The unit, soon to be known as the ‘Muslim Battalion’, consisted of some five hundred men selected from across the Soviet Union. The main requirement was that they should know the relevant languages and be in good physical shape. Each was expected to have two specialities: radio operator and mortar specialist; medical orderly and driver, and so on. The battalion was equipped with two mobile anti-aircraft guns, known as Shilkas, which could also fire at ground targets. These were manned by Slavs, since no Central Asian specialists were available.29
The KGB now set up two small detachments of SpetsNaz (special purpose) forces, drawn from the force later known as the Alfa group. This was originally set up by Andropov in July 1974 to deal with terrorism and the release of hostages, taking the British SAS among others as its model. Its members were all officers, selected for their fitness and intelligence.
The first detachment of forty men was code-named Zenit. It was sent to Kabul under the command of Colonel Grigori Boyarinov, who had fought in the Second World War and since 1961 had lectured on low-intensity warfare at the KGB Academy. At first Zenit was housed in the school of the Soviet Embassy in Kabul. Its immediate task was to protect the embassy itself and the senior members of the Soviet community. At Amin’s request, the group also provided training in counterterrorism for its Afghan opposite numbers.
Boyarinov’s group returned to Moscow in September. But it was replaced by a similar group, known as Zenit-2, under Colonel Polyakov. Polyakov and his officers systematically reconnoitred and mapped the main Afghan administrative and military buildings in Kabul: invaluable intelligence when the time came for the forcible takeover of Kabul in December.
In June Ustinov sent an air assault battalion to protect Soviet transport aircraft and their crews based in Bagram, and if necessary to cover the evacuation of Soviet advisers in an emergency. The troops were to travel as ‘technical advisers’ under the command of Colonel Vasili Lomakin, and their officers were to wear sergeants’ insignia of rank to disguise the provenance and structure of the unit. The paratroopers flew to Bagram early in July.30 The movement was picked up by the Americans, who concluded that the soldiers were indeed intended to protect Bagram and that the Russians had no intention of committing them to combat elsewhere in Afghanistan.31
Thus by the late summer of 1979 several of the military units that were to play a significant role in the first days of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan were already in place. The denouement was now to be driven forward at ever greater speed by dramatic political events in Kabul itself. Step by step, with great reluctance, strongly suspecting that it would be a mistake, the Russians slithered towards a military intervention because they could not think of a better alternative.
– THREE –
The Decision to Intervene
Now there began a period of plotting and counterplotting. Throughout the summer and autumn Taraki and Amin pursued their separate and contradictory intrigues, which ended in mutual betrayal and tragedy. The Soviet role in all this is still shrouded in ambiguity, and even those who were involved disagree about who was responsible for what. But whatever the truth, Soviet agencies were by now deeply involved in the domestic politics of Afghanistan, which they never fully understood and were never able effectively to shape to their own ends.1
As the domestic situation worsened throughout Afghanistan, and violent resistance to the Communist regime continued to spread, the confrontation within the ruling Khalq faction began to turn nasty. Amin gathered ever more power to himself. By the beginning of the summer, he held the key positions in the party and the state. He was a member of the Politburo and a secretary of the Central Committee. He was Prime Minister and Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Council of National Defence. He was putting his relatives and trusties into key positions in the army and the security organs. He had manoeuvred his son-in-law Colonel Yakub into the post of Chief of the General Staff. And he was doing all he could to undermine the position of his nominal superior, President Taraki, openly accusing him in the Politburo of dereliction of duty.
On 28 July Amin demoted several members of the cabinet whom he regarded as obstacles to his ambition, including the Minister of Defence, Colonel Watanjar, and the Minister of Internal Affairs, Major Mazduryar. He took over the Defence Ministry himself, and began to post officers and units which he distrusted away from the capital.
