In April 1978, the secular government of Mohammed Daoud Khan was overthrown in a bloody military coup orchestrated by communist officers seeded within the Afghan army. The coup took Moscow by complete surprise, but the Soviet Union quickly moved to support the newly installed Marxist regime led by Nur Mohammad Taraki. Taraki, a secular Marxist who declared himself “The Great Teacher,” embarked on a radical and uncompromising program of social and economic reforms designed to reconstruct traditional Afghan society on the Soviet model. His reforms included compulsory coeducational literacy drives, the redistribution of land, the abolition of traditional Islamic lending networks, the banning of bride dowries, and the mandatory instruction of Marxist-Leninist dogma. These reforms provoked intense, immediate resistance from conservative tribal elders and religious leaders. In March 1979, the tension erupted into open rebellion in the ancient western city of Herat, where a charismatic army captain named Ismail Khan led a violent garrison mutiny. The rebels hunted down and brutally executed more than a dozen Soviet military advisers and their families, prompting the Afghan government to launch retributive bombing runs that killed as many as twenty thousand citizens.
As the insurgency expanded throughout the Afghan countryside, Taraki’s regime grew increasingly unstable and violent. Tens of thousands of political prisoners were systematically jailed and executed behind Kabul prison walls. Rather than moderating his policies as Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin privately urged, Taraki defended the state terror by citing Vladimir Lenin’s historical instruction to remain merciless toward enemies of the revolution. In September 1979, the regime consumed itself when Taraki’s ambitious and ruthless prime minister, Hafizullah Amin, ousted his superior from power. Taraki was subsequently executed in a barricaded Kabul compound, leaving Amin as the sole head of the faltering state. Amin’s ascension initiated a bizarre and volatile comedy of errors within the Soviet intelligence apparatus. Under his leadership, Amin launched mass repressions that gutted the Communist Party, the military, and the civil service, rendering the Afghan state highly vulnerable to collapse.
The KGB Residency in Kabul had maintained both Taraki and Amin on its payroll for years, but Amin’s imperious behavior after taking power deeply alarmed his Soviet handlers. In an attempt to discredit Amin, the KGB initially planted false stories alleging that he was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent. This disinformation backfired spectacularly through a classic case of intelligence “blowback”. When Amin held a series of private, stilted meetings in Kabul with American chargé d’affaires J. Bruce Amstutz, the KGB began to panic that its own fabricated rumors might be true. Soviet intelligence noted that Amin had previously failed his doctoral examinations twice at Columbia University in New York, where he had been affiliated with the Asia Foundation—an organization with historical ties to the CIA. Although U.S. diplomats and the CIA Kabul station regarded Amin as a dangerous tyrant and had no operational contact with him, the paranoid KGB came to believe that the CIA was actively using Amin to penetrate Kabul’s leadership. KGB Chief Yuri Andropov warned General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev that the CIA was executing a devious plot to establish a base in Afghanistan, point Pershing missiles at the Soviet underbelly, and eventually destabilize the USSR’s southern Central Asian republics.
To prevent this imagined CIA encroachment and preserve the fading Afghan revolution, the Soviet Politburo’s inner circle made the fateful decision on November 26, 1979, to launch a full-scale military invasion and execute Hafizullah Amin. To replace the recalcitrant Amin, the KGB selected Babrak Karmal, a prominent, exiled Afghan communist who had been living in Eastern Europe under Soviet protection. Early in December, clandestine Soviet military and KGB units began to infiltrate Kabul and other strategic centers to prepare for the main assault. On December 7, 1979, the KGB executed the highly sensitive, covert extraction and infiltration of their selected puppet ruler. Protected by paratroopers and KGB special officers, Babrak Karmal was secretly flown from his exile into the secure, Soviet-controlled Bagram Air Base aboard a Soviet Tu-134 aircraft. The infiltration of Karmal occurred weeks before the formal invasion, establishing a parallel governing authority in waiting while the KGB set out to eliminate Amin.
With Karmal safely secured at Bagram, KGB assassins immediately began to case Amin’s residence to execute him cleanly before the arrival of regular army divisions. Operatives first attempted to poison Amin by infiltrating his private kitchen. However, the paranoid Amin employed multiple family members as food tasters; the poison succeeded only in sickening one of his nephews. The next day, a Soviet sniper shot at Amin and missed. These failed clandestine attempts forced the KGB to rely on a massive, brute-force frontal assault to complete the execution. On Christmas Eve, Soviet Antonov transport planes carrying airborne troops began landing at Kabul’s international airport, and regular tank columns rolled across the Amu Darya River. During the chaotic opening hours of the invasion, more than seven hundred disguised KGB paramilitaries wearing Afghan military uniforms stormed Amin’s Tajbeg Palace. After a brutal, close-quarters gun battle that claimed the lives of dozens of Soviet attackers, the KGB paramilitaries cornered and executed Hafizullah Amin, clearing the way to officially install Babrak Karmal as the new, Soviet-beholden President of Afghanistan.