The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  THE CHIEF ADDITION to Soviet special tasks capability during the later Cold War was the creation of KGB special forces (spetsnaz) with the foundation of the Alpha group in 1974, on Andropov’s personal instructions.79 Intended for foreign operations and initially kept secret from all but a minority of FCD officers, the special forces grew steadily in numbers during the late 1970s. Their first major operation, by far the most important special action of the Andropov era, was the murder of President Hafizullah Amin of Afghanistan, who seized power in a blood-thirsty palace coup in September 1979.80 Cautious though Andropov had become in ordering assassinations, he convinced himself that in this case he had no option. Amin, he believed, was contemplating ending the Communist regime in Afghanistan and turning to the West. There were even reports, which Andropov appears to have taken seriously, that Amin was plotting with the CIA.81 As during the Czechoslovak crisis in 1968,82 Andropov took the lead in insisting on the enforcement of the “Brezhnev doctrine” which asserted Moscow’s right to prevent the defection of any member of the Soviet Bloc.

  For the first time since its foundation, Department 8 of FCD Directorate S (Illegals) moved into the front line of KGB operations. Its plot to assassinate Amin, operation AGAT (“Agate”), formed part of a larger invasion plan.83 By late November, after Amin had demanded the replacement of A. M. Puzanov, the Soviet ambassador, Andropov and defence minister Ustinov, the two leading hawks in the Politburo, were agreed on the need for Soviet military intervention as well as the elimination of Amin.84 Early in December, Andropov sent Brezhnev a handwritten letter, reporting “alarming information [intelligence] about Amin’s secret activities, forewarning of a possible shift to the West,” bringing with it both the end of Communist rule and a catastrophic loss of Soviet influence.85 On December 8 Andropov and Ustinov jointly obtained Brezhnev’s approval for a draft invasion plan.86

  While Marshal Akhromeyev and the General Staff operations group in charge of the invasion established their headquarters near the Afghan border in Uzbekistan, the head of Directorate S, Vadim Vasilyevich Kirpichenko, and the head of Department 8, Vladimir Krasovsky, flew secretly into Kabul to supervise the overthrow of Amin. Dayto-day control of operation AGAT was entrusted to Krasovsky’s deputy, A. I. Lazarenko. A team from the KGB Seventh (Surveillance) Directorate flew in to monitor Amin’s movements. Meanwhile, elaborate attempts were made to avoid arousing Amin’s suspicions. His requests for military supplies were granted and two radio stations were constructed for him. On December 23, however, the KGB residency in Kabul reported that Amin’s suspicions had been aroused both by Western radio reports of Soviet troop movements and the frequent flights into the Soviet airbase at Bagram, outside Kabul. The main invasion began at 3 p.m. (local time) on December 25.87

  According to some accounts of the Soviet invasion, Amin was successfully duped into believing that the Red Army was arriving to provide him with “fraternal assistance” against anti-Communist rebels.88 The Kabul residency thought otherwise. On December 26 it reported to the Centre the publication of an article in the Englishlanguage Kabul Times entitled “The Will of the People will be the Deciding Factor.” Though the article made no direct reference to the massive arrival of Soviet troops, it ended with the slogan “Down with the interventionists!” The residency concluded:

  As the Afghan press is subject to strict censorship, the article could not have been published without the sanction of Amin. The time chosen to print the article was not a coincidence. It was printed in an English language newspaper, a language which few Afghans understand. It was clearly intended to turn the pro-Western sections of the population against the Soviet troops and to enable the mass media in the West to make an immediate fuss about the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. In general the article reflects the ambiguous and cautious attitude of Amin and his entourage towards the increased Soviet military presence in Afghanistan.89

  The assault on the presidential palace on December 27 was led by 700 members of the KGB Alpha and Zenith special forces, dressed in Afghan uniforms and traveling in military vehicles with Afghan markings. The signal for the attack to begin was the detonation of an explosive device concealed some days earlier beneath a tree in the central square of the capital. The palace guards, however, put up much stiffer resistance than had been expected, and over a hundred of the KGB troops were killed before the palace was taken and Amin gunned down. Among the casualties was the leader of the assault group, Colonel Grigori Boyarinov, commandant of the Department 8 special operations training school at Balashikha.90

