In Washington, President John F. Kennedy, who had been in office for only three months at the time of the Bay of Pigs débâcle, despairingly asked his special counsel, Theodore Sorensen, ‘How could I have been so stupid?’ At a summit meeting with Kennedy at Vienna in June, Khrushchev belligerently demanded an end to the three-power status of West Berlin and a German peace treaty by the end of the year. Kennedy said afterwards to the journalist James Reston: ‘I think [Khrushchev] did it because of the Bay of Pigs. I think he thought anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get in that mess could be taken, and anyone who got into it and didn’t see it through had no guts. So he just beat the hell out of me.’23
Taking its cue from Khrushchev, the KGB also set out ‘to beat the hell’ out of the United States by exploiting the Cuban bridgehead. On 29 July 1961 Shelepin sent Khrushchev the outline of a new and aggressive global grand strategy against the Main Adversary, designed ‘to create circumstances in different areas of the world which would assist in diverting the attention and forces of the United States and its allies, and would tie them down during the settlement of the question of a German peace treaty and West Berlin’. The first part of the plan proposed to use national liberation movements in the Third World to secure an advantage in the East-West struggle and ‘to activate by the means available to the KGB armed uprisings against pro-Western reactionary governments’. At the top of the list for demolition Shelepin placed ‘reactionary’ regimes in the Main Adversary’s own backyard in Central America. His master-plan envisaged creating a second anti-American bridgehead in Nicaragua, where the newly founded Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) was dedicated to following the example of the Cuban Revolution and overthrowing the brutal pro-American dictatorship of the Somoza dynasty. President Franklin Roosevelt was said to have justified his support for the repellent founder of the dynasty with the cynical maxim, ‘I know he’s a son of a bitch but he’s our son of a bitch.’ To the Centre the Somozas probably appeared as vulnerable to guerrilla attack as Batista had proved in Cuba. Shelepin proposed that the KGB secretly co-ordinate a ‘revolutionary front’ in Central America in collaboration with the Cubans and the Sandinistas. On 1 August, with only minor amendments, his grand strategy was approved as a Central Committee directive.24
The FSLN leader, Carlos Fonseca Amador, codenamed GIDROLOG (‘Hydrologist’), was a trusted KGB agent.25 In 1957, at the age of twenty-one, Fonseca had been the only Nicaraguan to attend the Sixth World Youth Festival in Moscow, and he had stayed on in the USSR for another four months. His book, A Nicaraguan in Moscow, which he wrote on his return, was full of wide-eyed admiration for the Soviet Union as a people’s democracy with a free press, total freedom of religion, and - even more improbably - magnificently efficient state-run industries. Fonseca was equally enthusiastic about Fidel Castro. ‘With the victory of the Cuban Revolution’, he said later, ‘the rebellious Nicaraguan spirit recovered its brightness . . . The Marxism of Lenin, Fidel, Che [Guevara] and Ho Chi-Minh was taken up by the Sandinista National Liberation Front which has started anew the difficult road of guerrilla warfare . . . Guerrilla combat will lead us to final liberation.’26
Within weeks of the victory of Castro’s guerrillas in January 1959, Tomás Borge, one of the founders of the FSLN, and a group of Sandinistas arrived in Havana, where they were promised ‘all possible support’ by Che.27 Much though he admired Fidel and Che Guevara, Fonseca was a very different kind of personality - remembered by one of his admirers as ‘almost always serious’ and by his son as ‘Super austere, very disciplined, methodical, cautious. He didn’t drink or smoke.’ Fonseca was a dedicated revolutionary with little sense of humour and a solemn expression. Only one published photograph shows him with a smile on his face.28
