Directorate S

by Steve Coll

  Saleh started to read off his list. Blee interrupted him. “This is a tragedy for my country but it is going to change your country forever,” Blee said. The American response to the hijackings was going to involve much more than an increased supply of grenades and helicopters.

  “This is now much beyond you,” Blee continued. “Consult your leaders because this is going to come in ways—in scope and in scale—that you cannot imagine.”26

  —

  There was a psychologist working at C.T.C., an expert on terrorism. She mentioned to Cofer Black that he should probably talk to the center’s workforce to address their emotions.

  Black asked her to walk around a little and take in the mood.

  “Should I give one of my motivational speeches?” he asked after she had done so.

  “These aren’t operators,” she advised him. They need reassurance. “You’re their father. Speak to them like that.”

  Black was accustomed to supervising case officers doing risky work. The style of speech these officers appreciated was derived from fired-up football coaches exhorting young men in locker rooms. Yet the C.T.C. analysts at New Headquarters in Virginia had graduate degrees. They did not respond especially well to entering-the-jaws-of-hell talk. Black made some notes. He called the workforce together on September 13.

  “It really pains me to tell you this, but by the time this is all over, at the victory parade, we will not all be there,” Black said. He guessed privately that around four or five dozen C.I.A. personnel would perish or be captured in the coming fight in Afghanistan and elsewhere. He was trying to sensitize the group to the losses he foresaw and to encourage them to appreciate the friends and colleagues they saw in the hallway. There was silence. A few wept.

  He tried to lighten the mood. He told them what he had been doing over the last forty-eight hours. He had met with President Bush. The president had already given him a nickname, “Heffer,” because apparently Bush couldn’t remember “Cofer” and “I am sort of a hefty guy.”

  Black also told them that his favorite movie was Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, a 1989 science fiction comedy about two teenage slackers who use a time machine to travel through history. Even those around him who were crying laughed.

  “Be excellent to each other,” Black went on. “Give everyone a break. We’re all doing the best we can.” He was thinking about a colleague on the analytical side of C.T.C. who had reported that a neighbor had confronted her and told her that she was partly responsible for September 11, sending her into tears. These were dark days, Black felt, many in C.T.C. were racked by guilt, the emotions were raw, and he struggled, too, to hold a measured tone.

  He added, “If you remember one thing from this, I’d like it to be that we’re the good guys, and we’re going to win.”27

  THREE

  Friends Like These

  Dave Smith had an office on the third floor of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, near the C.I.A. station, in the chancery’s secure area. In September 2001, he was ten months into his fourth deployment to Pakistan. His business card read “Colonel David O. Smith, United States Army Attaché.” This was slightly fictitious. He had served in the Army for thirty years and had risen to the rank of colonel but had recently retired. The Defense Intelligence Agency had recruited him as a civilian under a program designed to improve Pentagon reporting from hard countries, including Pakistan. After some rumination, the Pentagon’s lawyers had signed off on a plan to allow Smith to call himself an active United States Army officer and even to wear his uniform in Pakistan when the occasion required.1

  The D.I.A. was the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, headquartered at Bolling Air Force Base, adjacent to Washington’s low-income Anacostia neighborhoods. Its collectors and analysts provided intelligence to the secretary of defense and uniformed commanders, as well as to the White House and other government customers. The D.I.A.’s budget dwarfed the C.I.A.’s but it had none of Langley’s fame and little of its influence. Its leaders struggled to reconcile the requirements of military discipline with the law-skirting tradecraft of human intelligence collection, or “humint.” Yet the D.I.A. housed some of America’s most experienced, best-sourced experts on foreign armies, among other subjects.

  Dave Smith was one. He was a meticulous, balding man then in his midfifties. He was easily overlooked, useful for an intelligence officer. He had grown up in Missouri, where his father worked at an oil refinery. His ancestors had fought in many American wars, but Smith was the first in his family to graduate from college and the first to be commissioned as an officer. He served initially in the artillery but later joined the Army’s Foreign Area Officer Program. It deployed mid-ranking officers to embassies worldwide, where they collected information on host country militaries and their intelligence wings.

