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

of the mujahideen parties had groups overlooking the capital from winter camps in the nearby hills, and it was clear that the stage was set for a siege after the last Soviet soldier stepped across Friendship Bridge. The foreign diplomatic community had drawn down to near zero over the last few months, and as the final date for the Soviet withdrawal came—February 15, 1989—the battle lines were drawn.

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Islamabad, 0700 Hours, February 15, 1989

I had been in my office since 0630 hours, waiting for relayed reports of the last day of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. I stood by my wall map, checking and rechecking the pins marking the locations of Soviet garrisons throughout the country, red for units still in-country, green for those already withdrawn. The whole of Afghanistan was now covered with green pins, with only a few red ones left in Kabul, in Mazar-e-Sharif, and along the main withdrawal route to the north, through the Salang tunnel and across the Shomali and Mazar-e-Sharif plains. Today it was over. Boris Gromov would walk out of Afghanistan, thus ending 3,331 days of senseless war.

I had received reports that Gromov had actually been in the Soviet Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan for the last couple of days and that he would fly down to a point on the road from Mazar to the Friendship Bridge at Termez to link up with the last column of the 40th Army on its way home. It was all to be carefully choreographed by the little general himself.

I waited as the reports came in.

Termez, Uzbekistan, February 15, 1989

General Boris Gromov wanted the arrangements to be just right. The international press had been shuttled from nearby Termez in Uzbekistan to a special media center, complete with a new covered pavilion overlooking Friendship Bridge. The body of a hapless young trooper killed the day before had been furtively carried across the bridge before the press had time to reason that his blanket-wrapped form represented the last Russian soldier killed in the war. The cameras of several dozen news services zoomed in on the center of the bridge, where a lone Soviet tank had pulled to a halt. The figure of General Boris Gromov jumped from the turret, pulled his battle-dress tunic smartly into place, and strode purposefully over the last hundred yards toward the Soviet side of the Oxus. Just before he reached the end of the bridge, his son Maksim, a slim, awkward fourteen-year-old, greeted his father with a stiff embrace and presented him with a bouquet of red carnations. Son and father marched the last fifty yards out of Afghanistan together. At that moment, Gromov became the USSR’s “hero of Afghanistan.”

I never understood why.

In the almost ten years of war, the Soviet Union admitted to having lost around fifteen thousand troops killed in action, with several hundred thousand wounded or disabled from disease. General Gromov’s brilliantly staged exit from Afghanistan would grow rapidly into a national disaster for the USSR, yet he was the hero of Afghanistan. The Soviet adventure ended as it began, with fantasy and make-believe.

Islamabad, February 15, 1989

My telecommunications chief stepped into my office with his report.

“He’s out.”

I nodded and said, “Send it now.”

And with that order we sent an immediate cable to Langley with two words etched out of Xs covering the whole page:

CITE: ISLAMABAD 222487

IMMEDIATE DIRECTOR

WNINTEL INTEL

SUBJECT: SOVIET OCCUPATION OF AFGHANISTAN

FILE DEFER:

That same night I ended a ritual. My office was about three-quarters of a mile away in a straight line from the Soviet embassy. Since I had arrived in Pakistan in the summer of 1986, I had kept a table lamp lit in my window twenty-four hours a day, covering a period now approaching three years. Word had come back to me from a number of sources that the KGB Rezident in the fortresslike Soviet embassy just a rifle shot away had often commented that my office appeared to be occupied at all times of the day or night. On one occasion, a KGB man had even said to me directly that he had noticed I worked late each evening, since the lights in my officer were always burning.

As the sun dropped beyond the Margalla Hills on the night of February 15, 1989, I turned off all the lights in my office, including the table lamp that had burned steadily for the last three years.

First Chief Directorate Headquarters, 1230 Hours, February 15, 1989

It was over. Fortieth Army commander General Boris Gromov’s staged exit from Afghanistan had profound propaganda value. It added a sense of finality, Shebarshin thought, to the final act of a drama that had turned to a tragedy. Before Gromov had made his dramatic return home as the symbolic last Soviet soldier to walk out of Afghanistan, there had been calls from Najibullah for a “small Soviet force to carry out limited functions.” There were additional calls for Soviet air strikes in eastern Afghanistan, in Paktia near Zhawar and Khowst, and at other bandit strongholds. But Shebarshin had been dead set against any more Soviet intervention. There was no stomach for more adventures in Afghanistan.

Leonid Shebarshin was under no illusions that the Soviet Union had acted nobly at the end of its Afghan adventure. On the contrary, he was convinced that Gromov’s splendid performance before the world press was just another step in the betrayal of Afghanistan. Betrayal or not, it was irreversible. The USSR would have to live with whatever deal Shevardnadze had cut in backroom meetings with his counterparts, George Shultz and James Baker. And eventually the USSR would have to live with its shame.

Shebarshin had been through it all, the good, what little there was of it, and all of the bad. He had been the KGB man on the spot in Kabul in May 1986, when the Soviet Union decided that its man Babrak Karmal was the source of the failures and had to go. But there was a problem. The old man