Stalin's Final Sting

by Andrew Turpin

  A key part of his role was to prioritize and assign targets for the fleet of Mi-24 gunship helicopters that the Soviet 40th Army operated in Afghanistan. The main priority was to blitz villages from where mujahideen were believed to be operating.

  Much of his focus was on the Khost-Gardez Pass, the tortuous, twisting mountain highway between the two strategic towns of Khost in the south, just a handful of kilometers from the Pakistan border, where the Russians had a large military base, and Gardez to the north.

  From 1979 onward, when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the K-G had always been controlled by the mujahideen. But then, in late 1987, the Soviet 40th Army launched Operation Magistral, using thousands of troops and brute force to finally gain the highway.

  To keep control, the Russians launched frequent forays, both airborne and on the ground, against mujahideen bases and villages.

  In January 1988, Severinov had signed off on an attack on the village of Wazrar. He had learned from Sandjar Hassani that there were several mujahideen in the village. The attack had succeeded and the village had been pulverized. But just a few minutes later, two of the three Mi-24s had been shot down by mujahideen using Stingers. The crew of one of those helicopters had subsequently met a particularly grisly fate at the hands of the mujahideen.

  Even now Severinov couldn’t bring himself to talk about the incident.

  Hassani had subsequently informed Severinov that the man who had shot down the helicopter and killed the crew had been Javed Hasrat, assisted by Baz Babar. Further intelligence from Hassani led Severinov to capture Javed in Jalalabad and throw him into Pul-e-Charkhi jail. But then had come the raid on the jail by mujahideen, in which—so Severinov had been originally told—Javed had died.

  Now, twenty-five years later, it emerged that Javed had not died and was in fact working in an important role for the Afghan government to help sell off its oil and gas exploration assets.

  For Severinov, as a highly ambitious KGB officer, Operation Magistral had been a major opportunity to make a name for himself. The intelligence he gathered was a key factor in the Soviet success. It also directly paved the way for a promotion back to the murky, shark-infested waters of Berlin in 1989—the place where he had thrived in his previous KGB posting.

  After leaving the KGB when it was replaced by the SVR in 1991 as the Soviet Union broke up, he worked for oil and gas companies as a foreign affairs and security director. During the ’90s he was allocated shares in some of those companies, which flourished under the economic reforms brought in by the new Russian president, Boris Yeltsin. Severinov was one of the lucky few who earned a fortune and forged strong contacts in Russia’s political community.

  It was during that time that Severinov’s KGB background, his growing business profile, and his political interests brought him to the attention of senior people in the Russian economic and government machine. Most crucially, he renewed contacts with Yeltsin’s successor as president, Vladimir Putin, and won the trust of Putin’s siloviki, the group of mainly former KGB and military men who took charge of Russia, particularly Medvedev. Severinov subsequently set up Besoi Energy, and his financial and material reward had been huge.

  He often felt that the long hours and intense focus on his business life had come at a cost, however. Despite several relationships, Severinov had never married nor had children. Maybe, he sometimes worried, there was truth in the accusation leveled at him by one of his girlfriends—that the brutality of his time in the KGB had rendered him incapable of behaving as a loving husband should.

  Sometimes, he reflected to himself, he would have swapped all of his acquired wealth for the incident in January 1988 to have been unwound and reversed.

  Severinov snapped out of his thoughts. It was a pity that Safia hadn’t obtained the detail on ZenForce that he wanted, but the contents of her email had taken him several steps forward.

  Most immediately, Safia had raised two big issues in his mind. The first was, what should he do about Javed Hasrat? The second was Joe Johnson. He remembered the name from his time in Afghanistan working for the KGB. Hadn’t Johnson been CIA?

  He reached for his phone and did a Google search.

  A minute later, Severinov was staring at Johnson’s website. He was an investigator, specializing in war crimes, based in Portland, Maine, who had worked as a Nazi hunter for the US Office of Special Investigations in the past and was now running his own business.