  In 1982, Smith enrolled at the Pakistan Army’s prestigious Command and Staff College in Quetta, where he befriended Pakistani officers on track for promotion. He kept up those relationships when he deployed to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad as an attaché in the late 1980s, just as the C.I.A.’s covert action program to thwart the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was winding down, and then again in the mid-1990s, as the Taliban rose to power. By the time the D.I.A. recruited Smith in late 2000 to return to Islamabad under light cover, the Pakistan Army officers he had first met almost two decades earlier had risen to become commanding generals. One of them was Mahmud Ahmed, the director-general of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or I.S.I., Pakistan’s most powerful intelligence agency, the locus of the country’s covert operations to aid Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

  Smith and Mahmud shared an interest in military history. Over the years, they had enjoyed dinner at each other’s houses. During his tour in the mid-1990s, Smith had run a military history club for Islamabad expatriates. Mahmud was then director-general of military intelligence, a separate organization from I.S.I. that concentrated on battlefield information and India’s military deployments. At that time, the United States had imposed economic sanctions on Pakistan because of its nuclear program; relations between the two countries were badly strained. Still, Mahmud visited Smith’s house to talk to his history club about Pakistan’s 1965 war with India, a subject the Pakistani general had studied closely. Mahmud also had an abiding interest in the American Civil War. He could talk for hours about the tactical decisions of Robert E. Lee and George Meade.2

  Mahmud embodied all the contradictions and mysteries that Pakistan’s top generals presented to their American counterparts. He wore a bushy gray mustache and aviator sunglasses, carried a swagger stick as part of his uniform, and salted his monologues about history and war with references to Western literature. He played tennis. His wife was well educated, as was his daughter. The general once told a C.I.A. officer in Pakistan that he and his daughter were reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time together so they could discuss its theories of the universe. At the same time, Mahmud served as the paymaster of the obscurantist Taliban and, through them, as Al Qaeda’s enabler in Afghanistan.3

  In this he carried out Pakistan’s national policy. The country had lost three wars with India since its establishment as an independent Muslim homeland in 1947, birthed from the ashes of the British empire. Despite repeated battlefield failures, Pakistan’s generals had enriched and empowered themselves over decades by cultivating a nationalism that stoked the fear that India sought to weaken and dismember their country. (After winning the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War, India had severely damaged Pakistan by fostering the establishment of independent Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan.) By 2001, however, India was decoupling from its long rivalry with Pakistan. India’s economy was booming. Its generals and foreign policy strategists professed to be more concerned about China than about their dysfunctional sibling neighbor to the west. Yet the Pakistan Army used fear of India as a justification for dominating Pakistan’s politics.

  Pakistan
had a smaller population and a weaker industrial base than India. To compensate, the army had built nuclear bombs to deter an Indian military invasion. To destabilize its enemy, and to pursue Pakistan’s decades-old goal of acquiring all of disputed Kashmir’s territory, I.S.I. covertly armed, trained, and infiltrated Islamist rebels into Indian-held Kashmir, where the guerrillas blew up police stations, carried out kidnappings, and assaulted Indian Army posts.

  Pakistan’s top military leaders directed the I.S.I., an institution of about twenty-five thousand people. The spy service had three distinct categories of employees. There were senior leaders like General Mahmud who spent the bulk of their careers in the army, navy, or air force and then rotated through the intelligence service in supervisory roles, on tours of two to four years. The second group consisted of active military officers of the rank of colonel or below who had been directed into I.S.I. after failing to make the cut for promotion to generalship. Two thirds or more of Pakistan Army officers rising through the ranks were not destined to become generals, so at a certain point they were assigned to branches of service where they could rise as high as colonel. Some went into logistics, others into administration, and some entered into careers in intelligence, which allowed some of them to serve in uniform at I.S.I. for many years. The presence of these officers in the middle-upper ranks of I.S.I. further connected the institution to the Pakistan military’s leadership. Still, the day-to-day work even within I.S.I.’s less secretive directorates could be very different from that of the military, because of the strict compartmentalization of information. An officer would not have any idea what the man in the next office was doing. Information was telescoped to the top, where only the most senior generals had complete visibility.

