The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  Handsome at just over six feet, with thick black hair and piercing eyes, Shebarshin, at fifty, had spent most of his professional life in Asia. After graduating from the Oriental faculty of the Institute of Foreign Relations at Moscow University in 1958, he took a Foreign Ministry posting to Pakistan. He returned to Moscow four years later, making the shift so many of the Foreign Ministry’s most capable young diplomats seemed to be making in those days—into the KGB. He joined their foreign intelligence arm, the First Chief Directorate. After two years of training, Shebarshin was off on an unbroken thirteen-year run in South Asia, alternating between the KGB Rezidenturas in Pakistan and India. After a stint at Moscow Center, he was posted as KGB Rezident in Iran, arriving in Teheran just as the tortured decision-making process leading to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was gathering speed in the Kremlin and as the Iranian revolution was about to engulf Teheran.

  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 the white phosphorous rockets flew into a storage warehouse containing a supply of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) that had been delivered by the Soviets to the Afghan Army to protect them against air attacks from Pakistan. The rocket’s explosion ignited the fuel tanks of the SAMs, setting off a chain reaction of secondary explosions that radiated and spread from storage area to storage area within the giant Kharga facility, which at that moment was packed with about forty thousand tons of ammunition. Tens of thousands of mortar rounds, mountains of stacked rockets, and the SAMs themselves began to cook off one after the other as the chain reaction spun out of control. The firefighting teams never had a chance—the fire was out of control the minute the first white phosphorous rocket struck its target.

  All through the night, the diplomatic corps in Kabul was treated to a fireworks display that grew in magnitude as the secondary explosions worked their way from bunker to bunker. A BBC camera team on the roof of the British embassy captured the devastation of the strike, and soon the footage was being relayed around the world. Watching the pyrotechnics on Pakistani television that night in Islamabad, I wondered how many mujahideen commanders would take credit for the attack, even before the fires had begun to burn out at Kharga. The answer was quick in coming.

  Peshawar, Pakistan, 0930 Hours, August 27, 1986

  Three press conferences were called almost simultaneously the next morning by the press offices of the Peshawar-based Afghan resistance parties. By ten o’clock, Commander Abdul Haq and General Rahim Wardak, two of the most press-conscious of the mujahideen commanders based in Peshawar, had claimed credit for the attack. A
similar announcement followed from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s press office, and the other resistance parties would quickly follow suit. Rahim Wardak, derisively called the “Gucci commander” because of his camouflage fatigues, impeccably tailored to conceal an unmilitary girth, presented the most comprehensive operational plan, complete with maps and diagrams. But the flamboyant Abdul Haq, who had received the attention and much of the devotion of the mostly American press corps in Peshawar, ended up getting credit from the media for the operation. I never did find out who launched the attack—a dozen commanders insisted they were responsible—so I just decided to believe all or none of their claims. Kharga was smoking, and the mujahideen had a hundred new heroes. That was enough for me.

  Langley, August 28, 1986

  Jack Devine played the video of the Kharga blast a second time and knew it was just what he needed. A career officer in the Latin America Division of the Directorate of Operations, Devine had worked his way through some serious mine fields in South America, serving in Chile during Salvador Allende’s bloody overthrow and later as chief in Buenos Aires in the years of the disappearances during the military regime. He had earned a reputation for having sharp political instincts and a keen sense of how to navigate through treacherous times. At six feet five, Devine was hard to miss in his new fiefdom—he’d taken over the headquarters end of the Afghan project in June, just as it had been elevated from a country branch activity to a full-fledged task force, a change that cut the number of people looking over his shoulder to just two, the DDO and his deputy. Devine was exactly the right man to deal with the crosscurrents on Capitol Hill, within the Reagan administration, and on the CIA’s own seventh floor.

  When Clair George had asked him to take over the task force that spring, there wasn’t much going right in the war. Reports from the field were an unbroken string of dismal accounts of the Afghan resistance’s inability to get their supplies from Pakistan through the hundreds of infiltration routes into eastern Afghanistan. It wasn’t clear to Devine whether that was because of the increasingly successful Soviet helicopter assaults along the supply routes or because of the growing fatalism of the Afghan fighters. That fatalism had been picked up by the media—those who were still interested in Afghanistan—and most pundits were about to call the match to the Soviets. Important pockets of Capitol Hill were still supportive, but countering the staunchest advocates of American support to the Afghan resistance was a growing cadre of members of Congress and their staffers who were beginning to question the morality of bleeding the Soviets down to the last Afghan. Even at Langley there was a sharp divide as to whether it made sense over the long haul to keep up the pressure on the Soviets in Afghanistan. Analysts of the USSR tended to dismiss as futile the efforts of primitive tribesmen taking on a superpower. The Near East analysts saw it differently, and there was a tension between the two schools that would remain throughout the war.

  By August, Devine had figured that something had to give—and soon—or the fatalists would want to back off and try a new approach. The Soviets were beginning to talk about “an Afghan problem,” but they were still banking on a political agreement that would give them most of what they wanted—a friendly, neutral Afghanistan with their chosen people in charge. They wanted no erosion of the Brezhnev Doctrine—even though Brezhnev himself was long gone. As a result, there was no movement in any direction, and it appeared to Devine that the current stalemate would ultimately lead to a loss of commitment in Washington, unless something big happened and soon. Looking at the footage of the brilliant secondary explosions lighting up the night sky around Kabul, he had what he needed, at least for now.

  Over the next week, Jack Devine would play the video a few dozen times for key members of Congress and the CIA, and Bill Casey would arrange a private showing for Reagan. If we get a few more lucky shots like this, Devine started thinking, we might just get the worm to turn.

