Ghost Wars (9 page)

Hafizullah Amin’s ascension launched a tragicomedy of suspicion and miscalculation within the KGB. KGB handlers working out of the Kabul Residency had kept both Taraki and Amin on their payroll for years, sometimes meeting their clients secretly in parked cars on the city’s streets.
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After Amin gained power, however, he became imperious. Among other transgressions he sought authority from the KGB to withdraw funds from Afghanistan’s foreign bank accounts, which had about $400 million on deposit, according to KGB records. Frustrated and hoping to discredit him, the KGB initially planted false stories that Amin was a CIA agent.

In the autumn these rumors rebounded on the KGB in a strange case of “blowback,” the term used by spies to describe planted propaganda that filters back to confuse the country that first set the story loose. For reasons that remain unclear, Amin held a series of private meetings in Kabul that fall with American diplomats. When the KGB learned of these meetings, its officers feared that their own false rumors about Amin might be true. A document from India circulating that autumn noted that when he lived in New York, Amin had been affiliated with the Asia Foundation, which had a history of contacts with the CIA. As the weeks passed, some KGB officers examined the possibility that Amin might be an American plant sent to infiltrate the Afghan Communist Party. They also picked up reports that Amin might be seeking a political compromise with Afghanistan’s Islamic rebels. Of course, this was the approach the KGB itself had been urging on Taraki from Moscow earlier in the year. Now, suddenly, it looked suspicious. KGB officers feared Amin might be trying to curry favor with America and Pakistan.
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The KGB sent a written warning to Brezhnev about Amin in November. The Kabul Residency feared “an intended shift” of Afghan foreign policy “to the right,” meaning into closer alignment with the United States. Amin “has met with the U.S. chargé d’affaires a number of times, but he has given no indication of the subject of these talks in his meetings with Soviet representatives.”
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For their part, the Americans in Kabul regarded Amin as a dangerous tyrant. They held Amin partly responsible for the murder of Adolph Dubs, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, who had been kidnapped and shot to death in a Kabul hotel room earlier in 1979. Still, U.S. diplomats inside the embassy were aware of the rumors that Amin was a CIA agent. There was enough concern and confusion about this question among State Department diplomats in the embassy that before his murder, Ambassador Dubs had asked his CIA station chief point-blank whether there was any foundation to the rumors. He was told emphatically that Amin had never worked for the CIA, according to J. Bruce Amstutz, who was Dubs’s deputy at the time and became U.S. chargé d’affaires after his death. Officers in the Near East Division of the CIA, who would have handled Amin if he were on the agency payroll, also said later that they had no contacts with him when he lived in New York or later, other then casual discussions at diplomatic receptions. No evidence has yet surfaced to contradict these assertions.
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That fateful autumn, however, Amstutz did meet five times with Amin in private. Their discussions were stilted and unproductive, Amstutz recalled years later. Far from tilting toward the United States, Amstutz found the Afghan communist leader uncompromisingly hostile. Amin had twice failed his doctoral examination at Columbia, and in Amstutz’s estimation, this humiliation left him angry and resentful toward Americans.

CIA officers working in the Kabul station concentrated most of their efforts on Soviet targets, not Afghan communists. Their principal mission in Kabul for years had been to steal Soviet military secrets, especially the operating manuals of new Soviet weapons systems, such as the MiG-21 fighter jet. They also tried to recruit KGB agents and communist bloc diplomats onto the agency’s payroll. Toward this end the CIA case officers joined a six-on-six international soccer league for spies and diplomats sponsored by the German Club in Kabul. The officers spent comparatively little time cultivating Afghan sources or reporting on intramural Afghan politics. As a result the CIA had failed to predict Afghanistan’s initial 1978 communist coup.
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The agency still had relatively few Afghan sources. “What Are the Soviets Doing in Afghanistan?” asked a Top Secret/Codeword memorandum sent to National Security Adviser Brzezinski by Thomas Thornton in September 1979 that drew on all available U.S. intelligence. “Simply, we don’t know,” the memo began.
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The KGB fared no better in assessing American intentions. Knowing that Amin had been meeting with U.S. diplomats in secret but unable to learn the content of those discussions, KGB officers concluded that the CIA had begun to work with Amin to manipulate Kabul’s government. The KGB officers in Afghanistan then convinced their superiors in Moscow that drastic measures had to be undertaken: Amin should be killed or otherwise removed from office to save the Afghan revolution from CIA penetration.

