LETTER TO PAUL SEABURY FROM ROBERT M. GATES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90G01353R001300110002-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 78
• Document Creation Date: December 27, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 23, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: November 22, 1988
• Content Type: LETTER

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11
,-_THE FOLLOWING DOCUMENTS
ARE ATTACHED:
(Please do not remove)
/E,f 2~2 1~.
SUBJECT:
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The Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
Washington, 1) C. 20505
November 22, 1988
STAT
Mr. Paul Seabury
88-4337/1
I apologize for taking so long to respond to your letter of
early October, with which you enclosed your paper on "Secret
War".
I finally was able to read the paper recently and found it
most interesting and useful. I suppose one of the reasons I
found it so was the degree to which it parallels my own
thinking on some of these issues. At the risk of testing your
patience, I in turn have enclosed the texts of two speeches
germane to your topic. The first, "War By Another Name," I
delivered two years ago in California. The second on current
developments in the Soviet Union I delivered to the American
Association for the Advancement of Science Conference here in
Washington last month. I hope you find them of interest.
I am able to offer you some reassurance and information on
the Agency's analysis on the problem of Soviet proxy
operations. You will be gratified to know that during my watch
as DDI we established a Foreign Subversion and Instability
Center with analysts that addresses the question
of Soviet and surrogate subversive activities primarily in the
Third World. It also deals with front groups and other similar
types of operations. Best of all, as it is not located in a
regional office, it looks across the globe and is able to
discern patterns both in subversion and instability that I find
insightful and useful. In short, I think we are making good
progress on these kinds of problems.
Again, many thanks for your letter and accompanying paper.
STAT
Regards,
Robert M. Gates
STAT DDCI/RMGates/de
Enclosures*
A
DISTRIBUTION: (w/incoming)
AS Stated 0 - Addressee
1 ,ER-31 - DDCI Chrono
I e
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STAT
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War By Another Name
An Address to the Commonwealth Club of California
by Robert M. Gates, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
November 25, 1986
The most divisive and controversial part of American
foreign policy for nearly four decades has been our effort in
the Third World to preserve and defend pro-Western governments,
to resist Communist aggression and subversion, and to promote
economic development and democracy,
Our continuing difficulty in formulating a coherent and
sustainable bipartisan strategy for the Third World over two
generations contrasts sharply with the Soviet Union's
relentless effort there to eliminate Western influence,
establish strategically located client Communist states, and to
gain access to strategic resources.
But while we may debate strategy and how to respond, the
facts of Soviet involvement in major Third World conflicts are
undeniable, Consider two very painful memories:
It is clear that the Soviet Union, and Stalin
personally, played a central role in prompting North
Korea's invasion of the South in 1950,the cause of our
I
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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE
COLLOQUIUM ON SCIENCE, ARMS CONTROL AND NATIONAL SECURITY
14 OCTOBER 1988
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE SOVIET UNION AND
IMPLICATIONS FOR-L!-,.S. SECURITY POLICY
BY ROBERT M. GATES
DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
INTRODUCTION
THE THEME OF CHANGE IN THE SOVIET UNION HAS BEEN MUCH IN
THE MEDIA IN RECENT MONTHS AS WE HAVE WATCHED THE EFFORTS OF
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV TO MODERNIZE THE SOVIET ECONOMY AND
CONSOLIDATE HIS POLITICAL POWER. KNOWLEDGE OF RUSSIAN WORDS
SUCH AS "PERESTROIKA" AND "GLASNOST" HAS BECOME COMMONPLACE IN
THE WEST. WITHOUT PARALLEL IN A GENERATION, DEVELOPMENTS IN
THE SOVIET UNION HAVE CAPTURED THE INTEREST, AND IN SOME
RESPECTS THE IMAGINATION, OF A WIDE AUDIENCE AROUND THE WORLD.
IT IS TYPICAL THAT WE IN THE WEST, AND PARTICULARLY IN THE
UNITED STATES, WITH OUR FOCUS ON PERSONALITIES IN POLITICS,
SHOULD FOCUS ON GORBACHEV'S.PERSONNEL MOVES, WHO IS UP AND WHO
IS DOWN, WHO IS IN AND WHO IS OUT. THUS THE SPECIAL ATTENTION
FOCUSED ON THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE PLENUM AND SUPREME SOVIET
SESSION SOME TWO WEEKS AGO.
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STAT
Mr. Robert Gates
Deputy Director
Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, D.C.
Dear Bob:
Ei%1utE~v~~L~'uc4y~
88=4337X
I am enclosing :a paper which I presented last
week in Washington at the U.S. Institute of Peace
for a conference on "secret war".
I became intrigued by the problem of Soviet proxy
operations during my time on PFIAB, when I began
to surmise that the Agency was not doing too
good a job of analysis on the subject. I hope that
this defect has been remedied!
I hope you find the paper interesting.
Best regards,
J
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SECRET/PROXY WAR
by Paul Seabury
This meeting, dealing with the nature and future of
"secret war," is timely, coming as it does when, to some
observers, "peace is breaking out all over." A few weeks ago,
the cover of The Economist featured an idyllic beach scene:
paternal, lanky Uncle Sam stretched out in a beach chair in a
state of blissful contentment; in the foreground (or
foresand!) a group of jolly kids besporting themselves with
shovels making little sandcastles: Margaret Thatcher,
Francois Mitterand, Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev, Deng-Shao
Peng, and Noburu. The Economist's cover slogan is arresting:
"Oh, what a peaceful world." A picture is better than a
thousand words, as the saying goes, and disputes the currently
fashionable thesis of Professor Kennedy as to America's
imminent decline and fall.
The evidence put forth for this world-view, to be sure,
is comforting to all who are concerned with peace. The Afghan
war, it seems, may be coming to an end, as Soviet forces
continue their slow march home. A cease-fire has brought the
long, murderous war between Iraq and Iran to an end, at least
for the time being. Negotiations over the fate of Cambodia
seem to be making progress. Negotiations over Namibia and
Angola (Castro to the contrary) seem to portend the withdrawal
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of Soviet and Cuban forces from that interminable conflict.
"In extricating the Soviet Union from conflicts in
Afghanistan, southwestern Africa and Cambodia," writes James
Markham in The New York Times, "[Gorbachev] hopes to
consolidate his own country's status as a superpower.
Peace makes strategic sense."
We have it, too, on the word of one distinguished Soviet
historian, Dr. James Billington, that such developments may
mark a sea-change in Soviet foreign policy. "The wave of
revolution--and the idea of violent convulsive upheaval
effecting meaningful social change--is becoming
anarchronistic. The heady era of decolonization and Marxist-
inspired revolution is over."1
But then, only a few months ago, The Economist's
depiction of the overall situation was dark indeed. In its
issue of March 12, 1988, The Economist listed 25 "little
wars"--civil and international--as being Colombia, El
Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, Iran/Iraq/Lebanon,
Angola/Namibia, Chad, Ethiopia and Ethiopia/Eritrea, Western
Sahara, Mozambique, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, Afghanistan,
Burma, India, Indonesia, Kampuchea, Laos/Vietnam, the
Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Of these, on my inspection, at
least 17 were those in which the Soviet Union and/or its proxy
1. New York Times, 14 August 1988.
2
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affiliates, were actively engaged, whether in direct combat or
in the support and supervision of it. From the ranks of the
ravens of Spring came the swallows of Summer, but the somewhat
diminished flock of the former remains disturbingly large.
These days two contrary cottage industries are busy
speculating as to the respective declines of American and of
Soviet power. While those predicting the former have inspired
debate among foreign policy intellectuals,2 there appears to
be much greater consensus (among Sovietologists, at least)
that the Gorbachev era is one in which the Soviet Union,
plagued by manifold domestic difficulties, now faces grave
choices in its priorities, to escape otherwise inevitable
economic decline. Inevitably, this means that Soviet leaders
will recognize their own (what Paul Kennedy calls) "imperial
overstretch." As one task-force of American foreign policy
experts conclude, Gorbachev's assault on a "whole series of
ingrained (domestic) practises and attitudes" is commingled
with his assault on an "often militarized foreign policy."
Regrettably (so say the authors of this report), "the West has
2. See my "The Solvency Boys," The National Interest (Fall
1988), a review of Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the
Great Powers.
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not come to terms with these changes." "While Gorbachev has
as yet made no significant effort to scale back existing
Soviet global commitments, he has given lower priority to the
military expansion of Soviet interests than his
predecessors."3
This benign view is shared more vigorously by Mr. Armand
Hammer, in the aftermath of the recent Moscow Summit. Hammer
writes:
In the three years since Mr. Gorbachev has acceded to
power, the Soviet Union has engaged in no new adventures
around the globe, it has sent no "military advisers" to
developing trouble spots. In itself, this suspension of
expansionist activity marks a significant break with
Soviet foreign policy throughout the greater part of
this century.4
Much can be said for the view that there has been an
abatement of Soviet offensive political warfare in recent
months. Within the top Soviet leadership, there are signs of
3. "How Should America Respond to Gorbachev's Challenge?",
Joseph Nye, Harvard University, and Whitney MacMillan,
Cargill, Inc., Task Force Co-chairman. Institute for East-
West Security Studies, New York, 1987, pp. 9-11.
4. Armand Hammer, "Behind the Soviet Pullout from
Afghanistan," New York Times, 4 June 1988.
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profound disagreement as to foreign policy priorities.
Spokesmen such as Foreign Minister Eduard Scheverdnadze put
forward the view, consonant with Gorbachev's line, that
peaceful coexistence must not be seen as a tactic in an
endless class struggle. Instead, as he has argued, it must be
seen as a necessity in an age of nuclear weapons and
ecological disasters. In a speech this past summer, he argued
further that the USSR could not afford both to modernize and
to match Western "military-technological novelties." This may
not be much of a concession to Western skepticism, yet it
manifests a gnostic heresy, to which other Soviet leaders have
responded. Gorbachev's main adversary, Yegor Ligachev, on the
Politburo, has put a different patina on Soviet global
priorities, in a widely televised adddress to party members in
Gorky some weeks ago. In this speech, Ligachev openly
confronted the ideological issue as to the abandonment of
Lenin's legacy. As Pravda reported him, Ligachev dwelt upon a
critical ideological issue: that of general-human, as
contrasted to proletarian-class interests, in world politics.
