I. The Andropov Deception - Why in the World Did the USSR Invade Afghanistan?

The CIA-KGB plot to destroy the Soviet military.

The background to today’s post is the story of comrade Yuri Andropov (real name: Fleckenstein) taking over the KGB, staffing it with his co-ethnics, and initiating a plan to detonate the USSR. This is all something you should be familiar with already because we covered it in two long and detailed deep dive essays on the topic here and here.

Previously, I mentioned that Andropov was involved in luring the Soviet army into Afghanistan, but lamented that I didn’t have time to get into the details of that particular story since we were focused more on his rise to power and his plans to detonate the USSR and to initiate Convergence with the Western elite. Thanks to Andropov’s efforts, he mid-wifed the birth of a totally new system that only bares aesthetic similarity to the USSR of before and which continues on in the so-called Russian Federation of today. This USSR 2.0 shed many of its imperial territories, its command economy, and its old cadres in favor of a government run entirely by the KGB-FSB and still holds the goal of converging with the West and enforcing global government, but with more concessions to the local elite than the West is comfortable sharing at the moment.

All of Putin’s efforts since 2014, or perhaps even earlier, in 2007 were done with the goal of bringing the West to the negotiating table and making good on the promises made to the USSR elite right before they detonated the USSR.

Not only did Andropov lay the ground work for Convergence with the West, but he also lured the Soviet army into a trap, deliberately. The goals of this operation, as far as I can tell, were many and they were all sinister:

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

• To bleed the Soviet army, then the best and biggest in the world, and to inflict significant reputation and material damage on it

• To discredit Brezhnev and his Politburo, the military and other competing centers of power in the USSR elite

• To reform the KGB and to vastly enrich its bosses from the huge amounts of money siphoned off from the war effort, reconstruction efforts and from setting up a lucrative drug trade

• To damage 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 have a split emerge between several internal power factions in the late USSR which ruptures into an almost all-out gang war for power. These internal struggles continued into the post-Soviet period, with the FSB waging a clandestine war against their internal enemies such as the:

• The military through its systematic assassination campaign targeting popular Soviet officers

• The GRU (military intelligence, foreign operations), or at least a faction of it, by selling their assets off to Western intelligence 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 stand up to the organized crime operations of the KGB and paid a price in blood for it

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

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

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

We cannot make any sense of the modern-day Russian Federation, or Ukraine or Belarus, or the Baltics and Central Asia for that matter without understanding the radical changes that Andropov’s KGB effected on the Soviet government.

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

Also, for this story to make sense, we have introduce a few more characters to the drama. The first is Ustinov, who was the Minister of Defense, the USSR’s top general, essentially, who decided to throw his lot in with Andropov. Brezhnev we already know from a previous essay on him. And finally, there are the powerful KGB mob-bosses and the CIA assets operating within the USSR in close cooperation with Andropov and in Afghanistan as well. I offer this overview up front so that the reader doesn’t get lost in the details and foreign-sounding names as we dig deeper. What happened is quite easy to understand, actually, but it challenges many assumptions that people have about the nature of the Cold War, the basis of the post-WWII world order, and it introduces the reader to methods of subversion and social-engineering used by transnational intelligence agencies against their own populations, which are hard to accept because of the moral implications of this information. But the lessons from the secret history of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan have profound implications on our understanding of how the modern Russian Federation is run, and, for the Americans and British especially, it might provide an explanation for the otherwise baffling Washington decision to repeat the same experiment in Afghanistan that the USSR did only a few decades prior.

But I’ve said enough up front already.

You will see what I mean.

Let’s just dive right in.

The Diversion to Afghanistan

We may as well start somewhere, and Iran is a very interesting place to start. One key point that few know about was that the original USSR plan was to invade Iran. There, the GRU had done a lot of work preparing Soviet-sympathetic forces in the military who were ready to overthrow the new Islamic government set up by the CIA, so long as they had the backing of Moscow. At the very last minute though, all of these plans were scrapped and the Soviet army was thrown into the irrelevant backwater of Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, instead.