by George Crile
With hindsight it can be argued that this was the critical year of the war, not just the year of the great U.S. buildup but also the year when it appeared to many at Langley and in the U.S. government that perhaps the CIA had moved with too little, too late and that it might be on the verge of creating an all-time covert disaster.
With hindsight, this was the year the Soviets might actually have succeeded in breaking the resistance. Had it not been for the huge CIA escalation, but specifically the new mix of weapons that Vickers introduced that year, the Soviet offensive might have worked.
The moment of panic—when it seemed as if the Wilson-Avrakotos escalation might backfire—came early in 1985. Ironically, the problem came not from the conventional hard-liners in the Kremlin but from the man usually thought of as the voice of reason and the architect of glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev.
The first to get a look at the dark side of Gorbachev were the Pakistanis. Zia and his foreign minister, Yaqub Khan, were in Moscow in 1985 for Konstantin Chernenko’s funeral, when the newly elevated Gorbachev took them aside at the Kremlin and all but threatened to destroy their country if they did not halt support for the mujahideen. He was reportedly brutal in his delivery, declaring that Pakistan was in effect waging war on the Soviet Union and that he was not going to stand for it. Summoning all of his courage, Zia looked Gorbachev straight in the eye and insisted that his country was not involved. With that, the CIA’s key ally left Moscow for Mecca, where he prayed to Allah for courage to continue the jihad.
The CIA didn’t wake up to what Gorbachev had in mind for them until later, when the Kremlin put General Mikhail M. Zaitzev in charge of the Afghan campaign. Zaitzev was the legendary officer who had executed the brutal invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and his appointment was viewed as virtual proof that the Soviets were now committed to prevailing no matter what the cost. Almost immediately upon Zaitzev’s arrival, the 40th Army took to the offensive everywhere.
The battlefield reports coming in that spring were deeply disturbing. Whereas the Soviet forces had previously operated only with huge shows of force, easy to detect and hide from, they were now moving in all kinds of ways and on all fronts. For the first time, the Red Army itself was howling at the doors of Pakistan, its fighter-bombers striking border towns, Soviet battalions and regiments sweeping in to cut off supply lines. There was more of everything—more bombing, more shelling, more gunships prowling the countryside looking for mule and camel caravans to blast. But most unnerving was the introduction of thousands of elite Spetsnaz troops into the fighting.
The Spetsnaz are the Russian equivalent of America’s Green Berets. The most highly trained elite soldiers in the Soviet Union, they had previously been used only for the most technically demanding and sophisticated operations. But in Afghanistan Zaitzev and his commanders were now bringing in these skilled killers by helicopter at night, inserting them behind mujahideen lines to organize ambushes and sabotage raids. For a time they seemed to be an invincible and omnipresent force, spreading terror among the usually stoic mujahideen.
Gorbachev, alarmed at the price the Soviet Union was paying for its Afghan campaign, had given Zaitzev a year to break the back of the resistance. And by the summer and fall of 1985 many Western analysts seemed to think the Soviets were on the verge of pulling it off. The escalation had taken its toll on the mujahideen, who, in spite of their warrior discipline and their astonishing faith in Allah, had become a bit war weary. At the funerals of their fathers and sons and brothers and cousins they rarely wept. They claimed to believe that they were happy for their loved ones who were now in Paradise, but it was hard not to detect a certain exhuastion setting in. They were, after all, just people. The war had been going on for five years, and instead of things getting better they were now facing an enemy that was increasing his ability to punish in ways they had never had to worry about before.
For the first time that year, Avrakotos had to consider the possibility that for once he was playing chicken with an adversary who might not blink. He says, “This was the escalation that scared us because here we were pouring in stuff that would soon double and triple their casualties and that’s what caused them to escalate in the first place—the casualties. We had to ask ourselves, What would be left for them to do after that other than to invade Pakistan or to use tactical nukes?”
The well-publicized appointment of Zaitzev had created a kind of panic among the Afghan hands in Washington, but it turns out he was not the real commander. Instead, a far more lethal and politically important figure had been placed in charge.
