Afgantsy

comforted his wife: ‘Everything will be all right. I know this room. Soldiers used to be quartered here. Now it’s our turn.’ She immediately set to work to clean it up.¹⁴ Later she was taken to a separate building. The rest of Taraki’s family and his personal staff were moved from the presidential palace to the Pul-i Charkhi prison a couple of days after Amin took power.

That evening the Soviet officials called on Amin to express their regret at the shooting and their deep sympathy at the death of Tarun, whom they ‘had known to be a true friend of the Soviet Union’. Amin then gave his version of the story and concluded, ‘I am convinced that it was me whom they wanted to kill. More than a hundred shots have been fired at me before this. Now you can see for yourselves what Taraki wanted. I knew that an attempt on my life was being planned and was ready for this when I met Taraki at the airport on his return from Havana. Today Taraki wanted to kill me. He clearly did not plan to do this in the presence of Soviet comrades, but he must have forgotten to cancel his orders and his people began to shoot.’

The Russians again expressed their regret, emphasised the need for restraint, and repeated Brezhnev’s call for unity: a split in the Party would be ruinous for the Afghan revolution. Amin said that the revolution could survive without him, provided it had Soviet support. But the reality was that the army would now obey only him, not Taraki; an attempt the previous day by Watanjar to bring the army over to Taraki had failed. Amin had nevertheless sacked the commanders of the 4th and 15th Armoured Brigades as a precaution.

The Central Committee would now meet to relieve Taraki of his posts, said Amin, though he claimed that he personally was against that. The Russians replied that the Soviet leaders firmly believed that Taraki should remain as head of state and that Amin should keep his current posts. They would not understand it if Amin stripped Taraki of his position.

Amin said that he himself was ready enough to take Soviet advice. But things had gone too far. Blood had been spilled (he showed them the stains on his shirt). His comrades in the army were angrily demanding vengeance. The Russians forcefully reiterated their view that unity must be preserved within the leadership and between Taraki and Amin. They appealed to Amin to prevent the demonstrations against Taraki which were planned for the following day.

Throughout that night the soldiers of the Soviet parachute battalion in Bagram sat in their aircraft with their weapons, awaiting the order to fly to Kabul to rescue Taraki. Neither the paratroopers nor the Muslim Battalion ever received the order to move. Amin had meanwhile given instructions that any aircraft landing or taking off from the airfield should be shot down.¹⁵ Early on the following day, 15 September, Moscow ordered the special forces soldiers from Zenit to stand by for an operation against Amin. They assembled in the courtyard of the embassy, where they were briefed in detail. At about eleven o’clock the embassy security officer, Colonel Bakhturin, put them on fifteen minutes’ notice to move. But they too were never ordered to act: the Russians had sensibly decided that the balance of forces in Kabul was overwhelmingly against them.¹⁶

The four went into hiding. Mazduryar found his own refuge. Watanjar, Gulabzoi, and Sarwari took themselves to the villa of one of their KGB contacts. The officer’s wife found them in the sitting room when she came home from work. Colonel Bogdanov, the head of the KGB office in Kabul, had them taken to a KGB safe house on his own responsibility and then phoned Moscow to ask what he should do next. To his relief Moscow endorsed what he had done. The three men were dressed in SpetsNaz uniform, and they were put to live on the second floor of the villa.

The Party Plenum and the Revolutionary Council of the PDPA met on 16 September in a building surrounded by tanks and soldiers. The office of the Soviet Military Adviser was in the same building; the Soviet officers could hear the cheers as the meeting passed the resolutions expelling Taraki and the four ministers from the party, and electing Amin to the posts previously held by Taraki, the General Secretaryship of the party and the Chairmanship of the Revolutionary Council.¹⁷ The public was told that Taraki had asked to be relieved of his posts on grounds of ill-health and that Amin had been elected to succeed him. In a public broadcast the following day Amin attacked the excesses of the secret police and promised that the rule of law would prevail in future. He did not once mention Taraki. When he told the story later, Ambassador Puzanov said bitterly, ‘Amin made fools of us all.’¹⁸

The day after the shoot-out, 15 September, the Soviet Politburo met in Moscow to consider what to do. They had before them a memorandum prepared by Gromyko, Ustinov, and the KGB. This described the course of events in Kabul reasonably accurately. Taraki had failed to act decisively. Amin had ruthlessly exploited the situation. Now all the organs of power were in his hands. The pleas of the Soviet Politburo had been ignored.