They [the interests] are fundamentally and profoundly
interrelated. The true meaning of socialism is the
liberation of man and mankind from all forms of
exploitation and suppression. But can we as communists
remain aloof from global programs, from struggles
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against the nuclear threat and for the saving of
civilization? No, we cannot. Should humanity fail to
win this struggle, attempts to improve the life of the
working people . . . to ensure the basic interests of
the working class and the right of peoples to be in
charge of their own fate, will lose their meaning.
We proceed from the class nature of international
relations. Any other formulation of the problem can
only inject confusion into the minds of the Soviet
people and of our friends abroad. The active inclusion
of general-human problems into the solution of the
social and national liberation struggle does not at all
mean any artificial de-emphasis of the social and
national-liberation struggle.5
I dwell on this controversy as preamble to my paper on
Soviet secret warfare, since there is considerable
misunderstanding in the West these days as to the components
5. Pravda, 6 August 1988. Ligachev's address to the Gorky
party meeting was broadcast by television widely in the Soviet
Union--a notable event since such media statements on major
controversial matters is reserved for the Chairman of the
Central Committee.
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of Soviet power. In a recent article, Zbigniev Brzezinski,
for instance, took note of the likelihood that by the year
2110 A.D. the Soviet Union would rang fifth among the economic
powers of the world (below even China!). The Soviet Union, he
concluded, "is a one-dimensional rival. It is a credible
challenger in the military realm alone." This, he says, will
continue to be true. Glasnost notwithstanding, the Soviet
Union will remain a dangerous adversary. True enough.
Brzezinski is correct, that is, if we observe world
politics as what I would call (after Hans Morgenthau's
worldview) Morgenthauwelt, a world peopled by Powers and
lesser States, each endowed with special attributes and
interests. In such a world today, the Soviet Union indeed is
a heavily-armed anomaly with few attractive internal
endowments--cultural, economic, or otherwise. To observers
inclined to accept the Morgenthau view, the one distinguishing
feature of the U.S.S.R. as an "actor" is its enormous military
might, by which it still towers over all other powers.
Officially, and in practice, the Soviet Union, even under
Gorbachev, stubbornly and officially denies the existence of
Morgenthauwelt. As Ligachev in early August of this year
reminded his Soviet TV watchers (his important speech was not
reported at the time in U.S. major newspapers), the world is
composed of, and is still divided between, competing political
systems. This view has been reflected in other recent Soviet
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theoretical writings in the time of glasnost and perestroika.
In a recent Soviet strategic study, Lenin's original authentic
formulation is reaffirmed: "The entire world has become the
arena of the struggle between the two systems. The struggle
between the two systems is the axis around which evolves the
whole domestic and international life of all states of all
types."6
It must be said that Soviet foreign policy assets simply
cannot be weighed according to its material military might,
and that Soviet assets today, as always, include its own
ideological commitment to political warfare--a commitment that
today features assets of great importance no Soviet leader has
dared to abandon, and prominently have figured in their
"correlation of forces." These assets not only augment Soviet
military power; they also endow the U.S.S.R. with the
credentials as leader of a very widespread political proxy
system, a large part of which may be described as a system of
Secret Warfare. Thus a critical assessment of Soviet
international behavior must examine not only overt Soviet
state behavior in the context of selected issue-areas of
interest to Westerners, but Soviet assessments of its own
6. Ju. Ja. Kirsin, V.M. Popov, and R.A. Savuskin, Politceskoe
soderzanie souvremennykn voin (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), p. 255.
Quoted in Francoise Thom, Moscow's 'New Thinking' as an
Instrument of Foreign Policy (Toronto: MacKenzie Institute,
1987), p. 10.
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authentic position as sponsor of (to use Ligachev's words) the
social and national liberation struggle. Even in practical
Morgenthau terms, what would be the costs and benefits of
abandoning the elaborate system of proxy warfare that the
U.S.S.R. has developed over the years? A system, it must be
added, that consists in large part of covert operations:
secret warfare.
Leninist doctrine about the primacy of political
warfare--the perpetual friend/foe relationship--views it as
valid precursor, surrogate, and handmaiden to actual physical
conflict. This predisposition, to see international politics
chiefly as struggle, including clandestine war, measures all
relations as ones imbued with conflictual character. This
being so, Soviet theorists do not share the conventional
Western means of judging power among nations, including armed
forces. Thus (to return to the remark of Zbigniew
Brzezinski), the Soviet Union in its own terms is not a "one-
dimensional rival," nor merely a "credible challenger in the
military realm alone," if by that is meant "merely" the
capacity to mount a major war, and "win" it.
The chief reason why the Soviet Union should not be
assessed as a power on the basis of its military attributes
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I.
alone is that these are but part of a larger panoply of
strategic resources, diligently cultivated over the years
since the 1950s. These strategic resources, cultivated and
deployed on a vast geographic scale, form a complex system of
organized political warfare, an asset of immense importance to
Soviet strategy. The system can, for want of a better word,
be described as the "Red Orchestra." Any assessment of Soviet
perestroikan consolidation and retrenchment in world politics
today must take into account the vigor and vitality of this
strange, formidable system of proxy forces, unprecedented in
reach and scope. It goes without saying that no other power
in world politics today commands a similar orchestration of
political warfare. For that matter, no great power in history
ever has succeeded in doing so. This system may conceivably
decay and collapse but, then, it may not. It is of great
importance for Western observers of Soviet behavior in this
time of neo-detente to watch closely for signs of possible
fundamental change in this system, particularly as to Soviet
strategic thinking about it. Over the past quarter century,
this proxy system--the Red Orchestra--as it has grown in
scope, has engaged itself in widely dispersed conflicts in
many regions of the world--notably Africa, the Middle East,
and Latin America.
Nowadays, Moscow sends out signals that it seeks help
from the West to disengage from involvement in the Third
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World. The question is whether these signals are false,
whether they contain elements of truth, or whether, possibly,
they may portend some profound sea-change in Soviet thinking
about the world around them. If the latter were true, then
the twin global concepts that govern Soviet theoretical world
views would be brought into question: the concept of
Socialist Internationalism, and of Proletarian
Internationalism. The former, both a political and a legal
concept, refers to international relations among countries of
the Socialist Commonwealth; the latter conveys the idea of the
solidarity of the world revolutionary movement. Writing in a
Soviet military journal in 1977, about the ideological
instruction of military cadres, a leading Soviet general gave
flavor to the strategic objectives of the Soviet Union, in its
offensive against the enemies of socialism:
Bourgeois ideologists still seek to distort the social
role played by the armed forces of the socialist
countries in the modern world. . . . Implacability
toward the enemies of socialism is not confined to
defense of our concrete achievements; it presupposes an
active offensive against subversion, ideological
sorties, and all hostile phenomena. . . . Marxist-
Leninists do not oppose any and all wars, only the
unjust, aggressive wars of imperialism.7
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Such features of Soviet assets in the international
system are essentially incommensurable with those of all other
actors in world politics today, thus making it impossible to
speak of Soviet power as somehow comparable with the power of
other major actors in world politics. Furthermore, given the
extraordinary complexity of the network of Soviet (and Soviet
proxy) operations, it is also difficult to assess the weight
and combined influence of them, or to weigh them somehow
against the assets and influences of others.
Some may find it difficult to assess the successes and
failures of Soviet proxy offensives in the Third World in the
past twenty years; there can be little doubt as to the
enormous, if not tragic, costs of wars of national liberation,
or about their influence upon military thinking in the United
States. Leaving aside the bloody record of these past wars
(including Korea and Vietnam), at current count twenty-five
such wars are being fought, including some of quite long
7. Maj. Gen. D. Volkonogov, quoted in R. Judson Mitchell,
Ideology of a Superpower: Contemporary Soviet Doctrine on
International Relations (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press,
1982), p. 83.
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duration--"broken-backed wars." Taken together, they lead
some observers to conjecture that, in the foreseeable future,
wars will very likely perpetuate this pattern; these will be
"low intensity conflicts." None of the "little wars" has
flared into far-reaching physical conflict; none have proved
Sarajevo-like, igniting large-scale direct fighting between
major powers. Each in its own "little" way has had its own
unique characteristics, and combination of belligerents.
To generalize about this sorry record of late twentieth
century warfare, one may say that: (a) none of it has been
among or between history's most skilled practitioners of
warfare, the European states; (b) nearly all of it has been
fought in Asia, Latin America, and Africa; (c) most of it has
taken place within or among the residual legatees of Europe's
now-liquidated empires; and--most notably--(d) almost all of
these "little wars" have directly or indirectly involved the
Soviet union and its many proxies.
Such a journalistic overflight merely maps current sites
of actual shooting wars as of 1988; some, like the struggle in
Guatemala, have been going on intermittently for a very long
time, with periods of calm followed by resurgence of fighting.
Such intractible insurgency wars have led some observers, in
despair, to conclude they will never go away. As one said,
"It has become more than obvious that insurgencies do not
die--they fade away only to return at another opportune
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time. 118
One limitation upon this sort of journalistic photography
is that it ignores recent past "little wars" that have
stopped; it fails to speculate upon future locales. Not
infrequently, a site of supposedly consummated warfare serves
as a staging base for future offensives. From a Soviet/Cuban
perspective, Angola, now hotly contested, has been a base for
further operations in the offensive against Namibia, while
Namibia, seized, then would be a stepping stone toward South
Africa.9 Such is the nature of dubious battle, informed by
strategic purpose, that transitory outcomes open the way to
subsequent movements of events.
Even as every unhappy marriage is a unique form of hell,
so each of these "little wars" has its unique proximate
causes, passions, and participants. Considering them in the
aggregate, however, they share a certain unity, being (in
Soviet and proxy eyes) part of the broader struggle of
Proletarian Internationalism--battles in a larger political
war waged against the West, against the United States in
--------------------
8. Cesar Sereseres, "The Highlands War in Guatemala," in
Georges Fauriol, ed., Latin American Insurgencies (Washington,
D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1985),
p. 121. The author might have added a caveat: they go on,
sporadically, until victory, when they stop and become
something else.
9. By the same token, Grenada was to have been the stepping
stone for Cuba and the Soviets into the English-speaking
Caribbean.
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particular. "Wars of national liberation" are wars to break
the hated influences of advanced industrial societies. As the
recent report of the Commission on Integrated Long-Term
Strategy, Discriminate Deterrence, points out, these conflicts
in the Third World
are obviously less threatening than any Soviet-American
war would be, yet they have had and will have an adverse
cumulative effect on access to critical regions, on
American credibility among allies and friends, and on
American self-esteem. If this cumulative effect cannot
be checked or reversed in the future, it could gradually
undermine America's ability to defend its interests in
the most vital regions, such as the Persian Gulf, the
Mediterranean and the Western Pacific.10
The authors of this report might have pointed to an
interest far more vital to the United States--the political
tranquility of North America--now ominously threatened by the
presence of Soviet and Cuban proxy activities south of the
U.S. border. Massive destabilization of Central America has
been a feature of the 1980s; massive destabilization in Mexico
10. Discriminate Deterrence: Report of the Commission on
Integrated Long-Term Strategy (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1988), p. 13.
