Chapter 1. Spades and Men Every infantryman in the Soviet Army carries with him a small spade.
When he is given the order to halt he immediately lies flat and starts to
dig a hole in the ground beside him. In three minutes he will have dug a
little trench 15 centimetres deep, in which he can lie stretched out flat,
so that bullets can whistle harmlessly over his head. The earth he has dug
out forms a breastwork in front and at the side to act as an additional
cover. If a tank drives over such a trench the soldier has a 50% chance that
it will do him no harm. At any moment the soldier may be ordered to advance
again and, shouting at the top of his voice, will rush ahead. If he is not
ordered to advance, he digs in deeper and deeper. At first his trench can be
used for firing in the lying position. Later it becomes a trench from which
to fire in the kneeling position, and later still, when it is 110
centimetres deep, it can be used for firing in the standing position. The
earth that has been dug out protects the soldier from bullets and fragments.
He makes an embrasure in this breastwork into which he positions the barrel
of his gun. In the absence of any further commands he continues to work on
his trench. He camouflages it. He starts to dig a trench to connect with his
comrades to the left of him. He always digs from right to left, and in a few
hours the unit has a trench linking all the riflemen's trenches together.
The unit's trenches are linked with the trenches of other units. Dug-outs
are built and communication trenches are added at the rear. The trenches are
made deeper, covered over, camouflaged and reinforced. Then, suddenly, the
order to advance comes again. The soldier emerges, shouting and swearing as
loudly as he can.
The infantryman uses the same spade for digging graves for his fallen
comrades. If he doesn't have an axe to hand he uses the spade to chop his
bread when it is frozen hard as granite. He uses it as a paddle as he floats
across wide rivers on a telegraph pole under enemy fire. And when he gets
the order to halt, he again builds his impregnable fortress around himself.
He knows how to dig the earth efficiently. He builds his fortress exactly as
it should be. The spade is not just an instrument for digging: it can also
be used for measuring. It is 50 centimetres long. Two spade lengths are a
metre. The blade is 15 centimetres wide and 18 centimetres long. With these
measurements in mind the soldier can measure anything he wishes.
The infantry spade does not have a folding handle, and this is a very
important feature. It has to be a single monolithic object. All three of its
edges are as sharp as a knife. It is painted with a green matt paint so as
not to reflect the strong sunlight.
The spade is not only a tool and a measure. It is also a guarantee of
the steadfastness of the infantry in the most difficult situations. If the
infantry have a few hours to dig themselves in, it could take years to get
them out of their holes and trenches, whatever modern weapons are used
against them.
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In this book we are not talking about the infantry but about soldiers
belonging to other units, known as spetsnaz. These soldiers never dig
trenches; in fact they never take up defensive positions. They either launch
a sudden attack on an enemy or, if they meet with resistance or superior
enemy forces, they disappear as quickly as they appeared and attack the
enemy again where and when the enemy least expects them to appear.
Surprisingly, the spetsnaz soldiers also carry the little infantry
spades. Why do they need them? It is practically impossible to describe in
words how they use their spades. You really have to see what they do with
them. In the hands of a spetsnaz soldier the spade is a terrible noiseless
weapon and every member of spetsnaz gets much more training in the use of
his spade then does the infantryman. The first thing he has to teach himself
is precision: to split little slivers of wood with the edge of the spade or
to cut off the neck of a bottle so that the bottle remains whole. He has to
learn to love his spade and have faith in its accuracy. To do that he places
his hand on the stump of a tree with the fingers spread out and takes a big
swing at the stump with his right hand using the edge of the spade. Once he
has learnt to use the spade well and truly as an axe he is taught more
complicated things. The little spade can be used in hand-to-hand fighting
against blows from a bayonet, a knife, a fist or another spade. A soldier
armed with nothing but the spade is shut in a room without windows along
with a mad dog, which makes for an interesting contest. Finally a soldier is
taught to throw the spade as accurately as he would use a sword or a
battle-axe. It is a wonderful weapon for throwing, a single, well-balanced
object, whose 32-centimetre handle acts as a lever for throwing. As it spins
in flight it gives the spade accuracy and thrust. It becomes a terrifying
weapon. If it lands in a tree it is not so easy to pull out again. Far more
serious is it if it hits someone's skull, although spetsnaz members usually
do not aim at the enemy's face but at his back. He will rarely see the blade
coming, before it lands in the back of his neck or between his shoulder
blades, smashing the bones.
