Free The World Was Going Our Way by Christopher Andrew

siding instead with the Prague Spring and other manifestations of ‘Socialism with a human face’ (as many expected him to do after the tanks of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968), Castro would have added to Moscow’s problems instead of becoming one of its greatest international assets. With Castro and other charismatic Latin American revolutionaries on its side against American imperialism, the prestige of the Soviet Union in the Third World was enormously enhanced and its ageing revolutionary image rejuvenated.
     
     
    It was often the KGB, rather than the Foreign Ministry, which took the lead role in Latin America. As Khrushchev later acknowledged, the first Soviet ambassador to Castro’s Cuba ‘turned out to be unsuited for service in a country just emerging from a revolution’ and had to be replaced by the KGB resident, who proved to be ‘an excellent choice’. 8 Nikolai Leonov later described how he had also ‘worked with many [other] Latin American leaders . . . to help them as far as possible in their anti-American stance’. 9 The first contacts with Salvador Allende before his election as President of Chile in 1970 and with Juan and Isabel Perón before their return to Argentina in 1973 were also made by the KGB rather than by a Soviet diplomat. KGB contacts with the Sandinistas began almost two decades before their conquest of power in Nicaragua in 1979. As Leonov acknowledged, the initiative frequently came from the Centre’s Latin American experts:
     
     
     
    We ourselves developed the programme of our actions, orienting ourselves . . . I might as well admit that sometimes we also wanted to attract attention to ourselves, to present our work as highly significant. This was to protect the Latin American direction in intelligence from withering away and dying out. On the whole we managed to convince the KGB leadership that Latin America represented a politically attractive springboard, where anti-American feeling was strong . . . 10
     
     
     
    KGB operations were greatly assisted by the clumsy and sometimes brutal American response to Latin American revolutionary movements. The poorly planned and ineptly executed attempt to overthrow Castro by a CIA-backed landing at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 was probably the most farcically incompetent episode in Cold War US foreign policy. Humiliation at the Bay of Pigs, however, did not prevent Kennedy authorizing subsequently a series of plans to assassinate Castro which, mercifully, also degenerated into farce. Some, like the proposal to place an explosive seashell on the sea bed when Castro went snorkelling, probably never progressed beyond the drawing board. The most practicable scheme devised during Kennedy’s presidency seems to have been the plan for one of Castro’s lovers to slip two poison capsules into his drink. While waiting for an opportunity, she hid them in a jar of cold cream. When she came to retrieve them, the capsules had melted. It is doubtful in any case that she would actually have used them.
     
     
    Investigative journalism and official investigations in the mid- 1970s gave global publicity to a series of such homicidal farces. Also revealed were CIA attempts on presidential instructions to destabilize the regime of Chile’s Marxist President Salvador Allende in the early 1970s. Among the revelations was that of an apoplectic President Richard M. Nixon ordering his Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, to ‘make the [Chilean] economy scream’.
     
     
    KGB active-measures specialists could not have hoped for more promising raw material to use as the basis of their campaigns than the series of scandalous revelations of American dirty tricks in Latin America from the Bay of Pigs to Iran-Contra a quarter of a century later. Service A was also able to exploit a much older tradition of resentment at Yanqui imperialism, which was kept alive during the Cold War by a recurrent US tendency to claim that its