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could be a feature of the 1990s--a prospect that inspires
dread in those few who have the intellectual stamina to
envisage such a contingency.11
In its long history, the Soviet Union has been no
stranger to proxy activities. The Comintern embodied the
principle of international solidarity under Moscow's control,
yet its collective strength was based upon its principal
components, notably the European Communist parties. These now
are in eclipse; yet to compare the old Comintern with the
contemporary proxy system is to see the latter in its most
primitive form. In recent years, the Soviet proxy system
(excluding its innumerable other political fronts, which are
not the subject of this study) dramatically contrasts with the
Comintern, as to the nature of components and to capacity for
power projection.
In its mature contemporary form, the principal cast of
actors in the network of Soviet proxies, parties, and fronts
consists of the Soviet Union and twelve socialist states in
Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. These are
Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Bulgaria, Rumania, Poland, North
11. See Sol Sanders, Mexico: Chaos at our Doorstep (Lanham,
Maryland: Madison Books, 1986). It should be pointed out, of
course, that proxy offensives can be tuned on or off, downward
or upward, as the occasion requires. Some can even be
abandoned. Proxies themselves can be dumped. At present
there seems to be no Soviet inclination to carry things too
far in Mexico.
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Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, South Yemen, Ethiopia, and
Angola. In addition, it makes use of one nominally un-Marxist
but vigorous actor, Libya, and the PLO, a largely Marxist
"state without a state." These proxies, together with the
Soviet Union, today are linked together in cooperative
ventures of varying intensity in many parts of the Third
World; they also are linked together in a complex,
crosshatched system of friendship treaties.12
Proxy warfare is as old as the hills. Few great nations
have foresworn recourse to it, at least at some time in their
history. Whether proxies are called "hirelings," "lackeys,"
"cats' paws," "running dogs," or simply "loyal allies," the
generic significance of proxies is always the same: get
somebody else do your nasty work for you. The idea of the
proxy has enjoyed a bad reputation throughout history; the
proxy is inferior either as your substitute or auxiliary; the
proxy can be abandoned, if necessary. What is important,
however, in the case of Soviet proxies is the organizational
and ideological cement--real or artificial--that binds them in
a league of common struggle. It would be a severe mistake, in
assessing the wide range of Soviet proxy activities, to see
the participants as merely Soviet stooges, and thereby
12. See Avigdor Haselkorn, "Strategic Implications of the
Soviet Treaty Network," American Foreign Policy Newsletter,
Vol. 9, No. 1 (February 1986).
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discount ideological enthusiasm and commitment. Yet from a
Soviet strategic perspective, the USSR indeed dominates as
conductor of the Red Orchestra. How then does the ideological
momentum of the movement as a whole--its verve, as it were--
enter into Soviet calculations as a strategic asset? Would
Soviet policymakers, aware of the value of such precious
assets, ever seriously contemplate abandoning them, say, for
"reasons of state," and the temptation to become simply a
Great Power among powers?
To study the webs of alliances within the "Socialist
International" is to realize fully the importance of this
system to the Soviet leadership as an extension of its
influence in world politics. Few Westerners, to my knowledge,
have spent much time poring over a map to discern the range
and complexity of these networks. Formal treaties of
friendship and alliance, all a matter of public record, are
useful as starters. Wholly aside from the bilateral ties
between the USSR and individual Warsaw Pact satellites, a few
observations can be made about interesting anomalies in these
interlocking arrangements. (The attached map, though based
upon information three years old, is somewhat helpful.)
This global treaty network--a system of bilateral pacts
among the many alliance partners of the Soviet Union--consists
in mutual support agreements, linking such improbable partners
as Laos and Nicaragua, Mongolia and Libya, Vietnam and Syria,
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0 C E AN
pgoyy t R1~'~s~ti~
J-RERriFs
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South Yemen and the GDR, North Korea and Mozambique, along
with other more obvious pairs--Cuba and Angola, for instance.
Today, Sandinista Nicaragaua has security pacts not only with
the Soviet Union, but with Warsaw Pact states such as Cuba,
North Korea, Syria, and Vietnam. The aim of such new
infusions of socialist solidarity is thus to consolidate in
Central America the first "socialist" revolutionary platform
on the American mainland. A "system of mutually beneficial
cooperation"--to use ex-Soviet President Podgorny's phrase--
transforms Soviet strategic moves into the "collective" will
of "peaceloving" socialist states--a network the strategic
purpose of which is to politically isolate the United States,
both regionally and in the United Nations. More importantly,
to use Avigdor Haselkorn's words, it has served to provide
Moscow "with the necessary political facade to transform its
otherwise unilateral strategic initiatives into legitimate
acts sanctioned by the 'collective' will of the 'peace-loving
nations. ,,13
Proxy, or surrogate, political warfare--no stranger to
the affairs of nations at all times--reaches a high level of
complexity in recent Soviet practice. Its several basic uses
must be divined. To repeat, proxies can do your dirty work
for you. Proxy actions, notably clandestine ones, can be
13. Ibid., p. 2. I am indebted to the author for information
on which the attached map is constructed.
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disavowed; in the murky underworld of such political warfare,
the trail of responsibility often vanishes in obscurity. The
multiplicity of national actors and revolutionary movements
involved in particular operations can entail a division of
labor--a social division of labor!--and burden-sharing, in
which the cost in terms of materiel and human lives can be
dispersed. Multiple actions, at least in their overt forms,
can create the appearance, if not the reality, of true
international solidarity.
As Paul Henze, an observer of Soviet destabilization
measures, has remarked,
We are past the point where it serves the interests of
any party except the Soviet Union to adopt the
minimalist, legalistic approach which argues that if
there is no documentary evidence or some other form of
incontrovertible proof that the Soviet government is
behind something, we must assume that it is not. The
curious and equally illogical counterpart to this
attitude, so prevalent among journalists and academics
in the past decade, is to treat the U.S. government in
exactly the opposite fashion.14
14. Paul Henze, Goal: Destabilization: Soviet Agitational
Propaganda, Instability, and Terrorism in NATO South (Marina
del Rey, Calif.: European American Institute for Security
Research, 1981), pp. 2-3.
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r
As to the chief types of proxy (surrogate) operations,
there are at least eight. These are:
1. The dispatch and use of proxy front-line troops for
actual conventional combat operations. Since World War II the
most apparent of these Soviet campaigns have been the Korean
War, the Vietnam War, the Saudi-Egyptian war, the 1973 Arab-
Israeli War (the October War), and the Angolan and Ethiopian
campaigns in Africa.
2. The furnishing by proxies of materiel for combat
operations and destabilization in regions such as North Africa
(the the Polisarios in Morocco), the Middle East, sub-Saharan
Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America. On a
somewhat smaller scale, similar proxy operations have been
directed toward the Basque region of Spain, Northern Ireland,
Turkey, and Chile. The chief proxies in these actions have
been Czechoslovakia, Cuba, Communist Vietnam, Bulgaria, North
Korea, and Nicaragua (to El Salvador, Colombia, etc.). Here,
incidentally, we encounter flow patterns, that is, transfers
through one or more proxies to different ultimate
destinations, for purposes of concealment. Thus, Soviet aid
to Nasser's Egypt in the 1950s originally was funneled through
Czechoslovakia, shrouding the original source. Soviet aid to
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Central American and Caribbean guerrillas until recently has
been filtered through Cuba--now more brazenly overt. We may
call this logistical mode "camouflaged provenance."
3. Furnishing clients with proxy internal forces,
especially to replicate totalitarian systems of internal
control, in order to consolidate regimes and pacify
populations. The main donors of such assistance today are
East Germany, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Bulgaria. The
chief recipients have been Libya, Ethiopia, Cuba, Angola,
Mozambique, Grenada, Vietnam-controlled Cambodia, Zimbabwe,
the Seychelles, and Nicaragua.
4. Furnishing proxy professional training facilities for
client guerrilla terrorist groups. The chief locations of
such facilities today (other than the USSR itself) are or
recently have been Czechoslovakia, Syria, PLO-controlled South
Lebanon (before the Israeli invasion and Syria's expulsion of
the PLO), Bulgaria, Libya, Cuba, North Korea, and East
Germany.
5. Orchestrating clandestine drug-traffic operations,
either for purposes of political destabilization or for
funding other proxy operations. The chief proxy states for
this seem to be Bulgaria and Cuba--the one aimed toward West
Europe and Turkey, the other toward the United States.
6. The proxy furnishing of ideological training to
client cadres. The chief proxy states involved in this appear
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r
to be (again, other than the USSR itself) the GDR and Cuba.
Client cadres include nationals of many countries not now
subjects of major offensives: South Americans, Western
Europeans, South Pacific islanders, etc.
7. The proxy furnishing of infrastructural economic and
technical aid to new revolutionary clients. Such aid can
include seemingly benign facilities: constructing airports
and harbors; building communications systems and roads.
8. Soviet assignation of intelligence and
counterintelligence tasks to proxies (e.g., Cuba, East
Germany).
(Omitted from this catalogue is the traditional network
of front organizations that operate from headquarters outside
the Soviet Union and that are important for propaganda
offensives, a subject not included in this study.)
It has been in the normal nature of Third World proxy
offensives that each of them, in and of itself, rarely has
appeared earthshaking. American media reporting of them, such
as it is, normally deals with seemingly isolated particulars,
rather than with significant strategic configurations. A
further difficulty lies within the U.S. intelligence
community, which, well aware of clandestine particulars,
nonetheless often is loath to release information to the
public for fear of compromising its methods and sources.
Finally, it might be said at the present time that many
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Americans with more benign world views simply do not want to
know much about proxy operations since such knowledge might
clash with their policy preferences.
(So it was, in the congressional Contragate hearings in
1987, that, while Colonel Oliver North and others were
publicly savaged for their miniscule clandestine operation to
aid the anti-Sandinista forces, virtually no interest was
displayed in the vast array of clandestine proxy forces in
Nicaragua and surrounding areas (Cubans, Soviets, Bulgarians,
East Germans, and so on.)
