The Best American Magazine Writing 2015

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  Living in India in the 1930s and 1940s, she told me, “was like growing up on a movie set. The maharaja was very fond of my father. I was the same age as the maharaja’s brother. Every time there was a new birth of leopards or tigers at the zoo, they’d bring the cubs to the palace, and I’d go to the palace with my little white gloves and big hat.” She left to study at Barnard College and after graduating performed as a harpist. She gave that up to enroll in the Chinese and Japanese Studies Department at Columbia University and then returned to Asia, following her father into UNESCO, where she worked as an adviser to the governments of India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

  At Columbia, she met an aspiring diplomat named Alan Wolfe, a suave and capable product of Manhattan wealth. They married in Ceylon. The match was not ideal, according to some friends. Wolfe was “definitely not Nancy’s type,” said one of them, Mary MacMakin. “Though the fact that he was in the Foreign Service was such a draw for her. I think that’s why she married him.” According to MacMakin, Nancy was “a party girl” but “a brain, too.”

  Wolfe joined the Foreign Service after the war. He was posted to Iraq, where Nancy edited a news bulletin for American embassy staff, and then transferred to Pakistan. One day they were gazing toward the Khyber Pass, the entrance to the Hindu Kush and Afghanistan, and she suggested a trip there. “He couldn’t think of anything worse,” she told me. But, to her delight, Wolfe was assigned to the Kabul embassy in 1962. “He wasn’t happy. I was very happy.” Though on paper Wolfe was a cultural attaché, in truth Afghan culture was of only secondary interest to him. That was because, off the books, he was the Central Intelligence Agency’s new chief of station in Kabul.

  A rising star in the agency, Wolfe was, if not the best-liked operative in the Clandestine Services, surely among its most ambitious. An underling once described him to a journalist as “the kind of guy who only speaks to Cabots, Lodges, and God.” Duane Clarridge, a former CIA agent who worked under Wolfe, writes in his memoir that Wolfe “constantly measured [his superior’s] chair for size” and had “a low threshold for the dim-witted.” Another former agent who worked under him described to me his first meeting with Wolfe. “Wolfe was dressed in a very good suit, Brooks Brothers I’m sure,” he said. He walked around the room, making a point to look at his pocket watch every few minutes. “I’m expecting a call from Kissinger,” Wolfe kept saying.

  Soon after they moved to Kabul, Alan and Nancy met Louis Dupree. Born in 1925 to descendants of French Huguenots on the family tobacco farm at Dupree’s Crossroads, North Carolina, as a boy Dupree thought he would become a Presbyterian preacher. He also believed in integration, and the two were immiscible in the Jim Crow South. As a youth leader in the church, said Nancy—with the air of hagiography that characterizes much of her recollection of Louis—he invited a black boy to a service, and “when the church elders told him he couldn’t do that, he said, ‘Fuck you.’

  “This was way before Martin Luther King,” she added.

  With the outbreak of World War II, Dupree dropped out of school to attend the Coast Guard Academy, then joined the merchant marine. At sea he read everything he could. In 1944, he joined the army, trained as a paratrooper, and was dispatched to the Pacific, where his most challenging mission, according to stories he would later tell, found him dropping behind enemy lines in the Philippines to recruit Bontoc Igorot natives to fight the Japanese. The Bontoc, renowned headhunters, didn’t require much training. “Louis would tell us how they’d come back from raids with bags, sometimes, of Japanese heads,” Charles Kolb, the archaeologist who worked with Dupree at Aq Kupruk, recalled. Dupree was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.

  After the war, he won a scholarship contest for veterans and, with no high school diploma, was admitted to Harvard, where in eight years he completed bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees in anthropology. The Harvard archaeologist Carleton Coon took Dupree under his wing. One of the last great American academic generalists, Coon was, like Dupree, interested primarily in prehistoric Asian archaeology, but he convinced his pupil that to really understand the world, he must be versed in not only archaeology but also history, geography, biology, linguistics, ethnomusicology, political science, and whatever else he had time for. Dupree agreed. His dissertation, on Paleolithic tools, took up two volumes.

