‘I noticed long ago,’ Taraki told the Russians, ‘that Amin has the tendency to concentrate power in his own hands but I did not attach any particular significance to this. However, recently this tendency has become dangerous.’ He went on to complain about Amin’s refusal to accept criticism, the way he was building up his own public position, the authoritarian way he treated his ministers, and the way he had placed his relatives in key government and party posts. ‘One family is ruling the country just as it was in the times of the King and Daud.’
Reversing the assurances he had given to Brezhnev, Taraki now confessed that he had had doubts about Amin even before he left for Havana. Since his return Sarwari had informed him of three separate conspiracies launched by Amin, who had aborted them once he realised that they had been uncovered.
He went on to tell the Russians that his talks with Amin the previous day had not (as they had thought) resulted in agreement. Amin had again demanded that the four ministers be sacked. Taraki had accused Amin of persecuting them and forcing them into hiding. He, Taraki, was the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and Amin must obey his orders. Amin had smiled and said that, on the contrary, it was he who commanded the troops. Now, said Taraki, open conflict could not be ruled out. He was prepared to go on working with Amin, but only if Amin abandoned his present policies of repression.
The Russians suggested that Amin be invited to join the discussions, and Taraki telephoned him accordingly. As they were waiting, the KGB representative, General Boris Ivanov, remarked that there were persistent rumours of a plot to kill Amin when he got to the palace. Taraki pooh-poohed the idea.
Taraki’s aide Tarun then went out to meet Amin. A few minutes later, there was a burst of automatic fire on the other side of the door. Gorelov went to the window and saw Amin running towards his car. There was blood on the sleeve of his shirt.
Ryurikov was sent out to see what had happened. Tarun was lying halfway down the stairs. He had bullet wounds in his head and chest. A sub-machine gun was lying on the floor. There was still gun smoke in the stairwell. Taraki’s wife was there too: she had come out of the bedroom to see what was going on.
Taraki’s bodyguard came in and reported with a crisp military salute that, when Amin had begun to walk up the staircase, Tarun had told Taraki’s guards to leave and threatened them with his pistol. When they refused he fired at one of them and they killed him immediately.
Taraki then rang Amin to tell him that what had happened was the result of a misunderstanding with the guards. But after he put the receiver down he told the Russians that it had been a deliberate provocation. He agreed that the Russians should go to see Amin straight away.
All the Afghans involved in the shoot-out on the staircase died then or soon afterwards. None of the Russians actually saw what happened. This has left room for two alternative explanations. The first is that it was a put-up job by Amin designed to give him the excuse to arrest Taraki. The second is that there really was an attempt to get rid of Amin that went wrong. Ryurikov later inclined to the former view: assassination was not Taraki’s style, whereas Amin came from a family which was notorious for the bloody way in which it conducted its feuds and its political intrigues.13
Amin himself fled to the Ministry of Defence, and ordered his troops to surround the Palace, disarm the guard, and arrest Taraki. Two hours later Kabul Radio announced that Taraki and the four ministers had been relieved of their posts. That night many of Taraki’s people were arrested and some were shot, including the two guards who had opened fire on Amin. Taraki told his wife that Amin would not touch him: the Soviet comrades would not allow Amin to make a fool of himself. But the couple were soon taken under guard to a room in a smaller building within the palace complex. The room had not been used for some time and was thick with dust. Taraki comforted his wife: ‘Everything will be all right. I know this room. Soldiers used to be quartered here. Now it’s our turn.’ She immediately set to work to clean it up.14 Later she was taken to a separate building. The rest of Taraki’s family and his personal staff were moved from the presidential palace to the Pul-i Charkhi prison a couple of days after Amin took power.
That evening the Soviet officials called on Amin to express their regret at the shooting and their deep sympathy at the death of Tarun, whom they ‘had known to be a true friend of the Soviet Union’. Amin then gave his version of the story and concluded, ‘I am convinced that it was me whom they wanted to kill. More than a hundred shots have been fired at me before this. Now you can see for yourselves what Taraki wanted. I knew that an attempt on my life was being planned and was ready for this when I met Taraki at the airport on his return from Havana. Today Taraki wanted to kill me. He clearly did not plan to do this in the presence of Soviet comrades, but he must have forgotten to cancel his orders and his people began to shoot.’
