Afgantsy
Page 10
Surprisingly, Amin appears to have had no suspicion that the tide in Moscow had turned against him. Right up to the very last minute he continued to ask Moscow to send troops to help him cope with the spreading opposition to his rule.
Practical preparations for his forceful overthrow had already begun even before the final political decision was taken in Moscow. A crack reconnaissance company was sent to reinforce the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment already in Bagram. Another small detachment from Zenit, disguised as technical troops under the command of Colonel Golubev, arrived in Bagram and was attached to the Muslim Battalion. There were now 130 Zenit troops in Afghanistan. The contingent in Kabul was housed in three villas rented by the Soviet Embassy in Kabul.
On 4 December General Kirpichenko, a senior KGB officer, and a group of officers of the Airborne Forces headed by General Guskov, were sent to Kabul to plan for the removal of Amin. On 11 December Guskov issued a preliminary directive for the seizure of Dub (Oak)—the code name for the Arg Palace where Amin was now in residence. The operation was to be carried out by the Zenit troops and a company of the Muslim Battalion. The Russians had no plan of the building, and all they knew of the arrangements for defending it was that the Presidential Guard consisted of up to two thousand men. Smaller squads were to seize the radio and television building, the security service building, and other objectives in Kabul.
At this stage the plan was that the Parchamists led by Karmal should mount a coup against Amin and that Soviet support should be provided by no more than the forces that were already available. Babrak Karmal, accompanied by Anakhita Ratebzad, was secretly flown into Bagram to join Watanjar, Gulabzoi, and Sarwari, who had been brought there a few days earlier. The new arrivals were housed in inadequately heated dugouts and badly fed on kasha, supplemented by cheese, sausages, and canned food bought by their escorts before they left Moscow.
On Thursday, 13 December, the Soviet commanders were briefed on their objectives. They were told that the local people would welcome them and would rise up against Amin, and the soldiers were told to show them every friendliness. Those stationed in Bagram were ordered to stand by to move to Kabul.1
Yevgeni Kiselev, a military interpreter who later became a well-known TV presenter, was on duty in Kabul that night. There were two other duty officers: a colonel and a junior lieutenant. At about seven o’clock the Chief of Staff to General Magometov, the new Chief Soviet Military Adviser, came to the duty officer’s room for a private talk with the colonel. Afterwards the colonel, puzzled and anxious, told Kiselev and his colleague to go round the homes of all the senior military advisers—about three dozen of them—and tell them to assemble at the headquarters by nine o’clock to await orders. The orders never came, and the officers were allowed to go home. A few days later a young KGB officer told Kiselev that there had been a plan for a coup, but that it had been called off at the last minute.2
What had happened was that General Magometov and other senior Soviet representatives had discovered what was going on. They were appalled. They had not been consulted about the KGB plan. It was worthless, they told Moscow, and could not be carried out with the limited forces available. Without more military muscle, the plan might well fail, and the Soviet position in Afghanistan would be seriously compromised.
The operation was therefore postponed until a bigger force could be put together. Disagreement flared among the Soviet military and the politicians in Moscow about how large a force was needed. In 1968 the Soviet Union had deployed eighteen divisions, backed by eight Warsaw Pact divisions—some five hundred thousand men—to invade Czechoslovakia, a country with a much more forgiving terrain and no tradition of armed resistance to foreigners; a country moreover where, unlike Afghanistan, there was not already a civil war in progress.3 The government and the KGB initially believed that the job could be done with some 35–40,000 soldiers. The generals naturally wanted more. During the planning phase, under pressure from General Magometov in Kabul and others, the number was increased, and the force which crossed the frontier at the end of December consisted of some eighty thousand soldiers.4 Even this was nothing like the number that the soldiers believed would be necessary: Russian military experts later calculated that they would have needed between thirty and thirty-five divisions to stabilise the situation in Afghanistan, close the frontiers, secure the cities, road networks, and passes, and eliminate the possibility of armed resistance.5
The 40th Army Moves in
As the pace of preparations accelerated, an ‘Operational Group of the Ministry of Defence of the USSR’ was established on 14 December under Marshal Sergei Sokolov, the First Deputy Minister of Defence, a man already over seventy, tall, with a big bass voice and a calm, fatherly manner.6 It began work in Termez, the last town on the Soviet side of the Afghan border, but before long moved to Kabul, where it remained. The group set up a new army, the 40th, in the Turkestan Military District, under General Tukharinov, who had arrived in September as the district’s deputy commander. Since its objectives, its size, and the amount of time it spent in Afghanistan were all intended to be limited, the force was publicly referred to as ‘The Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces in Afghanistan’ (Ogranichenny Kontingent Sovietskikh Voisk v Afganistane, or OKSVA). This bland name was retained throughout the war for propaganda purposes, sneered at by foreign and domestic critics of the war, and is still often used even today.
