The Road to Afghanistan - George Washington University

intuitively identified their political preferences and ties. He wrote all of that informationdown in his notebook. It did not take long for the Afghan trainees to begin to trust theirinstructor and share with him personal secrets and particulars of their work.Kurilov soon understood that their work routinely consisted of identifying andpunishing enemies of the revolution. Most often, those enemies turned out to be their partycomrades who belonged to Parcham, rather than mysterious and terrifying religiousfanatics. Enemies—Parchamis—were arrested almost daily in the armed forces, stateinstitutions, and in their own beds in the middle of the night. Kurilov’s trainees naivelyboasted, “Today we executed yet another one.” Sometimes when describing the arrests, inorder to please their Soviet instructors they reported that they had a chance to use thetechniques that Dolmatov had taught them. Instructors from Zenit would only exchangeglances in response to such revelations. It was strictly prohibited for them to intervene inthe operative affairs of Afghan counterintelligence.However, Kurilov, who had little knowledge of local political nuances, sometimesthought that those unidentified Parchamis were truly the evil enemies of the AprilRevolution. In Soviet history, there were also all kinds of Trotskyites, Zinovievists, andmembers of other factions, and the Communist Party dealt with them mercilessly. Besides,all of these political events were taking place in the mystical, complicated Orient, whichwas so difficult to comprehend.Kurilov learned one thing well: Afghanistan was within the Soviet sphere of globalpolitics, and he was protecting the national interests of his country by helping the AprilRevolution.Gradually, during the process of learning more about the Afghan trainees, Valery461