The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  As I became embroiled in quartermastering the Afghan War, I discovered that on an annual basis we needed more mules than the world seemed prepared to breed. The weapons and other supplies the CIA was providing the Afghan resistance had grown upward of sixty thousand tons per year—all of which had to be hauled from Pakistan across zero line and over three hundred different infiltration routes to the commanders in the field. Such a daunting task required a combination of five- and ten-ton trucks, smaller pickups, and, finally, pack mules. So for the years I was involved in the Afghan resistance, we moved several thousand mules over the Kunjerab Pass from China and down into Pakistan to training camps, where we matched up mujahideen youngsters with their mules and taught both how to get along and, ultimately, how to survive.

  The Chinese mules were never really enough, both in numbers or in size, so we had to turn to other sources for specialty mules. Though I was never less than amazed at the ability of the Afghan Task Force in Langley to come up with precisely what I needed when I needed it, I often thought that my cables back to headquarters on the topic of mules might have tested their patience and credulity.

  For much of my time in Islamabad, I had a legend from the CIA’s paramilitary past working with me, a gnarly veteran named Dutch Snyder. Dutch was an old hand who knew whatever you needed to know about mules and mule skinners and much beyond that. He had been in and out of combat throughout Southeast Asia, ending up in the CIA’s special operations group, where he trained both CIA officers and friendly services around the world in the art of unconventional warfare. If Dutch didn’t have an answer for an offbeat problem in a guerrilla war, there probably wasn’t one.

  Dutch helped me with much of the procurement needs for the war, and occasionally he and I would conspire to slip in a “nonstandard” requirement for the mules the task force was buying for our program just to see if everyone in Langley was paying attention. A typical cable might have read like this:

  IMMEDIATE DIRECTOR

  WNINTEL—MULE REQUIREMENTS FOR FY 88

  1. TASK FORCE SHOULD SEEK ONLY MULES THAT MEET THE FOLLOWING STRINGENT REQUIREMENTS FOR PROGRAM NEEDS:

  A. NO MORE THAN THREE YEARS OF AGE.

  B. IN POSSESSION OF ALL THEIR TEETH.

  C. NO LESS THAN 12 HANDS HIGH NOR MORE THAN 17 HANDS.

  D. VETERINARY PASSED IN EXCELLENT GENERAL HEALTH.

  E. FEMALES PURCHASED BY TASK FORCE SHOULD BE CERTIFIED AS STUMP BROKE.

  2. PLEASE ADVISE SOURCES AND DELIVERY DATES WHEN KNOWN.

  3. NO FILE.

  As every Texas or Tennessee redneck knows, “stump broke” is a ribald characterization of a boy and his female mule and the things they might do with the boy standing behind his mule on a tree stump. Dutch and I thought it would take Langley a while to figure out that point E was a joke, but we were wrong. It wouldn’t take the task force long to get beyond its Ivy Leaguers and find someone who knew a little something about mules and rednecks, for soon we received a cable that read something like the following:

  IMMEDIATE ISLAMABAD

  WININTEL—MULE REQUIREMENTS FOR FY 88

  REF: ISLAMABAD 139987

  1. YOUR SPECS FORWARDED REF HAVE BEEN FOLDED INTO THE PROCUREMENT PROCESS. REGRET, HOWEVER, THAT OUR MOST RELIABLE SOURCES OF MULES DO NOT REPEAT DO NOT PROVIDE STUMP TRAINING OR STUMP BROKE CERTIFICATES. WE HAVE RUN EXHAUSTIVE IN-HOUSE REVIEW OF PERSONNEL FILES TO LOCATE OFFICERS IN THE AGENCY WHO FAMILIAR WITH COMPLEX CERTIFICATION PROCESS AND HAVE FOUND THAT ONLY TWO ARE SNYDER AND BEARDEN NOW, BY FORTUNATE HAPPENSTANCE, IN ISLAMABAD. (THIS DATA RETRIEVED FROM THEIR MEDICAL RECORDS.) BELIEVE THAT ISLAMABAD WILL THUS BE ABLE TO MAKE CERTIFICATIONS AS NECESSARY IN THE FIELD. HQS WILL HANDLE ALL OTHER SPECS.