The American "attentive public" rarely hears much news of
most Soviet proxy operations; in the major media they normally
go entirely unreported anyway.15
Surrogate, clandestine political offensives have been
difficult for democracies to combat successfully. One
observer has recently noted that the expression "low intensity
conflict" often used to describe such offensives is actually
inapt. He suggests instead that we call them "amorphous
wars"--conflicts that involve threats to American security but
15. During the Arab-Israeli October War, which hit the
headlines in a big way in 1973, there was virtually no
reporting of the presence of North Korean and Cuban combat
forces on the Arab side.
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are not so appreciated. "In amorphous wars," he says,
"threats are difficult to categorize, to analyze, and to
comprehend . . .." To identify the enemy is difficult--who is
he, actually? The amorphousness can be in the eye of the
beholder; he may not want to face the consequences of knowing;
such knowledge might require him to do something! The very
diffuseness of the threat, more often, is confusing; such a
war may be fought on widely separated fronts or axes--
sometimes whole regions )-6
The expression "amorphous war" invites intellectual
confusion. The dictionary tells us that amorphous means
"having no definite form," "being without definite character
or nature," "lacking organization or unity." Amorphousness is
by no means the same thing as stealth or secrecy; what appears
formless, furthermore, may seem so only because it remains
unexamined. The appearance of amorphousness actually may be
deliberate deception--as is camouflage. The strategy of
proxy, or client, political war may consist in pursuing
purposes clandestinely, but this does not mean it is formless.
For the last two decades, American policy elites have
been loath (or unable) to recognize the full nature of the
Soviet proxy system aligned against the United States.
Fragments of it surface from time to time, when some
16. Stephen Cimbala, "Amorphous Wars," International Journal
of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 2, No. 1, p. 75.
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newsworthy event occurs; terrorism, one aspect of this
fearsome system, is now agreed to be a truly international
formation--abetted, and to some extent trained, by the Soviet
Union. As the late William Casey wrote not too long ago:
The chain extends around the globe. Part of the
subversive threat we face in Central America is
stimulated by outsiders who are well-versed in
terrorism. For example, Italian Prime Minister Craxi
stated in early February [1986?] that Nicaragua hosts 44
of Italy's most dangerous terrorists--a statement
corroborated in part by a former Red Brigade terrorist
who stated that at least five of his former comrades now
serve as con-commissioned officers in the Sandinista
Army. Nicaragua, by the way, is a major recipient of
aid from Libya, and recently played host to Iranian
Prime Minister Musavi. Strange how the same names and
faces keep turning up whenever the subject is
international terrorism!17
Terror can strike almost anywhere--in Burma, Berlin,
Blackpool, Bogota, even the Capitol in Washington.
17. "The International Linkages--What Do We Know?", in Uri
Ra'anan, et al, Hydra of Carnage: The International Linkages
of Terrorism (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1986), p. 9.
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Unfortunately, it is but one feature of the proxy system, its
most photodynamic yet by no means most strategically
significant one. The true nature of proxy political warfare
can be judged only in its entirety, and by contemplating a few
of its most significant struggles. The system of proxies must
be understood holistically. The failure of most Westerners,
particularly Americans, to comprehend what Vladimir Bukovsky
has called the "conceptual character of the Soviet system and
the ideological roots of Soviet policies" is, one would hope,
remediable; the starting point would be to recognize that the
Soviet system today is far more comprehensive and far-reaching
than the "Soviet empire," which is commonly understood to
refer exclusively to the USSR, its East European satellites,
and its sprawling multinational empire east of the Urals.
One might, of course, begin with the parts of this far-
flung system and work toward the whole. For starters, we
might turn to one element, the Palestine Liberation
Organization, an active participant in Soviet proxy operations
in Africa and Latin America. Recent PLO language conveys some
indication of the flavor of a truly internationalist cause:
The Palestine resistance movement which leads the
27
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struggle of the Palestinian poeple is an organic [sic]
part of the forces of world revolution: the socialist
countries, the international liberation movement, and
the working class parties in the capitalist countries.
. . The Palestinian revolution is an integral part of
the three forces of international revolution, and its
victory is dependent upon the victory of these forces,
and its victory represents a definite support for these
forces in their struggle against imperialism and its
local tools.18
In another province--the Caribbean--similar language
appeared in the Basic Treaty between Castro's Cuba and the
now-defunct New Jewel Movement (then in control of the tiny
island of Grenada):
[The two Parties] brotherly united by the same ideals of
struggle as well as of active solidarity in favor of the
peoples that struggle for national liberation, and
likewise sharing the same convictions against
imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, Zionism, and
racism, become aware of the need to unite efforts and
coordinate actions of cooperation in the different
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activities within their scope.19
Vigorous strategic, yet ultimately unsuccessful, attempts
of the Soviet Union to destablize Turkey during the 1960s and
1970s provide a classic case in point. These operations,
designed to destablize NATO's southern flank, went virtually
unnoticed in the American press at the time. Organizing
terror on a massive scale throughout Turkey, the Soviets--
chiefly through proxies--invested vast amounts of money, arms,
and trained personnel, which flowed from Bulgaria, Syria and
Europe into the country. Both right- and left-wing terrorists
were financed directly from abroad, for example, through funds
brought in diplomatic pouches. Between 1977-1980, Turkish
authorities estimate that the total cost of Turkish terror to
the Soviets was in the range of $1 billion. Interrogation of
terrorists and their supporters revealed substantial
Bulgarian, Syrian, and Palestinian backing, along with
circumstantial evidence of deep Soviet, East German, and other
East European involvement. (This terror offensive--which
ultimately failed in its objective to weaken and overthrow the
Turkish constitutional regime--was fought both in Turkey and
abroad; throughout Europe and in the United States, many
Turkish diplomats were assassinated, chiefly by "Armenian"
19. See Paul Seabury and Walter McDougall, The Grenada Papers
(San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies), p. 50.
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liberation fighters, many of whom were trained in PLO camps in
Lebanon.)20
What outwardly may seem formless and random may have an
inner, if highly comnplicated, organizational logic. As will
be detailed below, scattered through the Communist world are
many camps and other training facilities of a truly
international character. In Cuba, the Soviet Union, the GDR,
Bulgaria, and elsewhere, these camps train political warfare
specialists recruited or drafted from such states as South
Africa, Morocco, Iran, Iraq, South Yemen, Nicaragua, El
Salvador, Honduras, Chile, India, Laos, Burma, and Bangladesh.
Such camps are international prep schools of terror and
destabilization.21
Observers are divided as to the degree of cohesion and
20. Henze, Goal: Destabilization, pp. 26-27, 33-45.
21. A recent published interview with a black South African
ANC "freedom fighter" captured by UNITA forces testifies to
the unusual complexity of such networking. In the space of
ten years this man underwent training in intelligence,
guerrilla combat, urban war, sabotage, andd Marxist ideology
in such widely dispersed clandestine locales as Angola, Cuba,
East Berlin, and Sofia, Bulgaria. In these diverse training
centers he had met and fraternized with European, Asian, Latin
American, and Middle Eastern co-trainees. (See Walter Rueb,
"Von Havanna bis nach Ost-Berlin: Der ANC ist mit seinen
Terroristen uberall," Die Weltl, March 1988.)
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purpose in this networked system of surrogate political war:
Is it centrally directed or is it diffuse and capricious? Is
it an orchestra or is it a jam session? Is it subject to
Muscovite micromanagement? Or does it proceed on its own
merry "pluralistic" way, with various ups an downs, as
opportunities present themselves to individual actors?
The greatest impediment to our understanding of it, to
repeat, is the secrecy not only of operations but also of
regimes; all the actors function in closed societies,
disclosing what they choose to disclose, misrepresenting what
they choose to misrepresent, about plans, decisions and
operations. True to their original Marxist/Leninist model,
they are cabalistic. As to the inner workings, we learn of
them fitfully, from collections of captured documents, from
defectors, from captives, photography, and so on. In actual
practice the variegations and combinations differ. Our two
major troves of captured documents--those of Grenada's New
Jewel Movement and of the PLO headquarters in Lebanon--display
with great clarity such inner workings but in themselves are
far less illuminating than, for instance, what might be
learned from those from major centers of power.22
22. See Seabury and MacDougall, eds., Grenada Papers for Party
and State archival documents seized by the U.S. Army in 1983.
For a sample of captured PLO archives, seized by Israeli
forces in Lebanon in 1983, see Ra'anan, et al, Hydra of
Carnage. These two collections of documents are derived from
the only archival materials seized from a totalitarian state
by democratic forces since the overthrow of the Third Reich in
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From a strategic perspective, however, one thing is no
secret--namely, the Soviet-proclaimed doctrines of wars of
national liberation. Perhaps the most comprehensive statement
of this was made in 1970 by the then Foreign Minister Andre
Gromyko, in a speech to Foreign Ministry employees:
In his speech to the Third Congress International, V.I.
Lenin said: "Millions and hundreds of millions are, in
fact, the overwhelming majority of the globe and are
coming forward as independent, actively revolutionary
factors. It is absolutely clear that the coming
decisive struggle for world revolution will see a
movement of the majority of the world's population, at
first directed toward national liberation, then turning
against capitalism and imperialism, and perhaps playing
a more revolutionary role than we expected." Continuing
what was begun by Lenin, the foreign policy of the
Soviet state applies many forces . . . to bring nearer
the hour of triumph of the national liberation struggle
of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America.23
1945. They are the only archival materials ever seized from a
Communist or proto-Communist state or party since Nazis seized
provincial archives in the city of Smolensk, only to have them
reseized by the U.S. Army in 1945.
23. Cited in Albert Weeks, Soviet and Communist Quotations
(Washington: Pergamon-Brassey's International Defense
Publishers), p. 105. The same line of messianic thinking is
engraved in the current Soviet Constitution: "The foreign
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One way to deal with the question of "orchestra or jam
session?" is to investigate the provenances, destinations,
strategic targets, and functional specializations of these
cooperative forces. As mentioned above, in addition to the
Soviet Union, the chief provenances of proxy forces are, in
rough order of magnitude, Cuba, North Korea, the German
Democratic Republic (GDR), Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Libya,
the PLO (diplomatically recognized as having state attributes
by all members of the bloc), Vietnam, Rumania, and Poland.24
policy of the USSR is aimed at ensuring international
conditions favorable for building communism in the USSR,
safeguarding the state interests of the Soviet Union,
consolidating the positions of world socialism, supporting the
struggle of peoples for national liberation" (Weeks, Ibid.)
