Physical fitness and bravery became a powerful feature of the VDV’s self-image – with its members building themselves up in the gym, perfecting their own form of unarmed combat, and encouraging boxing, a sport in which Sergei Skripal excelled. He competed at national level in the army championships.
As if the gym, troop training, and staff work were not enough, the officers in Fergana and their families also enjoyed a close-knit social life. The military cantonments established by the tsars in the nineteenth century were outposts surrounded by warlike tribes and guerrilla bands. Even in 1976, when Skripal arrived, it had retained that frontier feeling. Most local people were Uzbek and they socialized little with the officers and men of the 345th Regiment.
When days off or holidays allowed, Skripal’s young family and those of brother officers would find a quiet spot for a picnic, spreading blankets in the shade, savouring shashlik, sweet melon, and beer. A fellow regimental officer’s wife recalled that posting and the time:
The best years of my life were the late 1970s when we were living in Fergana… we often used to eat very late, because the men were working so hard. But we wives would cook together, laughing and talking while we were doing it, and then we often used to eat out of doors in the cool of the evening. We all had small children, and they grew up together. During the day we would go to the bazaar and buy fruit and vegetables.
Returning from an exercise, Skripal had discovered that during one of these trips to the local market some Uzbeks living near the garrison had been calling out lewdly, disrespecting Liudmila and other regimental wives as they passed in the street. Skripal and a few others decided to take matters into their own hands. ‘I went with a few paratroopers and found the guys responsible,’ he explained, ‘we beat them up – after that everything was relaxed.’
Life with the paratroopers in Fergana provided Skripal with a chance to live out many of his childhood ideas of chivalry and heroism. The VDV moreover gave you every chance to be a muzhik – a real man. He leapt out of aeroplanes, boxed for the honour of his chosen corps, cherished time with his little boy, and defended his woman’s honour. And he was still only in his late twenties. But events were afoot that would end this idyll in Fergana.
To the south, affairs in Afghanistan were taking an increasingly violent and unpredictable turn. The Kremlin had welcomed a coup in April 1978 that had brought communists – or the nearest to them that Afghanistan could muster – into power. These events were watched with intense interest in Fergana. Pretty soon the activities of Moscow’s socialist allies in Afghanistan triggered mass desertions in the army and revolt across the mountainous country. Stirred up by radical clerics, many Afghans feared the communists formed an existential threat for Islam and their traditional, largely rural, way of life.
From the outset, Moscow had wanted to empower and indeed arm the ‘progressives’ to the south. But the question soon emerged, which ones? Within the Afghan ruling party there was intense and violent factionalism. Sending advisers into Afghanistan, and expanding its intelligence network there, the Soviet Union began to see the possibility for a complete disaster – for the Afghan revolution to be overwhelmed by infighting and rural jihad.
Soviet intelligence agencies suspected the country’s defence minister, Hafizullah Amin, of being a CIA agent and an adventurer bent on seizing power. They believed he was using his influence in this key post to neutralize officers loyal to the president, and implicitly to Moscow, and replace them with people personally loyal to him. Many of Amin’s faction, the GRU believed, were American-trained officers who had benefited from educational programmes offered by the US in the 1950s and 1960s when Afghanistan sought a middle way between the Cold War rivals.
It was the GRU’s desire to take a decisive role in Afghanistan’s faction fight that would draw then Captain Skripal to the ‘dark’ side of covert operations and intelligence work.
Assigned a role in a small team of spetsnaz operatives, Skripal described to me a trip to Afghanistan under civilian cover. He suggested it had taken place late in 1978, though my own knowledge of Afghan events suggests early 1979 may have been more likely. They flew into the country on a regular service and of course wore casual clothes. Much about this mission remains unclear – not least the place and precise time when the team would strike. However the targets were mainly US-trained pilots, so we might assume the mission took place at or near one of Afghanistan’s air bases. Skripal himself was deliberately sketchy about details even when discussing it many years later. As a newcomer to this type of operation, perhaps he was cast in one of the more junior roles. Their objective was to kill several Afghan officers who’d been trained by the Americans.
The GRU brass who assigned them this assassination mission apparently assumed that its success would scotch the meddling CIA and at the same time neutralize some of Afghan Defence Minister Amin’s plans. Suffice to say that Skripal and his fellow operatives carried out their assigned role, killing the Afghans. But that did not stop either Hafizullah Amin’s seizure of power in October 1979 or the Soviet Union’s full-scale intervention in Afghanistan at the end of that year.
Even by the late summer of 1979, one battalion belonging to the 345th Guards Airborne had already deployed from Fergana to Bagram air base north of the Afghan capital, where its role was to protect Soviet advisers and aircraft. Once the rest of the regiment followed, as part of the full-scale invasion, the 345th became the elite ‘fire brigade’ unit of the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, fighting in many of the key actions of the decade-long conflict there. With its commitment to combat, the carefree days in Fergana came to an end, and over the course of its campaigns in Afghanistan, the regiment would lose hundreds of soldiers. Many would also be decorated for heroism, some even winning the coveted gold star medal, the Hero of the Soviet Union.
Like any fighting soldier, particularly one who had built up such close personal ties with many of his regimental colleagues, Skripal would have relished the possibility of going into action with them. But earlier in 1979, months before the invasion, he had been summoned elsewhere. He was to undergo a further stage in his metamorphosis from combat engineer to GRU spy.
3
INTO THE DARKNESS
In the Soviet or Russian military system the concept of razvedka embraces everything from the reconnaissance of a soldier creeping stealthily into no man’s land to a colonel serving in the embassy in Madrid under diplomatic cover. Either way, their mission is gaining information that will be useful to the General Staff, and therefore their country. ‘The GRU has two levels,’ Skripal explained, ‘tactical level, soldiers and spetsnaz, and strategic level, the higher-level service.’ By his decision to seek airborne training, taking part in reconnaissance missions in China, and finally his undercover task in Afghanistan, he had stepped through the ‘tactical’ levels of military intelligence-gathering; now, in 1979, near the end of his twenties, he had been called to something higher. The consequences for him and his whole family would be enormous.
At the time he joined it the GRU had thirty-five thousand people, Skripal estimated. A big proportion of these were at the tactical level, the special-forces brigades in various military districts. Others were involved in collecting signals intelligence, operating satellites, and so on. The ‘strategic workers’ constituted an elite of several thousand within the GRU. In the Soviet Army this service was considered particularly honourable; it was highly selective; and those who went into it had a life of privilege. As far as their friends and families were concerned there was something else too: it was important national work free from the taint of being a ‘chekist’, or member of the KGB. Although the secret police established after the Revolution soon changed its name, the acronym VChKP for its first incarnation lived on, in the term ‘chekist’, and was indeed used with pride by the organization’s members during the Soviet period.