The chain of military command which was thus created was riddled with contradictions. The 40th Army operated inside Afghanistan, but was formally subordinated to the Commander of the Turkmenistan Military District in Tashkent, who was himself responsible to the Chief of Staff in Moscow. Much of the military planning for operations within Afghanistan was done by the staffs of these three organisations. But the most senior officer in Afghanistan was the head of the Operational Group of the Ministry of Defence, and he too could and did take on himself the responsibility for managing operations, communicating directly with Moscow without taking too much notice of Tashkent. In addition there was the Chief Soviet Military Adviser to the Afghan government, who headed the large numbers of Soviet military advisers attached to the Afghan army, was responsible for coordinating the operations of that army with those of the 40th Army, and believed that he too had a responsibility for operational management. All this further added to the confusion which already surrounded the Soviet handling of policy in Afghanistan because of the divided counsels in Moscow and among the various Soviet representatives in Kabul. Forceful personalities—Gorbachev; General Varennikov (1923–2009), as head of the Ministry of Defence’s Operational Group the most senior general in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1989; Yuli Vorontsov, the ambassador in the last months of the Soviet military presence—could knock heads together from time to time. But the problems caused by these tortured and contradictory arrangements never entirely went away and they compounded the difficulties which already existed because of the longstanding rivalry between the army and the KGB.
Thanks to some heroic feats of improvisation, the 40th Army was more or less ready to move by the end of 24 December. In his directive to the commanders, Ustinov justified the action as follows: ‘In view of the political and military situation in the Middle East the latest appeal by the government of Afghanistan has been considered positively. It has been decided to introduce a few contingents of Soviet forces, deployed in the southern regions of the country, on the territory of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in order to provide international help to the friendly Afghan people, and also to create favourable conditions for the prevention of possible anti-Afghan actions on the part of neighbouring states…’7 This was to remain the Soviet government’s official justification for the war.
At midday on 25 December Ustinov issued the formal order to move: ‘The state frontier of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan is to be crossed on the ground and in the air by forces of the 40th Army and the Air Force at 1500 hrs on 25 December (Moscow time)’.8 The Soviet
intervention had begun.
What is surprising is not that there was a good deal of chaos, which of course there was; but that the formidable administrative and logistical difficulties were overcome, and the army deployed into Afghanistan on time. Indeed the Soviet general staff had always been very good at moving and supplying very large armies in very difficult situations. The methods were often crude in the extreme. They could cause great hardship to the soldiers themselves. But they had worked in the Second World War. In Afghanistan, despite the last-minute improvisations and the formidable obstacles of terrain and climate, they worked again, though some of the soldiers went hungry because the system had hiccuped.9
The main route for the invasion was the great road which runs around the periphery of Afghanistan, avoiding the mountains and linking the country’s great cities, from Balkh, destroyed by Genghis Khan in 1220, through Mazar-i Sharif, with its great shrine devoted to Ali, the cousin and brother-in-law of the Prophet, and onwards anti-clockwise to Herat, Kandahar, and Kabul. This was part of the Silk Road, the road along which trade and armies passed for thousands of years, along which the British feared the Russians—or the Persians, or the French—would burst into their Indian empire. In those days the eastern arc of the circle did not exist; until a new road was built by Nadir Shah over the Salang Pass in the early 1930s, there was no proper road through the mountains of the Hindu Kush from Kabul to Mazar-i Sharif. In the 1950s the Americans and the Russians competed to modernise the road. The Americans built the southern stretch from Kabul to Kandahar, and the Russians built the rest. It became a road along which you could drive cars, lorries, and if necessary tanks. The Soviet soldiers called it the betonka, from the Russian word for concrete.
