The Way of the Knife

by Mark Mazzetti

  But what the soldiers learned when they returned to their base was that, days earlier, the CIA had turned the men inside the two compounds away from the Taliban and convinced them to fight for the other side. Hanging in one of the buildings that night was the flag of the new government of Afghanistan, led by Hamid Karzai. The CIA had never told the special-operations task force that the dozens of Afghan men living in the compounds were now their allies.

  The confusion in Afghanistan was partly the result of normal battlefield turmoil, but it also had its origins in the jockeying between the Pentagon and CIA for supremacy in the new American conflict. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had felt stung that CIA paramilitary teams had been first into Afghanistan. It wasn’t just a matter of logistics, though it was true that the platoons of Green Berets had been delayed by bad weather and problems getting access to bases around Afghanistan. It was that the invasion was, at its inception, conceived and led by the CIA with the U.S. military in a supporting role. The ability of the CIA to move more swiftly than the military with just a fraction of the Pentagon’s budget and manpower gnawed at Rumsfeld. He began overhauling the Pentagon’s bureaucracy to ensure it didn’t happen again.

  Rumsfeld had been struggling in his efforts to revamp a Defense Department he saw as hidebound and controlled too much by parochial military services consumed with protecting their prized weapons systems. A former defense secretary during the Ford administration, Rumsfeld had returned to the Pentagon after a successful turn in the business world. He had amassed a personal fortune at the pharmaceutical company G. D. Searle, where he rolled out hit products like NutraSweet and orange Metamucil, and when he took over the Pentagon he made his intentions clear: He wanted to apply the laws of the private sector to a bloated Defense Department.

  At sixty-nine, Rumsfeld would soon become the oldest defense secretary in American history, and his frequent complaints about Defense Department waste sometimes had the flavor of a grandfather spinning tales of life during the Depression. His efforts to remake the Pentagon drew immediate comparisons to those of Robert McNamara, the defense secretary during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who arrived from Ford Motor Company with his “Whiz Kids,” determined to change the Pentagon’s culture. Some generals, put off by Rumsfeld’s approach, dubbed the group of aging businessmen that Rumsfeld had brought in to run the various military services the “Wheeze Kids.” By the time that American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon’s western façade on the morning of September 11, 2001, the military had already successfully thwarted many of Rumsfeld’s more ambitious attempts to cancel expensive, Cold War–era weapons. There was open speculation in Washington that Rumsfeld might be the first top member of the Bush administration to step down. But over the next year he soon turned into the most visible and popular member of President Bush’s cabinet. The United States pushed the Taliban out of Afghanistan’s cities by December 2001, using an innovative war plan for which Rumsfeld received public credit, and his blunt, high-profile press briefings made him the public face of the Bush administration’s retaliation for the terrorist attacks that had killed nearly three thousand Americans. Rumsfeld didn’t mince words or lapse into militaryspeak when talking about the aims of the war. He talked about “killing Taliban.”

  Rumsfeld also saw early on that much of the new war would be waged in dark corners of the world, away from declared war zones. It would look nothing like the infantry skirmishes of the nineteenth century, the trench warfare of the First World War, or the tank battles of World War II. The Pentagon needed to start sending soldiers into places where—by law and tradition—only spies had been allowed to go. For instance, the Pentagon at the time didn’t have a dedicated counterterrorism cell like the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, but within weeks of the September 11 attacks, Rumsfeld proposed building one of his own. Only bigger. In a memorandum to CIA director Tenet, Rumsfeld wrote, “From everything I hear, CTC is too small to do a 24-7 job,” and sent Tenet a proposal describing his plan for a Joint Intelligence Task Force for Combating Terrorism, an entirely new organization that might give the Pentagon control of the new war.

  Four days after he sent the proposal to Tenet, Rumsfeld put his thoughts about the scope of the new war into a top-secret memorandum for President Bush. The war would be global, he said, and the United States needed to be up front about its ultimate goals. “If the war does not significantly change the world’s political map,” he wrote to the president, “the U.S. will not achieve its aim.”

