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It seemed, indeed, that the personal memorandum, sent in early December 1979 by Andropov to Brezhnev, determined Brezhnev’s decision.^[9] Anatoly Dobrynin, former Soviet ambassador to the United States, shared this view.^[10] This confirms the observation made by Thierry Wolton that “the Kremlin knew the external world over the borders as if over the high walls of a citadel through the prism of what was reported to it by the KGB. The Organs, in this way, could manipulate the members of the Central Committee and the Politburo, which, in the closed Soviet universe, was a sacred power.”^[11]

The Soviet military, however, was not happy with the decision to invade Afghanistan. When, on December 10, 1979, Dmitry Ustinov, the defense minister, informed the chief of the General Staff, Nikolay Ogarkov, of the plan, the latter ”was surprised and outraged by such a decision.” He said he was “against the introduction of troops, calling it ‘reckless.’”^[12] Georgy M. Kornienko, who at that time was deputy foreign minister under Gromyko, wrote, referring to the position taken by his boss in the politburo meeting on December 12, 1979: “From my conversations with him, already after the introduction of troops, I concluded that it was not Gromyko who said ‘A’ in favour of such decision, but that he was ‘pressured’ into it by Andropov and Ustinov together. Which one of those two was the first to change their initial point of view and spoke in favour of sending troops, one may only guess.”^[13] It is a fair guess to assume that it was ultimately Yury Andropov who pushed his colleagues in the politburo—including General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev—to take this decision. It was, eventually, Andropov’s seven hundred special forces of the KGB, stationed in Kabul, who made the opening move by attacking the presidential palace and killing Amin. The justification given by the Soviet government for its intervention: that it had been asked for support by the Afghan government, was rather dubious. It is true that in March 1979 President Taraki had asked the Soviet Union to intervene by sending troops. At that time, however, the Soviet leadership had reacted negatively to this request. In December Taraki was no longer there, and Amin, who had executed his predecessor and taken his place, was certainly not in favor of a Soviet intervention. It is, therefore, not surprising to hear that “the Soviet troops . . . suffered from the confusion about their goals—the initial official mission was to protect the PDPA regime; however, when the troops reached Kabul, their orders were to overthrow Amin and his regime.”^[14]

If one reconstructs the events, it becomes clear that neither the Soviet military, nor the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, nor even Brezhnev himself, were at the roots of the fatal—and in the end self-defeating—decision to invade Afghanistan, but the KGB. The “Sadat” role that Andropov ascribed to Amin was probably a deliberate attempt at disinformation by this long-serving KGB chief to manipulate the Soviet leadership. It would not have been the first time. Already in 1956, when he was Soviet ambassador in Budapest, Andropov was one of the main instigators of the Soviet intervention, falsely informing Khrushchev, who initially was reluctant to intervene, that the Russian embassy was being attacked. In 1968 Andropov would again be among the hardliners who were in favor of sending Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.^[15] Andropov, a highly intelligent man, was an undisputed expert in manipulation. Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Romanian two-star general, and the highest intelligence officer to have ever defected from the Soviet bloc, a man who knew Andropov personally, characterized him as follows:

Once settled in the Kremlin, Andropov surrounded himself with KGB officers, who immediately went on a propaganda offensive to introduce him to the West as a “moderate” Communist and a sensitive, warm, Western-oriented man who allegedly enjoyed an occasional drink of Scotch, liked to read English novels, and loved listening to American jazz and the music of Beethoven. In actual fact, Andropov did not drink, as he was already terminally ill from a kidney disorder, and the rest of the portrayal was equally false.^[16]