The plan was that the 5th Guards Motor-rifle Division would enter Afghanistan along the western route through Herat and Shindand. The 108th Motor-rifle Division would cross the Amu Darya at Termez. The 103rd Guards Air Assault Division and the remaining battalions of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment would fly into Kabul and Bagram. The three divisions would be accompanied by the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade, and a number of other units. In the course of the next six weeks they would be joined by another motor-rifle division, the 201st, and further smaller units.10 The troops would secure the highway and garrison the main administrative centres along it. Tabeev, the Soviet Ambassador, had already informed Amin that the troops were coming. To ensure that their movements were properly coordinated, the commander of the 40th Army, General Tukharinov, met the commander of the operational division of the Afghan general staff, General Babadzhan, to discuss the details at Kunduz, the first Afghan town on the road from Termez.
The move began during the night of 24 to 25 December, when Soviet aircraft landed practically non-stop at Kabul and Bagram airports, carrying the soldiers of the 103rd Guards Air Assault Division from Vitebsk and the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment. Seven thousand seven hundred men, nine hundred items of military equipment, and over a thousand tons of supplies were flown to Kabul in the course of the next forty-eight hours. One aircraft—an Il-76 under the command of Captain Golovin carrying thirty-seven paratroopers—was lost when it crashed into a mountain and exploded as it was making its approach to Kabul airport. The British Embassy had observers at the airport. They were surprised that no attempt was made to disguise what was going on. The airport remained open for ordinary traffic and the British saw six helicopters with Soviet markings there.11
On the following afternoon the troops in Tajikistan began to cross the bridge which sappers had built with some difficulty across the fast-flowing and tricky Amu Darya. The soldiers were told that they were going to support the ordinary Afghan people against the counter-revolution, and that they had to get there before the Americans did. Although some conscripts were disgruntled because their demobilisation had been postponed, most of the soldiers were excited at the prospect of adventure. Though the mission was supposed to be peaceful, one battalion was told by its political officer that they would go through Afghanistan with fire and the sword, and the battalion commander added, ‘If a single shot is fired at you, you should open up with everything you have got.’ Marshal Sokolov, the head of the Operational Group of the Ministry of Defence then still stationed in Termez, came to see the soldiers off as they marched away to the tears of women and the sound of military music.12
The fourth battalion of the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade was sent ahead to secure the strategically indispensable Salang Pass, which lay on the route to the troops’ final destinations.13 Among them was a conscript sergeant, Sergei Morozov. He and his comrades found that there was no fighting to be done and the only casualties were two men wounded by accident. They lived in buildings without windows originally put up for the workers who had built the road over the Salang Pass. It was very cold at that height in midwinter, but the soldiers had brought their own stoves with them and scrounged the fuel from passing convoys. They had little else to do.14
Next came the 108th Motor-rifle Division under the command of Colonel Valeri Mironov. The division’s officers had already flown across the frontier in helicopters to reconnoitre the route.15 After a nasty moment when the column got stuck in the Salang Tunnel,16 the division reached its position outside Kabul on the morning of 28 December. It was at first welcomed by the local population. The relationship deteriorated sharply when it became clear that the soldiers had come to stay. There was a nasty incident at the beginning of February, when a patrol was ambushed outside Kabul and an officer and eleven soldiers—all reservists—were killed. But on the whole these early months were the calmest the division was to experience during the whole of its time in Afghanistan.
