by Steve Coll
Hamid Karzai invited Greg Vogle to his inauguration in Kabul on December 22. The new Afghan leader wore a lambskin hat and spoke in Pashto and Dari. Shouts and warm applause punctuated an emotional ceremony. From the ashes of September 11 a ruined country had won a new beginning. “We should put our hands together to forget the painful past,” Karzai said.44
PART TWO
LOSING THE PEACE,
2002–2006
SIX
Small Change
Rich Blee flew to Bagram Airfield in mid-December 2001. Kabul’s thin mountain air was smoky from cooking fires and winter was biting. He spent some of his first days in country arranging for turkeys to be acquired by Afghan staff and then deep-fried for Christmas dinner, to lift the morale of Kabul Station. Hank Crumpton and Cofer Black had asked him to serve as the new chief of station. He took a crammed, three-day refresher course in shooting M-16s and AK-47s and packed up. Kabul made Bangui, in the Central African Republic, the site of Blee’s first C.I.A. posting, seem stable and well provisioned. The Taliban had unplugged the city. The international airport had no air traffic control systems to speak about. Only satellite phones could be relied upon for voice communication. Gasoline and diesel had to be flown in by the barrel. The Taliban had squatted inside ministry buildings. They cooked on the floor and slept in offices. Sections of the city destroyed by street-to-street tank and rocket battles during the civil war still lay in ruins. After Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance, the Panjshiris and their Uzbek and Hazara allies had rushed from building to building, reoccupying lost property or seizing abandoned compounds. The armed militias created an unstable patchwork of policing and checkpoints from block to block.
The C.I.A.’s redoubt, the old Ariana Hotel, was a wreck. Kabul Station became a daily improvisation. The expatriates slept in shifts. The four-story hotel faced a traffic circle downtown, protected by a ten-foot wall. The C.I.A.’s staff built more walls and tried to push out the perimeter. The hotel had advantages: furnished rooms that could be used as bunks or as offices, and an Afghan staff seemingly eager to serve a reliable paymaster. Yet some of the staff had worked for the Taliban before the Americans arrived; their loyalties might be judged as uncertain. The dining room still functioned. The Ariana was close to the presidential palace, which made it easy for Blee to drop in on Karzai. Still, the hotel was truly decrepit. A Northern Alliance jet had dropped a bomb on it a few years back. C.I.A. officers chasing Al Qaeda into the White Mountains brought back a stray puppy and insisted that it be adopted; the dog slept on the hotel floors and crapped in hallways as it pleased. (Blee soon ordered the puppy banished, one of his more unpopular decisions.) Bearded special operators and case officers with Glock pistols strapped to their thighs tromped in and out. The atmosphere was a cross between a Central Asian organized crime clubhouse and a clapboard hotel on a muddy street in an old western.1
The C.I.A. had no institutional view about what should be done in Afghanistan after the Taliban. Blee and Hank Crumpton favored a major reconstruction program, to signal American commitment. Cofer Black thought the United States had a poor record of transforming countries like Afghanistan. He favored a light footprint and an unrelenting focus on Al Qaeda. In any event, the C.I.A. was supposed to offer presidents empirical intelligence and analysis and to steer clear of foreign policy advice. Yet agency operations created de facto policy in Afghanistan during 2002 by empowering strongmen with poor human rights records. The C.I.A.’s overall playbook that winter in Afghanistan was derived from its operations in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Angola, Somalia, and other Cold War proxy conflicts, in which many of the senior officers at the Counterterrorist Center had served. Station chiefs managed palace politics with cash, favors, and confidential advice to national leaders, while watching out for the influence of rival intelligence services. The Special Activities Division trained and paid rough militias as armed reconnaissance forces, to provide protection to expatriate case officers and to operate in contested areas or behind enemy lines. Career case officers recruited locals as reporting agents and vetted their information against satellite and Predator imagery or phone chatter picked up by the National Security Agency. To carry out such operations, the C.I.A. inevitably favored as political officeholders tough men independent of foreign intelligence services who would act reliably on American priorities. This client network would create a new landscape of winners in Afghanistan.
George W. Bush had given the C.I.A. one clear mandate: to attack Al Qaeda and its allies. As a practical matter, that meant Blee’s operating directive for Kabul Station prioritized pursuit of the Arab, Chechen, and Uzbek volunteers who had followed Bin Laden east and then melted away after the bombing of Tora Bora. No one knew their numbers, but the best estimates were in the range of several hundred up to two thousand foreigners—that is, non-Afghans and non-Pakistanis. This was Al Qaeda’s loose remnant army. Embedded within its ranks were the bomb experts, money men, and ex–Arab military officers who organized the cells that often conceived and backed the most ambitious overseas terror strikes.
