Spetsnaz Page 14

  * * *

  Apart from manned and unmanned submarines spetsnaz has for some decades now been paying enormous attention to ‘live submarines’ - dolphins. The Soviet Union has an enormous scientific centre on the Black Sea for studying the behaviour of dolphins. Much of the centre’s work is wrapped in the thick shroud of official secrecy.

  From ancient times the dolphin has delighted man by its quite extraordinary abilities. A dolphin can easily dive to a depth of 300 metres; its hearing range is seventy times that of a human being; its brain is surprisingly well developed and similar to the human brain. Dolphins are very easy to tame and train.

  The use of dolphins by spetsnaz could widen their operations even further, using them to accompany swimmers in action and warning them of danger; guarding units from an enemy’s underwater commandos; hunting for all kinds of objects under water -enemy submarines, mines, underwater cables and pipelines; and the dolphin could be used to carry out independent acts of terrorism: attacking important targets with an explosive charge attached to it, or destroying enemy personnel with the aid of knives, needles or more complicated weapons attached to its body.

  * * *

  Notes

  [1] 1 Pravda, 14 August 1939. [Return]

  Chapter 10

  Battle Training

  It was a cold, grey day, with a gusty wind blowing and ragged clouds sweeping across the sky. The deputy chief of the spetsnaz department, 17th Army, and I were standing near an old railway bridge. Many years previously they had built a railway line there, but for some reason it had been abandoned half-built. There remained only the bridge across leaden-coloured water. It seemed enormously high up. Around us was a vast emptiness, forest covering enormous spaces, where you were more likely to meet a bear than a man.

  A spetsnaz competition was in progress. The lieutenant-colonel and I were umpires. The route being covered by the competitors was many tens of kilometres long. Soldiers, sodden with the rain and red in the face, laden with weapons and equipment, were trying to cover the route in the course of a few days - running, quick-marching, running again. Their faces were covered with a dirty growth of beard. They carried no food and got their water from the streams and lakes. In addition there were many unpleasant and unforeseen obstacles for them on the way.

  At our control point, orange arrows told the soldiers to cross the bridge. In the middle of the bridge another arrow pointed to the handrail at the edge. A soldier lagging a long way behind his group ran onto the bridge. His tiredness kept his head down, so he ran to the middle of the bridge, and then a little further before he came to a sharp halt. He turned back and saw the arrow pointing to the edge. He looked over the rail and saw the next arrow on a marshy island, some way away and overgrown with reeds. It was huge and orange, but only just visible in the distance. The soldier let out a whistle of concern. He clambered onto the rail with all his weapons and equipment, let out a violent curse and jumped. As he dropped, he also tried to curse his fate and spetsnaz in good soldier’s language, but the cry turned into a long drawn-out howl. He hit the black freezing water with a crash and for a long time did not reappear. Finally his head emerged from the water. It was late autumn and the water was icy cold. But the soldier set off swimming for the distant island.

  At our control point, where one after the other the soldiers plunged from the high bridge, there was no means of rescuing any soldier who got into difficulty. And there was no one to rescue anybody either. We officers were there only to observe the men, to make sure each one jumped, and from the very middle of the bridge. The rest did not concern us.

  ‘What if one of them drowns?’ I asked the spetsnaz officer.

  ‘If he drowns it means he’s no good for spetsnaz. ’

  * * *

  It means he’s no good for spetsnaz. The sentence expresses the whole philosophy of battle training. The old soldiers pass it on to the young ones who take it as a joke. But they very soon find out that nobody is joking.

  Battle training programmes for spetsnaz are drawn up in consultation with some of the Soviet Union’s leading experts in psychology. They have established that in the past training had been carried out incorrectly, on the principle of moving from the simple to the more difficult. A soldier was first taught to jump from a low level, to pack his parachute, to land properly, and so forth, with the prospect later of learning to make a real parachute jump. But the longer the process of the initial training was drawn out, the longer the soldier was made to wait, the more he began to fear making the jump. Experience acquired in previous wars also shows that reservists, who were trained for only a few days and then thrown into battle, in the majority of cases performed very well. They were sometimes short of training, but they always had enough courage. The reverse was also shown to be true. In the First World War the best Russian regiments stayed in Saint Petersburg. They protected the Emperor and they were trained only to be used in the most critical situations. The longer the war went on, the less inclined the guards regiments became to fight. The war dragged on, turned into a senseless carve-up, and finally the possibility arose of a quick end to it. To bring the end nearer the Emperor decided to make use of his guards. . . .

  The Revolution of 1917 was no revolution. It was simply a revolt by the guards in just one city in a huge empire. The soldiers no longer wanted to fight; they were afraid of war and did not want to die for nothing. Throughout the country there were numerous parties all of which were in favour of ending the war, and only one of them called for peace. The soldiers put their trust in that party. Meanwhile, the regiments that were fighting at the front had suffered enormous losses and their morale was very low, but they had not thought of dispersing to their homes. The front collapsed only when the central authority in Saint Petersburg collapsed.

