The World Was Going Our Way (68 page)
Read The World Was Going Our Way Online
Authors: Christopher Andrew
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Accounts, #Espionage, #History, #Europe, #Ireland, #Military, #Intelligence & Espionage, #Modern (16th-21st Centuries), #20th Century, #Russia, #World
The KGB had been in contact with Nur Muhammad Taraki for almost thirty years. As a thirty-four-year-old Marxist journalist and writer, he had been recruited as a Soviet agent in 1951 with the surprisingly transparent codename NUR. In 1965 Taraki was elected First Secretary of the newly founded PDPA, then an underground movement, and was invited to Moscow, where he impressed the CPSU International Department and the other leading apparatchiks as serious, ideologically sound and ready to follow the Soviet lead. In keeping with the Centre’s usual practice, having become a fraternal Party leader he was formally removed from the Soviet agent network but, like many other Party leaders, maintained secret contact with the KGB and continued to provide intelligence on Afghanistan, talent-spotted potential agents and assisted in operations against the US and Chinese embassies in Kabul and other targets. As well as being given secret subsidies for the PDPA, Taraki was also given a personal allowance and food supplies. Though the Kabul residency had no doubt about Taraki’s loyalty, however, it found him increasingly difficult to deal with. Particularly since being given the red-carpet treatment in Moscow, he had become ‘painfully vain’, expected to be the centre of attention and was apt to interpret light-hearted conversation as jokes at his expense.
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The Centre was sufficiently concerned by Taraki’s conduct to order the residency in September 1968 to vet him thoroughly by ‘operational-technical means’ (almost certainly the bugging of his home). Though Taraki appears to have passed this test, the KGB held him largely responsible for the growing split within the PDPA between his own mainly rural Pushtun-speaking Khalq (‘Masses’) faction and the predominantly urban Persian-speaking Parcham (‘Banner’) group, led by Babrak Karmal. The Kabul residency found Karmal somewhat easier to deal with than Taraki. Karmal was better educated, naturally sociable and, in the KGB’s view, more flexible. Like Taraki, he had been recruited as a KGB agent, probably in the mid-1950s, and given the codename MARID.
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Both Taraki and Karmal complained bitterly to the KGB about each other. Taraki claimed that the circumstances of Karmal’s release from prison after serving a three-year term in 1952, ahead of other political prisoners, indicated that he had agreed to work for Afghan counter-intelligence. Despite its predilection for conspiracy theory, the Centre dismissed this allegation as disinformation devised to discredit Karmal and split the PDPA. Karmal in turn accused Taraki of taking bribes, owning four cars, having a large private bank account and being in secret contact with the Americans. The Centre dismissed these allegations also. It instructed the Kabul residency in 1974:
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Both Taraki and Karmal complained bitterly to the KGB about each other. Taraki claimed that the circumstances of Karmal’s release from prison after serving a three-year term in 1952, ahead of other political prisoners, indicated that he had agreed to work for Afghan counter-intelligence. Despite its predilection for conspiracy theory, the Centre dismissed this allegation as disinformation devised to discredit Karmal and split the PDPA. Karmal in turn accused Taraki of taking bribes, owning four cars, having a large private bank account and being in secret contact with the Americans. The Centre dismissed these allegations also. It instructed the Kabul residency in 1974:
In the course of regular meetings and conversations with MARID (Karmal) and NUR (Taraki) you must carefully, in the form of friendly advice and without referring to instructions from Moscow, tell them not to take any steps without prior agreement by us which could be used by their enemies as a pretext for striking a blow at their groups or compromising them. MARID and NUR should also be warned that they must desist from attacking each other and accusing each other of anti-republican activities, as this plays into the hands of the reactionary forces and will lead to the collapse of the democratic [Communist] movement in Afghanistan.