It seems almost incredible that a general as significant as Valentin Varennikov could have served so long in Kabul and been so little known to his American adversaries. Zaitzev was the subject of constant conversation; Varennikov none. It was as if the Kremlin had never focused in on the role that General Westmoreland had played in Vietnam.
Certainly in his own world, Varennikov was anything but invisible. To begin with he was an authentic war hero, possessor of the Golden Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union, a man whose history embodied the legend and mystique of the invincibility of the Red Army. It was Varennikov who was given the honor as a young captain at the end of World War II of presenting a captured Nazi flag to Stalin.
From that moment on, the Red Army had been his life, and he had never known anything but victory as he’d risen through the ranks to become one of the three most significant officers of the Soviet General Staff. By Christmas 1979, when the Soviets marched into Afghanistan, he was the Soviet General Staff’s man in charge of drawing up the master plan for all-out war against the United States and the West. As Varennikov matter-of-factly puts it, it was his job to design the strategy for the Red Army to fight the entire world at once and win, and he had no doubt that his side would prevail.
In 1985, when the grand old strategist of Soviet power took command in Kabul, he was alarmed by developments in Eastern Europe, what he saw as a subversive anti-Communist alliance between the Reagan administration and the Polish pope of Rome. He concluded that the Soviets would have to choose a place to halt the momentum. As he set off to draw the line in Afghanistan, he was prepared to use Soviet power without compromise. During the 1980s, while Wilson and Avrakotos were still maneuvering to get into positions of power, Varennikov was in charge of Soviet military affairs in the Third World—Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, Yemen, El Salvador, and South Africa. In all those areas where the United States felt threatened, the anonymous hand of Valentin Varennikov was at work stirring the pot. In 1993, surrounded by rich Oriental rugs in the Moscow apartment building where former generals are still given gracious housing, the general agreed to speak about Afghanistan as he awaited trial for his part in the failed coup against Gorbachev.
He quickly made his American visitor understand how significant Afghanistan had been to him and to the Kremlin leadership when he laid out his dark vision of U.S. intentions during the Cold War. “It was America that started the arms race as a way of bankrupting the Soviet economy,” he explains. “America loved blackmailing the world with its nuclear might.”
The general found himself even more alarmed when he learned that Reagan had launched a missile attack against the Soviet’s Libyan ally Muammar Qaddafi. The White House and the Pentagon openly rubbed salt in this wound to Soviet pride by releasing a videotape from a tiny camera that had been placed in the nose cone of the American rocket so that the whole world could see and feel, via television, the experience of riding a U.S. Air Force bomb right into Qaddafi’s tent. “What was I to think? I knew Qaddafi very well. We were friends. I had just visited him in that tent the month before. How could we ignore these things?”
From the standpoint of the Kremlin, the early returns on Varennikov’s series of offensives must have looked very promising indeed. By the summer of 1985, new floods of Afghans were pouring over the border seeking refuge in Pakistan, telling horror stories of saturation bombing, a new scorched-earth policy, and the dr
eaded night-fighting Spetsnaz troops.
What Gorbachev and Varennikov had no way of knowing that spring, however, is that they were moving with too little, too late. Back in Langley, Avrakotos had his own personal General Varennikov in place, thirty-two-year-old Mike Vickers, and Vickers was going to turn out to be the better general.
On one level it was preposterous for Vickers to be playing such a role. He was so junior in grade that he couldn’t even sign his own cables. But he was now speaking and acting in Avrakotos’s name, with a half-billion-dollar war chest to use to wreck General Varennikov’s campaign. And never for a moment did Vickers have any doubts about exactly what needed to be done.
What Vickers, operating even more invisibly than Varennikov, came up with was a radical departure from Hart’s concept of a massive mountain army. The brash young officer conceded that Howard Hart had accomplished much by arming a baseline force of more than 400,000. But because of the way the Afghans were armed and because of their lack of training and sophistication, he was convinced that the law of diminishing returns had long ago set in. In fact, he concluded that even if the Agency were to arm an extra 300,000 mujahideen, it would not improve their capacity to fight one bit.
