The World Was Going Our Way
Page 47
Whatever successes were achieved by active-measures campaigns in Pakistan and Bangladesh during the late 1970s were more than cancelled out by the hostile reaction in both countries to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the brutal war which followed. Hitherto Zia ul-Haq had been widely underestimated in both West and East. In the summer of 1978 The Economist had dismissed him as a ‘well-intentioned but increasingly maladroit military ruler’, while the Guardian declared that, ‘Zia’s name has a death-rattle sound these days. There’s a feeling he can’t last much longer.’ Once war began in Afghanistan, however, it seemed to Zia ul-Haq’s chief of army staff, General Khalid Mahmud Arif, that:
All eyes were focused on Pakistan. Would she buckle under pressure and acquiesce in superpower aggression? The Western countries quickly changed their tune. The arch critics of the autocratic military ruler of Pakistan began to woo him. They suddenly discovered Zia’s hitherto unknown ‘sterling qualities’ and the special importance of Pakistan in the changed circumstances.65
Zia began pressing the Carter administration to provide arms and assistance to the mujahideen insurgents against the Communist regime in Afghanistan even before the Soviet invasion. The Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) made similar approaches to the CIA. In February 1980 President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, visited Pakistan to agree with Zia US covert assistance to the Afghan mujahideen across the Pakistan border.66 The meeting between Zia and Brzezinski inaugurated what was in effect a secret US-Pakistani alliance for covert intervention in Afghanistan which lasted for the remainder of the war. The KGB almost certainly deduced, even if they did not obtain detailed intelligence on, the purpose of Brzezinski’s visit. After Brzezinski’s departure from Islamabad, Gromyko declared that Pakistan was putting its own security at risk by acting as a ‘springboard for further aggression against Afghanistan’. 67
Andropov simultaneously approved an elaborate series of active measures designed to deter Zia from providing, or allowing the Americans or Chinese to provide, assistance to the mujahideen. The head of the Pakistani intelligence station in Moscow was to be privately warned that if Pakistan was used as a base for ‘armed struggle against Afghanistan’, the Oriental Institute (then headed by Yevgeni Primakov) would be asked to devise ways of assisting Baluchi and Pushtun separatist movements on the North-West Frontier in order to seal off the Afghan border.68 The CIA concluded that there was a serious ‘possibility of large-scale Soviet aid to the Baluchi’.69 KGB active measures also sought to persuade Zia that some of his own senior officers, who opposed his Afghan policy, were plotting against him. Service A prepared leaflets in English and Urdu on Pakistani paper purporting to come from a secret opposition group to Zia within the Pakistani army. On the night of 28 February to 1 March 1980 KGB officers drove round Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Karachi distributing copies of the leaflets from a device attached to their cars. According to a KGB report, the leaflets were taken seriously by Pakistani security, which began an immediate investigation and wrongly incriminated the deputy army chief-of-staff, Lieutenant-General Muhammad Iqbal Khan (remembered by a British diplomat who knew him well as ‘a decent and straightforward man’). The KGB claimed that this investigation provoked an unsuccessful coup by Iqbal Khan on 5 March, which led in turn to the removal or retirement of a series of senior officers and to the expulsion of two members of the US consulate in Lahore who had been in contact with them. On 25 March Andropov was informed that operation SARDAR had led the Zia regime to believe that the United States was conspiring with dissidents in the Pakistani army. Andropov approved the continuation of the operation. Several similar leaflets were distributed over the next year.70
Letters fabricated by Service A in the names of various informants and bogus conspirators were sent to American organizations and other addresses in Pakistan whose mail was believed to be intercepted by the local security services, as well as to the Pakistani ambassador in Washington, in order to spread the fiction of a CIA plot to overthrow the Zia regime. Disinformation planted on the Pakistani ambassador in Bangkok reported that the State Department regarded the regime as an unpopular, incompetent dictatorship which should be replaced as soon as possible.71 Another active-measures operation sought to persuade the Pakistani authorities that the CIA was plotting with separatists in Baluchistan, promising to support their campaign for autonomy in return for help in conducting covert cross-border operations against the Khomeini regime. Among the more ingenious fabrications devised by Service A as part of this operation was a wallet containing a compromising document allegedly lost by a CIA officer operating under diplomatic cover. The wallet, supposedly found by a member of the Pakistani public, was handed in at a police station to ensure that it came to the attention of the authorities.72 Simultaneously, the KGB orchestrated a large-scale campaign in the Pakistani and foreign press attacking Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan.73 During the first eight months of the war the KGB claimed to have planted 527 articles in Pakistani newspapers. 74
