The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the war which followed (discussed in the next chapter), however, proved a fundamental obstacle to the KGB’s attempts to extend Soviet influence in the Islamic world. On 14 January 1980 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for ‘immediate, unconditional and total withdrawal of foreign troops’ from Afghanistan by a majority of 104 to 18 votes. KGB active measures proved powerless to prevent further hostile votes.46 Similar UN resolutions were passed by massive majorities every year until Gorbachev finally agreed to withdraw Soviet troops in 1988.47 The war also strengthened Moscow’s doubts about the loyalty of its Muslim subjects. In late February 1980, after some central Asian troops in Afghanistan had gone over to the mujahideen, Moscow began withdrawing Muslim troops and replacing them with Russian units. The central Asian press switched from propaganda celebration of the supposed ‘friendship’ between Soviet Muslims and their Russian ‘Elder Brother’ to emphasizing the ability of the ‘Elder Brother’ to eliminate ‘traitors’ and maintain law and order. There was an unprecedented flood of articles and publications eulogizing ‘our brave Chekisty’ and the proud legacy of ‘Iron Feliks’.48 The deputy head of the Tajik KGB, A. Belousov, reported that the CIA’s aim in the war in Afghanistan was not merely to defeat the Red Army and the Communist regime but ‘to destabilize the central Asian republics of the USSR’.49
Abroad, the ambitious FCD programme to extend Soviet influence in the Islamic world rapidly degenerated into a damage limitation exercise designed to stifle as many Muslim protests against the war in Afghanistan as possible. The Centre was reduced to reporting as successes cases where its agents at international Islamic conferences had managed to prevent the tabling of critical resolutions on the war.50 But the official Soviet representatives also suffered many setbacks. At the meeting in Mecca of the Supreme World Council of Mosques in 1983, the head of the Soviet delegation, Grand Mufti Shamsutdin Babakhanov, tried in vain to keep Afghanistan off the agenda. The Centre claimed that he had won the consent of delegates from Jordan, Libya, Tunisia and the United States, but that the Saudi royal family had insisted on discussing the role of Soviet troops in the war.51 Vladimir Kryuchkov told a conference of FCD departmental heads early in 1984, ‘. . . Anti-Soviet pronouncements from reactionary Muslim organizations have intensified.’52
Despite the formidable problems created by the war in Afghanistan, the main threats to the maintenance of Soviet authority in the Muslim regions were internal. Islamic religious practice obstinately refused to go away, while the proportion of Muslims in the Soviet population increased steadily throughout the middle and later years of the Cold War. Until the 1950s ongoing Slav immigration had seemed to guarantee Moscow’s continued dominance of Muslim areas. From the late 1950s onward, however, there was net Slav emigration from most of the Muslim republics. Simultaneously the Muslim birth rate began to outstrip that of the Slavs. Between 1959 and 1979 Muslims increased from less than one-eighth to one-sixth of the total Soviet population. By the 1988/89 academic year half of all primary schoolchildren came from Muslim backgrounds.53
Soviet rule in the Muslim republics was a politically correct facade which concealed the reality of a population which looked far more to Mecca than to Moscow, ruled by a corrupt political élite whose Marxism-Leninism was often little more than skin deep. Even the local KGBs were, in varying degree, infected by the corruption. The area of the Muslim Caucasus in which KGB control seemed most secure during the 1970s was Azerbaijan. During the previous decade the local Party leader, Muhammad Akhund-Zadeh, had turned corruption into an instrument of government under which a carefully calibrated system of bribery could purchase everything from university places to queue-jumping for apartments. In 1969, however, the local KGB chief, Geidar Aliyev, launched a ‘crusade against corruption’ which swept Akhund-Zadeh from office and led to his own appointment as Party boss. During the next decade Aliyev supposedly ‘cleansed’ Azerbaijan and clamped down on Muslim dissent by putting the republic under what appeared to be direct KGB rule. Baku, the capital and one of the main centres of the Soviet oil industry, became a propaganda showcase for ‘advanced socialism’ during the oil boom of the 1970s. In reality, claims the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist David Remnick, ‘Aliyev ruled Azerbaijan as surely as the Gambino family ran the port of New York. The Caspian Sea caviar mafia, the Sumgait oil mafia, the fruits and vegetables mafia, the cotton mafia, the customs and transport mafias - they all reported to him, enriched him, worshiped him.’54
