The World

Rawlings presided over the revenge killing of three judges who had dared to challenge his repressions during his first rule. Faced with an outcry, Rawlings arrested his own junta henchman and had him shot. Meanwhile he ruined the economy with Marxist nationalizations, encouraged by his allies Castro and Qaddafi. Rawlings resembled many of the pro-Soviet tyrants in Africa, but he was not one of them: ultimately this maverick would surprise everyone.

Back in the Gulf, Saddam and Khomeini had long hated each other. Saddam had almost had Khomeini assassinated; instead he killed the Shiite ayatollah al-Sadr. The Iraqis had long resented Iranian superiority and the shah’s power: Saddam’s surrogate father Uncle Talfah had written a pamphlet, Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies

. Now Saddam flew down to Riyadh to get Saudi support. Khomeini detested the Saudis, whom he had mocked as ‘the camel-grazers of Riyadh and the barbarians of Najd’. Fahd, Saudi crown prince and son of Abdulaziz, promised Saddam a billion dollars a month. The Americans greenlighted the war; so did Brezhnev, who had just taken a fatal decision.

OPERATION 333 IN KABUL

Operation Storm-333 was the most successful commando mission of modern times. At 19.15 on 27 December 1979, more than a thousand Soviet commandos, disguised in Afghan uniforms, stormed the Tajbeg Palace ten miles outside Kabul, to liquidate the Afghan general secretary Hafizullah Amin, whose radical policies and murderous purges, admiration for Stalin, and American education, alarmed the Soviets. Brezhnev’s senile elation was disturbing: he tangoed with typists and waitresses, but in public he could not finish a sentence, becoming a national joke. But the omnipotent geriatrics agonized about Amin. ‘Under no circumstances,’ said Andropov, ‘can we lose Afghanistan.’

The generals had warned against invasion. Privately Gorbachev thought it ‘a fateful mistake’, but on 12 December Andropov won the argument. As troops were mustered, Amin had moved out of the Presidential Palace to the heavily defended Tajbeg. Andropov’s Agent Patience was now Amin’s chef. If he could kill Amin, an Afghan invasion could be avoided.

On 13 December, Agent Patience poisoned Amin, but his nephew ate most of the poisoned food and had to be flown to Moscow and treated with an antidote. Then a sniper tried to shoot him but could not get close. Andropov ordered a quick surgical strike to liquidate Amin and pacify the country. On 25 December, Soviet forces started arriving with Amin’s approval. On the 27th, just hours before Storm-333, Amin presided over a banquet where he was poisoned again: he and his guests were all ill. Amin went into a coma but his Coca-Cola addiction diffused the poison and a Russian doctor, unbriefed by the KGB, revived him. Once news reached the hit squad that Amin was alive, 700 commandos led by twenty-five assassins of the Thunder unit of Alpha Group along with KGB and GRU contingents backed by 700 paratroopers and Spetsnaz

operators stormed the palace, defended by 1,500 troops, who fought back.

‘The Soviets will save us,’ said Amin as Andropov’s commandos blasted their way in.

‘They are

the Soviets,’ replied his adjutant.

‘It’s all true,’ said Amin. Once inside the palace, the assassins slaughtered Amin and virtually his entire family, his wife and son aged eleven and 350 guards; a daughter was wounded but survived. The parquet floors were awash with blood. A pro-Soviet president Karmal was installed; 80,000 troops with 1,500 tanks seized the cities, soon rising to 125,000; and at its peak over 600,000 personnel were drawn into the war. The invasion sparked a growing insurgency by around 250,000 mujahedin under tribal and religious leaders,^* backed first by Pakistan, then by the CIA and the Saudis.

Afghanistan provided perfect cover for Saddam. On 22 September 1980, he invaded Iran, calling it ‘Saddam’s Qadisiyya’, referring to the 638 Arab defeat of the Persians. Yet Saddam failed to destroy Khomeini; on the contrary, the Arab attack rallied Islamic zealotry and Iranian nationalism behind the imam, saving the regime. Thousands of Iranians volunteered to wear the red bandannas of martyrdom and were sent over the top of the trenches, often unarmed except for the key to the gates of heaven, in human waves that halted the Iraqi advance. As Khomeini executed Marxists and liberal ‘traitors’ in massive numbers, he rushed 200,000 recruits to his new army, the Revolutionary Guards. America and Russia lavished military aid on the Iraqi dictator. ‘It’s a pity,’ said Kissinger, ‘both sides can’t lose.’ The war would last ten years and kill a million young men – a forgotten catastrophe that encouraged Khomeini to consolidate his theocracy and Saddam to take more risks, funded by the Saudis.