  There was also a large civilian component of I.S.I., working under contract. These ranks included watchers and thugs who kept track of foreign diplomats and other surveillance targets in Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi, and elsewhere. They also included specialists who manipulated and intimidated politicians and journalists. The civilians cultivated an aura of menace and self-importance. They allowed military officers to keep their distance from the roughest business, including murder, if they chose.

  The range of I.S.I.’s activity within Pakistan and outside the country was vast. The service was organized into a series of directorates underneath the director-general, who was always a serving three-star general, as Mahmud was. Two-star generals led the major directorates. There were full directorates or subsidiary wings dedicated to counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and Pakistani domestic politics, for example. The analysis directorate was a prestigious post that produced white papers and memos and managed international liaison. I.S.I. ran stations in Pakistani embassies devoted to spying abroad. A technical directorate managed eavesdropping in concert with the army’s Signal Corps.4

  Buried in this bureaucracy lay the units devoted to secret operations in support of the Taliban, Kashmiri guerrillas, and other violent Islamic radicals—Directorate S, as it was referred to by American intelligence officers and diplomats. It was also known as “S Wing” or just “S.” (During the Cold War, the K.G.B. also had a “Directorate S” that ran the spy service’s “illegals” operations, meaning espionage carried out by trained officers and agents who operated abroad under deep cover. The I.S.I. version had similar aspects, if an entirely different ideological basis.) Directorate S partially resembled the C.I.A.’s Special Activities Division, in charge of covert paramilitary operations. Officers inside I.S.I. sometimes used other names for the external operations units—the Afghan Cell, the Kashmir Cell, Section 21, or Section 24. Veterans of Pakistan’s Special Services Group, a commando organization, primarily staffed the I.S.I.’s covert war cells, just as the C.I.A. drew its paramilitary specialists from the ranks of U.S. Special Forces.

  To enlarge Pakistan’s sphere of influence in Afghanistan during the 1990s, Directorate S covertly supplied, armed, trained, and sought to legitimize the Taliban. That a tennis-playing Gettysburg aficionado oversaw these operations was not remarkable. Black Label–sipping Pakistani generals with London flats and daughters on Ivy League campuses had been managing jihadi guerrilla campaigns against India and in Afghanistan for two decades. By 2001, however, C.I.A. and D.I.A. analysts were circulating reports that some I.S.I. and army officers had become increasingly influenced by the radical ideologies of their clients. This raised the possibility that generals with a millenarian or revolutionary outlook might capture the Pakistani state and its nuclear bombs. The classified reports singled out Mahmud Ahmed as one Pakistani general who had undergone a religious conversion, to the point where, in Mahmud’s case, his “evident personal enthusiasm for the Taliban . . . appeared to go well beyond considerations of Pakistani national interest,” as a C.I.A. officer who worked with the general later put it. Mahmud considered this a misunderstanding. He had not suddenly “become” religious. He had been conservatively faithful since school days. The issue arose, he felt, only because he had risen to command of I.S.I. and had therefore come under intense scrutiny.5

  Dave Smith’s superiors at D.I.A. had hoped that his long friendship with Mahmud might allow for deeper engagement with him. But after Smith arrived in Islamabad, Mahmud snubbed him. Smith thought he understood why: Mahmud had taken a lot of heat on visits to Washington over Pakistan’s support for the Taliban, and he wanted to signal that he did not have much use for Americans anymore. The general’s assistants told Smith he was too busy to meet and they pushed him off on I.S.I.’s director-general of analysis. Smith persisted. Finally, in May 2001, Mahmud had invited his old friend to his office at I.S.I. headquarters for tea and a chat.