  It was normal KGB procedure for the portraits of officers who fell in combat to be displayed in black frames at the Centre as a sign of mourning. On this occasion, since the fallen heroes of operation AGAT were so numerous, Andropov decided not to put their hundred portraits on display. Some of the survivors, however, were honored for their part in the operation. Kirpichenko was promoted from major-general to lieutenant-general, and soon afterwards made First Deputy Head of the FCD. Lazarenko was promoted from colonel to major-general. Leonid Aleksandrovich Kozlov of Department 8 was made a Hero of the Soviet Union.91 The head of Line N (Illegals Support) at the Kabul residency, Ismail Murtuza Ogly Aliev, was awarded the Order of the Red Star, as were an unknown number of the members of the assault group who had stormed the presidential palace.92

  Immediately after the storming of the palace, the exiled Afghan Communist and veteran KGB agent Babrak Karmal, who had been chosen by Moscow to succeed Amin, asked senior KGB officers in Kabul to assure Comrade Andropov that, as president, he would unswervingly follow his advice. He also called for the “severest punishment” of Amin’s former associates and all those who had opposed Soviet troops. Karmal was fulsome in his praise for the heroism shown by the KGB and other special forces who had stormed the presidential palace:

  As soon as we have decorations of our own, we would like to bestow them on all the Soviet troops and Chekists [KGB officers] who took part in the fighting. We hope that the government of the USSR will award orders to these comrades.93

  The long-drawn-out Afghan War (which will be covered in volume 2 of this book) rescued Department 8 from the doldrums into which it had lapsed for most of the 1970s. In 1982 its special operations training school at Balashikha set up a “Training Centre for Afghanistan,” headed by V. I. Kikot, previously a Line F officer in Havana, who was well-informed on the Cuban experience of irregular warfare.94 Department 8 also made an intensive study of the methods used both by the Palestinians against the Israelis and by the Israelis against Palestinian camps in Lebanon.95 Balashikha made a significant, though unquantifiable, contribution to the increasing use of special forces and methods of terrorizing the population—among them incendiary bombs, napalm, poison gas, tiny mines scattered from the air, even booby-trapped toys which maimed children and so demoralized their parents. But though Soviet forces and the terror campaign drove a quarter of the Afghan population into refugee camps in Pakistan, they failed to win the war.

  WITH THE INTENSIFICATION of the Cold War in the early years of the Reagan presidency and fears in the Centre that the new president was planning a nuclear first strike, Andropov became increasingly willing, both as KGB chairman and as Brezhnev’s successor from 1982 to 1984, to use, or connive in the use of, terrorism against United States and NATO targets. With Andropov’s knowledge (and doubtless his blessing), East Germany became what its last, non-Communist, interior minister, Peter-Michael Diestel, later called “an Eldorado for terrorists.” Among East Germany’s favorite terrorist groups was the West German Red Army Faction (RAF). Contemptuous of working-class reluctance to make a revolution and inspired by slogans such as “Don’t argue—destroy!,” the well-educated members of the RAF saw themselves as the militant vanguard of the deplorably inert proletariat, committed to the destruction of the “bourgeois power structures” of both the FRG and NATO. After a series of successful terrorist attacks in the mid-1970s, however, a grand offensive planned by the RAF in 1977 failed, and
four of its leaders committed suicide in prison.

  Thanks to the sanctuary offered by East Germany to its main surviving activists from 1977 onwards, the RAF was able to regroup. With training, weapons, funds and false identity documents provided by the Stasi, the Red Army Faction launched a new offensive during the early 1980s. In August 1981 a car bomb attack on the European headquarters of the US airforce at Ramstein in West Germany injured seventeen people; a month later RAF terrorists made an unsuccessful rocket attack in Heidelberg on the car of General Frederick Kroesen. During another terrorist offensive in 1984-5, the RAF attempted to blow up the NATO school at Oberammergau, bombed the US airbase at Frankfurt/Main, and attacked American soldiers at Wiesbaden. The Stasi also connived in the bombing of the La Belle discothèque in West Berlin, helping to transport the explosives which killed an American sergeant and a Turkish woman and wounded 230 people, including fifty US servicemen. Other Stasi contacts included the Provisional IRA, the Basque ETA and Carlos the Jackal.96

