The Soviet Union had just rolled its tanks into Afghanistan on Christmas Day, 1979, and the Cold War was burning hot again. My father supported the Mujahideen, the anti-government rebels, and we lived in fear that the intelligence services would find out. Every night around four in the morning, the roar of Russian tanks rumbled past our house in Kabul. The main road nearby was their supply route.
We were always afraid that one day they would come for my dad, and we would never see him again. It happened to so many people. Some ended up in jail. Quite a few just disappeared.
My uncles, on both my mother’s and my father’s sides, were fighting against the Russians. They were part of the Mujahideen forces. The rebels were poor and didn’t have enough arms to fight Soviet modern weapons, but they had a fierce determination. They saw it as a holy war, a defense of Islam against a godless communist occupation.
The Americans, who had been covertly supplying money and weapons to the rebels for over a year, went public with their fight. They decided they wouldn’t let Afghanistan become a graveyard for their own people. Instead, they funneled aid to the Mujahideen to make the Soviets pay the price for getting involved in the wrong place at the wrong time. The war raged on, and the country was closed to Western newsmen.
Disguised as Afghan freedom fighters, reporters managed to get in. They saw Soviet MIG fighters and MI-24 helicopter gunships blasting small towns. The rebels in the hills had no chance against that firepower. The scale of suffering was most visible in the refugee camps in Pakistan.
Hundreds of thousands of Afghans poured across the mountains, forming the largest concentration of refugees in the world. In those camps, the war was sold to the people as Islam under attack. Men were mobilized to defend their faith. Most of the men in the camps had been involved in fighting the Russians, patched up in hospitals and sent back into Afghanistan as soon as they were able to fight again.
Rumors grew. The rebels were seeking to wipe out more than just communism. Reports said they had destroyed over a thousand schools, murdered teachers, beheaded students, and set fire to schools in a campaign of terror. The Afghan war had become a religious war.
By the end of 1980, more than 80 percent of Afghan territory was under the control of the Mujahideen. When asked if their struggle would end if the Russians withdrew, one rebel said, “Till we are not able to establish a pure Islamic system in Afghanistan, we will continue our struggle. ” Those were chilling words, an omen of unintended consequences. As the conflict reached fever pitch in Afghanistan, the world turned its attention to a different arena: the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow.
Before the games even began, it became a political battleground. The USA called for an international boycott, saying it would be a violation of Olympic principles to attend games in a nation engaged in an aggressive war. To convince other nations, they called on the biggest athlete of all, Muhammad Ali. He was persuaded to visit African nations to gain support for the boycott.
Kenya’s withdrawal was considered a big victory, as they were a powerhouse in track and field. A total of 50 countries agreed to keep their athletes away from Moscow. Meanwhile, Afghan athletes agonized over whether they should participate in the Moscow Olympics. The war victims seemed half forgotten.
The games went ahead, much diminished, with 80 countries out of a total of 145 participating. For athletes who had trained for four years, it was a devastating loss. But that was politics. After a few years of relative calm, the Cold War was once again burning hot.
The Warsaw Pact had arrayed a formidable armory against NATO, with almost three times as many battle tanks. NATO countries were not capable of matching the conventional military strength of the Eastern Bloc, so they came up with a nuclear solution. European defense ministers arrived in The Hague for a NATO planning meeting. The Americans wanted their European allies to share the nuclear burden and place medium-range nuclear missiles on European soil, capable of striking the Soviet Union.
The cruise missiles, with a range of over 2,000 kilometers, were secretly flown to mainland Europe and Britain. They were installed at RAF Greenham Common, a massive Air Force base in rural southern England. The missiles were based in silos underneath the ground, coated with meters of concrete, surrounded by razor tape and armed American military police. The military police were briefed very clearly: if anybody crosses that line, you shoot them dead.
On British territory. Peace protesters were determined to demonstrate against the missiles. They planned to get 30,000 people to come to Greenham Common and knock the fence down. The government was embarrassed and had to stop the women from intruding onto the base.
The perimeter was 14 kilometers long, much of it through woodland, making it difficult to see people creeping up to the fence. On the day, an air defense plan was put into action, with helicopters patrolling all day. The protesters destroyed some of the fence but didn’t get in. Remarkably, no guns were fired.
Peace protesters remained camped on the perimeter of RAF Greenham Common for another 19 years. Many believed nuclear war was almost inevitable. Civil defense became a major priority. Across the Atlantic, the USA had been running war drills since the 1950s.
Sirens would sound the alarm, and the life of New York would stop as millions reacted to a mock attack. Children in elementary school practiced bomb drills, sitting in the hall with their hands over their heads, bending down as if that would do anything. Do-it-yourself fallout shelters became an essential addition to homes. One gentleman in Vancouver, Canada, who preferred to remain anonymous, built a bomb-proof shelter with a Geiger counter for checking radioactivity, heavily insulated doors to prevent radioactive penetration, and supplies including an oxygen tank.
Switzerland had one of the most advanced public defense plans. Every building less than 15 years old had its own fallout shelter, with the government paying half. For housing developments, there were communal shelters, maintained in spotless condition for any emergency. In Afghanistan, shelter remained a scarce commodity on the new front line of the Cold War.
