Asad was deeply dissatisfied with the performance of Syria’s MiG-19s and MiG-21s during the Yom Kippur War, and angry that the Soviet Union had refused to supply the more advanced MiG-23. He showed his displeasure by declining to send the usual congratulations to Moscow on the anniversary of the October Revolution.
42
A visit to Syria in February 1974 by Air Marshal A. Pokryshkin to assess Syria’s military needs failed to resolve the friction with Moscow. An official communiqué after Asad’s visit to Moscow in April described the atmosphere as one of ‘frankness’ (a codeword for serious argument) as well as, less convincingly, ‘mutual understanding’. Moscow’s desire to settle the dispute with Asad, however, was greatly increased by Sadat’s apostasy and turn towards the United States. A week after Asad’s April visit, Marshal Viktor Kulikov, chief-of-staff of the Soviet armed forces, flew to Damascus to carry out a fresh assessment of Syrian needs. In the course of 1974 Syria was supplied with over 300 Soviet fighter aircraft, including 45 MiG-23s with Cuban and North Korean pilots, over 1,000 tanks, 30 Scud missiles (with a range of up to 300 kilometres), 100 shorter-range Frog missiles and other military equipment. By the end of the year 3,000 Soviet military advisers had been despatched to Syria and training had begun in the Soviet Union for Syrian pilots of MiG-23s.
43
In June 1975 the head of the International Department of the CPSU, Boris Ponomarev, told a Ba‘th delegation in Moscow ‘how much the Soviet people and its Party valued the existence in Syria of a progressive national front with the participation of the Syrian Communist Party’.
44
Simultaneously, however, without Asad’s knowledge, the KGB was using the Bakdash wing of the Party leadership to recruit illegals. At a meeting in Moscow with P. D. Sheyin, a senior officer in the FCD Illegals Directorate S on 19 March 1975, Bakdash and a close associate (codenamed FARID) agreed to begin the search for suitable candidates as soon as they returned to Damascus.
45
They were given the following criteria to guide their selection:
[Candidates] were to be dedicated and reliable members of the Communist Party, firmly holding Marxist-Leninist Internationalist positions, with experience of illegal Party work, not widely known within the country as belonging to the Communist Party, bold, determined, resourceful, with organizational aptitude, highly disciplined and industrious, in good physical health, preferably unmarried, aged between 25 and 45. They were to have a good understanding of international affairs, and be capable of analysing and summarizing political information.
These candidates were intended for work in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Besides a native command of English or Persian (for Iran), they had to have a real possibility of obtaining an entry visa for Saudi Arabia or Iran on their own, for the purpose of working and long-term settlement; they had to have a qualification which was needed in the above countries (such as engineer, or technician in the petro-chemical field, in civil engineering related to road construction or housing construction, water and gas supply, electronics, civil aviation, or service industries).
It was desirable that the candidates should have relatives or personal contacts who could help them to enter the country and settle by finding a job or starting their own trading or production businesses; or that they should have the possibility of getting a job in their own country or in a third country with a company or enterprise which was represented in or had a branch in Saudi Arabia or Iran, and could thus go out to work there. Only the [Party] General Secretary or a trusted assistant of his should be aware of the use to which these people were being put.
Bakdash probably welcomed the KGB’s request as a reaffirmation of the special relationship with the Soviet leadership which his rivals within the Syrian Communist Party leadership lacked.
46
In his keynote address to the Twenty-fifth CPSU Congress in February 1976, Brezhnev singled out Syria as the Soviet Union’s closest Middle Eastern ally and declared that the two countries ‘act in concert in many international problems, above all in the Middle East’.
47
Asad was unaware that ‘through agent channels’ the KGB was simultaneously planting on him Service A forgeries designed to reinforce his suspicion of Sadat and the United States. Among them was a bogus despatch from the French Foreign Ministry to its embassies in Arab capitals in 1976 reporting that Sadat’s decision to terminate the Soviet-Egyptian Friendship Treaty had been taken under US pressure and was part of his strategy to solicit American investment and turn Egypt into a conduit for US influence in the oil-producing countries of the Middle East.
