The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  “Come on up and I’ll work you in,” said the DCI’s secretary.

  Devine made a quick call to the DDO’s office to inform Clair George and his deputy, Tom Twetten, that he was heading up to Casey’s office to show the DCI the satellite photos of the Jalalabad shoot-downs, getting quick clearance to skip the chain of command.

  The Jalalabad imagery was a fluke, a lucky hit by a satellite that just happened to be passing over in an orbit that offered cloudless coverage of Jalalabad hours after Engineer Ghaffar brought down the first three helicopters. But it was a fluke that came at the perfect time.

  Casey was alone when Devine was ushered into his office. As Devine spread the imagery sheets on the desk, Casey leaned over to get a better look.

  “These are the three helicopters brought down in the first deployment,” Jack said, pointing to the burned-out hulks clearly visible in the high-resolution satellite photos.

  There was a twinkle in Casey’s eye as he said, “This changes it all, doesn’t it?”

  “It does. There hasn’t been a day like this in a long time.”

  “They’re gonna lose, aren’t they?” Casey mumbled.

  “This changes the dynamic. That’s for certain,” Devine answered, not willing to go as far as Casey seemed to be taking the first Stinger attack.

  “Leave ’em with me, Jack. I’ll take ’em down to the President.”

  The meeting was over almost before it started. But Devine left the DCI’s office convinced that the old man really believed something new had entered the equation in Afghanistan. Now if only they could keep it up.

  Islamabad, September 30, 1986

  I hit the rewind button and played the tape again. I could make out Engineer Ghaffar, full black beard and beige rolled-wool Chitrali hat, just as he elevated and fired off his Stinger. Then the shaky picture cut to another gunner firing and to his missile drawing its white condensation trail in a graceful arc across the cloudless sky. The next frames showed the missile closing in on an MI-24D helicopter now centered on the screen. As the missile struck the chopper’s engine, the sound of the explosion was drowned out by the cries of Ghaffar’s team shouting over and over, “Allah hu Akhbar!” The next minute of tape was a collage of jumping feet, earth, sky, and an occasional knee, as the cameraman on Ghaffar’s team abandoned his task of recording the ambush, dropped his camera to his side, and joined in the celebration when two more helicopters were brought down in rapid succession.

  After another break in the sequence, the twisted hulk of one of the downed helicopters came into focus. Then a crouching mujahideen with a Kalashnikov at his side floated into the field of vision, approaching the crash site on foot. The final ten seconds of the film were a series of gruesome shots of the Soviet crew of the MI-24D, their lifeless bodies strewn about the wreckage. In the background audio were the voices of the Stinger team, their Pashto curses and epithets being hurled at the mutilated crewmen, punctuated by rapid fire from their Kalashnikovs. The body of one of the dead crewmen bounced and rolled a little as the submachine rounds ripped into it. Finally, the camera zoomed in on the face of a dead Soviet soldier. He looked about twenty, his face somehow peaceful in the awful setting. I thought of my own son, a Ranger officer who spent a lot of his time in helicopters, and of these dead soldiers’ parents somewhere in the USSR.

  I turned to my admin chief. “Make copies of this and get it off to the task force right away. But cut out the last scene at the crash site. I don’t want that to go to Washington. Let me see it again when you’ve edited it.”

  Kabul, 40th Army Headquarters, September 30, 1986

  The reaction in Kabul to the first Stinger ambush outside Jalalabad was mixed. On the one hand, a near total stand-down on flight activity was called within hours of the Jalalabad incident while 40th Army investigation teams surveyed the scene of the ambush, debriefed the surviving aircrews, and drew their conclusions. The instant assessment was that the American Stinger had finally been deployed, an issue that Soviet intelligence had followed closely while it was debated openly in Washington during the previous year. Within a day, orders were issued to secure “bandit-free areas” in a ten-mile radius from all air bases in Afghanistan. It was an impossible order, and the 40th Army command knew it. But issuing it seemed to demonstrate an ability to deal with the new threat. Additionally, all aircraft landing or taking off were instructed to make spiral descents and climb-outs at the airfields. The new rule of thumb was that twenty thousand feet was the assured safety altitude, about twice the ceiling of the Stinger.

