The Gun

by C. J. Chivers

  67. “SUBJECT: Blue Lantern Level 3: Pre-License End-Use Check on License 50129249, United States State Department.” Correspondence, unclassified, between the U.S. Embassy in Tblisi and Washington.

  68. Author’s interviews with officials at Colt Defense LLC, 2010.

  69. Personal communication to author from Timothy Sheridan, who brokered the American purchase of more than one hundred thousand Kalashnikovs for Iraqi and Afghan forces.

  70. Ellsworth S. Grant, The Colt Armory: A History of Colt’s Manufacturing Company, Inc. (Lincoln, R.I.: Mowbray Publishing, 1995), p. 180.

  71. Personal communication to author by Francis Olero Okwonga, former lieutenant colonel in the LRA and a commander of Kony’s security detachment.

  72. United Nations Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects, July 2001.

  73. Personal communication to author from Dr. Michael Brabeck. The section covering Mahmoud’s and his friend’s wounds was assembled from multiple interviews with participants, including Karzan Mahmoud, Balan Faraj Karim, Ramazan Hama-Raheem, and Qais Ibrahim Khadir.

  74. Author’s interviews with Karzan Mahmoud in Ottawa in 2007.

  75. Edward Ezell, “Draft Trip Report, Izhevsk,” November 6–14, 1994.

  76. Author’s interviews with officials at Rosoboronexport, the Russian state arms-export agency, in 2004 and 2007.

  77. Interview with Mikhail Kalashnikov by Bryon MacWilliams, correspondent in Russia for Newsweek magazine, in Izhevsk in 2004. Mr. MacWilliams shared notes of his interview with the author.

  78. Nadia Popova, “Russia’s Obama Offers Change Kirov Can Believe In,” St. Petersburg Times, May 5, 2009. See also “Kalashnikov Producer to Pay Wages in Sugar,” Russia Today, April 10, 2009.

  79. Remarks by Mikhail Kalashnikov in presence of author at the exhibition center in Izhevsk in August 2007.

  80. Kalashnikov with Joly, The Gun that Changed the World, p. 143. Interviews by author with workers at plant in 2004.

  81. Michael Gordon, “Moscow Journal: Burst of Pride for a Staccato Executioner,” New York Times, March 13, 1997.

  82. Igor Gradov, Moskovsky Komsomolets, November 9, 2004. Gradov published an interview with Kalashnikov in this Moscow newspaper on the day before the designer’s eighty-fifth birthday.

  83. An interview with Kalashnikov by M. Novikov appeared in the January 1968 issue of Volksarmee, published in Berlin.

  84. “Brand Name: Mikhail Kalashnikov,” New York Times Magazine, May 29, 1994.

  85. “Report No. OTIO-471: Translation of a Soviet Manual Concerning a 7.62mm Rifle,” September 13, 1955. Submitted to the Chief of Ordnance by H. H. Himmer, technical assistant, Ordnance Technical Intelligence Service. The report and a copy of the original Soviet manual are on file in the unsorted Ezell collection at Shrivenham.

  86. Guy Martin, “(the killing machine),” Esquire, June 1997, p. 76.

  87. DP No. 1195, issued from the Kremlin on July 5, 2007. Translated by Nikolay Khalip.

  88. Author’s observation.

  89. MacWilliams interview with Kalashnikov.

  90. Interview with author.

  91. Holcomb B. Noble, “Eugene Stoner, 74, Designer of M-16 Rifle and Other Arms,” New York Times, April 27, 1997.

  92. Interviews in Russia by author. See also Nabi Abdullaev, “Russian High School Students Learn ABCs of War,” Moscow Times, November 16, 2006.

  93. Interview with author, 2004.

  94. Mikhail Kalashnikov, Ya S Vami Shol Odnoi Dorogoi (Moscow: Vsya Rossiya Publishing House, 1999), p. 179.

  95. Grador, Moskovsky Komsomolets.

  96. Kalashnikov with Joly, The Gun that Changed the World, p. 112.

  97. Ibid., p. 82.

  98. Interview with Kalashnikov conducted by Nick Paton Walsh, July 3, 2003, at Kalashnikov’s dacha at Izhevski Prud. Paton Walsh provided the interview notes to the author.

  99. Kalashnikov, From a Stranger’s Doorstep, pp. 260–261.

  100. Letter from Andropov to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, February 18, 1973. From the Andrei Sakharov KGB file maintained by Yale University.