In a personal memorandum to Brezhnev, KGB chief Andropov explained why. “After the coup and the murder of Taraki in September of this year, the situation in the party, the army and the government apparatus has become more acute, as they were essentially destroyed as a result of the mass repressions carried out by Amin. At the same time, alarming information started to arrive about Amin’s secret activities, forewarning of a possible political shift to the West.” These included, Andropov wrote, “contacts with an American agent about issues which are kept secret from us.” In Andropov’s fevered imagination, the CIA’s recruitment of Amin was part of a wider unfolding plot by the agency “to create a ‘New Great Ottoman Empire’ including the southern republics of the Soviet Union.” With a base secured in Afghanistan, the KGB chief feared, as he wrote confidentially, that the United States could point Pershing nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union’s southern underbelly, where its air defenses were weak. Iran and Pakistan might go nuclear as well with American support and push into Central Asia. To prevent this, Andropov advised, the Soviet Union must act decisively to replace Amin and shore up Afghan communism.
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In the end Andropov and the rest of Brezhnev’s inner circle concluded the best way to achieve these goals would be to assassinate Amin and mount a military invasion of Afghanistan, installing new and more responsive Afghan communist leaders. KGB fears about Amin’s reliability were by no means the only factor in this decision. Without direct military support from Moscow, the broader Afghan government faced collapse because of desertions from its army. If communism in Afghanistan was to be saved, Moscow had to act decisively. Yet Politburo records also make clear that KGB fears about Amin’s loyalty played a role in this analysis. The questions about Amin accelerated the timetable for decision-making, encouraged the Politburo’s inner circle to think they faced devious CIA intrigues in Kabul, and helped convince them that only drastic measures could succeed.

Meeting in Moscow, the Politburo’s inner circle made the first tentative decision to invade on November 26, 1979, just five days after the Jamaat student mob had sacked the U.S. embassy in Islamabad and three weeks after Iranian students had seized hostages at the besieged American embassy in Tehran.

Clandestine Soviet military and KGB units began to infiltrate Afghanistan early in December to prepare for the assault. On December 7, Babrak Karmal, the exiled Afghan communist selected by the KGB to replace Amin, secretly arrived at Bagram air base on a Tu-134 aircraft, protected by KGB officers and Soviet paratroopers. KGB assassins began to case Amin’s residence. Operatives first sought to poison Amin by penetrating his kitchen, but Amin had by now grown so paranoid that he employed multiple food tasters, including members of his family. According to KGB records, the poisoning attempt succeeded only in sickening one of Amin’s nephews. The next day a sniper shot at Amin and missed. Frustrated, the KGB fell back on plans to stage a massive frontal assault on Amin’s residence once the broader Soviet military invasion began.
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The CIA had been watching Soviet troop deployments in and around Afghanistan since the summer, and while its analysts were divided in assessing Soviet political intentions, the CIA reported steadily and accurately about Soviet military moves. By mid-December ominous large-scale Soviet deployments toward the Soviet-Afghan border had been detected by U.S. intelligence. CIA director Turner sent President Carter and his senior advisers a classified “Alert” memo on December 19, warning that the Soviets had “crossed a significant threshold in their growing military involvement in Afghanistan” and were sending more forces south. Three days later deputy CIA director Bobby Inman called Brzezinski and Defense Secretary Harold Brown to report that the CIA had no doubt the Soviet Union intended to undertake a major military invasion of Afghanistan within seventy-two hours.
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Antonov transport planes loaded with Soviet airborne troops landed at Kabul’s international airport as darkness fell on Christmas Eve. Pontoon regiments working with the Soviet Fortieth Army laid floating bridges across the Amu Darya River near Termez in the early hours of Christmas morning, and the first Soviet tanks rolled across the border. As regular Soviet forces fanned out, more than seven hundred KGB paramilitaries dressed in Afghan army uniforms launched an operation to kill Hafizullah Amin and his closest aides, and to install new leadership in the Afghan Communist Party. Dozens of KGB officers were killed before they finally battled their way inside Amin’s Kabul palace and gunned him down.
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FROM THE VERY FIRST HOURS after cables from the U.S. embassy in Kabul confirmed that a Soviet invasion had begun, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s most determined cold warrior, wondered if this time the Soviets had overreached. Brzezinski and his colleagues knew nothing about the KGB’s fears of CIA plotting. They interpreted the invasion as a desperate act of support for the Afghan communists and as a possible thrust toward the Persian Gulf. As he analyzed American options, Brzezinski was torn. He hoped the Soviets could be punished for invading Afghanistan, that they could be tied down and bloodied the way the United States had been in Vietnam. Yet he feared the Soviets would crush the Afghans mercilessly, just as they had crushed the Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechs in 1968.