The Centre also went to elaborate lengths to exacerbate popular resentment against the Afghan refugees flooding across the border by planting agents in their midst with a mission to discredit them.75 Its active measures, however, had no effect on Zia’s policy. The Afghan refugee camps quickly became recruitment centres for the mujahideen. The ISI channelled the recruits into seven Islamic resistance groups, all with bases in Pakistan which directed operations across the Afghan border. The Hizb-i-Islami (Islamic Party) led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the most important of the fundamentalist mujahideen groups, had particularly close links with the Zia ul-Haq regime. In 1978, in an attempt to bolster support for the regime, Zia had taken five members of the Pakistani wing of Hizb-i-Islami into his government. With Zia’s support, the ISI replaced the Foreign Ministry as the main policy-making body on Afghanistan.76
Zia ul-Haq was well aware, even if he did not know many of the details, that the KGB was conducting a major active-measures offensive against him. Though the details remain classified, from an early stage in the war he received intelligence from the CIA as well as from his own agencies. 77 His response to the KGB offensive appears to have taken the Centre by surprise. In August and September 1980 Pakistan carried out the biggest expulsion of Soviet intelligence and other personnel since Britain had excluded 105 KGB and GRU officers in 1971.78 Kryuchkov reacted to the expulsion and the problems created by the dramatic reduction in the size of the Pakistani residencies by setting up an interdepartmental working group within the FCD chaired by one of his deputies, V. A. Chukhrov, to try to devise ways of working with Pakistani opposition forces to destabilize and eventually overthrow the Zia regime.79
The most violent of Zia’s opponents was Murtaza Bhutto, elder son of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who founded a small terrorist group, initially claiming to be the armed wing of the PPP, to avenge his father’s death. While in jail, Bhutto senior had famously remarked, ‘My sons are not my sons if they do not drink the blood of those who dare shed my blood today.’80 In May 1979, a month after his father’s execution, Murtaza visited Kabul to seek the help of the Taraki government in setting up a base in Afghanistan from which his guerrillas could launch attacks against the Zia regime.81 Murtaza was allowed to receive a large arms shipment from Yasir Arafat and to house a small band of apprentice guerrillas, his so-called ‘revolutionary army’, in a derelict building which the volunteers called ‘Dracula House’. His first attempt to smuggle some of his arms cache into Pakistan ended in disaster when the man chosen to take them across the border turned out to be a Pakistani agent. Murtaza was reduced to scouring Pakistani newspapers and claiming to his Afghan hosts that accidents and fires reported in them were the work of his guerrillas. After the Soviet invasion, however, Murtaza established a close relationship with Muhammad Najibullah, head of KHAD, the newly founded Afghan intelligence service, who as a goodwill gesture paid the costs of Murtaza’s wedding to a young Afghan woman.82
Murtaza and Najibullah had a series of discussions on joint covert operations against Pakistan.83 Since KHAD was operating under KGB direction, there is no doubt that their discussions were fully approved by the Centre.84 Given the risks of operating with the volatile Murtaza, however, the Centre preferred to deal with him at one remove through KHAD. Murtaza may never have realized that, in his dealings with him, KHAD was acting as a KGB surrogate.85 His first successful operations inside Pakistan, agreed with Najibullah, were a bomb attack on the Sindh high court and the destruction of a Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) DC-10 aircraft at Karachi airport in January 1981. He also planned to disrupt the visit of Pope John Paul II to Pakistan in February by exploding a bomb during the pontiff’s address in a Karachi stadium. But the bomb went off prematurely at the entrance to the stadium, killing the bomber and a policeman.86
In December Murtaza Bhutto and Najibullah decided on what was to be their most spectacular joint operation, codenamed ALAMGIR (‘Swordbearer’) by the KGB.87 It was agreed that Murtaza’s guerrillas would hijack a PIA airliner over Pakistan and divert it to Damascus or Tripoli. The three novice hijackers who boarded a plane at Karachi on 2 March 1981, however, made the mistake of choosing an internal flight which had insufficient fuel to reach Damascus or Tripoli. The leading hijacker, Salamullah Tipu, ordered the pilot to land at Kabul instead. As the plane landed, Tipu informed the control tower that he was a member of the armed wing of the PPP, which was fighting for the restoration of democracy in Pakistan, and wished to speak to ‘Dr Salahuddin’, Murtaza’s codename in Kabul. Murtaza, who chose the occasion to rename his terrorist group Al-Zulfikar (‘The Sword’), came to meet Tipu at the bottom of the aircraft steps88 and was joined by Najibullah, who was disguised in the clothes of an airport worker. Both the KGB mission and the Kabul residency advised Najibullah on the best methods of using the hijack to discredit the Zia regime.89 On 4 March Anahita Ratebzad, President of the Afghan-Soviet Friendship Association and Minister of Education, who was a ‘confidential contact’ of the KGB,90 came to the airport surrounded by TV cameras, to express support for the ‘just demands’ of the hijackers and to ask for the release of the women and children on the aircraft to mark International Women’s Day. In a pre-arranged gesture, Tipu announced that he was happy to accede to Ratebzad’s request. On 5 March the Afghan leader and long-standing KGB agent, Babrak Karmal, who had just returned from Moscow, conducted a live televised phone conversation with Tipu from the control tower. Like Ratebzad, Karmal gave strong backing to the hijackers’ ‘just demands’. Tipu replied in an emotional voice that Karmal was the greatest man in the whole of Asia.91
