The KGB, however, was increasingly concerned by the growing divisions within the Syrian Communist Party. Late in 1982 Nikolai Fyodorovich Vetrov of the Damascus residency had a series of meetings with Bakdash, then seventy years old, who had been Party leader for half a century. Bakdash complained that ‘not all Party members were totally dedicated to the Marxist-Leninist cause’, and that his age and poor health made it increasingly difficult for him to keep full control over all Party activities. Bakdash was also becoming increasingly suspicious of his associate FARID. He told Vetrov that, though a good Party official, FARID ‘had been unable to break finally with the petit-bourgeois environment from which he came’. Bakdash’s real objection to FARID, however, was fear that he was plotting against him. He told Vetrov that, as well as ‘promoting people who were personally loyal to him’, FARID had become corrupt, borrowing 50,000 Syrian pounds (which he had not repaid) to buy a house in Damascus from a businessman who had made a fortune from Soviet contracts but had ceased to support the Party.
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By the mid-1980s, however, Bakdash caused the Centre greater concern than FARID. For all his past protestations of Soviet loyalism, Bakdash was unable to adapt to the new era of
glasnost
and
perestroika
. As the Soviet Union fell apart, Bakdash defended Stalin and denounced Gorbachev.
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Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 in an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the PLO and strengthen its Maronite allies caused a new crisis in Syrian-Soviet relations. From 9 to 11 June Israel and Syria fought one of the largest air battles of the twentieth century over the Biqa’ valley. The Israeli air force destroyed all Syria’s SAM-6 missile sites on both sides of the Syrian-Lebanese border and shot down twenty-three Syrian MiGs without losing a single aircraft.
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When further SAM sites were installed in the course of the summer the Israelis demolished those too. Behind the scenes the Syrians blamed their defeat on the shortcomings of Soviet equipment, while the Russians blamed Syrian incompetence in using it. Both sides, however, needed each other. ‘Asad needed arms’, writes Patrick Seale, ‘while the Russians needed to restore the reputation of their high-performance weapons as well as their overall political position in the Arab world.’ Asad’s visit to Moscow for Brezhnev’s funeral in November 1982 provided an opportunity to mend fences with the new Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov. Despite opposition from both Gromyko and Ustinov, the Defence Minister, Andropov agreed to provide Syria with advanced weapons systems which were supplied to no other Third World country, some of them operated by Soviet personnel.
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The memoirs of Vadim Kirpichenko, one of the Centre’s leading Middle Eastern experts, contain a curiously fulsome tribute to Asad. During two meetings and five hours of discussions on security and intelligence matters, in the course of which Asad asked many detailed questions about the structure and functions of the KGB,
77
Kirpichenko claims to have found him ‘a good-natured, mild, proper and attentive person. No neurosis whatsoever, no haste, no posing whatsoever.’ Asad strongly reminded Kirpichenko of the legendary KGB officer Ivan Ivanovich Agayants, who had been wartime resident in Tehran and post-war resident in Paris: ‘Old intelligence hands still remember this good-natured and wise man.’ (Kirpichenko does not mention that Agayants was a specialist in deception, also a strong interest of Asad’s.)
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Kirpichenko’s rose-tinted recollections give some sense of the cosmetically enhanced view of Asad’s Syria passed on to the Soviet leadership at the time of the conclusion of the Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation. In reality, Asad was, by any standards, an unattractive ally. The signing of the treaty coincided with the beginning of the most homicidal period of Asad’s rule. During the early 1980s his regime killed at least 10,000 of its own citizens and jailed thousands more in usually atrocious conditions. Most of the Sunni stronghold of Hama, Syria’s most beautiful city and a centre of opposition to the ‘Alawi regime, was destroyed, its magnificent Great Mosque reduced to rubble. Many Lebanese from Syrian-controlled areas of Lebanon disappeared into Syrian prisons never to re-emerge.
