The Gun (55 page)

That night, before leaving their hotel, the Arabs slipped into athletic suits and packed their weapons into gym bags printed with the Olympic logo. Into each duffel they stuffed hand grenades, first-aid gear, amphetamines to ward off sleep, ropes cut to lengths ready for binding hostages, sections of pantyhose for masks, and a Kalashnikov assault rifle. Six of these rifles had been flown into Germany from Algiers, via Paris.
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The world had not yet adapted to the idea that calculated menace, in the form of attacks upon civilians, might lurk anywhere. This was before air passengers and luggage were as a matter of routine thoroughly screened. The Kalashnikovs, tools designed for infantry, were in Munich to be used to corral and kill civilians. As they lifted each firearm and slipped it into the kit, Afif and his deputy gave it a kiss. “Oh, my love,” they said.
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Then the team set out, into the night.

One operating tenet of Black September was its almost airtight secrecy. Even now, as they moved toward their crimes, six of the terrorists—Palestinians from refugee camps who had been trained in Libya—did not know what they had been ordered to Munich to do. Afif briefed them in a restaurant. They were to seize members of the Israeli delegation from their beds and then leverage their lives in a hostage siege. The world would be forced to hear the group’s demands, including the release of more than two hundred prisoners, most of them Palestinians in Israeli jails. Afif had the list ready. For Black September, hostage-taking was not unfamiliar. Another cell had hijacked a passenger jet, Sabena Flight 572, several months before, and demanded a similarly extensive prisoner release. Israeli commandos stormed the aircraft as the terrorists waited on the ground. The prisoners remained behind bars. This time Black September had bolder plans and a grander stage. With an international press corps assembled for the Games, a hostage seizure in Munich would bullhorn the Palestinians’ grievances as never before. Israel rarely bent to threats, the more so when demands were issued in public. Live television coverage was a more realistic aspiration than freeing prisoners in a swap. Afif told his cell what to expect. “From now on,” he said, “consider yourself dead.” Their status was predetermined, their fates known: “Killed in action for the Palestinian cause.”

At about 3:30
A.M.
the men stepped into taxis and were driven toward the section of fence Afif had selected. They arrived unmolested and met a group of Americans headed inside at the same time. The two teams—the athletes and the terrorists—helped each other over the top, gym bags and all.
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Afif hurried his group toward 31 Connollystrasse, a residence where more than twenty Israelis slept. A new age of terrorism, long in the making, was about to introduce itself. By sunrise, eight men with assault rifles would command the attention of the world and change public security as it had been understood.
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The hostage siege in Munich, televised live worldwide, marked the next leap in the spread of automatic rifles, and the last tactical breakout, when assault rifles were applied to uses that the men and the governments that had given them their shape and numbers had not foreseen. Their steps in this direction, and use as a preferred tool for terror, predated Munich;
there are earlier examples.
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But September 1972 in Munich brought the day that it became clear that whatever the Kalashnikov once was, whatever it had been meant to be, it had assumed a fuller and more universally dangerous character. After Munich, the Kalashnikov’s utility in crimes against civilians and public order would be demonstrated repeatedly, in hijackings, hostage seizures, assassinations, suicide rifle attacks, and summary executions, sometimes before video cameras, designed to sow hatred and fear. The rifles’ toll would become larger and their uses more ghastly with the passing years. They became requisite weapons for the massacres in Baathist Iraq, in Rwanda, and in the former Yugoslavia, for lawless formations of child soldiers, and for political crimes intended to jolt the world, from the Chechen and Ingush siege at a public school in Beslan to the Lashkar-e-Taiba raid into Mumbai. By the time the Kalashnikov line was a half-century old, its appearance as a central killing instrument in many of the most disturbing acts of political violence was no longer a shock. It was a norm. The people’s gun, defender of Russian soil and socialist ideal, had evolved into a familiar hand tool for genocide and terror.

The processes that completed the Kalashnikov assault rifle’s march out of communist garrisons were not random. They resulted from deliberate socialist arms-manufacturing, stockpiling, and transfer practices, followed by many means of distribution—some legal, some not—that followed.

