Afgantsy

military equipment, and over a thousand tons of supplies were flown to Kabul in the course of the next forty-eight hours. One aircraft—an Il-76 under the command of Captain Golovin carrying thirty-seven paratroopers—was lost when it crashed into a mountain and exploded as it was making its approach to Kabul airport. The British Embassy had observers at the airport. They were surprised that no attempt was made to disguise what was going on. The airport remained open for ordinary traffic and the British saw six helicopters with Soviet markings there.¹¹

On the following afternoon the troops in Tajikistan began to cross the bridge which sappers had built with some difficulty across the fast-flowing and tricky Amu Darya. The soldiers were told that they were going to support the ordinary Afghan people against the counter-revolution, and that they had to get there before the Americans did. Although some conscripts were disgruntled because their demobilisation had been postponed, most of the soldiers were excited at the prospect of adventure. Though the mission was supposed to be peaceful, one battalion was told by its political officer that they would go through Afghanistan with fire and the sword, and the battalion commander added, ‘If a single shot is fired at you, you should open up with everything you have got.’ Marshal Sokolov, the head of the Operational Group of the Ministry of Defence then still stationed in Termez, came to see the soldiers off as they marched away to the tears of women and the sound of military music.¹²

The fourth battalion of the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade was sent ahead to secure the strategically indispensable Salang Pass, which lay on the route to the troops’ final destinations.¹³ Among them was a conscript sergeant, Sergei Morozov. He and his comrades found that there was no fighting to be done and the only casualties were two men wounded by accident. They lived in buildings without windows originally put up for the workers who had built the road over the Salang Pass. It was very cold at that height in midwinter, but the soldiers had brought their own stoves with them and scrounged the fuel from passing convoys. They had little else to do.¹⁴

Next came the 108th Motor-rifle Division under the command of Colonel Valeri Mironov. The division’s officers had already flown across the frontier in helicopters to reconnoitre the route.¹⁵ After a nasty moment when the column got stuck in the Salang Tunnel,¹⁶ the division reached its position outside Kabul on the morning of 28 December. It was at first welcomed by the local population. The relationship deteriorated sharply when it became clear that the soldiers had come to stay. There was a nasty incident at the beginning of February, when a patrol was ambushed outside Kabul and an officer and eleven soldiers—all reservists—were killed. But on the whole these early months were the calmest the division was to experience during the whole of its time in Afghanistan.

The division got a new Chief of Staff, Colonel Boris Gromov, in the middle of January. He was not best pleased: it was a sideways move, when he had hoped for promotion. In Tashkent, where he stopped on his way down, officers were already saying that there would be a real fight in Afghanistan, though attacks on Soviet troops had barely started. He continued to Kabul in a hospital plane, embarrassed because he was wearing the uniform of a peacetime colonel when all the other officers were in their wartime gear. In Kabul he had to sleep in the freezing aircraft because there was no other accommodation. The next day the plane would not take off because its wheels were frozen to the runway.¹⁷

Planning a Coup

The tangled situation inside Afghanistan itself was still evolving. On 20 December Amin moved from the Arg, the presidential palace in the centre of Kabul, to the Taj Bek Palace.¹⁸ This had previously housed the headquarters of the Central Army Corps. It was situated on the southwest outskirts of the city and Amin may have thought that it would be more easily defensible. Some of the specialists from the Soviet KGB who advised Amin on his security arrangements were stationed inside the palace itself.

The palace was very solidly constructed: its walls were capable of withstanding artillery. Its defences had been carefully and intelligently organised. All the approach roads except one had been mined, and heavy machine guns and artillery were sited to cover the single open road. The inside of the palace was protected by Amin’s personal bodyguard, consisting of his relatives and people he particularly trusted. They wore a special uniform which distinguished them from other Afghan soldiers: forage caps with white piping, white belts and holsters, and white cuffs on their sleeves.

