veloped the production of magnesite clinker essentially at the disposal of the Soviet Union, and now the Soviets caused great difficulties for them [the North Koreans] by not purchasing it; they had been compelled to halt production in several mines.

Comrade Moskovsky reacted to that in the following manner: the Soviet Union never asked the government of the DPRK to develop the production of magnesite clinker; otherwise, he (the Soviet Ambassador) knew very well that production had not been halted in any of the magnesite mines [...] it was rather obvious that she [the Soviet Union] purchased goods they could really make use of. The Soviet organs would not take over magnesite sand in the future either.

As was well-known, they did not purchase Korean machine-tools, because the latter's quality was inferior to that of the Soviet machines, and the Soviet Union had no need of museum pieces.

As Ambassador to Pyongyang, Yi Chu-yon went on, he [Moskovsky] could see with his own eyes that they [the North Koreans] did not live well, food was scarce, clothes were in short supply, they worked hard, they made strenuous efforts, they even sacrificed their free time to develop the country and increase the living standards of the people. They wanted to become civilized people, they wanted to reach communism together with the socialist countries.

Unfortunately, Comrade Moskovsky replied, he did not know the situation of this place, for the Korean organs did not allow him to contact the people, they kept him away from the population. Nor had he, the Ambassador of the Soviet Union, any contact with the members of the Korean government; for instance, Kim Il Sung received even Japanese prostitutes, but he had not been willing to meet him [Moskovsky] for more than a year. They [the North Koreans] indeed worked hard, he could see that; the people were subjected to the torment of spending 8 hours at work and 4 hours at meetings every day. They [the Soviet diplomats] got information about the host country almost exclusively from the press. He also saw that Nodong Sinmun, the party's central newspaper, had been hurling abuse at the Soviet Union for a year under such terms as "certain people" and "certain countries".

Yi Chu-yon then presented the affair in such a way as though the Soviet Union and the Comecon countries (he listed them by name) had not been willing to purchase anything but non-ferrous metals from Korea; thus, they wanted to force the DPRK to remain a producer of raw materials and agricultural goods. Certain people lined their pockets through the trade with Korea.

Comrade Moskovsky repudiated this statement by saying that it was solely the inferior quality of Korean manufactured goods and other industrial products that prevented them from being purchased in larger quantities. Exchange of goods with Korea amounted to a mere 1.8 percent of the Soviet Union's foreign trade. "Do you not think,” Comrade Moskovsky asked, "that the statement [accusing] the Soviet Union of lining her pockets through this trade sounds ridiculous in the light of such an insignificant percentage?"

The Deputy Premier brought up the issue of the payment by installments of the loans the Soviets had granted [to the DPRK]. (This amount would run to approx. 12 million rubles next year, then it would rise by 5-10 million in the coming years.) The Korean government could provide the payment of the next installments only through the export of magnesite clinker and milled barite. If the Soviet Union did not accept these materials, it would deal a heavy blow to the economy of the DPRK. This would obviously prove that the Soviet leaders extended the disagreements to the state line. The Korean Workers' Party had its own political line, and it intended to proceed along this line. (Comrade Moskovsky asked Yi Chu-yon to send the Koreans present out of the room, and when the latter fulfilled the request, Comrade Moskovsky also sent out the employee of the commercial branch agency who had accompanied him.) They continued the conversation with two interpreters present.

"Now let's talk with each other as Communists,” Comrade Moskovsky began to speak. “First of all, you have no political line of your own, it is the Chinese policy that the leaders of the KWP imitate and carry out. We have been observing speeches about the alleged [...] attempts at the exploitation of Korea for approximately a year. Would it not be more appropriate if the high-ranking economic leaders, say, Deputy Premiers, of the Soviet Union and the DPRK came together to discuss and clarify the alleged grievances and the problems you perceive in our economic relations?” Thereupon, Yi Chu-yon declared that the time had not yet come for such a negotiation.

"It seems that you are afraid of such a discussion, and at present the Chinese would not allow you to meet the representative of the Soviet Union," the Soviet Ambassador replied. Comrade Moskovsky then handed over the copy of the letter the Soviet government had sent to China with regard to the 1965 meeting of African and Asian Premiers. He asked Yi Chu-yon whether the latter wanted him to set forth orally the content of the letter. The person in question declined, then added that it must have been full of aspersions.