The Russians again expressed their regret, emphasised the need for restraint, and repeated Brezhnev’s call for unity: a split in the Party would be ruinous for the Afghan revolution. Amin said that the revolution could survive without him, provided it had Soviet support. But the reality was that the army would now obey only him, not Taraki; an attempt the previous day by Watanjar to bring the army over to Taraki had failed. Amin had nevertheless sacked the commanders of the 4th and 15th Armoured Brigades as a precaution.
The Central Committee would now meet to relieve Taraki of his posts, said Amin, though he claimed that he personally was against that. The Russians replied that the Soviet leaders firmly believed that Taraki should remain as head of state and that Amin should keep his current posts. They would not understand it if Amin stripped Taraki of his position.
Amin said that he himself was ready enough to take Soviet advice. But things had gone too far. Blood had been spilled (he showed them the stains on his shirt). His comrades in the army were angrily demanding vengeance. The Russians forcefully reiterated their view that unity must be preserved within the leadership and between Taraki and Amin. They appealed to Amin to prevent the demonstrations against Taraki which were planned for the following day.
Throughout that night the soldiers of the Soviet parachute battalion in Bagram sat in their aircraft with their weapons, awaiting the order to fly to Kabul to rescue Taraki. Neither the paratroopers nor the Muslim Battalion ever received the order to move. Amin had meanwhile given instructions that any aircraft landing or taking off from the airfield should be shot down.15 Early on the following day, 15 September, Moscow ordered the special forces soldiers from Zenit to stand by for an operation against Amin. They assembled in the courtyard of the embassy, where they were briefed in detail. At about eleven o’clock the embassy security officer, Colonel Bakhturin, put them on fifteen minutes’ notice to move. But they too were never ordered to act: the Russians had sensibly decided that the balance of forces in Kabul was overwhelmingly against them.16
The four went into hiding. Mazduryar found his own refuge. Watanjar, Gulabzoi, and Sarwari took themselves to the villa of one of their KGB contacts. The officer’s wife found them in the sitting room when she came home from work. Colonel Bogdanov, the head of the KGB office in Kabul, had them taken to a KGB safe house on his own responsibility and then phoned Moscow to ask what he should do next. To his relief Moscow endorsed what he had done. The three men were dressed in SpetsNaz uniform, and they were put to live on the second floor of the villa.
The Party Plenum and the Revolutionary Council of the PDPA met on 16 September in a building surrounded by tanks and soldiers. The office of the Soviet Military Adviser was in the same building; the Soviet officers could hear the cheers as the meeting passed the resolutions expelling Taraki and the four ministers from the party, and electing Amin to the posts previously held by Taraki, the General Secretaryship of the party and the Chairmanship of the Revolutionary Council.17 The public was told that Taraki had asked to be relieved of his posts on grounds of ill-health and that Amin had been elected to succeed him. In a public broadcast the following day Amin attac
ked the excesses of the secret police and promised that the rule of law would prevail in future. He did not once mention Taraki. When he told the story later, Ambassador Puzanov said bitterly, ‘Amin made fools of us all.’18
The day after the shoot-out, 15 September, the Soviet Politburo met in Moscow to consider what to do. They had before them a memorandum prepared by Gromyko, Ustinov, and the KGB. This described the course of events in Kabul reasonably accurately. Taraki had failed to act decisively. Amin had ruthlessly exploited the situation. Now all the organs of power were in his hands. The pleas of the Soviet Politburo had been ignored.
Gromyko recommended that the Soviet government accept the accomplished fact and deal with Amin, while seeking to dissuade him from punishing Taraki and his associates. Soviet officials and military advisers should continue with their duties as before, but should not get involved in any of Amin’s repressive measures. Supplies of arms to Amin’s government should be somewhat reduced, except for spare parts and ammunition needed for operations against the insurgents. Public statements by the Soviet government should be purely factual and avoid all comment.