  The Pentagon did not yet have the machinery in place to carry out such a war, and Rumsfeld knew it as well as anyone. There was much to do.

  —

  ON A CLEAR NIGHT in early February 2002, three Afghan men and a young boy jumped from a white truck and into the darkness, their clothes billowing around them as the rotors from an American military helicopter churned dust into the sky. They waved their hands wildly as a group of commandos approached them with gun barrels pointed forward.

  Forty miles to the north, inside a makeshift operations center adjacent to Kandahar Airfield’s bombed-out passenger terminal, special-operations troops watched the mission unfold on a video feed provided by a CIA drone. The special-operations commander, Navy captain Robert Harward, picked up a secure phone and called his bosses in Kuwait to tell them about the captives. Mullah Khairullah Khairkhwa, the Taliban leader everyone had been hunting, he said, was now in custody.

  There was a long pause at the other end of the phone. Finally, Lt. General Paul Mikolashek, in Kuwait, spoke up.

  “If they are not the right people,” he asked, “will you be able to return them?”

  Harward shot a puzzled look to the other officers inside the command center. Taking a breath to let his anger pass, he assured the general that the detainees who had just been handcuffed and shoved into a helicopter and were flying back to the Kandahar base could—if necessary—be returned to the place where they had been arrested.

  What Mikolashek had just learned, but Harward still didn’t know, was that it was not Mullah Khairkhwa and his aides inside the helicopter. Khairkhwa, the Taliban interior minister, was driving in a different white truck that had just crossed the border into Pakistan. And the CIA knew it.

  It was the fourth month of the Afghan war, and American troops were pouring into the country in greater numbers. A new government had just been installed in Kabul, and Mullah Khairkhwa had spent days negotiating with the new Afghan president’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, about surrendering and becoming a CIA informant. Ahmed Wali himself was on the CIA’s payroll—an alliance that years later would be a source of tension between the CIA and the military in Kabul—and American spies relayed the message to Mullah Khairkhwa that he could avoid arrest and a long stint in the newly built prison at Guantánamo Bay.

  But after several days of negotiations, Mullah Khairkhwa wasn’t sure he could trust the Americans. He phoned another Taliban commander to tell him he was planning to escape to Pakistan; the call was intercepted by American military spies. The intelligence officers warned Mikolashek, who told Captain Harward, in Kandahar, to capture the Taliban minister before he made it over the border. The helicopters took off and headed south to grab Khairkhwa, with the CIA Predator that was tracking his white truck leading the way.

  But the CIA had a different plan. The war in Afghanistan had forced the spy agency into a tight embrace with Pakistan’s spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and CIA officers thought they might be able to get Pakistani spies to capture Mullah Khairkhwa and encourage him to become an informant. Or, at least, a high-profile arrest of a Taliban leader in Pakistan might earn Islamabad some goodwill in Washington.

  Shortly after the military helicopters lifted off from Kandahar, the CIA drone pulled off from tracking Khairkhwa’s truck, leaving the troops in the helicopter blind about the location of their target. Intelligence officers inside the special-operations command post began screaming into their phon
es to resume the Predator surveillance. It was several minutes before a second CIA Predator arrived—and began tracking an entirely different white truck.

  The CIA was now leading the commandos in the helicopter to the wrong target, while Mullah Khairkhwa and his entourage sped over the desert border at Spin Boldak and into Pakistan. Days later, after several more fruitless rounds of negotiation to turn Khairkhwa into an informant, Pakistani security forces closed in on the house where he was hiding, in the village of Chaman. Pakistani spies handed the Taliban leader over to CIA officers in Quetta, Pakistan, and Mullah Khairkhwa began his long journey to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He became one of the island prison’s first inmates.

