Stalin's Final Sting

by Andrew Turpin

  When CIA officer Joe Johnson is handed the tough task by his boss of forging better contacts among the mujahideen, he unknowingly finds himself up against a deadly KGB rival who wants him dead.

  But after coming under fire, Johnson comes to suspect that his difficulties stem not just from the Russians—but from a traitor on his own side.

  To extricate himself from the web of deceit in which he finds himself, Johnson comes to rely on a female colleague from Britain’s MI6, Jayne Robinson, to whom he grows unexpectedly close.

  As pressure mounts on Johnson from CIA headquarters at Langley and politicians in Washington, DC, the story reaches a climax during a life-or-death shootout in Jalalabad.

  The Afghan can be downloaded FREE of charge from the following link which will also add you to my emailing list so you can get updates on future books. I send few emails and you can unsubscribe at any time.

  Click here to get THE AFGHAN

  You should also enjoy the other thrillers in the Joe Johnson series, if you haven’t read them yet. You may find it is best to read them in order, as follows:

  Prequel: The Afghan

  1. The Last Nazi

  2. The Old Bridge

  3. Bandit Country

  4. Stalin’s Final Sting

  Here are links to all the books on my author page on Amazon:

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  Or you can just type “Andrew Turpin Joe Johnson thriller series” in the search box at the top of the Amazon page — you can’t miss the books!

  If you enjoyed this book please write a review

  As an independently published author, through my own imprint The Write Direction Publishing, I find that honest reviews of my books are the most powerful way for me to bring them to the attention of other potential readers.

  As you’ll appreciate, unlike the big international publishers, I can’t take out full-page advertisements in the newspapers or place posters on the subway.

  So I am committed to producing work of the best quality I can in order to attract a loyal group of readers who are happy to recommend my work to others.

  Therefore, if you enjoyed reading this novel, then I would very much appreciate it if you would spend five minutes and leave a review—which can be as short as you like—preferably on the page or website where you bought it.

  You can find the book on the Amazon website by clicking on the following links:

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  Many thanks!

  Thanks and acknowledgements

  Thank you to everyone who reads my books. You are the reason I began to write in the first place, and I hope I can provide you with entertainment and interest for a long time into the future.

  Every time I get an encouraging email from a reader, or a positive comment on my Facebook page, or a nice review on Amazon, it spurs me on to press ahead with my research or writing for the next book. So keep them coming!

  Specifically with regard to Stalin’s Final Sting, there are several people who have helped me during the long process of research, writing, and editing.

  I have two editors who consistently provide helpful advice, food for thought, great ideas, and constructive criticism, and between them have enabled me to considerably improve the initial draft. Katrina Diaz Arnold, owner of Refine Editing, again gave me a lot of valuable feedback at the structural and line levels, and Jon Ford, as ever, helped me to maintain the authenticity of the story in many areas through his great eye for detail. I would like to thank both of them—the responsibility for any remaining mistakes lies solely with me.

  As always, my brother, Adrian Turpin, has been a very helpful reader of my early drafts and highlighted areas where I need to improve. Others, such as Martin Scales, David Cole, David Payne, and Warren Smith have done likewise.

  But I also have a growing team of advance readers who go through my books at a later stage, just prior to publication, and have been able to give me a few useful pointers and have spotted the odd error. If you would like to join my Advance Readers team, send me an email at andrew@andrewturpin.com and let me know. Make sure to tell me a little about yourself — including what part of the world you live in and the type of books and authors you like.

  I would also like to thank the team at Damonza for what I think is a great cover design.

  Author’s note

  The conflict in Afghanistan during and after the Soviet military occupation from 1979 to 1989 has been a rich feeding ground for fiction and nonfiction authors alike.

  As with all the books in the Joe Johnson war crimes series, much of the historical backdrop to Stalin’s Final Sting is factual, including details of the atrocities inflicted on the Afghan population during that time.

  The Khost-Gardez Pass was the scene of many bloody battles during that period between the Soviet army and the mujahideen forces who managed for almost all of those ten years to control the pass and keep them at bay.

  In particular, the deployment by the Soviets of Mil Mi-24 helicopters—dubbed Hinds by NATO—and the use by the mujahideen of Stinger missiles to combat them has become the stuff of legend.

