The most important lesson drawn by Nkrumah from his overthrow was ‘that independent African states must pursue a policy of all-out socialism if they are to survive’.
35
That his host in Guinea, Sékou Touré, survived in power, however, was due not to ‘all-out socialism’ but to the pervasiveness of his reign of terror which left even the army too cowed to attempt a military coup. The prisoners brought from their homes in the early hours for interrogation at Camp Boiro and other prison camps constructed with assistance from the East German Stasi and the Czechoslovak StB were tortured until they confessed to the usually imaginary conspiracies with which Sékou Touré was obsessed.
36
The KGB turned a blind eye to the horrors of the Guinean regime, preferring instead to exploit its leader’s paranoid tendencies by active measures designed to convince him that the CIA was plotting to overthrow him. On at least one occasion (and probably on others not noted by Mitrokhin), the Centre heightened the dramatic impact of Service A’s forgeries by sending a senior KGB officer to Conakry, the Guinean capital, to deliver them in person. When shown the forgeries, Sékou Touré became - according to a KGB report - highly emotional, exclaiming angrily, ‘The filthy imperialists!’ The CIA officers responsible for the (non-existent) plot would, he declared, be expelled within twenty-four hours: ‘We highly appreciate the concern shown by our Soviet comrades.’
37
Active measures, however, were powerless to change Guinean economic realities. The Soviet aid and imports which poured into Guinea in the early years of independence achieved little. A Radio Moscow correspondent visiting Conakry complained, ‘We gave them what they wanted and they didn’t know what to do with it.’ But much of the blame lay with Moscow itself for embarking on a series of grandiose prestige projects which collapsed in disarray: among them a city-wide Conakry public address system which was soon switched off and never used again; a giant printing plant which operated at less than 5 per cent of capacity; a huge outdoor theatre which was abandoned half-completed; a 100kW radio station which was erected over a vein of iron ore and never functioned properly; and a national airline equipped with nine Ilyushins which were usually grounded.
38
Most remarkable of all was a report that Soviet snow ploughs had arrived in Conakry - a report which was widely disbelieved until a British academic discovered them rusting away at the end of the airport runway.
39
In 1978, after almost two decades of supposedly socialist construction, Sékou Touré was finally forced to seek help from the West to bail out his bankrupt economy.
40
Though the initial priorities of KGB active measures in Africa were operations in newly independent ‘progressive’ regimes designed to strengthen their suspicion of the United States and their trust in the Soviet Union, the apparent success of Service A’s forged documents purporting to reveal CIA plots led to their use in almost every (perhaps every) country on the continent. In operation ANDROMEDA, for example, the military ruler of Nigeria, General Yakubu ‘Jack’ Gowon, President of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1973-74, was sent a fabricated letter in March 1973 supposedly written by a patriotic junior army officer, anxious to alert him to Agency subversion in the armed forces:
Sir! I urge you to take urgent and just actions to defend the nation from the dangerous activities of certain American diplomats in this country, who are trying with all their might to deceive our soldiers and reduce our nation again to chaos. I am well acquainted with Mr H. Duffy, an officer in the US embassy whom I regard with great respect. It is always pleasant to spend time with him, and I usually visited him whenever I came to Lagos. Some time ago Mr Duffy informed me that their First Secretary, Mr Jack Mauer, wanted to consult with me. He described Mr Mauer as an influential person who could offer me assistance in arranging a trip to study at a US military college. I agreed and was introduced to Mr Mauer at a lawn tennis club. We agreed to meet in the evening. At the appointed time Mr Mauer arrived at the place where I was waiting for him. He was with a friend from the embassy who, as I understood it, was the owner of the car in which they arrived (LR 2229) and in which they drove me home to my brother’s house. They began to question me in detail about several young officers in our battalion, and asked me to inform them about the ones who were stealing weapons from our warehouse. I in fact do suspect that at least three of our soldiers and officers are concealing many weapons. I promised to help Mr Mauer and his friend (I do not know his name), but am not about to do anything for them, since I understood what it is they want. But I thought that no one knows how many others might take their bait.