The Politburo agreed with these proposals and Gromyko cabled appropriate instructions to Kabul.19 The Russians were not, however, prepared to take their reverse entirely lying down. Their first move, on 18 September, was to mount Operation Raduga (Rainbow) to rescue the three Afghan ministers who had taken refuge with the KGB in Kabul. Two aircraft—an Il-76 and a An-12—flew into Bagram, carrying a lorry with three boxes inside it, and a make-up artist whose job was to make the three men look like the photographs in the Soviet passports prepared for them. Colonel Bogdanov was put in charge of the operation.
Lieutenant Valeri Kurilov, of the Zenit group, described what happened: ‘We prepared three containers at our Moscow base at Balashikha: three wooden boxes, like the ones used for transporting arms. We put mattresses on the bottom and bored holes in the top and sides so that the ministers would not suffocate.
‘Once the boxes had been delivered to Bagram airport, we took them in a covered lorry with local number plates to the villa where the ministers were hidden. We blocked the entrance to the villa with a bus while the ministers crawled into the boxes, each with a weapon and a water bottle. Then we nailed down the lids.
‘We dragged the boxes—now much heavier than before—to the lorry and piled cardboard boxes on top of them. Our boys, some in civilian clothes, sat in the back of the covered lorry. Each had a submachine gun, a pistol, grenades, and a double supply of ammunition.
‘We’d taken care to provide backup: two other vehicles were travelling with us, a Zhiguli and a UAZ, with seven of our boys on board. There were six men in the bus and another six in the lorry. If anything had happened, we would have reacted and taken down a pile of people. But that was the last thing we needed. Our task was to get to Bagram without incident and load the three boxes on to the aeroplane…
‘At the checkpoint on the way out of Kabul the Afghans tried to inspect our vehicles. We got ready for a fight. Our commander, Dolmatov, told us not to shoot unless he gave the order. A tall young officer with a carefully trimmed moustache spoke to the driver in our lorry and then tried to open the canvas cover. Although the interpreter told him that there was nothing there except boxes with the personal belongings of the Soviet specialists, the officer tried to climb in. At that point Dolmatov’s heavy boot came down on his hand and the officer looked up to see Dolmatov’s Kalashnikov pointing straight at his head. The officer backed down and the convoy was allowed to proceed. We travelled the seventy kilometres to Bagram without further incident.
‘A huge Aeroflot transport plane was waiting for us. A guard of SpetsNaz was set up around it, the ramp was lowered, and the lorry drove straight into the belly of the aircraft. After take-off I took out my bayonet and levered off the tops of the boxes. All three men were alive and well, but bathed in sweat.’
The three men were then smuggled through to Bulgaria, where they went into hiding in a villa on the Black Sea. To put the Afghans off the scent, the KGB spread the rumour that they had sought sanctuary in Iran. Gulabzoi later maintained that he had never left Afghanistan and never travelled in a box. But the Russian participants in the operation all insisted that he did.20
By now the Soviet government was getting increasingly worried by KGB reports that Amin was turning towards the Americans. These suspicions were not idle. On 27 September Amin told Bruce Amstutz, the American chargé d’affaires, that he hoped for an improvement in relations. His new Foreign Minister, Shah Wali, said much the same to David Newsom, the US Under Secretary of State, in New York. Amstutz reported to Washington on 30 September that a senior official in the Afghan Foreign Ministry had expressed interest in improving relations with the US government.21
Amin’s people were also beginning to criticise the Soviet Union directly. On 6 October, at a meeting of socialist ambassadors to which the Soviet Ambassador was not invited, Shah Wali openly accused the Soviet Union, and Ambassador Puzanov in particular, of involvement in the attempted assassination of Amin on 14 September. Wali claimed that Puzanov had assured Amin on the telephone that he could come to Taraki’s office safely, and pointed out that Puzanov had been there throughout the shooting.