  Early on, he displayed a knack for portentous finds. At an excavation in Iran, he and Coon discovered skeletal remains that helped debunk the theory, dominant in archaeology at the time, that humanity’s origins lay in the Far East. On an expedition in France, he unearthed a stone carved with animal images dating from 25,000 BCE, at the time the oldest piece of moveable sculpture ever found. Then Dupree—the church youth leader had grown into a master schmoozer—convinced the French government to let his team take it back to Harvard.

  In the summer of 1949, he and a friend were sent by the Museum of Natural History to carry out the first American dig in Afghanistan. French and German archaeologists had long been active in the country, but their interest was in its Buddhist past. The remnants of prehistory lay mostly untouched. Within a few months, Dupree and a colleague had found the medieval city of Peshawarun, long thought vanished, in Afghanistan’s southwestern desert. They stumbled upon it while searching for a drink of water, they explained. Later Dupree found the oldest human remains ever discovered in Afghanistan, dated to 30,000 BCE, and the oldest tools, dated to 100,000 BCE.

  Dupree and his colleagues were regularly written up in newspapers, but they were anachronisms; the swashbuckling era of archaeology was ending. Coon’s generation had relied on their vast stores of personal knowledge to arrive at grand theories. Dupree’s contemporaries, by contrast, were scientific specialists who employed new technologies and meticulous record keeping—all of which bored Dupree no end. “He wasn’t really up on the Paleolithic literature or the most recent anthropological theories,” said Rick Davis, an archaeologist who worked for Dupree. “He kind of painted with a broad brush.” Charles Kolb said the handling of the Aq Kupruk artifacts was shambolic: When it came time to divide the excavation’s yield—including Daddy’s Head—among the Afghan and American partners, they simply laid out the thousands of pieces they’d found and commenced haggling.

  What Dupree lacked in punctiliousness, however, he compensated for with toil, good cheer, and a leonine confidence. He had the aura of a bygone age about him, at once domineering and gracious. “He was a real commander [and] was very direct,” said Davis. “He facilitated and encouraged so many people who came to Afghanistan, even people with the most slender credentials. He’d introduce these wayfaring scholars to these local people.” He added: “He worked very hard and liked to have a drink after six o’clock.”

  Ashraf Ghani was one of many young Afghan scholars whom Dupree helped and encouraged. “He was an incredibly gracious man,” Ghani said. “It was the openness of his mind. He exemplified a tolerance for critique, for ideas.”

  Dupree signed off letters with the Latinism “Summum Bonum.” Originally an Aristotelian notion translated as “the highest good,” he meant it more as Cicero had, as something like “happiness is to be found in the highest pursuits.” Depending on the day, he embodied this ideal or its opposite or both simultaneously.

  He was “a very profane character,” the American ambassador to Afghanistan in the mid-1970s, Ted Eliot, said. The first time Eliot’s wife dined at Dupree’s home in Kabul, a high-ranking Afghan official was also present. Eliot’s wife privately expressed her worry to Dupree that the Afghan regime was spoiling for a war with Pakistan. Dupree, well into his cups, brought the official over to Mrs. Eliot. “So what about it?” Dupree asked him. “Are you going to start a fucking war with Pakistan?”

  “That was typical,” Eliot said.

  In the list of Dupree’s published works for 1967—this is on his official résumé—one finds an entry for an article entitled “The Relationship of Religious Ritual to Orgasm Frequency Among the Tribal Women of Fungooli
stan: A Humping and Gathering Society.”

  Such impieties aside, by the 1960s Dupree was, by general consent, the leading Western expert on Afghanistan’s history. Some said the leading expert. His “knowledge of the country was extraordinary,” Kolb said. “He understood it from the prehistoric era through the current political situation.”

  Five

  Abdur Rahman, the builder of Bagh-e-Bala, liked to call his country Yaghistan: Land of Insolence. And, indeed, while there was much about Afghanistan to attract the polymath bon vivant Dupree, its chief appeal to his rebellious nature may have been precisely that. “The insolence of the Afghan, however, is not the frustrated insolence of urbanized, dehumanized man in western society,” Dupree would write in the introduction to his most important book, Afghanistan. “But insolence without arrogance, the insolence of harsh freedoms set against a backdrop of rough mountains and deserts, the insolence of equality felt and practiced (with an occasional touch of superiority), the insolence of bravery past and bravery anticipated.”