A second line of defence consisted of seven posts, each manned by four sentries armed with a machine gun, a mortar, and automatic rifles. They were relieved every two hours. The external ring of the defences encircling the palace was manned by the Presidential Guard: three battalions of motorised infantry and one tank battalion, around 2,500 men in all. On one of the commanding heights three T-54 tanks were dug in and these could fire directly on the area around the palace with their cannon and machine guns. In addition, not far off there was an anti-aircraft regiment, armed with twelve 100mm anti-aircraft guns and sixteen anti-aircraft multiple machine guns; and also a construction battalion of about a thousand men. In Kabul itself there were two divisions and a tank brigade of the Afghan army.¹⁹

This was a powerful force for the Russians to contend with. Even with the reinforcements they were now bringing in, the forceful destruction by the Russians of Amin and his regime would be a daring military operation, in which the Soviet forces would be heavily outnumbered by well-armed opponents.

Amin and the Taj Bek Palace were the main target. But to secure Kabul as a whole the Russians also needed to control the General Staff building, the Radio and Television Centre, the telegraph building, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the headquarters of the Gendarmerie (Tsarandoi), the headquarters of the Afghan Central Army Corps in the Arg Palace, and the Military Counter-intelligence building. These presented more tractable military problems than the Taj Bek, but would still require substantial forces and careful timing.²⁰

On 18 December Kryuchkov sent General Yuri Drozdov, head of the KGB’s Directorate of Illegal Intelligence, a war veteran, an accomplished linguist, and formerly an illegal agent in West Germany, to Afghanistan to consult with the KGB officers on the spot, see what was going on, and report back.²¹ Drozdov told his alarmed wife that he was off for a few days, then left early the following morning with Colonel Kolesnik of the GRU, who was briefly back in Moscow. Drozdov’s assistant took with him a briefcase for the KGB officer who was to meet them on arrival. The briefcase contained a recording of the speech that Babrak Karmal would broadcast once Amin had been overthrown. The party left it by accident at Bagram after they landed. Luckily it was safely recovered the next day.

That same day, the Muslim Battalion was moved from Bagram to Kabul and stationed on the outskirts of the city, less than a mile from the Taj Bek Palace, in an unfinished building with no glass in the windows. It was bitterly cold and the temperature went down to minus twenty degrees. The soldiers filled the gaps in the windows with waterproof capes, installed wood stoves, and erected bunk beds. The Afghans gave the Soviet soldiers woollen blankets made from camel hair and food was available in the local bazaar.

On 21 December Magometov summoned Kolesnik and Khalbaev, the commander of the Muslim Battalion, and ordered them to draw up a plan for the defence of the Taj Bek Palace in cooperation with Amin’s Presidential Guard. He told them nothing of any more dramatic plans. Kolesnik and Khalbaev accordingly went to call on Major Jandad, the commander of Amin’s Guard. They quickly agreed on where the companies of the Muslim Battalion were to be placed and on the construction of a bridge across an irrigation ditch which formed an obstacle on the approaches to Taj Bek. Jandad gave the Russians a small Japanese radio so that they could communicate directly. The two Soviet officers reconnoitred the approach routes to the palace and the positions of the Afghan units surrounding it, and began drawing up their plans.

Soviet troops continued to arrive in Kabul, including another special forces detachment, code-named Grom. This consisted of another thirty men from Alfa, the KGB’s anti-terror force, put together at one day’s notice under the command of Major Mikhail Romanov. The men told their families that they were going for winter training to Yaroslavl, north of Moscow, and would therefore miss the New Year celebrations. They had no idea that they were about to be involved in some real fighting. As they were getting ready to leave Moscow in Andropov’s personal Tu-134, someone photographed them boarding the plane; he was forced to expose his film.

On arrival in Kabul, they were briefly accommodated in the embassy before moving up to join the soldiers of the Muslim Battalion near the Taj Bek Palace. Here they zeroed in their weapons and were given Afghan uniforms