The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (v. 2) (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This second volume of the post-war history of the KGB-based on the "Mitrokhin Archive" of secret documents purloined by the late co-author, a KGB dissident-surveys the Soviet spy agency's skullduggery in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Historian Andrew portrays Russian policy toward the Third World as largely the creation of the KGB, which hoped that the spread of Soviet influence and revolutionary upheavals would make these regions the decisive Cold War battleground. The Cuban Revolution inspired these ambitions, and by 1980, after the American defeat in Vietnam and with leftist regimes installed in Nicaragua and Grenada, Cuban troops fighting in Africa and Russian forces occupying Afghanistan, both American and Soviet officials saw communism on the march. Still, in Andrew's account, Soviet initiatives-with a few exceptions, like the Afghanistan intervention-seem cautious, reactive and uncomfortably dependent on fickle client regimes; wary of confronting the United States, Russia often exerted a restraining influence on local allies. Andrew's engaging, occasionally gossipy narrative provides new evidence of Soviet sponsorship of Latin American insurgencies and Palestinian terrorists, along with details of KGB spycraft and dirty tricks. The world-wide communist conspiracy he depicts was far from a juggernaut, but he sheds new light on the hidden history of the Cold War. Photos.
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From The Washington Post

Yes, Virginia, there really was a KGB, nasty and brutish and also pretty dumb much of the time. So we are reminded by this second volume produced by Christopher Andrew, a Cambridge University historian, from a juicy cache of KGB documents copied and spirited out of Russia by Vasili Mitrokhin. He was a bureaucrat in the old Soviet intelligence agency who got the last laugh on his old bosses by stealing many of their best secrets. The first volume, The Sword and the Shield, used the Mitrokhin documents to show the extent of Soviet espionage in the Western world during the Cold War. It was chock-full of new information that tended to confirm the darkest Western worries about what Soviet spies were up to in the four decades after World War II. It sold tens of thousands of copies in Europe and America.

The publishers of this book are hoping for a similar commercial success and are doing their best to hype their product. "Newly Revealed Secrets," the dust jacket promises. But while the information divulged here can be fascinating, it is far from earthshaking. The book may cause a stir in India by demonstrating just how thoroughly news organizations and politics were penetrated by the KGB in the Indira Gandhi era, but there are no startling surprises or sensations disclosed here.

And frustratingly, the book adopts a KGB-centric view of Soviet foreign policy that implies that the cold warriors in Moscow had a triumphant sense that, as the title says, the world was going their way. Andrew, a serious scholar who provides extremely useful context for many of the anecdotes he recounts, falls short on the larger issue: the broad context in which the KGB and the CIA played their Cold War games in the Third World. Only at the end of his book does he acknowledge how badly things were going for the Soviets in the most important sense: Their entire system was failing, a process that began long before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and initiated the changes that, in just six years, unraveled the Soviet empire.

In the years after 1960 that are the subject of this book, the world was never really going Moscow's way, despite anxieties to the contrary in many Western countries. Soviet political leaders never behaved as though they expected the United States and its allies to lose their contest with the Soviet Union. By the early 1970s, when I spent three years in the Soviet Union as The Post's Moscow correspondent, Soviet communism was still a system but no longer a living ideology. At all levels of society, cynicism had trumped revolutionary zeal.

The Mitrokhin documents show that the KGB was more susceptible to Marxist-Leninist delusions than the Politburo, which isn't surprising. The KGB was a police organization. It was a thoroughly Soviet institution, just as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was a thoroughly American one. Also like Hoover's FBI, it was a little weird and not typical of its society's political class. Cops are a special breed; they tend to see the world darkly and aren't very good at grays. The KGB officers depicted in this book are familiar to anyone who dealt with our G-Men in the Hoover era -- and, often, laughably incompetent.

Reading about the KGB's efforts to influence events in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, one is struck again and again by how hapless they were. Foreign leaders repeatedly took Soviet arms and money but refused to toe Moscow's line or do anything truly helpful for the Soviet Union. Cuba's Fidel Castro and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser might have been the very best at this, but there were many more.

