The Gun (58 page)

As the Karamojong were changed by their acquisition of Kalashnikovs, the Egyptian experience with the rifles also took an ugly turn.
Egypt’s wars with Israel had yielded it little, whether under King Farouk or under Nasser, and its support for the fedayeen had fanned activities and sentiments it could not control. In 1979, President Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel and agreed to recognize the Jewish state. The treaty enraged the fedayeen and their closest supporters, who turned on Sadat with a loathing reserved for traitors. On October 6, 1981, at a military parade in Cairo, assassins within the Egyptian army struck. While a ceremonial convoy passed the reviewing stand, a lieutenant ran toward the dignitaries standing for the pass and review. The officer with the Kalashnikov seemed part of the performance; perhaps he was to salute. He started firing. At the same time, more soldiers on a troop transport opened fire on the bleachers. Sadat and eleven other people were killed. Egypt passed under martial law.

These three examples—the savvy of Cummings, the vulnerability of Amin’s armories, and the fate of Sadat, cut down by his own guns—were markers. And they were valuable for the smallness of their canvases. Cummings’s business centered on himself, but he could explain the forces that drove a larger system. In Uganda, processes difficult to see in international arms transfers could be traced. In Egypt, the risks of sponsoring terror on a neighbor’s soil had played out in full view, as had the ferocity of automatic-rifle power when miniaturized. The events in Uganda and Egypt also reflected an unstated but disturbing fact. The calamities that visited these governments had roots in steps intended to increase the governments’ strength: acquiring assault rifles to be ready for any foe.

The Soviet Union, seemingly impregnable under Stalin after the Great Patriotic War, was not to last. While it did, its idiosyncratic rules held. By the 1980s, Mikhail Kalashnikov wanted to travel within the Warsaw Pact to observe the production of his rifles elsewhere. He mentioned this desire on a visit to Moscow to the office of Dmitri F. Ustinov, the Soviet minister of defense. Kalashnikov regarded Ustinov as a mentor and friend. The reaction was cold. He sensed his mistake.

Hardly had I started to say that I wanted to see a weapons factory in Bulgaria, when Ustinov became gloomy and frowned. He said in a low voice: “Comrade Major.”

I was in civvies as usual, but the minister’s tone made me want to rise from the armchair and stand at attention.

It should be mentioned that this happened at precisely the time when the Americans had published an insulting story about “the Russian sergeant having armed the whole of the Warsaw Pact,” and they started rapidly raising my military rank. In the morning, I found out that I had been given the rank of senior lieutenant, and in the evening I was already a captain.

Obviously, Ustinov personally monitored my “military career,” and that was the case when I found out that I had been made a Major.

But that didn’t change anything.

I felt a chill go down my spine when the minister said distinctly: “You have not said that. I have not heard you say that. Anything else?”
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Kalashnikov, for all his official achievements, lived within Soviet constraints, no matter that the series of arms carrying his name had entered the official national culture.
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The Soviet Union maintained its military ranks through obligatory mass conscription, and before teenagers were drafted, they were required to master the assembly and disassembly of the AKM. The training was a part of the Program of Pre-Conscription Preparation of Youths, a Ministry of Defense curriculum managed by each school’s military and physical-education instructors. In Soviet schools, rifles were the fourth R. The curriculum also included competitions in donning gas masks, thousand-meter cross-country runs, hundred-meter swims, pull-ups, and throwing simulated hand grenades. All male Soviet students were expected to perform these tasks, along with learning the rudiments of marching, civil defense, and first aid.
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Even students from the most privileged families participated.

