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

your Central Asians, he said, nobody will even notice. Thus the Soviet military adventure in Afghanistan began incrementally. First there was the deployment in June of a battalion of Soviet Central Asians dispatched in to “guard Soviet installations.” They were followed by another detachment of airborne troops in July. Then Andropov sent in a unit of KGB special operations troops the same month.

KGB reporting during the summer of 1979 grew increasingly alarmist, with declarations that the military situation was out of control. There was always the suggestion that the American hand was behind the troubles, particularly after Amin succeeded in his widely predicted move against Taraki. After surviving two attempts on his life and brutally consolidating his power within the Kabul structure, Amin ordered Taraki killed in October. The KGB concluded that America’s man was now fully in charge in Kabul, and by the time the first snows had fallen in 1979, the analysis of a looming, American-fomented disaster on the USSR’s vulnerable underbelly had seized the imagination of the Politburo. GRU reporting from the Afghan capital countered the gloomy KGB dispatches in those critical months, but it was ignored.

Leonid Brezhnev was outraged by Taraki’s murder just days after his warm reception in Moscow, during which Brezhnev had assured Taraki that he would “take care of him.” Taking the assassination as a personal insult, the ailing Soviet leader shifted his position in favor of a military response. Andropov, whose KGB had worked behind the scenes to remove Amin over the summer, including the two failed attempts on his life, also took Taraki’s murder personally, and with Brezhnev coming on board, the course for intervention was set.

Events began to move rapidly in the fall. In late October, the KGB sent specialist teams throughout Afghanistan to conduct Operation Zenith, a polling effort to determine popular reaction to a Soviet military intervention. KGB reporting now focused on the proposition that Hafizullah Amin was sliding into the Western camp, adding a new spin that a bridgehead in Afghanistan would give the United States a much needed base for the ultimate invasion of Iran as punishment for the hostage taking by the ayatollahs. The encirclement of the USSR by American missiles would be complete, and Afghanistan’s “loss” would spark similar problems for the USSR among the “fraternal” nations of the Warsaw Pact. The fact that none of this was true was simply no longer in consideration.

On December 12, 1979, the Politburo met and formally ratified the proposal to send in the Army. Defense Minister Ustinov, KGB Chairman Andropov, and Foreign Minister Gromyko signed the order to dispatch a “limited contingent.” Brezhnev’s close confidant Konstantin Chernenko wrote out by hand a short protocol endorsing the proposal to intervene, entitling it “Concerning the Situation in ‘A’”; he then asked all Politburo members present to sign diagonally across the text. Brezhnev, who joined the meeting late, was the last to pen his shaky signature across the document.

Operations Oak and Storm were launched on Christmas Eve, and there would be no turning back. Amin was killed, and the new Soviet “emir of Afghanistan,” Babrak Karmal, was installed in a military operation that went like clockwork even though it was devised on the fly, as grand entrances by foreign armies into Afghanistan have generally been over the centuries. Going into Afghanistan had been a breeze, but then it always happened that way.

That was how it had all started almost seven years ago. Gorbachev had given the Army leeway to do what it had to to get the job done militarily in 1985, but even that hadn’t translated into measurable gains on the ground—just a more costly stalemate. Now it was time to get out, and Chernyaev had to manage the road map for a clean exit and to keep his job in the process. He had his work cut out for him.

Gorbachev had made his first move in the fall of 1985 at a Politburo meeting, when he read moving passages from emotion-filled letters from mothers who had lost sons in Afghanistan. Chernyaev noted in his diary that Gorbachev raised the emotional pitch while sidestepping the underlying question of whether the entire venture had been a mistake from the start. He first questioned the Afghan policy publicly in February 1986, at the Twenty-seventh Party Congress, and would raise the stakes again the following week in a speech in Vladivostok, when he described Afghanistan as a “bleeding wound.”

There would be no turning back after that.

First Chief Directorate Headquarters, Yasenevo, August 1986

For the last two years, Leonid Vladimirovich Shebarshin had had the taxing job of making sense of a badly managed war. As deputy chief of the First Chief Directorate’s Analytical Department, and as the KGB’s most experienced general officer in South and Central Asia, Shebarshin was doing his best to inject a small dose of something not much in evidence when the Politburo had decided to invade Afghanistan seven years earlier—reality. His mission was to help get the Army out of Afghanistan while leaving behind a friendly government. It was a tall order, Shebarshin concluded, a political challenge rather than a military objective.

Handsome at just over six feet, with thick black hair and piercing eyes, Shebarshin, at fifty, had spent most of his professional life in Asia. After graduating from the Oriental faculty of the Institute of Foreign Relations at Moscow University in 1958, he took a Foreign Ministry posting to Pakistan. He returned to Moscow four years later, making the shift so many of the Foreign Ministry’s most capable young diplomats seemed to be making in those days—into the KGB. He joined their foreign intelligence arm, the First Chief Directorate. After two years of training, Shebarshin was off on an unbroken thirteen-year run in South Asia, alternating between the KGB Rezidenturas in Pakistan and India. After a stint at Moscow Center, he was posted as KGB Rezident in Iran, arriving in Teheran just as the tortured decision-making process leading to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was gathering speed in