To that end, and on a very clandestine basis, America began arming and supporting the mujahaddin and soon Central Asia was crawling with every intelligence outfit in the civilized world: the Chinese, the Iranians, the French, the Italians, Pakistan’s ISI, of course — and MI6. Jock, for example, because of his background in the military, was instrumental in training senior members of the resistance in combat techniques, even flying some senior mujahaddin figures to the Highlands of Scotland for exercises with the SAS. If there was a difference in the American and British approaches to the war, it lay in operations like these. While we tended to view the conflict as essentially ideological — a stepping-stone, if you like, on the way to winning the Cold War — MI6 took a more traditional approach, seeing Afghanistan as an opportunity to recruit Soviet military and government personnel as agents who would return to Moscow and bring them valuable intelligence in five or ten years’ time. Meanwhile, Reagan, Casey and later Bob Gates were still playing The Great Game, trying to manipulate the future of an entire continent by playing factions off against one another.
Ben stopped reading and took the letter upstairs. He wondered when Bone was going to get to the point. Most of what he was saying had been reported, ad nauseam, in the papers after 9/11, articles that Ben had tended to skip through laziness. Was this just another stranger promising to throw light on the mystery of Christopher Keen? At least Bone had managed to get over the page. The sheer bulk of his letter was impressive, if only because many of the others had been so inconsequential. He poured himself a glass of water and continued reading in the studio.
Your father and I were posted to Kabul in the late winter of 1984, about a year before the introduction of the American Stinger missile drastically turned the tide of the war in favor of the mujahaddin. Christopher was an undeclared SIS officer working out of the British Embassy while I operated under cover of a Dutch aid organization which was predominantly a front for American espionage activity. It was a coincidence that we were there at the same time and while I spent a lot of hours on the road, shuttling between Peshawar and Kabul, we still managed to see quite a bit of each other and I was grateful to have a friend out there. What fascinated both of us about the invasion was the opportunity it provided to see the Soviet forces at first hand — how they operated in a military situation and so forth. (Don’t forget that this is the height of the Cold War, when the Soviets were still thought of as the Great Satan by Reagan and Thatcher.) A lot of people would be embarrassed to admit this in light of what happened within five or six years, but there were still a lot of high-profile individuals who gave credence to the idea that the Soviet Empire was aggressively expansionist and posed a serious threat to Western democracy.
What we discovered was that the Soviet machine was anything but effective. The army was riddled with corruption and petty crime. Drug and alcohol abuse were endemic and the conditions under which most soldiers were forced to live wouldn’t have been unfamiliar to a hostage in downtown Beirut. Added to that you had non-Slavic elements in the Soviet army who were Muslims not only hostile to the Communist system as a whole but also being asked to fight their own people — ethnic Tajik, Uzbek and Turkmen Afghans who were their Muslim brethren. It was a crazy situation.
Now as an intelligence officer, a situation like that looks like a big opportunity — and that’s how your father saw it. Pretty soon his whole raison d’etre for being out in Central Asia was to recruit members of the Soviet armed forces and medical staff as agents for British Intelligence. The Russians had made Afghanistan into a big black market and soldiers with nothing better to do would just wander around bartering gasoline, food rations, military clothing and footwear, even selling their own weapons and ammunition to get hold of drugs or alcohol. So it was possible for an experienced intelligence operative, fluent in Russian as your dad was, to engineer situations in which he encountered the enemy at first hand.
One individual like this was a young soldier who began there and then to spill his guts about everything that had been happening, not aware who your father really was, and probably not caring too much either. His name was Mischa Kostov and Christopher couldn’t have known it at the time but he was just about the best potential Soviet agent he was ever going to get his hands on. Mischa — I never met him, of course, but I know he was a sweet kid — was recruited to the army at the age of twenty, and drafted, I think, in April of ’85. As he told it to your father, he’d done about ten weeks of basic training in desert and mountain warfare at a camp in Termez before being sent by train to a Soviet assembly point in Ashkhabad and then on to Kabul by air. This was standard procedure and at this point in his military career the kid’s excited — not only does he get to serve Mother Russia, but the future looks rosy once he gets home. Afghan veterans were given preferential treatment when it came to getting jobs or a place at a good university, a decent apartment in Moscow. Added to that, a guy from the Russian army serves two years in Afghanistan, it’s counted as the equivalent of six back home, so if everything goes OK, Mischa is on to a fast-track promotion and treble his salary.
Only he finds there were guys in his unit who are only fighting for personal gain. There’s nothing ideological going on. Mischa’s a young man and he’s starting to realize that this is a selfish world we live in, that everybody’s out for themselves. Patriotism? Forget it. Most of his comrades have been told they’re going to Afghanistan to fight Iranian and Chinese mercenaries, to build kindergartens and schools for Afghan kids. And then they get there and see that this is bullshit. The soldiers are bored, too, restless and — in 85/86 — increasingly conscious that they’re never going to win the war. These are men quite a bit younger than yourself, Ben, with no women around and nothing to do but smoke hashish or opium, maybe shoot up some koknar. Sure we smoked some weed in Vietnam, but Afghanistan was like goddam Woodstock. The Agency later estimated that at least half a million young Soviet men were exposed to narcotics of one kind or another while serving tours of duty in Afghanistan. And when they went back home, they took that problem with them.
Then, of course, there was alcohol. These are Russians, after all. At one point — independent of Christopher and Mischa — I interrogated a Soviet soldier who told me the guys on his unit used to drink eau de cologne, antifreeze, glue, even brake fluid just to get themselves drunk. But far as your dad could tell, Mischa was more clear-headed. The army was rife with smug gling, pillaging, reprisals, torture, but he stayed out of it, keeping his head down. Only the gradual effect of the corruption on his morale was taking its toll and that’s what your father relied on, that’s the cynical line we had to take. There were men coming into Mischa’s unit from the front lines every day and the stories they had to tell were just horrifying. Hygiene, for one, non-existent. Here they are trying to fight one of the most sophisticated, battle-hardened resistance armies in history and the Russian soldiers are having to contend with dysentery, hepatitis, yellow jaundice, malaria, typhus, skin infections brought about simply by not having access to a shower or even hot water — sometimes for a month at a time. Clean sheets, clean underwear, are unheard of for these men. When they eat, it’s off aluminum plates that haven’t been cleaned in weeks. In the desert areas there’s sand and lice everywhere, heatstroke and dehydration, then frostbite in winter. Mischa was tough, and he could cope with this, but what he couldn’t stand was listening night after night to guys who were being destroyed by war.
After a while he was posted west towards the border with Iran and became involved in some of the heaviest fighting any unit had known out there. Your father began to worry that he wasn’t going to make it back. Forgive me for saying this, Ben, but I think in a sense Mischa had become almost like a son to him. Of course he did return to Kabul and it was then that he told Christopher that several of his comrades had come into conflict with older soldiers in their unit. The Soviet army has what they call ‘stariki’, veterans who, regardless of rank or ability, have an unwritten right to make life as tough as they can for younger conscripts. If you’d served less than six months in the army, it could get rough and young recruits, some of whom were just sixteen or seventeen years old, were forced to scrub toilets with toothbrushes, run around camp wearing gas masks until they fainted or just woken up in the dead of night for no better reason than that’s what the stariki wanted. The culture was so ingrained you could even get higher ranking officers at the mercy of their subordinates simply because they were younger or had served less time. And of course if they tried to complain to their commanding officers the treatment was only going to get worse. The irony was that these soldiers were out there to fight the mujahaddin, but their real enemy turned out to be themselves.