In the name of peace and order in this country, I urge you to stop them before they go too far. God bless you!
41
In Morocco two years later, operation EKSPRESS brought to the attention of King Hassan II a forged report from a CIA agent on an Agency plot to overthrow him. To add plausibility to the forgery, the report correctly identified the head of the CIA station, Charles ‘Chuck’ Cogan. Three US businessmen and a Rabat notable whom the KGB wished to discredit were also - probably falsely - named as working for the CIA.
42
Following the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s, the KGB also embarked on a major programme of active measures designed to discredit Mao’s regime. The Chinese message to the newly independent African states which alarmed Moscow was succinctly summarized in a verse by the Gambian poet Lenrie Peters:
The Chinese then stepped in . . .
We’re Communist brothers
To help you build Black Socialism.
Only you must kick out the Russians.
43
After some early successes, however, the Chinese overplayed their hand. In May 1965 Kenyan security forces seized a convoy of Chinese arms
en route
via Uganda to rebel forces in Congo (Kinshasa).
44
While on a visit to Tanzania in June, the Chinese Prime Minister, Zhou Enlai, declared that Africa was now ‘ripe for revolution’. African leaders were so indignant (‘Revolution against whom?’) that, despite having been welcomed in a number of their capitals over the previous two years, Zhou found nowhere else willing to receive him after he left Tanzania. The Kenyan authorities refused even to allow his plane to refuel on its journey home. Chinese pledges of aid to Africa dropped from $111 million in 1964 to $15 million in 1965.
45
The Centre, which referred to the Chinese in Africa by the demeaning codename ‘Ants’ (MURAVYI),
46
claimed much of the credit for the expulsion of PRC missions from Burundi, the Central African Republic, Dahomey, Tunisia and Senegal between 1965 and 1968.
47
As frequently happened, the KGB probably claimed more credit than it was due. Burundi’s decision to ‘suspend’ diplomatic relations with the PRC in January 1965 appears to have been motivated by the belief of Mwami (King) Mwambutsa that the Chinese had been implicated in the assassination of the Prime Minister, Pierre Ngendnadumwe.
48
Though KGB active measures may well have encouraged Mwambutsa’s suspicions, however, some historians conclude that the assassins did indeed have links with the PRC.
49
In January 1966 Colonel Jean Bedel (later self-styled ‘Emperor’) Bokassa, who had just seized power in the Central African Republic, broke off diplomatic relations with China following the discovery of documents which allegedly revealed a plot by an underground Armée Populaire Centrafricaine controlled by ‘Chinese or pro-Chinese’ .
50
Though proof is lacking, the emergence of these documents has all the hallmarks of a Service A fabrication. When the Dahomey regime of General Christophe Soglo also broke off relations with Beijing in January 1966, it gave no reasons and no evidence is available on the influence - if any - of Soviet active measures.
51
The breaking of diplomatic relations between Tunisia and the PRC in September 1967 followed a bitter polemic between the two countries in which President Habib Bourguiba had accused China of seeking ‘to provoke difficulties, to aggravate existing contradictions, to arm and train guerrillas against the existing [African] regimes’.
52
The KGB reported that the polemic had been fuelled by a bogus Chinese letter, fabricated by Service A, which was sent to Bourguiba’s son containing personal threats against him as well as attacking the regime.
53
While KGB active measures may have reinforced President Bourguiba’s suspicions of China, however, they are unlikely to have been at the root of them.
Though Kenya did not break off relations with the PRC, it expelled four Chinese officials in two years, the last of them the chargé d’affaires, Li Chieh, who was declared persona non grata in June 1967.
54
Though not publicly stated, the main reason for the expulsions was the PRC’s support for the left-wing Deputy President of the ruling KANU Party, Oginga Odinga, who had secretly told the Chinese in 1964 that President Jomo Kenyatta should be overthrown.