  As for the three men and the young boy who had been arrested and brought to a detention facility in Kandahar, they were loaded back into helicopters and flown forty miles south, where their truck was in the same spot it had been before they’d been ambushed by the American helicopters. The Afghans were sent on their way with several boxes of military Meals Ready-to-Eat. Out of respect for the detainees’ faith, the meals containing pork had been removed.

  2: A MARRIAGE AMONG SPIES

  “Pakistan has always seen such matters in black and white.”

  —Lt. General Mahmud Ahmed, head of Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, September 12, 2001

  Generations of CIA officers have graduated from “The Farm,” the agency’s training facility in the Virginia tidewater, having learned the first lesson of spycraft: There is no such thing as a friendly intelligence service. The spy services of other nations are meant to be penetrated, their officers “turned” to work for the United States by spying on their own countries. Foreign intelligence services may be useful for joint operations but never fully trusted. The greater the reliance on liaison services for an operation, the greater the danger that the operation gets blown.

  It was a philosophy that worked well enough during the Cold War, when the CIA’s primary mission was stealing the secrets of the Soviet Union and its client states—traditional foreign espionage. Bosses at Langley knew that the Soviets were trying to do the exact same thing to the United States and knew that Moscow had planted its own spies in foreign intelligence services to position itself for greater access to American secrets. The primary reason for getting close to foreign spies was for counterintelligence purposes: figuring out how deeply another foreign spy service had penetrated the CIA and catching the moles before they burrowed too deeply.

  But the dictates of a new war quickly changed the rules of the spying game. The CIA’s top priority was no longer gathering intelligence on foreign governments and their countries, but man hunting. The new mission put a premium on getting detailed intelligence about specific individuals, and it mattered little how that information was collected. As a result, the CIA immediately became more reliant on the foreign spy services that had spent years building dossiers on terror organizations. Desperate for information to stop the next attack, the CIA wasn’t picky about choosing its friends. During the early years after the September 11 attacks, the CIA’s relationship with spy services with unsavory histories of brutality—Egypt’s Mukhabarat, Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate, even the intelligence service of Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan pariah state—grew much closer.

  Some leaders of these countries relished the idea of lecturing the United States about the gritty business of terrorist hunting. Over dinner in Cairo in early October 2001, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak advised Donald Rumsfeld that bombs would do little good in America’s new war and that the United States should “put your money into buying allies on the ground in Afghanistan.” Mubarak, a modern-day pharaoh who had consolidated his power partly by crushing Islamist movements in his country, no doubt saw he had much to gain from a muscular partnership with a United States that was groping for a new strategy against terrorists. With a rhetorical flourish, he told Rumsfeld that the fight against terrorism was necessary “to save the planet.”

  But for a CIA now at war, there was no relationship more important than that with Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. For years, it had had all the worst qualities of a failing marriage: Both sides had long ago stopped trusting each other but couldn’t imagine ever splitting up.

  In this way, the rapport between the spy services was just the U.S.–Pakistani relationship in miniature. The close bonds between the CIA and ISI during the 1980s, when American and Pakistani spies ran guns into Afghanistan and trained mujahedeen to shoot down Soviet helicopters, had frayed during the 1990s. Washington had lost interest in post-Soviet Afghanistan and imposed harsh sanctions on Islamabad as punishment for the country’s clandestine nuclear program. Pakistan began nurturing the Taliban, a group of semiliterate Pashtun tribesmen from the southern part of Afghanistan, as a counterweight to the factions that comprised the Northern Alliance, which had long received support from India.

  The ISI had viewed the Taliban as Pashtun allies who, while strange and fanatical, could keep the Northern Alliance from taking over Afghanistan and setting up what Islamabad feared would be an Indian proxy state along its western border. Pakistani military officials also figured that for all they had done to expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, they had earned the right to hold the strings of the government in Kabul.