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Like Saddam Hussein and Muammar al-Qaddafi, Asad also used his intelligence agencies to hunt down his enemies abroad. As well as becoming notorious for providing safe haven for some of the Middle East’s most ruthless terrorists, his regime also failed to cover its tracks when carrying out its own terrorist operations against émigré dissidents and other Arab critics. Early in 1981 a Syrian hit squad, operating on the orders of Asad’s brother Rif’at, whom the KGB had once claimed to be able to influence,
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entered Jordan with instructions to assassinate the Jordanian Prime Minister, Mudar Badran, whom Asad had publicly condemned for being in league with Americans, Zionists and Syrian dissidents. The entire group was caught and made a humiliating three-hour public confession on Jordanian television, which could be seen by many Syrian viewers. Despite this embarrassment, Rif’at declared publicly that ‘enemies’ who had fled abroad would be dealt with. In March 1982 there were reports in the British press, based on briefings by ‘Western diplomatic sources in Damascus’, that six well-armed ‘hit squads’ had been despatched to Europe to assassinate dissidents. One such three-man squad arrested in Stuttgart, Germany, was found to be carrying sub-machine guns and explosives. A month later a bomb attack on the Paris offices of an Arab newspaper well known for its hostility to the Asad regime killed a pregnant woman passing by and injured sixty-three others, twelve seriously. The French government, which made little secret of its belief that the Asad regime was responsible, promptly expelled two Syrian ‘diplomats’ for ‘unacceptable activities’.
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It is highly unlikely that Brezhnev’s final years were disturbed by reports of such embarrassing bad behaviour by a regime with which he had just signed, after years of persuasion, a Friendship Treaty.
Unattractive though Syria had become as an ally, all other Soviet options for alliance with a major Middle Eastern power had disappeared. Syria’s attempt over the next few years to achieve strategic parity with Israel made it more dependent than ever before on advanced Soviet weaponry, among them fighter planes, surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles, and electronic and air-control battle systems. General Dmitri Volkogonov, then of the GRU, later recalled: ‘No country ever had as many Russian-speaking advisers as Syria . . . Everyone lived in a state of half-war, half-peace. The Soviet Union and its ideology were not wanted by anyone there, but its tanks, guns and technicians were highly valued.’
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By the end of 1985 the Syrian economy was collapsing under the weight of a military budget which accounted for half the gross national product. With Gorbachev unwilling to bail him out, Asad reluctantly accepted in 1986 that strategic parity with Israel was beyond Syria’s reach. The British ambassador in Damascus, Sir Roger Tomkys, found Asad brutally realistic about the changed balance of power in the Middle East. ‘If I were Prime Minister of Israel,’ Asad told him, ‘with its present military superiority and the support of the world’s number one power, I would not make a single concession.’
83
During the later 1980s, Moscow rejected most Syrian requests for advanced weaponry. Asad none the less regarded the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union as a disaster. Despite all his disputes with Moscow over the previous two decades, he had come to regard the Soviet alliance as essential to Syria’s security. A senior Damascus official said mournfully as power in the Kremlin passed from Gorbachev to Yeltsin at the end of 1991, ‘We regret the Soviet collapse more than the Russians do.’
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11
The People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen
The Soviet Union’s closest ideological ally in the Arab world was the People’s Democratic Republic of [South] Yemen (PDRY), founded in 1970, three years after gaining independence from Britain. As in Cuba, the ruling National Liberation Front (NLF) gained power as the result of a guerrilla campaign and thereafter declared itself a Marxist-Leninist party. As the Soviet presence in the Indian Ocean expanded during the 1970s, the Soviet fleet also made increasing use of port facilities at Aden and Socotra Island.
1
According to the Soviet ambassador to the PDRY, O. G. Peresypkin:
We proceeded from the assumption that scientific socialism was a universal theory and we wanted to prove that a small underdeveloped Arab country, a former British colony, would advance with seven-league strides towards the bright future provided it was armed with the slogans of scientific socialism.
The slogans failed. The Soviet advisers seconded to Yemeni ministries imbued them with the cumbersome inefficiency of the command economy in which they had been trained. Aleksandr Vassiliev, one of the Soviet officials who visited the PDRY, noted later: ‘When I visited Aden before collectivization . . . the Aden market and all the waterfronts were full of fish and fish products. When the fishermen were subjected to [collectivization], the fish immediately disappeared. ’ In retrospect, Peresypkin was ‘inclined to forgive the South Yemeni leaders who brought their country to deadlock. They were simply following blindly along behind their “elder brothers” who had “built socialism” . . .’
