Vympel / Group “V” / Independent Training Center
Founded in 1981 under the KGB’s First Main Directorate, Vympel was intended for direct action against NATO and other targets outside of the USSR. It operated in Afghanistan, and reportedly was also present in Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Mozambique and Angola.
After the attack on President Amin’s Palace in 1979, the head of the operation Maj-Gen Drozdov submitted a project to the Chairman of the KGB on the need to set up a “full-time” special forces team for foreign operation. On 19 August 1981 the joint session of the Soviet Council of Ministers and the Politburo accepted the project. The new unit was so secret that at the beginning even senior officers referred to it only as “the formation”. Later, the unit was given a number, 35690. Only very few officers referred to it as Vympel; most of them used its official title, The Independent Training Center of the KGB USSR.
It was a part of the “S” Directorate, of the First Main [Intelligence] Directorate, responsible for the KGB illegals operating abroad. At the beginning Vympel recruited only officers. Later it began to co-opt experienced NCOs mainly as instructors. Some of them stayed on the job as combat personnel. When Vympel/Omega was pulled out of Afghanistan, it returned to the USSR where it trained for foreign missions. Many Vympel officers worked in Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Yugoslavia, usually as observers and consultants. In the 1980s the unit's members developed particularly close links with their Vietnamese counterpart “Donong” from whom they learned jungle warfare.
Grigoriy Ivanovich Boyarinov, a chief of the long-secret Balashika special operations training center where generations of Russian and foreign specialists (including young Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat) learned their skills, was killed two decades later in Kabul by friendly fire while leading the KGB Vympel assault force that captured/killed Afghan President Amin in the early hours of the December 1979 Soviet invasion.
The KGB special forces teams played a vital role in the failed coup of August 1991 by refusing to obey the coup organisers. The plan to take over the Russian parliament with the Alfa group, supported by Vympel, failed when Alfa disobeyed the order and Vympel, still known only as the KGB Independent Training Centre, or Group “V”, was never given the order to attack.
During Yeltsin’s violent clashes with hard-liners in Parliament in October 1993, Vympel officers had refused orders to storm the Russian White House, then the location of Parliament. Yeltsin disliked the way Alpha and Vympel special units carried out his orders, and Vympel was dissolved. As a result of such insubordination, the officers of this elite unit were offered to go work for the police.
The Vympel was handed over to the Interior Ministry [MVD] for two years: Only fifty officers out of a few hundred, however, were actually transferred; the rest simply left. Elite (professional) MVD and FSB snipers are trained at the Water Transport Special Police Detachment facilities near Moscow. Famed special units such as the FSB’s Alfa Detachment and MVD’s Vympel detachment also regularly train here. The school and its graduates get the latest sniper gear to field test, but most stick with the SVD with a silencer. The professional snipers in Chechnya worked on the principle of killing the most dangerous enemy first. This is usually an enemy sniper or RPO-A flame-thrower gunner.
When Russia's Ministry of Security lost its power subdivisions, including Vympel [counter terrorist unit], the country lost an important rapid response asset. In 1995 the remnants of the unit were returned to the FSB and it focused on hunting down rebels in Chechnya, in the process loosing priceless skills - a matter for constant regret of its officers. It was reconstituted using some past members as a domestic counterterrorist force. At its 20th anniversary in 2001, Vympel had suffered only 6 fatalities. That number more than doubled at Beslan where 7 counterterrorist officers were killed, and Vympel remains heavily engaged in Chechnya and the Caucasus.
On September 1, 2004, heavily armed insurgents seized Middle School Number One in Beslan, North Ossetia, in a disputed area of southern Russia, not far from Chechnya. pproximately three dozen terrorists arrived at the school in multiple vehicles armed with automatic weapons, grenades, sniper rifles, night vision equipment, gas masks, improvised explosive devices and silencers. Government troops began to arrive and despite President Putin’s pledge not to storm the school, Russia’s elite Alpha and Vympel, Counter Terrorism and Special Forces units, began to arrive and assemble.
Throughout the crisis, the greatest single obstacle to the tactical deployment of the Alpha and Vympel teams were the huge crowds of onlookers outside the school, many of whom were armed and many of them who were drunk. The crowds provoked the terrorists at every opportunity. Alpha and Vympel assault teams vainly attempted to assemble and then enter the school. Many of the members of the Alpha and Vympel Teams were killed when they were shot in the back by bystanders as they entered the kill zone. Three hundred and thirty civilians were killed including 172 children. Eleven soldiers from Alpha and Vympel were also killed. Thirty-one of approximately 49 terrorists were killed.
Russian media indicated - neither publicized nor officially confirmed - that five FSB special operations personnel (reportedly from Vympel) were killed and another two badly wounded in an April 2005 assault on an apartment where well-prepared Chechen fighters were located. There were a few civilian casualties, and six Chechens were also killed.
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