The KGB’s second major penetration of the Sandinistas was probably the recruitment by the Mexico City residency in 1960 of the Nicaraguan exile Edelberto Torres Espinosa (codenamed PIMEN), a close friend of Fonseca as well as General Secretary of the anti-Somoza Nicaraguan United Front in Mexico, and President of the Latin American Friendship Society. Initial contact with Torres had been established when his daughter approached the Soviet embassy with a request to study at the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow. The Mexico City residency reported to the Centre that Torres was committed to the liberation of the whole of Latin America and saw revolution in Nicaragua as simply one step along that path.29 An admiring biographer of Fonseca describes the older Torres as his ‘mentor’. Among the projects on which they had worked together was a study of the anti-imperialist nineteenth-century Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. Fonseca was later married in Torres’s house in Mexico City.30
Shelepin reported to Khrushchev in July 1961:
In Nicaragua . . . at the present time - via KGB agents and confidential contacts3 PIMEN, GIDROLOG and LOT31 - [the KGB] is influencing and providing financial aid to the Sandino [Sandinista] Revolutionary Front and three partisan detachments which belong to the Internal Revolutionary Resistance Front, which works in co-ordination with its friends [Cuban and Soviet bloc intelligence services]. In order to obtain weapons and ammunition, it is proposed that an additional $10,000 be allocated to these detachments from KGB funds.32
The main early objective of KGB penetration of the Sandinista FSLN was the creation within it of what the Centre called ‘a sabotage-terrorism group’ headed by Manuel Ramón de Jesus Andara y Ubeda (codenamed PRIM), a Nicaraguan surgeon working in Mexico.33 On 22 November 1961 Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD, reported to Semichastny, the KGB Chairman:
In accordance with the long-term plan for the KGB’s intelligence operations in Latin America and Decision No. 191/75-GS of the highest authorities dated 1 August 1961 [approving Shelepin’s grand strategy in the Third World], our Residency in Mexico has taken measures to provide assistance in building up the national liberation movement in Nicaragua and creating a hotbed of unrest for the Americans in this area. The Residency, through the trusted agent GIDROLOG [Fonseca] in Mexico, selected a group of Nicaraguan students (12 people), headed by the Nicaraguan patriot-doctor PRIM [Andara y Ubeda], and arranged for their operational training. All operations with PRIM’s group are conducted by GIDROLOG in the name of the Nicaraguan revolutionary organization ‘The Sandinista Front’, of which he, GIDROLOG, is the leader. The supervision of the group’s future activities and financial aid given to it will also be provided through GIDROLOG. At the present time PRIM’s group is ready to be despatched to Honduras, where it will undergo additional training and fill out its ranks with new guerrillas, after which the group will be sent to Nicaraguan territory. During the initial period PRIM’s group will be tasked with the following assignments: the organization of a partisan detachment on Nicaraguan territory, filling out its ranks with the local population, and creating support bases of weapon and ammunition supplies. In addition, the detachment will make individual raids on government establishments and enterprises belonging to Americans, creating the appearance of a massive partisan struggle on Nicaraguan territory. In order to equip PRIM’s group and provide for its final training in combat operations, assistance amounting to $10,000 is required. The highest authorities have given their consent to using the sum indicated for these purposes.
I request your approval.
Though Semichastny had only just been appointed KGB Chairman and had been selected by Khrushchev for his political reliability rather than his understanding of intelligence, he did not hesitate. The day after receiving Sakharovsky’s report, he gave his approval.34 Semichastny would not have dared to do so unless he had been confident of Khrushchev’s support. There can be little doubt that Khrushchev shared the KGB’s exaggerated optimism on the prospects for a second bridgehead in Nicaragua on the Cuban model.
