The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  “I can see your point,” I said. “But I think you’ve asked me here because a deeply unhappy Charlie Wilson has more potential for trouble for you than a freshly martyred one.”

  Akhtar smiled weakly, seeing that I understood his problem. “Exactly,” he said. “And the president has also heard of this. So what do we do?”

  The mention of the president added a special texture to the problem. I could only imagine the discussion Akhtar and Zia might have had about Charlie’s disappointment.

  “Why not arrange a trip for Charlie and his friends?” I said. “Exciting and safe.”

  “Arrange?” Akhtar pondered.

  “Yes. You make sure that everything goes according to a script and that everybody walks away a winner, especially Charlie.”

  “You’ll clear this with your headquarters?” Akhtar asked tentatively.

  “Not a chance. This is your show, but I’ll be happy to help out in the background.”

  “You won’t tell Washington?” Akhtar seemed incredulous over what he must have thought was a total breach of discipline on my part.

  “I can’t think of anyone at my headquarters who would want to know in advance about Charlie Wilson going off to war.”

  Akhtar shrugged. “I think he wants to fire a Stinger.”

  Jesus, I thought. We’ve just gone from a grade B movie script to a Cecil B. De Mille production.

  “Maybe there could be some Soviet or DRA aircraft activity in the area when Charlie goes in,” I said. “With all the talk on the frontier about him going into Paktia, the Soviets will surely hear about it. Maybe they’d like to drop a little ordnance to welcome him.”

  Akhtar grimaced. “That’s precisely why I stopped him last time.”

  “But there ought to be a few real Stinger teams in the area. Not just Charlie and a Stinger.” I ignored Akhtar’s temporary retreat.

  “And you don’t think your headquarters would want to know about this?”

  “General,” I said, “there’s no one at Langley who’d want to have anything to do with this one way or another. Nobody would want to tell me to support it or to prevent it. And I won’t burden them with our little problem.”

  Akhtar just shook his head in resignation. “I’ll get my people working on it and get back with you,” he said. Then he abruptly changed the subject. “Milton, we have to do something about the MiG-21 pilot.”

  “Do something?” I asked, taken aback by the change of course in the conversation.

  “He’s not adjusting well,” Akhtar said somewhat cryptically.

  The MiG-21 pilot to which the general was referring was a young DRA fighter pilot who had flown his jet into Pakistan a few months earlier to accept a standing offer of a cash bounty to any Afghan Air Force pilot who defected with his aircraft. The CIA had standing orders for any and all Soviet aircraft, and my predecessor, Bill Piekney, had been successful in acquiring a flyable MI-25 attack helicopter two years earlier. The jet fighter had been a welcome addition to the growing USAF inventory of Soviet warplanes.

  “What do you mean, he’s not adjusting well?”

  Akhtar fidgeted. “He thought things would be different here. He’d been fed up with the closed-in life in Afghanistan and thought he’d get to celebrate a little more here.”

  “Celebrate?”

  “You know how these young guys are. They want to get leaked.” Now Akhtar was actually squirming.

  “Leaked?” I asked, thoroughly enjoying the general’s discomfort.

  “Yes. Maybe you can have your people take the young man to Bangkok or somewhere. It’s hard to get a young man leaked here in Islamabad.” Akhtar rolled his eyes a little, as if sharing a personal confidence.

  “I understand, General. You want us to take this fighter pilot somewhere and get him laid?”

  A light went on. “Yes, laid! That’s what he needs,” Akhtar declared.

  So I left ISI headquarters with the dual problems of a Texas congressman who, legend had it, never had trouble getting laid and who more than anything else wanted to go to war, and an Afghan fighter pilot who wanted out of his war and more than anything else to go to Bangkok to get laid.

  In the end, we’d take care of them both.