2
Despite its early hopes of turning the PDRY into an Arab beacon of ‘scientific socialism’, Moscow found South Yemen an almost constant headache. One of the main tasks of the Aden residency was to monitor the nearly continuous intrigues and power struggles which rent the NLF and its successor (from October 1978), the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP). It could do little to control them. From 1969 to 1978 there was a prolonged power struggle between ‘Abd al-Fattah Isma’il, the staunchly pro-Soviet leader of the NLF, and Salim Rubai’ Ali, the more pro-Chinese head of state. In June 1978, with Soviet and Cuban assistance, Isma’il led a successful coup against Rubai’ Ali, who was executed on charges of plotting an armed coup of his own with the support of the West and Saudi Arabia.
3
The main supporters of the PDRY within the Centre during the mid-1970s were Nikolai Leonov and Service 1 (Intelligence Analysis). In 1975 Leonov submitted a report to Andropov arguing that the Soviet Union was getting a poor return for its vast investment in the Middle East. Egypt, Syria and Iraq had no intention of paying their huge debts. Egypt had ceased to be a reliable ally, the Iraqi connection was insecure and Syria was then unwilling to commit itself to a Friendship Treaty. Service 1 therefore proposed concentrating on the PDRY, which did not require large amounts of aid. Its regime was ‘the most Marxist-Leninist’, Aden was of major strategic significance, and its oil distillery could meet the needs of both the Soviet navy and the air force. The report cited the way in which the British Empire had used Aden as one of the key points in its global strategy. The PDRY was also well away from the main Middle Eastern conflict zones. Its only - achievable - strategic need was to make peace with North Yemen. Service 1’s revival of the idea of turning the PDRY into an Arab beacon of ‘scientific socialism’ found little favour with Andropov. After keeping the report for several days, he returned it with a request for it to be shortened. Then he returned the shortened version asking for all the proposals to be deleted, leaving only the information it contained on the current position in the PDRY. In Leonov’s view, all that was of interest in the original document had now been removed from it. He had no doubt that Andropov’s demands for cuts derived from his personal discussions of its proposals with Politburo members who disliked the idea of increasing contact with a regime cursed with apparently ineradicable internecine warfare.
4
From 1972 onwards, however, the Centre maintained close links with the PDRY intelligence service, which proudly called its officers ‘Chekists’ in honour of its Soviet allies.
5
On 12 May 1972 Andropov had a meeting in Moscow with the Yemeni Interior Minister, Muhammad Salih Mutiya, during which the KGB agreed to provide free training for PDRY intelligence officers and cipher personnel. The fact that Mutiya also accepted an offer of free Soviet ciphers presumably enabled the FCD Sixteenth Directorate to decrypt PDRY intelligence radio traffic.
6
From July 1973 a KGB liaison officer was stationed in Aden (in addition to the undeclared staff of the Aden residency). In May 1974 the KGB and PDRY intelligence agency signed a secret agreement on collaboration in intelligence operations against the United States, United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. As part of the agreement the PDRY was supplied with ‘special equipment’, probably for use in bugging and surveillance operations. In 1976 the two agencies collaborated in operation KHAMSIN to bug the Saudi Arabian embassy in Aden.
7
Just as the Politburo disliked dealing with the divided Yemeni regime, however, so the KGB despised some of its PDRY intelligence allies. A prime example was a senior Yemeni intelligence officer codenamed AREF,
8
who was given a free holiday in 1978 at the Dubovaya Roscha Sanatorium at Zheleznovodsk, where he was diagnosed as suffering from cardiac insufficiency, diabetes, insomnia, nervous and physical exhaustion, as well as from excessive alcohol consumption. These ailments were not AREF’s main concern. His first priorities were treatment for incipient baldness and plastic surgery to improve his appearance. His Soviet doctor concluded that many of his problems stemmed from obsessive masturbation and a ‘passive’ homosexual relationship with a senior Yemeni minister which had produced nervous and sexual debility. AREF, however, turned out to be bisexual and pestered his interpreter, V. Konavalov, a KGB operations officer, to persuade a woman he had met at the clinic to have sexual relations with him. When Konavalov refused, saying that his duties were limited to providing translation and arranging medical treatment, AREF replied, ‘Comrade “Aleksandrov” [Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD] paid for the tickets, gave me a free pass to the Sanatorium, and I am convinced that he would not object to my having women.’ When Konavalov still refused, AREF accused him of being a racist. Konavalov also reported that, though AREF had brought with him some of the works of Marx and Lenin, he did not read them and used them only for display purposes.
9