But the KGB lacked convincing evidence, so its secret tribunal decided not to prosecute Vasilenko on espionage charges. Instead, the tribunal ordered Vasilenko cashiered for failing to report unauthorized contacts with the Americans and for illegally smuggling the hunting rifle Platt had given him into the Soviet Union. He was released from jail in June, simultaneously stripped of his rank, and thrown out onto the streets of Moscow without a pension and without a job. Eventually, Vasilenko’s contacts in the KGB’s old boy network slowly helped him pick up the pieces of his life.
Back in Washington, Jack Platt was distraught. All he knew was that Vasilenko had disappeared, and he had no idea whether his friend was alive or dead. With no sign of life, Platt quit his contract job at the CIA in 1988, quietly simmering over the fact that something had gone wrong on an important case and no one at the agency seemed to be doing anything about it. He bitterly warned friends who were still in the CIA’s Soviet/East European Division to “watch their backs.” But the truth of the matter was that by 1987, the CIA and the FBI were no longer expending much energy trying to explain why they had lost so many agents. Operations were up and running again in Moscow, and the atmosphere of suspicion that had descended over SE Division was starting to lift.
12
Islamabad, February 2, 1988
Arnie Raphel and I were sitting on my verandah in sweaters, enjoying the bracing coolness of the Islamabad evening. Over the last few months, it had become virtually certain that Gorbachev was ready to quit Afghanistan, his preconditions for a friendly and neutral Afghanistan no longer blocking the negotiations. Discussions in Geneva between the U.S. negotiator, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Mike Armacost, and his Soviet counterpart, Yuli Vorontsov, had reached a critical stage. We expected the final breakthrough at any moment, and Raphel and I were discussing prospects for an interim government in Afghanistan when my steward interrupted our conversation. It was a call for the ambassador, he reported solemnly. Arnie disappeared for five minutes, then returned, tilted his glass to mine, and said, “It was Armacost. It’s over. They’re going to sign in Geneva. Gorbachev will announce it in a week.”
“That’s it?” I said, still letting the news sink in. “Now what?”
“The ‘now what’ part might even be the hard part,” Raphel said.
And he was right. The road to a settlement had been full of detours ever since Gorbachev took his first tentative steps just over two years earlier, and Washington was split down the middle on the issue of whether the Soviets would ever really leave. Mike Armacost had declared flatly in mid-1987 that the Soviets would withdraw. Eduard Shevardnadze told George Shultz in September 1987 that they would be out of Afghanistan by 1988, but Shultz held the substance of his conversation with the Soviet Foreign Minister tightly until November of 1987, when he finally shared it with the DCI, Bill Webster.
But the CIA was still doubtful about how Gorbachev would manage the withdrawal politically, pulling it off without looking like the United States at the end of its Vietnam experience. Bob Gates bet Armacost $25 that the Soviets wouldn’t be out of Afghanistan by the end of the Reagan administration, though he acknowledged that the decision to get out had been made.
Precisely one week later, Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the Soviet people and declared that Soviet troops would commence their withdrawal from Afghanistan on May 15 and would complete it by March 15 the following year.
Chiang Mai, Thailand, April 10, 1988
As soon as it appeared certain that the Geneva Accords would be signed, I took off for a short break in Thailand with Marie-Catherine. The fight over the agreement had been long, but the Soviets, against most predictions, had finally bitten the bullet. The formal agreement would be signed in Geneva on April 14 and would go into effect on May 15. The Soviets would thus begin their withdrawal on May 15 and complete it within nine months, by February 15, 1989, almost ten disastrous years after they had invaded Afghanistan.
We arrived in Chiang Mai two days ahead of the Thai New Year and had planned on doing little or nothing for a few days while the lively up-country Thais swept their ancestral graves, cleaned up their houses, and happily doused anyone in town with cleansing water. I checked in with our people in Thailand as a courtesy and to let them know how and where to reach me if someone came looking. When a colleague called the next day and suggested that I come back to the office to read an immediate precedence cable, I tried to double-talk the subject out of him.