Moscow was infuriated by the accusation. Three days later Puzanov and his colleagues conveyed the Soviet government’s protest to Amin. His reaction, they later reported, was ‘brash and provocative. He sometimes contained his fury with difficulty.’ For most of the meeting he barely allowed the Russians to get a word in edgeways. Wali, he shouted, had merely repeated what Amin had told him to say. The interpreter who had translated Puzanov’s remarks could confirm his version of events. So could the Afghan officials who had been in his office at the time.
The Russians insisted that they had not telephoned until after the shooting, when they had asked Amin if they might call on him. He calmed down and spoke in a more conciliatory manner: he evidently did not want to ruin his relationship with the Russians entirely. But he absolutely refused to put out a public retraction of his story, or to accept that his memory might have been confused by the shock of events. A retraction, he said, would be interpreted in the party and in the country as a sign that he had succumbed to Soviet pressure.
As the Russians left he made a partial apology: ‘Maybe I have been speaking too loudly and too quickly during our conversation but, you know, I was brought up in the mountains and that is how we speak in the mountains.’
In private Amin was unreconciled. In his own entourage, in the most colourful language, he repeatedly accused Puzanov of lying to him directly: ‘I do not wish to meet him or talk to him. It is difficult to understand how such a liar and tactless person has been ambassador here for so long.’ All this was reported back to the Russians.22
The Death of Taraki
By the time the Soviet representatives had that meeting with Amin on 9 October, Taraki was already dead, though Amin did not see fit to tell them as much. He had been murdered, in an intrigue worthy of Shakespeare’s Richard III. A key role was played by the commander of the Presidential Guard, Major Jandad, who had studied in the Soviet Union and spoke reasonable Russian. Although his task was to protect the President, he was by now closely associated with Amin.
On the evening of 8 October Jandad summoned three of his people to his office: Lieutenant Ekbal, the head of counter-intelligence in the Presidential Guard, Captain Vadud, its communications officer and Lieutenant Ruzi, the head of its political department.
Jandad said, ‘There’s trouble brewing.’ Ekbal thought that he was talking about some imperialist plot. Instead, Jandad went on, ‘The Central Committee and the Revolutionary Council have decided that Nur Mohamed Taraki is to be executed. You have been entrusted with the task of carrying out this order.’ Ekbal replied, ‘As far as I know, the orders of the Central Committee and the Revolutionary Council are given in writing. I think that we need the appropriate document before we carry out this order.’ Ja
ndad said, ‘Don’t be stupid. What do you mean, you need a document? The Central Committee Plenum expelled him from the Revolutionary Council and the Central Committee. He’s as good as dead already. There’s nothing secret about the decision.’ Ekbal and Vadud mentioned a rumour that Taraki was to be sent to the Soviet Union. Jandad said the Russians had refused to receive him. The two men objected that if Taraki had committed a crime, then the facts should have been broadcast over the radio. Jandad assured them that there would be a broadcast in due course. ‘But the party has its secrets which are none of your business. Do what you’ve been ordered to do.’ He then sent Ekbal out to buy nine yards of white cotton cloth for a shroud.
Yakub ordered that Taraki was to be buried next to his brother. Ekbal and Ruzi found the grave with some difficulty, made the necessary preparations, and then joined Vadud in the palace.
Taraki was in his dressing gown when the three men came for him. Ruzi said, ‘We’ve come to take you to another place.’ Taraki gave him some money and jewellery to pass on to his wife. Ruzi told him to leave his belongings behind—they would be returned to him in due course.
The party went downstairs to another small room, in which there was a dilapidated bed. Taraki handed over his party card and his watch, which he asked should be given to Amin. Ruzi told Ekbal to bind Taraki’s hands with a sheet and ordered Taraki to lie down on the bed. Taraki did so without protest. Ruzi put his hand over Taraki’s mouth and told Vadud to bind his legs while Ekbal sat on them. Ruzi then covered Taraki’s head with a pillow and when he removed it Taraki was dead. The whole business lasted fifteen minutes. Not bothering with the cotton shroud, they rolled Taraki’s body in a blanket and took him in their Land Rover to the cemetery, where they buried him. They were in tears when they reported back to Jandad.23
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