  Great efforts were made to assure Soviet and Afghan pilots and aircrews that the Stinger was just another problem that could be dealt with. Soon, they were told, aircraft would be fitted with systems for dispensing high-intensity flares that would draw the infrared-seeking Stingers away from the heat of the aircraft engines by luring them to lock on to the flares falling away from the aircraft.

  More quietly, however, 40th Army headquarters began closely documenting the effectiveness of the new American missile, noting how many rebel groups were being equipped with Stingers, how many had been fired, and how many Soviet or DRA aircraft had been struck. Within the first year they calculated the success rate of the Stinger at 20 percent, up from about 3 percent when the rebels used the inferior Soviet SA-7 system.

  Langley, Early October 1986

  Tensions between the Soviet and Near East analysts on the task force had increased since the first Stinger ambush at Jalalabad. There were reports coming in from all sources—signals, intelligence, human intelligence reporting, and satellite imagery—that put the level of Soviet and DRA aircraft brought down over the last few weeks at about one a day, or one every two to three days if you took the more conservative estimate. The Soviet analysts would not accept the higher number and demanded photographic confirmation of every aircraft shoot-down before it would be counted.

  Jack Devine dismissed the debate as senseless and left it to the analysts to argue out. What he did see was the immediate stand-down of air activity following the shoot-down and the change in Soviet air tactics once flights were resumed. The “Stinger effect” wasn’t just a matter of numbers; it was also the increase in morale and effectiveness of the resistance forces. There’d been a shift in the tone of reporting from Islamabad, too, in the week following the Jalalabad ambush. No longer were the mujahideen sitting in their camps in Pakistan awaiting their fates. They were pouring into eastern Afghanistan, now that interdiction by Soviet and DRA aircraft of their infiltration routes seemed reduced. Yes, Devine said to himself, September 25 was a turnaround. Let the purists worry about the numbers. He knew what it meant, and so did his team in Islamabad.

  Over the next week, Devine would show the dramatic video footage of the downing of the MI-24Ds to selected members of Congress and the Reagan administration. Bill Casey would run the tape himself for President Reagan. The effect in Washington was just as it had been in Afghanistan: A new sense of commitment could be felt to stay the course. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. When Casey got out to Pakistan for his next visit, there would be something tangible to celebrate with the men he had supported for the last six years.

  5

  Islamabad, October 1986

  Casey would never make his promised visit to Islamabad—his world was rapidly narrowing to Washington, where he had fallen prey to the growing rumblings of Iran-contra and to a Congress increasingly after his blood. But his deputy, Robert Gates, traveled to the field in late October. His visit got off to a jumpy start.

  In the cable exchanges leading up to the DDCI’s visit, I had asked that the traveling party stay in a duplex house I controlled in a quiet residential quarter of Islamabad. I thought we could move about more discreetly than if the party stayed in the high-visibility Holiday Inn in Islamabad, with its usual contingent of international media. Gates’s administrative staff agreed, until word percolated down to them that the intended quarters were also the location of our temporary storage site
for the Soviet weapons systems we had acquired through an elaborate program of battlefield scavenging in Afghanistan. It seems that Gates’s security chief couldn’t bear the thought of the DDCI sleeping with a Soviet AT-4 antitank guided missile ready to cook off under his bunk. Could we clear out the explosive stuff before bedding down our visitors? I was urgently asked. I assured headquarters that we could.

  The Khyber Agency, Pakistan

  It was a crystalline, dry season day, dry even for that time of year, when I took Gates and his party to the Khyber Agency training site in a mix of helicopters—two slick French-made Pumas and a rattling American UH1 “Huey.” The Pakistani pilots swept low over mud-walled villages tucked into the foothills of the North-West Frontier Province, the scrub pines of the hilltops passing just feet below us as we cleared the ridgelines. Dropping down on the billowing red smoke canister signaling the wind direction at the primitive heliport, Gates mused that much, maybe too much, preparation had gone into his visit. He would later use the term Potemkin village, but I preferred to describe what we were seeing as good public relations. I told him to treat it as the best show the Pakistanis and the Afghans could put on for us and judge it on those terms. Military inspections were pretty much the same everywhere—a lot of show and no surprises.

