On 17 September General Boris Ivanov, the head of the KGB mission in Kabul, General Lev Gorelov, chief Soviet military adviser, and General Ivan Pavlovsky, Deputy Defence Minister, visited Amin to convey Moscow’s insincere congratulations on his election as Party leader. Amin declared that ‘he would work very closely with his Soviet friends and that he would take steps to eliminate known faults and to improve the style and methods of his work’, and claimed, with equal insincerity, to be doing his best to protect the hated Taraki against demands by the rest of the Party leadership that he be severely punished. The ‘Soviet friends’ did not, of course, believe a word Amin said. The immediate priority for the KGB was to exfiltrate three of Taraki’s leading supporters and former ministers, Sayed Gulabzoy (a long-serving KGB agent), Muhammad Watanjar and Asadullah Sarwari, who had taken refuge in the home of a KGB operations officer. The Kabul residency reported that all three had denounced Amin as an American spy. Despite the lack of documentary proof, their claims were passed by Andropov to Brezhnev and the leading members of the Politburo. Though Amin strongly suspected that the fugitive ministers were being sheltered by the Russians, this was categorically denied by the Kabul residency. All three shaved off their moustaches and dressed in the uniform of the KGB Zenith special forces who were stationed in Afghanistan to protect Soviet installations. They were then secretly transferred to the Zenith base to await exfiltration to the Soviet Union. The cover for the exfiltration, codenamed operation RADUGA (‘Rainbow’), was the apparently routine rotation of Zenith personnel. On 18 September ten Zenith troops arrived at the Bagram airbase, sixty kilometres from Kabul, ostensibly to relieve other personnel who were at the end of their tour of duty. With them came an operations group from the Illegals Directorate S, which specialized in constructing bogus identities, and a make-up expert with wigs, hair dye and other disguises. Gulabzoy and Watanjar were given suitably doctored Soviet passports as members of a Zenith unit departing on a Russian aircraft from Bagram airbase to Tashkent on 19 September. Because of the risk that Sarwari, who had become well known as Taraki’s security chief, might be identified even in disguise, however, he was smuggled on board the plane in a sealed container with a six-hour oxygen supply. Those who took part in operation RADUGA were given awards and personally congratulated by Andropov. Once in Tashkent, the three former ministers were put up for almost four weeks in a bugged house while their conversation was carefully monitored to check on their reliability. After recording ninety-two tapes, the KGB appears to have been satisfied by what it had heard and transferred them to a secret retreat in Bulgaria.26
On 6 October the Afghan Foreign Minister, Dr Akbar Shah Wali, summoned a meeting of ambassadors from the ‘socialist states’ (China and Yugoslavia included) and, to Moscow’s fury, accused the Soviet ambassador Puzanov (subsequently recalled) of conniving at an attempt by Taraki to assassinate Amin on 14 September. Simultaneously, pamphlets entitled ‘The attempt on the life of H. Amin by Taraki and the failure of this attempt’ were distributed among Party militants and the armed forces. On 9 October Puzanov, Pavlovsky, Gorelov and L. P. Bogdanov of the KGB met Amin to protest against Wali’s statement. Bogdanov subsequently reported to the Centre:
During the talks H. Amin was brash and provocative. He sometimes contained his fury with difficulty. He interrupted the Soviet representatives and did not give them a chance to state their point of view calmly. At the same time there were moments when he appeared to collect his thoughts and gave the impression that he did not want to spoil his relations [with the Soviet Union] completely.
Bogdanov also reported that Amin made no mention during the stormy two-hour meeting that Taraki was dead - despite the fact that the Afghan news agency had already distributed an announcement of his death, embargoed until 8 p.m. local time.27 Next day, 10 October, the Kabul Times reported that Taraki ‘died yesterday morning of a serious illness, [from] which he had been suffering for some time . . .’ In reality, he had been murdered on Amin’s orders. Three of Amin’s security personnel tied Taraki to a bed and suffocated him with a cushion - presumably to avoid leaving any visible sign of violence on his corpse. Taraki’s death throes were said to have lasted fifteen minutes. According to Gromyko, Brezhnev was ‘simply beside himself’ when told the news: ‘To those closest to him he said that he had been given a slap in the face to which he had to respond.’28 The response which Brezhnev had in mind at this stage, however, was the overthrow of Amin rather than a full-scale Soviet invasion.
