Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  Among the many trips to Afghanistan with eager observers, one that remains memorable was with the then third-ranking official at the Department of Defense, Fred Iklé, who oversaw special operations, foreign arms sales, and military assistance during the Reagan administration and had pushed hard to deploy the Stinger in Afghanistan. When we arrived at the airport in Islamabad, the Pakistanis handed out dozens of little green books to senior officials from both governments that listed members of the arriving party, including “Fred Iklé of DOD and Jack Devine of the CIA.” I was still undercover, which I took very seriously. “Milt, what the hell is this?” I asked Bearden, fuming. Somebody should have made sure that we didn’t have the names of undercover people printed in a widely circulated little green book. Bearden and I had a curt back-and-forth over this, but it lasted only a few minutes.

  Sometime later I made a trip to the Afghan border with Charlie Wilson. Before we left, Tom Twetten called and told me the congressman wanted to go to the region and was taking with him a journalist, George Crile of 60 Minutes. Both of us felt this was nonsense, very unprofessional, and very un-CIA-like. It was virtually unheard-of to have covert CIA operations officials travel abroad with a journalist. But Casey himself had agreed to it. And if Wilson was going, he needed someone from CIA to go along. Despite Crile’s presence, I was glad to be going, because it would give me another opportunity to develop an even closer relationship with Wilson. I also needed to be there so that Pakistani officials didn’t come to the mistaken conclusion that Wilson was negotiating on behalf of the U.S. government and that they could orchestrate an end run around the CIA through him. “Charlie was a complicated handling problem,” Twetten said. We stopped over in Egypt on the way to Karachi and unexpectedly met with President Hosni Mubarak. Wilson and I talked with him in between tennis matches; I wouldn’t exactly call it a meeting. But Wilson had arranged this on his own and didn’t notify Ambassador Frank Wisner, a friend of the Agency whose father was the first head of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, then known as the Directorate of Plans. Wisner, needless to say, was annoyed.

  Once we landed in Pakistan, we experienced a clash of titans. The momentary rift I had had with Bearden during the Iklé trip was nothing compared to Bearden’s first meeting with Wilson. The two got off to a bad start. Maybe it was because they were both Texans; I’m not sure. Wilson didn’t like the feel of Bearden, and Bearden had read too much about Wilson’s celebrity status. He had a perception of Wilson as a policy dilettante, lacking in substance. I tried to play the role of peacemaker, and it took them a little while to reset their relationship. Things got better as the trip proceeded. Eventually, they became very friendly and mutually respectful.

  We headed up to Peshawar, where we went into the Afghan refugee camps. There were more than three million people living in these camps along the border. It was a daunting challenge for the Pakistanis to take care of their needs, especially the hundreds of children who had been maimed by land mines. When we approached one of the medical tents, Swedish doctors asked us to donate blood. Wilson sat down and without hesitation rolled up his sleeve. I advised the doctors that I had been taking malaria tablets because of my international travel. With that, the doctor gestured me into the tent and pointed to the many maimed children. Do you think that matters? he said. That was the end of the discussion, and the reused needle was shoved into my arm to draw the blood. While I hoped the needle had at least been sterilized, it was a privilege to help these children.

  Later, we met under a huge tent, fifty yards by fifty, with all the Afghan tribal leaders, who had gathered for a conference moderated by Abdul Rahman Akhtar, the head of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. At one point I whispered to Wilson that you could cut the tension in the room with a knife. He replied, “If you think this is bad, last year we had to bring the tribal leaders in a half hour apart and disarm them.” He was right. We were in fact making slow progress with the likes of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani, and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Hekmatyar was the most powerful mujahideen leader and the ISI’s favorite. We considered him adept at fighting Soviets despite his anti-Western, radical Islamist views. Rabbani, an Islamic scholar trained in Egypt, based in Pakistan, and supported by the ISI, had built his militia with Pashtun, Uzbek, and Shi’ite fighters. Sayyaf, like Rabbani a Cairo-educated Islamic scholar, enjoyed strong Saudi backing.

