I. The Andropov Deception – Why Did the USSR Invade Afghanistan?

The background to today’s post is the story of comrade Yuri Andropov (real name: Fleckenstein) taking over the KGB, staffing it with his fellow ethnics, and initiating a plan to blow up the USSR. This is something you should already be familiar with, as we’ve covered it in two lengthy and detailed essays on the subject. here And here.

I mentioned earlier that Andropov was involved in luring the Soviet army into Afghanistan, but I regretted not having time to go into the details of that particular story as we were more focused on his rise to power and his plans to blow up the USSR and launch a military operation. Convergence with the Western elite. Thanks to Andropov’s efforts, he presided over the birth of a completely new system that bears only aesthetic similarities to the USSR of the past and that still exists in the so-called Russian Federation today. This USSR 2.0 has shed much of its imperial territories, its planned economy, and its old cadres in favor of a government run entirely by the KGB-FSB and still aims to merge with the West and impose a global government, but with more concessions to the local elite than the West is currently comfortable sharing.

All of Putin’s efforts since 2014, or perhaps even earlier, in 2007, have been aimed at bringing the West to the negotiating table and fulfilling the promises he made to the USSR elite just before they blew up the USSR.

Andropov not only laid the groundwork for Convergence with the West, but also deliberately lured the Soviet army into a trap. The objectives of this operation were, as far as I can tell, numerous and all of them sinister:

• To avert the planned invasion of Iran by the USSR and prevent the CIA government there from being replaced by a pro-Soviet government

• To bleed the Soviet army, at that time the best and largest in the world, and to inflict significant reputational and material damage on it

• In order to discredit Brezhnev and his Politburo, the army and other competing power centers in the USSR elite

• To reform the KGB and enrich its bosses enormously with the vast sums siphoned off from the war effort, reconstruction work and the establishment of a lucrative drug trade.

• Damaging Soviet society by flooding it with drugs

• And to turn the entire Islamic world against the USSR

And as a result of the fallout from Afghanistan, we see a split developing between various internal power factions in the late USSR, culminating in a near all-out gang war for power. This internal struggle continued into the post-Soviet period, with the FSB waging a covert war against their internal enemies such as:

• The army, with its systematic campaign of assassinations targeting popular Soviet officers,

• The GRU (military intelligence, foreign operations), or at least part of it, by selling their assets to Western intelligence agencies and leaking the names of their agents

• The Ministry of Internal Affairs (the non-KGB police in the USSR) who, to their credit, tried to resist the organized crime operations of the KGB and paid a price in blood for it

• The patriotic Russian civil society, which was systematically attacked, with Putin eventually passing laws banning any form of organization around Russian national identity

When the dust settled, Andropov’s KGB transformed into the FSB and inherited control of Russia. They were helped in this by their oligarch friends, most of whom started out as mafia bosses working for the KGB in the USSR in the black economy. Virtually all of these oligarchs owed their positions to the favorable contracts and positions they were able to secure under Andropov, and to their access to capital in the West, an advantage they were able to enjoy because they had cousins ​​in the West.

To reach this point, Andropov had to eliminate many powerful people and parties along the way.

We cannot understand the contemporary Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belarus, or the Baltic States and Central Asia without understanding the radical changes that Andropov’s KGB introduced into the Soviet government.

So, with all that background in mind, we begin today’s story with the strange, incomprehensible decision of the USSR to invade Afghanistan, the graveyard of the rich. The basics of this story can be found on Wikipedia, but the important stuff can only be found in the memoirs of old Soviet generals and bureaucrats and GRU spooks who were later left by the side of the road in the new Russian Federation, run by the KGB-FSB.

To make this story work, we have added a few more characters to the drama. The first is Ustinov, who was the Minister of Defense, the highest general of the USSR, who decided to throw his lot in with Andropov. We already know Brezhnev from an earlier essay about him. And finally, there are the powerful KGB mafia bosses and the CIA agents who work closely with Andropov inside the USSR and also in Afghanistan. I give this overview in advance so that the reader does not get lost in the details and foreign-sounding names when we dig deeper. What happened is actually quite easy to understand, but it challenges many assumptions that people have about the nature of the Cold War, the basis of the world order after World War II, and it introduces the reader to methods of subversion and social engineering used by transnational intelligence services against their own people, which are difficult to accept because of the moral implications of this information. But the lessons we can learn from the secret history of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan have profound implications for our understanding of how the modern Russian Federation is governed. And for the Americans and the British in particular, it may explain Washington’s otherwise baffling decision to repeat in Afghanistan the same experiment that the USSR had conducted only a few decades earlier.

But I’ve said enough.

You probably understand what I mean.

Let’s dive right in.

We might as well start somewhere, and Iran is a very interesting place to start. One important point that few people know about is that the original plan of the USSR was to invade Iran. There the GRU had done a lot of work to prepare Soviet sympathetic forces in the army who were ready to overthrow the new Islamic government of the CIA, as long as they had the support of Moscow. At the very last moment, however, all these plans were scrapped and the Soviet army was instead thrown into the irrelevant hinterland of Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires.