The Gun

by C. J. Chivers

  The bountiful trade in infantry rifles and machine guns assembled for World War II provided a useful precedent for understanding what was ahead. The war had pushed large quantities of military firearms around the globe, and when the fighting ended many governments were left with surpluses, sometimes staggering surpluses. For conventional forces, these excess weapons quickly became obsolete. In the arms-race climate of the Cold War, Western and Eastern armies adopted new standard cartridges and updated their standard arms. Where did the earlier generations of weapons go? Not into foundries. Some went into storage sites like the salt mines below Artemosvk. Others went to markets, wherever markets were. And once they entered markets, they turned up in conflicts everywhere. The gun-running business was often quiet and opaque, but one private dealer of the era, Samuel Cummings, an American who decamped for Europe and made his fortune brokering deals, granted moments of transparency. In the mid-1970s, Cummings, by then a minor tycoon, offered a tour to a British journalist of part of his arsenal, and explained how small arms move liquidly from fight to fight.

  Here, he points out, is a stack of American Garand rifles which were first exported to Germany in the ’fifties for the first German rearmament. When Germany got more advanced weapons they were transported to Jordan in the late ’sixties, and when Jordan got more advanced weapons they were bought by Cummings and shipped to Manchester. From there many of them were shipped to the Philippines, to help fight Moslem rebels financed by Libya, while a few remain in Manchester waiting for customers. Here, just next door to the Garands, are some British Enfield rifles which were captured by the Japanese in Indo-China, then taken over by the Americans and used in Vietnam, before they were bought by Cummings. Here are some Springfield rifles which were first supplied to the French in Indo-China in the ’fifties. Here are Mausers which were brought over to Taiwan by General Chiang Kai-shek when he left the mainland in 1949. Over there are German ME42 guns which were left by Hitler’s troops in Greece, Swedish guns made under license in Egypt and captured by the Israelis, British Sten guns dropped by parachute during the Second World War for the French Maquis, American Brownings for the Dominican Republic, Belgian Mausers from Venezuela, American M16s from the Chilean Army…. Cummings knows that his arsenals depend for their stocks on the aftermath of wars.

  Cummings, in one of his signature one-liners, declared the flow of arms “an index of the world’s folly.”20 Folly interested Cummings, and he made sure to read it well, because the business opportunities it presented interested him even more. What Cummings understood, and what his guided tour showed, was the durable nature of demand in a world in which the next local struggle was always about to start somewhere, and in which whenever one combatant adopted a new rifle its opponents wanted upgrades, too. There were almost always customers—if the price was right, the supply could be found, and weapons unneeded in one place could be married with a purchaser someplace else. If, as Cummings implied, today’s arsenals depend on their stocks from the aftermath of yesterday’s wars, then the Cold War had provided the biggest boon of all. Socialist stockpiling served as an immeasurably large, if latent, source of future supply—the greatest supplies yet. Cummings grasped this last point, too. He marveled at the appeal and practical merits of the Kalashnikov line, compared to what else was available. “If I was a Marine in Vietnam and was given one of those new ArmaLites,” he said, during the height of the M-16 scandal in Congress, “I’d throw it away and say I’d lost it and try to get one of the Russian rifles off a dead V.C. They’re the best.”21

  In his breezy and informed way, Cummings offered insights into private networks eager to move Kalashnikovs when the rifles became available. Idi Amin, in Uganda, offered a peek at a cruder form of transfer, which would be a factor in small-arms proliferation, too. Amin, a hulking career army officer, seized power by coup in Kampala in 1971. He was an outrageous character, a boxing champion and rugby player whose flamboyance and ease with spilling blood contributed to what became his international persona: brutish dictator and murderous buffoon. Some of those who knew him as a younger man, before his sadistic streak had manifested itself in wholesale executions, saw him as stupid, “a splendid type and a good player, but virtually bone from the neck up, and needs things explained in words of one letter.”22 But he possessed a viciousness, like Stalin’s, that was chilling when connected to power. During more than eight years as head of state, Amin squirreled away weapons with the help of the Kremlin, East Germany, and Libya, and applied his soldiers’ firepower advantage to the tasks of thwarting rivals and repressing Uganda’s population. Amin relied on the tools of the purge: large-scale arrests of civil servants and suspected guerrillas and their supporters, followed by imprisonment without trial, torture, and extrajudicial killings, often by firing squads, sometimes by hammer blows. Like many despots, he overreached. As resentment and fear exhausted Uganda, he annexed a portion of neighboring Tanzania, triggering events that chased him from the presidential suite. Tanzania’s army and a coalition of anti-Amin guerrilla groups invaded. Amin bolted. The disappearance of a commander in chief is never a good sign in a military government, and the Ugandan army took its cue from the boss. Officers and troops disappeared from many barracks. What happened next pointed to the risks ahead in Europe when communist nations crumbled from within.