“Where’s it from?” I asked.
“From the place you work now,” came the reluctant, spooky answer.
“What can you tell me about it?” I probed.
“Wait a minute.” There was a pause as he scanned the cable again. “It looks like an ammo dump has blown up.”
I was relieved that the cable had turned out to be a routine report of another mujahideen success just before the Geneva Accords went into effect. It might reinforce the wisdom of the Soviet decision to throw in the towel. I guessed that Islamabad was probably sending it along as an info copy to me to give me some more good news while I was on break. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks. That’s great. I’ll get all the details when I get back. If you would, just do me a favor and send a short cable back to my people with one word: ‘Bravo.’ Sign my name to it. Okay?”
“Wait a minute. Your guys are saying that the dump that blew is your dump, the one not far from where you live! There’s a firestorm at your place.”
“Oh, shit. Tell them I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
By the time Marie-Catherine and I got back to Islamabad, the most dangerous explosions had subsided. But ammunition was still cooking off at Ojhri camp, where thousands of deadly, unstable rounds were strewn about, ready to blow at the slightest jolt. When Ojhri blew, there were close to ten thousand tons of rockets, mortars, small-arms ammunition, plastic explosives, and Stingers in storage. Many of the 107 mm rockets had launched, some causing casualties throughout Rawalpindi and in nearby Islamabad; but since they were not fused, the rockets had not exploded on impact and there had been far less damage and loss of life. A couple of 107 mm rockets hit the American International School in Islamabad, causing an understandable panic among the parents and students but no injuries.
The people of Rawalpindi were less fortunate. The first major explosion flattened a shanty town that had built up outside the walls of Ojhri camp, killing dozens. As the explosions continued through the morning, with black clouds rising above Ojhri and drifting over Rawalpindi, many others were killed by falling ordnance and debris. At day’s end, casualties were up to one hundred killed and one thousand injured.
First Chief Directorate Headquarters, Yasenevo, April 10, 1988
Leonid Shebarshin considered the Ojhri camp explosion another good example of the abilities of Najibullah’s intelligence and security service, the Khad. He had no doubt that Khad had been behind the operation, but he also had no doubts that they had done it on their own, not in cooperation with the KGB special units in Afghanistan. Shebarshin had a deep respect for the capabilities of the Afghan special services, particularly in the area of “dirty tricks,” which is how he classified the destruction of the American and Pakistani supply dump at Ojhri camp. He was not naive enough to think that his Afghan colleagues would share with him everything they planned and felt no disappointment that the massive explosion at Ojhri could not be credited to the Soviet Committee for State Security.
It was a good operation, Shebarshin concluded, and it couldn’t have come at a better time, just days before the signing of the Geneva Accords.
Ojhri Camp, April 12, 1988
I was met at the airport and taken directly to Ojhri, where I was given a tour by Brigadier Janjua, the new officer in charge of the military assistance to the Afghans. As we walked carefully through the still smoldering rubble, I asked him how it had happened.
“We’re still investigating,” Janjua said, “but it looks like one of the porters dropped a box containing one of
the new Egyptian rockets, maybe a white phosphorus one. There was an explosion and a fire in the warehouse, and while the workers were moving the wounded to safety, the fire spread out of control. In minutes the whole thing went up.”
“The Egyptian ordnance again?” I asked, shaking my head.
“The Egyptian stuff again,” Brigadier Janjua answered, anger in his voice.
There had been a history of problems with the Egyptian ordnance. In the early years of the war, the Egyptians seemed to have swept the trash out of their warehouses and packed it up along with their old and unusable ordnance and sent it off to Pakistan for the Afghan resistance. A year or so earlier, there had been a fire in Ojhri involving Egyptian white phosphorous mortar bombs. Only quick action by camp personnel had prevented a similar disaster then. In later years, however, the quality of the Egyptian supplies had improved, and there were fewer complaints. But listening to Brigadier Janjua’s initial take on the disaster, I guessed that this would be the first of many versions of what had happened—maybe even the easiest to understand.
