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

The first indications that Afghanistan might not be good news were driven home to Shebarshin on New Year’s Day 1980, when the Iranians demonstrated against the Soviet embassy. The demonstrators did little damage, but they had finally been distracted from their dawn-to-dusk outrages at the American embassy some two thousand yards away. Some Soviet analysts thought that the anti-American mood in Iran would translate into a pro-Soviet policy with the ayatollahs, but Shebarshin dismissed such musings as wishful thinking. From the moment of the takeover of the American embassy by the “students” in 1979, the KGB Rezident was convinced that sooner or later the same outrages would be played out against the Soviet Union. According to the Iranians, the USSR was still the “small Satan,” just one level of evil down from the American “great Satan,” at least in the view of Iran’s revolutionaries. Imam Khomeini had made this point to the Soviet ambassador shortly after the intervention in Afghanistan—he had said to Moscow’s envoy that the military intervention was a grave mistake for which the USSR would pay dearly.

To reinforce their disapproval of events in Afghanistan, the Iranians turned on the Soviets briefly, then ratcheted up the pressure in January 1982, when they sacked the Soviet embassy, the same historic building in which the Teheran Conference of 1943 had been convened. Shebarshin did not miss the irony of the destruction of some of the remaining icons of World War II cooperation among Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt at the hands of the Iranians four decades later.

He returned to First Chief Directorate headquarters at Yasenevo 1983 and had been the First Directorate’s man on Afghanistan ever since. Witnessing the humiliation of the United States at the hands of Iranian revolutionaries had sobered him, but nothing he saw of the USSR’s management of its adventure in Afghanistan gave him confidence that a second superpower could not be brought to its knees by Islamic militants in Central Asia. On the contrary, he was convinced Moscow had misread events in Afghanistan at most important points since before the first dispatch of the “limited contingent” in 1979. The Afghan war was not an action to eradicate “bandits,” as the Afghan leadership and the Soviet Politburo contended, but a fight against committed Afghan Muslims and an Afghan populace that overwhelmingly supported them. It was a war that couldn’t be won, at least in the way it was being fought.

Now, in 1986, a few bold men inside the system were beginning to address the question of how the Soviet Union was to climb out of the Afghan pit. KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov had been one of the hawks in 1979 whose signatures could be found on the Politburo order to send in the troops, and he had kept his commitment to the end, remaining a hawk after he took over as General Secretary when Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982. Now Andropov was history, and it was with great irony that many Kremlin and Lubyanka insiders came to believe that he was ultimately brought down by a mysterious ailment he’d picked up in Kabul during a visit in February 1982. By March 1983 Andropov was on dialysis, and a year later, despite heroic efforts by his physicians, he was dead.

Andropov was succeeded by the man he had outmaneuvered when Brezhnev died, Konstantin Chernenko, Brezhnev’s loyal aide who had ramrodded the decision to intervene in Afghanistan through the Politburo in December 1979. Chernenko’s luck was no better than Andropov’s. A dying man when he took over from Andropov, he himself was gone thirteen months later. It was with the passing of Chernenko that the chain of the old guard was finally broken. Succeeding him was the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, who took over at the Kremlin with little experience in foreign affairs but with powerful doubts about the Soviet Union’s Afghan adventure. Gorbachev had not been a member of the Politburo until a year after the intervention in Afghanistan—his signature was not among those on the order to send in the Army in 1979. Though it was not known at the time, Gorbachev took over in the Kremlin with a single, unencumbered goal in Afghanistan: to get out. But he also knew that getting out would be far more difficult than going in—the one immutable truth about Afghanistan.

Now it fell to Leonid Shebarshin to bring a dose of reality to the KGB’s handling of Afghanistan. His work was cut out for him. He knew the Americans had no intention of making the Red Army’s exit from Afghanistan easy. According to all accounts, they were going to do everything in their power to make it as difficult as possible. The level and quality of American assistance to the bandits had increased dramatically, according to reports reaching Shebarshin’s desk.

   3   

Kabul, Afghanistan, 1700 Hours, August 26, 1986

The corrosive acid in the brass barrel of a time pencil, a device specially developed in the laboratories of the CIA’s Office of Technical Services, ate through the thin wire restraining a spring-loaded firing plunger at almost precisely 1700 hours. At that instant, the cylinder slammed forward, completing an electrical circuit and sending a succession of high-speed impulses from a pack of E cell batteries through wires leading to a dozen rockets propped up and aimed at the puppet Afghan 8th Army’s ammunition dump at Kharga, outside of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. The Chinese-made 107 mm rockets ignited in sequence, and within a few tenths of a second they were off, in flight toward their target some six kilometers away. The mujahideen who had set up the delayed-action launch were by now even farther away.

In what would later be described variously as the vengeance of God, superb planning and execution, or just plain dumb luck, there followed that evening and into the night a signal event in a war that had been going very badly for the Afghan resistance. At least one of