  Lenin’s party, which seized power in that vast empire by means of the bayonets of terrified guards in the rear, drew the correct conclusions. Today soldiers are not kept for long in the rear and they don’t spend much time in training. It is judged much wiser to throw the young soldier straight into battle, to put those who remain alive into the reserve, reinforce with fresh reservists, and into battle again. The title of ‘guards’ is then granted only in the course of battle, and only to those units that have suffered heavy losses but kept fighting.

  Having absorbed these lessons, the commanders have introduced other reforms into the methods of battle training. These new principles were tried out first of all on spetsnaz and gave good results.

  The most important feature of the training of a young spetsnaz soldier is not to give him time to reflect about what is ahead of him. He should come up against danger and terror and unpleasantness unexpectedly and not have time to be scared. When he overcomes this obstacle, he will be proud of himself, of his own daring, determination and ability to take risks. And subsequently he will not be afraid.

  Unpleasant surprises are always awaiting the spetsnaz soldier in the first stage of his service, sometimes in the most unlikely situations. He enters a classroom door and they throw a snake round his neck. He is roused in the morning and leaps out of bed to find, suddenly, an enormous grey rat in his boot. On a Saturday evening, when it seems that a hard week is behind him, he is grabbed and thrown into a small prison cell with a snarling dog. The first parachute jump is also dealt with unexpectedly. A quite short course of instruction, then into the sky and straight away out of the hatch. What if he smashes himself up? The answer, as usual: he is no good for spetsnaz!

  Later the soldier receives his full training, both theoretical and practical, including ways to deal with a snake round his neck or a rat in his boot. But by then the soldier goes to his training classes without any fear of what is to come, because the most frightful things are already behind him.

  * * *

  One of the most important aspects of full battle training is the technique of survival. In the Soviet Union there are plenty of places where there are no people for thousands of square kilometres. Thus the metho
d is to drop a small group of three or four men by parachute in a completely unfamiliar place where there are no people, no roads and nothing except blinding snow from one horizon to the other or burning sand as far as the eye can see. The group has neither a map nor a compass. Each man has a Kalashnikov automatic, but only one round of ammunition. In addition he has a knife and a spade. The food supply is the minimum, sometimes none at all. The group does not know how long it will have to walk - a day, five days, a fortnight? The men can use their ammunition as they please. They can kill a deer, an elk or a bear. That would be plenty for the whole group for a long journey. But what if wolves were to attack and the ammunition were finished?

  To make the survival exercises more realistic the groups take no radio sets with them, and they cannot transmit distress signals, whatever has happened within the group, until they meet the first people on their way. Often they begin with a parachute drop in the most unpleasant places: on thin ice, in a forest, in mountains. In 1982 three Soviet military parachutists made a jump into the crater of the Avachinsk volcano. First of all they had to get themselves out of the crater. Two other Soviet military parachutists have several times begun their exercises with a landing on the summit of Mount Elbruz (5,642 metres). Having successfully completed the survival route they have done the same thing on the highest mountains in the Soviet Union - the peaks named after Lenin (7,134 metres) and Communism (7,495 metres).

  In the conditions prevailing in Western Europe today different habits and different training methods are necessary. For this part of their training spetsnaz soldiers are dressed in black prison jackets and dropped off at night in the centre of a big city. At the same time the local radio and television stations report that a group of especially dangerous criminals have escaped from the local prison. Interestingly, it is forbidden to publish such reports in the press in the Soviet Union but they may be put out by the local radio and television. The population thus gets only small crumbs of information, so that they are scared stiff of criminals about whom all sorts of fantastic stories start circulating.

  The ‘criminals’ are under orders to return to their company. The local police and MVD troops are given the job of finding them. Only the senior officers of the MVD know that it is only an exercise. The middle and lower ranks of the MVD operate as if it were the real thing. The senior officers usually tell their subordinates that the ‘criminals’ are not armed and they are to report immediately one of them is arrested. There is a problem, though: the police often do not trust the report that the criminal is not armed (he may have stolen a gun at the last moment) and so, contrary to their instructions, they use their guns. Sometimes the arrested soldier may be delivered back to his superior officers in a half-dead state - he resisted, they say, and we simply had to defend ourselves.

  In some cases major exercises are carried out, and then the whole of the police and the MVD troops know that it is just an exercise. Even so, it is a risky business to be in a spetsnaz group. The MVD use dogs on exercises, and the dogs do not understand the difference between an exercise and real fighting.

  * * *

  The spetsnaz soldier operates on the territory of the enemy. One of his main tasks is, as we have seen, to seek out specially important targets, for which purpose he has to capture people and extract the necessary information from them by force. That the soldier knows how to extract the information we have no doubt. But how can he understand what his prisoner is saying? Spetsnaz officers go through special language training and in addition every spetsnaz company has an officer-interpreter who speaks at least two foreign languages fluently. But there is not always an officer to hand in a small group, so every soldier and sergeant questioning a prisoner must have some knowledge of a foreign language. But most spetsnaz soldiers serve for only two years and their battle training is so intense that it just is not possible to fit in even a few extra hours.