  Afghans like to claim that Cain and Abel founded Kabul, and that Cain is buried there. If so, he was only the first of many murderous dynasty builders to arrive. He was followed by the Aryans, the Kushans, the Persians, Alexander the Great and the Greeks, the White Huns, the Arabs, Tamurlane and the Mongols, the Ghaznavids, and yet more Persians. Afghanistan emerged as a loose coalition of territories under a monarchy only in the mid1700s, and its boundaries were not formally delineated until the 1880s, when they were decided on by British and Russian cartographers. Seeing the country as a mutually beneficial stretch of insulation between the Raj and the Tsar, they gave little thought to the myriad cultures and faiths that unwittingly found themselves inside the new borders: Pashtuns, Turkmen, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Baluchis, who variously practiced Sunni, Sufi, and Shiite Islam, Buddhism, and even some Zoroastrianism, along with expert grudge-holding and famously bloody battles over succession. The colonially minded American historian Theophilus Rodenbough, writing in 1885, observed that “the love of war is felt much more among Afghans then by other eastern peoples.” Commenting on local dress, he noted, “Weapons are borne by all.”

  Britain and Russia spent much of the nineteenth century vying for control of Central and South Asia in the sadistic enterprise known as the Great Game. Rodenbough proudly related that during the First Anglo-Afghan War, “Kabul and other towns were leveled with the ground; [Afghan] troops were blown from guns, and the people were collected together and destroyed like worms.” However, the Afghans had one elusive advantage over their would-be occupiers: Unlike the Britons and the Russians, they were not, had never been, a feudal people. Afghan political life was arranged around complex authority-sharing conclaves known as jirgas and shuras. When trouble arose, elders, chiefs, and religious leaders would act together to protect their territories. In this way, they had rebuffed one attempted conquest after another. Uninterested in cohering in peacetime, in war Afghans were something to watch; the British may have blown their enemy from cannons, but eventually they left in humiliation.

  In the 1930s, Afghanistan—for as long as anyone could remember, a byword for exotic isolation—began opening up to the world. On the eve of World War II, King Mohammed Zahir Shah aligned Afghanistan with the Axis powers and then, seeing which way the wind was blowing, switched to the Allies, thus avoiding being drawn into actual conflict by either. The Dari term for this is bi-tarafi, or “without sides.” Some observers called it self-preservation, others a way of playing world powers off each other, still others plain deceit. The Westerners, like Dupree, who understood Afghanistan best understood that bi-tarafi is all those things. Dupree admired the Afghans’ ability to stay out of fights just as much as their willingness to get into them. He liked to call his adopted home the Switzerland of Asia, where “spies swapped lies and information and played cat-and-mouse with counter-agents and counter-counter-agents.”

  By the time Dupree settled in Kabul, in the 1950s, its upper classes were dressing in Savile Row suits and sending their sons to Oxford. In 1958, the prime minister, Mohammed Daoud, became the first Afghan leader to visit Washington, and the next year Dwight Eisenhower returned the favor, the first American president to venture to the Afghan capital. Embassies opened. Diplomats, academics, archaeologists, and explorers arrived. Kabul University expanded. The Peace Corps set up shop. Kabul became a spur on the Hippie Trail, the path of enlightenment and drug tourism that snaked from Europe to India.

  Dupree was in the middle of it all. When not out on a dig, he taught courses and lectured about Afghanistan, compiled reports, advised governments and corporations, filmed documentaries, and wrote or edited scholarly articles and books (some 218 of the former and 22 of the latter by the end of his career). In between he socialized endlessly. “He knew everybody, whether they were Americans, Afghans, French, Russians, East Germans, West Germans, civilians, military,” Kolb said. “You name them, he seemed to know them.”

  More than any other foreigner, Dupree knew Afghans, all kinds of Afghans; he was as charmed by goatherds as he was by the royal family. They all had something to teach him, he felt. He assumed that Afghans found him charming, too, and indeed many did. What Dupree failed to see—what other Americans who knew and loved the country less did see—was that while Afghans liked him, that didn’t mean they trusted him. “Afghans were very cautious with Americans,” Ted Eliot, the former ambassador, said. “Their long history with foreigners taught them that you never knew who would be in charge next.”