48
The public celebration of Soviet-Syrian amity suffered a serious setback in June 1976 when Syria intervened in the Lebanese civil war in favour of the Maronite Christians against their PLO and left-wing opponents, with some of whom the KGB had close contacts. The left-wing leader, Kamal Jumblatt, was one of only a handful of Arabs to have been awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. Talks in Moscow in July between Khaddam, the Syrian Foreign Minister, and his Soviet counterpart, Gromyko, ended in such disarray that no joint communiqué was issued.
Pravda
declared that Syria was plunging ‘a knife into the back’ of the Palestinian movement.
49
Asad would have been further outraged had he known that the KGB residency in Damascus was secretly providing funds to support the Lebanese Communist Party which opposed Syrian intervention. On 26 July a KGB Buick Apollo motor car with diplomatic number plates set out from Damascus to the Lebanese border ostensibly to collect correspondence and foodstuffs sent by the Soviet embassy in Beirut. In reality it was carrying $50,000 concealed between a tyre-wall and inner tube for transmission to the Lebanese Communist Party.
50
Two months later a further $100,000 was handed over.
51
The main practical effect of the Soviet-Syrian quarrel during the second half of 1976 was an apparently drastic cutback in Soviet arms supplies. Asad retaliated by refusing an invitation to visit Moscow and by expelling about half the Soviet military advisers (then more numerous in Syria than anywhere else in the world). In January 1977 he instructed the Soviet navy to remove its submarines and support craft from the port of Tartus. Over the next few months, however, the winding down of Syrian involvement in the Lebanese civil war made possible the mending of the rift with Moscow. After the assassination of Kamal Jumblatt in March 1977, his son and successor Walid called on Asad at the end of the forty-day period of mourning - despite widespread and apparently well-founded suspicions that Asad had ordered his father’s death. In April Asad decided to mend his fences with the Soviet Union and flew to Moscow where he was greeted personally at the airport by Brezhnev. At a banquet in the Kremlin, Asad declared that Soviet-Syrian relations had ‘overcome all the difficulties in their way’: ‘We have always been convinced that the relations between our two countries are based on identity of principled outlook and on friendship and common interests . . .’ During 1977 Soviet arms exports to Syria totalled $825 million. In the following year they exceeded $1 billion for the first time.
52
Asad’s extreme hostility to both Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in November 1977 (a day of national mourning in Syria) and the Camp David Agreement of September 1978
53
reinforced his desire for Soviet support, and even produced a short-lived reconciliation between Syria and Iraq. Asad later admitted that, when Sadat visited him in Damascus shortly before his visit to Jerusalem, he thought briefly of locking him up to prevent him going to Israel.
54
KGB files reveal that in December 1977 Asad authorized a secret meeting in Damascus between his intelligence chiefs and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) which discussed plans for assassinating Sadat.
55
In the later 1970s, Moscow once again made the mistake of trying to force the pace in strengthening its alliance with Asad. In an obvious reference to renewed Soviet proposals for a Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation, Brezhnev told him during a Moscow banquet in his honour in October 1978 that the Soviet Union was prepared to expand co-operation with Syria still further, ‘particularly in the field of politics’. A month later, during a visit to Moscow by the Chief of the Syrian General Staff, General Hikmat Shihabi, there was an attempt to pressure him to conclude a trilateral pact with the Soviet Union and Iraq. He was also told that, to avoid the risk of exposing further Syrian MiG-27s to Israeli surprise attack, they would be better stationed in Iraq. Shihabi took deep offence and returned home two days ahead of schedule. Soon afterwards the Syrian ambassador in Moscow was recalled to Damascus.
56
Once again, however, the rift was mended, due chiefly to the common Soviet and Syrian opposition to both Camp David and Israeli support for the Maronite Phalangists in southern Lebanon. Encouraged by KGB active measures
57
which played on his own penchant for conspiracy theory, Asad saw the Camp David agreements as part of a gigantic US-Israeli conspiracy. In March 1980 Asad publicly accused the CIA of encouraging ‘sabotage and subversion’ in Syria in order to bring ‘the entire Arab world under joint US-Israeli domination’.
