The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

war a month after I’d arrived, that the stage was set. Now all we needed was a little luck.

The Kremlin, August 1986

Anatoly Chernyaev had one of the most daunting tasks in the Kremlin. As foreign policy aide to General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, his job was to guide the new Soviet leader through the political mine field blocking a speedy and graceful exit of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. The durable and imperturbable foreign policy expert knew the job had to be done, not only for his boss, but for the good of the USSR. From the day he signed on as Gorbachev’s foreign policy adviser a year earlier, he began to apply the common sense and political savvy he had developed over the last two decades in the Central Committee’s International Department to the USSR’s most consuming foreign policy issue—Afghanistan.

He knew the main obstacle to quitting Afghanistan was ideological—how to get out without looking beaten, as the Americans had in running away from Vietnam. Perhaps the Americans had the resilience to survive the loss of prestige, but the USSR didn’t. That was a fact. Chernyaev also knew that Gorbachev didn’t have the option of blaming the disaster of the Afghan enterprise on a string of dead predecessors. He couldn’t simply cut his losses and declare it had been a mistake from the beginning. Things weren’t done that way in the USSR. Maybe Khrushchev had pulled off attacking Josef Stalin’s years of tyranny in his “secret speech” a generation ago, but that had been an internal matter, not one that involved an issue as fundamental to Soviet policy as dismantling the Brezhnev Doctrine of never abandoning a fraternal socialist nation. Gorbachev would have to sidestep the issue of the decisions made seven years ago and chart a new course. Never mind that those decisions were colossal errors, based at least in part on intelligence from the KGB that bore scant resemblance to the truth. It wasn’t that the KGB didn’t know the realities, Chernyaev decided, it was that they reported what they thought Moscow wanted to hear.

During the course of 1979, KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov and Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov had come to two disturbing conclusions on Afghanistan. First, they had decided that the United States planned to establish military bases in Afghanistan to replace their listening posts in Iran, which they had lost when the shah was overthrown. Such a move, Andropov and Ustinov insisted, would forge yet another link in the chain of America’s encirclement of the Soviet Union. Their second conclusion was that Hafizullah Amin, Afghanistan’s foreign minister at the time, was maneuvering to displace Moscow’s own handpicked man in Kabul, Nur Muhammad Taraki, who had seized the presidency and the premiership in the April Revolution just a year earlier.

The threat to Taraki from Amin was viewed as all the more sinister by some in the Politburo because of a KGB black propaganda effort to malign Amin by portraying him as an agent of the CIA. The logic was compelling—after four years at Columbia University, Amin had to be a CIA agent. Once in power, the reasoning went, he would change camps, abandoning Afghanistan’s ties to the USSR and aligning with the United States. How long would it then be before U.S. intermediate-range Pershing missiles were aimed at the USSR from American bases in Afghanistan?

As was sometimes the case with propaganda efforts, the KGB operation against Amin backfired. About all it accomplished was to stir up more trouble in an already deeply divided People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and give the Moscow leadership one more bogus reason to complete the slide toward military intervention. In the end, the Politburo hard-liners swallowed the story of Amin being a CIA agent and added it to the growing list of reasons to take the plunge into Afghanistan. The fact that Amin was no friend of the United States, and even nursed a lifelong grudge against Columbia University for twice failing him in his doctoral thesis, was never factored into the equation. Amin was a central part of the problem, and that was that.

The mounting crisis had been brought home to the Politburo in monthly installments throughout 1979. In February, the American ambassador in Kabul, Adolph Dubs, was murdered during a failed rescue attempt after he’d been kidnapped by terrorists and held in the Hotel Kabul. The Soviet (and KGB) hand was visible in the cover-up—the three captured terrorists were summarily executed before American authorities could interrogate them. The autopsy showed that Dubs was shot several times in the head from a distance of about six inches, but the United States was able to do nothing beyond protest the use of force in freeing Dubs and cut off the remaining aid to Afghanistan, which it had intended to do anyway.

Then in March, Afghan warlord Isma’il Khan butchered a number of Soviet officers, soldiers, and their families in the ancient southwest Afghan city of Herat. After the Herat incident, Taraki pleaded for the USSR to send in a contingent of troops to put down the growing rebellion. That same month, Amin quietly took one of Taraki’s posts, appointing himself premier. The “CIA’s man in Kabul” was on the move, or so the advocates of intervention in the Politburo concluded.

Through the spring, Taraki’s pleas for Soviet military intervention were repeatedly rejected by the Kremlin, but the Politburo opened debate over Afghanistan in earnest after the Herat slaughter. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko initially declared that “under no circumstances” could the Soviet Union “lose” Afghanistan, a position he almost immediately reversed when he decided that if the USSR intervened in Afghanistan, the world would brand it the aggressor, détente with the West would collapse, and the USSR’s actions would be declared in violation of the tenets of the UN. Alexei Kosygin, the ailing seventy-five-year-old Premier, allied with Central Committee Secretary Andrei Kirilenko, led the opposition in the Politburo to any military intervention. They would not waver from that position throughout the debate.

But Taraki persisted. Send in