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- Jan 26, 2024
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[H1]The great game: The KGB and Pakistan[/H1]
THIS country cannot last. This was the conclusion of Joseph Stalin as the Soviet Politburo examined the map of the two winged Pakistan that emerged from the Partition of the subcontinent in August 1947.
The Kremlin's "special relationship" on the subcontinent was with India, not Pakistan. Mrs Gandhi could not have won the Bangladesh war without New Delhi's Friendship Treaty with the USSR. December 1971 was a Cold War proxy battlefield in the rice paddy fields of East Bengal.
A quarter century later, General Secretary Brezhnev and KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, the Russian spymaster who literally changed the map of the world, vindicated Stalin's prophecy. Most students of Pakistani politics are obsessed by the symbiotic relationship between the CIA, the Pentagon, the White House and the successive military dictatorships that have ruled Pakistan. My interest lies in the other great game played in the shadow world from Moscow Centre by the Soviet KGB, arguably the most ruthless and powerful secret intelligence agency on the planet at the time.
You still meet them in Moscow, St Petersburg, London, Geneva and Istanbul. Fluent Urdu or Pashto/Dari speakers, elegant Russians in their fifties now, men and women who once worked for various KGB residents in Kabul, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Karachi. The intelligence caches provided by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin to an enigmatic English don at Corpus Christi College, deep in the Cambridge fens, exposed the KGB's systematic infiltration of Pakistan's GHQ and diplomatic corps, confirmed that Chairman Andropov and his agents of the KGB First Chief Directorate waged a secret war against my country from the moment of its creation.
This was the secret world's Great Game of the1980's, was the modern equivalent of the struggle between the late Victorian British Raj and the Romanov empire, fought in Afghanistan for the sake of the jewel in the crown. I had no idea at the time but, as a teenager in London, I attended several "Save Bhutto" campaign rallies for the first elected prime minister of Pakistan then awaiting the hangman's noose in Rawalpindi. I saw Mir Murtaza and Shahnawaz, the sons of Bhutto.
A seventeen year old knows nothing about the cynical calculations of intelligence agencies or the surreal logic of the Cold War. I was simply motivated by outrage that a military dictator named Zia had usurped the power that the people of Pakistan had bestowed on ZA Bhutto, my boyhood hero for whom I had sworn to dedicate my life as a diplomat, to learn French, Spanish German, Russian and Arabic in a lifelong quest that still continues. But on April 4th 1979, when Zia hanged Bhutto, something died in me. I vowed never to work for any government of Pakistan ruled by a military dictator and I never did.
The Kremlin's "special relationship" on the subcontinent was with India, not Pakistan. Mrs Gandhi could not have won the Bangladesh war without New Delhi's Friendship Treaty with the USSR. December 1971 was a Cold War proxy battlefield in the rice paddy fields of East Bengal. Andropov distrusted ZA Bhutto, thought him a Chinese agent of influence ever since he joined Ayub Khan's Cabinet as foreign minister in 1964, was disgusted by the idea of a Berkeley–Oxford educated Sindhi feudal landowner donning a Mao cap and waving his little Green Book. Bhutto visited Moscow twice but neither Brezhnev, Podgornyn or Gromyko reciprocated with a state visit to Islamabad. The Kremlin distrusted Bhutto's new friends and patrons in the Islamic world – the Pahlavi Shah of Iran, Saudi King Faisal, Colonel Gaddafi, the Gulf oil shaikhs. They were right. Mr Bhutto was no Marxist Leninist ideologue but a student of Machiavelli, Napoleon and Sun Tzu. He had no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. His cynicism cost him his life.
THIS country cannot last. This was the conclusion of Joseph Stalin as the Soviet Politburo examined the map of the two winged Pakistan that emerged from the Partition of the subcontinent in August 1947.
The Kremlin's "special relationship" on the subcontinent was with India, not Pakistan. Mrs Gandhi could not have won the Bangladesh war without New Delhi's Friendship Treaty with the USSR. December 1971 was a Cold War proxy battlefield in the rice paddy fields of East Bengal.
A quarter century later, General Secretary Brezhnev and KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, the Russian spymaster who literally changed the map of the world, vindicated Stalin's prophecy. Most students of Pakistani politics are obsessed by the symbiotic relationship between the CIA, the Pentagon, the White House and the successive military dictatorships that have ruled Pakistan. My interest lies in the other great game played in the shadow world from Moscow Centre by the Soviet KGB, arguably the most ruthless and powerful secret intelligence agency on the planet at the time.
You still meet them in Moscow, St Petersburg, London, Geneva and Istanbul. Fluent Urdu or Pashto/Dari speakers, elegant Russians in their fifties now, men and women who once worked for various KGB residents in Kabul, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Karachi. The intelligence caches provided by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin to an enigmatic English don at Corpus Christi College, deep in the Cambridge fens, exposed the KGB's systematic infiltration of Pakistan's GHQ and diplomatic corps, confirmed that Chairman Andropov and his agents of the KGB First Chief Directorate waged a secret war against my country from the moment of its creation.
This was the secret world's Great Game of the1980's, was the modern equivalent of the struggle between the late Victorian British Raj and the Romanov empire, fought in Afghanistan for the sake of the jewel in the crown. I had no idea at the time but, as a teenager in London, I attended several "Save Bhutto" campaign rallies for the first elected prime minister of Pakistan then awaiting the hangman's noose in Rawalpindi. I saw Mir Murtaza and Shahnawaz, the sons of Bhutto.
A seventeen year old knows nothing about the cynical calculations of intelligence agencies or the surreal logic of the Cold War. I was simply motivated by outrage that a military dictator named Zia had usurped the power that the people of Pakistan had bestowed on ZA Bhutto, my boyhood hero for whom I had sworn to dedicate my life as a diplomat, to learn French, Spanish German, Russian and Arabic in a lifelong quest that still continues. But on April 4th 1979, when Zia hanged Bhutto, something died in me. I vowed never to work for any government of Pakistan ruled by a military dictator and I never did.
The Kremlin's "special relationship" on the subcontinent was with India, not Pakistan. Mrs Gandhi could not have won the Bangladesh war without New Delhi's Friendship Treaty with the USSR. December 1971 was a Cold War proxy battlefield in the rice paddy fields of East Bengal. Andropov distrusted ZA Bhutto, thought him a Chinese agent of influence ever since he joined Ayub Khan's Cabinet as foreign minister in 1964, was disgusted by the idea of a Berkeley–Oxford educated Sindhi feudal landowner donning a Mao cap and waving his little Green Book. Bhutto visited Moscow twice but neither Brezhnev, Podgornyn or Gromyko reciprocated with a state visit to Islamabad. The Kremlin distrusted Bhutto's new friends and patrons in the Islamic world – the Pahlavi Shah of Iran, Saudi King Faisal, Colonel Gaddafi, the Gulf oil shaikhs. They were right. Mr Bhutto was no Marxist Leninist ideologue but a student of Machiavelli, Napoleon and Sun Tzu. He had no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. His cynicism cost him his life.
