Directorate S

by Steve Coll

  He was right to be wary. That night, a new round of war erupted among factions of the Afghan rebels. The fighting soon shredded Kabul, claimed thousands more innocent lives, and consigned Afghanistan to yet deeper poverty and international isolation. America, by now absorbed by victory in the Cold War and startling geopolitical changes such as the reunification of Germany, looked away.

  I moved on as well, to London, to take up a position as an international investigative correspondent for the Post. I was stationed there on February 26, 1993, when a cabal of jihadists, some with ties to the Afghan war, detonated a truck bomb beneath the World Trade Center, killing six people and wounding many others. My editors asked for an investigation into the networks of Islamist radicals and financiers that seemed to lie behind the World Trade Center attack. I worked on some of that project with another reporter, Steve LeVine. We heard about a wealthy Saudi exile in Sudan, Osama Bin Laden, who was reported to be funding some of the groups we were looking into. Steve flew to Khartoum to ask for an interview. Bin Laden’s bodyguards said he would not be available. After speaking with some of Bin Laden’s aides and many other supporters and members of the jihadi movement from London to the Balkans to the Middle East, we wrote, “Arguably, the best way to think about Bin Laden’s multistory Khartoum guest house is not as a centralized, string-pulling headquarters,” but as “one among many scattered centers of gravity where militant Islamic radicals may find haven, succor or support.” We still had not heard of Al Qaeda. Because of Bin Laden’s rising notoriety, the United States soon pressured Sudan to kick him out of Khartoum. He went to Afghanistan in the summer of 1996, declared war on the United States, and soon found shelter with the Taliban.

  By 2001, I had become the Post’s managing editor in Washington. That spring, the paper carried coverage of the New York trial of jihadi conspirators who had participated in the terrorist attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa in August 1998. The prosecutors introduced evidence of Bin Laden’s involvement in the terrorist plot, as well as his leadership of Al Qaeda, which was at last identified publicly. A defector testified in detail about how Al Qaeda worked and how Bin Laden and his aides doled out support to followers and allies. Yet the conventional wisdom in Washington held that the group was isolated in distant Afghanistan, and that it was most likely to continue to carry out attacks overseas—Al Qaeda was a serious nuisance, in other words, but not a major threat to American territory or security.

  On the morning of September 11, I was at a desk in my home office in Maryland, typing notes for a book I was considering about genocide in Africa. I had CNN on mute on a small television to one side. When I saw the first reports about a plane that had smashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in clear weather, I assumed it was a freak accident. I scrambled to collect my keys and work materials, to rush to the newsroom. I was just about out the door when my wife called out as she watched United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower. We stared at the terrible scenes for some minutes. “Oh, this is Bin Laden,” it finally occurred to me to say. I drove downtown. Smoke rose from across the Potomac River, where American Airlines Flight 77 had struck the Pentagon.

  Six weeks later, I went digging around in my garage, looking for old tape recordings of interviews with I.S.I. officers from the early 1990s. I found them. That discovery inaugurated research for the book that became Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. My intention was to provide Americans, Afghans, and Pakistanis with a thorough, reliable history of the often-secret actions, debates, and policies that had led to Al Qaeda’s rise amid Afghanistan’s civil wars and finally to the September 11 attacks. I traveled back to Afghanistan and Pakistan to conduct some of the research. Ghost Wars came out in 2004.

  At the time, Afghanistan and Pakistan appeared to be stable and relatively peaceful. During the next several years, the Taliban and Al Qaeda revived, plunging Afghan and Pakistani civilians into further violent misery and insecurity. It seemed evident that I.S.I. was, once again, interfering secretly in Afghanistan, exploiting the country’s fault lines, and that the U.S. government, including the C.I.A., was again unable to forestall an incubating disaster. The Bush administration and then the Obama administration gradually escalated America’s commitment to suppressing the Taliban and defeating Al Qaeda. Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of Americans volunteered to serve in Afghanistan after 2001 as soldiers, diplomats, or aid workers. More than two thousand American soldiers died alongside hundreds of contractors. More than twenty thousand soldiers suffered injuries. Of the much greater number who returned safely, many carried questions about whether or why their service had been worthwhile and why the seemingly successful lightning-strike American-led war of late 2001 had failed to vanquish the Taliban and Al Qaeda for good.

  Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001–2016 is intended to address those questions, as best as the evidence allows. It is a second volume of the journalistic history recounted in Ghost Wars, starting from where that volume ended, on September 10, 2001. The new book can easily be read independently, but it also seeks to deliver to readers of the first volume a recognizable extension of the subjects, narrative approaches, and investigations they encountered there.

  Directorate S seeks to provide a thorough, reliable history of how the C.I.A., I.S.I., and Afghan intelligence agencies influenced the rise of a new war in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, and how that war fostered a revival of Al Qaeda, allied terrorist networks, and, eventually, branches of the Islamic State. The book also seeks to connect American, Afghan, Pakistani, and international policy failures to the worldwide persistence of jihadi terrorism. It tries to provide a balanced, complete account of the most important secret operations, assumptions, debates, decisions, and diplomacy in Washington, Islamabad, and Kabul. Like Ghost Wars, this volume asks the reader to traverse much territory. To keep things moving, I have again tried to prioritize action, vivid characters, and original reporting, without sacrificing depth and context.

  After 2008, the United States and N.A.T.O. allies fought a large-scale overt conventional war against the Taliban, and, in a secret annex campaign waged mostly by armed drones, against Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan. This campaign could be the subject of a book in and of itself (and has been the subject of a number of excellent ones, including Little America, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran; Obama’s Wars, by Bob Woodward; and The Way of the Knife, by Mark Mazzetti, which also provides a penetrating account of the C.I.A. during these years). In Directorate S, I have tried to offer new insights into that war, but not to recount it fully, concentrating instead on the less thoroughly treated trajectory of decision making at the C.I.A., the I.S.I., and the principal Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security. I have also had to consider how to absorb, but not regurgitate, the vast body of excellent journalism already produced by other reporters about Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001. I traveled repeatedly to both countries after 2005 while carrying out the research for what became Directorate S, but I cannot possibly match here the granular, on-the-ground correspondence and books by the many intrepid field reporters and resident researchers who have done so much to deepen public understanding of South Asia’s instability and political violence. I could not have written this volume without incorporating the insights and research of scores of other journalists and scholars, some of them colleagues and friends, including Ahmed Rashid, Peter Bergen, Dexter Filkins, Carlotta Gall, Anand Gopal, Felix Kuehn, Anatol Lieven, David Rohde, Owen Bennett-Jones, Sarah Chayes, Graeme Smith, Alex Strick van Linschoten, and Martine van Bijlert, as well as many others cited in the source notes. However, I have concentrated the narrative in Directorate S on my own reporting, and principally on the hundreds of interviews conducted for the book during the last decade, as well as new documentary evidence obtained from those sources. I have sought to ground my reli
ance on interviews and contemporaneous notes with secondary sources such as documents obtained from F.O.I.A. requests and the State Department cables released by WikiLeaks.

  For many Americans and Europeans who have lived and worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan before and after 2001, it is frustrating to hear discourse back home holding that Afghanistan and Pakistan are lands of “warring tribes” or “endless conflicts.” The historical record belies such clichés. Independent Afghanistan was impoverished but peaceful and stable, untroubled by radical international violence, for many decades of the twentieth century, prior to the Soviet invasion of 1979. Its several decades of civil war since that invasion have been fueled again and again by outside interference, primarily by Pakistan, but certainly including the United States and Europe, which have remade Afghanistan with billions of dollars in humanitarian and reconstruction aid while simultaneously contributing to its violence, corruption, and instability. And for all of Pakistan’s dysfunction, state-sponsored radicalism, and glaring economic inequality, it remains a modernizing nation with a vast, breathtakingly talented middle class and diaspora. If the army and I.S.I. did not misrule Pakistan, in alliance with corrupt political cronies, the country’s potential to lift up its own population and contribute positively to the international system might today rival India’s. The region’s “endless conflicts” are not innate to its history, forms of social organization, or cultures. They are the outgrowth of specific misrule and violent interventions. They reflect political maneuvering, hubristic assumptions, intelligence operations, secret diplomacy, and decision making at the highest levels in Kabul, Islamabad, and Washington that have often been unavailable to the Afghan, Pakistani, American, and international publics. This is the story of Directorate S.

