There are various accounts of how he died. Possibly he was killed deliberately, possibly he was caught by a random burst of fire. One story is that he was killed by Gulabzoi, who had been given that specific task.33 When the gun smoke cleared, his body was lying by the bar. His small son had been fatally wounded in the chest.34 His daughter was wounded in the leg. Watanjar and Gulabzoi certified that he was dead. The men from Grom left, their boots squelching as they walked across the blood-soaked carpets. Later that night Amin’s body was rolled up in a carpet and taken out to be buried in a secret grave.
The battle had lasted forty-three minutes from start to finish, apart from some brutal skirmishes with elements of the Presidential Guard stationed nearby, who were rapidly dealt with. Five members of the Muslim Battalion and the 9th Company of paratroopers were killed and some thirty-five suffered serious wounds.35 The KGB special forces groups also lost five dead. Among them was Colonel Boyarinov, who was killed by friendly fire right at the end of the battle. He seems to have been cut down by Soviet soldiers who had orders to shoot anyone who emerged from the palace before it was properly secured.36
Colonel Kuznechkov, the military doctor who had helped to cure Amin of his poisoning, was also dead, killed by a burst of bullets fired into the ballroom. When his colleague, Colonel Alekseev, tried to load his body on one of the BMPs, he was roughly told by the crew that they were taking only the wounded, not the dead. But Alekseev managed to persuade them to take the colonel nevertheless.
The victorious Soviets took a hundred and fifty prisoners from Amin’s personal guard. They did not count the dead. Perhaps two hundred and fifty of the Afghans guarding the palace had been killed by their erstwhile Soviet comrades in arms.
The Soviet soldiers who had been wounded during the storming of the palace were taken to the polyclinic at the nearby Soviet Embassy. Galina Ivanov, the wife of the economic adviser Valeri Ivanov, had of course known nothing of what was happening until a terrible sound of shooting broke out down the road and vehicles started bringing in the dead and wounded. One of the vehicles was shot up by the embassy guards, who also had no idea what was going on.
All the embassy doctors lived in one of the microrayons, the Soviet-built suburbs on the other side of town, and were unable to get to the embassy. Galina had taken courses in nursing while she was at university and she was called in to help. She worked from 8 a.m. until 11 p.m. Apart from Galina, the only other helpers available were the embassy dentist, a woman who had been a nurse in the Second World War, and a couple of other women. There was another medically qualified person around: the wife of one of the Orientalist advisers. She was a neurosurgeon, but when she saw what was going on she spun on her heels and walked off.
First the little team sorted out the living from the dead. Then the dentist had to use his barely relevant skills to operate as best he could, while Galina and the others bound up the wounds. Galina found it an absolutely horrible experience. When she went back to Moscow soon afterwards she could not understand how people could walk around the streets as if nothing had happened.37
Meanwhile the Russians, triggered by the explosion at the communications centre, had moved with brutal speed and carefully focused violence to take over their other objectives in the city.
The most important and difficult target was the General Staff building. Fourteen special forces troops, accompanied by Abdul Wakil, a future foreign minister of Afghanistan, were assigned to deal with it. A deception plan was devised to ease the odds. That evening General Kostenko, the Soviet adviser to Colonel Yakub, the Chief of Staff, took a number of Soviet officers to pay a formal call, including General Ryabchenko, the commander of the newly arrived 103rd Guards Air Assault Division. They discussed questions of mutual interest with the unsuspecting Yakub, a powerful man who had trained in the Ryazan Airborne School and spoke good Russian. Ryabchenko had no difficulty in behaving naturally, since he knew nothing of what was about to take place. Meanwhile other Soviet special forces officers were spreading through the building, handing out cigarettes and chatting to the Afghan officers working there. When the explosion went off, they burst into Yakub’s office. Yakub fled to another room after a scuffle in which his assistant was killed, but then surrendered and was tied up and placed under guard. Ryabchenko, taken wholly by surprise, sat immobile throughout. Kostenko was nearly killed by the Soviet troops.