The spetsnaz soldier loves his spade. He has more faith in its
reliability and accuracy than he has in his Kalashnikov automatic. An
interesting psychological detail has been observed in the kind of
hand-to-hand confrontations which are the stock in trade of spetsnaz. If a
soldier fires at an enemy armed with an automatic, the enemy also shoots at
him. But if he doesn't fire at the enemy but throws a spade at him instead,
the enemy simply drops his gun and jumps to one side.
This is a book about people who throw spades and about soldiers who
work with spades more surely and more accurately than they do with spoons at
a table. They do, of course, have other weapons besides their spades.
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Chapter 2. Spetsnaz and the GRU
It is impossible to translate the Russian word razvedka precisely into
any foreign language. It is usually rendered as `reconnaissance' or `spying'
or `intelligence gathering'. A fuller explanation of the word is that it
describes any means and any actions aimed at obtaining information about an
enemy, analysing it and understanding it properly.
Every Soviet military headquarters has its own machinery for gathering
and analysing information about the enemy. The information thus collected
and analysed about the enemy is passed on to other headquarters, higher up,
lower down and on the same level, and each headquarters in turn receives
information about the enemy not only from i
ts own sources but also from the
other headquarters.
If some military unit should be defeated in battle through its
ignorance of the enemy, the commanding officer and his chief of staff have
no right to blame the fact that they were not well enough informed about the
enemy. The most important task for every commander and chief of staff is
that, without waiting for information to arrive from elsewhere, they must
organise their own sources of information about the enemy and warn their own
forces and their superior headquarters of any danger that is threatened.
Spetsnaz is one of the forms of Soviet military razvedka which occupies
a place somewhere between reconnaissance and intelligence.
It is the name given to the shock troops of razvedka in which there are
combined elements of espionage, terrorism and large-scale partisan
operations. In personal terms, this covers a very diverse range of people:
secret agents recruited by Soviet military razvedka among foreigners for
carrying out espionage and terrorist operations; professional units composed
of the country's best sportsmen; and units made up of ordinary but carefully
selected and well trained soldiers. The higher the level of a given
headquarters is, the more spetsnaz units it has at its disposal and the more
professionals there are among the spetsnaz troops.
The term spetsnaz is a composite word made up from spetsialnoye
nazhacheniye, meaning `special purpose'. The name is well chosen. Spetsnaz
differs from other forms of razvedka in that it not only seeks and finds
important enemy targets, but in the majority of cases attacks and destroys
them.
Spetsnaz has a long history, in which there have been periods of
success and periods of decline. After the Second World War spetsnaz was in
the doldrums, but from the mid-1950s a new era in the history of the
organisation began with the West's new deployment of tactical nuclear
weapons. This development created for the Soviet Army, which had always
prepared itself, and still does, only for `liberation' wars on foreign
territory, a practically insuperable barrier. Soviet strategy could continue
along the same lines only if the means could be found to remove Western
tactical nuclear weapons from the path of the Soviet troops, without at the
same time turning the enemy's territory into a nuclear desert.
The destruction of the tactical nuclear weapons which render Soviet
aggression impossible or pointless could be carried out only if the
whereabouts of all, or at least the majority, of the enemy's tactical
nuclear weapons were established. But this in itself presented a tremendous
problem. It is very easy to conceal tactical missiles, aircraft and nuclear
artillery and, instead of deploying real missiles and guns, the enemy can
deploy dummies, thus diverting the attention of Soviet razvedka and
protecting the real tactical nuclear weapons under cover.
The Soviet high command therefore had to devise the sort of means of
detection that could approach very close to the enemy's weapons and in each
case provide a precise answer to the question of whether they were real, or
just well produced dummies. But even if a tremendous number of nuclear
batteries were discovered in good time, that did not solve the problem. In
the time it takes for the transmission of the reports from the
reconnaissance units to the headquarters, for the analysis of the
information obtained and the preparation of the appropriate command for
action, the battery can have changed position several times. So forces had
to be created that would be able to seek out, find and destroy immediately
the nuclear weapons discovered in the course of war or immediately before
its outbreak.
Spetsnaz was, and is, precisely such an instrument, permitting
commanding officers at army level and higher to establish independently the
whereabouts of the enemy's most dangerous weapons and to destroy them on the
spot.