24. An analogous form of the socialist division of labor is to
be seen in operations elsewhere than in the Third World--
namely, in intelligence gathering. See Henri Regnard,
"Eastern Europe Serves the Soviet Union by Gathering
Intelligence in the West," Aussenpolitik, Vol. 38, No. 4, pp.
354-361. See also Ion Mihai Pacepa, Red Horizons, for a
detailed account of how Ceausescu's Rumanian intelligence
operated in acquiring Western high technology for covert
delivery to the Soviet Union, and Rumania's role as patron of
the PLO. The recently assassinated PLO deputy to Arafat, Abu
Jihad, served as a Rumanian agent (Pacepa, p. 25). Oddly, the
Soviets make great use of Vietnamesse students in Western
Europe in what Regnard describes as a "veritable rampage in
all directions (electronics, energy resources,
telecommunications, and computers)" as one means by which
Vietnam repays the USSR for its very substantial aid (Regnard,
p. 359).
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TASK
USSR
CUBA
N. K.
VN
P.L.O.
DDR
~AND.
LIBYA
LYRIA
ZECH
BULG.
POL
ETHIA
ARMS MNFRS
X
X
x
ARMS SHIPPERS
X
X
X
X
x
x
x
AIR TROOP TRANSPORT
X
TERROR TRAINING
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
IDEOLOGICAL TRAINING
X
X
X
X
X
x
CONY. WAR TRAINING
X
X
X
PRAETORIAN GUARDS
X
X
X
SECURITY POLICE TRAINING
X
X
X
CONCENTRATION CAMPS
X
x
COMBAT FORCES: GROUND
X
X
X
X
X
x
COMBAT :AIR
X
X
X
E CON. COLLECTIVIZATION
x
x
x
IDEOL PURIFICATION MASSE
S
X
X
X
PROPAGANDA TRAINING
X
X
X
X
X
X
BASE CONSTRUCTION
X
X
x
INTELLIGENCE TRAINING
X
X
X
UNCONVENT. COMBAT FOR(
ES
X
x
4 Does no inckide adivilies of front organizalions-ep., World Peace Council, World Council of Churches, CISPES, A.N.C., sic.
SUPPLIERS
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Some who study these proxy provenances observe an
intriguing "functional division of labor" (or what could also
be called a "socialist division of labor") in shared tasks of
political destabilization, combat operations, regime-
protection for new clients, security police,
command/control/communications, and "revolutionary
transformation" of captured societies. The attached chart
sketches some of these missions and by whom they are carried
out. While much is known publicly of Cuban military
operations in Africa and Latin America, less is known about
Cuban political warfare operations, in the ideological and
operational training of international brigades, and about
their roles in political destabilization in South America.
What has been particularly interesting over the past fifteen
years has been the role of the East German regime in certain
specialized fields--establishment of
command/control/communications systems for security forces in
newly-conquered countries, training of security police,
construction of block warden systems for neighborhood
monitoring (in Nicaragua, this task has been carried out by
Cubans), training cadres for intelligence work, and
establishment of concentration camps. These missions have
been observed in Libya, South Yemen, Ethiopia, the Sudan,
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Angola, Mozambique, and Nicaragua. GDR policy functionaries
were observed in Grenada at the time of the collapse of the
Maurice Bishop regime. (In addition, the principle,
headquarters for the outlawed African National Congress are
located in East Berlin.) So extensive have been East German
operations in Africa, that West German cynics now refer to
them as the new Afrikakorps.25 Recent West German estimates
of Third World trainees in East-bloc ideological and political
warfare institutes put the number at more than 100,000. (See
attached map.)26
By far the one Marxist/Leninist state (other than the
Soviet Union) that engages in truly far-flung, intensive
missions is North Korea. While some Pyongyang-watchers have
made much of that regime's nonalignment between Peking and
Moscow, most if not all North Korean operations in the Middle
East and the Third World have been missions compatible with
Soviet, not PRC, goals.
In the late 1960s, as the Soviet Union began broad
25. Even before Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to
rescue the threatened pro-Soviet regime, East German
technicians were in control of Afghan government
communications, monitoring telephone systems throughout the
country.
26. "Die Roten and ihre hungernden Kostgaenger," Rheinischer
Merkur/Christ and Welt, No. 50, 11/12/87, p. 34. For a
comprehensive account of GDR military and police operations in
East Africa (Ethiopia in particular), see Henning von Loewis
of Menar, "Die DDR als Schrittmacher im weltrevolutionaeren
Prozess," Deutschland Archiv, No. 1 (1980), pp. 40-49.
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offensives against pro-Western, Third World countries, Kim
Il-Sung established what today has become a huge program for
training international terrorists. Today, more than 30
training sites reportedly exist in North Korea, while more
than 5,000 terrorists and guerrilla warriors have been trained
abroad in camps located in North Korea, Syria, Libya, and
elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East. Pyongyang furnishes
training in urban and rural guerrilla warfare, close-quarters
fighting, sabotage, military reconnaissance, and so forth.
(Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, for instance, was first trained
in North Korea.) North Korean trainers have worked regularly
with Polisario units based in Algeria, with SWAPO forces for
battle in Southwest Africa, and with both Yasir Arafat and
George Habash, rivals within the PLO. When U.S. and Caribbean
forces arrived in Grenada in 1983, a cadre of North Korean
advisers were discovered to be training the New Jewel
Movement's political army. After the Sandinista seizure of
power in Nicaragua, 300 North Korean military advisers, along
with Cubans, East Germans, and Bulgarians (who, incidentally,
also set up and organized the Ministry of the Interior) soon
appeared on the scene. North Korean fighter planes have
participated in wars both in Africa and the Middle East. The
list of African countries alone, where North Koreans have an
active presence as combatants, instructors, and palace guards,
is lengthy and includes Libya, Tanzania, Madagascar, Ghana,
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Zimbabwe, Zambia, Burkina Faso, Benin, Uganda, Angola, and
Ethiopia. (See attached map depicting North Korean global
activities.) While a North Korean presence in the Seychelles
supposedly ended in 1986, Soviet planes recently have flown in
a new contingent to reinforce the Marxist/Leninist regime of
France-Albert Rene (himself, oddly enough, a close longtime
friend of the late Maurice Bishop of Grenada). "Juche," an
ideological invention of Kim Il-Sung, known to some as
"Marxism/Leninism in Korean dress," today plays a significant
political-war role in both Africa and Latin America. (Recent
North Korean hosted meetings of leftists andd terrorists in
Havana and Lima, Peru--attended by groups from Colombia,
Ecuador, Uruguary, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Panama, Guyana, and
elsewhere--testify to the growing influence of Pyongyang in
the Western Hemisphere.)27
27. Descriptions of North Korean overseas operations can be
found in North Korea: Surrogate or Self-Reliant? (Washington:
Malodn Institute, 1988); and Daryl Plunk, "North Korea:
Exporting Terrorism," Asian Studies Center Backgrounder
(Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, Feb. 1988). See also
Joseph Bermudez, North Korean Forces (Boston: Jane's
Publications, 1988). It is little known nor long remembered
that Cuban ground forces and North Korean air units fought
against Israel in the October War of 1973.
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N O A T H U F 71/rf N1'; { 6---A 1. t+
-taI?fAA1 OPERA Otis
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Equally as ambitious, if far less endowed with resources,
the Palestine Liberation Organization since its inception has
played a far-reaching role in Soviet destabilization
activities in North and Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East,
Turkey, Central America, South America and, more recently, in
South and Southeast Asia. Graduates of PLO terror training
camps in Lebanon and elsewhere have plied their trade not only
in the Third World, but in Western Europe as well. As one
observer noted recently, the "list of groups that have
attended the Palestinian camps since 1969 is a veritable
'who's who' of left wing insurgents and terrorists."28
The roster of PLO-trained nationalities and tribes is
impressive--from North Africa: Dhofaris, Polisario, the
Iranian National Front, Kurds, and Eritreans; from Europe:
the Turkish People's Liberation Army, Armenians, the Red
Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang (now the Red Army Faction),
the German Revolutionary Cells, the IRA, the Basque ETA, South
Moluccan emigres, etc.; from the Western Hemisphere: Uruguyan
Tupamaros and Nicaraguan Sandinistas, the Monteneros of
28. Walter Alan Levin, "Soviet-PLO Relations, 1967-1987:
Motivations and Contradictions," MA thesis, Fletcher School of
Law and Diplomacy, 1988, p. 63. The most infamous individual
graduate is Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish assassin who nearly
succeeded in killing Pope John Paul II in 1982. Agca spent a
month in PLO training in Syria before being posted to Europe.
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Argentina, and the Vanguards of Brazil, etc.29 Aligning
itself with the USSR has also meant alignment with
multifarious "progressive" forces far beyond the PLO's
specific regional interests--a characteristic of most proxies.
(Vietnam, for instance, has reciprocated PLO help by providing
air defense training to them.) One of the strangest instances
of international reciprocity occurred in 1973 in the Lod
Airport in Tel Aviv. A Japanese Red Army unit massacred
Puerto Rican pilgrims returning to America to help the
Palestinian PFLP in an operation named afater a Nicaraguan
rebel! In Asia, the PLO has been active in numerous
insurgencies, including Guam, Thailand, the Philippines, and,
as mentioned above, in Sri Lanka. (See attached map.)
As for Latin America, the long-standing connections of
the PLO with Castro's Cuba sealed an alliance linking both to
"the victories in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Africa and Latin
America." Palestinians, themselves trainers, have been
trained in Cuba, while Cuban instructors have been trained in
Palestinian camps in the Middle East. Through the Cuban
connection, the PLO first established its own influence in
Central America, notably in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The
flavor of this latter connection is to be seen in the
recollections of Miguel Bolanos Hunter, a former Sandinista
29. Ibid. Sandinistas actually have taken part in Palestinian
actions against Israel.
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Z PLO (T) v/TJ&5
0 C / A N
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C E A
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counterintelligence officer:
FSLN-PLO relations . . . go back to the 1960s. The
first links were arranged through Cuba. For instance,
Patrice Arguello first met with the PLO in Cuba. From
Cuba he went to Europe and studied in Belgium, and then
he went to train with the PLO. Later, he died on a
mission. . . . There were quite a few Sandinistas with
PLO training . . ,.30
There is a long standing blood unity between us and the
. . . Many of the units
belonging to the Sandinista movement were at Palestinian
revolutionary bases in Jordan. In the early 1970s,
Nicaraguan and Palestinian blood was spilled together in
Amman and in other places in the "Black September
battles." It is natural, therefore, that in our war
against Somoza we received Palestinian aid for our
revolution in various forms.