  Meanwhile, my deputy, Joe Malpeli, was responsible for running unilateral operations in Afghanistan—operations that we did not handle through the Pakistanis. We obviously worked closely with the ISI, but we also wanted to make sure we had eyes and ears trained on the Afghan program independent of the Pakistanis, so we knew what they were doing and not doing. We also ran operations directly with Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Tajik guerrilla commander in the Panjshir Valley who had turned back four Soviet assaults between 1980 and 1982 before agreeing to a truce in 1983 that deeply angered Hekmatyar and the ISI. We considered him one of the best and most reliable fighters. He and Hekmatyar were rivals and squared off in a civil war after the Soviet withdrawal. Massoud would go on to form the Northern Alliance before he was killed by suicide bombers immediately before the 9/11 attack, for fear that he would be at our side in the inevitable fight afterward.

  After Akhtar’s meeting with mujahideen commanders in Peshawar, Wilson and I went down to Darra, in the unruly North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, close to the Afghan border. It was a “Wild West” town and an open-air gun market about twenty-five miles south of Peshawar. The Pakistanis were not enthused about the idea of our side trip, but they did not want to say no to Wilson. At the gun market, people fired guns into the air, and it would have been easy enough to get off a round directed at Wilson’s entourage. But we were under very heavy military guard the entire time, to discourage anyone from taking a shot.

  The market was exactly what it advertised itself to be: every store was literally a gun store, and you could buy every make of weapon (and knives and swords), including some from when the Brits were in Pakistan in the nineteenth century. The visit gave me a firsthand opportunity to see for myself if any of our weapons were being sold on the black market. We didn’t see any of them, and there was never significant reporting of anything turning up in Darra or the other gun-toting towns.

  At one point, Milt wandered off and came back with a ratty-looking, bloodstained Soviet army vest. I asked him what that was about, and he proceeded to tell me that one of the CODEL (Congressional Delegation) members we had left behind in Islamabad had requested a bloodstained relic from the fighting with the Russians. We rolled our eyes contemptuously. What a crass request; how demeaning of the loss of life associated with warfare. Before I had a chance to express my misgivings, Milt said he had picked up the vest in the market and had had one of the locals smear it with chicken blood. I hope the congressman didn’t mount his souvenir on his office wall for display.

  The Pakistanis saw Wilson as larger-than-life and key to U.S. support for them. They had seen the covert weapons program expand, and they rightfully believed that Wilson’s role in this was critically important. President Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq clearly respected and valued his relationship with Wilson. Wilson and I once met with Zia and General Akhtar during a trip to Islamabad. Wilson was smooth and used the right measure of Texas charm and wit, blended with a clear understanding of what was relevant on the ground from Zia’s perspective. (As for Zia, I’ve met a number of national leaders through the years, and by any measure, he was one of the most impressive. His presence projected power and stability, and his deep-set black eyes added more than a hint of mystery. He spoke in quiet, measured tones, which added to the overall effect of strength and left visitors hanging on his every word. It was a great tragedy for all of us when he perished in a C-130 airplane crash in 1988, along with General Akhtar and American ambassador Arnie Raphel. At the time of the crash, I felt sure it was a terrorist act, but the Defense Department’s official investigatio
n declared it a mechanical failure.)