The Centre was well aware that corruption in many guises existed in much of Muslim central Asia,55 but preferred to turn a blind eye when corruption reached the top. In the pre-Gorbachev era, noted Mitrokhin, ‘only the small fry were caught’.56 As Party First Secretary in the mid-1950s in Kazakhstan, the largest Islamic republic, Brezhnev had become convinced that ‘a certain degree of corruption’ was endemic in the national character of the peoples of central Asia and the Caucasus. The corruption, however, ran out of control. Brezhnev’s crony, Dinmukhamed Kunayev, Party First Secretary in Kazakhstan from 1970 to 1985, headed what was later denounced as the ‘Kazakh Mafia’; David Remnick found him ‘all bravado and condescension . . . He wore dark glasses and carried the sort of carved walking stick that gave Mobutu his authority.’ The Kazakh novelist Abdul-Jamil Nurbeyev saw Kunayev as a traditional clan chieftain whose main ambition was to ‘install his own relatives and friends at all key posts’ .57
Corruption was probably worst in Uzbekistan, the most populous of the Muslim republics, with a population exceeded by only Russia and Ukraine. Just as the ‘Kazakh Mafia’ was led by Kunayev, so the ‘Uzbek Mafia’ (later accused of embezzling more than 5 billion rubles of public funds) was led by the Uzbek First Secretary, Sharaf Rashidov, holder of no fewer than ten Lenin prizes. In 1977 the Centre was confronted with damning evidence of Rashidov’s corruption when it received reports that a former official in the Uzbek Ministry of Motor Transport named Ibrahim was planning to publish an exposé in the West. Rashidov, it was revealed, had bribed a deputy chairman of Gosplan (the State Planning Commission) with mink coats and other inducements to approve the building of an airport near his home in defiance of a plan already approved to site it elsewhere. Ibrahim himself complained that he had been forced to pay a bribe of 20,000 rubles to an Uzbek official to obtain the visa required for him to travel to the West.58 Andropov was doubtless informed of the case but appears to have been more concerned by the prospect of the exposé than by the corruption it revealed. On a subsequent occasion, Rashidov sacked the head of the Uzbek KGB, Melkumov, for arresting corrupt Communist Party members without obtaining the consent of the Party district committees. 59 Like Kunayev, Rashidov was a Brezhnev crony. According to the Soviet procurators who later investigated the Uzbek scandal, ‘Due to their “special relationship”, Uzbekistan was out of bounds to any critics.’60 Rashidov bought Brezhnev at least half a dozen luxury European sports cars as well as building extravagant hunting lodges for Brezhnev’s occasional forays into Uzbekistan. Rashidov also indulged the weakness for diamonds of Brezhnev’s daughter, Galina; Brezhnev’s son-in-law, Yuri Churbanov, later admitted receiving, among other gifts, a suitcase stuffed with banknotes. Aliyev was not to be outdone. In 1982 he presented Brezhnev with a ring set with a huge jewel, representing him as the Sun King, surrounded by fifteen smaller precious stones representing the Union Republics - ‘like planets orbiting the sun’, Aliyev explained. Overcome with emotion, Brezhnev burst into tears in front of the TV cameras.61
Corruption in the Muslim republics was condoned in Moscow. In 1971 Kunayev was elected a full member of the Politburo. With the election of Aliyev in 1982, shortly after Andropov succeeded Brezhnev as Soviet leader, the Politburo had for the first time two full members of Muslim origin, as well as Rashidov as a candidate member. Though Andropov may have detested the Russian corruption of the Brezhnev era, his promotion of Aliyev (whom he made First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers), li
ke his previous disinclination to take action over Rashidov, demonstrates that he had different standards for Muslim regions. It was not until 1983 that Andropov finally confronted Rashidov with evidence of his corruption. Soon afterwards Rashidov died from heart failure - or, according to some accounts, committed suicide.62 A secret investigation into the ‘Uzbek Mafia’ revealed what has been described as ‘one of the largest cases of public office corruption in contemporary history’.63 It was left to Gorbachev to sack Kunayev64 and Aliyev65 in, respectively, 1986 and 1987, and to reveal some (but by no means all) of the investigation into the Uzbek scandal in 1988.