Having gained Semichastny’s approval, Sakharovsky directed the KGB residency in Mexico City to give Andara y Ubeda (PRIM) $6,000 to purchase weapons and instruct him to despatch an initial group of seven guerrillas, later t
o be increased to twenty-two, from Mexico to Nicaragua. His guerrilla group was to be assembled at a camp in Nicaragua by 1 March 1962, ready to begin sabotage operations against American bases a fortnight later. Andara y Ubeda, however, insisted, no doubt correctly, that his men were too poorly armed and trained to launch attacks on the well-defended US bases. Instead, they engaged in guerrilla and intelligence operations against the Somoza regime, non-military American organizations and anti-Castro Cuban refugees. Between November 1961 and January 1964 Andara y Ubeda’s guerrillas received a total of $25,200 through the Mexico City residency. Andara y Ubeda, however, was not at first aware that he was being funded by the KGB. Torres (PIMEN) told him that the money came from members of the ‘progressive bourgeoisie’ who wished to overthrow the Somoza dictatorship. Andara y Ubeda was asked - and agreed - to sign a political manifesto, supposedly prepared by his progressive bourgeois backers (in reality drafted by the KGB), which called for a Nicaraguan revolution as part of a socialist struggle against imperialism.35
Torres also kept the KGB informed on the activities of other small Sandinista guerrilla groups, who were being trained with varying success in the jungles of Honduras and Costa Rica. The Mexico City residency reported to the Centre that he saw himself not as a Soviet agent but as a member of a national liberation movement working with the Soviet Union to emancipate the peoples of Latin America from economic and political enslavement by the United States. Torres’s case officers, V. P. Nefedov and V. V. Kostikov, none the less regarded him as ‘a valuable and reliable KGB agent’, who never failed to fulfil his assignments.36
In the heady early years of the Cuban Revolution, the Centre seems to have believed that its example was capable of inspiring movements similar to the Sandinistas in much of Latin America. Guerrilla groups sprang up in Colombia, Venezuela, Peru and Guatemala. In 1961 Castro’s intelligence organization was reorganized as the Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI), under the Ministry of the Interior. With Ramiro Valdés, Castro’s first intelligence chief, in overall charge as Interior Minister, Manuel Piñeiro Losada, nicknamed ‘Barba Roja’ because of his luxuriant red beard, became head of the DGI. Piñeiro’s chief priority was the export of the Cuban Revolution. The DGI contained a Dirección de Liberación Nacional with three ‘Liberation Committees’ responsible, respectively, for exporting revolution to the Caribbean, Central and South America. Piñeiro and Che Guevara spent many evenings, usually into the early hours and sometimes until daybreak, discussing the prospects for revolution with would-be revolutionaries from Latin America and the Caribbean. Always spread out on the table while they talked was a large map of the country concerned which Che examined in detail, alternately puffing on a cigar and drinking strong Argentinian tea - mate - through a straw.37
While Che and Piñeiro dreamed their revolutionary dreams and traced imaginary guerrilla operations on their maps into the early hours, the KGB sought methodically to strengthen its liaison with and influence on the DGI. Among the most striking evidence of the closeness of the DGI’s integration into the intelligence community of the Soviet bloc was its collaboration in the use of ‘illegals’, intelligence officers and agents operating under bogus identities and (usually) false nationalities. In 1961 the Spanish-speaking KGB illegal Vladimir Vasilyevich Grinchenko (successively codenamed RON and KLOD), who ten years earlier had obtained an Argentinian passport under a false identity, arrived in Cuba, where he spent the next three years advising the DGI on illegal operations.38
Further KGB exploitation of the Cuban ‘bridgehead’, however, was dramatically interrupted by the missile crisis of October 1962. In May Khrushchev summoned Alekseyev, the KGB resident in Havana, unexpectedly to Moscow and told him he was to replace the unpopular Kudryavtsev as Soviet ambassador. A fortnight later Khrushchev astonished Alekseyev once again by saying that he had decided to install offensive nuclear missile sites in Cuba targeted against the United States. A small delegation, including Alekseyev, was sent to Havana to secure Castro’s approval. ‘If the issue had been only our defence’, said Castro later, ‘we would not have accepted the missiles.’ He agreed to the building of the missile sites, he insisted, in the broader interests of solidarity with the Soviet bloc - or, as Moscow preferred to call it, ‘the socialist commonwealth’. Though Khrushchev sought the KGB’s assistance in cementing the alliance with Castro, he did not trouble to seek its assessment of the likely American reaction to the building of the Cuban missile bases. Acting, like Stalin, as his own intelligence analyst, he rashly concluded that ‘the Americans will accept the missiles if we install them before their [mid-term Congressional] elections in November’. Few world leaders have been guilty of greater foreign policy misjudgements. The discovery of the construction of the missile sites by US U-2 spy planes in October 1962 led to the most dangerous crisis of the Cold War.39
