by a burst of bullets fired into the ballroom. When his colleague, Colonel Alekseev, tried to load his body on one of the BMPs, he was roughly told by the crew that they were taking only the wounded, not the dead. But Alekseev managed to persuade them to take the colonel nevertheless.
The victorious Soviets took a hundred and fifty prisoners from Amin’s personal guard. They did not count the dead. Perhaps two hundred and fifty of the Afghans guarding the palace had been killed by their erstwhile Soviet comrades in arms.
The Soviet soldiers who had been wounded during the storming of the palace were taken to the polyclinic at the nearby Soviet Embassy. Galina Ivanov, the wife of the economic adviser Valeri Ivanov, had of course known nothing of what was happening until a terrible sound of shooting broke out down the road and vehicles started bringing in the dead and wounded. One of the vehicles was shot up by the embassy guards, who also had no idea what was going on.
All the embassy doctors lived in one of the
First the little team sorted out the living from the dead. Then the dentist had to use his barely relevant skills to operate as best he could, while Galina and the others bound up the wounds. Galina found it an absolutely horrible experience. When she went back to Moscow soon afterwards she could not understand how people could walk around the streets as if nothing had happened.37
Meanwhile the Russians, triggered by the explosion at the communications centre, had moved with brutal speed and carefully focused violence to take over their other objectives in the city.
The most important and difficult target was the General Staff building. Fourteen special forces troops, accompanied by Abdul Wakil, a future foreign minister of Afghanistan, were assigned to deal with it. A deception plan was devised to ease the odds. That evening General Kostenko, the Soviet adviser to Colonel Yakub, the Chief of Staff, took a number of Soviet officers to pay a formal call, including General Ryabchenko, the commander of the newly arrived 103rd Guards Air Assault Division. They discussed questions of mutual interest with the unsuspecting Yakub, a powerful man who had trained in the Ryazan Airborne School and spoke good Russian. Ryabchenko had no difficulty in behaving naturally, since he knew nothing of what was about to take place. Meanwhile other Soviet special forces officers were spreading through the building, handing out cigarettes and chatting to the Afghan officers working there. When the explosion went off, they burst into Yakub’s office. Yakub fled to another room after a scuffle in which his assistant was killed, but then surrendered and was tied up and placed under guard. Ryabchenko, taken wholly by surprise, sat immobile throughout. Kostenko was nearly killed by the Soviet troops.
The fighting lasted an hour. As it died away, Abdul Wakil appeared in Yakub’s office. He talked in Pushtu to the general for a long time, and then shot him. Twenty Afghans were killed. A hundred were taken prisoner, and as they so heavily outnumbered the attackers, they were herded into a large room and tied up with electric cable.
There was an unpleasant moment when a company of Soviet paratroopers, who had arrived forty minutes late, advanced on the General Staff building in armoured personnel carriers and opened up a heavy fire, forcing the
The Russians needed the Radio and Television Centre to broadcast Karmal’s appeal to the people at the earliest moment. They reconnoitred it very carefully throughout 27 December, some of them posing as automation experts to get inside the building. In the assault seven Afghans were killed, twenty-nine wounded, and over a hundred taken prisoner. One Soviet soldier received a minor wound.
No one was killed on either side in the telegraph building, and the defenders in the Central Army Headquarters and the Military Counter-Intelligence building surrendered without a fight. There was no serious resistance at the Interior Ministry building either, though one Russian soldier was wounded and subsequently died. The attackers had orders to arrest the Interior Minister, S. Payman, but he had fled in his underwear and sought refuge with his Soviet advisers.
By the morning the firing had more or less died down. But not quite. As they drove into town in their Mercedes, the senior officers who had directed the attack on the palace were fired on by a nervous and trigger- happy young paratrooper. The bullets hit the car but not the occupants. A colonel jumped out and gave the soldier a sharp clip round the ear. General Drozdov asked the young lieutenant in charge, ‘Was that your soldier? Thank you for not teaching him to shoot straight.’38
Once the fighting in the Taj Bek Palace had stopped, Colonel Kolesnik set up his command post there. The victorious Soviet soldiers were dropping with fatigue. Since it was possible that Afghan troops in the area might try to retake the palace, they set up a perimeter defence, their nerves still at full stretch. When they heard rustling in the lift shaft, they assumed that Amin’s people were launching a counter-attack through the passages which led into the palace from outside. They sprang to arms, fired their automatic weapons, and hurled grenades.
It was the palace cat.39
– FIVE –
Aftermath
The inhabitants of Kabul paid little attention to what happened during that dramatic night. They were too used to shooting in the capital and most slept quietly. When they woke up the next day, Afghanistan had a new government, and the small boys were back selling cigarettes around the ruined government communications conduit as if nothing had happened.
Once the city had been secured, Kabul Radio broadcast Babrak Karmal’s pre-recorded appeal to the peoples of Afghanistan. ‘Today the torture machine of Amin has been smashed,’ he announced, ‘his accomplices—the primitive executioners, usurpers and murderers of tens of thousands of our fellow countrymen—fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters, children and old people…’
Karmal himself was not in the studio: he had remained in Bagram under the protection of the KGB. On the evening of 27 December—before the fighting was over—Andropov came through on the telephone ‘to congratulate him on the victory of the second stage of the revolution’ and on his ‘appointment’ as chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, an appointment which had not yet been endorsed by any formal Afghan body. The next morning Karmal travelled to Kabul in a column of armoured fighting vehicles, supported by three tanks, and lived for the first few days with his KGB protection team in a guest villa on the outskirts of Kabul. On 1 January a telegram arrived from Brezhnev and Kosygin congratulating him on the occasion of his ‘election’ to the highest state and party posts.1
The gates of the Kabul prisons were thrown open and thousands of prisoners now poured out into the streets. One of them was Dr Lutfullah Latif, a Parchamist who had worked in the Health Ministry. He had been arrested in November 1978, interrogated and tortured for ten days, then sent to Pul-i Charkhi. Three days before the Soviet coup, he and the other prisoners could see and hear the Soviet aircraft landing non-stop at the airport. Then one evening there was firing for half an hour, followed by silence. The door to the prison block was broken down, some Afghan and Russian officers appeared, took the guards prisoner and then left again, taking the keys to the cells with them. It took the prisoners a day to force open the locks. There were political meetings going on outside in the prison yard. The prisoners spent the next night in their cells, but the following day buses were sent to take them home. All were freed, whatever their political affiliation.2
But that was not the end of the arrests and the repressions. Karmal’s people began to settle scores with