The leaders of the CPSU and the Soviet government, Comrade Moskovsky remarked, did not cast aspersions on anyone but substantiated their message by realistic arguments based on the principles of Marxism-Leninism. Casting aspersions was solely a habit of the weak who could not bring up convincing arguments.

With this, the three-hour debate came to an end.

József Kovács (Ambassador)

DOCUMENT No. 40

Report, Embassy of Hungary in North Korea to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 1 October 1964

[Source: MOL, XIX-J-1-j Korea, 5. doboz, 5/bc, 005971/1964. Translated by Balazs Szalontai.]

On 24 August, the Provisional Chargé d'Affaires of the Soviet Embassy, Comrade Pimenov, told Comrade Fendler that recently problems had recent arisen in Soviet-Korean cooperation for lumber. In accordance with the five-year agreement signed in 1957, the DPRK lumbers free of charge, with its own workforce, in the Amur region. In 1961, during Kim Il Sung's visit to Moscow, the agreement was extended, at the request of the Korean side, for another 10 years. The DPRK has hitherto lumbered approx. 2 million cubic meters of wood, and at present there are still approx. five thousand Koreans working in the forests around Khabarovsk. In the last months the Korean workers and their leaders have been behaving more and more provocatively, they are violating the rules aimed at the protection of forests, and the articles of the intergovernmental agreement, etc. The competent Korean authority is intentionally raising difficulties in the work with the local Soviet organs, and finally the head of the Korean enterprise made an ultimatumlike statement, according to which they would cancel the agreement unless the Soviet side fulfilled a good many demands of theirs. At the same time, they are taking advantage of the relaxed rules of border crossing to ship large quantities of vodka, apple, salt, Japanese goods, transistor appliances, etc., from the DPRK for the workers, and the Korean workers are carrying on a speculative trade with the local population by selling these goods. This had assumed such proportions that the local organs were obliged to report it to Moscow. On 17 August the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister sent for the Ambassador of the DPRK, and gave him a verbal warning; at the same time, he reminded him that since it was an intergovernmental agree

ment they were talking about, the government of the DPRK should officially confirm the statement of the aforementioned managing director, and in this case, if the DPRK wanted to cancel the agreement, the Soviet side would not make difficulties over that. Deputy Minister Kim Yong-nam also sent for Comrade Pimenov about the issue, and he blamed the Soviet organs for the difficulties.

On 8 September Comrade Pimenov also informed Comrade Fendler about the fact that three days ago Deputy Minister Kim Yong-nam had again sent for the Soviet Chargé d'Affaires, and handed him the letter of the Korean government, in which they proposed the cancellation of the agreement, laying the blame on the Soviet side.

Following that, Comrade Moskovsky told me that recently he had met Deputy Minister Kim Yong-nam. The Deputy Minister raised the issue of the cancellation of the Khabarovsk

lumbering agreement [...].

Thereupon the Soviet Ambassador replied the following: [...] Unfortunately, the competent Korean authorities took unfair advantage of the helpfulness of the Soviet Union. For one thing, recently the Korean lumberers have been exploiting the forests really ruinously, they are cutting down even the saplings, and, as a consequence, it will take a long time to reforest the area.

Secondly, the Korean organs took advantage of the relaxed rules of border crossing [...] to smuggle in Chinese anti-Soviet propaganda material, and they also involved the employees of the Korean Consulate in Nakhodka in that. [...]

Finally, Comrade Moskovsky emphasized to the Deputy Minister that if this activity continued, the Soviet organs would be obliged to close the Korean Consulate in Nakhodka and arrest certain persons so as to put an end to these unfriendly, destructive activities against the Soviet people.

József Kovács (Ambassador)

Introduction

By Christian Friedrich Ostermann

W

That was behind the Soviet decision in December 1979 to invade Afghanistan? And when and why did Mikhail Gorbachev decide to pull out Soviet troops nearly ten years later? What was the role of the U.S. covert assistance program, in particular the Stinger missiles? What role did CIA intelligence play? How did the Afghan War's history, a key step in the rise of militant Islam, intersect with the history of the final decade of the Cold War? These were among the questions addressed at a major international conference, "Towards an International History of the War in Afghanistan," organized in April 2002 by the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) in cooperation with the Woodrow Wilson Center's Asia Program and Kennan Institute, George Washington University's Cold War Group, and the National Security Archive.2 Designed as a "critical oral history" conference, the discussions between policy veterans-former Soviet officials and former National Security Council (NSC), State Department, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials from the Carter, Bush, and Reagan administrations and scholarly experts centered on newly released and translated US, Russian, Bulgarian, German, Czech, and Hungarian documents on the war, a selection of which are printed below.3 In addition to those mentioned below, conference participants included former RAND analyst Alexander Alexiev, former CIA officials George Cave and Charles Cogan, Ambassador Raymond L. Garthoff, former Kabul University professor M. Hassan Kakar, Ambassador Dennis Kux, Ambassador William Green Miller, former Carter NSC staffer Jerrold Schecter, President George H. W. Bush's Special Afghanistan Envoy Peter Tomsen, and former Reagan administration Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs Nicholas A. Veliotes.