  How is this problem solved? Can a spetsnaz soldier understand a prisoner who nods his head under torture and indicates his readiness to talk?

  The ordinary spetsnaz soldier has a command of fifteen foreign languages and can use them freely. This is how he does it.

  Imagine that you have been taken prisoner by a spetsnaz group. Your companion has had a hot iron on the palms of his hands and a big nail driven into his head as a demonstration. They look at you questioningly. You nod your head - you agree to talk. Every spetsnaz soldier has a silken phrasebook - a white silk handkerchief on which there are sixteen rows of different questions and answers. The first sentence in Russian is: ‘Keep your mouth shut or I’ll kill you.’ The sergeant points to this sentence. Next to it is a translation into English, German, French and many other languages. You find the answer you need in your own language and nod your head. Very good. You understand each other. They can free your mouth. The next sentence is: ‘If you don’t tell the truth you’ll be sorry!’ You quickly find the equivalent in your own language. All right, all clear. Further down the silk scarf are about a hundred simple sentences, each with translations into fifteen languages - ‘Where?’, ‘Missile’, ‘Headquarters’, ‘Airfield’, ‘Store’, ‘Police checkpoint’, ‘Minefield’, ‘How is it guarded?’, ‘Platoon?’, ‘Company?’, ‘Battalion?’, ‘Dogs?’, ‘Yes’, ‘No’, and so forth. The last sentence is a repetition of the second: ‘If you don’t tell the truth you’ll be sorry!’

  It takes only a couple of minutes to teach the stupidest soldier to communicate with the aid of the silken phrasebook. In addition the soldier is taught to say and understand the simplest and most necessary words, like ‘forward’, ‘back’, ‘there’, ‘here’, ‘to the right’, ‘to the left’, ‘metres’, ‘kilometres’ and the numbers from one to twenty. If a soldier is not able to learn this no harm is done, because it is all written on the silk scarf, of which there is one for every man in the group.

  In the early 1970s Soviet scientists started to develop a very light electronic device for translating in place of the silken phrasebook or to supplement it. The high command’s requirements were simple: the device had to weigh not more than 400 grams, had to fit into a satchel and to be the size of a small book or even smaller. It had to have a display on which could appear a word or simple phrase in Russian which would immediately be translated into one of the most widely used languages. The person being questioned would print out his answer which would immediately be translated into Russian. I do not know whether such a device is now in use. But progress in technology will soon permit the creation of something similar. Not only spetsnaz but many other organisations in the Soviet Army have displayed interest in the device. However, no device can replace a real interpreter, and that is why, along with the real interpreters, so many people of different foreign nationalities are to be found in spetsnaz.

  A Soviet soldier who escaped from Afghanistan told how he had been put into a reconnaissance company from an air-assault brigade. This is a case of not-quite spetsnaz. Somebody found out that he spoke one of the local dialects and he was immediately sent to the commanding officer. The officer asked him two questions, the traditional two:

  ‘Do you drink vodka? What about sport?’

  ‘Vodka, yes, sport no.’

  He gave completely the wrong answers. But in battle conditions a man speaking the language of the enemy is particularly valued. They take him on in spite of everything, and take very good care of him, because on his ability to speak and understand what is said may depend the life of the group or of many groups. And on the way the groups carry out their mission may depend the lives of thousands and in some cases millions of people. The one drawback to being an interpreter is that interpreters are never forgiven for making a mistake. But the drawback is the same for him as it is for everyone else in the unit.

  * * *

  No soldier should be afraid of fire. Throughout the Soviet Army, in every branch of the forces, very close attention is paid to a soldier’s or sailor’s psychological readiness to come up against fire. In the Navy old submar
ines are grounded, and several sailors are shut in a compartment in which a fire is started. In the tank forces men are shut into an old tank and a fire is lit inside or outside and sometimes both at once.

  The spetsnaz soldier comes up against fire more often than any other soldier. For that reason it is constantly present in his battle training from the first to the last day. At least once a day he sees fire that is clearly threatening his life. He is forced to jump over wide ditches with fires raging in them. He has to race through burning rooms and across burning bridges. He rides a motorcycle between flaming walls. Fire can break out next to him at any moment - when he is eating or sleeping. When he is making a parachute jump to test the accuracy of his fall a tremendous flame may flare up suddenly beneath him.

  The spetsnaz soldier is taught to deal with fire and to protect himself and his comrades by every means - rolling along the ground to stop his clothes burning, smothering the flames with earth, branches or a groundsheet. In learning to deal with fire the most important thing is not so much for him to get to know ways of protecting himself (though this is important) as to make him realise that fire is a constant companion of life which is always at his side.