SPOKESMAN BOOKS
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Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
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Catalogue
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Haditha Ethics - From Iraq to Iran?
The Spokesman, 91
Reviews
Christopher
Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The
Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World,
Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 720 pages, ISBN 0713993596 £30
The
Mitrokhin Archive began
to appear in England at the very end of the last century. It burst into the
British newspapers as the source of a host of stories about Melita Norwood, an
old lady who stood exposed as the most persistent Soviet Spy in Europe, a
great-grandmother who earned the intriguing headline in The
Times:
‘The Spy Who Came in from the Co-op’. Mitrokhin was another intrepid spy,
for the other side, and it was his revelation which brought fame to that one
grandma. Mitrokhin, by contrast, smuggled numerous documents from the KGB’s
archives to his summer dacha, and thence to the West, when he took flight.
Now
the second volume considers KGB successes in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the
Far East, Africa, Latin and Central America and the Middle East. According to
Mitrokhin’s dossier, 10.6 million rupees were spent in the single year 1975
alone, in order to assist the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Ghandi.
Further considerable sums were expended in manufacturing evidence of
CIA and Pakistani intelligence machinations in the growth of Sikh separatism.
Mitrokhin
claims that the Russians spent $400,000 on subsidising the Communists in Chile
as well as making a donation of $50,000 to Allende. But, surprise, surprise:
the CIA spent $425,000 trying to undermine Allende. ‘Their dollars were
targeted far less effectively than the KGB’s roubles’, claims Mitrokhin,
which is apparently why Allende was killed and we got a prolonged period of
terror at the hands of the victorious murderer, Pinochet.
The
KGB appears to have been in similar difficulties to those encountered by
Western intelligence agencies, in making sense of events in Iraq, and deciding
whether it wanted to bring an end to Saddam’s rule in Baghdad or not.
Support for the Iraqi Communist Party was therefore somewhat sporadic.
According to Mitrokhin, it was the persistent advocacy of four members of the
Politburo which persuaded Brezhnev to authorise Russian military intervention
in Afghanistan.
What
emerges from all of this derring-do, and all this lavish expenditure, is a
mixed result, but by no means a triumph for the spooks. Of course, the spooks
will have got their wages, and, as in other countries, will very seldom come
unstuck when their schemes misfire. But is it not the same the whole world
over? Clandestine events bring clandestine happiness to a legion of happy
conmen, without often changing political outcomes one iota.
Andrew
James