  Paktia Province, Afghanistan, May 1987

  Several weeks later, Charlie Wilson was back in Pakistan. This time he crossed over zero line without mishap. He was accompanied by the Gucci commander, Rahim Wardak, and some very tough fighters from Jalaluddin Haqqani’s militias in Paktia Province. The group, with Charlie riding a white stallion, traveled into the Khowst region, mounted a few attacks on the Soviet and DRA garrisons there, and marauded the countryside. Though he never got to fire his Stinger—Haqqani’s people had actually dragged chains and tires on the dirt roads in a futile attempt to attract enemy fighter aircraft to the clouds of dust—he did manage to have a memorable combat tour at the front. I stayed hidden in the “long grass” throughout, coordinating as best I could with Akhtar to make sure all went well and all our friends returned home safely.

  Charlie would make yet another trip into Afghanistan as the Soviets were in full retreat. But for that visit he would bring a CBS 60 Minutes crew led by Harry Reasoner and producer George Crile. The whole team—producer, correspondent, rock star Charlie Wilson on a new white stallion, camera- and soundmen, and a gaggle of mujahideen—went off to celebrate the victory over the Soviet garrison at Ali Khel. The CBS show that finally aired ended with Mohammed Zia ul-Haq’s lasting three-word assessment of how the war in Afghanistan had been won:

  “Charlie did it.”

  Paul Stombaugh and his son in Moscow, 1985.

  The “taxi phone” on Kastanayevskaya Street in the Moscow suburbs where Paul Stombaugh was ambushed in June 1985.

  Vladimir Sharavatov, the Seventh Directorate surveillance supervisor who was involved in most of the KGB arrests of American spies depicted in this book.

  The U.S. embassy in Moscow (center foreground), with the spires of Adolf Tolkachev’s apartment building in the background.

  Viktor I. Cherkashin, the Line KR chief in Washington who handled Aldrich Ames’s walk-in and the letter in which Robert Hanssen volunteered to spy for the KGB. (Courtesy of Jacqueline Mia Foster, Contact Press Images)

  Major General Rem S. Krassilnikov, chief of the First Department of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate, 1985.

  Krassilnikov in 1999, at the site where Leonid Polyshchuk (GTWEIGH) was ambushed in August 1985. (Courtesy of Jacqueline Mia Foster, Contact Press Images)

  Burton Gerber, chief of the SE Division, 1984-1989.

  Valentin Klimenko, Krassilnikov’s deputy and later chief of the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB Second Chief Directorate. He is now the Rezident in Israel.

  Aleksandr “Sasha” Zhomov, aka Phantom, aka PROLOGUE, at home with his spaniel in 2001.

  A Moscow signal site being read by a Moscow case officer in a drive-by. Note the “V” mark on the pillar—a signal from a Soviet agent that an operational task has been carried out.

  Jack Platt, chief of the SE Internal Operations course, 1987.

  Paul Redmond, deputy chief of the SE Division and later deputy chief of counterintelligence, 1995.

  Jack Downing, former chief in Moscow and Beijing and Deputy Director for Operations.

  Gennady Vasilenko as a young KGB officer.

  General Leonid Shebarshin, 1987.

  A disabled Soviet tank that became a landmark on the road from Parachinar, Pakistan, to Ali Khel in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province.

  Milt Bearden and Frank Anderson at Ali Khel shortly after the Soviet garrison fell in 1987. The Soviet major who was adviser to a battalion of Afghan government troops died in the assault. Note the vodka bottle at the lower left.

  The redoubtable Chinese mules on the road to Nangarhar.

  Aerial shot of a transient mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan.

  Chinese-made 107 mm rockets being set up for delayed laun
ch.

  Front row, from left: Major General Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI); Director of Central Intelligence William Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and Milt Bearden at a mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province, 1987.

  Afghan resistance leader Sibghatullah Mojaddedi and Milt Bearden in 1988.

  From left: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani, William Webster, Hamid Gul, Ambassador Robert Oakley, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Richard Kerr, and Milt Bearden at a meeting in Islamabad, 1988.