55
Odinga, who had also been courted by the Russians,
56
was replaced as Deputy President in 1966 and lost a trial of strength with Kenyatta over the next year. As evidence of Chinese machinations, Kenyan newspapers published extracts from an inflammatory pamphlet entitled ‘New [Chinese] Diplomats Will Bring the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to Africa’. Though published in the name of the New China News Agency, the pamphlet appears to have been forged.
57
The most likely forger was Service A. Fabrications designed to discredit the Chinese in West Africa included a pamphlet attacking the regime of President Léopold Senghor in Senegal supposedly issued by pro-Chinese Senegalese Communists and bogus information about Chinese plots which was sent to Senghor’s government. On the basis of such active measures, the KGB claimed the credit for the expulsion from Senegal in 1968 of two New China News Agency correspondents.
58
In neighbouring Mali the KGB reported also in 1968 that it had brought about the dismissal of the Minister of Information after an active-measures operation, codenamed ALLIGATOR, had compromised him as a Chinese stooge.
59
There can have been few long-serving African leaders who were not at various times fed fabricated evidence of both Chinese and CIA conspiracies against them. Occasionally, however, the fabrications were based on fact - as in the case of the evidence of Chinese plots communicated to President Mobutu.
60
After the later improvement of relations between the PRC and Zaire, Mao personally told Mobutu during his visit to Beijing, ‘I wasted a lot of money and arms trying to overthrow you.’ ‘Well, you backed the wrong man,’ replied Mobutu .
61
The case of Mobutu illustrates the complexity of KGB active measures in some African states. As well as being warned of Chinese plots against him, other active measures spread stories of his collaboration with the CIA.
62
The undoubted decline of Chinese influence in Africa during the mid- and late 1960s, however, was due less to Soviet active measures than to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Beginning in 1966, experienced ambassadors were withdrawn from Africa, often to be paraded in dunces’ hats and abused by Red Guards in Beijing, leaving in charge of PRC embassies fanatics who engaged in hysterical public adulation of Chairman Mao and denunciations of his opponents. Huge quantities of Mao’s writings and portraits flooded some African capitals. In Mali, for example, an estimated 4 million copies of Mao’s
Little Red Book
were distributed - one per head of the population. And yet not a single African leader publicly echoed Chinese attacks on the Soviet leadership.
63
As elsewhere in the Third World, the KGB’s greatest successes in African intelligence collection were probably obtained through SIGINT rather than HUMINT. Between 1960 and 1967 the number of states whose communications were decrypted by the KGB Eighth Directorate increased from fifty-one to seventy-two.
64
The increase was doubtless due in part to the growing number of independent African states. Because of the comparative lack of sophistication of their cipher systems, many were, without realizing it, conducting open diplomacy so far as the KGB and other of the world’s major SIGINT agencies were concerned. The small SIGINT section of the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organization, for example, found little difficulty in breaking the codes of its neighbours - except for South Africa which, like the Soviet Union, used the theoretically unbreakable one-time pad for its diplomatic traffic as well as state-of-the-art cipher technology.
65
The work of Soviet codebreakers was simplified by the KGB’s recruitment of cipher personnel at African embassies around the world.
66
The hardest African target for agent penetration as well as for SIGINT was probably the Republic of South Africa, where the KGB lacked either a legal residency or any other secure operational base.
67
In April 1971, however, a senior military counter-intelligence officer, subsequently codenamed MARIO, contacted the KGB residency in Lusaka and offered information about the South African intelligence community. A certain indication of the importance attached to MARIO by the FCD was that it briefed both Andropov and Brezhnev personally on him. Over the next two years his KGB case officers had meetings with him in Zambia, Mauritius, Austria and East Germany. His military intelligence was also highly rated by the GRU. In 1973, however, it was discovered that MARIO had left military counter-intelligence some time before he approached the Lusaka residency. The fact that he successfully deceived the KGB for two years is evidence of its lack of other sources able to provide reliable information on South African intelligence.
68