For instance, Andrew and Mitrokhin reveal that the Costa Rican social democrat José Figueres Ferrer took $300,000 in KGB money to help finance his political activities while remaining a staunch anticommunist. His only tangible concession was to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union after he became president in 1953; he also agreed to occasional meetings with KGB agents. The "big men" in Angola, Ethiopia and elsewhere who called themselves Marxist-Leninists were well-armed and well-funded by the Soviets, but they were all failures in power who only debased the Marxist-Leninist currency on their continent.

The Mitrokhin documents confirm that the Soviets eagerly helped Nicaragua's Sandinistas and the left-leaning Salvador Allende in Chile, but they also show a total absence of optimism about either. The KGB realized that Allende was doomed long before the military coup that ousted him in 1973, and the Sandinistas' brief victory in Nicaragua came as a surprise. In the case of Allende, the documents show, Yuri Andropov, the longtime leader of the KGB, actually hid his agency's pessimistic prognosis from his comrades in the Soviet political leadership.

Andrew identifies the mid-1970s as a time when the Soviets seemed most hopeful about their prospects in the Third World. In fact, this was the moment when a doddering Politburo deluded itself into playing serious games in far-flung corners of the globe. This followed the American defeat in Vietnam, Richard M. Nixon's willingness to treat Leonid Brezhnev as an equal and a period of economic difficulties in the West -- all read in Moscow as signs of American decline. Using Cubans as their surrogates, the Soviets intervened in peripheral nations of southern Africa and, in 1979, launched the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan. In 1983, Andropov, for years the keeper of the KGB flame, became the Soviet leader, but he died after just 15 months in power; his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, died 13 months later. Then came Gorbachev (in 1985); and then the end.

After recounting many intriguing details about the secret struggle for influence in the Third World, Andrew devotes much of the conclusion of his book to reaffirming the obvious: The KGB was an ugly institution that tried to hurt American interests wherever it could. But did this need further proving? To my mind, it would have been more useful to draw larger conclusions from the many examples he provides of the clumsy ineffectiveness of an organization that scared us for too long.

Ultimately, The World Was Going Our Way confirms a conversation I had in the early 1970s with Raisa Orlova, a literary scholar and dissident. At the time, I asked her to explain how the KGB's pursuit of Soviet dissidents could have been so clumsy. "Why should they be better," she asked, "than the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Agriculture?" In the end, the KGB did no better at fomenting a world revolution than the Ministry of Agriculture did at feeding the Soviet people.

Reviewed by Robert G. Kaiser
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 736 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (September 20, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465003117
• ISBN-13: 978-0465003112
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #396,381 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary largely for showing contractors as the weak link , September 28, 2005

By	Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

This is, like the first book, an extraordinary piece of scholarship. While it can be tedious in both its detail and in the drollness of the "accomplishments" that enjoyed so much Politburo attention and funding, it joins books such as Derek Leebaert's The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World in documenting the insanity and waste that characterized much of the so-called "secret wars" between the US Intelligence Community (within which the CIA is a $3 billion a year runt against the larger defense budget approaching $50 billion a year) and the KGB and GRU.

For those who have the patience or speed to get through this entire book, the single most important revelation and documentation concerns the ease with which the Russians were able to recruit traitors within the US defense community contractors. Ralph Peters has written about this in New Glory : Expanding America's Global Supremacy but speaks mostly of legal treason--corruption and waste. This book carefully addresses the sad reality that DoD is totally penetrated by foreign spies (one would add, Third World and allied spies including France, Germany, and Israel, never mind China and Iran) via the contracting community.

One day someone will do a careful calibration of both the good and the bad of secret intelligence. When that day comes, this book will be as good a place as any with which to start.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Nice continuation to Volume I, May 15, 2008

By	Diogo M. Liberal "D-MAN" (Lisbon) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the the Third World: Newly Revealed Secrets from the Mitrokhin Archive (Paperback)

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. 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. 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.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perkele, January 15, 2006

By	Nikita (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews

A good account of facts which were relatively unknown to common people. Corruption and exploitation are two main problems encountered by the Third World, perhaps initiated by different superpowers during those days. Superpowers do not exist any more but unfortunately those countries of the Third World are still struggling both politically and economically.