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On 30 April 1978, Taraki, henceforth the self-styled ‘Great Leader of the April Revolution’, became both President and Prime Minister of a government which included the two other strong men of the PDPA, Babrak Karmal and Hafizullah Amin (a leading member of the Khalq faction), as, respectively, Vice-President and Deputy Prime Minister. During the summer the Kabul residency reported that ‘personality cults’ were developing around both Taraki and Amin, with Amin presuming to compare Taraki to Lenin. At a meeting with a KGB delegation, led by the FCD chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, Taraki dared to liken the April Revolution in Afghanistan to the October Revolution in Russia - a comparison which must have struck Kryuchkov as akin to the crime of
lèse-majest
é. Taraki’s pretensions, however, were scarcely more absurd than those of the increasingly decrepit Brezhnev, whose rejuvenated portrait appeared beside that of Lenin on hundreds of thousands of posters inscribed with the slogan ‘From Ilyich to Ilyich’. On 5 December 1978 Taraki and Brezhnev signed a Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation. The platitudinous public eulogies bestowed by each side on the other, however, concealed considerable private friction. When asked to release KGB agents and confidential contacts who had been thrown into jail by the Daoud regime, Taraki, who took personal charge of the Afghan security apparatus, proved unco-operative. He declared, in a thinly veiled reference to the KGB, ‘Some Soviet specialists, particularly those who worked for many years in Afghanistan under the old regime and have now returned, often have a dated view of the country and do not see, in an objective light, what is happening in the country.’
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lèse-majest
é. Taraki’s pretensions, however, were scarcely more absurd than those of the increasingly decrepit Brezhnev, whose rejuvenated portrait appeared beside that of Lenin on hundreds of thousands of posters inscribed with the slogan ‘From Ilyich to Ilyich’. On 5 December 1978 Taraki and Brezhnev signed a Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation. The platitudinous public eulogies bestowed by each side on the other, however, concealed considerable private friction. When asked to release KGB agents and confidential contacts who had been thrown into jail by the Daoud regime, Taraki, who took personal charge of the Afghan security apparatus, proved unco-operative. He declared, in a thinly veiled reference to the KGB, ‘Some Soviet specialists, particularly those who worked for many years in Afghanistan under the old regime and have now returned, often have a dated view of the country and do not see, in an objective light, what is happening in the country.’
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Cocooned in his own preposterous rhetoric, the ‘Great Leader of the April Revolution’ showed little grasp of the problems of establishing Communist rule over a staunchly Muslim country. Though Taraki attended Friday prayers at a Kabul mosque and surprised the KGB by beginning his radio broadcasts with the phrase, ‘In the Name of the Almighty’,
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he began an assault on traditional Islamic authority, thinly disguised as an attempt to ‘clean Islam . . . of the ballast and dirt of bad traditions, superstition, and erroneous belief’. The 320,000 traditionally minded mullahs were treated as an obstacle to ‘the progressive movement of our homeland’. Many religious leaders who resisted the ‘cleansing’ process were tortured and shot - or buried alive.
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Taraki gave orders for members of the Muslim Brotherhood and followers of Khomeini to be immediately ‘eliminated’ whenever they were found.
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Islam became the unifying bond of opposition to the PDPA and its Soviet backers. Afghan resistance to the regime was thus transformed into a
jihad
in defence of Islam whose significance was grossly underestimated by the KGB. None of the reports noted by Mitrokhin even mention the threat of an Afghan
jihad
. The Centre was far more concerned by the vicious power struggle which quickly developed between the Khalq and Parcham factions within the PDPA. If only that internecine warfare could be overcome, the Centre naively believed, the PDPA could become ‘the leading and directing force of Afghan society and the force behind its organizational and ideological rebirth’. Taraki, however, turned a deaf ear to the pleas for party unity from the Soviet embassy, the Kabul residency and the KGB liaison mission which arrived in May to help reorganize the Afghan security service. The Kabul residency reported in July, ‘Only the leadership of the CPSU can influence the wild [Khalq] opportunists and force them to change their attitude towards the Parcham group.’ The ‘wild opportunists’, however, paid little attention even to the entreaties of Moscow. Large numbers of Parcham supporters were thrown into jail. Their leader, Karmal, who inspired greater confidence in the Centre than Taraki, was sent into exile as ambassador to Czechoslovakia (a job from which he was subsequently sacked).
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he began an assault on traditional Islamic authority, thinly disguised as an attempt to ‘clean Islam . . . of the ballast and dirt of bad traditions, superstition, and erroneous belief’. The 320,000 traditionally minded mullahs were treated as an obstacle to ‘the progressive movement of our homeland’. Many religious leaders who resisted the ‘cleansing’ process were tortured and shot - or buried alive.
8
Taraki gave orders for members of the Muslim Brotherhood and followers of Khomeini to be immediately ‘eliminated’ whenever they were found.