  The Pakistani officers handling Gates’s visit had been through it before with Casey’s visits to the region and the growing traffic from Washington. They knew how to take care of their American visitors with a flashy trip to the North-West Frontier Province, the Wild West tribal area of Pakistan where the mujahideen training sites were set up. The camps, designed to handle up to a hundred Afghan fighters for a week or two at a time, were usually struck after a couple of training cycles and moved to another location. There were endless possibilities for training sites in the rugged northwest, and it seemed that the Soviets and their Afghan intelligence service, Khad, were never able to effectively track our movements. Not one of the camps was successfully attacked by air or by infiltration teams during the years I was involved with the program.

  A bunch of small arms had been laid out for review: assault rifles, light and medium machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPG-7)—the hands-down favorite of the mujahideen—and 75 and 82 mm recoilless rifles. Crew-served weapons, 12.7 and 14.5 mm machine guns, 82 mm mortars, and 107 and 122 mm free-flight rockets, were also set up for firing, and the Pakistanis and their trainees put on an incomparable show. They fired everything in their arsenals at targets whitewashed onto the surrounding hillsides at two hundred, three hundred, and one thousand yards, and they put on a damn good show.

  One blue-eyed young Afghan gunner—he looked no more than fifteen—snapped up an RPG-7 on command and quickly slipped a round in the muzzle, pulling the safety pin and streamer out of the conical warhead as he laid the launcher on his shoulder. He brought the outline of a Soviet tank two hundred yards away into the optical sight and fired, all in about two seconds. As the round struck the target dead center with a great explosion and a shower of rocks, there were a hundred cries of approval. We saw white rock after white rock “destroyed” by the small arms, prompting Gates to wonder if the gunners might not be Pakistani shills. I thought not. The one thing it had never been necessary to fake in Afghanistan was shooting skill.

  After the small-arms demonstrations, we walked a few hundred yards to another area where the mortars, rockets, and recoilless rifles would be fired at targets—large chalked circles—one and two thousand yards down the narrow valley. Along the way, hidden, heavily camouflaged mujahideen would pop up out of rabbit holes or from under scrub bushes just at our feet, shouting menacingly while training their Kalashnikovs on Gates and me. All great theater, at least after the first one had popped up.

  The crew-served weapons were demonstrated with the same skill—almost all direct hits on the chalked targets. Gates again wondered aloud how much of what he was seeing was real. I told him I wasn’t sure it mattered. The weapons were real, the people were real, and if they ultimately took the guns and their skills to war against the Soviets, that was good enough for our purposes. It would all be just fine as long as the war continued to go our way.

  Late on the evening after our visit to the Khyber Agency, I arranged for a close relative of Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud’s to visit Bob Gates discreetly in the privacy of the safe house. Massoud’s man made the usual pitch to the DDCI, telling him that the Pakistanis were giving the lion’s share of the supplies to Massoud’s archfoe, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and that as proof of the claim of Pakistani favoritism it was a Hekmatyar commander who was given the first issue of Stingers. Would Gates intercede with the Pakistanis and see to it that Massoud got his share of Stingers? Gates said he would and promised also to talk to the Pakistanis about establishing a more equitable share of all the ordnance.

  Eager to demonstrate his gratitude, Massoud’s man reached inside his shalwar kameez and whipped out a Soviet 9 mm Makarov semiautomatic. Would the DDCI accept this small offering as a token of appreciation from Ahmad Shah Massoud?