In a discursive memo to Carter written on the day after Christmas, classified Secret and titled “Reflections on Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan,” Brzezinski worried that the Soviets might not be plagued by the self-doubts and self-criticisms that had constrained American military tactics in Vietnam. “We should not be too sanguine about Afghanistan becoming a Soviet Vietnam,” he wrote. “The guerrillas are badly organized and poorly led. They have no sanctuary, no organized army, and no central government—all of which North Vietnam had. They have limited foreign support, in contrast to the enormous amount of arms that flowed to the Vietnamese from both the Soviet Union and China. The Soviets are likely to act decisively, unlike the U.S. which pursued in Vietnam a policy of ‘inoculating’ the enemy.

“What is to be done?” Brzezinski then asked. He sketched out a new Afghan policy,much of it to be carried out in secret. He drew on the plans developed earlier in the year at the White House and CIA to channel medical kits and other aid to the Afghan rebels. “It is essential that Afghanistan’s resistance continues,” he wrote. “This means more money as well as arms shipments to the rebels, and some technical advice. To make the above possible we must both reassure Pakistan and encourage it to help the rebels. This will require a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and, alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy. We should encourage the Chinese to help the rebels also. We should concert with Islamic countries both in a propaganda campaign and in a covert action campaign to help the rebels.”
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Disguised KGB paramilitaries were still chasing Hafizullah Amin through the hallways of his Kabul palace, Soviet tanks had barely reached their first staging areas, and Brzezinski had already described a CIA-led American campaign in Afghanistan whose broad outlines would stand for a decade to come.

“Our ultimate goal is the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan,” Brzezinski wrote in a Top Secret memo a week later. “Even if this is not attainable, we should make Soviet involvement as costly as possible.”
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Anti-Soviet fever swept Washington, arousing support for a new phase of close alliance between the United States and Pakistan. Together they would challenge the Soviets across the Khyber Pass, much as the British had challenged czarist Russia on the same Afghan ground a century before.

Yet for the American staff left behind to work near the charred campus of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, half a day’s drive from the Khyber, the Soviet invasion was a doubly bitter turn of events. They were shocked by Moscow’s hegemonic violence and at the same time angry that Pakistani dictator Zia-ul-Haq would benefit.

The diplomats and CIA officers in Islamabad had spent much of December burning compromised documents and reorganizing their shattered offices in makeshift quarters at a U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) compound near the burned embassy grounds. Worried about another attack on their offices by rioters, the CIA had shipped back to Langley decades’ worth of index cards filled with names and details of contacts and agents.

It took more diplomatic fortitude than many of them possessed to suddenly embrace Zia as a strategic partner. As many inside the embassy saw it, the Pakistani general had left them for dead on that Wednesday afternoon in November. As Soviet armor rolled into Afghanistan, there were sarcastic suggestions from the Islamabad CIA station of an alternative new American policy toward Pakistan: the secret export of hundreds of thousands of Russian dictionaries and phrase books to Islamabad for government use after the Soviet regional occupation was complete. They might be able to use a few of those Russian phrase books over at the student union of Quaid-I-Azam University, too.