The Gun

and hard to land. Each applicant had to pass a background check. Those from families with a history of private business ownership or who had relatives in the West were turned away. Those offered positions were required by the Staasi, the secret police, to sign an oath pledging never to reveal what took place in the plant. “You were not allowed to tell your own wife what you did,” said one former employee. Such measures were nonsensical, he added. Like most everyone else, “she already knew.”⁸⁶ The plant was given a cover: It manufactured tools and home appliances. Over time the villagers coined a knowing joke. That strange plant on the hill, they said, makes a wonderful coffee filter.⁸⁷

By 1958, rifle production had begun. A bustling gun works grew. Under police escort on the country roads, truck drivers brought in components that had been forged and machined elsewhere.⁸⁸ The barrels came from Suhl, from a plant said to manufacture bicycles.⁸⁹ Smaller gun works contributed other parts. A few were machined within the Wiesa compound. The first result was the Maschinen Pistole Kalashnikov, or MPiK, a copy of the original design. Soon more than one thousand people were employed by the works, and the plant became the engine of the local economy in a time when German citizens were still suffering postwar shortages of everything from fresh fruit to building supplies to schnapps. Some townspeople were pleased, and welcomed the good fortune of having a large employer near their homes. Others were afraid. They thought that by choosing Wiesa for a rifle plant, the party had made their village a target. “We always knew, and we were told,” one local man said, “that in case of war Wiesa would be one of the first places to disappear from the planet.”⁹⁰

Production was slow in the first years. But output rose under harsh quality-control measures, and enough rifles were made to equip the Nationale Volksarmee, the Staasi, and a list of foreign customers, including Iraq, Algiers, Yemen, India, and the Republic of Congo. Rail cars would arrive. They departed filled with green wooden crates containing ten assault rifles each. If the estimates of production levels are accurate, as many as three hundred thousand crates left the grounds. Many were trucked to Dresden. Others went to Rostock, a port on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, on their way to export. The secrecy of the gun works in Wiesa was short-lived. Virtually everyone in Wiesa knew. Much of East Germany did, too. The covers—the bicycle plant in Suhl, the appliance plant in Wiesa, the idea that East Germany did not manufacture rifles—grew to be absurd. Assault rifles peddled by East German front companies in Berlin turned up in wars in Africa and the Middle East. And yet over the years, day by day, the unstated rules of totalitarianism demanded that the people of Wiesa feign indifference, even ignorance, as the muffled crack of gunfire rose from the basement firing range each night. “I decided that up to the edge of the fence was mine,” said one of the plant’s neighbors. “After that it was a foreign country, and I couldn’t care about it.”⁹¹

Others did care. Little attracts more attention among armies than word that another military force has a new weapon and is investing heavily in its production. Whispers about new weapons can be an emotionally and intellectually powerful variety of intelligence; they inspire curiosity and often worry. Such was the case in many foreign capitals when the AK-47 began to be seen. As the Kremlin hardened its foreign policy, outside interest in the weapon grew. Foreign intelligence services and arms technicians collected specimen rifles. One of the earliest collections was made in 1956 by Erkki Maristo, of the Finnish military’s ordnance department, who was at the center of a minor Cold War intelligence caper. In the mid-1950s, the Finnish Defense Forces were exploring available options for a new service rifle and wanted to test existing designs. Intelligence sources had brought news of the M1943 cartridge and the AK-47. In May 1956, Lieutenant General Sakari Simelius, chairman of the Finnish Small Arms Committee, saw the AK-47 on a visit to the Soviet Union. Like the Soviet army, the Finns had experience with submachine guns and had no bias against lighter-powered automatic arms. They had studied the sturmgewehr closely and battle experience had taught them that weapons built around traditional European rifle cartridges were not necessarily the best choice for defending their thickly forested nation, where many engagements were fought at close range. The Soviet weapon might fit Finnish needs. How to obtain a sample? Direct sale from Moscow seemed impossible. No defector had carried an AK-47 across the Soviet-Finnish border. The defense forces found another means—a businessman with connections in Poland who agreed to arrange a clandestine purchase. As part of Warsaw Pact standardization efforts, Poland was beginning to manufacture its version of the AK-47. After the businessman’s inquiries, an early rifle was offered for sale. In fall 1956, Maristo sailed by ferry across the Baltic Sea as a private citizen and landed in Poland. In Warsaw, he was shown one of Poland’s prototype Kalashnikovs. He purchased it for an undisclosed price. The rifle was disassembled and the parts smuggled home on a Polish commercial vessel sailing from Gdansk to the Finnish port of Kotka, where it was picked up by the Ministry of Defense and reassembled for analysis.⁹²