  During all of this, the ongoing duels between the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, on one side, and the CIA, MI6, and Pakistan’s ISI, who were supporting the mujahideen on the other side, were critical to the outcome.

  As with all the books in this series, because my protagonist Joe Johnson is from the United States, and most scenes are from his point of view, it seemed to make sense to try to use American spellings and terminology wherever possible, rather than my native British.

  Research and bibliography

  My research for Stalin’s Final Sting and for its direct prequel in the Joe Johnson series, The Afghan, was all carried out as part of the same process. Both books are set mainly in Afghanistan and I researched, wrote, and edited both of them in parallel. The biggest difference lies in the timeframe: The Afghan is set in 1988, when Johnson was still working for the CIA, and Stalin’s Final Sting in 2013, but there are many references in the latter book to events and situations in the former.

  For this reason, the following notes that I have put together on my research sources are very similar for both titles.

  Across both books the research proved to be so interesting that I often found myself immersed in some book or article online and had to remind myself to get on with it, collect the information I needed, and focus on the writing of my story.

  The whole saga of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan really is a classic case study of the CIA at work to try to further the interests of the United States in an under-the-radar manner. As the Soviet army marched in during December 1979, the Cold War was running strongly, and there is no doubt that the US feared what the next move would be if it proved successful.

  As it happened, the Soviets ended up being bogged down in an attritional war against the mujahideen that lasted for nine years before they finally pulled out in 1989—just before the Eastern European revolutions of that year, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  That certainly did not seem the likely outcome during the first few years of the occupation, when over 100,000 Soviet troops took control of the country, backed by the KGB.

  The CIA, which together with Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency assisted the mujahideen in their fight, can take a large amount of credit for the eventual victory.

  The CIA’s Operation Cyclone proved a critical turning point. This program funded and arranged the supply of Stinger mi
ssiles from September 1986 onward, which finally gave the mujahideen the weaponry they needed to combat the terrifying Soviet Mil Mi-24 gunship helicopters—dubbed the “Hind” by NATO.

  These Hinds had been used by the Soviets to destroy villages and to kill a lot of the two million Afghans who died during the war. Another three million fled the carnage across the border into Pakistan.

  Anyone who would like a colorful and racy account of how the Stingers were deployed by the CIA, and the politics behind those decisions, should look no further than Charlie Wilson’s War, by George Crile, available on Amazon HERE.

  A 2007 film of the book, under the same title, and starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, is also available. There is no doubt that the late Charlie Wilson, a Democratic congressman, was a driving force that championed the use of Stingers and cajoled and pushed his colleagues in Congress to support Operation Cyclone with ever-increasing levels of funding. It seems likely that without the energy of this larger-than-life character, they may not have been deployed at all.

  Another extremely insightful book is Ghost Wars, by Steve Coll, a Washington Post journalist. The book covers the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan from 1979 through to 2001 and includes sections on Bin Laden. It is available on Amazon HERE.

  Milton Bearden, a thirty-year CIA veteran, was station chief in Islamabad from 1986–89, during which time he was very heavily involved in Operation Cyclone. He subsequently wrote a vivid and technically detailed thriller about the battles between the Soviets and the mujahideen entitled The Black Tulip (1998), which is still available on Amazon HERE. I found it very useful as background reading and as an inspiration for some of my plot lines.

  Before anyone asks, my fictional CIA Islamabad station chief during the 1980s, Robert Watson, is NOT based on Bearden, who I’m sure would be appalled at most of the things Watson did during his career.

  For the story of the KGB archives photographed by Abdul Akbari, I drew inspiration from the Mitrokhin Archive, a collection of notes put together by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, which he brought to the UK in 1992 when he defected.

  Steve Coll wrote an excellent article in the The Washington Post about the role played by intelligence agencies in Afghanistan and the importance of the Mitrokhin Archive in deciphering this activity. It can be found HERE.

  There is a Wikipedia entry about this HERE. There is also a book by Christopher Andrew, entitled The Sword and the Shield, available on Amazon HERE.