  As he began to explain that the cold, dead fingers of a Soviet colonel had been pried from the weapon by Commander Massoud himself after a great battle in the Panjshir Valley, the DDCI’s security detail had their hands on their own weapons in a sort of Mexican standoff and were waiting nervously a few feet away to see what would come next. Nothing did, but for the next three years I would have to brief the security details of high-level visitors to expect a Makarov to pop into the scene at some point during discreet meetings with mujahideen commanders.

  Bob Gates left Islamabad with a good understanding of the way things were going at a critical moment in the war. During his meeting with President Zia, he had been told that the heat should be turned up in the war, but that care should be taken so the pot did not boil over. President Zia asked pointedly for intelligence on India’s plans for a major military exercise on its border with Pakistan, Operation Brasstacks. The Pakistanis had been concerned for weeks over the training exercise planned by India’s new and hawkish Army chief of staff, General Krishnaswami Sundarji. The DDCI responded with the standard “Friends do not discuss friends with friends,” but he added another important line to that answer. He said that neither do friends let friends get into trouble. That statement, though vague and noncommittal, seemed to satisfy the Pakistanis for the moment, as they believed that whatever was to happen in Brasstacks, the United States would be watching and would intervene before things got out of control.

  First Chief Directorate Headquarters, Yasenevo, October 1986

  Leonid Shebarshin had been briefed that all of the technical countermeasures against the Stinger had been put in place. Soviet and DRA aircrews were flying above the ceiling of the American missile and taking intensive defensive precautions when approaching and departing from airfields in Afghanistan, particularly those in the east.

  The KGB’s point man on Afghanistan had also learned that over the last few days the GRU had successfully acquired two Stinger missiles from their penetrations of Afghan resistance groups. He was unaware of the details of the GRU’s previous acquisition of the documentation on the missile from a NATO source, though he did know that the Defense Ministry had a set of countermeasures ready to put into effect almost immediately after the Jalalabad shoot-downs of the three MI-24Ds. With the acquisition of the two Stingers and the development of even more effective tactical and technical countermeasures, the impact of the Americans’ new missile might be reduced.

  Much ado about nothing, Shebarshin had concluded. The military would manage to carry out its mission, but the real challenge in Afghanistan remained unchanged.

  The Kremlin, November 13, 1986

  A sense of fatalism could be felt among the men gathered at the special session of the Politburo to discuss Afghanistan. It had been known for over a year that Gorbachev was determined to quit Afghanistan—he said as much at the Party Congress in February—but it was also known that he had given the Army a year to
win, or at least create the illusion of winning, and then get out. Today’s meeting was believed by some to signal the end of the waffling. Much of it was there in the restricted minutes of the meeting that Anatoly Chernyaev filed away for his boss:

  “Have all comrades familiarized themselves with the memoranda from Comrades Chebrikov, Shevardnadze, Sokolov, and Dobrynin?” Gorbachev opened the meeting with a reference to the documents that had been provided each Politburo member before the meeting.

  The handful of men who ran the Soviet Union answered in the expected affirmative.

  “Then let us exchange opinions. My intuition is that we not waste time. We have been fighting in Afghanistan already for six years. If our approach is not changed, we will fight for another twenty to thirty years. Our military must be told that they are learning badly from this war. Are we going to fight on endlessly, making a testimony that our troops are incapable of dealing with the matter? We need to finish this process as soon as possible.”

  Following the rigid protocol of the Politburo, the first member to respond to Gorbachev’s opening remarks was the redoubtable Andrei Gromyko, until the previous year the longest-serving Soviet Foreign Minister—twenty-eight years—and now chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. It was Gromyko who, a year earlier, had made the speech nominating the new Soviet leader as General Secretary.

  “It is necessary that we establish a strategic goal. Too long ago we spoke of the necessity of sealing the borders of Afghanistan with Pakistan and Iran. Experience has shown that we have been unable to do this because of the difficult terrain and the existence of hundreds of passes in the mountains. Today, the necessity is to set the strategic goal of ending the war.”

  Gorbachev broke in at this point to reinforce Gromyko’s point. “It is necessary to include in the resolution the importance of ending the war in the course of one year—at maximum two years,” he said.