The ideological blinkers worn by both the Politburo and the Centre leadership prevented them grasping the real nature of the Afghan problem - the impossibility of imposing on a staunchly Muslim and fiercely patriotic country the rule of a Communist regime with little popular support and unreliable armed forces. Instead of addressing the real problem, Moscow blamed the inadequacies of the Taraki government. The Afghanistan Commission concluded in its report of 28 June: ‘In the Party and the government . . . all power in fact is concentrated in the hands of N. M. Taraki and H. Amin, who none too rarely make mistakes and commit violations of legality . . .’
16
Matters were made worse by the increasingly vicious infighting between the two. More worryingly still, the far more energetic Amin seemed to be getting the better of the struggle for power. On 27 March, profiting from Taraki’s loss of nerve after the gruesome débâcle at Herat, Amin succeeded in replacing him as Prime Minister, though Taraki retained the post of President. On 27 July Amin also became Defence Minister, thus gaining direct control of the Afghan armed forces.
17
Though the Centre regarded Taraki as vain and incompetent, it had even graver doubts about Amin who, unlike Taraki and Karmal, appears never to have been recruited as a KGB agent.
18
The Kabul residency reported in July that Amin had asked his Soviet financial adviser, P. Y. Dragulis, to try to discover ways in which he could get access to the $400 million of Afghan government funds in foreign bank accounts. The problem, Amin complained, was that withdrawals from these accounts normally required three Afghan official signatures. He asked Dragulis to try ‘to arrange it somehow so that I can sign and get the money’. Dragulis told the KGB that he feared that if Amin did manage to ‘get the money’, he would try to eliminate all those (Dragulis included) who had evidence of his embezzlement.
19
Far more worrying to the Centre were its exaggerated suspicions of Amin’s sympathies for the United States. Though fluent in English, he had not troubled to learn Russian. While a teacher in Kabul twenty years earlier, Amin had won an American scholarship to take a Master’s Degree in Educational Administration at Columbia University. As a Soviet historian wrote later, ‘The fact that Amin had studied at Columbia University in New York in his youth whipped up our bestial spy mania.’ Even Kim Philby, in an interview a few months before his death in 1988, was still insisting that ‘there was more than a suspicion that Amin was dickering with the Americans’ .
20
A KGB investigation found no shortage of apparently sinister connections which seemed to support its conspiracy theories. Amin’s friends at Columbia had included Nemattula Pazhwak, later Afghan Minister of Education and, according to his KGB file, an anti-Communist. On his way back from New York after his graduation, Amin had stayed with the Afghan ambassador in Bonn, Ali Ahmad Popal, whom the KGB bizarrely believed to be a Western agent. During his early political career in Kabul, Amin had received financial backing from the chairman of the Spinzer joint-stock company, Sarwari Nasher, who was alleged to maintain contact with both the exiled king of Afghanistan and the Americans. After the April ‘Revolution’, Amin had freed Nasher from prison and provided him with a car and driver.
21
According to KGB defector Vladimir Kuzichkin, alarmist KGB ‘investigations showed him to be a smooth-talking fascist who was secretly pro-Western’.
22
On 1 September a memorandum from the Centre to the Politburo (almost certainly agreed beforehand by Andropov with Gromyko and Ustinov) declared Amin personally responsible for the general failure of Afghan government policy and unjustified mass repression. Ways had therefore to be found of removing Amin from power and persuading Taraki to form a more broadly based government including members of the Parcham faction as well as ‘patriotically inclined’ clergy, tribal leaders and intellectuals. Ten days later, Taraki visited Moscow on his way back to Kabul from a meeting in Havana of the Non-Aligned Movement (of which Afghanistan was a member). During the stop-over Brezhnev effectively invited him to arrange the removal of Amin from the Afghan government.
23
Amin, meanwhile, was plotting to assassinate Taraki as soon as he returned home. According to a KGB agent report, Amin persuaded the head of the radar section of the Afghan anti-aircraft defence force to arrange for Taraki’s plane to be shot down when it entered Afghan airspace on his return from Moscow (presumably by falsely identifying it as a hostile aircraft). The Centre claimed the credit for discovering and thwarting this ‘terrorist act’. Amin then attempted to turn the tables by complaining to the Kabul residency that Taraki had tried to assassinate him.
