The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  He’d worked well with the Pakistanis to keep the supplies moving and to keep the cost of the occupation of Afghanistan high for the Soviets. But a shift in Soviet tactics from broad rural pacification efforts to more sharply focused helicopter-borne special operations against resistance infiltration routes and strongholds had paid off for the Soviets. The war was going badly for the resistance, and for Bill Piekney.

  Now, with a change in ground rules in Washington, Piekney was caught in a political bait-and-switch game among congressional hawks, the Pakistani government, and the CIA’s seventh floor.

  Rawalpindi, Pakistan, January 1986

  Piekney could feel his jaw dropping as the words that Senator Orrin Hatch had flown halfway around the world to hear came tumbling out of the mouth of Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, the soft-spoken president of Pakistan. Why, of course, yes, certainly, Pakistan will permit the United States to ship Stinger missiles to the Afghan rebels through our territory, Piekney heard the ever adaptable Zia tell the anti-Communist Republican from Utah. Yes, certainly, we will train the mujahideen in their use. Yes, I agree, it is time to turn the heat up on the Soviet Army.

  Zia, now in his seventh year as Pakistan’s self-appointed leader, had entered politics as had so many of the leaders in the Third World, wearing khaki. He had been made Army chief in 1976 by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s charismatic Prime Minister, in the fatally mistaken belief that he was controllable, perhaps even a little slow out of the starting blocks. A fervent Islamist, Zia would be either at the mosque or out on the golf course, Bhutto had thought, and was not likely to become a threat to his own leadership.

  A year later, Zia was running Pakistan and Bhutto was sitting in jail waiting for the hangman. In the face of almost universal outcry and condemnation from the West, Zia had Bhutto tried on a variety of still controversial charges and sentenced to death. To everyone’s surprise, the death sentence was actually carried out in April 1979, eight months before the Soviets launched their Afghan adventure. Washington turned a cold shoulder to the generals in Islamabad after Bhutto’s execution, but the estrangement would be brief. After one look at the map of Central Asia, President Jimmy Carter understood that if he was to oppose the Soviet grab in Afghanistan, it would have to be in partnership with Zia ul-Haq.

  Carter moved quickly. In early 1980, he sent his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to Islamabad for consultations with the new leader of Pakistan. The two agreed to join forces, and the United States quietly began to assemble the wherewithal to mount a sustained effort to support the Afghan resistance, and to do it in secret. But on a not-so-secret side trip, Brzezinski traveled the length of the Khyber Pass to the Pakistani outpost at Michni Point, where he was photographed squinting along the sights of a Soviet AK-47 assault rifle, its muzzle elevated and pointing into Afghanistan. In that moment, the President’s national security adviser became the symbol of the impending U.S. involvement in Afghanistan’s endless martial history.

  Zia, from the outset, believed his generals could work with the CIA, whose history in Pakistan dated back to the 1950s, when it flew high-altitude U-2 surveillance flights over the Soviet Union from northwest Pakistan. The massive hangar at the military side of the Peshawar airport was still nostalgically called the “CIA hangar” a quarter century after CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was brought down by Soviet air defenses over Sverdlovsk. There was a record of cooperation with the CIA, and the Pakistanis felt comfortable with it.

  But Zia drew the line at allowing the American hand to show. Keep it covert, he had insisted. The Pakistani leader had come to associate the introduction of American-made weapons, especially antiaircraft missiles, as a first step toward bringing in the Pentagon. He was concerned, possibly rightly, that if the Pentagon got its nose under the tent, it would be only a short time before the American involvement in the war had slipped from his control.

  Though Zia admired the United States, he knew that no Pakistani leader should invest too deeply in the American relationship. The good times were very good for Pakistan, but they were always followed by estrangement. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, Zia calculated that with the conservative, anti-Soviet Republican in the White House, he might expect a consistent American policy toward Pakistan as long as the Soviets remained in Afghanistan. When Reagan was reelected four years later, the Pakistani president rightly decided that the U.S.-Pakistani relationship might actually carry through to the end of the Soviet adventure. But even as he deepened Pakistan’s involvement with the United States in Afghanistan, he always kept a finger to the wind and a sharp eye on the mood of the American Congress.