The fighting lasted an hour. As it died away, Abdul Wakil appeared in Yakub’s office. He talked in Pushtu to the general for a long time, and then shot him. Twenty Afghans were killed. A hundred were taken prisoner, and as they so heavily outnumbered the attackers, they were herded into a large room and tied up with electric cable.
There was an unpleasant moment when a company of Soviet paratroopers, who had arrived forty minutes late, advanced on the General Staff building in armoured personnel carriers and opened up a heavy fire, forcing the Zenit troops inside to take cover as tracer bullets flew across the room glowing like red fireflies. Order was restored and the paratroopers helped to secure the building.
The Russians needed the Radio and Television Centre to broadcast Karmal’s appeal to the people at the earliest moment. They reconnoitred it very carefully throughout 27 December, some of them posing as automation experts to get inside the building. In the assault seven Afghans were killed, twenty-nine wounded, and over a hundred taken prisoner. One Soviet soldier received a minor wound.
No one was killed on either side in the telegraph building, and the defenders in the Central Army Headquarters and the Military Counter-Intelligence building surrendered without a fight. There was no serious resistance at the Interior Ministry building either, though one Russian soldier was wounded and subsequently died. The attackers had orders to arrest the Interior Minister, S. Payman, but he had fled in his underwear and sought refuge with his Soviet advisers.
By the morning the firing had more or less died down. But not quite. As they drove into town in their Mercedes, the senior officers who had directed the attack on the palace were fired on by a nervous and trigger-happy young paratrooper. The bullets hit the car but not the occupants. A colonel jumped out and gave the soldier a sharp clip round the ear. General Drozdov asked the young lieutenant in charge, ‘Was that your soldier? Thank you for not teaching him to shoot straight.’38
Once the fighting in the Taj Bek Palace had stopped, Colonel Kolesnik set up his command post there. The victorious Soviet soldiers were dropping with fatigue. Since it was possible that Afghan troops in the area might try to retake the palace, they set up a perimeter defence, their nerves still at full stretch. When they heard rustling in the lift shaft, they assumed that Amin’s people were launching a counter-attack through the passages which led into the palace from outside. They sprang to arms, fired their automatic weapons, and hurled grenades.
It was the palace cat.39
– FIVE –
Aftermath
The inhabitants of Kabul paid little attention to what happened during that dramatic night. They were too used to shooting in the capital and most slept quietly. When they woke up the next day, Afghanistan had a new government, and the small boys were back selling cigarettes around the ruined government communications conduit as if nothing had happened.
Once the city had been secured, Kabul Radio broadcast Babrak Karmal’s pre-recorded appeal to the peoples of Afghanistan. ‘Today the torture machine of Amin has been smashed,’ he announced, ‘his accomplices—the primitive executioners, usurpers and murderers of tens of thousands of our fellow countrymen—fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters, children and old people…’
Karmal himself was not in the studio: he had remained in Bagram under the protection of the KGB. On the evening of 27 December—before the fighting was over—Andropov came through on the telephone ‘to congratulate him on the victory of the second stage of the revolution’ and on his ‘appointment’ as chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, an appoint
ment which had not yet been endorsed by any formal Afghan body. The next morning Karmal travelled to Kabul in a column of armoured fighting vehicles, supported by three tanks, and lived for the first few days with his KGB protection team in a guest villa on the outskirts of Kabul. On 1 January a telegram arrived from Brezhnev and Kosygin congratulating him on the occasion of his ‘election’ to the highest state and party posts.1
The gates of the Kabul prisons were thrown open and thousands of prisoners now poured out into the streets. One of them was Dr Lutfullah Latif, a Parchamist who had worked in the Health Ministry. He had been arrested in November 1978, interrogated and tortured for ten days, then sent to Pul-i Charkhi. Three days before the Soviet coup, he and the other prisoners could see and hear the Soviet aircraft landing non-stop at the airport. Then one evening there was firing for half an hour, followed by silence. The door to the prison block was broken down, some Afghan and Russian officers appeared, took the guards prisoner and then left again, taking the keys to the cells with them. It took the prisoners a day to force open the locks. There were political meetings going on outside in the prison yard. The prisoners spent the next night in their cells, but the following day buses were sent to take them home. All were freed, whatever their political affiliation.2