Vickers’s first bold act was to cut off hundreds of thousands of mujahideen from the Agency’s main support program. Instead of giving the same arms and ammunition to 400,000 or more conventional guerrillas, Vickers decided to create an elite force of 150,000. Basically, he was betting everything on this new army within an army. The “holy warriors” who didn’t make the cut would continue to be supported but would be treated essentially as a militia.
To an outsider, it might have appeared to be a scaling back, but 150,000 was still a huge number. The Contra army in Nicaragua, for example, was said to be no more than 20,000. More important than the size, however, was what Vickers had in mind for this core group of Muslim warriors. He intended to give them the most sophisticated weaponry and turn them into a force of late-twentieth-century “technoguerrillas.”
Drawing on Gust’s authority, Vickers was already channeling a torrent of new and varied weapons to the mujahideen, but that was only half the battle. He had been appalled when he’d discovered that the Agency was offering the mujahideen only four or five training courses in weapons and tactics, none any longer than a week. Now, under the supervision of marine Colonel Nick Pratt, the straitlaced officer who had been so repelled by Charlie Wilson on the Egyptian trip, the Agency began giving twenty different courses covering a range of irregular warfare disciplines, some lasting a month or more.
It seemed to Gust that the mujahideen had some genetic gift for learning how to use weapons and instruments of destruction. His PM operatives, dressed in shalwar kameezes with beards and Chitrali hats, set out to train the Afghans in their Pakistani border camps. They were taught not only how to fire their new weapons but how to work together in combat and how to mount a range of different kinds of operations, from urban sabotage to huge, combined-arms ambushes.
By the end of the year, the Agency began sending in frequency-hopping radios and burst transmitters. Now, instead of waiting days for messengers on horseback, a commander like Ismail Khan in Herat, near the Iranian border, could communicate with the ISI in Pakistan instantly. With basic combat walkie-talkies, these biblical warriors were finally able to talk to one another in combat and coordinate attacks.
That year Art Alper’s Technical Services people even came up with a small device that the mujahideen could carry with them to give an early alert when a gunship was approaching. It would be many long months before Vickers could introduce his “symphony of weapons” to combat the Hind, but this exotic noise sensor, not much bigger than a quarter, was a godsend. It didn’t just predict the approach of a helicopter but identified the direction it was coming from, thus giving the Afghans time at least to hide. On every front, the CIA was turning its guerrillas into a far smarter and more lethal fighting force.
Throughout the entire buildup, only a handful of people understood the role Vickers, hiding behind his lowly GS-11 rating, was playing. He would be in England negotiating to buy Blowpipes one day and back the next; in Pakistan for four and back for two; in China for seventy-two hours, placing orders for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons, and back to the sixth floor, operating as if he had never been away. As Avrakotos explained, “He was our brain. I couldn’t afford to have him away for more than four days at a time.”
When things went badly and the reports made it sound as if all was lost, Vickers would be there to reassure Gust. It was only logical, he explained, that the Soviets would finally make their move. As for the Spetsnaz, Vickers suggested that there might be something hopeful about their introduction.
No rational army, he explained in his role as Gust’s tutor, uses its most valuable soldiers for semiconventional battle. Spetsnaz soldiers are the army’s equivalent of jet fighter pilots. You don’t treat such thoroughbreds as if they were ordinary grunts. “You wouldn’t send me to lead a raid on the Kabul garrison,” he went on. “It’s a waste. There’s something desperate about it.”
It was always reassuring for Avrakotos to talk to this cool strategist. Vickers, with his white shirt and tie, looking out calmly through his owl glasses, invariably responded to such crises as if he were being asked to solve a simple arithmetic problem. Avrakotos had been genuinely alarmed about the Spetsnaz and told him they needed a counterstrategy fast.