  From left: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Richard Kerr, and Maulvi Yunis Khales in Islamabad, 1988.

  Milt Bearden and Richard Stolz in Torkham moving supplies into Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan, 1988.

  Milt Bearden in Paktia Province with two of Hekmatyar’s fighters, 1987.

  Milt Bearden and Frank Anderson in Paktia, 1987.

  Top Soviet hands at CIA headquarters. From left: Milt Bearden, Gardner “Gus” Hathaway, Steve Weber, Deputy Director for Operations Dick Stolz, Paul Redmond, and Burton Gerber.

  Oldrich Cerny, Václav Havel’s national security adviser (left).

  Polish intelligence chief Andrzej Milczanowski with Milt Bearden in Warsaw.

  Milt Bearden, David Rolph, and Rem Krassilnikov in Dzerzhinsky Square with “Iron Felix” still standing in the background, 1991.

  From left: Valentin Klimenko, David Rolph, John MacGaffin, Milt Bearden, and Rem Krassilnikov in a KGB safe house in Moscow, 1992.

  The Lubyanka headquarters of the KGB defaced by demonstrators sending their message to the international audience in both Russian and English on August 22, 1991.

  The entrance of Lubyanka was defaced with a swastika on the evening of August 22, 1991.

  The pedestal that held the statue of “Iron Felix,” Dzerzhinsky Square, August 22, 1991.

  “Iron Felix” being hauled down by a German-built crane on the night of August 22, 1991.

  Boris Yeltsin, captured on film by a CIA officer, at the Russian Parliament in August 1991.

  Paul Redmond in front of a fragment of the Berlin Wall at CIA headquarters.

  8

  Islamabad, Late April 1987

  The call from Clair George came through to my secure communications center in Islamabad late in the afternoon. There was none of the usual opening banter; Clair was all business.

  “Milt, I want you to think very carefully before you answer the question I am about to ask. Do you understand?”

  “I understand, Clair,” I said, wondering what the hell and how big the issue was that had prompted the call from the DDO. I had worked for Clair for years, and this was the first time he had ever gone to the bother of calling me directly in the field on the secure line.

  “Were you in any way involved in an attack on an industrial site deep inside the Soviet Union . . . in Uzbekistan . . . anytime in the last month?”

  There it was. Clair wasn’t trying to prompt an answer with his careful, almost lawyerly, question. He was just conveying to me the seriousness of the matter and giving me a chance to forgo a flip answer right off the bat. The fact that this was a secure line without an official record was also not lost on me. As it turned out, the answer was easy.

  “No, Clair. If anything like that is going on, we’re not involved here. You can say straight out that the agency is not involved.”

  “Absolutely uninvolved? No foreknowledge?” Clair’s voice lightened a little, but he was still insistent. He wanted no room for misunderstanding.

  “Clair, I don’t know precisely what you’re talking about, but I can say I had absolutely no foreknowledge of any attack across the Amu Dar’ya. But if it happened, and if they used weapons we have provided, would that mean involvement? I don’t think so. We stand by our position that once the stuff’s delivered to the Paks, we lose all control over it.”

  “Please say again that there was no involvement in the planning or execution of an attack, any attack, on Soviet territory.”

  “Clair, that’s absolutely correct. We have not been involved in any way with planning or carrying out attacks on the Soviet Union.”

  “That’s fine, Milt. You may or may not be getting a cable on this. If you do get one, answer it just the way you answered me.”

  “Okay, Clair, but how about a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “There has been some discussion between Dobrynin and Shultz over certain matters in the USSR last week. I just wanted to be sure to have your input.”

  What Clair might have said was that he wanted to be sure that I wasn’t off freelancing with the Pakistanis and the mujahideen by carrying the war across the Amu Dar’ya into the Soviet Union. Clair never sent the cable, and I never heard from him on the matter again. But I decided to find out what ISI knew about the incident.

