Page "Sandinista National Liberation Front" Paragraph 107

According to Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew, who undertook the task of processing the Mitrokhin Archive, Carlos Fonseca Amador, one of the original three founding members of the FSLN had been recruited by the KGB in 1959 while on a trip to Moscow.

This was one part of Aleksandr Shelepin's ' grand strategy ' of using national liberation movements as a spearhead of the Soviet Union's foreign policy in the Third World, and in 1960 the KGB organized funding and training for twelve individuals that Fonseca handpicked.

These individuals were to be the core of the new Sandinista organization.

In the following several years, the FSLN tried with little success to organize guerrilla warfare against the government of Luis Somoza Debayle.

After several failed attempts to attack government strongholds and little initial support from the local population, the National Guard nearly annihilated the Sandinistas in a series of attacks in 1963.

Disappointed with the performance of Shelepin's new Latin American " revolutionary vanguard ", the KGB reconstituted its core of the Sandinista leadership into the ISKRA group and used them for other activities in Latin America.