The Finns were enthused. They wanted more samples. On March 15, 1957, working through a company called Ankertex OY, the defense forces purchased one hundred more Polish Kalashnikovs, making Poland an early commercial exporter of assault rifles and equipping the Finns with the samples they needed for reverse engineering.⁹³ In the 1960s the Finns began production of an exceptionally well-made Kalashnikov knock-off, the RK-60, which was updated in 1962 and became the Finnish Defense Forces’ standard arm. (The Finns’ selection raised questions of which nation had pulled off a masterful bit of small-arms intrigue. Was Maristo’s collection trip to Warsaw a Finnish intelligence coup? Or had the Finns been lured into a well-orchestrated KGB double game? The Finns’ decision to adopt the 7.62?39 round and a Soviet-pattern could be seen as serving Soviet interests. Finland and Russia shared a long northern border, and as an unaligned state Finland was not a NATO member. There is ample evidence that the Soviet Union gladly aided the Finns’ choice. In 1960, it sold 20,000 AK- 47s to the Finnish Defense Force, and in 1962 sold another, smaller quantity. The weapons were to expedite assault-rifle training. Once the RK-62 was adopted in Finnish small-arms munitions stores were incompatible with NATO’s weapons, but compatible with the Soviet Union’s. The Finnish decision gave the Soviet military a logistical edge along its northwestern frontier.)

As the Finns tested their Polish guns, AK-47s kept reaching foreign hands. A confidential 1958 report to the Netherlands General Staff, prepared by intelligence officials and the Dutch inspector of armaments, detailed the exploitation of a folding-stock Kalashnikov that had been manufactured in 1952. The Dutch intelligence service sensed the weapon’s production momentum and deduced part of the Soviet army’s intentions. It noted that the AK-47s seen in intelligence photographs through 1956 had been assigned to the infantry, whereas more recent images showed them with artillery, signals, and antiaircraft soldiers. The analysts ventured that “it is very likely that this weapon will become the only Soviet shoulder weapon.”⁹⁴ The report was both prescient and understated; the weapon was moving well beyond Soviet possession.

Arms specialists in Yugoslavia also pursued Kalashnikov technology. Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia’s prime minister, headed a socialist nation that might have been a candidate for early standardization, had relations with the Kremlin not been strained.⁹⁵ When the Soviet army transferred technical specifications elsewhere, Yugoslavia was left out. It obtained neither sample rifles nor the aid needed to manufacture them. Engineers at the Zastava arms plant in Kragujevac, however, had been experimenting with automatic-rifle designs since 1952, working with captured specimens of the sturmgewehr. In 1959, they got their break. First, two AK-47s came into their possession, apparently after a pair of Albanian border guards passed them off upon defecting to Yugoslav soil.⁹⁶ Engineers at Zastava made metal castings from the rifles but did not glean enough data to copy them. Tito then came through personally. On a foreign visit to a nation that had received Soviet military aid, he retrieved more AK-47s. These were passed to the engineers to finish their work. (During this time, Tito traveled to Egypt, Indonesia, and India, any one of which might have provided him the sample arms; which country did so has remained a state secret.)⁹⁷ By the end of 1959, the Zastava plant was developing an AK-47 variant.⁹⁸ The work was done by industry. Unlike the Finns, the Yugolav military was not interested in issuing the AK-47, fearing its soldiers would consume too much ammunition.⁹⁹ The factory pushed on alone. Its assault rifles would in time become widely exported, and would be present in many wars.¹⁰⁰

One nation alone had the most puzzling reaction to the AK-47 and its creeping movement across the globe: the United States. Throughout the crucial period of the AK-47’s design, development, and mass distribution, American military officers did not foresee or understand the significance of what was happening at its enemy’s test ranges and arms plants. The American intelligence and arms-design failures were almost total. On the level of anticipating security threats, the Pentagon did not recognize the risks to its forces or its allies from the AK-47’s capabilities and global production. And as for designing infantry firearms, it remained obstinately committed to