“Was there anything anyone could have done?” I asked.
“Maybe. If they’d tried to handle the fire instead of the injured, it might have been different. But probably not. It was out of control very quickly,” Janjua answered. “After that, about all anyone could do was get out of the way. And some of our boys couldn’t even do that.”
I went from Ojhri to the embassy, where Ambassador Raphel, with the help of my deputy Philippe Jones, had coordinated the American response. There had been no American casualties, but a few near misses had unnerved the community. Some embassy employees were asking to be sent home right away.
Arnie Raphel was coolheaded from the first blast, which he’d heard all the way from Rawalpindi. He had dryly asked Philippe Jones at one point while the rockets were still flying, some of them landing near the embassy itself, whether it was really a good idea to have stored so much ammunition so close to Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Phil had answered truthfully that it sure as hell hadn’t been such a good idea in view of events, but that was the way the Pakistanis had wanted it.
He never brought up the question of who might be to blame again. Instead, he cabled the Department of Defense to dispatch explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) teams to Pakistan to assist in the cleanup. The EOD teams arrived in a matter of days, and for the next several weeks small explosions would be heard each day as the teams detonated the unstable ordnance they had carefully collected.
Though the ambassador was able to keep a cap on American finger-pointing, the blame game in the government of Pakistan was running rampant. Ojhri was still smoking when the first accusations began to fly. Prime Minister Junejo launched an attack against ISI and the Army. The Army counterattacked with criticism against General Akhtar, who had left ISI almost a year earlier, and Akhtar counterattacked by laying the blame at Hamid Gul’s feet for storing too much ordnance at Ojhri. The battle between Junejo’s government and Zia’s Army escalated almost as quickly as the explosions at Ojhri.
Then the whispering began.
The coincidence of the destruction of ten thousand tons of ordnance at Ojhri and the signing of the Geneva Accords four days later spawned rumors that the KGB had sabotaged Ojhri. Others, adding new spin to the same story, preferred to have the Indians, probably acting on behalf of the KGB, behind the sabotage. There was a flurry of alleged eyewitness sightings of Indian Mirage fighters flying at low level in the area just before the first explosion; one of them, the rumors had it, had fired a particle beam straight into the ordnance stored at Ojhri, setting off the conflagration. A sort of one-upmanship entered the game, with each new version of KGB and Indian perfidy becoming more rococo than the last. And before long, the rumor mill decided to settle on the most delicious culprit of all—the Americans. Soon authoritative reports were circulating that the Americans had blown the Ojhri dump as part of a secret deal with the Soviets. The evil conspiracy of the two superpowers had sprung out of the tortured concept of “negative symmetry”—agreed to by the United States and the Soviet Union as an annex to the memorandum of understanding they had in Geneva. Specifically, the United States had made the following statement:
The obligations undertaken by the guarantors are symmetrical. In this regard, the United States has advised the Soviet Union that the United States retains the right, consistent with its obligations as guarantor, to provide military assistance to parties in Afghanistan. Should the Soviet Union exercise restraint in providing military assistance to parties in Afghanistan, the United States similarly will exercise restraint.
That was enough for the multitudes already suspicious of our intentions in a post–Geneva Accords world, particularly those who interpreted the statement about symmetry as an American bailout. It was a short trip to the conclusion that the Americans had agreed to blow Ojhri.
Like most storms, the Ojhri story finally died with a heave and a sigh. The heave came after six weeks of attack and counterattack between the Army and the prime minister and culminated with Prime Minister Junejo taking the bold steps of blocking Zia’s senior Army promotions and demanding a public airing of the results of an Army inquiry into the Ojhri disaster. On May 29, Zia would respond in the way he knew best for dealing with meddlesome prime ministers.
