Aleksandr Antonovich Lyakhovskiy Working Paper pp - Woodrow ...

guilty party with all the severity of the law! For we were on the territory of a friendly country and
any accidental shot or carelessly tossed word could serve as a cause of an international scandal.
The longer I heard Yasha the more the conviction grew in me that something was wrong
here. Rather, everything was wrong. Or I had lost my mind and was inappropriately evaluating
reality and what Semenov said; or was it HE who was out of sorts Everything that he had said was
so divorced from reality that I somehow couldn’t even find the words to comment on this plan. This
was complete adventurism, elementary ignorance of the situation, and the most complete
incompetence…
Of course this was not something that was Semenov’s idea. Some big boss had drawn up
the plan. Yasha had already told me then that the high command had put him, the chief of our entire
group, in a foolish position and in a practically hopeless situation: here’s your plan of operations –
fulfill it…
In principle the opinion of all the “Zenit” troops was the same: the proposed plan was an
absurdity born of an ignorance of the situation. An obvious dilettante had drawn up the plan. But no
one then talked openly aloud about this. Everyone understood that this was a decision of some high
command unknown to us. It was not precluded that our Party advisers here had also had a hand. By
the way, the bespectacled briefer who was explaining to us about Amin the usurper, judging from his
manners and smooth speech, completely looked like a representative of the latter [trans. note: the
Party advisers]…
A day later it was explained to us in the morning that we were going to Kabul at night.
However the standdown was given at noon. The adventurist version of the plan had been scuttled.
Well, thank God!
The snipers from the special KGB subunits did not manage to kill Amin. “Zenit” officers Vladimir Tsvetkov
and Fedor Yerokhov set the sights of the sniper rifles at Bagram at 450 meters, chose positions along Amin’s usual
route of travel, set up a watch, and specified withdrawal routes to the Soviet Embassy, but each time, before they
passed a reinforced guard was set up along the whole route and the vehicles moved at enormous speed and the “Zenit”
troops could not carry out the mission.
Through inertia, for three more days (14-16 December) work continued in Bagram to prepare to seize the
palace in the center of Kabul with the forces of the special services and the “Muslim” battalion (scouting, working out
the details of the assault, coordination – down to the smallest details), but this was preparation for operations which
had been proposed to begin in the event of the success of a new subversive action against Amin.
However the next attempt against him on 16 December ended in failure. They tried to poison Hafizullah
Amin but his nephew Asadullah Amin, the chief of the counterintelligence service, drank the Pepsi Cola with the
“contents”; he was sent to the USSR for treatment with a very serious attack of hepatitis. Soviet doctors saved him but
after the change of government in Kabul he ended up in Lefortovo Prison where attempts were made to learn from him
the circumstances of the murder of Taraki and other information. However Asadullah Amin conducted himself
worthily and firmly at interrogations and said nothing. He was then deported to Afghanistan and executed there by the
new regime.
An An-12 aircraft urgently flew in from Fergana for the members of the future Afghan government headed by
Babrak Karmal and they again left for the USSR.
According to Yuriy Izotov, an officer of Group “A”:
We had to return to Tashkent again when the operation did not come off; it was not
cancelled, but postponed. We met there with future members of the CC PDPA Politburo whom
Valentin Ivanovich Shergin and his guys were guarding. I noted that the Afghans were unhappy
about the inactivity and I suggested they throw knives. I led them out to the street, set up the boards,
and began to train. Then I led Anahita to work in the dacha where we had been fishing with her. I
had to disperse them somewhat to keep dark thoughts from them. But then they seated us in the
33