  Despite Wilson’s stature in the eyes of the Pakistanis, it was always quite clear to me and everyone else at the CIA that aid to the mujahideen was a U.S. government program, which by law the Agency, not Wilson, was responsible for running. We greatly valued his support, but we kept him professionally at arm’s length while maintaining a productive and cordial personal relationship with him. “We all loved Charlie,” Bearden said, but it was “Charlie Wilson’s War” only in Charlie Wilson’s mind. “We had moved way beyond his involvement at that point, and it was then a major U.S. government program,” Bearden said. Indeed, this is one of my biggest problems with the movie about Wilson, which creates the impression that he and a handful of other quasi-rogue Agency operatives brought the Stinger to Afghanistan and ran the entire covert operation independent of policy or chain of command. Wilson had nothing to do with the Stinger decision. George Crile stated as much in his book, though this fact got lost in Hollywood. Nonetheless, Wilson was critically important to the effort because of his commitment and the amount of money he was able to appropriate. Wilson had developed a reputation as a hard-drinking partier, especially during his earlier years in Congress. But he was a complicated, serious person, too—very helpful to us and truly dedicated to the cause. He was a keen fan of the Flashman adventure series and fashioned himself in Flashman’s image: a swashbuckling adventurer. He tried to impart his enthusiasm for Flashman to all of us, and at one point, he presented key players on the Afghan team with leather jackets with Flashman and other warrior emblems sewn onto each. I have kept mine fondly, as a reminder of our time together. Charlie had found the jackets on a CODEL trip to South Korea on other business, but Afghanistan was obviously always on his mind. “When he was working on something he cared about, he was serious—and he was serious about the war,” said Tim Burton, our logistics chief. Anderson, my successor, remembered that Wilson was “constantly looking for things he could do to keep our feet to the fire.” There was a “prove it to Charlie Wilson” refrain at the Agency because of the amount of money Wilson brought in and his relationships with the Pakistanis, who from time to time would be convinced the Agency was not doing enough and would call Wilson directly to complain, Anderson said.3 But Anderson knew that Wilson was not calling the shots. I can’t remember him ever trying to ride roughshod over the task force. We just had to be responsive and keep him informed about what was going on. If it made sense, he stood aside.

  At home, the task force team continued working on new weapons systems, even with the success of the Stingers. Wilson had about $30 million set aside in the defense budget for research and development. One of the things that really interested me were efforts to develop a device for clearing land mines, because they were such a terrible problem in Afghanistan, causing serious injuries to so many fighters and civilians, including children. We were also looking at bullets that would penetrate a tank and a device that would temporarily blind a helicopter pilot with a flash and cause him to come crashing down. The lawyers decided the flash device was not consistent with the Geneva Accords. I agreed. War is war, but if you have ground rules, you’ve got to follow them. Usually, the rules are predicated on sound reasoning. Do you want those same techniques applied to American troops? Shooting down a helicopter with a rocket is an acceptable action, because both sides authorize combatants, and the Hinds could fire back with everything they had. Blinding pilots, it seemed to me, was another matter. The lawyers also objected to a plan we were working on for developing a small drone that we could fly into the window of the Soviet officers’ quarters at Bagram Airfield outside Kabul and blow the place up. This struck them as a prohibited form of assassination. Interestingly enough, the mini-drone became the forerunner to the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that have become such a prominent part of the CIA arsenal and, like the Stinger, a game changer in the war on terrorism.

  Still, when it came to attacking Soviet facilities with high technology, we were undeterred. Shortly after he was detailed to the task force, Clifton Dempsey began developing a long-range precision weapon. The 107-millimeter and 122-millimeter rockets were highly inaccurate, and we couldn’t rely on luck to win the war, no matter how spectacular the mujahideen attack on the Kharga ammunition dump had been. Dempsey had to not only develop the weapon but make sure it could be carried on the back of a mule. In his research, he came across a Finnish Tampella 120-millimeter mortar that could travel almost four miles. This weapon was licensed and manufactured in Spain with monies from a special R&D fund Charlie Wilson had set up at DOD. We purchased 20 mortars and 125 rounds. With the army’s help, we increased the mortar’s precision by replacing the sight with a north-seeking precision module and changing out the tripod design with a bipod. The army also helped us adapt a computer that provided the azimuth (arc), propellant, and elevation needed to improve the mortar’s accuracy. The Tampella eventually became standard in all U.S. Army mortar systems.

  But the most exciting addition Dempsey introduced was the now-ubiquitous global positioning system, a constellation of Pentagon satellites that none of us had ever heard of. Smaller, shorter-range mortars left the mujahideen vulnerable to Soviet counterbattery fire, which enabled the Soviets to quickly determine a mortar’s location and return fire before those manning the weapon had a chance to move. But from about four miles away, mujahideen fighters firing the giant Spanish-made mortars would be out of the Russians’ counterpunch range, and the GPS satellites would tell them how to guide their mortars to the target. Once the coordinates of the mujahideen location were fed into a computer, along with the coordinates of their target, the computer could tell them the exact compass direction and elevation at which to aim the mortar tube. There was some skepticism about this at the Agency, but Dempsey convinced me to go with him to Fort A.P. Hill, about an hour and a half south of Washington, for a demonstration.

