During the early 1980s, despite the continuing success of KGB active measures, there was a dramatic change of mood in Soviet policy to Africa. In 1980 Andropov was still defiantly optimistic about the prospects for ‘liberated’ Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia. Within a few years Andropov’s optimism had evaporated.
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At the end of the 1970s the civil war in Angola had seemed to be winding down, and Angola’s huge oil resources encouraged optimism about its economic prospects. During the early 1980s, however, thanks to South African support for UNITA, fierce fighting flared up once more. In only two years (1981-82) Angolan GNP fell by 20 per cent. On a visit to Angola in 1981 a KGB delegation led by Vadim Kirpichenko, though accommodated in the relative luxury of a government mansion, experienced regular interruptions to the electricity and water supply and some of the other daily hardships endured by even the more privileged sections of the Luanda population. Kirpichenko found DISA, the Angolan version of the KGB, in ‘primitive’ condition, despite the training provided by Stasi advisers:
One could sense poverty and scarcity everywhere, even in the external appearance of the senior heads. The level of education of the leaders, too, was then extremely low. When the Minister [for State Security] introduced the [KGB] delegation to the leading personnel of the ministry, we saw the head of one department wearing a jacket with one sleeve about ten centimetres longer than the other. We never did understand why he did not shorten the longer sleeve, which would not have required too much effort. We were surprised to discover three local Portuguese amongst the leading personnel of the ministry. After the ceremonial introductions, I began, at the request of the Minister, to outline some of our assessments of current problems of the international situation. I had barely spoken two words before the leading personnel of the ministry began to sink into a sweet sleep.
Kirpichenko insists that this discourteous response was ‘in no way a reflection of the quality of my speech’.
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While Angola remained a drain on the ailing Soviet economy, it depended even more heavily on export earnings from US oil companies. Ironically, the MPLA was forced to use Cuban troops to defend American oil installations from UNITA attack.
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In Mozambique as in Angola, Moscow had to confront the intractable problems caused by a combination of civil war and economic mismanagement. According to Markus Wolf, the long-serving head of the Stasi’s foreign-intelligence arm, ‘Internal power struggles in the [FRELIMO] government were exacerbated by debates between the Soviet military and the KGB over the proper way to handle a conflict that was careering out of control.’
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Dmitri Volkogonov, the first historian to gain access to Andropov’s papers as General Secretary, concludes that he ‘had no idea what to do about such “allies” ’. It was harder still to deal with Ethiopia, where Mengistu continued his orgy of violence against all opposition, much of it a figment of his paranoid imagination. When the political commissar of Mengistu’s army, Asrat Destu, was asked during his visit to Moscow in 1984 why the bloodbath continued, he replied, ‘We are doing what Lenin did. You cannot build socialism without red terror.’ A fortnight after Destu returned to Addis Ababa, he was killed in a shoot-out at a meeting of Mengistu’s Revolutionary Council.
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In March 1984, a month after Andropov’s death, the Centre was taken by surprise when Samora Machel and the South African President, P. W. Botha, signed the Nkomati non-aggression agreement (so called after the town in Mozambique where the signing took place). Photographs of the tall figure of the notoriously short-tempered Botha, nicknamed
die Groot Krokodil
(‘the Great Crocodile’), towering over the much smaller Machel seemed to symbolize the triumph of Pretoria’s bullying power. In return for FRELIMO’s agreement to cease providing bases for the ANC, Pretoria promised to withdraw support for RENAMO (though, in reality, South African military intelligence continued to provide it with some covert assistance). A dismayed ANC declared that the agreement had ‘surprised the progressive world’.