24
To Moscow’s dismay, the struggle for power which followed Taraki’s safe return to Afghanistan was won by Amin. On 16 September Kabul Radio announced that the PDPA Central Committee had granted a (fictitious) request from Taraki ‘that he be relieved of his party and government positions due to health reasons and physical incapacity which render him unable to continue his work’, and had elected Amin to succeed him as Party leader. The Central Committee circulated to Party members a secret resolution denouncing the ‘terrorist actions and unprincipled behaviour’ of Taraki and his chief supporters from the PDPA, and announcing their expulsion from the Party.
25
On 17 September General Boris Ivanov, the head of the KGB mission in Kabul, General Lev Gorelov, chief Soviet military adviser, and General Ivan Pavlovsky, Deputy Defence Minister, visited Amin to convey Moscow’s insincere congratulations on his election as Party leader. Amin declared that ‘he would work very closely with his Soviet friends and that he would take steps to eliminate known faults and to improve the style and methods of his work’, and claimed, with equal insincerity, to be doing his best to protect the hated Taraki against demands by the rest of the Party leadership that he be severely punished. The ‘Soviet friends’ did not, of course, believe a word Amin said. The immediate priority for the KGB was to exfiltrate three of Taraki’s leading supporters and former ministers, Sayed Gulabzoy (a long-serving KGB agent), Muhammad Watanjar and Asadullah Sarwari, who had taken refuge in the home of a KGB operations officer. The Kabul residency reported that all three had denounced Amin as an American spy. Despite the lack of documentary proof, their claims were passed by Andropov to Brezhnev and the leading members of the Politburo. Though Amin strongly suspected that the fugitive ministers were being sheltered by the Russians, this was categorically denied by the Kabul residency. All three shaved off their moustaches and dressed in the uniform of the KGB Zenith special forces who were stationed in Afghanistan to protect Soviet installations. They were then secretly transferred to the Zenith base to await exfiltration to the Soviet Union. The cover for the exfiltration, codenamed operation RADUGA (‘Rainbow’), was the apparently routine rotation of Zenith personnel. On 18 September ten Zenith troops arrived at the Bagram airbase, sixty kilometres from Kabul, ostensibly to relieve other personnel who were at the end of their tour of duty. With them came an operations group from the Illegals Directorate S, which specialized in constructing bogus identities, and a make-up expert with wigs, hair dye and other disguises. Gulabzoy and Watanjar were given suitably doctored Soviet passports as members of a Zenith unit departing on a Russian aircraft from Bagram airbase to Tashkent on 19 September. Because of the risk that Sarwari, who had become well known as Taraki’s security chief, might be identified even in disguise, however, he was smuggled on board the plane in a sealed container with a six-hour oxygen supply. Those who took part in operation RADUGA were given awards and personally congratulated by Andropov. Once in Tashkent, the three former ministers were put up for almost four weeks in a bugged house while their conversation was carefully monitored to check on their reliability. After recording ninety-two tapes, the KGB appears to have been satisfied by what it had heard and transferred them to a secret retreat in Bulgaria.
26
On 6 October the Afghan Foreign Minister, Dr Akbar Shah Wali, summoned a meeting of ambassadors from the ‘socialist states’ (China and Yugoslavia included) and, to Moscow’s fury, accused the Soviet ambassador Puzanov (subsequently recalled) of conniving at an attempt by Taraki to assassinate Amin on 14 September. Simultaneously, pamphlets entitled ‘The attempt on the life of H. Amin by Taraki and the failure of this attempt’ were distributed among Party militants and the armed forces. On 9 October Puzanov, Pavlovsky, Gorelov and L. P. Bogdanov of the KGB met Amin to protest against Wali’s statement. Bogdanov subsequently reported to the Centre:
During the talks H. Amin was brash and provocative. He sometimes contained his fury with difficulty. He interrupted the Soviet representatives and did not give them a chance to state their point of view calmly. At the same time there were moments when he appeared to collect his thoughts and gave the impression that he did not want to spoil his relations [with the Soviet Union] completely.