9
Islam became the unifying bond of opposition to the PDPA and its Soviet backers. Afghan resistance to the regime was thus transformed into a
jihad
in defence of Islam whose significance was grossly underestimated by the KGB. None of the reports noted by Mitrokhin even mention the threat of an Afghan
jihad
. The Centre was far more concerned by the vicious power struggle which quickly developed between the Khalq and Parcham factions within the PDPA. If only that internecine warfare could be overcome, the Centre naively believed, the PDPA could become ‘the leading and directing force of Afghan society and the force behind its organizational and ideological rebirth’. Taraki, however, turned a deaf ear to the pleas for party unity from the Soviet embassy, the Kabul residency and the KGB liaison mission which arrived in May to help reorganize the Afghan security service. The Kabul residency reported in July, ‘Only the leadership of the CPSU can influence the wild [Khalq] opportunists and force them to change their attitude towards the Parcham group.’ The ‘wild opportunists’, however, paid little attention even to the entreaties of Moscow. Large numbers of Parcham supporters were thrown into jail. Their leader, Karmal, who inspired greater confidence in the Centre than Taraki, was sent into exile as ambassador to Czechoslovakia (a job from which he was subsequently sacked).
The main lesson which Taraki believed he had learned from his study of the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution was the need for Red Terror. That, he implied, was a lesson which his Soviet comrades seemed to have forgotten. When Puzanov asked him to spare the lives of two Parcham militants who had been sentenced to death, Taraki replied: ‘Lenin taught us to be merciless towards the enemies of the revolution, and millions of people had to be eliminated in order to secure the victory of the October Revolution.’ Of the twenty-seven alleged conspiracies to topple the regime which Taraki claimed had been uncovered in the four months after the April Revolution, most were probably based on little more than the paranoid tendencies of Taraki and his sycophantic inner circle. Among the supposed ringleaders arrested in August for planning the assassination of Taraki and Amin were the Armed Forces Minister, Major-General Abdul Qadir, a veteran KGB agent codenamed OSMAN, and the Chief of the General Staff, Major-General Shapur Ahmadzai. Taraki claimed that the plot in which they were implicated also involved China, the United States, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Federal Republic of Germany. Even the show trials at the height of Stalin’s Terror had generated few more absurd conspiracy theories. Taraki, however, informed Moscow that a number of the conspirators (doubtless after prolonged torture) had revealed the details of the plot. Ahmadzai, he revealed, was deeply depressed, wept constantly and repeatedly asked to be shot immediately. Many of the other alleged plotters who had been arrested were ‘close to committing suicide’.
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Taraki was well aware that, having purged most senior officials from the Daoud administration as well as other ‘anti-revolutionary, anti-democratic elements’, real and imagined, his regime was heavily dependent on Soviet advisers. The Kabul residency, however, reported regular Afghan complaints about the advisers’ arrogance and incompetence. The finance minister, Abdel Karim Misaq, told the ministry’s chief adviser, N. K. Grechin, ‘I beg you not to bring your bureaucratic ways into Afghan ministries! We have enough of our own . . . And I would ask you not to take the place of ministers . . .’
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The advice given by KGB advisers was responsible for at least one deeply embarrassing débâcle in Kabul. On 14 February 1979 the US ambassador, Adolph ‘Spike’ Dubs, was kidnapped in broad daylight by four Maoist ‘guerrillas’ and taken at gunpoint to the Hotel Kabul, where they demanded the release of some of their imprisoned comrades from Afghan jails in return for Dubs’s release. On the advice of his KGB advisers, Amin ordered an Afghan assault group, armed with Kalashnikovs and wearing Soviet bullet-proof jackets, to storm the hotel. In the shoot-out which followed, Dubs and two of his kidnappers were killed, a third was captured and the fourth escaped. The KGB then embarked on an immediate cover-up to hide their part in the operation and conceal as effectively as possible responsibility for Dubs’s death. American security personnel who had come to the hotel were prevented from removing any of the bullet cases from the room. Though the guerrillas had been armed only with a total of three pistols, a gun of unknown origin similar to a Kalashnikov supposedly belonging to the Maoists was planted in the room to give the impression that they had used it to kill the ambassador. In order to prevent the Americans interrogating either of the two guerrillas who had survived, they were told that all four had been killed during the shoot-out. In reality, the captured guerrilla was shot during the night following the kidnap, as was a prisoner who, it was falsely claimed, was the guerrilla who had escaped - thus providing the requisite number of four corpses to show the Americans. Photographs of the three genuine and one bogus Maoists were also published in Afghan newspapers. At the request of Osadchy, the Kabul resident, Amin and other Afghan ministers informed the US embassy, when expressing their condolences, that they had acted entirely on their own initiative and that no Soviet advisers had been involved.