Blood-ties also link the PLO to Salvadoran and Nicaraguan
30. Ibid., p. 75.
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Communist leaders: the Nicaraguan Minister of Transportation,
Charles Zarouk, is of Palestinian descent; Shafik Handal,
General Secretary of Salvador's Communist party, and his
brother Farad are also Palestinian.31 PLO members also formed
part of the International Brigade that helped bring the
Sandinistas to power. In 1979, shortly before the overthrow
of Somoza, a plane reportedly flying medical equipment from
Beirut to Nicaragua was found instead, when intercepted in
Tunisia, to be carrying 50 tons of ammunition.
In the Socialist International panoply, Castro's Cuba is
by far the most interesting of all Soviet clients and proxies.
For students of power politics, it defies comprehension: a
small island country, with a population scarcely larger than
New York City's, a nearly bankrupt economy, and huge
unemployment. By economic standards, Cuba today would qualify
as a banana republic. In Batista's time, no one could have
imagined that by the 1980s an impoverished Cuba's presence and
influence would permeate Latin America; North, West and East
Africa; and the Middle East, or that its hubristic leader
31. Ibid., pp. 63-77. Shafik Handal assisted the U.S.
Communist party in founding the U.S.-based pro-Salvadoran
guerrilla organization, CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with
the People of El Salvador).
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would stand tall among the rebellious chieftains of Third
World militancy. Today, as one observer puts it, Cuba is "a
small country with a big country's foreign policy." One
obvious if insufficient explanation of the gap between Cuba's
scarce internal resources and its pretentious global
capabilities is that the gap is filled by huge annual Soviet
benefactions; the Soviets are assured that "what the Cubans do
abroad will serve their purpose."32
Since the late 1960s, Cuba's long proxy contribution to
the war against the West has grown formidably. Many of its
covert exploits are scarcely known or recalled in the West.
(See attached map.) By 1969-1970, for instance, Cuban
military units were in place in Jordan, Syria and Iraq. When
the Yom Kippur War erupted in October 1973, Cuban troops were
hastily flown in from Havana to bolster flagging Syrian forces
on the Golan Heights. There Cuban soldiers took heavy
casualties from Israeli artillery. Their able then-commander,
Arnaldo Ochoa, subsequently (1985) restructured the Sandinista
Army in Nicaragua, and recently (1988) has been sent by Castro
to take command of beleaguered and demoralized Cuban forces in
Angola. (Even less well known was the Cuban role in the
original organization of Polisario guerrilla forces in
--------------------
32. Robert Pastor, "Cuba and the Soviet Union: Does Cuba Act
Alone?", in Barry Levine, ed., The New Cuban Presence in the
Caribbean Basin (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1983), p.
207.
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01
Morocco, an operation they mounted clandestinely from the
Canary Islands).
In one respect, Castro's Cuba is the ideal prototype of a
Soviet proxy; in another, a significant anomaly. While other
proxies' contributions to Socialist International operations
are functionally specialized, Cuba's contributions are
comprehensive and across-the-board. Indeed, except for
several of the Soviets' old-time regulars, the East bloc
satellites, Cuba performs all of the proxy functions I have
enumerated above, in addition to certain tasks it has
perfected by itself. (One interesting innovation, later
copied by the Soviets in Afghanistan, has been the abduction
and training of young children from conquered countries, to
form the basis of future overseas leadership cadres. Young
Angolans, for instance, are trained for this purpose on the
Cuban "Isle of Pines," now called the "Isle of Youth." The
Isle currently contains eighteen international camps for
children from ten countries.)
The network of Cuban military advisers and troops, while
now chiefly in Angola and Nicaragua, extends far beyond those
two countries into seventeen others--a network as extensive as
the North Korean one: Angola, approximately 40,000 troops
today; Ethiopia, 6-7,000 troops and advisers; South Yemen,
1,200 troops and advisers; Libya, 2,000 troops and advisers;
Mozambique, ca. 1,000 advisers. Lesser numbers of Cubans
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operate in Syria, Equatorial Guinea, Tanzania, Guinea-Bissau,
North Korea, Sao Tome, Algeria, Uganda, Laos, Afghanistan,
Sierra Leone, Benin, and Cape Verde.
In another respect, Cuba is a genuine anomaly in the
roster of proxies. While dependent upon Soviet funding,
Castro's pursuit of a global "internationalist" foreign policy
by no means always squares with Soviet purposes and, on more
than one occasion, has been profoundly at odds with them. In
Grenada, for instance, toward the end of the New Jewel
Movement's rule, Castro's fidelity to Maurice Bishop clashed
with the Soviets' switch of support to Bishop's murderer and
Stalinist rival, Bernard Coard. In East Africa, Castro's Horn
of Africa priorities diverged significantly from Moscow's. On
more than one occasion, Castro's Latin American priorities
have significantly differed, and well may do so in the future.
The emotional sources of Castro's hatred of the United States
differ from Muscovite ones--the case often being made that
this boundless, ambitious, personal hatred in Castro's mind
preceded his ideological conversion to Marxism/Leninism.
Castro surely regards his own messianic role as independent of
the Soviet Union. Today, also, his deep resistance to
Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost measures parallels the
bitter PRC recriminations with Khruschev's revisionism in the
1960s.
For such reasons, the special relation of Cuba to the
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Soviets must, as one observer has put it, be seen as symbiotic
rather than simply surrogate.33 Insofar as Castro claims for
himself the mantle of Third World leadership in his chosen war
against the United States, Soviet and Cuban goals clearly
differ in emphasis and priorities.
The small Caribbean island of Grenada, which briefly and
tragically experienced Marxist/Leninist rule, merits close
inspection for several reasons. Ironically, it is the only
country in our century ever to be liberated from Communist
rule. For this reason alone it merits attention, since once
the New Jewel Movement died of self-inflicted wounds, and
invading American forces captured party and state papers,
Grenada provided scholars and analysts an intimate picture of
the inner process by which a conquered nation is subject to
"socialist transformation."
The brief, agonizing Grenadan experience under communist
rule also illuminates our study of the nature of the Soviet
proxy system. Every locale of Communist political warfare is
unique, and so too is the experience of it. Grenada is no
33. See Edward Gonzalez, "Cuba, the Third World, and the
Soviet Union," in Andrzej Korbonski and Francis Fukuyama,
eds., The Soviet Union and the Third World (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 123-147.
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exception, and therefore it would be risky to generalize too
much from this one now intimately-known episode.
What makes Grenada particularly interesting is that,
during the brief time of the New Jewel rule, Grenada was both
a subject and an object of proxy operations: the ruling
movement drew upon human material and financial resources from
many other parts of the Socialist International in order to
embark upon its programs of domestic Gleichschaltung. But, at
the same time, the miniscule Bishop regime already was
embarking upon regional subversive adventures, joining with
Castro's Cuba in ambitious schemes to extend Marxist-Leninist
control over other English-speaking Caribbean countries,
Jamaica and Barbados, in particular. Their dual aim was the
transformation of their tiny island into a collectivized
Communist society, and the mobilization of military and
paramilitary power for tasks in Central America, the
Caribbean, and possibly also in West Africa. In these latter
tasks, we see that, with Cuban help, Grenada would become a
power-projector in black Anglophone regions. The joining of
Black nationalism, anti-imperialism, and Marxism-Leninism
under the aegis of Castro thus meant, in effect, that the New
Jewel Movement, seeking power in the socialist world, would
voluntarily be a proxy of a proxy.
In the span of three years, aid--material, financial, and
human--flowed into Grenada from Cuba, Libya, the Soviet Union,
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Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, the PLO, North Korea, and East
Germany. Grenadan "students" were sent abroad to Cuba, the
Soviet Union, Hungary, East Germany, and elsewhere, for
military, political, and professional training. (Grenadan
"students" sent abroad encountered cultural problems in
multinational training schools and camps. As one Grenadan
report from Cuba noted, they had a "special problem" in
dealing with PLO "students," "because of their difference in
lifestyle." The Grenadans, the report continued, "are
accustomed with [sic] their Caribbean language, and sometimes
the Palestinians take offense at obscene language, and would
either threaten or strike their colleagues." Palestinians
also accused the Grenadans of stealing. Other reports told of
reverse situations--of West African students inducing
Grenadans into homosexual relationships, using suspect drinks
and "black magic." Grenadan students in Moscow encountered
far different problems in adjusting to Slavic culture and
Russian weather.)34
Arms materiel flowed in from Vietnam, Eastern Europe,
Cuba, and elsewhere. Professional advice was sought from
Vietnam as to how the New Jewel Movement might "reeducate" its
population, in special camps, to rid Grenada of reactionary,
34. See Stephen Schwartz, Grenada: The Fate of A Cuban
Colonial Possession (unpublished ms., Washington, D.C., June
1988), especially pp. 44-45.
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bourgeois, and anti-social elements. In Grenada, Cubans
(rather than East Germans) provided essential instruction in
the creation of security policy systems, neighborhood
surveillance, and counterintelligence. Cuban advice also was
sought concerning methods of subduing recalcitrant Christians,
churches, and orders.
From the beginning, Havana, not Moscow, called the tune
in Grenada. Grenadan emissaries in Moscow found themselves
low in the pecking order of Soviet priorities; captured
documents show little evidence of Soviet "micromanagement" on
the island. Yet toward the end of the New Jewel Movement's
brief and stormy life, as the "revo" faltered andd splintered,
clearly the Bernard Coard faction that overthrew Maurice
Bishop enjoyed Soviet support. Coard, the apparatchik,
contrasted with Bishop, the charismatic leader. (When
arrested by American authorities, Coard was carrying KGB
intelligence equipment.) The anger displayed by Castro on
learning of Bishop's murder was genuine, and directed in part
at suspected Soviet complicity. Clearly, the Soviets had seen
the need for tighter and more ruthless means of exercising
power.