Is it possible for spetsnaz to pinpoint and destroy every single one of
the enemy's nuclear weapons? Of course not. So what is the solution to this
problem? It is very simple. Spetsnaz has to make every effort to find and
destroy the enemy's nuclear armament. Nuclear strength represents the teeth
of the state and it has to be knocked out with the first blow, possibly even
before the fighting begins. But if it proves impossible to knock out all the
teeth with the first blow, then a blow has to be struck not just at the
teeth but at the brain and nervous system of the state.
When we speak of the `brain' we mean the country's most important
statesmen and politicians. In this context the leaders of the opposition
parties are regarded as equally important candidates for destruction as the
leaders of the party in power. The opposition is simply the state's reserve
brain, and it would be silly to destroy the main decision-making system
without putting the reserve system out of action. By the same token we mean,
for example, the principal military leaders and police chiefs, the heads of
the Church and trade unions and in general all the people who might at a
critical moment appeal to the nation and who are well known to the nation.
By the `nervous system' of the state we mean the principal centres and
lines of government and military communications, and the commercial
communications companies, including the main radio stations and television
studios.
It would hardly be possible, of course, to destroy the brain, the
nervous system and the teeth at once, but a simultaneous blow at all three
of the most important organs could, in the opinion of the Soviet leaders,
substantially reduce a nation's capacity for action in the event of war,
especially at its initial and most critical stage. Some missiles will be
destroyed and others will not be fired because there will be nobody to give
the appropriate command or because the command will not be passed on in time
due to the breakdown of communications.
Having within its sphere an organisation like spetsnaz, and having
tested its potential on numerous exercises, the Soviet high command came to
the conclusion that spetsnaz could be used with success not only against
tactical but also against strategic nuclear installations: submarine bases,
weapon stockpiles, aircraft bases and missile launching sites.
Spetsnaz could be used too, they realised, against the heart and blood
supply of the state: ie. its source and distribution of energy -- power
stations, transformer stations and power lines, as well as oil and gas
pipelines and storage points, pumping station and oil refineries. Putting
even a few of the enemy's more important power stations out of action could
present him with a catastrophic situation. Not only would there be no light:
factories would be brought to a standstill, lifts would cease to work, the
refrigeration installations would be useless, hospitals would find it almost
impossible to function, blood stored in refrigerators would begin to
coagulate, traffic lights, petrol pumps and trains would come to a halt,
computers
would cease to operate.
Even this short list must lead to the conclusion that Soviet military
razvedka (the GRU) and its integral spetsnaz is something more than the
`eyes and ears of the Soviet Army'. As a special branch of the GRU spetsnaz
is intended primarily for action in time of war and in the very last days
and hours before it breaks out. But spetsnaz is not idle in peacetime
either. I am sometimes asked: if we are talking about terrorism on such a
scale, we must be talking about the KGB. Not so. There are three good
reasons why spetsnaz is a part of the GRU and not of the KGB. The first is
that if the GRU and spetsnaz were to be removed from the Soviet Army and
handed over to the KGB, it would be equivalent to blindfolding a strong man,
while plugging his ears and depriving him of some other important organs,
and making him fight with the information he needs for fighting provided by
another person standing beside him and telling him the moves. The Soviet
leaders have tried on more than one occasion to do this and it has always
ended in catastrophe. The information provided by the secret police was
always imprecise, late and insufficient, and the actions of a blind giant,
predictably, were neither accurate or effective.
Secondly, if the functions of the GRU and spetsnaz were to be handed
over to the KGB, then in the event of a catastrophe (inevitable in such a
situation) any Soviet commanding officer or chief of staff could say that he
had not had sufficient information about the enemy, that for example a vital
aerodrome and a missile battery nearby had not been destroyed by the KGB's
forces. These would be perfectly justified complaints, although it is in any
case impossible to destroy every aerodrome, every missile battery and every
command post because the supply of information in the course of battle is
always insufficient. Any commanding officer who receives information about
the enemy can think of a million supplementary questions to which there is
no answer. There is only one way out of the situation, and that is to make
every commanding officer responsible for gathering his own information about
the enemy and to provide him with all the means for defeating his own enemy.
Then, if the information is insufficient or some targets have not been
destroyed, only he and his chief of staff are to blame. They must themselves
Spetsnaz: The Inside Story of the Soviet Special Forces Page 1