The Centre was convinced that there was no time to lose. Amin, it believed, was planning to ‘do a Sadat on us’ 29 - to expel Soviet advisers as soon as he felt strong enough and turn to the United States. The Kabul residency reported that Amin’s brother, Abdullah, had told his supporters, ‘It would clearly be sensible for us to follow Egypt’s course and treat the Russians as President Sadat did.’30 In the Centre’s conspiratorial imagination, routine meetings between Amin and US diplomats, which in reality the Americans found tedious and unproductive, acquired a deeply sinister significance. Even the FCD’s able counter-intelligence chief, Oleg Kalugin, whose grasp of American policy-making was far more sophisticated than that of Andropov and Kryuchkov, ‘viewed Afghanistan as a country within our sphere of interest, and thought we had to do whatever possible to prevent the Americans and the CIA from installing an anti-Soviet regime there’.31 Though the Centre’s main fear was of a pro-American Afghanistan, it was also preoccupied in the autumn of 1979 by a second nightmare scenario. The Kabul residency reported, possibly inaccurately, that secret meetings had taken place at the end of September between representatives of Amin and the ‘extreme Muslim opposition’ at which the possibility of expelling all Soviet officials, releasing all imprisoned Muslim rebels, and ending the civil war had been discussed.32 To some KGB officers this raised the spectre of ‘an Islamic government’.33 Only by a Soviet invasion did it seem that Afghanistan could be kept within the Soviet sphere of influence.
The first step in the invasion plan was to assemble a dependably pro-Soviet Afghan government-in-waiting to take power after the overthrow of Amin. On 25 October the Centre despatched Aleksandr Vladimirovich Petrov, formerly a Line PR officer at the Kabul residency, to Prague, where Moscow’s chosen successor to Amin, Babrak Karmal, was living in exile.34 While talks with Karmal were proceeding, a series of meetings were held in FCD departments to brief officers on the worsening situation in Afghanistan. The situation, they were told, was intolerable. All of them had to be prepared for the decisive action that would be needed to put things right. To Mitrokhin, as probably to most of those who attended the briefings, it was clear that a Soviet invasion was in the offing. On 30 October, probably prompted by Petrov, Karmal wrote a personal letter to Brezhnev denouncing Amin as an anarchist and declaring: ‘The leading members of the [Afghan] Party are prepared to organize and unite Communists, patriots and all the progressive and democratic forces in Afghanistan. The achievement of these aims will be assisted by the fraternal assistance, consultations and advice of our Soviet friends.’
In early November the KGB secretly brought Karmal, the three former ministers exfiltrated from Kabul in September and three other prominent Afghan exiles to Moscow, where they discussed plans to oust Amin from power and set up a new government headed by Karmal. Mitrokhin’s notes on the KGB minutes of the meeting record the ‘decisive influence’ on the Afghans’ deliberations of the views of their Soviet comrades.35
Within the Politburo the main pressure for invasion came from Andropov and his two habitual allies, Ustinov and Gromyko. Though Ustinov was probably the first to become persuaded of the need for Soviet military intervention, the most influential voice was that of Andropov, who suffered from what some of his colleagues termed a ‘Hungarian complex’. As Soviet ambassador in Budapest, he had witnessed the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 at first hand. His insistence then on the supreme necessity of defeating counter-revolution had helped to persuade an initially reluctant Khrushchev to agree to Sovie
t military intervention. Thereafter Andropov was obsessed with the need to stamp out ‘ideological sabotage’ wherever it reared its head within the Soviet bloc. In 1968, a year after he became Chairman of the KGB, he was one of the chief advocates of the invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring. At a KGB conference in March 1979 he reiterated his view that every outbreak of ideological subversion represented a danger which could not be ignored:
We simply do not have the right to permit even the smallest miscalculation here, for in the political sphere any kind of ideological sabotage is directly or indirectly intended to create an opposition which is hostile to our system . . . and, in the final analysis, to create the conditions for the overthrow of socialism.36
By the autumn of 1979 Andropov was convinced that Afghanistan, like Czechoslovakia eleven years earlier, was threatened with ‘ideological sabotage’ and that only Soviet military intervention could prevent ‘the overthrow of socialism’.