The program could be seen in Pripyat, founded in 1970 to support the Nuclear Power Station in the Name of Vladimir I. Lenin, which had been
constructed at Chernobyl. Its citizens were selected from accomplished families. Theirs was to be a model city, brick-and-mortar testimony to Soviet progress and the atom’s peaceful use. In Pripyat as elsewhere, the AKM was as surely a part of the curriculum as Lenin, Pushkin, and the periodic table. In one set of evaluations, held at School No. 1 on April 10 and 11, 1986, the tenth-grade boys, most of them sixteen years old, were timed assembling and disassembling their school’s assault rifles. The AKM’s few parts and simple design made it ideal for the exam. Most students needed only thirty-four to fifty seconds to complete the test, held under the watchful gaze and stopwatch of I. D. Peshko, chief referee. Some students were remarkably fast. Andrei Avramenko, born in 1969, took apart his Kalashnikov and put it together again in twenty-eight seconds. Sergei Svirnov performed the chore in twenty-four seconds. Sergey Salih was the best of all, completing the task in twenty-two seconds. His hands must have been a blur. Even the laggard, Oleg Bryukhanon, was capable. He needed seventy-five seconds—and that was the slowest of all.
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Two weeks later, the dream of Pripyat came to ruin. Reactor No. 4 exploded, bombarding Pripyat with radiation. Families were evacuated in an apocalyptic panic while the Kremlin pretended all was well. The evacuees left behind a world in freeze-frame—contaminated, sealed from intrusion, stopped in time. The abandoned city and its records, including I. D. Peshko’s military preparation files, became an exhibit of the Soviet experience everywhere. The preconscription records showed the extent of assault-rifle infiltration into Soviet life. On purely ergonomic grounds they were consistent with records from tests organized by the United States Army in 1966, which underscored the simplicity of the Kalashnikov compared to American-designed arms. In those tests, conducted with American soldiers, the average assembly-disassembly times for the M-14, the M-16, and the AK-47 were seventy-one seconds, eighty seconds, and thirty-four seconds, respectively.
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At sixteen years of age, the schoolboys of Pripyat were quicker than American soldiers with their own service rifles.
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Assembly-disassembly times are not the most important measure of a rifle’s design. But if a rifle is otherwise sound, they can be a measure of some significance. And the preconscription training, the tests held for teenaged boys handling assault rifles as part of their school day, established this: Children, it turned out, could figure out the basics of the Kalashnikov at least as quickly as soldiers could.

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From school gymnasiums to jungle patrols to terrorist attacks, the AK-47 and its descendant arms seemed to be almost everywhere in the 1980s—in the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations, in Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, in the Middle East. They were represented in the hands of state armies, police and intelligence services, and guerrilla formations and shadowy terrorist groups. The Iraqi and Iranian armies each carried Kalashnikov variants in the trench warfare along their contested border, as did the insurgents they underwrote on each other’s soil. The weapons remained the tools of the strongman and the crackdown, and were used by the People’s Republic of China to clear demonstrators from Tiananmen Square. In the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Kalashnikovs became the primary rifles of all parties—the occupying Soviet army and its Afghan government forces, as well as the mujahideen they fought.

The arrival of the Kalashnikov in Afghanistan predated the Soviet invasion in late 1979. As part of its military aid programs, the Kremlin had provided arms and training to Afghanistan’s government since 1956. In the early 1970s, Pakistan was training insurgents as assets to undermine the presidency of Mohammad Daoud Khan. After the Marxist coup of 1978, and the Soviet invasion the following year, the insurgents acquired arms from several sources, ranging from battlefield collection to defecting Afghan government soldiers. Ultimately they received arms through a mechanism that brought the Soviet assault rifle nearly full circle: an international arms pipeline, fed by several nations, flowing through Pakistan.

The pipeline was an open secret. To feed it, arms were purchased by the Central Intelligence Agency, Saudi Arabia, and wealthy Arabs, among other sources, and moved by containership to the port of Karachi, where they were received by officers of the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, Pakistan’s most powerful intelligence service. From Karachi, most of the arms moved by rail to the Ojhri Camp in Rawalpindi, which became an ISI arms depot—a reservoir of arms and ammunition to be sent over the border. The items were sorted there and carried by truck to Peshawar and redirected again, often to warehouses of Afghan commanders and groups fighting inside Afghanistan. The commanders’ logisticians moved the arms to the border on their own fleets of trucks
and passed them off to smaller camps, from where they sometimes moved by animal train. The system was slow. At any point after Karachi it could look mismanaged and vulnerable. Ammunition was piled high in Rawalpindi without adequate attention to safety (and in 1988 the Ojhri Camp depot exploded). The routes to the border were watched by Pakistani border guards and police officers who often extracted bribes. Afghan commanders diverted and resold weapons, redistributing them for cash. And inside Afghanistan, the Soviet army, while mostly road-bound, was actively searching for the pack trains. But the pipe was force-fed enough equipment in Karachi that arms and ammunition flowed out the other side, and the mujahideen were outfitted for war in remote terrain.
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It also proved nearly impervious to interdiction at large scale. In time it was publicly acknowledged to have grown from ten thousand tons of weapons and ordnance in 1983 to sixty-five thousand tons in 1987.

