since it became an independent structure in 1969). Since Hafizullah Amin came to power by ordering the assassination of his predecessor Nur Muhammad Taraki and fearing he would be ousted from power the same way he asked the Soviet government to provide his protective detail. The combined KGB Grom and Zenyth contingent was deployed in that role, wearing Afghan army uniforms without identification. Later, when the Soviet leadership re-evaluated the situation and ordered a military intervention the dual characteristics of those KGB officers as intelligence operatives with advanced combat training and their location within the Presidential Palace made them ideal to both gather intel on the actions of the Afghan leadership and spearhead the assault on the residence, opening the way for the "Muslim Battalion" (154th Special Operations Independent Force – ) of the GRU Spetsnaz. Col. Boyarinov was killed in the fighting along with 5 operatives of Grom and Zenyth. Storm-333 is a rare example of KGB Spetsnaz and GRU Spetsnaz operating in concert. Kaskad and Omega After the full-sized invasion of Soviet forces within the Afghan People's Republic in July 1980 the KGB ordered the KUOS to form another special operations task force - Kaskad (, Russian for "cascade"). From July 1980 until April 1983 the Kaskad made four tours to Afghanistan in different composition and with different duration, so the four task forces are known simply as Kaskad-1 (6 months), Kaskad-2 (6 months), Kaskad-3 (9 months) and Kaskad-4 (12 months). Unlike the CIA the KGB operated both in intelligence and counter-intelligence capacities, so in contrast to the Zenyth Task Group, which was tailored to a specific operation and concentrated on intelligence gathering, the Kaskad Task Groups were organised to provide support to the KGB counter intelligence operatives in theater, suppressing covert activities in the towns and hunting down agents cross-country. In addition those task groups had the mission to select, train and mentor groups of Afghans which would take over their duties once the Kaskad is brought back to the Soviet Union and dissolved. In April 1983 the Kaskad-4 was relieved by the Omega Special Operations Task Group () with the same tasks as the Kaskad teams. The name of the task force (the last letter in the Greek alphabet) indicated it to be the last unit of that sort to be deployed to Afghanistan. Omega was composed of 9 mobile special operations task groups (8 located