  2. NO FILE.

  Touché.

  Islamabad, November 1987

  Another silver bullet made its debut late in the year—the 120 mm Spanish mortar. For the first seven years of the conflict, the resistance had only the Warsaw Pact 82 mm mortar in their artillery arsenal. A reliable weapon, the 82 mm mortar was nonetheless limited in range and effectiveness as employed by the mujahideen. Indirect firing tactics were taught to the Afghan gunners but rarely used; instead, the resistance fighters normally fired their mortars at targets within direct sight at ranges of no more than a few thousand yards. The new Spanish mortar, larger and with devastating explosive power, had a range of about ten thousand yards. It came, moreover, with a ranging system worked out by Langley in close cooperation with the U.S. Army that fused the low-tech mortar with the high-tech world of satellite guidance.

  It was as simple as it was effective. The mortar team would infiltrate by night to within about eight thousand yards of their target, preselected by screening satellite imagery of Soviet or DRA garrisons. The mortar men would set up their tubes and then determine their own precise location using a global positioning satellite (GPS) receiver. Once their exact coordinates had been calibrated, the leader of the team would feed the GPS data into a small computer, add the coordinates of the target, and then query the computer for the precise compass direction and elevation to aim their mortars in order to hit their target with the first round.

  The gunners would attach a specially designed “north-finding module” to the mortar tube and adjust its azimuth, or compass direction, according to the information provided by the computer so that it would be pointed precisely at the target. Winds aloft could be factored into the calculations to ensure that the first round fired at the target hit it with full surprise. The firing procedures, seemingly complicated to the layman, were quickly picked up by the Afghan gunners selected to head the mortar teams. In theory and in field tests, the new satellite-guided system would be a remarkable breakthrough for the resistance fighters who heretofore relied on “walking” their mortar rounds in on a target and in the process forfeiting the element of surprise. We trained the mortar teams in October and dispatched the first of them into the Konar Valley in late November.

  Chagasaray, Afghanistan, 2235 Hours, November 28, 1987

  The Konar Valley is among the most picturesque settings in eastern Afghanistan. The fast-flowing Konar River cuts through a series of spectacular gorges and winds its way through valleys with sheer walls rising up thousands of feet to pine-covered plateaus. Along the river are stands of poplar, cherry, and apricot trees; the occasional rope-and-board suspension bridge provides the only means of crossing over the river to the east and to Pakistan’s rugged northern territories.

  The Spetsnaz battalion garrisoned at Chagasaray about midway down the valley toward the Jalalabad plain had for years had a free hand in running interdiction operations against the infiltration routes from neighboring Pakistan. Tonight, it would have the tables turned on it.

  The combined Pakistani-mujahideen team made its way across the Konar River well after dark, leading pack mules loaded with four Spanish mortar tubes, base plates, assorted ammunition, and thick asbestos blankets for wrapping the still hot tubes and loading them onto the mules after the attack. The caravan made its way undetected to a point eight thousand yards from the Spetsnaz garrison.

  After setting up their mortars precisely as trained, the team checked and rechecked the GPS readings and the azimuth and elevation of their mortar tubes. Once satisfied that everything was done exactly right, they loaded the heavy mortar bombs into the tubes. The gunners grasped their lanyards and tensely awaited the order to fire. When it came just after 2230 hours, they pulled their lanyards and all hell broke loose.

  Three of the tubes fired as planned, but the fourth exploded, killing two of the crewmen and seriously wounding a third in the jaw with a piece of shrapnel. Uncertain of the cause of the disaster, the officer in charge ordered the mortars dismantled and loaded on the mules, along with the dead and the wounded gunner, for the hurried return to Pakistan.

  Ojhri Camp, 1020 Hours, November 29, 1987

  I met with my Pakistani counterparts the next day to probe what might have happened. The mood was dark as we searched for answers. The
first thought, a long shot, was that the cold temperatures at the higher elevations of the Konar Valley might somehow have acted on a flaw in the metallurgy of the mortar tube, causing the failure. But we dismissed that as unlikely and finally decided to put the mortars on a supply flight that was at the Pakistani military airfield at Chaklala that day and send them back to the United States for testing. We sent the wounded gunner back on the same flight for treatment—his jaw had been nearly blown off, and he had traveled on mule back to Pakistan with it held together by his tightly wound turban. According to the Pakistani officer on the team, the wounded man had never uttered a word of complaint.