  101. The quotation about Azeris and Armenian is from John Kampfner, from “Living Legend: The Private World of Mikhail Kalashnikov,” Telegraph magazine, p. 20. The quotation about moans and screams is from Kalashnikov, From a Stranger’s Doorstep, p. 162.

  102. “Paton Walsh interview” with Kalashnikov.

  Epilogue: The Twenty-first Century’s Rifle

  1. From author’s inventory of the weapons used in the training.

  2. Author’s observation. In scores of patrols with the Afghan National Army and Police, the author identified seven Russian AK-47s with date stamps of 1953 or 1954.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Alice Mayhew and David Rosenthal supported the too-long period of research for this book and offered patient encouragement throughout. As they waited, all manner of people helped.

  Librarians, curators, collectors, historians, and independent and government researchers merit first mention. They found and offered materials I would not have turned up alone. Monique Howell at Indiana State Library and the staff at the Indiana Historical Society provided copies of Richard J. Gatling’s letters and other records related to his life and work; more records of the Gatling Gun Company were retrieved by archivists at the Connecticut State Library. Dr. Charles Bonsett of Indianapolis rendered further assistance. The staff of the Naval Historical Center at the Washington Navy Yard provided references on machine-gun design and development. Kay Livingston of the Stimson Library at the U.S. Army Medical Department Center and School located early published ballistic studies of Dr. Louis La Garde. Joseph Slade, who holds a portion of Hiram Maxim’s family papers, shared details of Maxim’s life. The Maine Historical Society and Dick Eastman helped untangle an apparent falsehood Maxim circulated about the reasons he did not risk military service with his countrymen in the American Civil War. Alan Swindale discussed a letter his grandfather had sent from the campaign in Matabeleland. The staff at the reading room of the Imperial War Museum in London assisted by copying soldiers’ diaries and reams of letters written at the Western Front in World War I. David Keough of the U.S. Army Military History Institute at the Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, pointed me to documents related to American rifle and machine-gun training (as well as declassified intelligence reports from Vietnam).

  Mary Ellen Haug, at the Marshall Center Research Library in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, located the United States government’s translation of Vladimir Zhukov’s hagiographic Cold War biography of Mikhail Kalashnikov. The librarians at the Museum of Artillery, Engineers and Signal Corps in Saint Petersburg and the Museum Complex of Small Arms of M. T. Kalashnikov in Izhevsk provided archival newspaper and magazine clippings that offered further insights into the official accounts of Kalashnikov’s life and the weapons bearing his name. The museum in Izhevsk also allowed a viewing of their video collection of many of Kalashnikov’s public appearances and statements. Max Popenker, founder of the website www.guns.ru, shared Soviet-era accounts of weapons designers and their work, including limited-edition and out-of-print references, that helped unpeel legends. Kristina Khokhlova assisted with translations. Lynne Seddon and the library staff at the College of Management and Technology College in Shrivenham, part of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, came in on weekends so that on visits from Moscow I could review the unsorted collection from the archives of Edward Ezell, a researcher of small arms and former curator at the Smithsonian Institution. When time ran short, they assisted with photocopying and shipped boxes of copies to my home.

  Richard Jones, a curator of the Ministry of Defence’s Pattern Room at the Royal Armouries, Leeds, helped with weapons identification and referrals to written sources related to the evolution of firearms and ammunition design. A meeting with him shaped years of further reporting and reading. Lin Xu, after a chance conversation
in the Pattern Room, found and translated references in Chinese that yielded fresh accounts of the assault rifle’s travels to China. He also explained technical aspects of small-arms operation and subtle shifts in Kalashnikov design in different countries over time.

  Christian Ostermann, director of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, repeatedly referred me to historians and regional specialists in the former Eastern bloc. The center’s trove of translated records from government archives in the former Soviet Union and from Warsaw Pact nations were essential to understanding many events described in these pages. János Rainer at the Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in Budapest searched the institute’s archive of photographs and found several that showed revolutionaries carrying captured Soviet Kalashnikovs. He then identified József Tibor Fejes and helped with gaining access to records in Budapest’s city archives related to Fejes’s trial and execution. Kati Tordas, a journalist and researcher, volunteered her time to sleuth out and translate details of Fejes’s case. László Eörsi, the indomitable researcher of the Corvinists, shared his material.

