"Promoted to the rank of general, and proclaimed a Hero of Socialist Labour, Kalashnikov was honoured by Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Yeltsin and Putin, collecting the Order of the Red Star, the Stalin Prize First Class, and three Orders of Lenin. He is still alive, subsisting on a modest pension in Izhevsk, and though proud of his invention he describes it as a golem, an imp with a life of its own... In 1982, the Israelis gave the Kalashnikovs they had captured from Palestinians to the CIA, which shipped them via Pakistan to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Russians. Osama bin Laden's first AK was a Palestinian gun supplied by the Israelis and given to him by the Americans."