A group—Amin later christened it the ‘Gang of Four’—now began to form in opposition to Amin. It consisted of Watanjar, Mazduryar, the previous head of the security service, Asadulla Sarwari, and the Minister of Communications, Gulabzoi. All were former military officers who had been involved in the coups against the King in 1973 and against Daud in 1978. They appealed to Taraki for support, but it was not forthcoming. Amin complained to Taraki about them, accusing them of spreading false rumours about him and trying to discredit him with foreigners. The head of the security police AGSA, Ahmad Akbari, who was also Amin’s cousin, told him at the end of August that Taraki was preparing a terrorist act against him.
It was at this point, on 1 September, that the KGB submitted a memorandum to the Central Committee, with some thoughts on what might be done. The Amin–Taraki government, the analysts said, was losing its authority. The Afghan people were becoming increasingly hostile to the Soviet Union. Taraki and Amin were ignoring advice from Soviet representatives to broaden the political and social base of the regime. They still believed that their domestic problems could be solved by military force and the massive use of terror. Amin was the chief driving force behind this policy, so a way should be found of removing him from power. This seems to have been the first time that the idea of removing Amin was formally articulated at the highest levels of the Soviet government.
Taraki, the memorandum continued, should be persuaded to set up a democratic coalition government. The PDPA—including Parchamists currently excluded from office—should retain the leading role. But ‘patriotic’ clergy, representatives of national minorities, and the intelligentsia should also be brought in. People who had been unjustly imprisoned should be released, including representatives of the Parcham faction. Meanwhile an alternative PDPA government should be prepared and held in reserve; Babrak Karmal, who was still in exile, should be brought into the planning process. This was essentially the plan that was implemented in December.
The Crisis Explodes
From now on the Politburo’s Committee on Afghanistan—Gromyko, Andropov, Ustinov, and Ponomarev—became the chief policymaking body for Afghan affairs. It met regularly, often with Soviet representatives brought in from Kabul. The pace of decision-making was greatly accelerated.2 Analyses and recommendations prepared by the Foreign Ministry, the KGB, the Ministry of Defence, and the International Department of the Central Committee were put to the Committee, who passed their recommendations on to the Politburo for decision. Needless to say, the arrangements for coordination between departments, like their counterparts in other governments, were fine in theory, but did not work so well in practice. Departments remained at loggerheads, while the careful but sometimes conflicting analyses and recommendations put forward by cautious officials were often ignored or set aside by leaders who had their own ideas.
The KGB had long experience of dealing with Afghanistan, many covert contacts there, and its own ideas of how things should be handled: it was in many ways the lead department. It had invested much of its capital in the Parcham faction, and tended to reflect their views, even though these were a comparatively small proportion of the membership of the PDPA—fifteen hundred out of fifteen thousand.
The rest of the membership was from Khalq. That was also the faction to which most of the Communist officers in the army belonged, men whom Amin had made a special effort to cultivate.3 The result was a growing contradiction between the views of the KGB, who came to favour intervention and the replacement of Amin by their man, the Parcham leader Babrak Karmal, and the views of the Soviet military, who were prepared to live with Amin because they b
elieved that the main thing was to retain the support of the Khalq officers in the army, many of whom had been trained in the Soviet Union and had good professional relations with their Soviet military colleagues. These disagreements were exacerbated by poor personal relations between senior KGB and army officers, and by rivalries between the KGB and the army’s own intelligence organisation, the GRU.
All this had an increasingly negative effect on the formulation and execution of policy, including the decision to invade Afghanistan in the first place, and the management of policy in the nine years after the invasion took place. Afghan government leaders naturally took advantage of these differences to play one faction off against the other.
