When Russian President Vladimir Putin builds his network of influence in Africa, he doesn’t do it randomly. He draws on the rich history of Soviet relations with African countries, dating back to the 1960s, and on the Cold War efforts of Russian spies to counter American influence on the ground.
1960 was a momentous year for what would soon become the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The country gained independence from Belgium in June and installed its first democratically elected government. In September, power struggles led Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, alias Mobutu Sese Seko, then Secretary of State, to stage his first military coup. And a few months later, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was assassinated.
This quick succession of events marked a pivotal year in history, but not just for emancipation rights in Africa. Some 11,000 kilometers east of Kinshasa, in Russia, the Kremlin’s foreign policy took a new turn amid the crisis gripping the Belgian Congo. Alexander Shelepin, head of the KGB at the time, realized that there were hardly any Russian spies south of the Sahara desert. There was a strong base of secret agents in Egypt, some scattered across the Maghreb and some linked to the local Communist Party stationed in South Africa.
A handful of spies to save Prime Minister Lumumba
In Shelepin’s eyes, his spy network on the African continent was thin. Nikita Khrushchev, then first secretary of the Communist Party, had made opening up to low-income countries (mostly African) and breaking with his predecessor Joseph Stalin a priority.
As a result, the Congo crisis became “the first known case of KGB intervention in a sub-Saharan African country,” explains Natalia Telepneva, a historian and specialist in Soviet intelligence in Africa at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.
Thus began the race for Russian influence south of the Sahara. Despite the lack of interest in the region from the early 1990s to the late 2000s, the Kremlin left its mark. “To re-establish the Russian presence in Africa, Vladimir Putin took advantage of the Soviet Union’s relatively good reputation on the continent and drew on a network of old contacts,” says Marcel Plichta, who researches Soviet influence in Africa at the University of Saint Andrews, in Scotland.
But during the Congo crisis, Russia did not yet have a legacy on the continent. “Ivan Potekhin, the leading Africanist in the USSR at the time, had only first visited Africa in the 1950s,” notes historian Natalia Telepneva.
The Soviet Union’s operation to help then-Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba crack down on Belgian-backed secessionists was under-resourced. “Moscow only had the means to send a handful of agents to the ground,” says Telepneva. So when Joseph-Désiré Mobutu carried out his military coup in 1960, which was actively supported by the CIA, the coup for the KGB was significant.
“Low Cost” Cold War in Africa
The Soviet Union had to catch up if it wanted to further its strategy of influence in the region, but it could count on the enthusiasm of the wave of independence from the colonial powers in the 1960s to achieve that goal.
“To get agents to join the KGB in Africa, the continent offered exciting espionage prospects. And the missions they would pursue – supporting independence movements while monitoring US activity on the ground – seemed noble.” writes the historian Tepneva in her book ‘Cold War Liberation’, based on the memoirs of Vadim Kirpitchenko, the first director of the KGB’s African division.
Beginning in the 1960s, Russia opened an increasing number of embassies in African countries. Each of her delegations “included both an agent from the KGB and the GRU (the foreign military intelligence agency of the Soviet army),” explains Telepneva.
The Congo crisis served as a lesson. “Moscow realized that the USSR did not have the same resources as the Western powers in Africa. So intelligence and clandestine operations seemed the best way to wage a ‘low cost’ Cold War,” says Telepneva.
The Congo crisis served as a lesson. “Moscow realized that the USSR did not have the same resources as the Western powers in Africa. So intelligence and clandestine operations seemed the best way to wage a ‘low cost’ Cold War,” says Telepneva.
Although the Soviet Union ended up losing ground in Africa, the efforts made were useful for the Kremlin’s foreign policy in the future. Russia became an ally of the late former prime minister Lumumba, who became a key figure inspiring other independence movements across the continent. The United States, for its part, was seen as an ally of the former colonial powers in Africa. The reputation that the Soviet Union was on the “right side” of history in Africa was furthered by Russia, and reinforced by the USSR’s support for Nelson Mandela in his fight against the apartheid in South Africa.
Russian spies worked hard to maintain their country’s reputation. The country began a broad campaign of “active measures,” what today would be called disinformation and propaganda. His goal was to present the Soviet Union as a disinterested supporter of a decolonized Africa. Meanwhile, Washington appeared as a puppeteer conspiring in the shadows, safeguarding his own interests.