  In the northeastern region of Moroto, Ugandan troops vacated their garrison, leaving behind an armory. Moroto was inhabited by the Karamojong tribe, traditional herders who roamed the countryside in search of water and forage for their livestock. Their region was formally Ugandan but never fully under Ugandan control, and as a seminomadic people, many Karamojong saw themselves as unincorporated. They had paid for this perceived backwardness and disloyalty at the hands of Amin and his government. After the evaporation of the army at Moroto, local men looted the base and relieved it of weapons. This marked a consequential rearrangement. The Karamojong were already accomplished cattle rustlers, and with their newly acquired Kalashnikovs they could raid their neighbors’ herds with heretofore unimaginable ease. The qualities that made a Soviet conscript with an AK-47 much more formidable than a Soviet conscript with a Mosin rifle or PPSh translated seamlessly to the business of rustling. But there was a difference. The introduction of Kalashnikovs to the Karomojong multiplied their firepower by a much larger factor than had the introduction of AK-47s to Soviet infantry squads, because the rustlers were not graduating from rifles and submachine guns. They were moving up from spears. In the ensuing years, traditional Karamojong power arrangements eroded, and the elderly leaders were supplanted by younger men leading bands of rustlers equipped with assault rifles. Warlords became a force. Karamojong raiding parties set upon their neighbors and claimed herds owned by the Iteso and Acholi people. Before the raids, the Acholi had three hundred thousand cattle. By 1997 many Acholi switched to raising donkeys. Their cattle holdings shrank to five thousand. Government efforts to control the Karamajong proved insufficient. Upheavals in Rwanda and Congo, and the eruption of an unrelated Acholi insurgency, brought more Kalashnikovs into the country. A local arms race matured. Attempts to restrict the flow of assault rifles were futile. The Ugandan government chose a new strategy. Hoping to co-opt some of the warlords and to create an informal buffer against the expanding Acholi insurgency, it urged Karamojong men to register their rifles in return for monthly stipends of about ten dollars.23 What had been illegal in Uganda had become so entrenched that policy now sanctioned it with cash.

  As the Karamojong were changed by their acquisition of Kalashnikovs, the Egyptian experience with the rifles also took an ugly turn. Egypt’s wars with Israel had yielded it little, whether under King Farouk or under Nasser, and its support for the fedayeen had fanned activities and sentiments it could not control. In 1979, President Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel and agreed to recognize the Jewish state. The treaty enraged the fedayeen and their closest supporters, who turned on Sadat with a loathing reserved for traitors. On October 6, 1981, at a mil
itary parade in Cairo, assassins within the Egyptian army struck. While a ceremonial convoy passed the reviewing stand, a lieutenant ran toward the dignitaries standing for the pass and review. The officer with the Kalashnikov seemed part of the performance; perhaps he was to salute. He started firing. At the same time, more soldiers on a troop transport opened fire on the bleachers. Sadat and eleven other people were killed. Egypt passed under martial law.

  These three examples—the savvy of Cummings, the vulnerability of Amin’s armories, and the fate of Sadat, cut down by his own guns—were markers. And they were valuable for the smallness of their canvases. Cummings’s business centered on himself, but he could explain the forces that drove a larger system. In Uganda, processes difficult to see in international arms transfers could be traced. In Egypt, the risks of sponsoring terror on a neighbor’s soil had played out in full view, as had the ferocity of automatic-rifle power when miniaturized. The events in Uganda and Egypt also reflected an unstated but disturbing fact. The calamities that visited these governments had roots in steps intended to increase the governments’ strength: acquiring assault rifles to be ready for any foe.

