The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

54. O’Riordan informed the Central Committee, “I will take no part in the transport operation, and my role will only involve transferring the technical information about this to Seamus Costello.” Yeltsin, The View from the Kremlin, p. 314.

55. Bishop and Mallie, The Provisional IRA, pp. 221-2; Smith, Fighting for Ireland?, p. 90; Coogan, The Troubles, pp. 276-80. The Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), founded as the military wing of IRSP, became arguably the most violent of the republican paramilitary groups. Its victims included Airey Neave, MP, Conservative spokesman on Northern Ireland, killed in 1979 by a bomb, activated by a mercury tilt switch, which was planted in his car in the Palace of Westminster car park.

56. k-27,393; vol. 6, ch. 5, part 5.

57. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, p. 228.

58. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 5. On Piñeiro, who in 1974 became head of a new Departamento Americano of the Cuban Communist Party’s Central Committee, which took over responsibility for assistance to Latin American revolutionary movements, see Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 514.

59. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 5.

60. Pezzullos, At the Fall of Somoza, p. 58. Shelton’s reports were widely regarded in diplomatic circles as reflecting only Somoza’s views. On at least one occasion, his political officer, James R. Cheek, used the State Department’s “dissent channel” to contradict his chief. Jeremiah O’Leary, “Shelton being Replaced as Ambassador to Nicaragua,” Washington Star (April 19, 1975).

61. Pastor, Condemned to Repetition, p. 39.

62. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 5.

63. Booth, The End and the Beginning, p. 142, Pezzullos, At the Fall of Somoza, pp. 116-17. Shelton was replaced as ambassador in April 1975.

64. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 5.

65. On the three main factions within the FSLN which emerged in 1975, see Booth, The End and the Beginning, pp. 143-4; Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, pp. 233-55.

66. On Fonseca’s link with the USSR, see volume 2.

67. k-27,393.

68. The file seen by Mitrokhin records only Fonseca’s request to visit Moscow. Though he saw no file on the trip itself, it is unlikely that the request was rejected.

69. Pezzullos, At the Fall of Somoza, pp. 117-19. On KGB relations with the Sandinistas, see volume 2.

70. t-7,135; vol. 2, appendix 3.

71. Kuzichkin, Inside the KGB, pp. 111-12.

72. Kalugin, Spymaster, pp. 238-9.

73. Kalugin, Spymaster, pp. 152-3.

74. vol. 2, app. 3.

75. Kalugin, Spymaster, pp. 152-9. Cf. Wise, Molehunt, pp. 195-7.

76. vol. 2, app. 3. The Line KR officer Vladimir Nikolayevich Yelchaninov (codenamed VELT), posted to the New York residency in 1978, also spent much of his time trying to track down defectors; vol. 6, app. 2, part 5.

77. Bereanu and Todorov, The Umbrella Murder, pp. 34-7, 70-3.

78. Kalugin, Spymaster, pp. 178-83; Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 644-5. Bereanu and Todorov, The Umbrella Murder, adds usefully to previous accounts of Markov’s murder but also introduces some implausible speculation. For an illustration of an earlier version of the weapon used to kill Markov, a KGB poison pellet cane of the 1950s, see Melton, The Ultimate Spy Book, p. 152.

79. Interviews with Alpha group veterans, broadcast in Inside Russia’s SAS (BBC2, June 13, 1999).

80. vol. 1, ch. 4.

81. Westad, “Concerning the Situation in ‘A,’” p. 130. Dobbs, Down with Big Brother, pp. 11-12.

82. See above, chapter 15.

83. vol. 1, ch. 4. Mitrokhin’s account contains only a brief allusion to the attempts to poison Amin’s food, which appears to have been the Eighth Department’s preferred method of assassination. According to Vladimir Kuzichkin, who defected from Directorate S a few years later, the first choice of assassin was an Azerbaijani illegal, Mikhail Talybov, who was bilingual in Farsi and had spent several years in Kabul with Afghan identity papers forged by the KGB. Equipped with poisons from the OTU laboratory, Talybov succeeded in gaining a job as a chef in the presidential palace. But, according to Kuzichkin, “Amin was as careful as any of the Borgias. He kept switching his food and drink as if he expected to be poisoned.” Kuzichkin, Inside the KGB, pp. 314-15; Kuzichkin, “Coups and Killings in Kabul,” Time (November 22, 1982); Barron, KGB Today, pp. 15-16. A further, unsuccessful attempt to poison Amin took place at a lunch given by him for his ministers on December 27 (Dobbs, Down with Big Brother, p. 19).

84. Westad, “Concerning the Situation in ‘A,’” p. 130.