I would liken our system to a tree. The roots represented the ships and aircraft bringing supplies from various countries to Pakistan. The trunk lay from Karachi almost to the border, at which point the many branches lay across the frontier. These branches divided into hundreds of smaller ones inside Afghanistan, taking the sap (arms and ammunition) to the leaves (the Mujahideen). Lop off a small branch, even a large one, and the tree survives, and in time others grow. Only severing the roots or trunk kills the tree. In our case only the branches were subject to attack.
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The path of the Kalashnikov into Afghanistan and through generations of mujahideen has been well established and reasonably well traced. The value of its reconstruction lies in this fact: Processes hidden from view elsewhere in this case eventually came to be known. The sheer scale of shipments ensured that some portion of this movement came to light. In many other wars, determining the origins of arms with precision is more difficult, and few people attempt the task. Often, absent public accounts by people directly involved, inquiries into assault-rifle transfers become a frustrating exercise in working backward. Weapons identified in combatants’ hands are traced, to the extent possible, to their sources. Such efforts have been intermittent, and even the most talented and industrious researcher rarely succeeds in connecting every dot. Most
glimpses have been fragmentary. But fragmentary views have value. One of the finer examples, little known and scarcely studied, was the record assembled of weapons used in the 1980s by the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front, or FMLN, which at the time was a socialist insurgent group in El Salvador.

At the close of the Cold War, the Institute for Research in Small Arms in International Security, an assemblage of scholars and arms enthusiasts, underwrote a researcher who created a database of captured FMLN arms. The database grew to include 5,429 weapons, of which 4,713, or almost 87 percent, were assault rifles.
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The database confirmed what anyone could see. Assault rifles, rejected by the United States until the 1960s, had come to be regarded as requisite equipment for modern war. But the data did more than document the obvious. They revealed the complexity and richness of a guerrilla movement’s sources of supply. They also pointed to the ease with which assault rifles travel from place to place, overcoming logistical difficulties, geographical obstacles, or efforts at interdiction.

For the war in El Salvador, the majority of the assault rifles captured by the government, and the preponderance of the assault rifles captured early in the war, were American-made M-16s. Since the White House did not purposely supply the FMLN and backed the government the movement sought to overthrow, the natural deduction was that these weapons had traveled roundabout routes to insurgent hands. When the researcher traced serial numbers, the discovery was startling. Of almost 3,000 captured M-16s, nearly 1,900 could be traced back to a previous owner. Of these, 1,239 had once been in the inventory of the United States military, including 973 rifles documented as having been in Vietnam. The American military had left them in Asia, where they had been collected—perhaps by a private broker like Cummings but more likely by the intelligence service of a communist government—and shipped back across the sea. Another nearly 600 of the guerrillas’ M-16s had been provided to the Salvadoran government as part of the American foreign military sales program and had leaked from government possession to the
insurgency.
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In sum, the United States had armed its foes, indirectly but surely. The war echoed edicts of Mao: “Guerrillas must not depend too much on an armory. The enemy is the principal source of their supply.”
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The channels of supply became more varied and sophisticated with time. Early in the insurgency, the Salvadoran government captured several primitively scrubbed FAL assault rifles; on each, a drill had been used to cut a hole through the magazine well where a crest identifying the nation of manufacture
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had been located. Whoever attempted to hide the rifles’ national origin had missed a step. The serial numbers remained intact. A review of these markings found that the rifles had entered the region in 1959 in Cuba, in the last moments of the rule of Fulgencio Batista, when Fabrique-Nationale, the Belgian arms manufacturer, had a contract to provide its NATO-standard assault rifle to Cuba.
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The arms became property of Fidel Castro’s government after revolution chased Batista from power, and from there they had been provided to like-minded revolutionaries a hop away. These rifles were old, worn, and heavy. As the FMLN picked up momentum and recruits, it sought newer arms, leading to the acquisition of M-16s—a much more impressive logistical feat. By the mid-1980s, the movement’s sources of supply further diversified, and Kalashnikovs began to reach the insurgents, including large numbers of Kalashnikovs from North Korea and a smaller quantity from the East German plant in Wiesa. A few insurgents also carried Yugoslav RPKs. By 1989 Dragunov sniper rifles had been captured, too.
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(These weapons also had been scrubbed. The serial numbers had been filed off, though their Cyrillic markings showed them to be of Soviet origin.) While the socialist suite of infantry arms edged in on the war, the markings on captured 7.62x39 cartridges used in FMLN Kalashnikovs revealed that their ammunition had been manufactured in Cuba. What did it all mean? The insurgents’ arms-procurement arrangements had progressed, from rifles abandoned by capitalist enemies in Cuba and Vietnam, to interlocking and complementary socialist sources. The socialist system of export had matured. Kalashnikov assembly lines—created under the auspices of defending the Soviet Union and ensuring arms standardization for conventional communist forces—had developed into a supply
network for insurgency in the Americas. This was armed revolution practically applied. It was also what it looked like, in logistical and ideological terms, when the Kremlin’s brand of socialism worked. Each of these Kalashnikovs, and they were now appearing in every war, represented an incongruous achievement. As it groaned and buckled in its last years, the Soviet Union was struggling to deliver food to the citizens of Moscow. Its weapons reached the far corners of the world.