The Trade in Troublemaking

WHEN Ceylon's leftist government was recently confronted with a massive insurrection by a group of Maoist dissidents known as the People's Liberation Front, it clamped down immediately on one important source of the trouble: it accused the North Korean embassy in Colombo of complicity in the uprising, ordered the embassy closed, and expelled 18 North Korean diplomats. By last week, after a month of fighting throughout the island, several hundred Ceylonese were dead, but the government was slowly gaining an upper hand against the insurgents.

The involvement of the North Koreans in the Ceylon insurrection dramatized the extent to which guerrilla training has become an international activity. Today, with the help of a foreign "scholarship" and perhaps a forged passport, a young, aspiring revolutionary from any of several dozen countries may travel halfway round the world to learn the use of rifles and machine guns, the making of Molotov cocktails and the art of political kidnaping. Then, after several months or even years of training, he returns to his home country to put his education into practice.

Almost every region of the world can qualify today as either a target of terrorists or a training ground. Even the tranquil fields of The Netherlands have served as a mock battlefield for a group of Indonesian separatists seeking independence for the South Moluccas Islands; Basque nationalists train secretly in northern Spain and southwestern France. Many countries dabble in terrorism, but five in particular have become large-scale exporters of insurgency. The five:

NORTH KOREA was recently accused of training Mexican as well as Ceylonese terrorists (TIME, April 19). According to the Mexican government, 50 young Mexicans using North Korean passports traveled to Pyongyang by way of the Soviet Union--a clear indication to the Mexican government that the Russians were in on the deal. The North Koreans, moreover, gave members of the Mexican group $26,000 for travel expenses and the recruiting of additional guerrillas in Mexico.

To some extent, the North Koreans have concentrated on waging terrorist attacks against South Korea, but they have also managed to train 2,000 guerrillas from 25 countries; 700 foreign rebels are now believed to be in residence in ten special camps. Training lasts from six to 18 months. Foreigners as well as Koreans are taught taekwondo, the local version of judo and karate, and are put through such rigorous training as running five hours at night, sometimes through rough mountain terrain, shouldering 100-lb. sandbags. "Running, running, running," in fact, is the training slogan.

CUBA has trained some 2,500 Latin American guerrillas during the past decade. In addition, the Cubans have sent military instructors to Algeria and to the Congo-Brazzaville. Despite Fidel Castro's tough words two weeks ago about aligning himself with the "revolutionary peoples of the world," Cuba's training program has been somewhat curtailed in the post-Che Guevara period. While still capable of exploiting regional trouble spots, the Cubans have lately been preoccupied with economic problems at home and have been inhibited by the fact that leftist movements in many Latin American countries are splintered.

ALGERIA. More than 20 "national liberation fronts" and assorted movements maintain offices or representatives in Algiers, which has won the reputation of being the "home of revolutionaries." These groups include Al-Fatah, the Viet Cong, the Angolan resistance movement (M.P.L.A.) and the Black Panthers, whose local office is presided over by Eldridge Cleaver. There is even a representative for a group known as the Movement for the Autodetermination and Independence of the Canary Islands, which have belonged to Spain since the 15th century. "Catholics go to Rome," remarked an Algerian official, "Moslems to Mecca, and revolutionaries come to Algiers."

The Algerians provide military training facilities, however, for only a few major organizations, such as the fedayeen and the Angolans. For the most part, Algiers is a base for propaganda and political agitation rather than guerrilla training.

CHINA has emphasized the training of insurgents from elsewhere in Asia --Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Ceylon, Japan and the Philippines. The Chinese program, which currently involves 100-150 students per year, is one of the toughest and most fervent. Most sources agree that, while the Russians provide strong ideological and theoretical training for warfare in the indefinite future, the Chinese program is pragmatically oriented toward more immediate action, and is extremely rigorous. Training takes place under deliberately primitive conditions; if guerrillas visit the cities at all, they do so in the guise of students or tourists.

One measure of the fierce hostility between China and the Soviet Union is the fact that both countries are training members of several tribes that live along the Sino-Soviet border. In addition, the Chinese provide military training in Tanzania for several groups of black freedom fighters from South Africa, South West Africa, Rhodesia, Angola and Mozambique. They also supply small arms and ammunition to the fedayeen.

SOVIET UNION. Western intelligence agencies say that Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University is a prime recruiting ground for Soviet intelligence. The university's student body consists of 3,000 foreign students, mostly from the non-Communist developing nations, and 1,000 Russians. Its vice rector is a major general in the KGB secret police; his job on campus is to screen out "undesirable" elements and watch for prospective recruits. If a student is among the several dozen chosen for guerrilla training, he receives special courses and favors and may discover that he has become irresistible to pretty Russian girls. Later he may be "farmed out" to North Korea, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia or elsewhere for further instruction. When he finally goes home, he remains under the guidance of a resident KGB man.

The Soviets prefer to remain in the background, but they are deeply involved in the financing and control of programs in Cuba, Algeria, North Korea and among the fedayeen. The recent Mexican case revealed how closely the Soviets are working with the North Koreans. The Ceylon civil war demonstrated that the Russians still maintain a two-pronged policy of giving official support to relatively moderate leftist governments, while at the same time subsidizing local subversive opposition movements. Accordingly, the Russians have delivered six MIGs with pilots and ground crews to help the Socialist government of Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike put down the insurrection. At the same time, they have given arms to the Ceylonese rebels through an organization called the Ceylonese-Soviet Friendship Society.

Another group of Soviet proteges who recently made news were the Turkish students involved in the kidnaping of four U.S. airmen two months ago. The students, it turned out, had received training from Soviet instructors in Syria. The Soviet "diplomat" who had overseen their activities in Turkey was subsequently transferred to--of all places--Ceylon.

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