhammad asked for ten relay stations to extend the station’s broadcasting range.
92
Soviet hostility to Saddam Hussein was reinforced by his immediate denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. The following month Czechoslovakia secretly agreed to supply the ICP base in Kurdistan with 1,000 anti-tank rockets and several thousand Skorpion sub-machine guns with ammunition.
93
Further military supplies followed from the Soviet Union and Hungary.
94
Apart from acting as a conduit for Soviet-bloc arms, however, the ICP added little to the strength of Kurd resistance. Aziz Muhammad admitted to a KGB contact that Party organization inside Iraq had largely broken down. His plan to move the ICP Politburo to Kurdistan was being resisted by ‘some leading comrades’ who preferred to stay in exile in the Soviet bloc. Muhammad acknowledged that the Party needed to rectify the ‘low level of its ideological work’, resolve internal differences, reorganize its security and intelligence system, and improve central direction.
95
The outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in September 1980 reduced Soviet-Iraqi relations to their lowest point since the establishment of the Ba‘th regime. Saddam’s invasion of Iran, whose immediate pretext was the long-running border dispute over the Shatt al-Arab waterway, was motivated by a mixture of fear and aggression: fear that Khomeini would rouse Iraq’s Shia majority to revolt, combined with a desire to take advantage of the confusion in the Iranian armed forces brought about by the Islamic revolution. Moscow declared its neutrality in the conflict and cut off all military supplies to Iraq, including those due under existing contracts. Saddam’s delusions of grandeur made him confident, none the less, of an easy victory. A popular joke put Iraq’s population at 28 million: 14 million Iraqis and 14 million portraits of Saddam Hussein. Oil export revenues, which had risen from $1 billion in 1972 to $21 billion in 1979, fed Saddam’s ambitions. ‘Iraq’, he boasted, ‘is as great as China, as great as the Soviet Union and as great as the United States.’
96
Among the greatest of Saddam’s delusions was his absurd belief, despite his complete lack of military experience, in his own military genius.
97
His inept generalship helped to ensure that, instead of ending in a quick victory, the war with Iran was to drag on for eight years and end with fighting inside Iraq.
The Kurds, as well as the Iranians, benefited from Saddam’s military incompetence. At the end of 1980 Aziz Muhammad sent an optimistic message to the Soviet Politburo via the KGB resident in Damascus. War with Iran had forced Saddam to reduce his forces in Kurdistan. The ICP, Muhammad reported, was making progress in bringing together the Kurdish factions into a unified military campaign to overthrow Saddam’s dictatorship. Armed ICP partisan units in Iraqi Kurdistan, including some members of the Central Committee, were ready to join the armed struggle. Significantly, however, Muhammad spoke not of thousands but only of ‘hundreds’ of Communist partisans. In reality, though Muhammad refused to recognize it, the ICP units had no prospect either of posing a significant threat to Saddam Hussein or of providing leadership for the much more numerous Kurdish detachments. ‘You, dear Comrades’, he told the Soviet Politburo, ‘remain our main support and hope.’ He asked for $500,000 to support ‘the struggle of our partisan detachments and the work of our Party within Iraq’ during the coming year.
98
Soviet support for Kurdish partisans in Iraq remained secret. During the Twenty-sixth Congress of the CPSU in the spring of 1981 Aziz Muhammad denounced the campaign of ‘savage repression’ conducted against the ICP and the Kurdish people by the Iraqi Ba‘th regime. But, at least in the
Pravda
version of his speech, he was allowed to make no reference to the partisan war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Muhammad was permitted only to say, vaguely, that the ICP was employing ‘diverse methods for the struggle for the establishment of a democratic regime and autonomy for the Kurdish people’.
99
In the last resort Moscow was unwilling to give large-scale support to the Kurds for fear of helping Khomeini achieve victory in the Iran-Iraq War.
In the summer of 1981, having lost hope of a quick victory over Iran, Saddam abandoned his opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union responded by inconspicuously ending its arms embargo. Soviet arms deliveries during the remainder of the year, however, fell far short of Iraqi requirements. In 1982 the tide of war shifted in favour of Tehran. During the spring Iran recovered almost all the territory lost since the beginning of the conflict. In June Iraq announced a unilateral withdrawal from Iranian territory. Iran, however, failed to respond to Saddam’s peace moves and carried the war onto Iraqi territory. Anxious to prevent an Iranian victory, Moscow resumed large-scale arms exports to Iraq for the first time since the start of the war. In return Saddam declared a general amnesty for Iraqi Communists and released many from jail.
100
The Soviet Union no longer had any illusions about the prospects of turning Iraq into its main Middle Eastern bridgehead. The prospect of an Iranian victory over Iraq, however, followed by a triumphant Khomeini inciting Soviet Muslims to revolt, was totally unacceptable. The scale of Soviet military supplies to Baghdad was thus carefully calculated to prevent decisive victory by either side. Kissinger’s celebrated comment, ‘What a pity they can’t both lose!’, probably evoked some sympathy in Moscow.
The partial mending of bridges between Moscow and Baghdad coincided with a Soviet intelligence disaster in Tehran. On 5 June 1982 Shebarshin was on holiday at a KGB sanatorium re-reading
War and Peace
when he received an urgent summons to Moscow, where he was told that Kuzichkin had disappeared from Tehran three days earlier. A KGB investigation eventually concluded, correctly, that Kuzichkin had been working for SIS and had fled across the Turkish border using a British passport. The next two months, Shebarshin wrote later, were ‘the most difficult, the most bitter period of my life’: ‘It is painful for me to recall that I had once got on well with [Kuzichkin] and facilitated his promotion.’ Shebarshin was forced to return to Tehran to close down agent networks which Kuzichkin might have compromised.
The final humiliation, so far as Shebarshin was concerned, was an order from the Centre to call on the head of the British diplomatic mission, Nicholas Barrington (later knighted), to ask how a British passport had come into Kuzichkin’s possession: ‘The absurdity of this plan was clear to me, but someone in the Centre had imagined that the Englishman would reveal the whole truth to me. This was one of those stupid orders which I was forced to carry out periodically throughout the entire course of my service in the KGB.’
101
Shebarshin and Barrington had been on friendly terms since they had met while on diplomatic postings in Pakistan in the mid-1960s before Shebarshin joined the KGB - though Barrington’s wide range of Pakistani contacts had led Shebarshin to conclude wrongly that he was an SIS officer. On leaving the Soviet embassy in Tehran for the appointment made by his secretary with Barrington in the summer of 1982, Shebarshin had only to cross the road to enter the British embassy. Since the beginning of the hostage crisis at the US embassy, however, the Swedish, not the Union, flag had flown over the embassy. To protect those of its staff who remained in Tehran, it had become the British interests section of the Swedish embassy. Instead of following the Centre’s absurd instructions to ask Barrington about the British passport given to Kuzichkin to help him escape across the Turkish frontier, a question which no British diplomat would have dreamt of answering, Shebarshin merely reported that Kuzichkin had disappeared and asked if Barrington had any news. The two men then had a general discussion on the dangers of diplomatic life in Khomeini’s Iran.
102
‘Barrington’, Shebarshin later recalled, ‘was courteous, even sympathetic, and promised to consult London.’
103