The crumbling of Soviet rule in central Asia began after Kunayev’s replacement by a Russian First Secretary. Riots led by university students in the Kazakh capital, Alma Ata, left about thirty dead and there were protests elsewhere in Kazakhstan. At the same time, the authority of the official Muslim hierarchy began to erode. SADUM issued vaguely worded condemnations of ‘attempts to lead the youth astray’ but irritated the Centre by its reluctance to endorse the Russian repression which followed the riots. It caused even greater offence among the Muslims of central Asia by its failure to defend their rights. An Islamizdat (Muslim samizdat) leaflet accused Grand Mufti Shamsutdin Babakhanov of ‘not knowing what the right path is to take’: ‘It is not enough to go abroad and speak out against the injustice of Zionist occupation of lands that belong to Muslim Arabs and to deny the right of [Kazakh] Muslims to reign in their own homeland here . . .’ On 6 February 1989 Babakhanov was forced to resign after several days of demonstrations in Tashkent’s main mosque accusing him of drunkenness and womanizing.66
The old guard in Moscow fell back once again on conspiracy theory to explain the crumbling of Soviet rule. A writer in the influential Literaturnaya Gazeta asserted in 1987:
[President Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew] Brzezinski developed an Islamic ‘Kriegspiel’ against the Soviet Union . . . The objective was to create an ‘Islamic bomb’ in the Soviet republics of central Asia. The idea took flesh when an official report was prepared in 1979. [I]t indicated that specialized, secret Muslim organizations should be created with the aim of undertaking subversive operations in our country.67
There is no doubt that this bizarre article reflected some of the thinking in the Centre. Nikolai Leonov, head of KGB intelligence assessment, declared in April 1991, ‘Read the articles and speeches of Zbigniew Brzezinski . . . and you will see that his goal is to eliminate the Soviet Union as a united state.’ The Bush administration, he insisted, was secretly following the same policy. ‘The all-pervading tune’ of US-financed broadcasts to the Caucasus and other parts of the Soviet Union was ‘the incitement of hatred of the Russians’. Unlike previous KGB chairmen, Kryuchkov did not claim that imperialist plots were the principal cause of Soviet ills. ‘The main sources of our trouble, in the KGB’s view,’ he declared, ‘are inside our country.’ But he accused the CIA and other Western intelligence services of promoting ‘anti-socialist’, separatist groups as part of their continuing ‘secret war against the Soviet state’.68
Kryuchkov, however, did more than the CIA to assist the ‘separatist groups’. By leading an abortive hard-line coup in August 1991 to preserve the Soviet Union, he inadvertently accelerated its demise. The first Muslim people to declare independence as the Soviet Union crumbled in the aftermath of the failed coup were, predictably, the Chechens, Moscow’s most disaffected Islamic subjects. The KGB had long been aware of the buildup of arms in Chechnya-Ingushetiya but seemed powerless to prevent it. Andropov had told the Politburo in 1973, ‘The men of Chechnya-Ingushetiya are mad on rifles. They will spend vast sums acquiring them and will even attack guards, the militia and members of the armed forces for this purpose.’ Some of the Chechens’ illegal armoury came from Georgia. Workers at the Tbilisi arms factory stole firearms components, assembled them at home, then sold them in Grozny. The Chechens also succeeded in stealing firearms, including machine guns, from Red Army depots.69 As the arms buildup accelerated in 1991, many of the weapons went to the paramilitary National Guard of the leader of the Chechen independence movement, Djokhar Dudayev, a former Soviet air force general. Though the independence movement proclaimed, ‘Chechnya is not a subject of Russia but a subject of Allah’, Dudayev took some time to reacquaint himself with his Islamic roots. He told an interviewer that Muslims were obliged to pray three times a day. When told that it was five times rather than three, he replied nonchalantly, ‘Oh well, the more the merrier.’70
On 6 September Dudayev’s National Guard stormed the Supreme Soviet in Grozny. The Russian head of the city administration threw himself, or was thrown, to his death from a third-floor window. Nine days later, surrounded by Dudayev’s National Guard, the Supreme Soviet voted to dissolve itself. The climax of the struggle for power which followed was the seizure on Dudayev’s orders of the KGB headquarters in Grozny in early October. By the time the building was stormed by the National Guard, it contained only three or four KGB personnel, of whom one at most was armed. The evidence from both Chechen and Russian sources strongly suggests that Boris Yeltsin had agreed in private simply to hand over the headquarters to Dudayev, together with advanced communications and other technical equipment hitherto used to control KGB operations in the whole of the northern Caucasus.71 The long drawn-out conflict between Soviet intelligence and the Chechens, marked on the Soviet side by what some human rights groups claimed were crimes against humanity, thus ended in a humiliating retreat for the KGB.