  That was him. In 1988, Johnson, as a CIA agent in Islamabad, had recruited Javed as his mujahideen agent inside Afghanistan. The two of them had been meeting in a safe house in Jalalabad as Severinov, acting on intelligence from Hassani, arrived at the location near the Kabul River and the airport.

  But Johnson had gone and Severinov had trapped only Javed. Soon after, it emerged that Johnson had shot dead Severinov’s boss Leonid Rostov in a nearby warehouse while escaping.

  Needless to say, Johnson’s website mentioned none of that. It didn’t even mention his CIA background.

  If Johnson now wanted to speak to Javed as part of some work he was doing for the ICC, as Safia was indicating, then what would Javed tell him, and where would he stop? If it were the ICC, then it must be something to do with war crimes.

  Severinov’s imagination, which was always active, went into overdrive. Might Johnson also start digging into Severinov’s background? And if he found things that Severinov didn’t want made known—all the villages and their populations destroyed during Operation Magistral, for example—and went public, what might be the outcome in terms of reputational damage to him and to Russia? To Putin?

  The timing did not look good. He had visions of a stream of allegations being made public about his role in Magistral, angering the Afghans and thus flattening his bid for the oil and gas fields.

  Am I overreacting?

  He didn’t know the answer to that question. But he certainly wasn’t going to just sit and wait for the time bomb to explode. He was going to have to do something. In his experience, attack was the best form of defense.

  He glanced up at a framed quotation that hung on his office wall, written in fading ornate Russian cursive handwriting on yellowed paper.

  It read, “Be a bee that stings for the Motherland: be busy, be dangerous.”

  In all four corners of the print was a large black-and-white image of a Russian honeybee, and underneath was an attribution: Josef Stalin. The print had been one of his father’s possessions, and Severinov hung a small replica of it in all the various properties he owned, including the safe house in Kabul.

  Next to it was a black-and-white photograph of Stalin, taken in his later years.

  Severinov gazed first at the photograph, then at the framed quotation. He had used the quote as his motivation for years—right from the start of his career in the KGB and through the building of his business empire. But whenever any of his visitors asked about its origins, he had always avoided answering.

  He decided he would ask Lvov to go and check out the Kabul address on Street Ten listed on Javed’s CV and also would start to think about how to tackle Johnson.

  Severinov’s phone beeped twice. He looked at the screen. There was a warning message: Battery Low. That was slightly odd, he thought. The phone was only four months old, and already the battery life was dwindling. True, he used it a lot, but it should perform better. He made a mental note to ask his head of IT to test it.

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  Thursday, May 30, 2013

  Wazrar, Khost-Gardez Pass, Afghanistan

  Javed groaned as the black Toyota Hilux pickup rounded a hairpin bend. Fifty meters ahead of them, the segment of smooth black tarmac ended and the highway turned into the same old rough, stony, rutted gray surface that he had always remembered.

  “I thought this was just too good to be true,” Javed said to Baz as the vehicle bumped off the end of the tarmac and onto the dirt section, shortly after they had begun their descent from the pass’s highest po
int at 2,900 meters. The noise level in the cab rose dramatically as stones thrown up by the Toyota’s tires continually pinged into the wheel wells.

  Baz, who was behind the wheel, shrugged. “They’ve still got another thirty-five kilometers of highway to pave. Most of the Khost and Gardez ends are done; it’s mainly in the middle.”

  He steered left to overtake a gaudily painted and heavily overloaded truck that was battling up the steep slope in first gear, throwing off a dense cloud of dust and stinking diesel exhaust fumes.

  The Khost-Gardez Pass, running more than one hundred kilometers between the cities of Khost and Gardez, had been a rough dirt route for as long as Javed could remember, apart from a few poorly maintained gravel and tarmac sections. It used to take trucks all day to navigate, and that was assuming there were no rockfalls, mudslides, or storms to hold vehicles up further.

