By Oleg Kalugin
I was the head of the KGB’s foreign counterintelligence branch when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. The fateful order to send our military into such difficult terrain was by no means a foregone conclusion. Before Soviet leaders made the final call, we wrung our hands, considered our options, and argued among ourselves. Here is the inside story of how that wrenching decision was made.
At the time, I viewed Afghanistan as a country within the Soviet sphere of interest and thought we had to do whatever possible to prevent the Americans and the CIA from installing an anti-Soviet regime there. How wrong I would turn out to be.
My first and only trip to Afghanistan came in August 1978. Four months earlier, a pro-Communist coup headed by Noor Mohammad Taraki had overthrown the government of Mohammad Daoud, killing him and his family. Moscow had not been overjoyed by news of the coup, for in Daoud we had enjoyed a stable ally and relative peace along our southern border.
Reports soon began to filter back to KGB headquarters in Moscow of growing Islamic opposition in Afghanistan to the new Taraki regime. My KGB colleague Vladimir Kryuchkov and I were then sent to Kabul on a fact-finding mission. Our objectives included signing a cooperation agreement between the Soviet and Afghan intelligence services.
What we found on the ground was not encouraging. Kabul struck me as a big village, with worse poverty than I had seen on my prior visits to India. We had wanted to visit the southeastern city of Jalalabad, but Afghan officials said it was not safe — a troubling signal that the situation was less rosy than our hosts portrayed it.
Kryuchkov and I proceeded to meet the Afghan leaders who had slaughtered their opponents to gain power, and who later would die by the sword themselves.
Taraki, who had co-founded Afghanistan’s Communist party in 1965 and personally ordered the murder of Daoud, was by then a fragile, stooped old man. In his advancing age, he struck me as a fuss-budget given to general utterances, and I saw then that he didn’t have the physical strength or the political backing to continue to lead the country for long.
The man who eventually would depose Taraki, Hafizullah Amin, was a far more physically impressive figure. Amin was a dark, handsome man with glittering eyes. He was the shrewdest and most literate of the officials I met in Afghanistan, and when we discovered that we had both studied in New York at Columbia University, we hit it off immediately. We spoke to each other in English and reminisced about old haunts and familiar landmarks in the Big Apple. When we parted he gave me a big hug and invited me back as his personal guest. (I would never get the chance. The following year, KGB special forces troops gunned down Amin at the presidential palace as Soviet troops took over the city.)
Foreign Policy for more
(Submitted by reader)