  Islamabad, Late April 1987

  Major General Hamid Gul would have been a tough armor officer in anybody’s army. His reputation for boldness and unconventional action had been established during the tense days of the India-Pakistan confrontation five months earlier, when the Indian Army carried out its training exercise on Pakistan’s border. Gul, then an armor commander in Multan in southern Punjab, had caused a flurry of concern in the Indian general staff when his division had “gone missing.” He had, in fact, quickly and secretly moved his armor out of garrison and kept it away from India’s prying eyes for much of the exercise, raising expectations that he might strike into India’s Punjab Province from almost any direction.

  After the tensions on the Indian border subsided, President Zia made one of his periodic shuffles at the top of his general staff and promoted Akhtar, who was then head of ISI, to lieutenant general and assigned him as chairman of the joint staffs committee. Hamid Gul was transferred from Multan to take over at ISI. In my first meeting with him, Gul told me that he was a “moderate Islamist,” a tough disciplinarian, and open-minded. I told him I thought we’d get along fine, if for no other reason than because the job demanded it. After a few meetings, I thought I spotted a side of Hamid Gul that could make the slide from “daring and bold” to plucky or even harebrained, and much later I would find that I was right.

  I called on Gul at ISI headquarters shortly after Clair’s tense telephone call and found him primed to talk about the incursion across Amu Dar’ya. With him was Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf, his chief of military operations, whom I had come to consider my single greatest adversary in ISI. Yousaf resented the American involvement in his program and made few bones about it. If he could have his way, the United States would simply deliver sixty thousand tons of ordnance each year to Karachi, throw in a few hundred million in cash, and leave the rest to him. He didn’t welcome our suggestions and generally ignored anything that looked like a demand. I had decided that one way or another, it would be better for Yousaf to move on, but it would take a while to make that happen.

  I took one look at the scene with Yousaf and the note taker and decided I wanted to clear the room. “General, let’s dispense with the formalities and go straight into an executive session,” I said. I was referring to a protocol for a meeting between just me and the ISI director general. There would be no aides, no note takers, no written record. Gul nodded and dismissed his two officers with a wave of his hand. I glanced at Yousaf as he left the room and got a look in return that convinced me I had at least one enemy in ISI.

  “This is about events in the USSR?” Gul said as soon as we were alone.

  “It is indeed, General.”

  “There was an . . . occurrence in the last days, but I have been assured that the order has been sent that put an end to such things.”

  “How’s that possible, General? How can you call back these operations? I’ve always been told by Yousaf that such things were spontaneous.”

  Gul fidgeted. I guessed he’d come under pressure from his own government and was improvis
ing his story about the strike across the Amu Dar’ya.

  “I have assured the prime minister that I have issued orders that there will be no further incursions into the USSR for the time being.”

  General Gul still hadn’t answered my question on how he could stop the attacks. The prime minister, Mohammed Khan Junejo, a politician from Sindh Province, was now running the parliament in a hybrid democracy that left Zia in power as both president and chief of Army staff. It was my bet that Zia was letting Junejo handle this hot potato and that Gul was feeling the pressure without Zia there to cover his back. Zia might even have been amused to watch the drama from a distance.

  “General, there have been representations in Washington, and I have been bluntly asked for assurances that there was no American involvement in the incident. I’ve given those assurances.”

  Gul smiled. “I’m sure the representations in Washington and your conversations about them would not have achieved the level of bluntness of the conversation Sahabzada had with the Soviet ambassador two days ago.”

  A former Army general and wartime hero, Sahabzada Yaqub Khan was Pakistan’s flamboyant and able foreign minister. I could only imagine how a conversation between Hamid Gul and the headstrong old warrior Sahabzada Yaqub Khan might have gone. At least it explained the uncertainty I’d seen in Gul since our session began.

  “I’m not so sure, General. The Soviet ambassador in Washington had a very frank discussion with George Shultz. I’m sure the messages were about the same.”