The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden (epub e reader txt) 📕

when the Americans pulled out of Saigon. But that hadn’t happened, and one of the few men on the Soviet side who was convinced that it wouldn’t was Leonid Shebarshin, who ninety days after the withdrawal of 40th Army troops from Jalalabad was on an official visit to Kabul with Vladimir Kryuchkov, the new Chairman of the KGB.

There had not been a single Soviet soldier in Jalalabad since the May pullout—it had been determined to be too great a risk. But to Shebarshin’s amazement, Kryuchkov, another believer in the durability of the Najibullah regime, decided he would chance a quick run to Jalalabad. He and Shebarshin boarded a blacked-out Antonov AN-26 transport in Kabul after dark for the short flight to Jalalabad. Shebarshin felt self-conscious, awkward, and uncomfortable in the parachute he and the KGB Chairman were told to don, all the more so since he had no idea how the thing worked beyond the quick briefing he’d been given. Just jump out the door and pull the ring there on your chest and you’ll be fine, he’d been instructed. Nor did he draw much comfort from the pistol strapped to his side. If he jumped, he thought, he’d probably lose it. Shebarshin decided such thoughts were unworthy of a man, but then again for the sake of objectivity they should at least be noted, he would later say.

As the Antonov lifted off the runway, the pilot put it into a series of steep climbing turns that seemed to take almost twenty minutes before the lumbering turboprop transport was above the effective range of the Stinger gunners. As they leveled off for the short flight along the Kabul River, the historic route of retreat of a doomed British Army almost a century and a half earlier, Shebarshin could see flashes of artillery and small-arms fire like blinking matches twenty thousand feet below. Almost as soon as the Antonov had reached altitude, it began its descent into Jalalabad, using the same gut-wrenching spiraling motion, but this time downward. As soon as they pulled to a grinding halt at the end of the runway, engines still turning, the passengers were whisked out to a waiting car. The Antonov then wheeled around and took off into the night sky; it had been on the ground in Jalalabad for no more than a minute.

Kryuchkov and Shebarshin were put up for the next two nights in the family residence of Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani, the Afghan resistance leader. The rebel leader’s home had been damaged by occupation troops over the years, but the staff still spoke of their old master with a tone of reverence. It wouldn’t take much to fix it up after the war was over, Shebarshin decided as he surveyed the elegant old house.

The next day was surreal, sheer make-believe as they toured in and around Jalalabad, meeting with Afghan officials and troops in the field. In the stifling heat of the Jalalabad plain, they pinned medals on rows of khaki chests and heard the same half-believed mantra that everything was okay. Everything was under control. Here and there were fading red posters extolling inevitable victory. Muslim fatalism, thought Shebarshin as he absorbed the scene.

The second night, a blacked-out Antonov dropped into Jalalabad to pick up the two VIPs for the return to Kabul. The two men were rushed aboard and in seconds were in a spiraling ascent above the city to safety and the corridor home. After takeoff, the crew noted in the log that large-caliber tracer fire followed their ascent until they were above the range of any weapons known to be in the bandits’ hands. At 2245 hours, they were back on the ground in Kabul.

First Chief Directorate Headquarters, August 15, 1988

Back in Moscow, Leonid Shebarshin mused over another one of the many distractions of a war coming to an end. A freebooting militia commander in Paktia Province near the Pakistan border, a man of constantly shifting allegiances, had captured an Air Force colonel when his Sukhoi-25 was shot down near the Pakistani border about ten days earlier. Negotiations had been under way since the day after the shoot-down for a cash ransom for the release of the colonel. Shebarshin was aware it would cost a tidy sum to secure the freedom of a full colonel, certainly more than might be paid for a lieutenant, but it was worth it to get a brave officer out of captivity. Too many pilots had died at the hands of the bandits over the years, and now it seemed that everybody was willing to make a deal.

The Paktia shoot-down was a case in point. Within hours of the incident, a message had been delivered to the 40th Army and to the KGB that a white-haired colonel was safe and sound and that those holding him were ready for a trade. Now all that had to be done was the haggling over the price. Not a bad way for a pilot to end his own war, particularly considering the alternatives, Shebarshin thought. He scanned the report until he found the colonel’s name. He decided he didn’t know the man.

Islamabad, August 15, 1988

The operation to extract the downed Su-25 from Paktia had gone well, as had the bargaining over the pilot. The pickup trucks and the rocket launchers were handed over in return for the plane and the pilot. We never sought access to captured Soviet pilots or other troops unless they stated clearly to the Pakistanis that they wanted to defect to us. Memories of Soviet interrogations of U.S. POWs in Vietnam and Korea were fresh enough, and the policy was that there would be no direct American interference with captured Soviet combatants. The previous year, we had assisted in the resettlement of three Soviet soldiers who had been held by the mujahideen for more than a year and finally decided they wanted to resettle in the West. They ended up in Canada, but we helped process them into the resettlement