Vickers was soon presiding over a meeting of three knuckle draggers from the Ground Branch of the P.M. division and two of the Pentagon’s leading irregular-warfare experts. Within days, three Agency types turned up in Pakistan, armed with a very specific set of countertactics to pass on to the freedom fighters. One tactic, for example, called for the mujahideen to lure the Spetsnaz into restricted areas, which would have been mined in advance and would be covered by machine-gun fire. Soon the Afghans were actually hunting the Spetsnaz: never easily or without a price but now at least able to hold their own. Before the year was out, the cost to the Soviet special forces would be enormous.
Gust’s war room during this time was electric, infused with patriotic purpose. The PM types would always stop by to see him before going off on their missions. As Avrakotos saw it, “Sending one of these people to Afghanistan was sort of like giving Itzhak Perlman a Stradivarius. Give him an AK-47 and he’s home. He suddenly lurches from being an asshole at Tyson’s Corner into being an honorable killer.” Gust would always leave these warriors with a few words of encouragement. “I told them to just teach the mujahideen how to kill: pipe bombs, car bombs. But don’t ever tell me how you’re doing it in writing. Just do it.”
One of the secretaries remembers the sense then in the war room of being “surrounded by heroes.” The case officers were all framed by huge blown-up pictures of mujahideen warriors. After hours they would tell the wide-eyed young women about the nobility of the Afghans. “I got the feeling that the Russians had come in and taken their land, their homes,” recalls one of the secretaries. “People were being massacred, children were dying, and the mujahideen were fighting impossible odds. When you found out what was happening you couldn’t be involved and not care.”
For this woman, watching Vickers grow a beard before leaving on a trip or listening to Gust say good-bye to the paramilitaries as they set off for Pakistan was like watching a World War II movie with RAF pilots heading off to fight the Luftwaffe. In reality, however, these PM officers did not actually go into combat. Throughout the war, the CIA was rigidly prohibited from having any American agents operating inside Afghanistan.* In fact, for most of the war, they were only permitted to train the Pakistanis, who in turn trained the Afghans.
Some of the hard-right enthusiasts complained about this, arguing that Americans would be more effective, but Avrakotos and Vickers knew that direct involvement would be a prescription for disaster. Besides, they saw General Akhtar’s ISI as first-rate military men, many of them highly experienced
and well trained (some out of the American Special Forces schools at Fort Bragg).
Beyond that, they knew it would be absurd for non-Muslim Americans to accompany the Afghan holy warriors in combat. The Pakistanis, many of whom were of Pashtun origins, spoke the same language, shared the same geography and religion. They were now constantly going with the mujahideen as advisers on combat runs into Afghanistan, a fact that Gust knew could cause him no end of trouble because of the explicit prohibition on any direct CIA involvement. “I got around that by asking if the Pakistani advisers had any Pathan blood,” explains Avrakotos. “‘Yes,’ was the response. ‘Okay then, they are not Pakistani. They are Pathans or Uzbeks.’”
To the CIA men who had operated on the ground in Pakistan, it was clear that American spies would have made a mess of things trying to deal directly with these Afghans from another time and place. “Akhtar’s troops did something for us we couldn’t,” explains Avrakotos. “It would have cost us millions to try to do what they did—all the movement of weapons, the training of the mujahideen, the coordination of everything.”
There was another plus. Because most of the ISI trainers were virtual blood brothers to the Afghans, they were more than eager to do things that would have been political suicide for Americans. For example, they had no hesitation when it came to training for sabotage and assassination. And unlike their American counterparts, they could even offer bounties to hit the targets deemed most valuable.
Without so much as a second thought, the ISI officers promoted the value of selective killing. This was war, and as they saw it the idea was to convince the mujahideen that some of the enemy were more important to kill than others. They went to some lengths to teach their Afghan charges how to identify a Soviet general or commanding officer by describing where he would normally stand in a group of soldiers and what position he would take when walking about a base. An Afghan soldier could more easily decide whom to shoot first once he not only knew who the general was but also understood that the higher the rank of the Soviet soldier killed, the bigger the bounty he could collect back in Peshawar.*