Before the invasion could go ahead, however, Andropov and his colleagues on the Politburo Afghanistan Commission had first to win over the ailing Brezhnev. In order to ensure support for the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Andropov had fed the Politburo with misleading intelligence reports. 37 During the final months of 1979 he was once again economical with the truth. In order not to alarm Brezhnev, Andropov deliberately underplayed the scale of the Soviet military involvement which would be required - initially giving the misleading impression that the overthrow of Amin would be carried out by the Afghan opposition to him rather than by Soviet forces, who would merely provide back-up. He wrote to Brezhnev after the meeting of the Afghan leaders in exile: ‘In order to carry out their political programme, the healthy forces of the PDPA intend to come to power by overthrowing the regime. A military committee to plan the military and political operation to eliminate H[afizullah] Amin has been set up.’ All that would be involved would be ‘a rapid military operation in the capital’. It was therefore in the interests of the USSR to give secret advice and material aid to the ‘healthy forces’ who were preparing to come to power.38 Early in December, Andropov sent Brezhnev a further letter, reporting ‘alarming information [intelligence] about Amin’s secret activities, forewarning of a possible shift to the West’, which would result in both the end of Communist rule and a catastrophic loss of Soviet influence. Though still unwilling to mention the possibility of a full-scale Soviet invasion, Andropov reported that Karmal and his comrades had ‘raised the question of possible [Soviet] assistance, in case of need, including military’ in overthrowing the Amin regime. Andropov added that, though Soviet forces already in Kabul should be ‘entirely sufficient for a successful operation’, ‘as a precautionary measure in the event of unforeseen complications, it would be wise to have a military group close to the [Afghan] border’.39
On 12 December, gathering in Brezhnev’s office before a Politburo meeting, the members of the Afghanistan Commission - Andropov, Ustinov, Gromyko and Ponomarev - obtained the General Secretary’s support for Soviet military intervention. The Politburo then authorized Andropov, Ustinov and Gromyko to oversee the implementation of the decision. The whole affair was treated with such extraordinary secrecy that the document recording this decision was handwritten to avoid informing the Politburo typists, euphemistically entitled ‘Concerning the Situation in “A” ’, and even more euphemistically phrased without any explicit reference either to Afghanistan or to troops. The Politburo members then scrawled their signatures across the handwritten document.40 While Marshal Akhromeyev and the General Staff operations group in charge of the invasion established their headquarters near the Afghan border in Uzbekistan, the heads of FCD Directorate S (Illegals), Vadim Kirpichenko, and of its Department 8 (‘Special Operations’), Vladimir Krasovsky, flew secretly into Kabul to supervise the overthrow of Amin (operation AGAT [‘Agate’]). Day-to-day control of AGAT was entrusted to Krasovsky’s deputy, A. I. Lazarenko. A team from the KGB Seventh (Surveillance) Directorate flew in to monitor Amin’s movements. Meanwhile, just as before the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, elaborate attempts were made to avoid arousing suspicion that invasion was imminent. In an attempt to reassure Amin, his latest requests for military supplies were granted and two radio stations were constructed for him.41
Even more secret than the preparations for military intervention was the plan to assassinate Amin drawn up by Department 8. Andropov doubtless hoped that by the time Soviet troops arrived to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan, Amin would be dead and Karmal would have issued an appeal for fraternal assistance from the Red Army to legitimize the invasion. In keeping with the usual procedure for authorizing assassination, Brezhnev was almost certainly informed of the plan. A year earlier the Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov, had been killed in London with a poison pellet fired by a silenced gun concealed inside an umbrella. The poison (ricin) had been provided by the poisons laboratory attached to the KGB OUT (Operational