With the new BRICS international pressure group now in full swing under its Russian and Chinese masters, I am immediately transported back to my newspaper days in Africa during the years of the Cold War following WWII.

My aim throughout those two decades, after the surrender of the Western World’s enemies in Nazi Germany and Japan, was to gain a keen appreciation of just how the Eastern bloc sought to politically and economically ‘white-ant’ a good many of our better influences in Africa and elsewhere in the West.

At that time in history, the Soviet Russians created a network — similar to that now being created by BRICS — to attempt to literally influence and capture the world to their own way of economic and political thinking.

The overall picture I was able to assemble showed me just how the Communist Soviets hoped to work cheek-by-jowl with individual British and European Marxists in the hopes of capturing Africa for their own good.

In one of the most intricate plans imaginable, Russia’s KGB aided by underground Communists in Britain, France, Belgium, Italy — and even the dictator Salazar’s Portugal — aimed as a group to infiltrate Africa with the object of destabilising Colonialism and making a grab for Africa’s rich mineral, diamond and gold assets.

By comparison, when one analyses the new Communist-inspired BRICS, the immediate reaction is that this grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa could be reading from the same playbook, once again under the strict tutelage of the Kremlin and now assisted by its allies in Beijing.

As one organisation, BRICS has the potential to control, or at least influence, South America, Eastern Europe, India, the East and Africa.

In the 1950s/60s, the Democratic World as a whole was unfortunately largely both deaf and blind to the desire by the Communist Stalinists in Russia to take over Africa, the world’s largest undeveloped continent.

As Britain’s top Mi5 spy, Sir Percy Sillitoe, told me during one interview I had with him, there were too many gins and tonic being sipped by government officials in Africa during the ‘Cold War’ years and too many indulgences side-tracking parliaments throughout the rest of the Western Free World to really become concerned about Africa’s future. Political lethargy, he explained, had started to settle in throughout the West.

In any case, it was obvious to me that those countries originally owning the African colonies were desperate to get rid of them as they generally were becoming restive and were bleeding them financially.

With this thought in mind, it is to be hoped that the same situation of creeping Red political and economic tentacles will not apply again following the emergence of Russia and China’s new BRICS.

But just what was the Soviet Russian playbook that was planned and unsuccessfully enacted at a time when Putin himself was a senior KGB political officer in Moscow?

I found the answer to this question after quite some considerable detective work in Africa. From detailed research, I established that one of the Soviet Union’s big strategic targets was initially centred on Tanganyika and its neighbouring Congo region.

Between them, both countries stretched right across the middle of the continent from the Indian Ocean in the east to the Atlantic in the west. This vast corridor of land also offered the use of some of Africa’s most navigable inland waterways, rich mineral and other valuable mining resources and some of the world’s most natural sea-going harbours for the construction of major naval bases.

The Russians believed at the time that, by initially cutting Africa in half ideologically, they would be in a commanding position to infiltrate into the rest of the continent in both the north and into the rich mining resources of the south.

Their general belief was that the United States, Britain and Europe had become so disinterested in Africa that they would not intervene in a serious way and would be glad to say goodbye.

Another aim was to militarily claim the Zanzibar and Pemba island group off the Tanganyika coastline to enable them to have a strategic and controlling naval base in the Indian Ocean.

Even the poverty-stricken Chinese Communists of Mao Tse Tung’s time had their eyes on Tanganyika’s extensive untouched underground coalfields and on Dar es Salaam’s harbour which provided the only sea traffic gateway to the vast copper mining resources of Katanga, in the Eastern Congo, by way of the entrepot port of Bukoba on the western shores of Lake Victoria.

My concern over the BRICS development and its political design is that, with member States in so many strategic points around our globe, we may in future see Red motivated attempts to ‘white ant’ and split the West into different political blocs.