  Back in the United States, the Army replicated the same cold-weather conditions for its tests of the remaining mortar tubes but failed to duplicate the failure experienced in Konar. Suspicions from the outset pointed to the most logical, fundamental error made during the preparations for the attack, what mortar men call a “double feed.” Testing that suspicion, Army investigators purposely loaded one mortar tube with two rounds—a double feed—and fired it. As expected, the tube exploded just as the one had in the Konar Valley, leaving no doubt among the investigators that an overanxious gunner had loaded his tube twice that night without realizing it. And he’d paid for his error with his life.

  The Army’s verdict of a “double feed” in the Chagasaray incident was accepted with relief. The Pakistani officers in charge of the mortar project knew well the realities of both mortars and combat anxieties and had no difficulty accepting the results of the American tests. Instead of brooding, as soon as the 120 mm mortar was cleared for combat, they mounted the operation once again on December 15, aimed against the same target. Despite their misgivings about returning to the same target area, the second time around was a spectacular success.

  The gunners again moved under cover of darkness to within about eight thousand yards of the Chagasaray garrison, set up their tubes, queried with the GPS satellites, set their azimuth and elevations, and let loose a barrage of rounds that struck the Spetsnaz battalion garrison with complete surprise. The Soviets never knew what happened to them. They made a futile attempt at counterbattery fire but succeeded only in hitting one of their own outposts. The mujahideen gunners dropped round after round down their tubes, long overstaying their planned time on target, until they had expended their ammunition. Then they rolled their tubes in the asbestos blankets, loaded them aboard their mules, and made their way back to Pakistan in the last hours of darkness.

  By the time the sun was high in the sky, a CIA KH-11 satellite looked down on the Spetsnaz garrison at Chagasaray and took a series of photographs of the devastation wreaked by the new weapon. When I showed the imagery boards to the Pakistanis and the Afghan commanders ten days later, the effects of the attack were stark. Just like the before and after imagery boards of the Kharga ammunition dump in August 1986, the boards of Chagasaray before the attack showed the intact wooden barracks buildings, the battalion vehicles neatly parked, and the usual evidence of an active, orderly military installation set along the Konar River. The shots taken after the attack showed the burned-out shells of the buildings, scattered and destroyed vehicles, and a few new, undamaged vehicles that were determined to belong to the Soviet Army team that had arrived on the scene the next day to investigate the attack.

  The attack against Chagasaray had a special effect on resistance morale. In a war characterized more by defensive operations and ambushes than by offensive attacks on mainline Soviet units, the devastation of the Chagasaray garrison marked a qualitative change in the way the resistance carried its war to the Soviet 40th Army. Although the success of the strike was never replicated with the same dramatic results, the mortar attack was just one more event that reinforced the Soviet decision to quit Afghanistan. By the end of 1987, even the hard-core doubters in Washington were becoming convinced that Moscow was ready to quit.

  11

  Nottoway Park, Fairfax County, Virginia, November 23, 1987

  Bob Hanssen was back in his element as he walked purposefully down the dirt path to the small footbridge on the quiet edge of the busy county park. He reached down, and in a dark crevice just beneath the footbridge, he could feel the spot. It was one of his favorite dead drop sites, one the KGB had creatively named “Park.” The last site they’d recommended, named “AN” and located in a more remote park in the far western suburbs of Fairfax County, had not been satisfactory as far as Hanssen was concerned. It was far from his home in Vienna, Virginia, and it required too much physical effort, too much undignified mess, for the middle-aged FBI agent. With new management responsibilities at work, six children at home, and an increasingly active life in the Catholic Opus Dei religious community, Hanssen was a busy man, and he didn’t have time for such cumbersome security arrangements. Using his code name B, he had just written a frosty letter to his KGB handlers about the dead drop issue, urging a switch back to the more convenient Park.