The KGB used its entire arsenal, manipulating the local media and forging documents to make the CIA the enemy to be destroyed. Moscow fed the paranoia of the Ghanaian revolutionary – and eventually the country’s first prime minister and president – Kwame Nkrumah, who saw himself as an “African Lenin”. He saw American spies everywhere. “In 1964, a fake letter written by the A service outlining a CIA plot so enraged him that he sent a letter directly to the President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, accusing the CIA of using all its resources with a sole objective: to overthrow him,” reads the Mitrokhin files, named after Vasily Mitrokhin, the KGB’s chief archivist who defected to the UK in 1992, taking 30 years of notes with him.
From Soviet dream to disappointment
It’s hard not to see these “active measures” as a precursor to today’s online disinformation campaigns and “spoof factories.” trolls” led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group. Putin’s Russia uses a new and improved version of the Soviet narrative. At the time, the Soviet Union presented itself as a champion of decolonization. Today, “Russia proclaims itself an ally of the pan-Africanist movement anti-colonial,” says Plichta. The Russian campaign to fuel anti-French sentiment in the Central African Republic and Mali is just one example.
But not all of the KGB’s efforts were crowned victories in due course, or at least not to the extent Moscow had hoped. The Soviet Union “thought that these countries would align naturally with communist ideologies and therefore with the USSR. But it turned out to be more complicated than they expected,” explains Telepneva.
Kwame Nkrumah, who ruled Ghana for six years, was the Soviet Union’s first “friend” in sub-Saharan Africa. He was overthrown in 1966 after drifting towards authoritarianism. The other two countries that most openly sided with Russia, Mali and Guinea, left behind no memories of a communist paradise. After eight years in power, the Malian leader Modibo Keita was overthrown, while the Guinean Ahmed Sékou Touré remained at the helm of a brutal regime for more than 25 years, until 1984.
It was not until the second wave of decolonization and the dismantling of Portugal’s colonial stronghold in Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Angola in the 1970s that Soviet-influenced operations picked up again. But this time, leader Leonid Brezhnev urged the intelligence services to “redirect their efforts to strengthen military and security cooperation with the armies of ‘friendly’ countries,” says Telepneva. The Kremlin had realized that, until now, it had underestimated the role of the military in African power struggles.
The Soviet Union and soft power
The Soviet Union became a major arms supplier to the African continent. Backed by Soviet support against Somalia, Ethiopia received a “Soviet plane full of military equipment and instructors [en su suelo] every 20 minutes” in the winter of 1977, according to the Mitrokhin archives.
Once again, this approach is reminiscent of the tactics of Putin and the Wagner group. “Moscow’s main strategy to extend its influence in Africa, in addition to sending Wagner mercenaries, is to multiply military agreements [21 de los cuales se firmaron entre 2014 y 2019]”Plichta says.
During the Cold War, military support went beyond the supply of weapons. The Soviet Union also trained thousands of “freedom fighters” in their country. The Perevalnoe-165 Educational Center in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula now annexed by Russia in 2014, has become the most famous example.
The handling of weapons was only a part of what was taught. “There was also political training with excursions to tourist sites, visits to collective farms and film screenings. The courses also included an introduction to Leninism-Marxism and discussions on the history of colonization,” explains Telepneva.
Moscow realized very early that education could strengthen its ties with Africa, so Khrushchev launched the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow in 1961. Over 50 years, he trained more than 7,000 students from 48 African countries in physics. , economy and public administration. He also admitted African students to various universities in the USSR.
For Russian spies, the universities were a wonderful breeding ground for potential recruits. In fact, the vice president of Lumumba University was part of the KGB. But “that was not the most important thing for Moscow,” says Konstantinos Katsakioris, a specialist in African education and the former Soviet Union at the University of Bayreuth (Germany). Moscow’s priority was to improve the Soviet Union’s reputation in Africa. All students were expected to spread the good Soviet word in their country.
This also became Putin’s advantage. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow gradually withdrew from Africa, but all the students who were educated in the former USSR stayed there. So when, in 2014, Putin decided to reinvest in the African continent in search of new allies to offset Russia’s diplomatic isolation caused by its annexation of Crimea, he knew his agents could find friends there.
“Soldiers and students were young when they went to the Soviet Union. Today, some of them have become influential members in their home countries,” Plichta says. These veterans of the Soviet adventure in post-colonial Africa are today the potentially helpful ears into which Putin and Prigozhin’s men can whisper.
*Article adapted from its original in French