The available Russian documents-including a set of materials provided to CWIHP by Russian military expert A. A. Lyakhovsky revealed how one-sided official reporting from Afghanistan severely limited Soviet policy options between March 1979, when an uprising in Herat and calls for Soviet intervention first surfaced during discussions in Moscow, and the final decision-making process on intervention that fall. Russian scholar Svetlana Savranskaya argued that the Soviet leaders' almost exclusive reliance on alarmist KGB assessments of a quickly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan in the fall of 1979—at the expense of more cautious military intelligence and diplomatic channels-constituted a critical factor in the decision to intervene. That year, Soviet concerns mounted over the possibility of a potential US intervention in Iran following the ouster of the pro-Western Shah. Moscow, moreover, feared that the United States sought

a substitute foothold in Afghanistan and worried about maintaining its credibility with communist world allies. Soviet leaders were genuinely concerned that Afghan strongman Hafizullah Amin was either a US agent or prepared to sell out to the United States. At the CWIHP conference, former US Charge d'Affaires J. Bruce Amstutz as well as other participants forcefully refuted allegations of Agency links to Amin. In his five conversations with Amin in the fall of 1979, Amstutz remembered, the Afghan leader did not in any way suggest that he was interested in allying himself with the United States.

US relations with successive communist regimes in Afghanistan had been volatile since the April 1978 communist coup, the "Saur Revolution." The accessible KGB record remains garbled on a key event in the downward spiral of the US-Afghan relationship prior to the Soviet invasion of 1979: the still-mysterious February 1979 abduction and subsequent killing of US Ambassador Adolph Dubs. The materials, provided to CWIHP by defected KGB archivist Vasiliy Mitrokhin (published as "The KGB in Afghanistan," CWIHP Working Paper No. 40, available at http://cwihp.si.edu), suggest that the Amin regime, against the advice of the US embassy in Kabul, had authorized the storming of the hotel where the ambassador was held by three terrorists associated with a radical Islamic group. It remains unclear why the KGB recommended the execution of the only terrorist who survived the hotel storming of the hotel before US embassy personnel could interrogate him. Dubs had in fact advocated a waitand-see policy toward Kabul and had favored the resumption of Afghan officer training in the United States, which had been suspended after the communist take-over in 1978, eager as other State Department officials to avoid forcing Kabul to rely solely on the USSR.

But by early 1979 relations between the two countries were rapidly declining. Following a meeting with Amin, Carter Administration NSC official Thomas P. Thornton recounted providing a negative assessment of the regime that influenced the US to suspend its assistance program to Afghanistan, a decision reinforced by the "Dubs Affair.” In mid-1979, the Carter administration began to provide non-lethal aid to the Afghan resistance movement. The Reagan administration would indeed inherit an active program of covert military aid to the Mujahadeen that had begun in December 1979 (though some conference participants suggested that a USfunded arms pipeline was in place as early as August 1979— an assertion repudiated by some of the CIA officials present). In the early 1980s, under the leadership of CIA Director William Casey, this aid program expanded into a sophisticated coalition effort to train the mujahadin resistance fighters, pro

the government of Saudi Arabia decided to share the costs of this operation equally with the United States. In its full range of activities, the coalition included the intelligence services of the United States, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, and China. According to the former CIA station chief in Pakistan, Milton Bearden, at the height of the covert assistance program in 1986-1987 the coalition was injecting some 60,000 tons of weapons, ammunition, and communications equipment per year into the Afghan war.