  A project funded by the US Agency for International Development had been paving the route since 2007, although progress had been far slower than hoped, partly due to flooding but mainly because of corruption, bribery, and continual attacks on the project by the Taliban. Javed had been told that project costs had more than doubled from the original $69 million budget.

  The Toyota rounded another hairpin. A group of US soldiers, all carrying semiautomatic rifles, were standing next to a barrier in the center of the highway constructed from two armored vehicles and some orange cones. One soldier raised his hand in a signal to stop. To their right were four Afghan National Army soldiers. Baz braked to a halt.

  It was the fourth US-operated checkpoint they had come across. Normally, Javed enjoyed chatting with US servicemen, but during this journey he had shown his Afghan passport and shied away from conversation, sticking to his native Pashto rather than his American-accented English, acquired in Houston.

  After checking their passports and quickly searching the Toyota, the soldier, whose face was caked in dust and sweat, waved them through. The dirty plywood bed at the rear of the truck merited only a cursory glance.

  As they moved off, Javed clicked onto the cell phone monitoring app through which he was keeping track of the various bidders in the oil and gas investment process. The NDS, the Afghan National Directorate of Security, had installed the trackers, partly at Javed’s request but also because they wanted to keep a close eye on those interested in the country’s strategic energy assets.

  The first one, in Zilleman’s phone, was located in Washington, DC. No surprise there, Javed thought. The guy was American, after all, and seemed to split his time between Zürich and the US capital. The location of the second, belonging to Severinov, was also unsurprising. He was still in Moscow, at a location a few miles west of the capital, near the Moscow River. Javed checked the others. None gave any cause for concern.

  He logged out of the app and was about to put his phone back in his pocket when an email alert showed on his screen. He opened it.

  Hello Javed, you might remember me from Jalalabad, 1988. I know what happened there, and I’ve felt guilty about it ever since. I understand you are currently in Kabul. I too am back in Kabul for a while. I called your office and arranged a meeting via your assistant, but I was told on arrival that you were on vacation. It would be good to meet up again.

  Regards,

  Joe Johnson

  Javed looked out the windshield. First Severinov and now Joe Johnson. It was more than odd that after two and a half decades, both had popped back up into his life. During his time in the US he had considered trying to get in touch with Johnson but had never followed through. He resolved to reply as soon as time permitted; it would be interesting to meet again. Perhaps it would help to explain whether these resurfacing specters of his past were connected.

  It was just as well that he hadn’t been staying at his own rented house in Kabul, Javed thought. If Johnson was on his tail and desperate enough to try to arrange a meeting at his office, it wouldn’t be a great surprise if he had also tracked down his address on Street Ten.

  The Toyota lurched hard to the left as a wheel hit a pothole, dragging Javed’s attention away from Johnson’s email and back to the highway, which was carved out of a rocky, khaki-colored mountain slope, almost completely devoid of greenery. To their left, cliffs climbed six hundred meters into the dazzling blue above. To their right, an almost vertical one-hundred-meter drop descended to the river, which tossed and smashed its way southward along the valley floor toward Pakistan.

  It was prime hunting country for the Taliban and its offshoot groups of guerrilla insurgents, such as those led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, who were fighting the Afghanistan government and its US-led military supporters from NATO countries. It seemed like such a long time since Haqqani had been a high-profile leader of the mujahideen, someone whom Javed had respected until the leader had switched his allegiance to the Taliban in 1995.

  The mountainous territory around the Khost-Gardez route, with its myriad of hidden trails, paths, and passes, provided the Haqqanis with easy opportunities to sneak over the border from their Pakistan bases and launch rocket attacks on the various US military camps and convoys.

  “It seems like everything has changed, but nothing has changed,” Javed said. “In the ’80s it was us against the Russians. Now it’s the Taliban.”

  “Most people hate the Haqqanis,” Baz said. “But they’re all scared. So they keep their mouths shut. We will need to be mighty careful going up to the cave. We’re quite likely to run into some Taliban or Haqqanis along the way.”