  Six

  Louis Dupree and Alan Wolfe were the only Americans in Kabul who could match one another cocktail for cocktail and tale for tale, and by the mid-1960s they had become good friends. “He was very smooth,” Mary MacMakin said of Wolfe. “A good talker, a good dancer, a good drinker—drinking especially.” And Dupree, who had a connection at customs and brought in liquor by the crate, seemed “impervious to alcohol.” Wolfe relished drinking martinis with Dupree and listening to stories of the Bontoc headhunters.

  To much of the rest of the world, as to the country’s more cosmopolitan citizens, the opening of Afghanistan was an encouragement, proof that the Cold War could be avoided in certain corners of the globe. Dupree’s social calendar seemed proof of this: On a given night, he might be found dining in the company of the American ambassador or the Russian one. But to Wolfe—a gentleman spy in the classical mold who spoke seven languages and thought a great deal about meaning in history—Afghanistan wasn’t just another front in the Cold War; it was a deceptively important one, and one to which Washington wasn’t paying sufficient attention, he believed.

  And, to a degree, he was right. Russia’s preoccupation with Afghanistan had persisted through the fall of the Romanovs and the October Revolution. “The road to Paris and London might lead through Kabul,” Leon Trotsky remarked, to the agreement of his boss, V. I. Lenin, who said, “The East will help us to conquer the West. Let us turn our faces toward Asia.” For a time, the Afghan royal family was receptive to the Kremlin’s overtures, particularly after Lenin wrote the king a pandering letter in which he expressed his conviction that Afghanistan had been chosen by history for a “great and historic task,” namely to “unite all the enslaved Muslim peoples.” Afghanistan was the first country to recognize Soviet Russia, in 1917, and two years later the USSR was the first nation to recognize an independent Afghanistan.

  But the Afghans perceived, rightly, that the atheist Moscow regime was out to topple Islam along with all other religions. They also suspected that the Bolsheviks’ intentions for Afghanistan weren’t all that different from what the old regime’s had been: where the Tsars saw Afghanistan as the passageway to a larger empire, the Bolsheviks saw it as the means to further revolution. Neither much appealed. This suspicion was confirmed when Lenin backed a plan to recruit an army of disaffected Muslims and use Afghanistan as a staging ground to attack British India. Relations soured further in the 1930s, when Stalin ordered the Muslim leadership in So
viet Central Asia decimated and instituted forced collectivization, sending hordes of refugees into Afghanistan.

  The Afghan government wanted help in modernizing, however, and during the Cold War help came from one of two places. Finding American requests to sign mutual-security pacts and contain “communist aggression” too demanding, Kabul turned to Moscow. Beginning in the 1950s, Soviet arms, advisers, and economic aid came rushing in. Afghans traveled to the USSR for academic and military training. Washington countered with projects and weapons of its own, but it never caught up.

  Wolfe was acutely aware of all this. How much he privately told Dupree about his work was known only to the two friends. Publicly, they were at the center of Kabul’s international social scene. This being the 1960s, that scene was characterized not only by heavy boozing but by adultery. Afghan officials bedded foreign diplomats’ wives; foreign diplomats bedded Afghan officials’ wives; wives bedded wives. Nancy and Annie Dupree, Louis’s wife, rebuffed any number of offers. In the midst of it the two women, who were very different—Nancy was childless and famously flirtatious, Annie more traditional and shy, with three children—bonded. It was with Annie that Nancy reenacted the battles on horseback in the meadow.

  Soon after arriving in Afghanistan, Nancy accompanied the American ambassador to see the giant Buddhas at Bamiyan. Appointed to act as an unofficial historian for the trip, she attempted to read up on the statues, but was appalled to find that no guidebooks to Bamiyan existed. At a cocktail party upon their return, she cornered the Afghan minister for tourism, Abdul Tarzi. She recalled the encounter this way: “Now, instead of being a diplomat’s wife, I said, ‘Mr. Tarzi, it’s a scandal. That is one of the wonders of the world and you don’t have a proper guide, you don’t have anything.’ And in typical Afghan style, this Mr. Tarzi drew himself up, and he said, ‘You’re quite right, why don’t you do something about it?’ A French archaeologist who was part of the discussion said, ‘Madam, do you like ladies’ coffee parties?’ I said, ‘Not really.’ He said, ‘Do you play bridge, Madam?’ I said, ‘That’s a waste of time.’ ‘Then,’ he says, ‘I suggest you take up this challenge of Mr. Tarzi’s.’”