By 1981, the victims of the Soviet-Afghan War gathered in even greater numbers on the Pakistani border. It was said to be the largest concentration of refugees in the world, possibly numbering as many as 2 million, or one seventh of Afghanistan’s entire population. Despite US government support, the rebellion was not making headway. Reports from inside Afghanistan revealed what had driven these people from their homes.
The town of Paghman was a ruined shadow of its once glorious past. Before the Soviet intervention, it was a town of tree-lined streets and villas. Now it was ringed by 70 Afghan army posts commanding the surrounding hilltops. In a hospital in Kabul, children who were victims of a war too young to understand were being treated.
A boy named Max, about seven or eight years old, was wounded by a booby trap. Another child had a bullet in his chest from an incident on the roads of Jalalabad. Rockets rarely hit their intended targets, landing instead in heavily populated civilian areas. I lost a dear friend when a rocket hit a house only three houses away from where I lived.
Despite the devastation, some chose not to flee. In the ruins of Paghman, a 31-year-old mayor named Mohammad Akbar, elected the year before, was the driving force keeping life going. In one dark building, a mullah was found teaching a class of children. Life would be extremely difficult, especially in the cold winter days.
I remember craving for bread, but the markets were empty. There were incidents where street dogs, too hungry, attacked kids. There was a large group of Afghan people no one was talking about: the women. During Russian time, women in the cities relatively enjoyed freedom.
They could go to school, wear whatever they wanted, and enjoyed their basic rights. Communism became linked with women’s emancipation. Under President Najibullah, women enjoyed Western-style freedoms and a certain measure of independence. But in other cities and rural areas, it was a very different story.
Not many schools were functioning. Women could only go out if they had a burqa or proper hijab. In places where rebels had control, female students came under threat at the university. The Mujahideen didn’t like education for girls and women.
They attacked the university, throwing acid in the faces of female students. Some women decided to fight back. A militia was formed by women drawn together by the threat posed by the forces of Islamic fundamentalism. “We join with the militia because we defend women’s rights,” one said.
“We will fight against counter-revolution in our country. ” Although they weren’t fighting in the front line, many had received full military training and were ready to defend to death their newly-won rights. Fatima joined up five years earlier. Her aim was twofold, she said: to fight the fundamentalist government and to defend women’s rights.
If the fundamentalists came to power, the future for some women was likely to be a step backward. There were very strong women who well understood the virtues of a more secular environment, deeply unhappy about the support of Islamic extremists by the great powers playing games against each other. With no end in sight, Afghanistan had become the Soviet Union’s own version of Vietnam. The situation went from bad to worse.
On September 1st, 1983, Korean Air Flight 007 from New York to Seoul went missing over the Sea of Japan with 269 people on board. The Korean airliner had been shot down. After a week, the Soviet Union admitted responsibility. On the night of the disaster, the flight strayed off course and entered Soviet airspace over the Kamchatka Peninsula.
The Russians believed the jumbo jet was a US spy plane. Four jet fighters were scrambled. On the tapes of the radio transmissions between the pilots, it is clear beyond any doubt that the Soviet Union did in fact shoot down this unarmed commercial airliner. The pilots had armed and fired their heat-seeking missiles.
One exploded just behind the tail of the plane, the other by the left wing. The cabin of the 747 decompressed, oxygen masks deployed, and it took 12 minutes for Korean Airlines flight 007 to crash. Despite fury in Korea, the Russians claimed the strike was legitimate. One of the pilots stated the airliner had ignored tracer warning shots, but the tapes showed no conversation about warning shots at all.
The USSR found the cockpit voice recorder but did not tell anyone for nine years. Cold War relations were at an all-time low. If they were willing to shoot down an unarmed commercial plane, they were certainly willing to shoot down an unarmed city. After more than 35 years of war fought across the globe, the Cold War entered a new era: the era of the spy.
1985 was known as the year of the spy. There were five or six significant espionage cases in that single year that the FBI made arrests and got convictions. One of the biggest spy scandals of the ’80s was handed to FBI special agent Joe Wolfinger. John Walker worked in the codes department of the US Navy.
His marriage breakdown was about to get him into serious trouble. His former wife, from whom he was divorced, got drunk one day and called the FBI to report that her former husband had been a spy for 20 years. She said she believed he made a million dollars from espionage. Wolfinger and his team watched Walker day and night.
On May 19th, 1985, they followed him from his house. When he got to Richmond, he turned north, and they knew something was going to happen. They believed Walker was on his way to make a drop, where a spy makes an exchange, placing a package containing classified information and picking up one containing money. As the day unfolded, Walker placed a bag under a tree.
An FBI agent came running out of the woods with the bag under his arms, shouting into the radio, “I’ve got it. I’ve got it. It’s got secret stuff in it. ” The agents had their evidence.
They tracked Walker to a motel and arrested him. Interrogation revealed Walker had been spying for the USSR since 1968. But he was not a communist. His motivation was financial.
It was money. Despite the huge victory, the USA believed John Walker was just the tip of the iceberg. There was no way to know how many John Walkers were out there. The decade of the most intense spying activity in the Cold War ended badly for Walker.
The government wanted him to talk, and he ended up with a life sentence and never got out. It is said that the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. There were signs that the great and deadly game of the Cold War may have an end date.
But for a while longer, the world must stand on the brink.