  PART ONE

  BLIND INTO BATTLE,

  September 2001–December 2001

  ONE

  “Something Has Happened to Khalid”

  In the late summer of 2001, Amrullah Saleh flew to Frankfurt, Germany, to meet a man he knew as Phil, a C.I.A. officer. Saleh handled intelligence liaisons, among other tasks, for Ahmad Shah Massoud, the legendary Afghan guerrilla commander, who was then holding out against the Taliban and Al Qaeda from a shrinking haven in the northeast of his country. At twenty-eight, Saleh had a stern, serious demeanor; he was clean-shaven and kept his dark hair cropped short. He spoke English well, but deliberately, in a sonorous accent.

  Saleh typically met his C.I.A. handlers at a hotel. He and Phil discussed a cache of spy gear the C.I.A. had organized for Massoud. The delivery included communications equipment and night-vision goggles that would allow Massoud’s intelligence collectors on the front lines to better watch and eavesdrop on Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. The C.I.A. had been training and equipping Massoud’s intelligence directorate for several years, but the program was limited in scope. Under the policies of the Clinton administration and more recently the George W. Bush administration, the C.I.A. could not provide weapons to support Massoud’s war of resistance against the Taliban. The agency could only provide nonlethal equipment that might aid the agency’s hunt for Osama Bin Laden, the fugitive emir of Al Qaeda, who moved elusively around Taliban-ruled areas of Afghanistan. One shipment had included a giant, remote-controlled telescope. At another point the C.I.A. considered supplying Massoud with a balloon fixed with cameras to spy on Al Qaeda camps, but between Afghanistan’s heavy winds and the possibility that neighboring China might misinterpret the dirigible, they decided against it.

  Frankfurt was a logistics hub. The C.I.A.’s supply lines for Massoud were jerry-rigged and constrained by caution at headquarters. By early 2001, Langley had ordered C.I.A. officers to stop flying in Massoud’s helicopters because they weren’t judged to be safe enough. Phil and his colleagues usually delivered equipment directly to Dushanbe, where Saleh ran an office for Massoud. Tajikistan was recovering from a bloody civil war and there was occasional political unrest in the capital. That could make it difficult for C.I.A. officers to travel there but for the most part they found a way. Once in a while, however, they had to ask Saleh to pick up equipment in Germany and carry it the rest of the way himself. The C.I.A. officers involved knew the German government was highly sensitive about anything the agency did on German territory without informing the B.N.D., the principal German intelligence agency. But the supplies to Massoud were uniformly nonlethal; some of the equipment might skirt the borders of export licensing rules, but it was not obviously illegal, as arms and ammunition would be. Massoud’s lieutenants were experienced smugglers. Sometimes Saleh would have to figure out how to transport C.I.A. equipment on his own.

  This made Saleh nervous. He did not relish answering the questions of German police or customs officers at Frankfurt Airport. Where did you buy this? He would have no answer. Do you have any receipts? No. What will you use these night-vision goggles for? It would be unwise to mention the Afghan war. How did you obtain the funds to buy a $5,000 satellite phone and subscription?1

  Saleh had become an intelligence specialist only recently, but he was an avid student of the profession. In 1999, Massoud had selected him and eight other senior aides and commanders to travel to the United States to attend a C.I.A. training course put on by the Counterterrorist Center under strict secrecy rules; few people outside the center knew about it. The curriculum partly covered the arts of intelligence—identifying and assessing sources, recruitment, technical collection, analysis, and report writing. The paramilitary courses covered assessing targets, manuevering and communicating in the field, and so on. In Nevada, the trainees climbed a mountain with a telescope to practice reconnaissance operations in conditions that replicated those in Afghanistan. The training reflected the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center’s hope—a quixotic one, in the view of many agency analysts familiar with Afghanistan—that Massoud’s guerrillas might someday locate and trap Bin Laden, even though the Al Qaeda leader rarely traveled to the north of the country, where Massoud’s guerrillas were.

