Allen Lane £30 pp677

After the death of Stalin, with the Soviet empire secured as far west as the Oder and Danube, the Soviet Union’s apparently formidable secret police and intelligence service became committed to realising Lenin’s dream of global revolution — rallying the comrades, in the words of the Internationale, for the “last fight to unite the human race”. This long-awaited second tranche from the 2,000-folio KGB archive smuggled out of Russia by its archivist Vasili Mitrokhin reveals a classic case of hubris and nemesis.

Having denounced Stalin’s Cult of Personality at the 20th party congress in 1956, Khrushchev also disposed of his policy of “socialism in one country”. He announced instead that “the new period in world history that Lenin predicted has arrived, and the peoples of the East are playing an active part in deciding the destinies of the whole world — are becoming a new mighty factor in international relations”. So credulous were the supposed hard men of the Kremlin that for a quarter of a century they believed the Third World was the arena in which they could win the cold war. This illuminating book, co-authored by Christopher Andrew, our leading authority on the secret machinations of the Evil Empire, is the measure of their progressive disillusionment.

Andrew pays tribute to the courage of Mitrokhin, who died here last year aged 82, in secure exile. He reminds us that had the KGB learnt that their plots were being betrayed to the West by one of their own most trusted officers, “the odds are that after a secret trial Mitrokhin would have ended up in the execution cellar with a bullet in the back of the head”.

Of those peoples of the East envisaged by Khrushchev as the storm troops of the final phase of world revolution, none were so assiduously courted by his intelligence service as the Indians. Among revelations that have already made sensational headlines in the Indian press is the disclosure that Indira Gandhi — code-named “Vano” — was fed details of bogus CIA conspiracies, as well as forged documents that purported to show that Pakistan was behind the growth of Sikh separatism. The KGB claimed that Afghan refugees had been contracted to murder her. However, as Andrew says, Gandhi “tragically underestimated the threat posed by her own Sikh bodyguard” — and the invasion of the Golden Temple of Amritsar signed her death warrant.

If the head of the KGB’s counterintelligence, Oleg Kalugin, regarded India as a “model of infiltration of a Third World government”, it was to the West, four years after the 20th-congress speech, that his mercurial leader Khrushchev turned to establish a “bridgehead” against the “main adversary”, the United States. The famous bear-hug exchanged at the United Nations in 1960 with the charismatic “maximum leader” of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro, was intended principally as a rapier thrust at the Americans on their own turf. Actually, at first the Russians were sceptical of Castro’s Marxist commitment and Khrushchev accused him of “adventurism”. Nevertheless, Khrushchev’s brinkmanship carried the relationship onward, to the verge of Armageddon, in the missile crisis of 1962.

As Andrew points out, the Americans’ dirty tricks on the Latin American front did give the KGB a string of first-class propaganda coups, from the Bay of Pigs to the Iran-Contra affair. In fact, he calls Reagan’s campaign against the Sandinistas “a public relations disaster on a global scale”. Elsewhere, America became paired in Mexican eyes with Pinochet’s Chile as the two “most unappealing countries” after KGB black propaganda put it about that Mexican children were routinely being kidnapped, spirited across the American border and murdered for their vital organs.

Pinochet’s predecessor Salvador Allende was given the code name Leader by Moscow Control — an inappropriate choice as his total incompetence soon raised doubts about his survival prospects. This idol of the left, with a penchant for good wines and sexual voyeurism, ignored repeated warnings from the KGB to suppress the rising tide of disaffection in his army’s ranks. After the inevitable CIA- inspired coup of 1973, the Kremlin was left with a single champion in the New World, Castro, who continued to hurl defiance — and take its economic aid.

The other promising area for undermining western influence was in the Middle East — yet it would ultimately prove the graveyard of the Soviet empire. Russian intelligence was already aware of the threat from militant Islam signalled by the Iranian revolution, but it was Yuri Andropov’s KGB that fanned the flames, advising Brezhnev to intervene in Afghanistan. As part of their global propaganda campaign they also put out a story that Jimmy Carter’s security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had developed an “Islamic Kriegspiel against the Soviet Union, to create an Islamic ‘bomb’ in Central Asia”. The “bomb” exploded under them in Chechnya, with consequences that are still reverberating.

As soon as he took power Gorbachev issued a diktat against “the impermissibility of distortions of the factual state of affairs in messages and informational reports sent to the central committee”. It was too late. As Andrew says, the ruinously expensive flow of arms and military hardware to the Third World had fatally undermined the creaking Soviet economy — and “fantastic conspiracy theories reflected the state of disorientation and denial within KGB Centre’s leadership produced by the collapse and global humiliation of the political system of which they were part. The Soviet Union had nothing of importance to offer the Third World save for arms which most of the recipients couldn’t afford to buy and Moscow could no longer afford to subsidise”. It sums up the essence of this important book, which, while it casts a baleful light on a crazed political experiment, still has lessons for our present confused world scene.

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