Islamabad, May 30, 1988
“Can you believe it?” Arnie Raphel said with a tone that matched the dispirited look on his face.
Raphel was referring to the sudden overnight move by Zia, who had fired Prime Minister Junejo for corruption and incompetence and dissolved the national and provincial parliaments. The men in khaki were back in charge in Pakistan.
“Sure I can believe it. At least he didn’t throw him in jail.”
“Were you picking up anything that would have tipped us off?” Raphel asked a little guardedly.
“Absolutely nothing. My guess is that Zia made up his mind last night and decided to move then. I’m not going to kick myself for missing it. How ’bout you?”
“I was with the president last night,” Raphel said softly. “I met with him and then rode around Islamabad with him for an hour. And all we talked about was the endgame in Afghanistan. How things were going pretty well and how we all had to be sure to get a new interim government in place before the Soviets left. He was concerned that we were only interested in kicking the Soviets out and a little cavalier about what happened after that. We could always pack up and go home, but Pakistan would still be next door to Afghanistan. Not the slightest hint that he was about to shut down Junejo.”
Listening to the ambassador, I saw the reason for his dark mood. “And you’re feeling responsible, because you know Zia so well and he didn’t even tell his buddy Arnie Raphel what he was going to do. Right?”
“You know Washington, the whispering will start tomorrow. What the hell kind of a relationship does he have with Zia, for chrissakes! He rides around with him and Zia says nothing much but then goes home and fires his prime minister!” Raphel said.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. But I don’t see what you can do about it.”
“Take a look.” Raphel motioned toward his computer terminal.
I sat at his desk and read the telegram he’d drafted describing his meeting with Zia the previous evening and commenting on the president’s actions a few hours later. When I finished I said, “It’s too defensive. Don’t send it. I’d just get back to work and let the political section deal with the reporting telegram. And think of the positive side. Now you won’t have to spend all that time with that jerk Junejo. You can do all your business at Army House.”
Raphel smiled, this time without irony. “You didn’t report in your channel that you thought something was brewing?” he asked.
“And not run it by you first? Not a chance. I missed it just like you. But I didn’t have dinner with the guy the night before. I think I’ll rush back and tell my people that if they think I look bad, take a look at Arnie Raphel. He was tooling around Islamabad with t
he man while he was planning his move and missed it! That’ll take the heat off me.”
Arnie Raphel never looked back, at least as far as I could tell, though he did continue to take heat from Foggy Bottom for missing the signs that Zia was making his move.
Islamabad, 1600 Hours, May 15, 1988
I climbed up on the couch in my office and placed the first green magnetic disk on the map of Afghanistan mounted on my wall. It covered Barikot at the north end of the Konar Valley in eastern Afghanistan and represented the first withdrawal of a Soviet 40th Army unit from a combat garrison. I then slapped a green disk over the Soviet garrison at Jalalabad, and over the next few days, the green disks would begin to cover hot spots all over Afghanistan, as the Soviets faithfully executed their pledge to pull out half of their troops in the first six months under the terms of the Geneva Accords.
They were finally on their way out.
Kabul, 0430 Hours, May 16, 1988
Leonid Shebarshin was startled awake by a clap of thunder, then another that seemed just above his head. He looked up through the window to see the first faint light of a summer dawn. The downpour should follow soon, he thought as he closed his eyes again and listened to the next deafening clap, followed by four more at regular intervals. Now that his mind was cleared of sleep, his thoughts of summer rain evaporated, replaced by the understanding that Kabul was under heavy bombardment from the bandits who occupied the high ground surrounding much of the capital. During a short break in the shelling, he caught the sound of the muezzin’s plaintiff call to morning prayers.
Two mornings earlier, the first columns of Soviet troops had crossed the Amu Dar’ya, heading for Termez, never again to return to Afghanistan. The ten-year war was finally winding down. The troops were on their way out.
The Main Enemy Page 37