Among the hijackers’ demands was the release of over fifty ‘political prisoners’ from Pakistani jails. When Zia refused, one of the passengers was beaten, shot and thrown onto the tarmac, where he writhed in agony as he lay dying. The victim, Tariq Rahim, was a devoted former ADC to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, but the paranoid tendencies of both Tipu and Murtaza convinced them that Rahim had really been in league with Zia.92 This gruesome episode may well have persuaded the KGB that it was time for the aircraft to move on. Before the plane was refuelled for a flight to Syria, then the Soviet Union’s closest major ally in the Middle East, further arms were taken on board unseen by the TV cameras. The three hijackers, who had arrived in Kabul armed only with pistols, left equipped with Kalashnikovs, grenades, explosives, a timing device and $4,500.93 After the aircraft landed in Damascus, Zia initially continued to refuse to release political prisoners but was eventually persuaded to do so by Washington in order to save the lives of American hostages on board. Murtaza hailed the freeing of fifty-four PPP members from Pakistani jails as a triumph for Al-Zulfikar. KHAD and the KGB appeared to agree. Al-Zulfikar’s base was moved from the derelict ‘Dracula House’ to new palatial headquarters, which received a steady stream of refugees from Zia’s regime anxious to become guerrillas and fight for its overthrow.94
As well as supporting Al-Zulfikar, KHAD was also used by the KGB to channel arms to separatist and dissident groups in the Pakistani provinces of Baluchistan and Sindh. At the end of 1980 the leader of a Baluchi separatist group based in Afghanistan had secret talks with Najibullah who promised to provide the separatists with arms, 400 military instructors and three training camps. After talks between another Baluchi leader and the Afghan President, Babrak Karmal, in April 1982, KHAD opened two more camps to train Baluchi guerrillas to fight the Pakistani and Iranian regimes.95
The huge influx of Afghan refugees in Pakistan (eventually numbering perhaps as many as 3.5 million) offered numerous opportunities for agent infiltration. Since the agents were usually Afghan, in most instances the KGB used KHAD as its surrogate. According to statistics in FCD files, acting as a KGB surrogate, in the early 1980s KHAD’s foreign intelligence directorate had 107 agents and 115 ‘trainee’ agents operating inside Pakistan, mostly within the Afghan refugee community.96 The FCD interdepartmental working group headed by Chukhrov made penetration of the mujahideen a major priority.97 Twenty-six KHAD agents were said to have access to the headquarters of the rival mujahideen groups; fifteen were members of the Pakistani armed forces, intelligence community and official bureaucracy.98 Their main achievement was to increase the existing tension and mistrust between the rival groups. Though this achievement did not change the course of the war in Afghanistan, it significantly diminished the effectiveness of mujahideen operations.99
The Centre also attempted to disrupt the links between Zia and the mujahideen groups in Pakistan by active measures designed to brand him as a traitor to Islam. On 18 April 1981 Kryuchkov submitted to Andropov a new proposal for disinformation designed ‘to cause a deterioration in Pakistani-Iranian relations and to exacerbate the political situation in Pakistan’:1. Using [Service A’s] samples in the Centre, leaflets should be written in Urdu by a fictitious opposition group calling for the overthrow of the regime of Zia ul-Haq and an Islamic Revolution in Pakistan. A large number of the leaflets should be printed and distributed in Pakistan. The text of the leaflet must make it clear that the writers are under the strong influence of Khomeini. The leaflet should quote Khomeini’s criticisms of Zia ul-Haq and the present regime in Pakistan. The leaflet should be distributed by the residencies in Islamabad and Karachi and by our Afghan friends.
2. The residencies in Bangladesh and India should get the press in these countries to publish articles about a powerful opposition organization in Pakistan which was set up by the Iranian special services and which is actively working to overthrow Zia ul-Haq.
We await your approval.
Andropov gave his approval on 21 April.100 Service A’s leaflets attacking Zia as a traitor to Islam (operation ZAKHIR) took several forms. Some, such as the following example (unusually copied in its entirety by Mitrokhin), were intended to appear to be the work of Shi’ite groups inspired by Khomeini’s example:
In the name of Allah, merciful and kind! Glory to Allah who made us Muslims and said in his Holy book: ‘Is there anyone better than the man who calls on Allah to do good and says that he is obedient to him?’ (S.41, A.33) Blessed is the prophet, his family and associates.
Brothers in faith!
Our enemies are not only those who openly oppose Islam, but also those who, under the cover of Islamism, do their dirty deeds. For it is written: ‘Do not be afraid of your enemies, but of the day when you turn your back on Islam and the mosques.’
Zia ul-Haq is a hypocrite like the former Shah of Iran. He also prayed with Muslims, went on a pilgrimage to the Holy places and knew how to talk about the Holy Quran.