Grenada, in microcosm, illustrates the tensions and
frictions among major proxy elements, andd also the contrast
between Soviet and Cuban priorities--apparent also in
Nicaragua, where cautious Soviet involvement contrasts with
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The Libyan Khadafi regime, no stranger to African, Middle
Eastern and European terror activities, is also deeply engaged
in Latin American actions. Regarded widely as a loose cannon
on a pirate ship, Khadafi has intruded extensively into
Central America and the Caribbean, some operations dating back
to the late 1960s. In 1969, Sandinista representative Benito
Escobar arranged for 50-70 Sandinistas to be trained in PLO
camps in Lebanon; several years later other cadres were sent
to be trained in Khadafi's Libyan camps. In 1979, Khadafi
invited Central American guerrilla leaders, including
Sandinistas, to a conference in Benghazi, promising financial
and military support for their movements. Tomas Borge, a
founder of the FSLN, then used Libyan money to buy arms from
Vietnam and North Korea. Later, after vast amounts of Libyan
funds had flowed to Managua, the Sandinistas hosted a
celebration of the 11th anniversary of Khadafi's ouster of
Americans from Libya. As one Sandinista leader observed then,
"The ties between the Libyan people and the Nicaraguan people
are not new, but were consolidated when the Sandinista Front
struggled in the field of battle to win the liberty of our
homeland."
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A strange event in 1985 showed interproxy solidarity
between Communist Nicaragua and Libya; at that time,
Sandinistas recruited domestic forces to join Khadafi's "Green
World Guard" (a force mobilized to accompany Khadafi to the
United Nations). Further, huge shipments of Libyan arms have
clandestinely flowed to Nicaragua, and Libyans also have
worked closely with Sandinistas in Nicaraguan joint ventures
in sugar production, cattle raising, and other economic
ventures. Libyan involvement in Chilean and Caribbean terror
ventures, and leftist movements in Antigua, Dominica, French
Guiana, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, and St. Lucia have also
been noted. Libyan aid to South Pacific insurgencies began in
1986, concentrated on Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Fiji.
What all this indicates is a networking among Soviet
proxies for reciprocal aid, independent of any direct Soviet
control or supervision. This component of the proxy system,
in its spontaneity and sometimes ebullient enthusiasm, differs
somewhat from more direct Soviet operations. By now, after
twenty years, a blooded camaraderie links revolutionary groups
across the Third World, joined by memories of past common
struggles against the imperialists, and the anticipation of
wars to come. As a Caribbean newspaper, the Daily Express of
Trinidad, observed recently, "The trouble is that, left to
Libya, the Caribbean would soon become not a 'zone of peace,'
a phrase that militants of the left like to raise when it
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suits them, but a sea of blood."35
XIV
Some weary Western observers of Soviet proxy warfare are
by now so inured to its presence in Third World regions that a
mood of cynicism occasionally informs their analysis. "All
wars of insurgency," writes one author, "are long and slogging
conflicts, often inconclusive. Such wars do not end suddenly
with one side declaring 'victory.' Insurgencies can simply
fade away--and then reappear when new strategic realities
promise greater succcess."36 To make things worse, of course,
new insurgencies may break out or flare up in unexpected
places; swift coups may bring rapid seizures of power; and
another round of difficulties commences. Today's attention to
relatively new scenes of such conflict focuses upon such
disparate scenes as the Philippines, Sri Lanka, East Timor,
and the South Pacific, while others, perhaps Panama and
Mexico, stand in the wings awaiting their turn.37
35. For the details, see U.S. Department of State, Libyan
Activities in the Western Hemisphere, August 1986.
36. H. Joachim Maitre, "The Dying War in El Salvador," in
Walter Hahn, ed., Central America and the Reagan Doctrine
(Univ. Press of America, 1987), p. 133.
37. For a discussion of new Soviet and Soviet-proxy activities
in the South Pacific, see George Tanham, "Subverting the South
Pacific," The National Interest, No. 11 (Spring 1988). The
Soviet-supported drive to "denuclearize" the newly independent
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In these new sites of contention, where Soviet proxies
are known to be present, the Soviets themselves, as usual,
remain modestly in the background. This discretion is typical
of most such encounters. For Soviet leaders, U.S.-Soviet
relations long have been strategically paramount; these
constitute for them the central axis of world politics. In
most such engagements, the Soviets have clearly preferred low-
risk operations; for them, there has been a marked dislike for
deploying their own military forces in combat. In this regard
the Red Army's Afghan invasion has been a remarkable
exception; but the "lesson" now may be read by Soviet leaders
as advising greater, rather than less, reliance on proxies in
the future. After all, the costs and risks of this direct
adventure have proved immense.
There is an irony in this, since Soviets, on the
strategic offensive, have waged war indirectly, while, on two
major occasions, the U.S. (in Korea and Vietnam) found its
armed forces up front, taking brutal casualties. And there is
a certain gloomy aspect to the future of America's capability
(or collective will) to mobilize its own proxy forces for
South Sea "nations" has been carried out chiefly through
Communist-dominated Australian labor unions and other such
fronts. A possible consequence of this "antinuclear
offensive" would be to bar U.S. naval forces from South
Pacific ports; combined with successful operations in the
Philippines, directed at Subic Bay facilities, the U.S. naval
presence in the region could be severely crippled.
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effective countermeasures. The congressional "Contra
Hearings" of 1987 may well be a watershed of profound
importance for any effective U.S. clandestine attempts to
engage in covert actions. The Soviets--content with small,
carefully orchestrated, and marginal moves unlikely to arouse
the American public--normally display a greater degree of
patience than their American counterparts. Angelo Codevilla
has described this as a "discriminating retail approach to
warfare."
An assessment of the proxy system's value to the Soviet
Union is in order. Now, when the Soviet Empire is beset with
troubles within, with the consequences of its Afghan
adventure, and with troubles in its East bloc satellites, one
might wonder about the future value of the system to the broad
goals of the Soviet state.
The first thing to be said is that, from an ideological
standpoint, any outright abandonment of the proxy system would
be almost inconceivable. A repudiation of Socialist
Internationalism, especially with respect to the Third World,
would profoundly undermine the legitimating foundations of the
Soviet system as a whole. As one observer recently has
written, anticipating Ligachev,
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"a more than marginal change in the [Soviet]
leadership's attitude toward the struggle for ascendancy
in the underdeveloped world is unlikely because the
leadership would see any profound shift as undercutting
the Soviet raison d'etre. The perpetual effort to press
outward has become enshrined in the leadership's self-
image and has also become embedded in the myth about the
historic role of the Soviet state which helps justify
the party's rule. Short term compromises, even small
retreats, are justifiable. . . . Accepting and
legitimzing a long-term derailment of the locomotive of
history is another matter entirely."38
But such a manifest abandonment of these proxy assets
also would jeopardize the loose alliance the Soviets long have
enjoyed with profoundly anti-American and anti-Western forces
in Asia, Africa, and Latin America--forces I have described.
To any observer of the composition of this strange admixture
of forces, it should be evident that the degree of its
solidarity arises from authentic and powerful, commonly-shared
hatreds. The revolt against the West, after all, had its
38. Harry Gelman, "The Soviet Union in the Less Developed
World," in Korbonski and Fukuyama, Soviet Union and the Third
World, p. 300.
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proximate origins in the Bolshevik Revolution in the twentieth
century. Though the sources of such animosity vary
considerably (and in some instances long antedate that
revolution), taken together, their strength has been a source
of profound reassurance to the Soviet leadership. Even from a
purely practical, strategic viewpoint, the anticipation and
subsidization of revolts against the West (to the extent they
succeed) help to confuse and destabilize the West itself--no
small objective. Some today may argue that rumblings of
nationality discontent in Soviet Asia inevitably will tarnish
the USSR's reputation as protector of Third World causes; yet
this very challenge, one might well argue, could inspire
greater dedication to revolutionary zeal elsewhere. It also
should be pointed out that strategic destabilization, followed
by "revolutionary consolidation," has advanced the purely
military aspirations of the Soviet Union, as reflected in the
strategic correlation of forces.
Only someone with foreshortened vision could ignore the
evolution of the Soviet State as a global military power in
contest with the United States and its allies. Today, among
many other things, the USSR has a two-ocean navy, with bases
in Southeast Asia and in the Caribbean. Some of the Soviets'
and proxy conquests in Africa, Latin America, and Asia have
important strategic value. (Reports of Soviet and Bulgarian
airport, harbor, and submarine base construction in Nicaragua,
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augmenting Soviet bases in Cuba, must be considered harbingers
of future aspirations. Current Soviet maritime and political
probings of the South Pacific region also are disturbing.)
From a strategic standpoint, one major triumph, not only
for the Soviet Union but also for several of its proxies,
would be a successful destabilization of both Central America
as a whole, and Mexico. Any major upheaval in Mexico
conceivably could cause profound social dislocation inside the
United States--a domestic crisis of a magnitude seldom seen in
American history; so great would be its repercussions that
America might well follow George McGovern's advice and "come
home," abandoning its commitments both in East Asia and
Western Europe. Such a prospect would fulfill not only Soviet
aspirations, but those of North Korea, the PLO, if not all
other proxies put together, another telling argument for the
maintenance of the system!
In the eyes of some Western observers, including quite
competent economic analysts, the costs of the Soviets'
extended overseas empire--both its maintenance and
enlargement--are considerable. The economic evidence
(including the huge costs of maintaining the Castro regime,
Vietnam, etc.) is fragmentary but powerful.
It long has been the conventional wisdom in the West that
empires are burdens; the swift divestiture of overseas
colonies by Europeans after 1945 bore eloquent witness to this
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view. It is shared also by some Russians. In Solzhenitsyn's
Letter to the Soviet Leaders, written before his exile, he
pointed to the costs of empire as a chief reason for the
impoverishment of the Russian poeple.
Twenty years after Khruschev launched his support for
wars of national liberation in the Third World, those
countries unfortunate enough to be liberated now are basket
cases--their economic infrastructures ruined, in some cases
their peoples afflicted by famine, in some their ruthless
regimes challenged by insurgency. All are heavily burdened by
costs of huge military and police establishments. Nicaragua
is only the latest victim of the costs of national liberation;
still others may join it. Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, South
Yemen, all are telling examples of Socialist victory. Cuba,
the first such Third World victim, has languished in economic
desolation for more than two decades, its economy propped up
by huge Soviet subsidies. From a purely cost-accountant
standpoint, one might wonder how many more such Pyrrhic
victories the Soviet Union's proxy campaigns can sustain. The
prospects of economic bankruptcy plague all newly-established
Marxist-Leninist regimes in Asia, Africa, and the Western
Hemisphere. How the Soviet Union could sustain them
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economically is an interesting question.