  —

  Islamabad is a planned capital dating to the 1960s, tucked into the Margalla Hills. It lacks the grandeur and beauty of Lahore, the Punjabi seat of Mughal tombs and gardens, and it evinces little of the ungoverned chaos of Karachi. It was designed as an international enclave, a kind of fantasy theme park of what a modernizing, prosperous Pakistan might eventually become. The city is laid out on a grid system. I.S.I.’s headquarters occupied an unmarked compound in the G/6 section, nestled behind a ten-foot wall. The main I.S.I. building was old and in need of renovation. It was so close to the main road, Khayaban-e-Shurawardy, that a well-placed truck bomb might damage it badly. The security measures at the I.S.I. entrance in mid-2001 were not rigid, especially if Smith called ahead and provided his diplomatic car’s license plate number. The I.S.I. guards popped his trunk, used mirrors to check the chassis for any sign of explosives, made sure there were no unauthorized passengers in the vehicle, and waved him through. Smith’s driver pulled inside and deposited the “colonel” at the front door. The I.S.I.’s chief of protocol escorted the American to the second floor.

  Mahmud’s modest-size office lay away from the street. A portrait of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, hung on the wall behind the desk, a standard decoration in government offices. There was a large wooden plaque carved with the names and service dates of previous spy chiefs. Mahmud directed Smith to a sofa. An aide joined them to take notes. Smith pulled out his own pad and pen. A chaprassi served tea, cakes, and sandwiches and then withdrew.

  Smith said he hoped to hear Mahmud’s views about the role of Islam in the Pakistan Army. Mahmud said he would be happy to discuss it, but first he had to provide some “context.” Mahmud was notorious for long monologues; here came another.

  “This part of the world is still going through a demographic metamorphosis. It is still recovering from colonialism,” the I.S.I. director said. “There’s a lot of resentment toward the West.” Moreover, he continued, “Islam is misunderstood in the West. Islam sees no distinction between religion and the state.” This had been true of Christianity in Europe for many centuries, until the Enlightenment, Mahmud added. “The Pakistan Army is not completely insulated from this thinking,” he went on, meaning that the army enlists soldiers who have been raised in village settings wh
ere there is no separation of church and state. Enlisted men learn “all kinds of prejudices” from village mullahs before they even enter the army. In recent years, the army had tried to teach them a “moderate” faith, he said, and had placed a great deal of emphasis on reeducation. The great majority of Pakistanis and especially the rank and file of the army were motivated, conservative, and stable Muslims.

  In the mid-1990s, he had been assigned command of Pakistan’s Twenty-third Division, headquartered at Jhelum, near the heavily militarized Line of Control that divided Kashmir between de facto Indian and Pakistani sovereignty. There, on the front lines, Mahmud said, brother Pakistan Army officers had urged him to reexamine his faith. “I knew my military topics but was ignorant about religion. The men would come to me for military advice but go to the maulvi for moral guidance. In my pursuit of unity of command it was necessary for me to educate myself about religion. I took it upon myself to study Islam,” he said. “I wanted unity of command—both tactical and moral.” This was not an outlook that should alarm the United States, Mahmud continued. Islam in Pakistan was becoming “conservative and orthodox,” not revolutionary. That is, it might be considered fundamentalist, but it did not seek political upheaval. The Taliban, Mahmud believed, represented a similar strain of faith—from the American perspective, an essentially harmless, inward-facing orthodoxy.6

  Smith wrote up the conversation in reporting cables. His account did little to calm those at C.I.A. and the Pentagon who feared that I.S.I. was commanded by a politically restless, religiously recommitted general who oversaw what amounted to an alliance between a nuclear state and Al Qaeda.