  “Recognize that I am dressed in business suit and cannot slog around in inch-deep mud,” he wrote in a November 19 letter. “I suggest we use once again original site.” He had complained about AN in September, too, writing to the KGB, “I am not a young man, and the commitments on my time prevent using distant drops such as you suggest. I know in this I am moving you out of your set modes of doing business, but my experience tells me we can be actually more secure in easier modes.”

  So now Hanssen was back at a dead drop site in his own neighborhood, one where he felt far more comfortable. But more important, Bob Hanssen was happy with his new job as supervisor of the FBI’s Soviet Analytical Unit, a position that gave him access to virtually all operational and analytical documents related to the Soviet Union produced by the FBI’s counterintelligence squads. One interesting document to cross his desk during his first months back in Washington was the summary of an October trip to Guyana by CIA officer Jack Platt to renew his friendship with Gennady Vasilenko. Platt had dutifully sent a copy of his trip report to the FBI, which was working with the CIA on the Vasilenko case—code-named MONOLITE—and it didn’t take long for it to pass through Hanssen’s office.

  That night in Nottoway Park, Hanssen was turning over a copy of Platt’s report to his Soviet handlers, along with a package of other secret documents, including a detailed account of the KGB secrets that Vitaly Yurchenko had revealed to the CIA and FBI before his curious redefection to Moscow. He left the package, wrapped tightly in plastic, tucked underneath the footbridge, exactly where he found another package from the KGB waiting for him, one that contained $20,000 in cash and a letter from the KGB telling him that another $100,000 had been deposited on his behalf in a Soviet bank. The letter also contained specific questions about classified information for Hanssen to answer in the next exchange.

  Just across the street from Nottoway Park, a few yards away from where Hanssen was stooping in the dark, were tidy subdivisions filled with well-tended houses, home to dozens of CIA, FBI, and Defense Department employees and their families. One senior CIA counterintelligence officer in particular lived just two blocks away, and he jogged almost daily through Nottoway Park along a route that passed close to the Park dead drop site. Like Bob Hanssen, he specialized in Soviet matters, and years later, the eerie similarities in their lives would come to haunt the CIA man and his family and would nearly destroy his career and his life.

  Havana, Cuba, January 11, 1988

  The hands came out of nowhere, shadows reaching out to clamp Gennady Vasilenko’s arms to his sides, even as his body was being roughly dragged down and his head was slammed with a dull thud to the floor of the small Cuban house, opening a bloody gash. The KGB security agents had been hiding inside, waiting for Vasilenko to arrive from the airport on what he believed was a routine trip for KGB business. Instead, he had come to Havana only to find himself crumpled over and suffocating, caught up in a sudden and brutal KGB ambush.

  Tall, athletic, and above all fun loving—too much so, perhaps, for his own good—Gennady Vas
ilenko was the KGB’s deputy Rezident in the Latin backwater of Georgetown, Guyana, where he was supremely bored, particularly after his last overseas assignment, a far more interesting tour of duty in Washington. He had little to do in Guyana besides think about hunting and women and drinking, not necessarily in that order, while providing some limited support for halfhearted Soviet and Cuban forays into the revolutionary politics of South America. Vasilenko had been ordered to Cuba so that he could use the KGB’s secure facility inside the Soviet embassy in Havana, where he was told he was to write the secret “counterintelligence annex” to the annual report for the embassy in Guyana. He figured it wouldn’t take long to document a year’s worth of desultory operations in Georgetown, where almost nothing of any consequence had happened since the members of the Jonestown cult drank their Kool-Aid and committed mass suicide back in the late 1970s. So he’d have plenty of extra time in Havana, and he hoped it would provide an opportunity to see old friends and catch up on KGB gossip. He had arranged for a KGB colleague to pick him up at the airport, and he was planning to stay at his friend’s home for a few days.

  At the airport he was met instead by a local KGB security officer, who told him his friend had been suddenly called away. The security officer, thoughtfully, had found him another house to use during his stay. But as soon as he walked into the house, the ambush exploded around him. Vasilenko was given little chance to catch his breath before the interrogations began inside what he now realized was a KGB safe house.