Ironically, while all of these states today depend
heavily upon the Soviets or their proxies for military/police
support, many have had the presumption to court Western
governments, banks, and other institutions for aid to rescue
them from their self-inflicted misery and their ill-fated
social experimentation. Vietnam, its economy in ruins, now is
joining the queue; Nicaragua may not be far behind. It would
be ironic, if what Marxism-Leninism has joined together in
enmiseration, capitalism may bail out--to relieve or rescue
not only the decrepit Soviet economy, but also the devastated
outer provinces of its extended empire, and of the Socialist
International.
Ratios of cost/benefit for dynamic, aggressive empires
depend upon the nature of defined objects and purposes. What
are the criteria of value? In the matter of Soviet proxy
actions, two radically different standards exist--one derived
from the strategic goal, the other from purely economic
considerations. If the strategic object is that of political
warfare--to destablize, weaken, and overthrow adversaries--
then proxy warfare proves cheap indeed, when compared with the
cost of other means to such an end. If the object is that of
enrichment, then in the long run the cost of "empire
maintenance" becomes profoundly dear. The cost of the Vietnam
proxy war, to the Soviet Union, was trivial; to the
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Vietnamese, the cost of war and its consequences were
staggering. Vietnam is now heavily dependent on Soviet aid.
Yet that cheap and victorious war had profound effects upon
the morale, prestige, and political will of the main
adversary, the United States. The ledger book of the Vietnam
war is one which cost accountants cannot manage alone.
So it is, particularly, with human lives; for if life be
held dear, the lives of proxies are far less so. In the
aggressive spread of Soviet influence by war since 1950, few
Russian lives have been lost, while millions of proxies have
perished in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The
"correleation of forces" has been advanced through indirect
means.
We therefore see that the nature of true "costs of
empire" may be measured by antithetical criteria. Were the
Soviets to abandon their long-held strategy of political war
against the West and attend to neglected matters at home, they
might do this in knowledge of the savings that might ensue.
But, in any event, the savings, in economic terms, would not
be particularly great. Most proxy operations are very cheap.
Were the Soviets to persist in their Third World political
warfare, in solemn commitment to old traditional goals, the
costs would be small compared with the cost of alternative
methods of expansion such as direct aggression.
To repeat, the fundamental question to ask of Soviet
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choices is: What would be the real political costs to the
Soviet Union of outright relinquishment, abandonment, or even
repudiation of the spirit of proletarian internationalism
common to it and to all Communist states and movements? How
much does an authentic, common hatred of free societies serve
to bond such diverse forces to long-term Soviet purposes? Put
differently, can such states and movements, feeding off and
enmiserating their own peoples, continue indefinitely as an
effective force in world politics?
Envy, hatred, and apocalyptic utopian expectations have
animated the Red Orchestra. The Satan of Milton's Paradise
Lost, after all, was a peer among peers in solidarity with
other fallen angels. Milton likened these subnatural beings
to earthbound forces familiar in Western memory; his
description of them is strikingly akin to those that have
given rise to today's Socialist Internationalism:
A multitude, like which the populous North
Pour'd never from her frozen loyns, to pass
Rhene or the Danew, when her barbarous Sons
Came like a Deluge on the South, and spread
Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands.
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Conclusion
The convenor of this meeting asked me to furnish
concluding observations of a constructive sort. What can be
done?
His instruction reminds me of a version of the Aespoian
ant and the grasshopper story: As winter approached, the idle
and indigent grasshopper consulted his friend the ant as to
how he could survive the impending dark season. The ant said,
quite simple! Turn yourself into a cockroach, find a warm
kitchen, and a radiator and you will fare very well. That is
all very well and good, said the grasshopper, but it is also
impractical. I cannot change myself into a cockroach. Be
that as it may, replied the ant; I am only offering you policy
guidance.
One way directly to meet this complex, ubiquitous
challenge of secret war would be to reply in kind; fight fire
with fire; fight proxies with proxies. But as recent events
have shown--Contragate being the most dramatic--the American
political temperament is such that such action is virtually
out of the question even when it is not covert; America's
reputation as a reliable sponsor of anti-Communist movements
has been drastically compromised by its abandonment of such
friends.
Several years ago the so-called Reagan Doctrine promised
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a strategic counteroffensive directed at vulnerable and remote
outposts of Soviet proxy war, to achieve signal reverses to
Soviet fortunes. Many such troubled outposts, such as
Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, and Nicaragua, have been plagued
by the resistance of local freedom fighters. Unambiguous and
indirect American support for them, coupled with support of
other friendly nations, might cause the Soviets to reconsider
the costs of their support of "national liberation forces,"
and of "Socialist Internationalism" when, in the aftermath of
victory, comes ruination and civil war. What is to be gained,
some might say, by "national liberation victory" when this is
followed by unalloyed defeat and/or costly indefinite
maintenance of remote barricades? But since the measures
taken under the Reagan Doctrine were half-hearted and/or
abandoned, then these dubious battles will be settled on way
or another by forces with little U.S. participation. Perhaps
the American mood may change, but the American reputation for
fickleness will remain. America does not do well at Proxy
operations and everybody by now knows this. The grasshopper
cannot become a cockroach.
Still, in eyes of a watching world, the Soviets now face
a profound dilemma: the aftermath of tactical victories for
proletarian internationalism. Some past victories, as that in
the proxy Vietnam war, were profoundly important boons for
them. Others have proved Phyrric: stabilized ruination, as
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in Cuba; protracted conflict or ignominious defeat, as in
Afghanistan. Any of these prospects surely are of small
comfort, save to those who continue to be infatuated by the
ideological compulsions of authentic Leninist docrines, or by
those Soviet strategic theoreticians who view such Third World
adventures as an end-play, the ultimate aim of which is
finally to isolate the United States from critical strategic
zones of world politics. That there may be an admixture of
motives--of relentless, cautious geopolitics bonded with
conventional Leninist ideology--goes without saying. If the
prime foreign policy aim of the Soviet leadership remains that
of politically detaching the United States from key regions of
the world, by strategies of destabilization, neutralization,
and orchestrated secret terror, in concert with its proxies,
then we deal with a certain form of Realpolitik--one which has
met with singular successes in the past, and some failures.
The record of the Reagan Doctrine has been, on the
contrary, one of singular failures and some successes. It
would seem now to have promise of success in Afghanistan,
tragic failure in Central America, uncomfortable and
problematic stalemates in East, West, and South Africa. In
these regions of failure or stalemate, where Soviet proxy war
has been most evident, a basic reason for this has been a
combination of intense domestic political opposition and the
penchant of official American diplomacy to strive for
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diplomatic compromises in the name of "peace." Such indeed is
the massive political opposition to effective measures in
Central America that the Soviets and their proxies now have
clearly consolidated their base in the continental Western
Hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine has been tacitly abandoned.
To repeat: What is to be done? A few thoughts are in
order:
1. It just may be that Professor Billington's view is
correct: the "heady era of decolonization and Marxist-
inspired revolution is over." (In which case it well may be
the Soviets will find other fish to fry in pursuit of their
interests. In South America, for example, Soviet state-to-
state diplomacy today places great emphasis on courting
nationalist, anti-Yankee sentiments within Latin
establishments, rather than in toppling them; it has made
great headway. The same is true elsewhere.)
2. Concerning Professor Billington's prophecy, as far as
U.S.-Soviet relations are concerned, the proposition needs to
be subjected to the closest scrutiny for significant empirical
confirmation. What evidence is there that the proxy alliance
is actually disintegrating or put on the back burner or still
very much alive? It is necessary to test the tides. For
beginners, one interesting minimal scrutiny would begin by
asking, with what vigor or laxity do the Soviets and their
proxies continue to recruit, train in terror camps, and
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despatch professional cadres of secret warriors to operational
areas? Such a scanning would look at camps in Cuba, East
Germany, Nicaragua, and the Middle East. This is not an
impossible intelligence task. It should be done in a
comprehensive way, preferably in cooperation with friendly
intelligence services.
3. The principle of fullest possible disclosure of proxy
war should be allowed. A slackening of direct Soviet
engagement should be regarded as meaningless if the slack is
taken up by Soviet proxies. In southern Africa, for instance
(including Angola and Namibia), a Soviet disappearance is
meaningless if their chief proxies there--East Germany and
Cuba--continue the ruthless advance of proxy liberation
warfare.
Fullest disclosure should mean that the U.S. government
be obliged periodically to report to Congress and the American
public on the state of Soviet global proxy operations. It
ought also to mean that such findings be systematically
brought to the attention of the Soviet as well as the American
people. Today, as discussions and debates on policy issues
are tolerated by the Soviet government and party, inevitably
attention will turn to this key issue: of what profit is it
to the Russian people that the Party and State continue these
distant, demeaning assaults on international public order?
Does proletarian internationalism and national liberation as
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fundaments of the Soviet system require the U.S.S.R.
perpetually to sponsor movements of social disintegration
abroad? Such questions already are being raised, if
cautiously and obliquely, even in official journals such as
Pravda. The questioning should continue; it requires
knowledge and information. The revelations of past misdoings
(such as the Nazi-Soviet Pact) should be accompanied by
revelations of current and equally obnoxious contemporary
doings. The instance of Ethiopia comes particularly to mind.
Glasnost can apply to foreign policy!
4. Since western, and particularly American, media have
paid scant attention to the complex and clandestine aspects of
Soviet proxy warfare as I have described them, while dwelling
upon intimate details of feeble and often foolish American
operations, the media must be encouraged to take on this task.
Some years ago, Peter Braestrup wrote a book analyzing the
American media's response to the Vietcong Tet Offensive--a
matter it widely mispresented at the time to the American
public. He called it Big Story. But there is a far bigger
story in secret war, the details of which are not impossible
for reporters to draw out.
"Secret war," the theme of this meeting, should arouse
the professional appetite of investigative reporters. Often,
things that are secret are only so because efforts to explore
them have been fitful, lazy, or lacking in conceptual,
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analytical common sense. I have been struck, for instance, by
a vast and growing body of little-known monographic works,
scholarly or otherwise, to be found in specialized bookshops
(such as Kramer's in Washington) that deal with pieces of this
complex proxy problem. Ambitious reporters well could begin a
career by consulting them.
5. Finally, there has been a tendency in American
diplomatic language and practice, particularly before summit
conferences, to stress the importance of joint Soviet/American
attention to the resolution of "regional conflicts." All well
and good. But as such regional conflicts normally are ones
fed and fired by the political warfare strategies of the
Soviet Union, a diplomacy that seeks only a resolution of them
in the name of cease-fires and signed agreements should pay
far greater attention to the political issues at stake, and
not to the aim of bringing temporary end to fighting. The
political aim should on all occasions dominate diplomacy in
the quest for international order.
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