58
Asad repeatedly claimed and almost certainly believed that a central part of the plan for the subjection of ‘the entire Arab world’ was a secret Zionist conspiracy, with American support, to create a greater Israel. His close friend and Defence Minister, Mustafa Talas, later claimed absurdly that, ‘Had it not been for Hafiz al-Asad, Greater Israel would have been established from the Nile to the Euphrates.’
59
During 1979 Moscow supplied more MiG-27s and other advanced weaponry, as well as writing off 25 per cent of Syria’s estimated $2 billion military debt. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December, Asad was one of the very few leaders outside the Soviet bloc not to join the world-wide chorus of condemnation. His Foreign Minister, Khaddam, told an interviewer: ‘We have studied the situation and have come to the conclusion that the fuss about Afghanistan is meaningless theatrics, designed to reshuffle the cards in the Arab region, to end Sadat’s isolation, and to assist in bringing success to the Camp David agreements.’
In January 1980, in a further attempt to please Moscow, Asad included two members of the Bakdash faction of the Syrian Communist Party in his new government. He also allowed the exiled leader of the Iraqi Communist Party, Aziz Muhammad,
60
to base himself in Syria. In October, Asad finally agreed to sign a twenty-year Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation with the Soviet Union. During 1980 Syrian arms imports from the Soviet bloc exceeded $3 billion.
61
While reinforcing its alliance with Asad, Moscow secretly strengthened its covert relationship with Bakdash. In 1978 Bakdash had assured one of his KGB contacts that, while he remained Party leader, ‘there would never be a Carrillo or even a Marchais’ - in other words, that the Party would remain uncompromisingly loyal to Moscow and ideologically orthodox.
62
He told the Party Congress in 1980: ‘I firmly believe that it is not enough [merely] to declare friendship for the Soviet Union. Rather, we must support every action in Soviet foreign policy which has always been, still is, and always will be in harmony with the interests of all people.’
63
Bakdash also benefited from the support of Asad. Immediately after the signature of the Friendship Treaty in October 1980, Asad began a campaign of intimidation and terror against a Communist breakaway group, led by Bakdash’s opponent, Riyadh al-Turk. Most of al-Turk’s supporters were jailed, forced to leave the Party, driven underground or went into exile. Some were tortured. According to reports by Amnesty International and human rights groups during the 1980s, al-Turk was systematically tortured throughout the decade, and was rushed to hospital at least six times on the verge of death to be resuscitated for further abuse, which included breaking bones in all his limbs.
64
During 1978 108 Syrian Communists went on training courses (doubtless at Soviet expense) in the Soviet Union. The KGB noted that most were the friends or relatives of Party leaders.
65
During 1979 the KGB Damascus residency made five payments to the Party leadership totalling $275,000.
66
Bakdash informed the residency that over $50,000 had been spent on setting up an underground printing press and requested an additional allocation.
67
Payments in 1980 amounted to at least $329,000 and were probably higher.
68
Far more substantial sums, however, were paid to the Party as a result of lucrative Soviet contracts with trading companies controlled by the Party. In 1982, for example, the Damascus residency reported that one of the companies set up with Party funds would contribute during the year 1,200,000 Syrian pounds to the Party.
69
At Bakdash’s personal request, the Damascus residency also secretly supplied the Party with arms: 150 Makarov pistols and ammunition were handed over in June 1980. As a security precaution, in case the arms were subsequently discovered, they were wrapped in Syrian packaging obtained by the KGB on the black market.
70
A further consignment of seventy-five Makarov pistols with ammunition was handed over in March 1981. Bakdash thanked the KGB for ‘their fraternal assistance and constant concern for the needs of the Syrian Communist Party’.
71
At a meeting in a safe apartment a year later with two operations officers from the Damascus residency, Bakdash enumerated one by one the residents with whom he had established close and friendly collaboration over the quarter of a century since he had returned from exile. He ended by eulogizing the KGB: ‘You are the only Soviet authority with which we have always enjoyed, and still enjoy, full mutual understanding on the most varied issues. Please convey to Comrade Andropov the profound gratitude of our Party.’
72