  For more color about the impact of the Soviet occupation on the Afghan people, I would recommend a book by ITN journalist Sandy Gall, Agony of a Nation (1988) which is available HERE.

  On the genocide committed by Soviet forces against the Afghan population, there is a good article by Michael Reisman and Charles Norchi that details the extent of depopulation and atrocities committed. Entitled “Genocide and the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan,” it can be found HERE.

  A good summary of the Soviet-Afghan war, including the extent of the genocide perpetrated by Soviet forces, can be found in Wikipedia HERE.

  The degree of international interest in investing in Afghanistan’s oil and gas reserves is well documented. For example, The Daily Telegraph reported in 2011 how China National Petroleum Corp secured a joint-venture deal to invest in oil exploration in Afghanistan’s northern provinces. It can be found HERE.

  In January 2013, The Atlantic carried an article entitled “The New War for Afghanistan’s Untapped Oil” about the attacks carried out by the Taliban on various energy installations. It can be found HERE.

  My prologue about Javed’s escape from Pul-e-Charkhi prison is entirely fictional but was inspired by real-life accounts of escapes from the prison, albeit in a much less dramatic fashion than Javed’s. For a report on one such escape, involving fifteen Taliban commanders, see this article in Tolo News HERE.

  The legendary Khost-Gardez Pass may need little introduction. However, there are some excellent videos on YouTube about this region, including a few about the lengthy and controversial construction project to pave the highway. For example, there is this one produced by USAid, click HERE, and another by the same organization, which can be found HERE.

  These two films give a good illustration of the type of terrain through which the highway passes and the small villages en route, similar to my fictional village of Wazrar. I could have chosen a real village as the backdrop for the scenes in the K-G Pass, but I decided that the sensitivities of the situations I was writing about made it perhaps better to come up with a fictional one, albeit closely based on reality.

  One of the themes that runs through Stalin’s Final Sting is that of revenge. This concept is one that is deeply rooted in the Afghan culture and is tied to the idea of honour, particularly at the family and tribal level. This lifestyle is known as Pashtunwali, or Pushtunwali, depending on your choice of spelling, and is an unwritten code adopted by the Pashtun people.

  An excellent article which explains the principles of Pashtunwali can be found in The Economist HERE.

  Expat life in Kabul is a challenge, whether as an embassy employee or in a private capacity, due to the constant threat of Taliban attacks and kidnappings. A good article that captures the essence of daily life in what amounts to a war zone has been written by Bill Bent on the American Foreign Service Association website. It can be found HERE.

  Life at the various US army outposts around Afghanistan were similarly hazardous. Forward Operating Base Wilderness, in the K-G Pass, features in Stalin’s Final Sting and some of the detail was inspired by a CBS News Sixty Minutes feature entitled “Afghanistan: Fighting in a Hornet’s Nest.” It can be found HERE.

  Also helpful with regard to life at FOB Wilderness was an article in The Huffington Post by journalist Franz-Stefan Gady, which can be found HERE.

  All these books, articles, and videos are simply a flavor of the many I read and watched while researching Stalin’s Final Sting and The Afghan. However, they do give you the basis for some further reading should you be so inspired.

  About the author and contact details

  I have always had a love of writing and a passion for reading good thrillers. But despite having a long-standing dream of writing my own novels, it took me more than five decades to finally get around to completing the first.

  Stalin’s Final Sting is the fourth in the Joe Johnson series of thrillers, which pulls together some of my other interests, particularly history, world news, and travel.

  I studied history at Loughborough University and worked for many years as a business and financial journalist before becoming a corporate and financial communications adviser with several large energy companies, specializing in media relations.

  Originally I came from Grantham, Lincolnshire, and I now live with my family in St. Albans, Hertfordshire, U.K.

  You can connect with me via these routes:

  E-mail: andrew@andrewturpin.com

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  Do get in touch with your comments and views on the books, or anything else for that matter. I enjoy hearing from readers and promise to reply.

  First published in the U.K. in 2019 by The Write Direction Publishing, St. Albans, U.K.

  Copyright © 2019 Andrew Turpin

  All rights reserved.

  Ebook edition

  ISBN: 978-1-78875-007-3

  Andrew Turpin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living
or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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