|
The author describes the sinister activities of the KGB in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East from the conception of the USSR until its undoing in about 1990 or so.The facts that are presented are mind bogling, there seem to have been no ethical limits for the KFB.The book is not a non-fiction book for the average layman, but it seems to be geared more towards historians, or VERY interested laypersons. It lists too many facts and details, which at times becomes boring.One would have hoped for more facts about the historic background of the specific time and place, and less details / names. (Of course the professional reader has no need for this.).It takes some perseverance to finish to book.
It is a well written study of how the KGB tried to manipulate and fight the cold war in the third world. At the end of the Cold War, in the third world as in many other fields the Soviet's economy could not afford the price. The writers argument which I think is correct is that the KGB was one of the major means used by the Soviets to spread communism throughout the world.
Yet little of it is presented here. Unfortunately for the USSR, either the form of communism that took shape in these third world countries produced a rival for example China or they became a major drain on the Soviet economy. I was a bit disappointed though after reading at the start how this new and great archive was now available.
Often they were more inventive and clever then their enemies. Overall there seemed little radically new in the book although there are some new and interesting points. For example in South Africa, I never realized how much the USSR and South Africa must have traded during the apartheid era in diamonds.
Often they were played by the locals just like the US.
To be fair probably from a scientific point of view this is the most correct form to do so, however at some point the reader becomes a bit bored. The book is a very interesting continuation to the first volume of the metrokin archive. I would howerver like to point out that at the middle of the book the form of writting of the book becomes very dull because all the charpters are prepared in the same way. Chapters that speak of Iraq, Syria, Israel and Afganistan are very interesting, specially because they purport the russian or soviet point of view for strategical analisys. Nevertheless its a good book and provides good information.
Although I enjoyed most of this book, the main facts aren't new. But for the average person, it's a long book that doesn't teach you much about Soviet foreign involvement that you haven't already heard from western anti-communists during the cold war years.In this book, we find much on how the KGB tried to recruit agents and seduce leaders that may be brought under Soviet influence, how they set up residencies in embassies, how they "distorted" the facts to please the politicians in Moscow, how they dealt with intelligence operations that failed, how they fabricated documents to mislead both their friends and their opponents, etc.What you get from this book essentially is great insight in the minds of the people who were running foreign residencies for the KGB. Only details are new, but those details often do not have much consequence anyway. So this book is great for those who study spy agencies and for the scholars who study the role of the KGB. If you are not already aware of it, you also learn about Soviet involvements in the third world, but if it's what you're mainly interested in you can find other books that deal with this subject more directly. Finally, this book also gives much information about the tough relationship between Russia and China, which we don't know that much about in the West; I found this aspect particularly interesting.
In Cuba, as a prime example, the US refused to intervene against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista's misanthropic reign - with which the US possessed leverage - and instead vainly attempted to thwart the Castro regime, with which it possessed none. I agree with Robert Kaiser's take on this work in the introductory review, that much of the assembled facts here were already known or surmised at the time of its publication. This blinkered US policy, based only on the short term interests of American investors in Cuba, laid the groundwork for Castro's defection and the KGB's penetration into the Western Hemisphere.Similarly, the unquestioning US subsidy of Israel's Mideast grand strategy likewise gave the KGB entry into the Middle East. The rubric of "newly revealed secrets from Soviet archives" was one of the biggest cons of the American publishing industry in the 1990s.This book underscores another Western shortfall as well - that the success of Communism in the world from 1917 on was directly related to the "Democracies'" unwillingness to put its rhetoric into practice. This extended with a vengeance into the Third World in this book's timeframe. American unwillingness to come to grips with its own racial problems in the 50s and 60s, and similar ambivalence regarding anti-colonialism in Africa, ensured that black Africa would seek constructive engagement with the Kremlin while Washington pursued it with Pretoria.The KGB's successes here were all in proportion to Western - specifically American - failure of vision. These successes would have been far greater than even Mitrokhin suggests, were it not for the KGB's own hamstrung bureaucratic mentality.
|