After the establishment of Kalashnikov factories in the 1950s and 1960s, the early circulation of rifles followed predictable paths. The Soviet Union and other communist nations armed the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, equipping ideological partners for a war carried by ideological currents. Similarly, the gifts of AK-47s and an ammunition plant to Fidel Castro’s Cuba during the 1960s fit with the mandates that armed the Warsaw Pact. These recipients were Kremlin allies. But as weaponry of Soviet provenance shaped socialist military forces around the globe, the Kremlin was also providing assault rifles and other armament to Arab states, seeking to blunt Western influence in the Middle East. By 1967, all of this was visible—as obvious as the Kalashnikovs in the hands of the NVA regulars in Vietnam, and as tangible as the piles of Kalashnikovs
collected by the Israel Defense Forces after their defeat of Egypt’s battalions in the Six Day War.
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The state-to-state transfers were also unsurprising. They were for wars fought in an orthodox way, by forces whose organization and tactics were doctrinal and familiar. In the early years of its proliferation, the AK-47 was a calling card, an explicit mark of the socialist hand in wars in which its weapons appeared, even in wars, like the Six Day War, that were watched uneasily within the Kremlin and by the Eastern bloc’s ruling elite.

The transfers of assault rifles to Arab governments were scarcely remarked upon as they occurred. Diplomats and commentators concentrated on Soviet military hardware thought to be more menacing—the artillery, tanks, armored personnel carriers, radar systems, missiles, and aircraft that might change the regional security equation. Rifles were just rifles. Who worried over a weapon with a range of a few hundred meters, which injured its victims bullet by bullet, when a neighboring state was updating its jet fighters and main battle tanks? What was lost to the security experts of the era was a process more dangerous than the introduction to the region of larger-ticket conventional arms: the prodigious migration of the rifle from state garrisons to those bent on unconventional war and crime. By the late 1960s, the ingredients enabling this migration were in place. Assault-rifle production had reached such levels that socialist military forces were well supplied, the proxy fights were established, and new armed political movements had taken shape. The movements represented a mix of nationalist, religious, and ethnic ambitions, and were organized by leaders willing to exploit arming opportunities made available by the Cold War. Within a very few years the Kalashnikov’s attributes—its mechanical characteristics combined with its unprecedented availability—transformed Stalin’s rifle, conceived as a tool of the state, into an engine for violence in the service of almost any cause.

Two phenomena paired to ensure this outcome. One was a socialist behavior: stockpiling, a behavior linked to the excessive rifle production in planned economies. The second was a capitalist axiom: the unrelenting energy of markets. Once excess socialist assault rifles existed, market forces ensured that they moved. Political motivations, not the laws of
demand and supply, were often behind early distributions. Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang provided rifles to curry favor among potential allies or to disrupt the activities of the West. Hard currency in return was welcome, but other motivations shaped deals. With time, rifles transferred in this way were redistributed by brokers and gun-running networks unencumbered by political concerns. Assault rifles became commodities. They recirculated by truck, train, containership, airplane, animal train, and brokerage. They often moved for profit alone. This migration accelerated throughout the later Cold War years and then beyond, when the stockpiles, less secure than in Soviet times, provided boundless new supply.

Decades of arms-manufacturing policies in the planned economies of the Eastern bloc had led, by the 1970s, to a material consequence: surpluses of arms without apparent use. The full extent of the Eastern bloc stockpiling is unknown. No thorough historical record has ever been assembled. Nor is it possible for a complete and accurate record to be made. All of the factors related to the socialist arms industry and the associated forms of trade—the conventions of state secrecy, the volume of production over time, administrative incompetence, personnel turnover, pervasive corruption, and other forms of criminal activity—worked to prevent accountability. Further, weapons and ordnance were stockpiled by a range of organizations, adding complexity to the problem. The Soviet army served as the primary storekeeper in many regions, but in each of the Warsaw Pact countries the national army, the federal police, and the intelligence services also had armories. Many nations also cached weapons for emergency issue to workers and ad hoc militias, and stored others in schools, where they were used for preparing teenagers for conscription and civil defense. Years later it is not possible to assemble the accountability puzzle fully. And yet in a few nations, enough arms eventually turned up, or enough researchers tried to document what was occurring as the weapons left government possession, to allow insights into the nature of stockpiling and the risks that accompanied amassing arms at such scale.