Technical) Directorate, which was under Andropov’s personal control.42 The plan to kill Amin involved the same laboratory, though the poison was different and it was to be administered differently. Department 8 succeeded in infiltrating the illegal Mutalin Agaverdioglu Talybov (codenamed SABIR) into the kitchens of Amin’s presidential palace, where he was employed as a chef. As an Azerbaijani brought up close to the Iranian border, Talybov was a fluent Farsi speaker and had previously operated in both Iran and Chechnya-Ingushetiya with Iranian identity documents in the name of Ikhtiar Kesht. In Kabul, he posed as a Farsi-speaking Afghan. While working as a chef, Talybov succeeded in poisoning some of the food prepared for Amin and his immediate entourage.43
On 13 December Karmal and five members of his future government were secretly flown from Moscow to Bagram airbase, ready to take over as soon as Amin had been liquidated.44 On the 17th Amin’s nephew and son-in-law, Asadullah Amin, who was also head of the security service, was taken seriously ill with acute food poisoning and, ironically, flown to Moscow for urgent medical treatment. 45 Talybov’s main target, however, escaped. According to Vladimir Kuzichkin, then a Line N (illegal support) officer at the Tehran residency, ‘[Hafizullah] Amin was as careful as any of the Borgias. He kept switching his food and drink as if he expected to be poisoned.’46 It is quite possible that Asadullah Amin had eaten a dish prepared for Hafizullah. Karmal and his colleagues were forced to fly back from Bagram airbase to the Soviet Union to await the next attempt to overthrow Amin. Since poisoning had failed, the only option which remained was to shoot Amin at the beginning of Soviet military intervention.
On 20 December Amin moved his headquarters to the Darulaman Palace on the outskirts of Kabul, having apparently been persuaded by Soviet advisers that it offered him greater security.47 The advisers, however, had in mind not Amin’s security but the fact that an attack on the Darulaman Palace, conveniently close to the Soviet embassy, would avoid the need for street fighting in the centre of Kabul.48 On 23 December, the Kabul residency reported that Amin’s suspicions had been aroused both by Western reports of Soviet troop movements and by the frequent flights into the Soviet airbase at Bagram. The main invasion began at 3 p.m. local time on 25 December. Two days later 700 members of the KGB Alpha and Zenith special forces, dressed in Afghan uniforms and travelling in military vehicles with Afghan markings, stormed the Darulaman Palace.49 As the sound of gunfire reverberated from the outskirts of the city, frightened PDPA members at Kabul Radio hid their Party cards behind radiators or flushed them down lavatories in the belief that Amin’s government was under attack from anti-Communist mujahideen. They were further bemused when they heard a broadcast at 8.45 p.m. purporting to come from their own radio station but, in reality, from the Red Army headquarters at Termez, announcing that Babrak Karmal had assumed power and requested fraternal Soviet military assistance. Fifteen minutes later Soviet paratroops arrived at Kabul Radio and told the confused staff that they had come ‘to save the revolution’. 50
The satisfaction of the Centre at the success o
f operation AGAT was reflected in a series of awards and promotions: among them those of the head of FCD Directorate S, Kirpichenko, who had overall charge of the operation, from Major-General to Lieutenant-General, and of Lazarenko, who had day-to-day control of AGAT from Colonel to Major-General. Though the Darulaman Palace had been quickly taken and Amin gunned down with his family, however, his guards had put up stiffer resistance than the Centre had expected. Over 100 of the KGB special forces were killed and wounded. Those who died included their commander, Colonel Grigori Boyarinov, commandant of the Department 8 special operations training school at Balashikha, who was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union. The portraits of KGB officers who were killed during operations were normally displayed in black frames in a place of honour at the Centre. Since the fallen heroes of operation AGAT were so embarrassingly numerous, however, Andropov decided not to put their portraits on display.51
22
Afghanistan
Part 2: War and Defeat
The World Was Going Our Way Page 52