By January 2002 some Al Qaeda foot soldiers and unit commanders had migrated into Pakistan. But others had gone to ground in eastern Afghanistan, along the mountainous border from Jalalabad south toward Paktia Province. As early as mid-December intelligence analysts at Task Force Dagger, the Special Forces command whose A-Teams had embedded with the Northern Alliance as they defeated the Taliban, had concluded that significant numbers of Al Qaeda were regrouping around Paktia and Gardez.2
Blee recruited Chris Wood as the incipient Kabul Station’s chief of operations, in charge of the C.I.A.’s collaboration with U.S. Special Forces to the east. Wood had no military experience, but his Dari skills and his experience with the Panjshiris during the autumn campaign recommended him, as well as the fact that he had spent the previous four years in Islamabad, running Afghan agents. There were only about thirty or forty C.I.A. officers left in Afghanistan by the time of Karzai’s inauguration, although the number would grow again during 2002. The Pentagon’s Special Forces soldiers and officers now outnumbered case officers by about fivefold.3
The American-led units formed to push into eastern Afghanistan, to chase Al Qaeda remnants, comprised mixed teams of Special Forces—Green Berets, Delta Force, and Navy SEAL Team 6—plus C.I.A. officers and communications and intercept specialists. They were eventually referred to as Omega Teams. They might operate independently on reconnaissance missions, to identify Al Qaeda positions, or they might train and accompany Afghan militias of several hundred or more men. The C.I.A. officers on the teams included paramilitary specialists such as Greg Vogle, but also language and area specialists such as Chris Wood, who led a reconnaissance team that winter of 2002 that operated along the twisting highway between Khost and Gardez. Intelligence operations have a range, like radar or rifles, Wood told colleagues. C.I.A. tradecraft held that case officers should try to operate tens of miles from denied territory in order to run agents behind enemy lines.4
To recruit Afghan militias that could provide local support, the C.I.A. turned to Amrullah Saleh, and to Asadullah Khalid, a Pashtun from Ghazni Province, in the east. Khalid was then in his early thirties. His father had served in parliament during the pre-Communist era. Before 2001, as Sayyaf’s intelligence aide, Asadullah had traveled to the United States and worked with the C.I.A. on programs to recover Stinger missiles and collect intelligence on Al Qaeda. Like Saleh, he was young, relatively independent, game for action, and implacably opposed to the Taliban.5
More senior and established commanders in the Northern Alliance such as Fahim Khan and Abdul Rashid Dostum controlled large armed forces, but they worked simultaneously with the C.I.A., Iranian intelligence, and Russian intelligence. Asadullah was less entangled in these relationships. By early 2002, he had become a partner of the C.I.A. for reasons of mutual advantage, as a European security officer put it: “In their weakness they became friends of the Americans, and gained
strength.”6
The Americans built up small forward bases to train and prepare their hastily recruited forces. Early in the New Year, they reinforced a forward operating base on the outskirts of Gardez, a provincial capital eighty miles due south from Kabul, in a fortress compound with twenty-five-foot mud-brick walls and a steel gate, located at about seven thousand feet above sea level.
Gardez became a hub of clandestine and unconventional warfare planning and intelligence collection. C.I.A. case officers and Green Berets rode out to local villages, met elders, offered food and medical aid, and sought out traveling Afghan agents who might be paid fifty or a hundred dollars to ride or walk into districts where Al Qaeda might be holed up. “It’s a little like Star Wars,” as an officer involved put it. “We would send these little agents all over the place to try to find where the rebel alliance was. And if the agents didn’t come back, or they came back dead, or they couldn’t get past roadblocks, we knew there was a problem.” The essential questions plumbed by the C.I.A.’s agents were: Where are the Al Qaeda who fled Tora Bora but remained in Afghanistan? What weapons and defenses do they have? How many are there?
Michael Hurley, a senior C.I.A. case officer deployed at Gardez from December 2001 to May 2002, worked on “the big question after Tora Bora,” which was “Where is the last redoubt in Afghanistan?” Yet it was difficult to sort rumor from fact. Paying impoverished locals for information created financial incentives for them to invent tantalizing false stories or settle vendettas by labeling a business or tribal rival as Al Qaeda. Even where multiple sources confirmed that foreign fighters were present, according to Hurley, “local agents weren’t very good about sorting out foreigners’ nationalities” or determining which leaders might be with them.7
In January, Major General Warren Edwards of Central Command flew into Kabul and met with Rich Blee. The station chief told him that he expected “the last battle” of the Afghan war to be fought soon around Gardez. Edwards took note; in his experience, Blee “had a much better feel for Afghanistan than most of the people I talked to.” By late January, the “fire ants,” as the human agents run by the C.I.A. mainly out of Gardez were known, reported with increasing credibility the existence of a large group of foreign Al Qaeda fighters in the Shah-i-Kot Valley, to the southeast of Gardez. The valley floor stood at 8,500 feet above sea level and the surrounding peaks rose as high as 14,000 feet. Shah-i-Kot had been an Al Qaeda sanctuary during the 1980s, as well as a base of the Haqqanis, a family-led network of Afghan Taliban allies. “We had estimates of 200 to 300 people, up to 1,200 to 1,400,” Hurley recalled. Task Force Dagger’s intelligence analysts assessed the foreigners as mainly from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an Al Qaeda ally. But the analysts could not confirm the numbers of enemy present through Predator photography, U2 surveillance planes, or satellite imagery. The weather was bad, the valley ridgelines had caves that were difficult to penetrate, and there was no sign of a large force in the open. Maybe they weren’t there; maybe they had adopted strong measures to avoid detection. The C.I.A. “lost a couple” of reporting agents who were captured and executed and “we ran into a couple of roadblocks, and they were manned by Chechens and Uzbeks,” according to an officer involved. “We knew that was bad” but “we didn’t know how many.”8