  They had agreed that on reaching Wazrar, they would rest at Baz’s family compound—or qalat—on the edge of the village, where he, two cousins, and their extended families all lived in a small cluster of houses. Baz’s wife, Nazia, and their three grown-up children were away in Khost visiting her sister, but the rest of the family was around.

  Once they finalized their plans and preparations, they would continue by mule into the mountains up to the cave where Javed’s remaining Stingers and RPGs were stored. Baz had assured him they were still there, all intact, as he had checked on them periodically.

  Baz negotiated the Toyota through a Z-shaped bend and past a convoy of four trucks. “Almost there,” he said, glancing at Javed.

  Javed nodded. “This feels odd, coming back to my roots, without the rest of them.” He didn’t need to say any more. Baz knew he was referring to Ariana and Hila.

  “Yes,” Baz said. “One day you need to bring Roshina and Sandara.”

  Javed’s two remaining daughters had never again set foot in the land of their birth after the three of them had left for Pakistan and then the United States in 1990.

  Javed knew exactly when he would see the view he had been so eagerly awaiting. They rounded an outcrop that jutted out into the highway, and there, across the other side of a gorge, tucked up against the sandy brown mountainside that towered behind them, he saw a row of flat-roofed mud-brick homes.

  As they drew nearer, he could see the village had expanded somewhat since his departure. The cluster of brown houses, a hundred meters or so back from the riverbank, now had a few smarter green- and cream-painted buildings among them. The homes that had been destroyed by the Russians had all been rebuilt, and the four ancient trees that marked the center of the village were still there.

  Five and a half hours after leaving Kabul, they had arrived at the northern fringes of Wazrar. Baz turned left off the highway and continued up a narrow lane.

  At the top of the lane, Baz steered through a gate into the area where the four homes belonging to his extended family stood, including those of his brother, Noor and two cousins. All were built from mud bricks and were enclosed in a single large courtyard by a thick wall that provided some security and protection from the hot sun in summer and the freezing winds of winter.

  Javed had a sudden sense of going back in time. He climbed out of the Toyota. The first sound he heard, in the distance, was a faint but distinct whine, followed by a bang: mortar fire. He turned to Baz, who was removing h
is bags from the rear seats, and pursed his lips.

  Baz caught the expression on his face. “Welcome home,” he said. “Nothing’s changed, as you can hear.”

  “I want to go and see the grave first,” Javed said, ignoring his friend’s comment.

  “Sure,” Baz said.

  They walked out the gate and turned right, heading farther up the track until they came to the community graveyard where the bodies of Ariana and Hila had been buried so long ago, their graves dug north to south as is the Pashtun custom, their faces turned toward the Kaaba, the sacred mosque in Mecca.

  Javed stood silently for a couple of minutes at the foot of the two graves, gazing down at them. The mortar fire had stopped, and the only sounds were the distant cries of children and the whistling of the wind.

  “I will have my revenge, Baz,” he finally said in a level tone.

  Thursday, May 30, 2013

  Kabul

  The Olympic-sized open-air swimming pool stood on top of the parched brown mount of Bibi Mahru Hill, less than a mile northwest of the US embassy. It was empty, with just a few puddles of rainwater lying on the bottom, far below the five diving boards that hung uselessly overhead.

  Haroon had suggested walking up the hill after agreeing enthusiastically to Johnson’s suggestion that he stay in Kabul for a while and help him and Jayne with their investigation.

  “Why have you brought me up here?” Johnson asked. He looked down into the pool, feeling a little exposed out on the hillside, so far from the safety of the villa or the embassy. Small groups of men were hanging around, staring at them, and piles of rubbish and what looked like debris from building sites lay everywhere. Two youths sat on an abandoned car tire, smoking, and some younger boys were playing cricket with a tennis ball and a bat made from an old plank.