The new regime was soon confronted with a growing opposition inside the country. In March 1979, there was a violent rebellion in Herat, Afghanistan’s third largest city. During this rebellion several Soviet advisers were executed. The PDPA, fearful of losing control, turned to Moscow with a demand for military support. A meeting was arranged in Moscow on March 20, 1979, between President Taraki and four Soviet heavyweights: Aleksey Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers; Andrey Gromyko, Minister of Foreign Affairs; Dmitry Ustinov, Minister of Defense; and Boris Ponomarev, head of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Taraki not only demanded weapons, but also military personnel, including pilots and tank drivers. Although Kosygin refused any direct military involvement of Soviet troops on the ground in Afghanistan, Moscow became more nervous when the KGB hinted at the supposed unreliability of the Afghan prime minister, Hafizullah Amin. Yury Andropov, the head of the KGB, feared that Amin could become an “Afghan Sadat,” turning, eventually, to the West.[4] “Andropov suspects him to be an agent of the CIA: logical if one knows that Amin has passed four years at Columbia University.”[5] This suspicion led to dramatic events in the late summer of 1979. KGB agents in Kabul told President Taraki that he should arrest Amin. When, on September 14, Amin was invited to Taraki’s palace to talk with Soviet representatives, Taraki’s guards opened fire and tried to kill him. But Amin escaped. He mobilized his own militia and had Taraki arrested. On October 9, 1979, President Taraki was executed. Hereupon the Soviet Union decided to intervene and replace Amin with its own favorite, Babrak Karmal. Amin was killed by Vympel Spetsnaz troops. These are KGB special forces consisting of multilingual officers specializing in combat and sabotage in enemy territory. “Created in 1979,” wrote J. Michael Waller, “Vympel served as the shock force prior to the invasion of Afghanistan. In its first foreign operation, Vympel commandos stormed the presidential palace in Kabul and assassinated the inhabitants, including Afghan President Hafizullah Amin and seven of his children. This allowed the Soviet protégé, Babrak Karmal, to “invite” the Soviet army to intervene in his country.”[6] Amin’s assassination took place on December 25, 1979. The next day, Karmal declared himself secretary general of the Afghan Communist Party and prime minister.
The Soviet troops were to stay in Afghanistan for more than a full decade with over a hundred thousand troops permanently involved. In this period at least twenty-five thousand Russian troops were killed. Over one million Afghans lost their lives in the conflict. An important question is who pushed Brezhnev, at that time in poor health, to take the decision to invade Afghanistan. In the politburo meeting of December 12, 1979, in which the decision was taken, Kosygin, who opposed an intervention, was absent. Many point to KGB chief Yury Andropov as the main instigator. Artyom Borovik, for instance, wrote: “Many servicemen and MID [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] workers told me that the script for the events in Afghanistan was written by the KGB. Initially, Andropov was against the idea of an invasion, but eventually he followed the same reflex that he’d learned some twenty years earlier in Hungary, where he served as an ambassador and where troops had to be sent in 1956.”[7] This interpretation is supported by Svetlana Savranskaya, a political analyst.
The decision to send troops was made on the basis of limited information. According to Soviet veterans of the events, KGB sources were trusted over the military intelligence (GRU) sources. This partly reflected the growing influence of the KGB chairman Yu. V. Andropov, who controlled the flow of information to General Secretary Brezhnev, who was partially incapacitated and ill for most of 1979. KGB reports from Afghanistan created a picture of urgency and strongly emphasized the possibility of Amin’s links to the CIA and U.S. subversive activities in the region.[8]
It seemed, indeed, that the personal memorandum, sent in early December 1979 by Andropov to Brezhnev, determined Brezhnev’s decision.[9] Anatoly Dobrynin, former Soviet ambassador to the United States, shared this view.[10] This confirms the observation made by Thierry Wolton that “the Kremlin knew the external world over the borders as if over the high walls of a citadel through the prism of what was reported to it by the KGB. The Organs, in this way, could manipulate the members of the Central Committee and the Politburo, which, in the closed Soviet universe, was a sacred power.”[11]
The Soviet military, however, was not happy with the decision to invade Afghanistan. When, on December 10, 1979, Dmitry Ustinov, the defense minister, informed the chief of the General Staff, Nikolay Ogarkov, of the plan, the latter ”was surprised and outraged by such a decision.” He said he was “against the introduction of troops, calling it ‘reckless.’”[12] Georgy M. Kornienko, who at that time was deputy foreign minister under Gromyko, wrote, referring to the position taken by his boss in the politburo meeting on December 12, 1979: “From my conversations with him, already after the introduction of troops, I concluded that it was not Gromyko who said ‘A’ in favour of such decision, but that he was ‘pressured’ into it by Andropov and Ustinov together. Which one of those two was the first to change their initial point of view and spoke in favour of sending troops, one may only guess.”[13] It is a fair guess to assume that it was ultimately Yury Andropov who pushed his colleagues in the politburo—including General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev—to take this decision. It was, eventually, Andropov’s seven hundred special forces of the KGB, stationed in Kabul, who made the opening move by attacking the presidential palace and killing Amin. The justification given by the Soviet government for its intervention: that it had been asked for support by the Afghan government, was rather dubious. It is true that in March 1979 President Taraki had asked the Soviet Union to intervene by sending troops. At that time, however, the Soviet leadership had reacted negatively to this request. In December Taraki was no longer there, and Amin, who had executed his predecessor and taken his place, was certainly not in favor of a Soviet intervention. It is, therefore, not surprising to hear that “the Soviet troops… suffered from the confusion about their goals—the initial official mission was to protect the PDPA regime; however, when the troops reached Kabul, their orders were to overthrow Amin and his regime.”[14]
If one reconstructs the events, it becomes clear that neither the Soviet military, nor the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, nor even Brezhnev himself, were at the roots of the fatal—and in the end self-defeating—decision to invade Afghanistan, but the KGB. The “Sadat” role that Andropov ascribed to Amin was probably a deliberate attempt at disinformation by this long-serving KGB chief to manipulate the Soviet leadership. It would not have been the first time. Already in 1956, when he was Soviet ambassador in Budapest, Andropov was one of the main instigators of the Soviet intervention, falsely informing Khrushchev, who initially was reluctant to intervene, that the Russian embassy was being attacked. In 1968 Andropov would again be among the hardliners who were in favor of sending Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.[15] Andropov, a highly intelligent man, was an undisputed expert in manipulation. Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Romanian two-star general, and the highest intelligence officer to have ever defected from the Soviet bloc, a man who knew Andropov personally, characterized him as follows:
5
Andreï Kozovoï,
6
J. Michael Waller,
7
Artyom Borovik,
8
Svetlana Savranskaya, ed., “The September 11th Sourcebooks, Volume II: Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War: The Soviet Experience in Afghanistan: Russian Documents and Memoirs,”
9
“Personal Memorandum, Andropov to Brezhnev, n.d. [early December 1979],”
12
Alexander Lyakhovsky,
13
Georgy M. Kornienko,
15
Cf. Brown,