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Soon afterwards N. V. Shishlin, foreign affairs consultant to the International Department (and later to Gorbachev), told the London embassy and KGB residency in a private briefing that ‘saving Mozambique’ was beyond Moscow’s power; its economy had virtually collapsed and FRELIMO was riven with internal rivalries. Shishlin also described Angola’s economic problems as catastrophic and its political leadership, like that of Mozambique, as divided and incompetent. He feared that the MPLA, like FRELIMO, might be forced to come to terms with South Africa. The KGB residency in London (and doubtless other capitals) was instructed to collect intelligence on what the Centre feared were a series of potential threats to Soviet influence: among them US plans to undermine the Soviet position in southern Africa; US pressure on its allies to deny economic assistance to Angola and Mozambique; the danger that Angola and Mozambique might move into the Western sphere of influence; SWAPO’s willingness to compromise on a Namibian settlement; and Western attempts to undermine the ANC or weaken its Marxist base.
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There were deep contradictions at the heart of Soviet policy towards southern Africa. Despite its uncompromising denunciation of apartheid, Moscow maintained top-secret contacts with Pretoria over the regulation of the world market in gold, diamonds, platinum and precious minerals, in which the Soviet Union and South Africa between them had something approaching a duopoly. Because of the extreme sensitivity of these contacts and the outrage which their public disclosure would provoke in black Africa, the KGB took a prominent part in arranging them. In 1984, just as the South African economy was on the verge of a serious crisis, the Kremlin decided to step up secret discussions with Pretoria on the regulation of the market. As a preliminary, KGB residencies in the United States, Britain, West Germany, France and Switzerland were asked to collect intelligence on a whole series of South African financial institutions and businesses.
81
In the mid-1980s De Beers Corporation in South Africa was paying the Soviet Union almost a billion dollars a year for the supply of high-quality diamonds. Moscow’s lucrative secret agreements with Pretoria to keep mineral prices high did not prevent it attacking South Africa’s Western business partners for doing business with apartheid.
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The Gorbachev era was marked by a growing sense that involvement in sub-Saharan Africa represented an unacceptable drain on Soviet resources, by deepening pessimism about the region’s revolutionary potential, and by an increasing conviction that its manifold problems were peripheral to Soviet interests.
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The leadership of the SACP, hitherto staunch defenders of the Moscow line, found it difficult to hide their frustration. In the ill-concealed quarrel between Gorbachev and Castro, who increasingly saw himself as the defender of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy against Soviet revisionism,
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the SACP was unmistakably on Castro’s side - choosing to hold its Seventh Party Congress in July 1989 not in Moscow but Havana. Within the Soviet bloc in central and eastern Europe, the SACP leadership now looked not to Gorbachev’s revisionist regime but to Erich Honecker’s hard-line East Germany for inspiration. At the Havana conference it announced its ambition to ‘build East Germany in Africa’ after the end of apartheid.
85
Over the next few months, however, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet bloc persuaded the SACP to take a more flexible view.
By a fortunate irony, the Soviet one-party state and the South African apartheid regime began to crumble away at almost the same time. Gorbachev’s unwillingness to devote time or money to the South African struggle helped to turn the ANC toward negotiations. The end of the Cold War pushed Pretoria in the same direction. Early in 1989 South Africa agreed to a deal - jointly brokered by the United States and the Soviet Union - to give independence to Namibia (South-West Africa) in return for the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola. In July the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, the commanding figure (though not yet the President) of the ANC, had a secret meeting with President P. W. Botha. Mandela had heard ‘many accounts of his ferocious temper’: ‘He seemed to me the very model of the old-fashioned, stiff-necked, stubborn Afrikaner who did not so much discuss with black leaders as dictate to them.’ To Mandela’s surprise, he found Botha in conciliatory mood: ‘He had his hand out and was smiling broadly, and in fact, from that very first moment, he completely disarmed me.’ Far more important than Botha’s change of heart, however, was the immense moral authority and capacity for uniting the South African people which Mandela had, amazingly, preserved during over twenty-seven years in jail. Mandela’s leadership did more than Umkhonto’s surprisingly ineffective guerrilla war to bring about the new post-apartheid South Africa. In December 1989, a month after the Berlin Wall came down, Mandela met Botha’s successor as President, F. W. de Klerk, for the first time. Immediately after the meeting, Mandela wrote to the exiled ANC leadership in Lusaka, echoing Margaret Thatcher’s words about Gorbachev five years earlier, that de Klerk was a man he could do business with.