  Islamabad, September 3, 1986

  The reverberations of the Kharga attack were still being felt a week after the strike, partly thanks to the media, who’d had a chance to watch the fireworks from the rooftops in Kabul, and partly because the CIA managed to show the resistance the fruits of their work in the form of satellite imagery couriered to Pakistan a few days later. Within the week, I briefed the Pakistanis and a few Afghan commanders using the satellite photos of the attack.

  The first set of images showed the 8th Army ammunition dump at Kharga five days before the attack, the storage bunkers full of neatly stacked ammunition and equipment. A careful inspection of the one-meter resolution imagery would enable us to distinguish stacked boxes of mortar rounds from the larger wooden boxes containing rockets. The site was jam-packed and waiting to blow.

  The next set of photos were of the morning after the attack. When they were held up to the earlier shots, the effect was dramatic. Every bunker and revetment in the earlier photo seemed to have been torched, leaving behind an empty, blackened scar. Wispy smoke trails, still drifting up in corkscrews, were frozen reminders of the seething devastation.

  Early assessments led our analysts to conclude that the Soviets would have trouble replacing the losses. With unstable ammunition cooking off unpredictably for weeks, Kharga was out of commission indefinitely. And resupply would challenge an already strained Soviet logistics system, all of which meant that operations would have to be seriously curtailed. This break couldn’t have come at a better time. It wouldn’t be long before the snows started filling the high passes and the war would settle down again to its dormant winter mode. When the fighting season kicked off the next spring, the mujahideen would have at least one advantage.

  And for dramatic effect we calculated the cost-effectiveness of the attack, sharing the results with Pakistan’s intelligence service and the resistance leaders. The price of the rockets used in the attack was $110 each, for a total of less than $1,500. The cost to the Soviet patrons of the Afghan Army must have been about $250 million, not counting the even greater cost of their morale.

  So as I finished my first month in Islamabad, I decided that with everything else in place, a little bit of extra luck would indeed help. Never mind that Kharga was a fluke; you take what you can get. It had given a new energy to the resistance and had taught me how even the smallest of breaks could be parlayed into events that could alter the course of a war.

  First Chief Directorate Headquarters, Yasenevo, September 3, 1986

  Leonid Shebarshin had read the reports. There was no hard evidence on the cause of the explosions, but speculation in Kabul pointed to two possibilities—a lucky rocket strike or an accident. He had learned that there were rarely clear-cut answers to any questions in Afghanistan, that truth and reality were always mixed with myth and, often enough, with sheer fantasy. The possible explanations for any occurrence were never separated by mere degrees; they were always poles apart.

  The first of his Afghan reality lessons was driven home during his trip in the spring of 1984, just after what had been touted in the 40th Army command as the heaviest and most successful joint strike in the war by the Soviet and allied Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) forces against the stronghold of Ahmad Shah Massoud in the Panjshir Valley. Deputy Defense Minister Marshal S. L. Sokolov, a rugged old-line tank officer, wanted to look over the battleground himself. He choppered the sixty miles north from Kabul with Shebarshin as part of his inspection team.

  The team found nothing, absolutely nothing, to observe. There was no populace to be won over by propaganda teams in the valley, no opposing forces to fight, just ripened, unharvested wheat fields dotted with Soviet and Afghan tanks. The optimistic Soviet generals welcoming Sokolov had provided a splendid, perfectly ordered briefing on the battle for the Panjshir Valley and the current security situation. As Shebarshin listened to the briefing, he wondered how any army could lose a war when it had such a meticulous battle plan as was shown there on the maps all covered with colored triangles, squares, and circles. Victory seemed very much in reach. />
  But in the course of the briefing, Shebarshin spotted signs of concern on the face of Marshal Sokolov. “Where is the enemy?” the chain-smoking Sokolov—he preferred American More kings—asked in his calm, fatherly manner. “Is he hiding in the nearby gorges?”

  “Yes, Comrade Marshal of the Soviet Union,” the briefing officer responded confidently. “We have outposts, patrols, and choppers to follow his movements.”

  Shebarshin found the briefing incomprehensible, but not because he lacked a military background. It just didn’t pass the logic test. The briefing officer stated with cool detachment that of the three thousand enemy bandits in the operation, seventeen hundred had been killed. The remainder withdrew from the battle, taking with them their dead and their weapons. “How can thirteen hundred rebels carry off seventeen hundred of their dead—and their weapons?” Shebarshin asked naively. “And can such a force represent a threat again after such a defeat?”

  The briefer chose to ignore his question, but Shebarshin would soon have an answer from his own sources. There had been almost no enemy casualties in the battle—perhaps fifteen had been killed. Ahmad Shah Massoud had been forewarned of the Soviet thrust into the Panjshir Valley and had pulled out his troops and much of the population of the valley ahead of the attack. Shebarshin would never know for certain who had tipped off Massoud to the assault, but his suspicions pointed to senior officers within the DRA Defense Ministry in Kabul. At any rate, the Soviet sweep into the Panjshir Valley in 1984 created the myth of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the invincible “Lion of the Panjshir.” The myth would take on a life of its own as Massoud became the idol of the French and the odds-on darling of the British press, who followed events closely in their old empire.

  But Leonid Shebarshin would come to know another side—and there were many—of Massoud. For one thing, he knew about Massoud’s secret contacts with Soviet military intelligence through a GRU officer operating under the pseudonym “Adviser.” Over the last three years of the Soviet occupation, Massoud’s back channel to the Soviets would serve him well. Always just one step away from a final agreement to cease hostilities, the 40th Army command held back from launching major assaults into Massoud’s stronghold until the final stages of their withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989.