  The United States had entered the fray for a combination of moral and geopolitical reasons for what seemed like the long haul. Some in Congress thought that the war could happily last forever, that the Soviets could be bled the way the United States had been for over a decade in Vietnam. Others, by the sixth year of the war, were less comfortable with what seemed to them a cynical strategy of fighting the Soviets down to the last Afghan. Still other lawmakers saw the Afghan adventure as the Soviet Union’s fatal weakness. These hawks no longer wanted just to mire the Soviets in the Afghan bog; they wanted to defeat them and believed they could if the United States would only stop pulling its punches. Thus, an alliance of congressional hawks and moralists formed in early 1985, the bloodiest year of the Soviet occupation, and together they would force a change in the rules.

  Until 1985, the Soviets had focused their efforts on attempting to eliminate popular support of the mujahideen in the countryside; it was a scorched-earth policy that accomplished nothing beyond forcing millions of Afghans to seek refuge in Pakistan and Iran. The mujahideen still owned the countryside. After 1985, when Gorbachev signaled his tacit agreement to give the Army its head for one more year, Soviet tactics shifted to the use of helicopter-borne special operations troops—Spetsnaz—against resistance strongholds and infiltration routes. The casualties mounted on both sides, but the advantage seemed to have shifted to the Soviets.

  Reagan responded to the pressures from Congress and the Soviet escalations by signing National Security Decision Directive 166, a presidential order that redefined U.S. goals in Afghanistan in unambiguous terms—push the Soviets back across the Amu Dar’ya, the river that marked the border between the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. The CIA’s covert action role in Afghanistan dating back to the Carter administration called for “harassing” the Soviets, not driving them out. Reagan was upping the ante, and now he actually believed he could win. But the question of the Stinger, which many saw as vital to this new phase of the war, had yet to be resolved. The CIA consistently reported to Congress that the Pakistani president simply wouldn’t countenance the escalation that was sure to follow the introduction of American missile systems. Piekney was the third in a line of Islamabad chiefs to be shackled by Zia’s policy since 1979, and he had never thought the Pakistani president would waver from that course.

  Now, as he sat stunned in Zia’s private office, tucked away at the rear of the old colonial governor’s residence, Piekney felt as if he had been the victim of a political ambush—which, of course, was exactly what he was.

  Orrin Hatch had come to Rawalpindi to test Zia one more time and to hear his objections for himself. Accompanying the senator was Michael Pillsbury, a policy provocateur who bounced between congressional staff jobs and political positions in the Pentagon and who had persuaded Hatch to push for Stingers. At the CIA, Pillsbury was seen as a noisome gadfly, a persistent pest who inserted himself into policy debates without really understanding the nature of intelligence or the ground rules for covert action. But people like Pillsbury might not have mattered if the Stinger issue had been receiving high-level attention at the White House or State Department. It was precisely because top-level Reagan administration officials weren’t focusing much attention on Afghanistan that midlevel bureaucrats like Pillsbury were able to step into the policy vacuum. Tensions between the CIA a
nd Pillsbury provided much of the drama behind Hatch’s meeting with Zia.

  As he traveled to Pakistan, Pillsbury had a problem: CIA Director Bill Casey was determined to prevent him from sitting in on Hatch’s meeting with Zia to discuss the CIA’s covert action program in Afghanistan. Days before the congressional delegation arrived in the country, Piekney had received a cable from Langley passing on an order from Casey blocking Pillsbury from attending the meetings with Zia. Piekney was told Pillsbury lacked the appropriate clearances for the meetings concerning the CIA’s Afghan covert action program. Before Hatch’s delegation arrived, Piekney called back to CIA headquarters and asked Near East Division Chief Bert Dunn to reaffirm the order.

  “Let me make sure I have this straight. I should tell Hatch that he can’t bring Pillsbury in, right, Bert?”

  “That’s right.”