  In 1983, at the height of operation RYAN (the combined KGB/GRU attempt to find (nonexistent) evidence of US and NATO plans for a surprise nuclear attack), Andropov ordered preparations by Department 8 for terrorist attacks on British, American and NATO targets in Europe. Plans were made for a campaign of letter bombs to be sent to Mrs. Thatcher’s office at 10 Downing Street and to a series of prominent US and NATO representatives.97 At about the same time the KGB organized a series of dead drops in bars and restaurants near American bases in West Germany, intended to conceal explosives which could be detonated in a manner that would give the impression of terrorist attacks. The dead drop sites included behind a vending machine, in a ventilation cavity under a sink, on a wooden beam over a lavatory and underneath a paper-towel dispenser. By the time the sites were discovered by the CIA in 1985, however, operation RYAN was winding down and plans for a KGB terrorist campaign against NATO targets had been shelved.98

  In August 1983, while RYAN was still in full swing, the Centre instructed the main residencies in European NATO countries to step up their search for NATO preparations for

  the secret infiltration of sabotage teams with nuclear, bacteriological and chemical weapons into the countries of the Warsaw Pact; [and] the expansion of the network of sabotage-training intelligence schools and increase in the recruitment of émigrés from the socialist countries and persons who know the language of these countries, and the creation of émigré military formations and sabotage and intelligence teams.99

  Though, as with most of the requirements for operation RYAN, there was no such intelligence to collect, the Centre’s instructions give an important insight into Moscow’s contingency plans for the role of Department 8 and its DRGs in an attack on NATO.

  THE DECLINE AND fall of the Cold War brought a further decline in KGB special actions. The last major special action of the Soviet era was directed not against the traditional Main Adversary and its NATO allies, but against the reformers within the Soviet Union. On December 8, 1990 Kryuchkov, who had become KGB chairman two years earlier, summoned to his office in the Lubyanka his former chief-of-staff, Vyacheslav Zhizhin, now deputy chief of the FCD, and Alexei Yegorov of Counter-intelligence. There he instructed them to prepare a report on the measures needed to “stabilize” the country following the declaration of a state of emergency—in other words, the “special” and other actions required to preserve one-party rule and a centralized Soviet state.

  Over the next eight months Kryuchkov repeatedly tried and failed to persuade Gorbachev to agree to the declaration of a state of emergency and the “stabilization” of the Soviet Union. The point of no return for himself and his co-conspirators was the agreement on July 23, 1991 of the text of a new Union Treaty which would have transferred many of the powers of central government to the republics. On August 4 Gorbachev, whom Kryuchkov had placed under close surveillance some months earlier as SUBJECT 110, left for his summer holidays in a luxurious dacha at Foros on the Crimean coast, intending to return to Moscow for the signing of the Union Treaty on August 20. The day after Gorbachev’s departure, Kryuchkov and his fellow plotters—chief among them the defence and interior ministers, Dmitri Yazov and Boris Pugo (former head of the Latvian KGB)—met at OBJECT ABC, a KGB sanatorium equipped with swimming pool, saunas, masseuses and cinema. There they secretly constituted themselves as the State Committee for the State of Emergency, and met over the next fortnight to make preparations for a coup which would forestall the signing of the Union Treaty. The committee ordered the printing of 300,000 arrest forms and the supply by a factory in Pskov of 250,000 pairs of handcuffs. Kryuchkov called all KGB personnel back from holiday, placed them on alert and doubled their pay. Two floors of cells in the Lefortovo prison were emptied to received important prisoners and a secret bunker prepared for the committee in the Lubyanka in case the going got rough.