Nevertheless, Elie D. Krakowski, former special assistant to US assistant secretary of defense for international security policy during the Reagan administration, argued that US aid and in fact overall American strategy toward Afghanistan remained half-hearted and inconsistent, mostly due to the fact that Afghanistan policy derived largely from the United States' relationships with Pakistan and Iran. This, in turn, meant allowing the Pakistani ally broad leeway, with the result that US assistance was channeled largely to radical Islamic resistance groups. Confronted with allegations that one third of the Stinger missiles alone were kept by the Pakistan intelligence service for its own purposes, the former CIA officials at the conference asserted that oversight over the aid program was tighter and more discriminate than publicly perceived.

London-based Norwegian scholar Odd Arne Westad pointed out that Russian documents reveal how quickly the Soviet leadership grew disenchanted with the intervention in Afghanistan. A narrow circle of leaders had made the decision to intervene, with KGB chief Andropov and Soviet Defense Minister Ustinov playing critical roles. According to Anatoly S. Chernyaev, a former member of the Central Committee's International Department and later a key foreign policy adviser to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, many Soviet officials like him learned of the invasion from the radio. Even at the time, criticism of the decision within the Soviet elite was more widespread than often assumed. Not surprisingly, internal discussion of settlement proposals began as early as spring 1980. These proposals bore remarkable similarities to those introduced by the United Nations in 1986.

By the time Gorbachev came to power in March 1985, the war in Afghanistan had developed into a stalemate. The Soviet forces were mainly tied up in cities and in defending airfields and bases, leaving only roughly 15 percent of their troops for operations. According to Lester Grau, a US Army specialist on the war, the Afghan conflict had become "a war of logistics." Grau also emphasized the heavy toll disease took on the Soviet troops; almost 60 percent of them were hospitalized at some point during the war. Some advocates of the US covert aid program, such as Congressman Charles Wilson (D-TX), contended that the aid program drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan and credited the decision to introduce the shoulder-held Stinger missiles in 1986 as the basic turning point of the war. This missile proved highly effective against Soviet helicopters.

In a further effort to build military pressure against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, James G. Hershberg

declassified US documents that in 1986 the Reagan Administration's National Security Council staff tried to funnel aid to the mujaheddin through Iran as part of its covert arms dealings with Tehran-a previously undisclosed aspect of the Iran-Contra affair whose ultimate impact remains unclear." Former CIA Iran expert George Cave, a participant in the clandestine US-Iran contacts spearheaded by thenNSC aide Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, confirmed that the US sought to collaborate with the Iranians against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Based on his notes of CPSU Politburo meetings and conversations between Gorbachev and foreign leaders, Anatoly Chernyaev argued that Gorbachev had decided to withdraw from Afghanistan within months of taking power. The Reagan administration's active program of aid and assistance, in coordination with its coalition partners, played an important role in shaping Moscow's decision to end the war and withdraw. But Chernyaev pointed to the loss of public support within the Soviet Union-as reflected in demonstrations by the mothers of soldiers, negative press reports on the campaign, and the high number of desertions-as the paramount impetus for the Gorbachev's decision to withdraw. Gorbachev could not pursue his campaign for perestroika unless he ended the war in Afghanistan and sharply reduced the arms race. But the decision was highly controversial. Now a withdrawal would raise questions about Soviet credibility ("they think this would be a blow to the authority of the Soviet Union in the national liberation movement") and might cause a domestic backlash ("they will say: they have forgotten about the sacrifices and the authority of the country"). Thus it took the new Soviet leader considerable time to gain approval from the other members of the Politburo and the leadership of the army and the KGB.

The new evidence illustrates the dilemmas that confronted the Soviet leadership. Sensitive to potential fallout from images similar to those of the US pullout from Vietnam a decade earlier, fearful of turning the Afghanistan into a "bloody slaughterhouse" (General Varennikov), and determined to preserve a "neutral" and friendly regime in Afghanistan, Moscow leaders, particularly Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, favored an exit strategy of "Afghanization" without "losing the war." But as with perestroika in general, the transformation Gorbachev urgently pursued in Afghanistan proved both far more difficult than anticipated. Propping up the (last) communist regime of Najibullah through additional aid while Soviet troops were still in the country gave ever more leverage to a ruling Communist elite largely content to leave the fighting to the USSR "while they live quietly in palaces." Turning the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) into the "leading force" of "national reconciliation" stalled as party officials resisted the almost certain loss of the party's leading role. "Karmalism"-ideological rigidity combined with inaction— gripped much of Moscow's chosen instrument of change. Najibullah himself seemed to many in Moscow a questionable "No.1" for a "new Afghanistan," yet Gorbachev felt