But that was not the end of the arrests and the repressions. Karmal’s people began to settle scores with their political enemies. ‘Revolutionary Troikas’ arrested people, sentenced them, and executed them on the spot with a bullet in the back of the neck. Amin’s guards were among the first victims. The commanders of units which had remained loyal to Amin were arrested, and the prisons were soon full again. The Russians protested. Karmal replied, ‘As long as you keep my hands bound and do not let me deal with the Khalq faction there will be no unity in the PDPA and the government cannot become strong… They tortured and killed us. They still hate us! They are the enemies of the party!’3
Taraki’s wife had been imprisoned in Pul-i Charkhi in a separate small building surrounded by a wall and barbed wire. Now her place was taken by the women from Amin’s family (the men had all been killed). They operated on Amin’s eldest daughter—the one who had been wounded when the palace was stormed—and then incarcerated her in the prison with her new baby. Najibullah released the women twelve years after their arrest, two years after the official end of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, on the eve of the final collapse of his regime.4The large number of Soviet civilians living in Kabul had, of course, no idea of what was going on. Even the new Soviet Ambassador, Fikryat Tabeev, had not been warned what was to happen. He was taken entirely by surprise when the communications conduit exploded and the lights in the embassy went out. His wife was furious that her husband had been left—literally—in the dark.5 He called General Kirpichenko for clarification. Kirpichenko replied that he was too busy to talk just then, but would report in the morning.
Andrei Greshnov, a military interpreter with the 4th Afghan Tank Brigade, had stolen a small fir tree in preparation for the New Year, set it up in his apartment in the new microrayon, and decorated it with baubles looted from the officers’ mess. On the wall he wrote ‘Happy New Year 1980’. When he looked in on his old apartment nine years later, the inscription was still there. For several days he had heard the aeroplanes flying into Bagram, taking off and landing in a continual distant roar. Like everyone else, he had assumed that these were the aircraft bringing the regiment which the Soviet government had promised to send to defend Amin. In fact they were bringing in not a regiment but the whole 103rd Guards Air Assault Division, as well as the remaining paratroopers from the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment.
After he had finished work on the evening of 27 December, Greshnov took a bottle of Aist vodka round to his Azerbaijani friend Mamed Aliev, who lived in the old microrayon. Aliev had a splendid Japanese television with a built-in radio, which he had acquired in town in exchange for a pistol which was surplus to his requirements. They turned on the radio. Something odd was happening. Several stations were on air, all calling themselves ‘Radio Kabul’. One, broadcasting in Pushtu, was denouncing the enemies of Amin and the April Revolution. Another, broadcasting in Dari and barely audible through the jammers, claimed that power was passing into the ‘hands of the healthy forces in the party’.
Greshnov and Aliev were frying potatoes and arguing about how much salt to put on them when the firing started. The street outside was lit up as if it were daytime. They rushed out on to the balcony—and rushed straight back in again as tracer bullets whistled around them. Tanks started firing further off.
Greshnov set out for home; the Soviet military advisers would be looking for him to interpret. But as he ducked out of the door, he was gripped by a huge figure in an anorak, armed with a foreign-looking machine gun. He stuttered in Dari that he had to go to work to help defend the regime against counter-revolutionary treachery. ‘Work’s over for today, laddie,’ was the quiet reply in pure Russian. ‘Thank your mother that you were born with fair hair, otherwise you’d have been shot outright. Go back where you came from.’ It was a long time before Aliev opened the door in response to his frantic banging: he was terrified that he would be shot because he looked like an Afghan. The two men spent the night watching through the window as soldiers and civilians were rounded up and taken away, Soviet armoured vehicles clattered around the streets and disorganised firing echoed throughout the city.