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The Taraki regime was also critical of the performance of Soviet military advisers during the early months of operations against the
mujahideen
. According to an official Afghan complaint after the failure of a military operation against rebels in the Kamdesh gorge at the end of 1978:
mujahideen
. According to an official Afghan complaint after the failure of a military operation against rebels in the Kamdesh gorge at the end of 1978:
The Afghan troops led by Adviser Bryaskin have long since shown themselves incapable of eliminating the anti-government bands. We gave your advisers wide powers in the leadership of the Afghan troops. We punish [our] troops severely for any failure to accept the advice of your commanders. This suggests to us that not all your advisers are sufficiently competent. We need experienced generals of whom we know there are many in the USSR. They must increase the fighting capability of the Afghan army and teach it to fight and to use the experience of the Soviet army during the war.
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Kabul’s tone changed, however, after a major rebellion erupted in Herat on 15 March 1979 and was joined by the 17th Division of the Afghan army. Frenzied, vengeful mobs hunted down Afghan government officials, Soviet advisers and their families, and skinned some of them alive. Body parts of Soviet advisers, their wives and children were triumphantly paraded through the streets. Though Amin remained calm, Taraki panicked, phoning Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin to appeal for Soviet troops to be sent to Afghanistan in disguise ‘to save the revolution’. Taraki flew to Moscow to press his case, but without success. On 1 April the Politburo concluded that the Taraki regime’s ‘political inflexibility and inexperience’ was compounded by its reluctance to take Soviet advice: ‘The use of Soviet troops in repressing the Afghan counter-revolution would seriously damage the international authority of the USSR . . . In addition, [it] would reveal the weakness of the Taraki government and would widen the scope of counter-revolution both at home and abroad . . .’
The Politburo, however, made one decision which was to prove of major importance. It set up a commission ‘to formulate proposals and co-ordinate actions’ on Afghanistan composed of Andropov, Gromyko, Defence Minister Ustinov (all full members of the Politburo), and the head of the Central Committee’s International Department, Boris Ponomarev (a non-voting candidate member). It was this commission which had the major role in policy-making on Afghanistan during the nine months which led up to the Soviet invasion. Though the commission, like the Politburo, was not yet ready to agree to Soviet military intervention, it accepted the need for a rapid increase in both military advisers and aid to shore up the Afghan regime against the insurgents. An inspection of the Afghan army by six Soviet generals in April emphasized its low morale along with ‘the low level of political training, the extreme religiousness and downtrodden nature of the masses of soldiers’. Over the next two months matters went from bad to worse with the escalation of rebel attacks combined with mutinies and desertions within government forces. After violent demonstrations in the centre of Kabul on 23 June, even Moscow Radio, which usually sought to play down the strength of opposition to the Taraki regime, acknowledged that, ‘The Afghan Revolution has encountered strong resistance from its enemies.’
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On 28 June the Afghanistan Commission reported to the Politburo that ‘the measures taken by the [Afghan] government to stabilize the situation have been not very effective’. As well as recommending the despatch of more military advisers to the demoralized regiments of the Afghan army, the commission also agreed on the need to send a parachute battalion disguised as aircraft-maintenance personnel to protect Soviet air squadrons at the Bagram airbase and a KGB detachment of 125-150 men disguised as embassy staff to defend the Soviet embassy.
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On 28 June the Afghanistan Commission reported to the Politburo that ‘the measures taken by the [Afghan] government to stabilize the situation have been not very effective’. As well as recommending the despatch of more military advisers to the demoralized regiments of the Afghan army, the commission also agreed on the need to send a parachute battalion disguised as aircraft-maintenance personnel to protect Soviet air squadrons at the Bagram airbase and a KGB detachment of 125-150 men disguised as embassy staff to defend the Soviet embassy.
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