  At the C.I.A.’s school, Saleh was a bit bored by the paramilitary instruction. He was more drawn to the craft of intelligence collection. He wanted a fuller understanding about intelligence systems and methods. He peppered the C.I.A. officers on the faculty with questions. He found a few who were willing to give him extra time and he tried to understand how the C.I.A. worked. When the course was over, Saleh went to Borders to buy a stack of books about spy services and intelligence history. Since then, he had earned respect at the C.I.A. The officers with whom he worked assessed Saleh as tough, disciplined, honest, and professional, if also a bit young to command authority in Afghan society, which venerated age and experience.2

  To solve his shipping problems in Germany, Saleh tried to draw on his self-education, particularly concerning the methods of Israeli intelligence. Mossad had networks of helpers around the world—not just employees and paid agents or informers, but friends of the service who could be called upon for ad hoc favors. Saleh telephoned an Afghan-German businessman in Frankfurt whom he had cultivated for such assistance.

  “I have something I need you to do—I need your help,” Saleh said. The man suggested they meet at a hotel.

  “I won’t lie,” Saleh said when they were settled. “It’s equipment. If I’m lucky, I can take it out of Frankfurt Airport. If I’m unlucky, they will confiscate it.” The gear was not lethal, Saleh added, but it did constitute “war equipment.”

  “Brother, I had offered to help you—but not in smuggling,” the businessman said.

  “This is not smuggling,” Saleh pleaded. “It’s all plastic, there’s no explosives, nothing. There are some goggles.”

  Still, the man declined. He wished Saleh luck.

  Saleh transported the gear, which was about the size of a half sofa, to Frankfurt Airport. He booked himself on a flight to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, from where he would transfer to Dushanbe. This was typical of the struggle against the Taliban in which he and Massoud were eng
aged: They were fighting a D.I.Y. guerrilla war. Massoud and his men had resources; the commander and many of his top lieutenants kept bank accounts in London and elsewhere abroad, according to C.I.A. reporting, and Massoud was reported to control just over $60 million in London accounts. Yet they were effectively at war with the Taliban and Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state with a gross domestic product in 2001 of more than $70 billion.3

  At the Lufthansa counter Saleh filled out forms. Then he answered many questions about his equipment. Had the C.I.A. tipped off the Germans and had the Germans agreed to go easy? He never knew. After a long colloquy, Lufthansa demanded only a considerable sum of money, which it calculated based on the weight of Saleh’s cargo.

  —

  Amrullah Saleh had grown up in Kabul in a poor family from the Panjshir Valley. He was the youngest of five brothers. At seven, he was orphaned. Like many Afghans who came of age during the Soviet occupation of the country during the 1980s, he knew political violence intimately. One of his brothers disappeared, executed by unknown parties. Another of his brothers, who was an air force officer, fell to an assassin in Kandahar. At twenty-two, Saleh joined Massoud’s guerrillas in the Panjshir Valley. The Panjshir is a gorge that occasionally widens into a valley. It slices from the north of Kabul toward Tajikistan. A tight kin network of ethnic Tajiks inhabited the valley and scratched out livings as farmers, emerald miners, smugglers, and traders. By the time Saleh arrived the Soviets had withdrawn their combat forces from Afghanistan, leaving behind advisers to shore up an Afghan Communist regime headed by President Najibullah, a former secret police chief. The war between mujaheddin guerrillas and the Communist government in Kabul continued but, increasingly, the guerrillas fought among themselves. They anticipated victory and competed for its prospective spoils. Massoud was perhaps the most politically savvy faction leader, the one who followed precepts of successful guerrilla leaders throughout history. He was a brilliant battlefield tactician, but he was equally concerned with food supplies and security for his civilian followers and with his popular credibility.