Dudayev was elected President at chaotic elections on 27 October, and on 1 November issued a presidential decree proclaiming the ‘state sovereignty of the Chechen Republic’. In December, at a meeting in the Kazakh capital, Yeltsin and the leaders of ten other Soviet republics signed the Alma Ata Declaration, formally ending the existence of the USSR. From that agreement emerged five newly independent central Asian republics, all recognized by Russia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The conflict between Russia and Chechnya, however, was not over. During the Brezhnev era Chechnya-Ingushetiya had been forced into a ‘voluntary union’ with Russia which amounted in reality to annexation. 72 Yeltsin’s government insisted on maintaining the union.73 That insistence led first to cold war, then in 1994 to a Russian invasion of Chechnya and a war which still continues.74
21
Afghanistan
Part 1: From the ‘Great April Revolution’ to
the Soviet Invasion
The Communist era in Afghanistan began on 27 April 1978 with a bloody military coup which the Afghan Communist Party (PDPA) subsequently dignified with the title, ‘the Great Saur [April] Revolution’. 1 The KGB residency in Kabul was given advance warning of the coup by two of its Afghan military leaders, Sayed Gulabzoy (codenamed MAMAD) and Muhammad Rafi (NIRUZ), both of whom were Soviet agents. The Centre was alarmed by the news, telling the residency on 26 April that SAVAK, the Shah’s intelligence service, might have tricked PDPA supporters in the armed forces into staging a rebellion which it expected to be crushed. There was no basis for the Centre’s pessimistic conspiracy theory. Instead of being crushed, the rebels won a surprisingly easy victory. A single tank battalion, one air squadron and a few hundred PDPA militants, led by the Party leader, Nur Muhammad Taraki, were all that were required next day to seize the former royal palace and kill the President, Muhammad Daoud, together with his family. At a meeting with the KGB resident, Viliov Osadchy, and the Soviet ambassador, Aleksandr Puzanov, two days after the coup, Taraki complained that, but for Soviet discouragement, the PDPA could have seized power three years earlier. Osadchy and Puzanov reported to Moscow that they had dismissed his complaint.2
The KGB had been in contact with Nur Muhammad Taraki for almost thirty years. As a thirty-four-year-old Marxist journalist and writer, he had been recruited as a Soviet agent in 1951 with the surprisingly transparent codename NUR. In 1965 Taraki was elected First Secretary of the newly founded PDPA, then an underground move
ment, and was invited to Moscow, where he impressed the CPSU International Department and the other leading apparatchiks as serious, ideologically sound and ready to follow the Soviet lead. In keeping with the Centre’s usual practice, having become a fraternal Party leader he was formally removed from the Soviet agent network but, like many other Party leaders, maintained secret contact with the KGB and continued to provide intelligence on Afghanistan, talent-spotted potential agents and assisted in operations against the US and Chinese embassies in Kabul and other targets. As well as being given secret subsidies for the PDPA, Taraki was also given a personal allowance and food supplies. Though the Kabul residency had no doubt about Taraki’s loyalty, however, it found him increasingly difficult to deal with. Particularly since being given the red-carpet treatment in Moscow, he had become ‘painfully vain’, expected to be the centre of attention and was apt to interpret light-hearted conversation as jokes at his expense.3
The Centre was sufficiently concerned by Taraki’s conduct to order the residency in September 1968 to vet him thoroughly by ‘operational-technical means’ (almost certainly the bugging of his home). Though Taraki appears to have passed this test, the KGB held him largely responsible for the growing split within the PDPA between his own mainly rural Pushtun-speaking Khalq (‘Masses’) faction and the predominantly urban Persian-speaking Parcham (‘Banner’) group, led by Babrak Karmal. The Kabul residency found Karmal somewhat easier to deal with than Taraki. Karmal was better educated, naturally sociable and, in the KGB’s view, more flexible. Like Taraki, he had been recruited as a KGB agent, probably in the mid-1950s, and given the codename MARID.4 Both Taraki and Karmal complained bitterly to the KGB about each other. Taraki claimed that the circumstances of Karmal’s release from prison after serving a three-year term in 1952, ahead of other political prisoners, indicated that he had agreed to work for Afghan counter-intelligence. Despite its predilection for conspiracy theory, the Centre dismissed this allegation as disinformation devised to discredit Karmal and split the PDPA. Karmal in turn accused Taraki of taking bribes, owning four cars, having a large private bank account and being in secret contact with the Americans. The Centre dismissed these allegations also. It instructed the Kabul residency in 1974:
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