  The Soviet Union, seemingly impregnable under Stalin after the Great Patriotic War, was not to last. While it did, its idiosyncratic rules held. By the 1980s, Mikhail Kalashnikov wanted to travel within the Warsaw Pact to observe the production of his rifles elsewhere. He mentioned this desire on a visit to Moscow to the office of Dmitri F. Ustinov, the Soviet minister of defense. Kalashnikov regarded Ustinov as a mentor and friend. The reaction was cold. He sensed his mistake.

  Hardly had I started to say that I wanted to see a weapons factory in Bulgaria, when Ustinov became gloomy and frowned. He said in a low voice: “Comrade Major.”

  I was in civvies as usual, but the minister’s tone made me want to rise from the armchair and stand at attention.

  It should be mentioned that this happened at precisely the time when the Americans had published an insulting story about “the Russian sergeant having armed the whole of the Warsaw Pact,” and they started rapidly raising my military rank. In the morning, I found out that I had been given the rank of senior lieutenant, and in the evening I was already a captain.

  Obviously, Ustinov personally monitored my “military career,” and that was the case when I found out that I had been made a Major.

  But that didn’t change anything.

  I felt a chill go down my spine when the minister said distinctly: “You have not said that. I have not heard you say that. Anything else?”24

  Kalashnikov, for all his official achievements, lived within Soviet constraints, no matter that the series of arms carrying his name had entered the official national culture.[32] The Soviet Union maintained its military ranks through obligatory mass conscription, and before teenagers were drafted, they were required to master the assembly and disassembly of the AKM. The training was a part of the Program of Pre-Conscription Preparation of Youths, a Ministry of Defense curriculum managed by each school’s military and physical-education instructors. In Soviet schools, rifles were the fourth R. The curriculum also included competitions in donning gas masks, thousand-meter cross-country runs, hundred-meter swims, pull-ups, and throwing simulated hand grenades. All male Soviet students were expected to perform these tasks, along with learning the rudiments of marching, civil defense, and first aid.25 Even students from the most privileged families participated.

  The program could be seen in Pripyat, founded in 1970 to support the Nuclear Power Station in the Name of Vladimir I. Lenin, which had been constructed at Chernobyl. Its citizens were selected from accomplished families. Theirs was to be a model city, brick-and-mortar testimony to Soviet progress and the atom’s peaceful use. In Pripyat as elsewhere, the AKM was as surely a part of the curriculum as Lenin, Pushkin, and the periodic table. In one set of evaluations, held at School No. 1 on April 10 and 11, 1986, the tenth-grade boys, most of them sixteen years old, were timed assembling and disassembling their school’s assault rifles. The AKM’s few parts and simple design made it ideal for the exam. Most students needed only thirty-four to fifty seconds to complete the test, held under the watchful gaze and stopwatch of I. D. Peshko, chief referee. Some students were remarkably fast. Andrei Avramenko, born in 1969, took apart his Kalashnikov and put it together again in twenty-eight seconds. Sergei Svirnov performed the chore in twenty-four seconds. Sergey Salih was the best of all, completing the task in twenty-two seconds. His hands must have been a blur. Even the laggard, Oleg Bryukhanon, was capable. He needed seventy-five seconds—and that was the slowest of all.26

  Two weeks later, the dream of Pripyat came to ruin. Reactor No. 4 exploded, bombarding Pripyat with radiation. Families were evacuated in an apocalyptic panic while the Kremlin pretended all was well. The evacuees left behind a world in freeze-frame—contaminated, sealed from intrusion, stopped in time. The abandoned city and its records, including I. D. Peshko’s military preparation files, became an exhibit of the Soviet experience everywhere. The preconscription records showed the extent of assault-rifle infiltration into Soviet life. On purely ergonomic grounds they were consistent with records from tests organized by the United States Army in 1966, which underscored the simplicity of the Kalashnikov compared to American-designed arms. In those tests, conducted with American soldiers, the average assembly-disassembly times for the M-14, the M-16, and the AK-47 were seventy-one seconds, eighty seconds, and thirty-four seconds, respectively.27 At sixteen years of age, the schoolboys of Pripyat were quicker than American soldiers with their own service rifles.28 Assembly-disassembly times are not the most important measure of a rifle’s design. But if a rifle is otherwise sound, they can be a measure of some significance. And the preconscription training, the tests held for teenaged boys handling assault rifles as part of their school day, established this: Children, it turned out, could figure out the basics of the Kalashnikov at least as quickly as soldiers could.

