Read Online The World Was Going Our Way by Christopher Andrew - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Christopher Andrew
Tags: Espionage, History, Military, 20th Century, Biographies & Memoirs, Europe, Ireland, World, Intelligence & Espionage, Russia, True Accounts, Modern (16th-21st Centuries)
Ads: Link
maintained diplomatic missions and ‘legal’ KGB residencies in only three Latin American capitals - Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Though the KGB began delivering secret Soviet subsidies to a handful of pro-Moscow Communist parties in 1955, the amounts remained small by comparison with those given to the leading parties in the West and Asia. 5
The serious interest of the Centre (KGB headquarters) and subsequently of the Kremlin in the possibility of challenging the United States in its own backyard was first aroused by the emergence of a new generation of charismatic Latin American revolutionary leaders, chief among them Fidel Castro. The KGB’s leading Latin American expert, Nikolai Leonov, who was the first to make contact with Castro, wrote later, ‘Cuba forced us to take a fresh look at the whole continent, which until then had traditionally occupied the last place in the Soviet leadership’s system of priorities.’ 6 The charismatic appeal of Castro and ‘Che’ Guevara extended far beyond Latin America. Though the Western ‘New Left’ of the 1960s had little interest in the increasingly geriatric leadership of the Soviet Union, it idolized both Castro and Guevara, lavishing on them the uncritical adulation which much of the Old Left had bestowed on Stalin’s supposed worker-peasant state in the 1930s. Che Guevara T-shirts on American campuses comfortably outnumbered, even in presidential election years, those bearing the likeness of any US politician alive or dead. Though there was much that was genuinely admirable in Cuban health-care and educational initiatives, despite the increasingly authoritarian nature of the Cuban one-party state, the radical pilgrims to Havana in the 1960s were as uncritical as those to Moscow in the 1930s of whom Malcolm Muggeridge had written, ‘Their delight in all they saw and were told, and the expression they gave to that delight, constitute unquestionably one of the wonders of our age.’ One of the wonders of the 1960s was delight such as that expressed by the political economist Paul Sweezy after his pilgrimage to Cuba:
To be with these people, to see with your own eyes how they are rehabilitating and transforming a whole nation, to share their dreams of the great tasks and achievements that lie ahead - these are purifying and liberating experiences. You come away with your faith in the human race restored.
Though sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution, Frances Fitzgerald accurately noted that ‘many North American radicals who visit Cuba or who live there have performed a kind of surgery on their critical faculties and reduced their conversation to a kind of baby talk, in which everything is wonderful, including the elevator that does not work and the rows of Soviet tanks on military parade that are in the “hands of the people” ’.
Similar examples of self-administered brain surgery proliferated across both the West and the Third World. Even Jean-Paul Sartre, despite his global reputation for rigorous philosophical analysis, became for a period almost incoherent in his hero-worship:
Among these fully awake men, at the height of their powers, sleeping doesn’t seem like a natural need, just a routine of which they had more or less freed themselves . . . They have excluded the routine alternation of lunch and dinner from their daily programme.
. . . Of all these night watchmen, Castro is the most wide awake. Of all these fasting people, Castro can eat the most and fast the longest . . . [They] exercise a veritable dictatorship over their own needs . . . they roll back the limits of the possible. 7
Castro’s emergence, after some hesitations, as a reliable pro-Moscow loyalist was of immense importance for both Soviet foreign policy and KGB operations. Had he shared much of the New Left’s scornful attitude to the bloated Soviet bureaucracy and its increasingly geriatric leadership,
The serious interest of the Centre (KGB headquarters) and subsequently of the Kremlin in the possibility of challenging the United States in its own backyard was first aroused by the emergence of a new generation of charismatic Latin American revolutionary leaders, chief among them Fidel Castro. The KGB’s leading Latin American expert, Nikolai Leonov, who was the first to make contact with Castro, wrote later, ‘Cuba forced us to take a fresh look at the whole continent, which until then had traditionally occupied the last place in the Soviet leadership’s system of priorities.’ 6 The charismatic appeal of Castro and ‘Che’ Guevara extended far beyond Latin America. Though the Western ‘New Left’ of the 1960s had little interest in the increasingly geriatric leadership of the Soviet Union, it idolized both Castro and Guevara, lavishing on them the uncritical adulation which much of the Old Left had bestowed on Stalin’s supposed worker-peasant state in the 1930s. Che Guevara T-shirts on American campuses comfortably outnumbered, even in presidential election years, those bearing the likeness of any US politician alive or dead. Though there was much that was genuinely admirable in Cuban health-care and educational initiatives, despite the increasingly authoritarian nature of the Cuban one-party state, the radical pilgrims to Havana in the 1960s were as uncritical as those to Moscow in the 1930s of whom Malcolm Muggeridge had written, ‘Their delight in all they saw and were told, and the expression they gave to that delight, constitute unquestionably one of the wonders of our age.’ One of the wonders of the 1960s was delight such as that expressed by the political economist Paul Sweezy after his pilgrimage to Cuba:
To be with these people, to see with your own eyes how they are rehabilitating and transforming a whole nation, to share their dreams of the great tasks and achievements that lie ahead - these are purifying and liberating experiences. You come away with your faith in the human race restored.
Though sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution, Frances Fitzgerald accurately noted that ‘many North American radicals who visit Cuba or who live there have performed a kind of surgery on their critical faculties and reduced their conversation to a kind of baby talk, in which everything is wonderful, including the elevator that does not work and the rows of Soviet tanks on military parade that are in the “hands of the people” ’.
Similar examples of self-administered brain surgery proliferated across both the West and the Third World. Even Jean-Paul Sartre, despite his global reputation for rigorous philosophical analysis, became for a period almost incoherent in his hero-worship:
Among these fully awake men, at the height of their powers, sleeping doesn’t seem like a natural need, just a routine of which they had more or less freed themselves . . . They have excluded the routine alternation of lunch and dinner from their daily programme.
. . . Of all these night watchmen, Castro is the most wide awake. Of all these fasting people, Castro can eat the most and fast the longest . . . [They] exercise a veritable dictatorship over their own needs . . . they roll back the limits of the possible. 7
Castro’s emergence, after some hesitations, as a reliable pro-Moscow loyalist was of immense importance for both Soviet foreign policy and KGB operations. Had he shared much of the New Left’s scornful attitude to the bloated Soviet bureaucracy and its increasingly geriatric leadership,
Similar Books