Artem Borovik, who was one of the first journalists to tell the Soviet public what was actually going on, concluded, ‘One of our problems in Afghanistan, it seemed to me, was that the Soviet Union never had a central office in charge of the various delegations of its super-ministries: the KGB, MID [Ministry of Foreign Affairs], MVD [Ministry of Internal Affairs], and Ministry of Defence. The chiefs of these groups acted autonomously, often sending contradictory information to Moscow and often receiving conflicting orders in return. The four offices should have been consolidated under the leadership of the Soviet ambassador. But there were so many different Soviet ambassadors that none of them had enough time to become thoroughly familiar with the state of affairs in Kabul. There was Tabeev, then Mozhayev, then Yegorychev, then Vorontsov—all within a two-year period. Of these four men, only Vorontsov was a professional diplomat with extensive experience in Central Asia. While the rest had enjoyed successful careers within the Party apparatus, they had no background in Central Asia affairs.’4
Such dysfunction was not unique to the Soviet effort in Afghanistan. Fifteen years earlier the US mission in Saigon in 1966 had been in equal disarray, the consequence of a rapid build-up, pressure from above, frequent changes of staff, personal frustration, poor leadership, and fatigue. The Americans had landed themselves with an open-ended commitment which, as one American official said at the time, could ‘lure us unwillingly and unwittingly into a strange sort of “revolutionary colonialism”—our ends are “revolutionary”, our means quasi-colonial’.5 Much the same could have been said of the US-led coalition in Kabul forty years later.
The crisis now exploded. Taraki was due to fly to Havana for a meeting of the Heads of the Non-Aligned Movement. The KGB warned him not to leave Kabul at this time, since Amin might move in his absence. He ignored them and departed on 1 September. His delegation was almost wholly composed of men with confidential links to Amin, notably Major Tarun, Taraki’s personal adjutant, who played an equivocal—and for himself fatal—role in the events of the next two weeks.
In Taraki’s absence relations between Amin and the Gang of Four deteriorated still further. The four men stopped sleeping at home to avoid arrest, and began to circulate leaflets calling for opposition to Amin and the restoration of unity between the party’s two warring factions. Sarwari telephoned Taraki in Havana to warn him that Amin was preparing to take power.
On his way back from Havana Taraki stopped in Moscow on 10 September to meet Brezhnev and Gromyko. Brezhnev spoke in grave terms about the situation in the Afghan leadership, ‘which is causing particular concern not only to your Soviet comrades, but also, according to information we have, to the members of the PDPA… [T]he concentration of excessive power in the hands of others, even your closest aides, could be dangerous for the fate of the revolution. It can hardly be expedient for one person to occupy an exclusive position in the leadership of the country, the armed forces, and the organs of state security.’ Brezhnev clearly had Amin in mind; but if it was a hint that Moscow would support the removal of Amin, Taraki did not pick it up.6 Instead he asked once again for direct military support, and once again the request was rejected. He also met Babrak Karmal, who had been brought by the KGB to Moscow. The two men discussed ways of restoring party unity and getting rid of Amin. News of this meeting apparently leaked to Amin, perhaps through Major Tarun.
That evening, at his lodging on the Lenin Hills overlooking Moscow, Taraki met Alexander Petrov, a KGB officer who had previously worked in Afghanistan. Petrov warned him that Amin was plotting against him. Taraki replied, ‘Don’t worry. Tell the Soviet leadership that for the time being I am in complete control of the situation, and that nothing happens without my knowing about it.’7 He repeated this optimistic assurance to Brezhnev as he left Moscow for the onward flight to Kabul.
The Russians were by no means so sure. That same night, Colonel Kolesnik (a code name adopted for the purpose of this operation: his real name was Kozlov), the GRU staff officer who was later to plan and direct the storming of Amin’s palace in Kabul, briefed Major Khalbaev, the commander of the Muslim Battalion, to join his men in Tashkent and prepare them to fly to Kabul to protect Taraki. He showed Khalbaev a picture of Taraki and said, ‘The order to protect that man comes straight from Brezhnev himself. If he dies, then you and your battalion had better not come back alive.’ The men of the Muslim Battalion were ordered to hand in all their documents and don Afghan uniform, ready to move at a moment’s notice. But Andropov was already considering various covert ways of removing Amin, including kidnapping him and taking him to the Soviet Union. He persuaded Brezhnev and Taraki that the Muslim Battalion should stay where it was, at least for the time being.