A pair of examples sketch the history. The urge to lay away weapons was powerful, and not readily deterred, even in the People’s Republic of Albania, a founding member of the Warsaw Pact that broke from the Kremlin’s orbit. From late in World War II through most of the Cold
War, Albania was ruled by Enver Hoxha, an avowed Stalinist. After Stalin died, Hoxha quarreled with the Kremlin. The tension grew severe enough to cut off the Albanian police and military from the principal source of socialist arms supply. The rupture in relations did not set Albania’s state institutions back in their quest for arms. By the early 1960s, Albania was receiving military aid from China, which was learning to use its weapons programs to build relations with other governments. At first China shipped in enormous quantities of arms and ordnance. Shipments alone were not enough to satisfy Hoxha, who wanted the further security of domestic sources. By 1964 the aid reached the next step: China was helping to build arms plants. Just as Soviet specialists had worked in mainland China in the 1950s to modernize small-arms production and train workers, Chinese technicians provided the same service in Hoxha’s Albania. Some of the visiting Chinese specialists remained in Albania at least three years.
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One project involved launching Kalashnikov production in the central mountain district of Gramsh, where output eventually reached more than 275,000 assault rifles a year.
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In these ways, the Hoxha regime did more than stay apace in the arms race with other governments. Albania under his hand became a bunker state. Vast storehouses of arms, tinder for future wars in the Balkans and elsewhere, were stashed in buildings and tunnels across the land.

A different set of circumstances filled the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic with arms. Throughout the Cold War, the German drive across Slavic soil in the Great Patriotic War was both a fresh memory and a core narrative in Soviet national identity. The Kremlin considered Ukraine a buffer in the event of another conventional war with the West. As Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces arrayed along the borders of the capitalist world, Ukraine was prepared as a second defensive line. Huge stockpiles were cached on its territory, ready to be issued in any number of desperate scenarios. The most spectacular of the storage sites was in Artemovsk, in eastern Ukraine, near the border with Russia. Artemovsk lies in a region atop geological deposits of salt, and when the Soviet army sought a place to hide a reserve of conventional arms, the mines—out of sight of American spy planes—seemed ideal.

More than 150 meters belowground, in man-made caverns from which miners had carted away salt, the army sequestered surpluses. The mines became a repository of small-arms firepower on a scale unknown
in the West. The tunnels were filled with caches within caches, a layering of small arms reflecting generations of European war. Within them were weapons reaching to World War I, along with arms captured from the Third Reich or donated to the Red Army by the United States during the Lend-Lease program of World War II. Added to these were Soviet arms that the Red Army had used to fight the Wehrmacht, but subsequently replaced. There were newer additions: stockpiles of standard Soviet small arms from the Cold War, up to and including the most recent designs. The Artemovsk arsenal was an armory and a warren, a storage network mapped out by logisticians in which crates of weapons were separated by type and stacked toward ceilings, in places ten meters or more high. Electric cables and lights ran along the walls, keeping the place in a dim artificial glow. Beneath this maze and monument to Cold War thinking, farther below the earth, miners continued to extract salt. The depot was sealed off, separated by heavy doors and airlocks, the entrances watched by guards.
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In all, the caves held some 3 million guns.

While Kalashnikov rifles were piled into storage, the assembly lines across the Warsaw Pact and Asia were producing more. Izhmash, the factory that began arms production in 1807, was now the busiest manufacturer of the Soviet Union’s principal firearm and served as a routine stop for communist dignitaries visiting the Urals. The factory provided a source of national pride. The Kalashnikov assault rifle, like the caviar, like the vodka, like the furs, was seen as quintessential—a mark of the nation that produced it. Mikhail Kalashnikov had a new role. He was a tour guide. Early in the 1960s, before deposing his mentor, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid I. Brezhnev visited Izhevsk as part of his duties as chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the union’s legislature. Brezhnev was in his midfifties, dark-haired and emanating the insider confidence of a politician on the rise. Kalashnikov, ever capable of befriending and performing for power, was eager to escort the chairman on his rounds. In the Soviet Union, important decisions rested within few hands. Brezhnev was a potential patron, a man to be solicited, to be known to, no matter what.