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The Russian military’s poor performance in Ukraine comes as no surprise to the former CIA officer who ran the agency’s covert operation against the Red Army in Afghanistan four decades ago.

Russia’s best were plagued by bad maintenance, poor chains of command, low morale, alcoholism and desertions—and of course, the hit-and-run tactics of the CIA-backed Afghan “holy warriors,” whom the U.S. eventually armed with game-changing Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. The Red Air Force had no answer for them. The vaunted Red Army reeled.

“Their equipment sucked,” says Milton Bearden, CIA station chief in Pakistan during the most vigorous chapters of the agency’s proxy war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the mid-to-late 1980s.

The Red Army’s medical kits included glass bottles that might have been holdovers from World War Two, Bearden told SpyTalk, instead of the plastic vials in use by American and other contemporary military services. Kits captured by the Afghan guerrill…