Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Despite the KGB’s increased reluctance to take the risks involved in implementing directly special actions in the West, it continued to use—or connive at the use of—terrorist groups as proxies in the struggle against the United States and its allies. The Centre’s mood, however, remained distinctly cautious. It was almost three years before the arms requested by the IRA in November 1969 through the intermediary of the Irish Communist leader, Michael O’Riordan, were finally delivered by the KGB. Shortly after the request had been made, the IRA had split into two: the Officials under Cathal Goulding and the Provisionals led by Sean MacStioftin. 50The sympathies of the KGB were wholly with the Marxist Officials rather than the more nationalist Provisionals. Though Goulding’s long-term aim was to create a nonsectarian, non-military, all-Ireland revolutionary movement, the Officials were responsible for some of the bloodiest episodes in the Troubles of the early 1970s. The only answer to the “forces of imperialism and exploitation,” Goulding declared in 1971, lay “in the language that brings these vultures to their senses most effectively, the language of the bomb and the bullet.” The Official IRA’s bloodthirsty attempts to upstage the Provisionals ended by alienating some of its own supporters. In February 1972 a bomb planted at the Aldershot headquarters of the Parachute Regiment killed seven people, including a Catholic priest and five women canteen workers. Nationalist anger at the killing of an off-duty British soldier on home leave in Derry on May 21 led the Officials’ army council to announce a ceasefire eight days later. Since the Officials reserved the right to take what they described as “defensive action,” however, the ceasefire had little immediate effect. Though Goulding gradually succeeded in scaling down “military operations,” local militants continued terrorist attacks during the remainder of 1972 and 1973. 51

On July 3, 1972 the Irish Communist leader, Michael O’Riordan, wrote to remind the CPSU Central Committee that the arms he had first requested on behalf of the IRA in November 1969 had still not been received. Since then, on behalf of the Official IRA, he had held numerous discussions on the means of shipment with the KGB’s “technical specialists:” “The fact that there has not been the slightest leak of information for two and a half years proves, in my opinion, a high level of responsibility with regard to keeping the secret, so to speak.” Andropov agreed. On August 21 he presented to the Central Committee a “Plan for the Operation of a Shipment of Weapons to the Irish Friends,” codenamed SPLASH. SPLASH was a variant of operation VOSTOK, which had delivered arms to Haddad and the PFLP two years earlier. Once again, the weapons and munitions—2 machine-guns, 70 automatic rifles, 10 Walther pistols, 41,600 cartridges, all of non-Soviet origin to disguise the involvement of the KGB—were transported by a Soviet intelligence-gathering vessel, on this occasion the Reduktor. On this occasion, the arms, in waterproof wrapping, were submerged to a depth of about 40 meters on the Stanton sandbank, 90 kilometers from the coast of Northern Ireland, and attached to a marker buoy of the kind used to indicate the presence of fishing nets below the surface. KGB laboratories carefully examined the arms shipment before it left to ensure that there was no trace of Soviet involvement. The Walther pistols were lubricated with West German oil, the packaging was purchased abroad by KGB residencies and it was specified that the marker buoy should be Finnish or Japanese. A few hours after the arms had been deposited on the sandbank, they were retrieved by a fishing vessel belonging to the “Irish friends,” whose crew were unaware of their contents. 52Operation SPLASH was supervised on board the Reduktor by an officer from the 8th Department of Directorate S (the successor to Department V). Several further Soviet arms shipments to the Official IRA were delivered by similar methods. 53

The KGB can have had few illusions about the likely use of the arms it supplied, since the man in charge of their collection from the sandbank was the Officials’ most hard-line terrorist, Seamus Costello. 54Late in 1974, after a dispute with Goulding, Costello was expelled from the Officials and founded a new Trotskyite movement, the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP). The Officials set up four assassination squads to liquidate the dissidents, but came off worse in a series of shoot-outs in the spring of 1975. They had, however, rather the better of a feud later in the year with the Provisionals. The Official IRA eventually succeeded in murdering Costello in 1977. 55The probability is that some of the arms smuggled into Ireland by the KGB were used in the internecine warfare between republican paramilitaries.

As well as shipping arms to the Official IRA, the KGB also continued to use some Third World terrorists and guerrillas—notably the PFLP and the Sandinistas—as proxies. In Latin America, the KGB found itself—somewhat to its irritation—being upstaged by its Cuban ally, the DGI. By 1970, in the Centre’s view, the DGI had effectively “expropriated” the Sandinista ISKRA guerrilla group. In 1969 the DGI financed the guerrilla operation to free the FSLN (Sandinista) leader, Carlos Fonseca Amador (GIDROLOG), from a Costa Rican jail, where he had been imprisoned for bank robbery. 56Fonseca was recaptured shortly after his jailbreak, but freed again and flown to Cuba after the Sandinista hijack of a plane carrying American executives of the United Fruit Company, who were released in exchange. 57The DGI also organized guerrilla training for the Sandinistas in Cuba, and gave them 100,000 dollars to purchase weapons. The head of the DGI, Manuel Piñeiro Losado, whose nickname “Redbeard” reflected his fiery temperament, told the deputy head of the FCD, Boris Semenovich Ivanov,

Of all the countries in Latin America, the most active work being carried out by us is in Nicaragua. Aid is being given to partisan groups headed by C[arlos] Fonseca. This movement has influence and could go far.

At a meeting with Fonseca in February 1971, Piñeiro restated the conviction of the Cuban leadership that for most Latin American countries armed conflict was the only path to liberation. Though Cuba remained willing to offer the Sandinistas “any kind of support and assistance,” they would need to make major changes in their organization if they were to avoid the defeats and heavy losses they had suffered during the past decade. The Centre concluded that future attempts to use the Sandinistas for special actions against United States targets would have to be made in collaboration with the DGI. 58

The KGB did, however, retain a number of agents within the Sandinistas, among them GRIN (not identified by Mitrokhin’s notes), who was used to identify possible operations in which the KGB could make use of the FSLN. In May 1974 a Sandinista delegation visited the Soviet embassy in Havana and delivered a letter to the CPSU Central Committee asking for assistance. The most dramatic Sandinista attack on a United States target was the attempt, assisted by the DGI with the personal blessing of Fidel Castro, to kidnap Turner B. Shelton, the American ambassador in Managua and a close friend of the Somoza family. 59Remarkably, Shelton and President Anastasio Somoza Debayle appeared together on the 1974 twenty cordoba note, the ambassador’s head inclined deferentially towards the president; the note quickly became known as the sapo (“toady”). 60The original plan of attack appears to have been for a guerrilla group to force an entry into the US embassy during a diplomatic reception. 61On December 27, 1974, however, an unexpected opportunity arose during a party in honor of Shelton given by the former minister of agriculture, José Maria (Chema) Castillo. A Sandinista working undercover as a waiter at the reception telephoned the guerrilla group to report that Castillo’s house was poorly guarded, providing an excellent opportunity to kidnap the ambassador. 62