  After greeting the congressional delegation, Piekney found himself standing with Hatch, and the senator soon asked Piekney the question he had been dreading. Was it all right if Pillsbury sat in on the meetings with Zia? Cautiously, Piekney told Hatch that, actually, he had received orders to keep Pillsbury out.

  “Well, do you mind if I call Bill Casey and talk to him about it?” Hatch asked.

  “Of course not,” Piekney said.

  Hatch was escorted to a telephone, where he placed a call directly to Casey back at CIA headquarters.

  After some persuading from Hatch, Casey backed down and agreed to let Pillsbury attend the meetings. But Piekney later heard from a colleague who was in the room with Casey that as soon as he hung up, he became angry with himself for caving in to the senator’s demands. That evening the Americans, with Pillsbury in attendance and various other members of Hatch’s delegation, all crowded into Zia’s private office. And it was there that Piekney heard Zia suddenly, and without warning, change six years of Pakistani policy in an instant.

  Hatch’s meeting with Zia turned out to be a watershed event in American support for the Afghan rebels. With Zia’s approval, opposition within the Reagan administration to the direct infusion of American arms collapsed. The United States would be turning up the heat on the Soviet 40th Army in Afghanistan, and Bill Piekney could only shake his head as he thought about how rapidly the political ground had shifted in both the United States and Pakistan.

  Langley, July 12, 1986

  Back in Washington, I began to close up shop and prepare for my transfer to Islamabad in early August. It was a standing tradition for a DO chief on his way to the field to have a private talk with the DCI before heading out, and my checkout talk with Casey took place three weeks before my departure. Any ambiguities in the job description that may have plagued Piekney had all but evaporated by the time I received my marching orders from Bill Casey.

  I’d known Casey since he took his first trip abroad as DCI in 1981 when I was chief in Lagos, Nigeria. I had been on the ground in the oil-rich, rough-and-tumble West African country for about six months when I found myself standing on the steaming tarmac of Murtala Muhammad Airport, waiting for the arrival of a USAF C-141 carrying Ronald Reagan’s new DCI, the old OSS man and Wall Street operator who had already begun to breathe new life into an agency adrift for the last half dozen years. As soon as the black Starlifter pulled to a whining halt, two of Casey’s bodyguards whisked their charge down the short ladder from the paratroop jump door. Within moments I was in the back of a limousine with the white-haired DCI and caught up in one of Lagos’s infamous “go-slows,” the unique Nigerian version of gridlock.

  We were traveling in a tight, three-car convoy, and at one point when we were at a dead standstill, an unsuspecting Nigerian motorist broke into our motorcade, briefly separating us from the lead car. A Nigerian security officer riding shotgun with us calmly stepped out of the car and shouted through the closed window to the offending driver. The man ignored him until the officer took his heavy, handheld Motorola, smashed out the side window, and repeated his demand. The man quickly pulled to the side of the road.

  Casey, taking all this in, seemed about to comment when there was an insistent knock at his window. Looking over, I saw a Nigerian youth about twelve years old holding up a twenty-five-foot green garden hose, still in factory packaging, and gesturing animatedly to Casey.

  “What’s he want?” Casey mumbled, bemused by the frantic Lagos scene.

  “Wants to sell you a garden hose,” I answered. “It’s a hot item on the black market. Pirates take the stuff off the ships backed up in port. This week it’s garden hoses.”

  Casey flashed his toothy smile for the first time. “Not really an impulse buy, is it?”

  “Welcome to Nigeria, Mr. Director.” We both laughed, and over the next two days the beginnings of a personal friendship with Casey developed, one that would last until his death. He stayed two days as my houseguest in Lagos. Under the watchful eye of his personal physician, who traveled with him, I poured Casey’s rum and tonics in the evening—he’d quip that he liked tonic water, but the taste was so bad that he could drink it only with a shot of rum in it. And in the morning I fried his bacon and scrambled his eggs. From that point on, he took a personal interest in where my career was heading and was eager for me to move across the continent to Khartoum two years later, another spot he had visited in his first foray to Africa in 1981.