Greshnov got home early the following morning. Where there had been a flowerbed on the roundabout outside his house, there was now an anti-tank gun, its barrel trained on his apartment block. The wives of some of the Soviet advisers were giving home-made food to the Soviet soldiers. Out on the street he met Latif, a driver from the 4th Afghan Tank Brigade, who told him, ‘Our tanks were destroyed outside the TV station. No one survived.’ Greshnov swore loudly and asked, ‘Who did that?’ Then he realised he was being stupid: it was of course the Russians who had done it. It took him some time to sort out his loyalties, and when Latif told him that one Afghan tank had knocked out a Soviet armoured personnel carrier before it was destroyed he was briefly delighted.6
Alexander Sukhoparov had been an adviser to the PDPA since August 1979. He too could not understand what was happening during the night. He had to get his news from the BBC and other foreign radio stations. On the morning of 28 December Soviet paratroopers arrived to protect the hotel where he was staying. They were in a state of high excitement, but they too had no good idea of what had happened or of why they were there. They asked Sukhoparov about Afghan customs, about the layout of the town, about the attitude of the people to their arrival. It was a cold sunny day and people were wandering the streets, congratulating one another that Amin had been overthrown. ‘They greeted our soldiers warmly,’ Sukhoparov wrote later, ‘gave them flowers, and called them friends and liberators.’7
Nikolai Zakharov, a Komsomol official, had arrived in May 1979 to help the Afghans create a Communist youth organisation. He was at the airport on 25 December and saw military vehicles being unloaded from a transport aircraft and soldiers mustering alongside.
‘They’re ours,’ cried Zakharov’s interpreter, Abramov.
‘You’re off your head,’ Zakharov said dismissively. ‘How would our soldiers have got here?’
‘They really are ours,’ said the interpreter. ‘Look at the red stars on their fur hats.’
Three days later Zakharov wrote up his diary: ‘Last night, 27 December, at about 18.30, there was an outbreak of automatic and artillery fire which grew until it reached a maximum at 19.30. The sound of gunfire came from the airport, from the House of the People, and at times very close from the nearby residential area.’ And then he solemnly transcribed the official justification for the overthrow of Amin.8
It had been a remarkably daring, successful, and—considering the circumstances—cheap affair. Twenty-nine Soviet soldiers had been killed in action, forty-four in accidents (including the paratroopers who were killed when their
transport plane crashed into the mountains as it was coming in to land in Kabul), and seventy-four wounded. Afghan military losses were of course higher: about three hundred dead. There were no civilian casualties because the Russians had not used aircraft to soften up their targets. Almost exactly ten years later, in December 1989, the Americans invaded Panama to oust General Noriega. The military casualties suffered by both sides were similar to those suffered in Kabul. But because the Americans used aircraft, there were also civilian casualties, the number of which remains a matter of controversy.9
The operation seemed to have been politically successful as well. An oppressive ruler had been removed and one agreeable to the Soviets had been installed. Dmitri Ryurikov and his colleagues in the Soviet Embassy were sent out to canvass opinion. All reported that their Afghan contacts were pleased Amin had gone. But some had added, ‘We are glad to see you. But you will be very well advised to leave again as soon as you can.’10 As they fanned out through Afghanistan, the Soviet troops heard much the same thing: their arrival was welcomed, sometimes with flowers; but they too were reminded that their early departure would be even more welcome.
Protesters and Doubters
But back in the Soviet Union the first few protests were voiced almost immediately. A handful of dissenters—Yelena Bonner, the wife of Andrei Sakharov, and others—issued a statement on 29 January 1980. They entirely rejected the official version of events and the contention of the authorities that the Soviet people wholeheartedly supported their action. ‘There is a war in Afghanistan, Afghans are dying and our own boys are dying too, the children and grandchildren of those who survived the Second World War and those who did not return from it.’ They appealed to those who remembered the earlier war, those who remembered Vietnam, people of goodwill everywhere, to demand that the Soviet troops be withdrawn in accordance with the resolution which had just received overwhelming support at an emergency meeting of the UN General Assembly.
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