  * * *

  From school gymnasiums to jungle patrols to terrorist attacks, the AK-47 and its descendant arms seemed to be almost everywhere in the 1980s—in the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations, in Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, in the Middle East. They were represented in the hands of state armies, police and intelligence services, and guerrilla formations and shadowy terrorist groups. The Iraqi and Iranian armies each carried Kalashnikov variants in the trench warfare along their contested border, as did the insurgents they underwrote on each other’s soil. The weapons remained the tools of the strongman and the crackdown, and were used by the People’s Republic of China to clear demonstrators from Tiananmen Square. In the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Kalashnikovs became the primary rifles of all parties—the occupying Soviet army and its Afghan government forces, as well as the mujahideen they fought.

  The arrival of the Kalashnikov in Afghanistan predated the Soviet invasion in late 1979. As part of its military aid programs, the Kremlin had provided arms and training to Afghanistan’s government since 1956. In the early 1970s, Pakistan was training insurgents as assets to undermine the presidency of Mohammad Daoud Khan. After the Marxist coup of 1978, and the Soviet invasion the following year, the insurgents acquired arms from several sources, ranging from battlefield collection to defecting Afghan government soldiers. Ultimately they received arms through a mechanism that brought the Soviet assault rifle nearly full circle: an international arms pipeline, fed by several nations, flowing through Pakistan.

  The pipeline was an open secret. To feed it, arms were purchased by the Central Intelligence Agency, Saudi Arabia, and wealthy Arabs, among other sources, and moved by containership to the port of Karachi, where they were received by officers of the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, Pakistan’s most powerful intelligence service. From Karachi, most of the arms moved by rail to the Ojhri Camp in Rawalpindi, which became an ISI arms depot—a reservoir of arms and ammunition to be sent over the border. The items were sorted there and carried by truck to Peshawar a
nd redirected again, often to warehouses of Afghan commanders and groups fighting inside Afghanistan. The commanders’ logisticians moved the arms to the border on their own fleets of trucks and passed them off to smaller camps, from where they sometimes moved by animal train. The system was slow. At any point after Karachi it could look mismanaged and vulnerable. Ammunition was piled high in Rawalpindi without adequate attention to safety (and in 1988 the Ojhri Camp depot exploded). The routes to the border were watched by Pakistani border guards and police officers who often extracted bribes. Afghan commanders diverted and resold weapons, redistributing them for cash. And inside Afghanistan, the Soviet army, while mostly road-bound, was actively searching for the pack trains. But the pipe was force-fed enough equipment in Karachi that arms and ammunition flowed out the other side, and the mujahideen were outfitted for war in remote terrain.29 It also proved nearly impervious to interdiction at large scale. In time it was publicly acknowledged to have grown from ten thousand tons of weapons and ordnance in 1983 to sixty-five thousand tons in 1987.

  I would liken our system to a tree. The roots represented the ships and aircraft bringing supplies from various countries to Pakistan. The trunk lay from Karachi almost to the border, at which point the many branches lay across the frontier. These branches divided into hundreds of smaller ones inside Afghanistan, taking the sap (arms and ammunition) to the leaves (the Mujahideen). Lop off a small branch, even a large one, and the tree survives, and in time others grow. Only severing the roots or trunk kills the tree. In our case only the branches were subject to attack.30

  The path of the Kalashnikov into Afghanistan and through generations of mujahideen has been well established and reasonably well traced. The value of its reconstruction lies in this fact: Processes hidden from view elsewhere in this case eventually came to be known. The sheer scale of shipments ensured that some portion of this movement came to light. In many other wars, determining the origins of arms with precision is more difficult, and few people attempt the task. Often, absent public accounts by people directly involved, inquiries into assault-rifle transfers become a frustrating exercise in working backward. Weapons identified in combatants’ hands are traced, to the extent possible, to their sources. Such efforts have been intermittent, and even the most talented and industrious researcher rarely succeeds in connecting every dot. Most glimpses have been fragmentary. But fragmentary views have value. One of the finer examples, little known and scarcely studied, was the record assembled of weapons used in the 1980s by the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front, or FMLN, which at the time was a socialist insurgent group in El Salvador.