The division got a new Chief of Staff, Colonel Boris Gromov, in the middle of January. He was not best pleased: it was a sideways move, when he had hoped for promotion. In Tashkent, where he stopped on his way down, officers were already saying that there would be a real fight in Afghanistan, though attacks on Soviet troops had barely started. He continued to Kabul in a hospital plane, embarrassed because he was wearing the uniform of a peacetime colonel when all the other officers were in their wartime gear. In Kabul he had to sleep in the freezing aircraft because there was no other accommodation. The next day the plane would not take off because its wheels were frozen to the runway.17
Planning a Coup
The tangled situation inside Afghanistan itself was still evolving. On 20 December Amin moved from the Arg, the presidential palace in the centre of Kabul, to the Taj Bek Palace.18 This had previously housed the headquarters of the Central Army Corps. It was situated on the southwest outskirts of the city and Amin may have thought that it would be more easily defensible. Some of the specialists from the Soviet KGB who advised Amin on his security arrangements were stationed inside the palace itself.
The palace was very solidly constructed: its walls were capable of withstanding artillery. Its defences had been carefully and intelligently organised. All the approach roads except one had been mined, and heavy machine guns and artillery were sited to cover the single open road. The inside of the palace was protected by Amin’s personal bodyguard, consisting of his relatives and people he particularly trusted. They wore a special uniform which distinguished them from other Afghan soldiers: forage caps with white piping, white belts and holsters, and white cuffs on their sleeves.
A second line of defence consisted of seven posts, each manned by four sentries armed with a machine gun, a mortar, and automatic rifles. They were relieved every two hours. The external ring of the defences encircling the palace was manned by the Presidential Guard: three battalions of motorised infantry and one tank battalion, around 2,500 men in all. On one of the commanding heights three T-54 tanks were dug in and these could fire directly on the area around the palace with their cannon and machine guns. In addition, not far off there was an anti-aircraft regiment, armed with twelve 100mm anti-ai
rcraft guns and sixteen anti-aircraft multiple machine guns; and also a construction battalion of about a thousand men. In Kabul itself there were two divisions and a tank brigade of the Afghan army.19
This was a powerful force for the Russians to contend with. Even with the reinforcements they were now bringing in, the forceful destruction by the Russians of Amin and his regime would be a daring military operation, in which the Soviet forces would be heavily outnumbered by well-armed opponents.
Amin and the Taj Bek Palace were the main target. But to secure Kabul as a whole the Russians also needed to control the General Staff building, the Radio and Television Centre, the telegraph building, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the headquarters of the Gendarmerie (Tsarandoi), the headquarters of the Afghan Central Army Corps in the Arg Palace, and the Military Counter-intelligence building. These presented more tractable military problems than the Taj Bek, but would still require substantial forces and careful timing.20
On 18 December Kryuchkov sent General Yuri Drozdov, head of the KGB’s Directorate of Illegal Intelligence, a war veteran, an accomplished linguist, and formerly an illegal agent in West Germany, to Afghanistan to consult with the KGB officers on the spot, see what was going on, and report back.21 Drozdov told his alarmed wife that he was off for a few days, then left early the following morning with Colonel Kolesnik of the GRU, who was briefly back in Moscow. Drozdov’s assistant took with him a briefcase for the KGB officer who was to meet them on arrival. The briefcase contained a recording of the speech that Babrak Karmal would broadcast once Amin had been overthrown. The party left it by accident at Bagram after they landed. Luckily it was safely recovered the next day.
That same day, the Muslim Battalion was moved from Bagram to Kabul and stationed on the outskirts of the city, less than a mile from the Taj Bek Palace, in an unfinished building with no glass in the windows. It was bitterly cold and the temperature went down to minus twenty degrees. The soldiers filled the gaps in the windows with waterproof capes, installed wood stoves, and erected bunk beds. The Afghans gave the Soviet soldiers woollen blankets made from camel hair and food was available in the local bazaar.