  It was pouring rain when we arrived. I had on a business suit, so I reached for a sensible umbrella as I started to get out of our car.

  “Jack, I’ll do anything you want, but please put that umbrella away,” Clifton said.

  In the army, when it rained on the battlefield, you got wet. So I put the umbrella away, got drenched, and watched the GPS-guided simulated mortar hit its target with stunning accuracy.

  I also went to the Nevada desert to see the GPS 120 system tested, originally intending to use all the rounds in the testing. But I was so impressed with the system that I stopped the test after several volleys and decided to deploy the system to Afghanistan immediately, as we were in a rush to ramp up the pressure in sync with the deployment of the Stinger. The only disagreeable part of the test involved the CIA project manager coordinating the effort. It was his job to provide all of the necessary logistical support. He seemingly did not have his heart in it and was dragging his feet. His attitude was getting in the way. When that happens, there is no choice but to remove the manager from the project, which I told his superior needed to happen as soon as possible. The man was quickly replaced with a quality officer, who helped make the GPS-guided mortar work, and fast.

  But making sure it worked was only half the battle. We had to figure out how we were going to deliver this large, heavy weapon to Afghanistan. Burton, my logistics genius, began working with his staff to develop a special saddle, so that mules could carry the mortars on their backs into the country. We had to procure the mortars from the Spanish without telling them what we planned to do with them. In the end, we sent about twenty of them to the field, and about seven of these were used in a devastating attack on the Spetsnaz battalion in the Kunar Valley, in eastern Afghanistan, in November 1987. This was the first time the GPS system was used in combat. A mujahideen team launched the mortar barrage right through the Soviet installation there, almost destroying it entirely. The Russians had no idea what hit them and had nothing in place with which to counterattack. Before and after photographs from spy satellites showed how completely the GPS-guided mortars devastated the Sp
etsnaz base.

  The White House also started pushing for the introduction of the French-made Milan antitank missile once Soviet armored tanks replaced Hind helicopter gunships as the most lethal threat on the battlefield. My feeling was if the Milan worked to knock out the tanks, put in the Milan. After the Stinger went in, concern about sophisticated weapons, which the Milan was, dissipated. The Milan, guided by a thin copper wire, had ten times the range (about two miles) of an RPG-7, which was then the preferred shoulder-held antitank rocket-propelled grenade launcher. After we decided to deploy the missile and created the procurement pipeline, the Milan made it out to the field. By this time it was 1987 and Anderson had taken over the task force. The Milan soon did to tank formations what the Stinger had done to helicopter squadrons. By the fall of that year, Anderson said, the field report on troop illnesses and other tactical information made it clear to those running the task force that the Soviets were fighting with a “dead army” and we were winning the fight against them.

  By the time I left the program in 1987 to become chief of station in Rome, the war was winding down. The Soviets under Gorbachev announced their plans to withdraw, but the covert war raged on as the CIA continued arming rebels fighting to topple the Communist government of Mohammad Najibullah. When the last Soviet unit rumbled out of Afghanistan across the Friendship Bridge into Uzbekistan in February 1989, Bearden sent out a simple cable from Islamabad: “WE WON.” It had been a huge team effort. With the Soviets gone, the Bush administration quickly lost interest in Afghanistan. The Berlin Wall fell in November, consuming the administration’s foreign policy focus. The CIA kept pushing arms through the mountain passes as the rebel factions tried to close in on the Najibullah regime, but with the Soviets gone from the equation, Congress cut its secret appropriation for Afghanistan by 60 percent in 1990. The 1991 Gulf War made Afghanistan a distant memory. The CIA’s authority to arm the warring rebel factions formally lapsed on January 1, 1992. The Najibullah government finally fell later that year, but there was no outside power with enough interest left to broker a peace. Kabul descended into civil war among rebel factions, and paved the way for the rise of the Taliban in 1994.