Gromyko recommended that the Soviet government accept the accomplished fact and deal with Amin, while seeking to dissuade him from punishing Taraki and his associates. Soviet officials and military advisers should continue with their duties as before, but should not get involved in any of Amin’s repressive measures. Supplies of arms to Amin’s government should be somewhat reduced, except for spare parts and ammunition needed for operations against the insurgents. Public statements by the Soviet government should be purely factual and avoid all comment.

The Politburo agreed with these proposals and Gromyko cabled appropriate instructions to Kabul.¹⁹ The Russians were not, however, prepared to take their reverse entirely lying down. Their first move, on 18 September, was to mount Operation Raduga (Rainbow) to rescue the three Afghan ministers who had taken refuge with the KGB in Kabul. Two aircraft—an Il-76 and a An-12—flew into Bagram, carrying a lorry with three boxes inside it, and a make-up artist whose job was to make the three men look like the photographs in the Soviet passports prepared for them. Colonel Bogdanov was put in charge of the operation.

Lieutenant Valeri Kurilov, of the Zenit group, described what happened: ‘We prepared three containers at our Moscow base at Balashikha: three wooden boxes, like the ones used for transporting arms. We put mattresses on the bottom and bored holes in the top and sides so that the ministers would not suffocate.

‘Once the boxes had been delivered to Bagram airport, we took them in a covered lorry with local number plates to the villa where the ministers were hidden. We blocked the entrance to the villa with a bus while the ministers crawled into the boxes, each with a weapon and a water bottle. Then we nailed down the lids.

‘We dragged the boxes—now much heavier than before—to the lorry and piled cardboard boxes on top of them. Our boys, some in civilian clothes, sat in the back of the covered lorry. Each had a submachine gun, a pistol, grenades, and a double supply of ammunition.

‘We’d taken care to provide backup: two other vehicles were travelling with us, a Zhiguli and a UAZ, with seven of our boys on board. There were six men in the bus and another six in the lorry. If anything had happened, we would have reacted and taken down a pile of people. But that was the last thing we needed. Our task was to get to Bagram without incident and load the three boxes on to the aeroplane…

‘At the checkpoint on the way out of Kabul the Afghans tried to inspect our vehicles. We got ready for a fight. Our commander, Dolmatov, told us not to shoot unless he gave the order. A tall young officer with a carefully trimmed moustache spoke to the driver in our lorry and then tried to open the canvas cover. Although the interpreter told him that there was nothing there except boxes with the personal belongings of the Soviet specialists, the officer tried to climb in. At that point Dolmatov’s heavy boot came down on his hand and the officer looked up to see Dolmatov’s Kalashnikov pointing straight at his head. The officer backed down and the convoy was allowed to proceed. We travelled the seventy kilometres to Bagram without further incident.

‘A huge Aeroflot transport plane was waiting for us. A guard of SpetsNaz was set up around it, the ramp was lowered, and the lorry drove straight into the belly of the aircraft. After take-off I took out my bayonet and levered off the tops of the boxes. All three men were alive and well, but bathed in sweat.’

The three men were then smuggled through to Bulgaria, where they went into hiding in a villa on the Black Sea. To put the Afghans off the scent, the KGB spread the rumour that they had sought sanctuary in Iran. Gulabzoi later maintained that he had never left Afghanistan and never travelled in a box. But the Russian participants in the operation all insisted that he did.²⁰

By now the Soviet government was getting increasingly worried by KGB reports that Amin was turning towards the Americans. These suspicions were not idle. On 27 September Amin told Bruce Amstutz, the American charge d’affaires, that he hoped for an improvement in relations. His new Foreign Minister, Shah Wali, said much the same to David Newsom, the US Under Secretary of State, in New York. Amstutz reported to Washington on 30