  Guy Laron provided data and context on Soviet arms deals in the 1950s. Mathieu Willemsen of the Legermuseum in Delft, the Netherlands, provided copies of declassified studies of an early AK-47 that was smuggled out of the Soviet Union. His colleague at the museum, Casper van Bruggen, provided information related to one of the first known battlefield collections of an AK-47 by Western combat forces, and secured permission to reprint a photograph of one of the Dutch soldiers with one of the guns. Alexandra Hildebrandt, chairwoman of the board of the Mauermuseum in Berlin, looked into the question of weapons carried by the East German border guards. Dr. Thomas Mueller, formerly of the Waffenmuseum in Suhl and currently of the Bayerisches Armeemuseum in Ingolstadt, assisted with the research in Wiesa, including providing the names of workers and firms involved in Kalashnikov production. Daniel Oswald assisted with research and translation in the former East Germany, and interpreted interviews in Wiesa. Norbert Moczarski helped explore the question of Hugo Schmeisser’s involvement in AK-47 development in Izhevsk. Victor Homola and Stefan Pauly, in Berlin, assisted with details of East Germany’s secret production, and Stefan spent weeks of his time examining the deaths by Kalashnikov fire of German civilians trying to flee to the West.

  Brady Dolim at the National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, helped release records offering details of the first American exploitations of Soviet small arms and M1943 ammunition. Branko Bogdanovic, of Serbia, assisted with information related to the copying in Tito’s Yugoslavia of the Kalashnikov design. Markku Palokangas of the Military Museum of Finland met me in Helsinki and discussed his research into the Finnish acquisition of an early Polish AK-47 in the 1950s; Robie Kulokivi of WERETCO and Tapio Saarelainen, of the Finnish army, helped me further understand Finnish arming decisions and the origins of the Finnish Kalashnikov. Andreas Heineman-Gruder at the Bonn International Center for Conversion helped with information and contacts in Ukraine, which led to an understanding of small-arms stockpiles there; I was further assisted in Ukraine, with reports and pictures of the cache within Artemovsk salt mines, by people who asked not to be named. Hwaida Saad, in Lebanon, helped with research into Kalashnikov production in the Arab world.

  William Stolz of the University of Missouri culled and copied reams of material from the records of Representative Richard H. Ichord. Among those records were copies of letters written to Congress and newspapers by First Lieutenant Michael Chervenak, and related correspondence and clippings. James Ginther, an archivist at the Special Collections Branch at the Library of the Marine Corps, provided digital copies of the 1967 and 1968 command records from Second Battalion, Third Marines, Chervenak’s unit in Vietnam. Richard Verrone, formerly of the Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University, helped with early clippings and with oral histories. The Marine Corps records, when set against the Vietnam-era military maps assembled by the university, made it possible to trace the location of the firefight in which forty American rifles jammed, prompting Chervenak to write. The current chief executive at Colt Defense, retired General William Keys, discussed in an interview the core aspects of the infantry’s complaints about early M-16 performance in Vietnam. Keys was a Marine company commander in Vietnam; his Marines suffered from the problems documented in this book. Jeffrey Gould, with whom I served in a platoon in the First Marine Regiment in the 1980s and 1990s, and who is now an engineer at Picatinny Arsenal, in New Jersey, retrieved a reliability study of infantry arms conducted by the army in 1968, and arranged its public release. Gus Funcasta, also of Picatinny, offered smart insights and suggested smart questions. The staff at the National Archives assisted by providing access to records of the early M-16 program, which included the brief mention of the comparative study, using human body parts from India, of the lethality of the M-14, the AR-15, and the Kalashnikov. Thomas Blanton, of the National Security Archive, provided advice on how to obtain a copy of the report of those tests, which had been withheld from public view for more than forty years.

  Veterans of Second Battalion, Third Marines in 1967 and 1968 spent long hours recalling their tours, and often providing records, photographs, and phone numbers or email addresses to other veterans of the same operations: Al Nickelson, Ed Elrod, Mike Chervenak, Chuck Chritton, Tom Givvin, Ray Madonna, Chuck Woodard, Dick Culver, Tom Tomakowski, Jack Beavers, Rod Radich, Dave Smith, Ord Elliott, Cornelio Ybarra Jr., Roy DeMille, David Hiley, Bill Snodgrass, Don Aaker, and Stan Maszstak. Larry Rottmann, once forbidden by the army of speaking publicly about the M-16’s failures, granted permission to reprint one of his poems.