On 11 September Taraki flew back to Kabul. Amin had already begun to take his own measures. Taraki’s aircraft was made to circle over Kabul for a whole hour while Colonel Yakub, the Chief of the General Staff, completely revised the security arrangements to ensure that they were under the control of Amin’s men.8 As soon as he had landed, Taraki demanded that Amin tell him what had happened to the four ministers, the Gang of Four. ‘Don’t worry, they’re all safe and well,’ replied Amin. The two men then drove together to the Central Committee in town, where Taraki reported on his trip to Havana.
The next morning the row over the four ministers continued. Amin claimed that the four men had been behind an attempt to assassinate him while Taraki was away. They should be sacked and punished. Taraki asked Amin to accept their apologies, then reinstate them. Amin retorted that if the ministers did not go he would refuse to follow any of Taraki’s further instructions.
Meanwhile the four ousted ministers were operating out of the presidential palace, Abdur Rahman’s Arg, which the Communists had renamed the House of the People. Watanjar rang round all the commanders of the Kabul garrison to find out which of them was loyal to Taraki. They immediately reported these approaches to Colonel Yakub, who told Amin. Gulabzoi suggested to Taraki that he ask for the Soviet battalion stationed in Bagram to be sent to Kabul to guard him. Taraki told him that was unnecessary. The quarrel had been settled. In any case it was inappropriate for him to hide behind Soviet bayonets.9 Gulabzoi told him that there had been a shoot-out that morning at the Ministry of Security when Amin’s men had come to arrest Sarwari. Two people had been killed. Gulabzoi again asked Taraki to act. Again Taraki calmed him down, saying all was going according to plan. Tarun faithfully reported these goings-on to Amin.
By now the Russians were getting far more deeply involved, though this brought them no greater influence on events. On the evening of 13 September the four ousted ministers came to the Soviet Embassy. In the name of Taraki they asked for Soviet help to arrest Amin. Less than two hours later, Tarun rang from the palace to say that Amin had arrived there. He and Taraki were both asking the Russians to join them.
The Russians judged that the situation had become critical. ‘The possibility that H [Hafizullah] Amin might order the military units loyal to him to take up arms against Taraki,’ they later telegraphed to Moscow, ‘could not be excluded. Both groups were trying to enlist our support. For our part we were sticking firmly to the line that the situation in the leadership must be normalised along party lines, i.e. collectively. At the same time we were trying to restrain both groups from acting
in haste and without thinking.’10
Hoping they might calm things down, Puzanov and his three senior colleagues went to the palace. Taraki and Amin were waiting for them. The Russians read out another appeal for unity from Brezhnev. Taraki welcomed the appeal in fulsome terms. Amin followed suit, asserting in even more sycophantic language that he was honoured to serve under Taraki: if service to Taraki and the revolution required his own death, he would be happy to make the sacrifice.11 The four Russians left, satisfied by the appearance of reconciliation.
Later they heard (and reported to Moscow—incorrectly) that Amin and Taraki had reached some agreement. They did not know the details. But they congratulated themselves that their visit, and the appeal from Comrade Brezhnev, had calmed things down: ‘Amin did not resort to extreme actions, as he was convinced that the Soviet side would not support any actions which might aggravate the situation in the Afghan leadership and work against the unity of the PDPA.’12 This massive misjudgement was a measure of how far the Soviet representatives were out of touch with what was actually going on.
The following morning Puzanov and his three senior colleagues called on Taraki once again. At last Taraki spoke openly about his difficulties with Amin. Dmitri Ryurikov, a Soviet diplomat acting as Puzanov’s executive assistant and interpreter, recorded the conversation in the diary he was keeping for his ambassador.
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