Bogdanov also reported that Amin made no mention during the stormy two-hour meeting that Taraki was dead - despite the fact that the Afghan news agency had already distributed an announcement of his death, embargoed until 8 p.m. local time.
27
Next day, 10 October, the
Kabul Times
reported that Taraki ‘died yesterday morning of a serious illness, [from] which he had been suffering for some time . . .’ In reality, he had been murdered on Amin’s orders. Three of Amin’s security personnel tied Taraki to a bed and suffocated him with a cushion - presumably to avoid leaving any visible sign of violence on his corpse. Taraki’s death throes were said to have lasted fifteen minutes. According to Gromyko, Brezhnev was ‘simply beside himself’ when told the news: ‘To those closest to him he said that he had been given a slap in the face to which he had to respond.’
28
The response which Brezhnev had in mind at this stage, however, was the overthrow of Amin rather than a full-scale Soviet invasion.
The Centre was convinced that there was no time to lose. Amin, it believed, was planning to ‘do a Sadat on us’
29
- to expel Soviet advisers as soon as he felt strong enough and turn to the United States. The Kabul residency reported that Amin’s brother, Abdullah, had told his supporters, ‘It would clearly be sensible for us to follow Egypt’s course and treat the Russians as President Sadat did.’
30
In the Centre’s conspiratorial imagination, routine meetings between Amin and US diplomats, which in reality the Americans found tedious and unproductive, acquired a deeply sinister significance. Even the FCD’s able counter-intelligence chief, Oleg Kalugin, whose grasp of American policy-making was far more sophisticated than that of Andropov and Kryuchkov, ‘viewed Afghanistan as a country within our sphere of interest, and thought we had to do whatever possible to prevent the Americans and the CIA from installing an anti-Soviet regime there’.
31
Though the Centre’s main fear was of a pro-American Afghanistan, it was also preoccupied in the autumn of 1979 by a second nightmare scenario. The Kabul residency reported, possibly inaccurately, that secret meetings had taken place at the end of September between representatives of Amin and the ‘extreme Muslim opposition’ at which the possibility of expelling all Soviet officials, releasing all imprisoned Muslim rebels, and ending the civil war had been discussed.
32
To some KGB officers this raised the spectre of ‘an Islamic government’.
33
Only by a Soviet invasion did it seem that Afghanistan could be kept within the Soviet sphere of influence.
The first step in the invasion plan was to assemble a dependably pro-Soviet Afghan government-in-waiting to take power after the overthrow of Amin. On 25 October the Centre despatched Aleksandr Vladimirovich Petrov, formerly a Line PR officer at the Kabul residency, to Prague, where Moscow’s chosen successor to Amin, Babrak Karmal, was living in exile.
34
While talks with Karmal were proceeding, a series of meetings were held in FCD departments to brief officers on the worsening situation in Afghanistan. The situation, they were told, was intolerable. All of them had to be prepared for the decisive action that would be needed to put things right. To Mitrokhin, as probably to most of those who attended the briefings, it was clear that a Soviet invasion was in the offing. On 30 October, probably prompted by Petrov, Karmal wrote a personal letter to Brezhnev denouncing Amin as an anarchist and declaring: ‘The leading members of the [Afghan] Party are prepared to organize and unite Communists, patriots and all the progressive and democratic forces in Afghanistan. The achievement of these aims will be assisted by the fraternal assistance, consultations and advice of our Soviet friends.’
In early November the KGB secretly brought Karmal, the three former ministers exfiltrated from Kabul in September and three other prominent Afghan exiles to Moscow, where they discussed plans to oust Amin from power and set up a new government headed by Karmal. Mitrokhin’s notes on the KGB minutes of the meeting record the ‘decisive influence’ on the Afghans’ deliberations of the views of their Soviet comrades.
35