  Dr. Martin Fackler, the former army trauma surgeon and terminal-ballistics researcher, provided copies of many of his studies of wound ballistics, and patiently answered questions. Michael Rhode, an archivist at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., shared many referrals, opening a world of researchers and records explaining the changing ways that people have been wounded in war. Sanders Marble, senior historian at the Surgeon-General’s Office of Medical History, dug up references and introduced me to several doctors familiar with wounds and wounding. These include Dr. Dave Edmond Lounsberry, a coauthor of “War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq,” an invaluable public document for understanding the two most recent American wars, and Dr. Ron Bellamy, whose statistical studies of wounding agents in battle are a resource on this subject in which rigor rises above anecdote. Dr. Paul Doughtery provided copies of terminal-ballistic studies, old and new. Kevin McKiernan and Dr. Mike Brabeck shared email correspondence, documents, photographs, and memories of the treatment of Karzan Mahmoud, who met with me several times in Iraq, Canada, and the United States. Karzan also introduced me to other survivors, who walked me across the ground in Sulaimaniya and meticulously recounted the gunfight in which they were maimed. Security officials in northern Iraq allowed Kevin and me to conduct multiple lengthy interviews with Qais Ibrahim Khadir, the terrorist involved in the attack, who was later executed. I was further aided by many victims of assault-rifle proliferation in many other places, including the survivors in Beslan.

  Several arms dealers helped me, too. The preponderance of them, due to the nature of their business, asked to remain anonymous here. Two don’t mind a public thank-you: Reuben Johnson and Tim Sheridan. I was aided by many people engaged in many ways in researching ongoing conflicts: Tania Inowlocki, James Bevan, Aaron Karp, Robert Muggah, Tanya Lokshina, Phillip Killicoat, Brian Wood, Sergio Finardi, Peter Danssaert, Peter Bouckaert, Anna Neistat, Ole Solvang, Hugh Griffiths, Nicholas Marsh. Gary Kokalari, a one-man Albanian smear factory, provided a seemingly small tip that exposed a Pentagon-funded international scandal in the Kalashnikov ammunition trade, and deepened my understanding of arms and munitions movements. John Wallace and Ed Costello helped with recollections of time shared with General Kalashnikov, and with referrals. Ruslan Pukhov and Dmitri Be
nder helped with insights and materials in Russian. Virginia Ezell provided referrals and references, including useful copies of Small Arms World Report. Several government employees and military officers helped locate records or shared material and information that, because of a stubborn culture of government secrecy in the United States, are not accessible to the public. Their assistance enriched this book. Officials at Rosoboronexport in Moscow invited me to several ceremonies related to the Kalashnikov and its place in Russian arms history, discussed many aspects of the international arms trade, and through their colleagues at Izhevsk, arranged a rare tour of the Izhmash plant to observe the manufacture and final assembly of assault and sniper rifles.

  They also arranged interviews with General Kalashnikov, as did Igor Krasnovksi, one of the general’s grandsons. General Kalashnikov deserves a special thank-you for meeting several times in Izhevsk and Moscow, and for entertaining questions he has heard before.

  The nudge toward this book, which ultimately led to those interviews, came from Samuel G. Freedman, who, in 2002, not long after David Rhode and I had returned from Afghanistan and completed a series of newspaper articles about guerrilla and terrorist training methods, suggested a more thorough examination of the Kalashnikov’s origins and ubiquity. Stuart Krichevsky seconded the idea and shepherded it throughout.

  Karen Thompson guided the book through its production, and worked around (and tolerated) my repeated long trips overseas. Jonathan Karp arrived with enthusiasm to publish the book she made possible. Outside of Simon & Schuster, several editors supported reporting into aspects of the military small-arms trade and its effects. At the New York Times: Susan Chira and Roger Cohen, who edited the foreign report, Matt Purdy and Paul Fishleder on the Investigations desk, Katie Roberts and Marc Charney at the Week in Review, Rogene Fisher and Jeff Delviscio at the At War blog, along with Ian Fisher, Kyle Crichton, Beth Flynn, and Bill Keller. Also, Mark Warren and David Granger at Esquire. Sid Evans and Anthony Licata at Field & Stream, with David DiBeneddetto and Colin Kearns. David Petzal, an army veteran and editor who has dedicated decades to understanding small arms, read the draft manuscript and applied an eye true to his reputation: thoroughly informed, unsparing, and welcome.