  So here we were five years later about to set off on what was becoming Casey’s endgame vision for the Soviet Union. The DCI tilted back in his recliner and peered over his glasses at me as I took one of the wingback chairs in front of his desk. With his soup-stained tie, Casey looked his usual disheveled self. I glanced at the stack of books on the corner of his desk to see if I could make out the titles for his weekend reading.

  “Headin’ out?” Casey asked before I could get a good look.

  “Early next month, but this is the only hole you had in your schedule for another guy on his way to the field. They’re stacking up outside your door.”

  “Everybody’s turning over this year. Don’t know why Clair lets it happen that way . . . all that turnover. Seems dumb to me. Never mind. Watcha gonna do out there, Milt?”

  “What do you want me to do?” I threw his probe back at him.

  “I want you to go out there and win. That’s what the President wants. He put it in writing. We’ve been screwin’ around long enough with this steady-as-she-goes approach. Zia’s always telling me to turn up the heat a little but not to let the pot boil over . . . you know, that kind of stuff.”

  “That’s what he’s been telling everybody these days from what I hear, except the earful he gave Hatch.”

  Casey rolled his eyes at the mention of Senator Hatch. He’d had enough of the so-called 4H Club—Senators Orrin Hatch, Jesse Helms, Chic Hecht, and Gordon Humphrey—who, along with their staffers, had been demanding bolder CIA action in Afghanistan.

  “Old Zia’s still pretty smart, and you want to listen to him when you get out there. Whenever you want him to do something that’s above your pay scale, tell him and General Akhtar I said I wanted it done. It’ll make a difference.”

  “You really want to give me that kind of a blank check?” I said, leaning forward to make sure he meant it. “I’ll use it, you know.”

  Casey had developed a close relationship with both Zia and his intelligence chief, General Akhtar. Zia had shrewdly calculated that Casey would stand with Pakistan as long as Reagan was in the White House, and Akhtar, also shrewdly, bought into any policy that Zia had embraced. That all three men clearly liked one another just added to the relationship. Allowing me to trade on that relationship was no small matter.

  “You do whatever it takes to win out there. I want to win the whole thing. Afghanistan is only part of it. I’ll give you everything you’ll need. Fight’s finally done on the Stingers, and you got all the money you’ll need. A billion enough for ya?” The old man slipped into the mumbled half sentences that told me his mind was racing around some great vision that I had only a small part of.

&nbs
p; “Yeah, a billion ought to do it,” I said.

  “When are the Stingers going in?” he asked.

  “They’re training some guys now. Ought to be deployed in early September.”

  “What about the broadcasts?”

  Clair had told me that Casey had been promoting a plan to broadcast propaganda into the Soviet Central Asian republics, an idea no one else thought was a good one. Casey was convinced that he could push the Soviets against the wall, but almost everyone else at Langley and in Foggy Bottom was convinced that if pushed too far, the Soviets might overreact and strike back at Pakistan. Clair had told me to watch for anything that looked as if it was going to spill over the Amu Dar’ya into the USSR. I’d taken that to mean anything on the ground or on the airwaves.

  “I’m still reading in on that,” I said, choosing to dodge the question, “but everything’s pretty much on track as I understand it. When’re you planning to come out and check the traps?”

  Casey peered over his glasses at me for a moment without answering. I could only guess where his thoughts were carrying him. I knew he liked nothing better than flying around in his VIP module, lashed inside a black C-141 and checking things out in the field, but I also knew that he was under growing attack from the Hill for his other pet project—the Central American Task Force, whose mission was to get the Sandinistas out of power in Nicaragua. “God, soon as I can—getting out of here right now is no easy task. Maybe before the end of the year.”

  “I’ll scramble your eggs when you come.”

  That brought a smile from Casey and the meeting to an end. “You go on out there and do what it takes, Milt,” he said. “Tell Akhtar and Zia that I’ll be out as soon as I can get away from here. And tell Zia I’m still watching his pot. I won’t let it boil over.”

  Casey gripped my hand as I rose to leave his office. I didn’t know it then, but this would be the last time I’d see the old man.