  On August 18 the plotters made a final attempt to intimidate Gorbachev into declaring a state of emergency. Having failed, they kept him incommunicado under house arrest in Foros and announced next day that the president was prevented by “ill health” from performing his duties, and that Vice-President Gennadi Yanayev had become acting president (in fact a mere figurehead) at the head of an eight-man State Committee for the State of Emergency. The plotters quickly discovered, however, that the old autocratic machinery of the one-party state was in too serious a state of disrepair for them to be able to turn back the clock. The Alpha group spetsnaz was supposed to storm the Moscow White House, the seat of government of the Russian Federation, and arrest its president, Boris Yeltsin, but failed to do either. Not one of the 7,000 reformers on the plotters’ detention list was arrested. The coup crumbled farcically and ignominiously in only four days. Pugo committed suicide. “Forgive me,” he wrote in a note to his children and grandchildren. “It was all a mistake. I lived honestly, all my life.” As Yazov was being led to a prison van, he said to those who arrested him, “Everything is clear now. I am such an old idiot. I’ve really fucked up.” Kryuchkov lacked sufficient self-knowledge to reach a similar conclusion.100

  The result of the final special action organized by the KGB was thus the precise opposite of what Kryuchkov and his fellow plotters had intended, accelerating both the collapse of the Communist one-party state and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The coup also ended in unprecedented humiliation for the KGB. On the evening of August 21 a heavy crane arrived in front of the Lubyanka and, before a cheering crowd, hoisted the giant statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky by a noose around his neck, toppled him from his pedestal and dragged him away to a field near the Tretyakov gallery, which became a graveyard for statues of the Soviet regime.

  APPENDIX

  “SPECIAL POLITICAL ACTION” PROPOSED BY THE ATHENS RESIDENCY TO THE CENTRE IN APRIL 1969

  Our operational letter No. 24/[Line]F of April 14, 1969 sets out a draft plan for carrying out a Lily [sabotage operation] against the target codenamed VAZA [“Vase”].

  The operation is codenamed YAYTSO [“Egg”].

  The aim and purpose of the operation is to cause moral and political damage to the south-east wing of NATO.

  Constant disagreements between Greece and Turkey cause great concern to the leadership of the USA and NATO and are a weak link in American policy in the area of southeast Europe.

  Carrying out a Lily on the VAZA could exacerbate relations between Greece and Turkey.

  The operation would be carried out in the name of a Greek who had come from Turkey and was dissatisfied with the situation of the Greek minority there (there can also be another variant [pretext] for carrying out the sabotage).

  VAZA is a two-storey house in Thessaloniki. The house and its annex belong to the Turkish consulate-general… There is no furniture, only a table, iron troughs and a cooking stove.

  On the upper floor of the house there are displays with Atatürk [the Turkish national hero]’s clothes and a photographic portrait of him. Apart from a desk there is no furniture.

  Next to
the VAZA, about 15-20 m away, there is the two-storey building of the Turkish consulate-general. This house is also used as living accommodation for consulate officials.

  The VAZA and the consulate have a common courtyard. (A detailed description of the layout of the houses and the courtyard is attached.)

  The most suitable place for planting a Bouquet [explosive device] is in the bushes growing about one meter from the VAZA.

  The VAZA is not open to the general public. It can be visited with the permission of the Turkish consulate; a special official is assigned to watch over the VAZA and to accompany visitors to the VAZA.

  The VAZA and the consulate are guarded round the clock by two gendarmes. The guard posts are mobile and the approaches to VAZA are restricted. The most convenient time to approach the target is at nightfall.

  Specifications of the Bouquet:

  The size and weight of the Bouquet must be related to the results which are desired from the attack on the VAZA. Evidently, there is no point in causing serious damage to the VAZA; it is better to achieve a moral and political effect. When calculating the force of the Bouquet, one must bear in mind that the distance from the Splash [explosion] to the consulate living quarters is 15-20 m.

  …In order to increase the impact and achieve the desired results, the Bouquet must be wrapped in a newspaper published in Turkey for Greek citizens.

  The temperature in Thessaloniki ranges in winter from below zero to 14°C, while in summer it ranges from 24°C upwards. Occasionally there are thick fogs.

  The Gardener [saboteur] must be sent to the country as a foreign tourist at the height of the tourist season. The greatest influx of tourists occurs from June to August. According to his identity documents, the Gardener’s identity documents must show him to be a citizen of a country friendly to Greece or a neutral state (the USA, Britain, West Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Canada, Libya), excluding the Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Holland and Belgium.