Afgantsy

send its own troops, disguised if necessary in Afghan uniforms. On 14 April they asked for up to twenty helicopters with crews. On 16 June they asked for armoured troops to guard government buildings and the airports at Bagram and Shindand. On 11 July they asked for Soviet special forces battalions to come to Kabul. On 19 July they asked for a couple of divisions. The requests continued and multiplied throughout August.²³

During these months the Soviet military were divided. Some senior officers were opposed to intervention. But others, including Ustinov, were not. In the circumstances the general staff did what general staffs do: they made plans, they raised troops, they began training appropriate to the conditions that the troops would face if they were ever sent to Afghanistan, and they started to deploy resources to the border. In May General Bogdanov, a senior staff officer, tried his hand at a plan for the introduction of Soviet forces into Afghanistan. He concluded that six divisions would be needed. A colleague who saw his plan advised him to lock it away: ‘Otherwise we’ll be accused of violating the sovereignty of a neighbouring state.’ The plan was brought out of the safe at the beginning of December. But instead of six divisions, the Russians at first sent three, then later added one more.²⁴

The first troops had already arrived. In February 1979 the American Ambassador, Adolph Dubs, was kidnapped by terrorists, imprisoned in a Kabul hotel, and killed in a botched attempt by government forces to release him. The Russians sent KGB protection squads to Kabul to protect their own senior officials there.²⁵

Following the Politburo’s decisions in April, elements of the 5th Guards Motor-rifle Division and the 108th Motor-rifle Division began moving towards the Afghan frontier under the guise of training exercises. General Yepishev, the Chief of the Main Political Administration of the Soviet Defence Ministry, who had helped prepare the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, visited Kabul to give advice and promise military supplies. Taraki and Amin again asked for Soviet troops and were again turned down. The numbers of Soviet transport aircraft flying in and out of Bagram sharply increased. Soviet military and civilian advisers continued to pour into Afghanistan. Rumours persisted that Soviet servicemen were flying helicopters and operating tanks on combat missions. Soviet frontier troops were increasingly involved in clashes with rebel groups along the Afghan border.²⁶

Another military delegation followed in August under General Pavlovski, who had commanded the force which invaded Czechoslovakia. Pavlovski’s main task was to review the state of the Afghan army and its operation against the rebels, and to make recommendations to Amin. On the eve of his departure Pavlovski asked Defence Minister Ustinov if it was planned to introduce Soviet forces into Afghanistan. ‘In no circumstances!’ the minister answered categorically.²⁷ Pavlovski remained in Kabul until 22 October and was a close witness of the events which led to the overthrow of Taraki by Amin.

Many of the Afghan requests for troops came through the Soviet representatives in Kabul—the ambassador, Puzanov; the Chief Soviet Military Adviser, Gorelov; and the KGB representative, Ivanov. As often happens, the people on the spot were sometimes more sympathetic to their clients’ predicament than to the views of their principals, and often supported the Afghan requests, or at least forwarded them without comment. Within a week of Yepishev’s visit, Amin asked Gorelov to forward a request for helicopters with crews. Ogarkov, the Chief of Staff, minuted on Gorelov’s report: ‘That should not be done.’ The Politburo agreed, and Gorelov was told to remind the Afghans of the reasons why the request had been turned down. When Pavlovski arrived, Amin asked him if the Russians could send a division to Kabul. It would not be expected to take part in combat, but it would free an Afghan division to tackle the rebels on the ground. This request, too, was turned down. A month later Gorelov, Puzanov, and Ivanov came up with an idea of their own. The Soviets should set up a military training centre near Kabul on the lines of the one they had in Cuba—a somewhat disingenuous proposal, since everyone knew that the ‘training centre’ in Cuba consisted of a brigade of combat troops.²⁸

Military Preparations

For its part the Soviet Ministry of Defence had already quietly begun to take measures directly related to the possibility of combat in Afghanistan. In April 1979 its Main Intelligence Directorate (Glavnoe Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenie, or GRU) ordered the creation of a special battalion, based in Tashkent in Turkmenistan, to consist of Tajik, Uzbek, and Turkmen soldiers from the Central Asian republics who spoke the same languages as the people on the other side of the Afghan frontier. Major Khalbaev was appointed to command the battalion and given two months to complete its formation.

The unit, soon to be known as the ‘Muslim Battalion’, consisted of some five hundred men selected from across the Soviet Union. The main requirement was that they should know the relevant languages and be in good physical shape. Each was expected to have two specialities: radio operator and mortar specialist; medical orderly and driver, and so on. The battalion was equipped with two mobile anti-aircraft guns, known as Shilkas, which could also fire at ground targets. These were manned by Slavs, since no Central Asian specialists were available.²⁹

The KGB now set up two small detachments of SpetsNaz (special purpose) forces, drawn from the force later known as the Alfa group. This was originally set up by Andropov in July 1974 to deal with terrorism and the release of hostages, taking the British SAS among others as its model. Its members were all officers, selected for their fitness and intelligence.

The first detachment of forty men was code-named Zenit. It was sent to Kabul under the command of Colonel Grigori Boyarinov, who had fought in the Second World War and since 1961 had lectured on low-intensity warfare at the KGB Academy. At first Zenit was housed in the school of the Soviet Embassy in Kabul. Its immediate task was to protect the embassy itself and the senior members of the Soviet community. At Amin’s request, the group also provided training in counterterrorism for its Afghan opposite numbers.

Boyarinov’s group returned to Moscow in September. But it was replaced by a similar group, known as Zenit-2, under Colonel Polyakov. Polyakov and his officers systematically reconnoitred and mapped the main Afghan administrative and military buildings in Kabul: invaluable intelligence when the time came for the forcible takeover of Kabul in December.

In June Ustinov sent an air assault battalion to protect Soviet transport aircraft and their crews based in Bagram, and if necessary to cover the evacuation of Soviet advisers in an emergency. The troops were to travel as ‘technical advisers’ under the command of Colonel Vasili Lomakin, and their officers were to wear sergeants’ insignia of rank to disguise the provenance and structure of the unit. The paratroopers flew to Bagram early in July.³⁰ The movement was picked up by the Americans, who concluded that the soldiers were indeed intended to protect Bagram and that the Russians had no intention of committing them to combat elsewhere in Afghanistan.³¹

Thus by the late summer of 1979 several of the military units that were to play a significant role in the first days of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan were already in place. The denouement was now to be driven forward at ever greater speed by dramatic political events in Kabul itself. Step by step, with great reluctance, strongly suspecting that it would be a mistake, the Russians slithered towards a military intervention because they could not think of a better alternative.

– THREE – The Decision to Intervene

Now there began a period of plotting and counterplotting. Throughout the summer and autumn Taraki and Amin pursued their separate and contradictory intrigues, which ended in mutual betrayal and tragedy. The Soviet role in all this is still shrouded in ambiguity, and even those who were involved disagree about who was responsible for what. But whatever the truth, Soviet agencies were by now deeply involved in the domestic politics of