Khrushchev’s decision to resolve the crisis by announcing - without consulting Castro - the unilateral withdrawal of ‘all Soviet offensive arms’ from Cuba caused outrage in Havana. Castro angrily told students at Havana University that Khrushchev ‘had no balls’. Privately, he denounced the Soviet leader as a ‘sonofabitch’, a ‘bastard’ and an ‘asshole’. In a bizarre and emotional letter to Khrushchev, Castro declared that the removal of the missile bases brought tears to ‘countless eyes of Cuban and Soviet men who were willing to die with supreme dignity’. Alekseyev warned Moscow in the aftermath of the missile crisis that ‘one or two years of especially careful work with Castro will be required until he acquires all of the qualities of Marxist-Leninist party spirit’. 40
In an attempt to shore up the Cuban bridgehead, Khrushchev issued a personal invitation to Castro to visit the USSR in order to ‘become acquainted with the Soviet Union and the great victories achieved by its peoples’, and ‘to discuss matters concerning relations between the peoples of the Soviet Union and Cuba, and other matters of common interest’. In April 1963, accompanied by Alekseyev, Castro and his entourage arrived in Moscow, intending to stay only a few days. Castro was persuaded, however, to stay on for a forty-day tour of the Soviet Union which, amid almost continuous applause, took him from Leningrad to the Mongolian border. Old Bolsheviks in Leningrad told him that no one since Lenin had received such a hero’s welcome. Wearing his olive-green battle fatigues when the weather was warm enough, Castro addressed enthusiastic crowds at sports stadiums, factories and town centres across the Soviet Union. He inspected a rocket base and the Northern Fleet, reviewed the May Day parade with Khrushchev from the top of the Kremlin wall, was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, and received the Order of Lenin and a gold star.41 Castro responded with effusive praise for the achievements of Soviet Communism and its support for the Cuban Revolution. He told a mass rally in Red Square:
The Cuban Revolution became possible only because the Russian Revolution of 1917 had been accomplished long before. (Applause) Without the existence of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s socialist revolution would have been impossible . . . The might of the Soviet Union and of the whole socialist camp stopped imperialist aggression against our country. It is quite natural that we nourish feelings of profound and eternal gratitude to the Soviet Union. (Applause) . . . From the bottom of their hearts the peoples of the entire world, all the peoples of the world, must regard your success as their own. (Applause)42
Khrushchev told the Presidium that his personal talks with Castro had lasted several days: ‘. . . As soon as I finished breakfast, he would come and wait for me. We would sit down together until 2:00. Then we would have lunch and more time together . . . He was left very satisfied.’43 Throughout his forty-day triumphal progress across the Soviet Union, Castro was escorted both by Alekseyev and by Nikolai Leonov, the young KGB officer who had first identified Castro’s revolutionary potential in the mid-1950s. Leonov acted as Castro’s interpreter and, when the visit was over, boasted in the Centre that he and the Maximum Leader were now firm friends for life. In the wake of the visit, the Centre received the first group of Cuban
foreign intelligence officers for training by the KGB.44
Scarcely had Castro returned to Cuba, however, than doubts returned in the minds of his Russian hosts about his reliability and political maturity. Moscow was particularly disturbed by the increasing public emphasis in Havana on ‘exporting the revolution’. In September 1963, Che Guevara published a new, much-quoted article on guerrilla warfare. Previously, he had insisted on the importance of a series of preconditions for the establishment of guerrilla bases, such as the absence of an elected, constitutional government. Now he appeared to be arguing that no preconditions were necessary. ‘Revolution’, he declared, ‘can be made at any given moment anywhere in the world.’ Worse still, in Moscow’s eyes, was the fact that Che’s revolutionary heresies seemed to have the blessing of the Castro regime. Despite his personal closeness to Castro, even Alekseyev was shocked. A cable from the Soviet embassy in Havana to Moscow accused Che of ignoring ‘basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism’ and denounced his essay as ‘ultrarevolutionary bordering on adventurism’. Che paid no heed either to the criticism from Moscow or to the opposition to his ideas from Latin American Communist parties. Henceforth he was to be personally involved in the export of the Cuban Revolution.45
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