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On 2 February 1990 de Klerk announced to parliament the unbanning of the ANC and - to an audible gasp from those present in the chamber - of the SACP also. On 11 February Mandela walked free through the prison gates. In August he announced that the ANC was unilaterally suspending the armed struggle begun almost thirty years before. Ironically, the man who persuaded Mandela that the time had come to take this historic step was none other than the former pro-Soviet hard-liner Joe Slovo, leader of the SACP. Less than three years later the ANC won South Africa’s first democratic elections.
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The crumbling of the Soviet system ultimately did far more than Soviet Cold War policy to persuade the apartheid regime that its time was up. For the ANC, none the less, Soviet support in the early stages of the armed struggle, at a time when the United States and many of its allies held it at arm’s length, was of real significance in sustaining it during its most difficult years. ‘The cynical’, said Mandela later, ‘have always suggested that the Communists were using us. But who is to say that we were not using them?’
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Ultimately, the ANC gained more than Moscow from the once close relationship between them.
26
Conclusion: The KGB in Russia and the World
Only a decade before the Soviet Union fell apart, the Centre leadership still remained optimistic about the success of its forward policy in the Third World. Andropov confidently told the Vietnamese interior minister, Fam Hung, during his visit to Moscow in October 1980:
The Soviet Union is not merely talking about world revolution but is actually assisting it. The USSR is building up a powerful military and economic potential which is a reliable defence for the socialist countries and other progressive forces in the world . . . Why did the USA and other Western countries agree on détente in the 1970s and then change their policies? Because the imperialists realized that a reduction of international tension worked to the advantage of the socialist system. During this period Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Afghanistan were liberated.
1
The future DCI, Robert Gates, noted at the same time, ‘The sense that the Soviets and their surrogates were “on the march” around the world was palpable in Washington’
2
as well as in Moscow. The victorious Sandinistas in Nicaragua secretly informed Moscow of their intention to turn themselves into a Marxist-Leninist ‘vanguard party’ which, in alliance with Cuba and the Soviet bloc, would spread the revolution through Central America.
3
Andropov was in no mood to suspend the onward march of ‘world revolution’ in the hope of restoring the détente of the early 1970s. His hostility to, and suspicion of, the United States reached an extraordinary climax after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as President in January 1981. Four months later the KGB and GRU jointly embarked on operation RYAN, the largest Soviet intelligence operation of the Cold War, designed to detect the - in reality non-existent - plans of the Reagan administration for a nuclear first strike.
4
By the time RYAN began, Brezhnev did little more than rubber-stamp policies decided by others. When Valeri Boldin became assistant to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1981, he was shocked to observe Brezhnev at Politburo meetings sitting with a vacant stare:
More often than not he would read out a note prepared for him by his assistants, printed in very large characters on a special typewriter. He often got so confused that he read the same sentences over and over again, and then looked around pathetically, as if acknowledging his helplessness.
5
As Brezhnev entered the final, demeaning phase of his long physical and mental decline, Andropov was driven by the determination to succeed him as Soviet leader, end the ‘era of stagnation’ (as it was later called) at home, stand up to the supposed nuclear menace of the Reagan regime, and consolidate the Soviet victory over the Main Adversary in the Third World. To prepare for the more dynamic era which he intended to inaugurate, Andropov took the unprecedented decision to embark on what were in effect the first Soviet active measures ever to be implemented against a Soviet leader. Andropov cynically proposed that Brezhnev’s personal authority should be enhanced by more frequent appearances on television - with the real intention of exposing the increasing infirmity and confusion of the General Secretary to public view and thus demonstrating the need for his own more vigorous leadership. Brezhnev’s decrepitude became the dominant theme in the privately circulated political jokes which for most Soviet citizens were the only available form of political dissent. Among them was this version of Brezhnev’s daily schedule:
9 a.m.: reanimation
10 a.m.: breakfast
11 a.m.: awarding medals
12 noon: recharging his batteries
2 p.m.: lunch
4 p.m.: receiving medals
6 p.m.: signing important documents
8 p.m.: clinical death
9 p.m.: reanimation