  With Pakistani intelligence providing succor to the Taliban with both money and advice on military strategy, and with the spigot of money from Washington to Islamabad shut off, American officials stationed in Islamabad during the 1990s found they had no leverage with the ISI when they demanded that Pakistani spies push the Taliban government in Kabul to hand over Osama bin Laden. The United States turned up the pressure in late 1998, after al Qaeda simultaneously bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but Pakistan’s spy service was unmoved. The Americans in Pakistan sent a string of cables to Washington detailing their frustrations. One State Department cable from Islamabad in December 1998 carried a dry, understated subject heading: “Usama bin Ladin: Pakistan seems to be leaning against being helpful.” When one American diplomat brought up bin Laden’s name during a meeting with General Ehsan ul Haq, a future ISI chief, the Pakistani general grew testy.

  “I cannot understand why you Americans are so concerned about Afghanistan,” he snapped.

  On the morning of September 11, 2001, General Mahmud Ahmed, the head of the ISI, happened to be in Washington meeting with lawmakers inside a secure chamber of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. A short, stocky man with a bushy white mustache extending across the middle of both cheeks, Ahmed had taken over the ISI after the 1999 military coup that installed General Pervez Musharraf as president, and he did little to hide his sympathies for the Taliban. He once scolded a Pakistan military analyst who had told President Musharraf that Pakistan’s policy toward the Taliban was hurting its standing with other nations. “The Taliban,” the ISI chief said, “is the future of Afghanistan.”

  On that morning on Capitol Hill, Ahmed was having a friendly exchange with Representative Porter Goss, the committee’s top Republican, regaling the congressman with his knowledge of obscure facts about the American Civil War. Goss had wrapped a book about the Civil War to give to Ahmed as a gift, but the pleasantries were cut short when committee staffers raced into the meeting room to tell the lawmakers and the ISI chief that the second plane had just hit the World Trade Center. “Mahmud’s face turned ashen,” recalls Goss. The Pakistani spymaster quickly excused himself from the meeting and jumped into the embassy car waiting for him. The book, still wrapped, was left inside the room.

  The following morning, General Ahmed was called to the office of Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, who was in no mood for diplomatic correctness. President Bush had announced the night before that the United States would treat both the terrorists and their patrons equally, and Armitage presented the ISI’s dilemma in Manichean terms.

  “Pakistan faces a stark choice; either it is with us or it i
s not,” Armitage told the Pakistani spy chief, saying the decision was black and white, with no gray.

  Insulted by Armitage’s bluntness, Ahmed responded that although Pakistan had long been accused of “being in bed” with terrorists, nothing could be further from the truth. His country would back the United States without hesitation, he said, assuring Armitage that “Pakistan has always seen such matters in black and white.” Armitage warned that the United States was preparing a laundry list of demands for Pakistan that were likely to cause “deep introspection” in Islamabad.

  The terms of the CIA–ISI marriage were discussed the next day. Armitage told General Ahmed that the United States wanted unfettered access to Pakistani airspace and the ability to carry out military and intelligence operations inside Pakistan. America also wanted access to Pakistani ports, airstrips, and bases in the mountains along the border with Afghanistan. Finally, he insisted that the ISI hand over to the CIA all the intelligence it had about al Qaeda.

  Ahmed assured Armitage he would pass the list of demands to Musharraf. But, he said, Pakistan wanted something in return: assurance that it would be reimbursed for its support in the campaign against al Qaeda. If Pakistan was going to turn against the Taliban and agree to a war on its western border, it would need to be rewarded for it.

  The parameters of America’s dysfunctional relationship with Pakistan in the post-9/11 era had been set: The United States insisted on the right to wage a secret war inside Pakistan, and Islamabad extracted money in return. President Musharraf had acceded to most, but not all, of Washington’s requirements. For instance, he put limits on where American planes could fly in Pakistani airspace, fearing that the United States might try to conduct surveillance flights over Pakistani nuclear sites. He also denied the United States access to most military bases, allowing the American military to station personnel at only two air bases: Shamsi, in the southwestern region of Balochistan, and Jacobabad, in the northern province of Sindh. In the end, Washington and Islamabad’s renewal of their vows left both sides believing they had given up more than they were getting, creating recriminations and resentment that would boil over years later.