Major General Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck, a West Point graduate who commanded the Tenth Mountain Division and who was then the highest-ranking officer commanding conventional forces in the country, organized planning exercises at Bagram Airfield for an attack on the Shah-i-Kot. His officers built a terrain model of the region on the floor of an old Soviet hangar; Hagenbeck and his men walked through it every day, war-gaming their plan. Among other things, Hagenbeck and his lieutenants sought to absorb the lessons of Tora Bora, to plan from the start for the deployment of reliable American and allied N.A.T.O. forces, led by the 101st Airborne Division, behind Al Qaeda’s positions, to prevent the enemy’s escape into Pakistan.9
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Where were Osama Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri? There were reports of his presence at Jalalabad, Peshawar, and Kandahar. None of these panned out, and increasingly there were no good leads. Yet there were plenty of false sightings of both men that had to be run down by Kabul Station. At one point, an Afghan Tajik vendor in Utah contacted his congressman and persuaded him to inform the Pentagon that the vendor knew where Bin Laden was hiding, near Gardez. The military spun up an operation to attack the site. It turned out that the F.B.I. had previously documented that the source was a fabricator. From Langley, Charles Allen circulated his daily Bin Laden hunt memo for about three months after Tora Bora, but he dropped it when the leads ran dry. Allen consulted case officers who had served in Pakistan; they suggested regions where Allen might look around, such as the northern Pakistani border city of Chitral and the Swat Valley. He went into Langley headquarters on weekends to take a hard look at the satellite and other overhead imagery with analysts, but they found nothing. One hypothesis was that Bin Laden had actually died at Tora Bora, but when F.B.I. forensic teams, working with Special Forces, exhumed Al Qaeda grave sites there, they identified some of Bin Laden’s bodyguards, but found no trace of the leader himself.10
Kabul Station became a destination for visitors from Washington, all of whom Blee and his deputy had to brief, protect, and entertain. Among the early arrivals was A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, the C.I.A.’s executive director, a wealthy former investment banker from Baltimore whom Tenet had recruited a few years before to bring private sector management expertise to agency operations. A Princeton-educated lawyer and former Marine, Krongard lived in a hillside mansion outside Baltimore that had a private shooting range; he had a large gun collection. Like Tenet, he had an expansive personality. Krongard toured Kabul and Gardez. Tenet sent Jose Rodriguez of the Counterterrorist Center as an escort, “just to make sure Buzzy doesn’t kill anybody,” as Rodriguez told colleagues. The visit was another distraction, but it produced a momentous decision.11
Krongard was struck by how insecure Kabul Station seemed even though the war was supposedly won. Inside the Ariana Hotel, officers carried a weapon even to the bathroom. Krongard had known Blee when he worked on the Seventh Floor, as an aide to Tenet, and admired him. They discussed the Afghan guard force protecting the Ariana Hotel. Blee had to assume the C.I.A.’s address was no secret around Kabul. If they were attacked, Blee said, “you could have the whole hotel in a firing position, but we don’t know if the Afghans will fight, leave, or lead the enemy in.” At one point, the C.I.A. conducted an internal security review of Kabul Station and found the facility to be virtually indefensible; it was a hotel, and hotels are meant to be accessible. The guards’ primary loyalty was to the Northern Alliance, not necessarily the C.I.A. Krongard pledged to do something when he got back to Langley.12
The C.I.A. contracted for training facilities with Blackwater USA, the private firm run by Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL. According to Krongard, he had never worked with Prince directly before early 2002, but they knew of each other. After Krongard returned from Afghanistan to Langley, Prince, who was in C.I.A. headquarters, made a cold call at Krongard’s office, seeking to identify how Blackwater could grow its business at the agency. Prince asked what needs the C.I.A. had. Krongard mentioned his Kabul Station issue. “I’ve got a Rolodex,” Prince said, meaning a network of former noncommissioned officers, Special Forces, and retired SEALs.
“Go down to the contract office,” Krongard told him. As Krongard recalled it, “‘Let’s move’ was the attitude.” Blackwater’s for-profit provision of bodyguards, shooters, spies, and other operatives in the global war on terrorism was born. Weeks later, Kabul Station had an expatriate protection force in place, organized by Prince.13
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The militia and reconnaissance operations Chris Wood oversaw in Afghanistan’s east early in 2002 constituted one leg of the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism strategy in post-Taliban Afghanist
an. A second was to fund the reconstruction of the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s intelligence and security service. The C.I.A. now had the opportunity to shape a friendly intelligence agency at the axis of Central and South Asia. (The mandate of N.D.S. approximately combined those of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. in the United States.) After the Panjshiris took Kabul, Engineer Arif returned to N.D.S. as de facto chief, on Fahim Khan’s orders. Karzai formally appointed Arif as his interim government’s head of intelligence in late December 2001. As a practical matter, Karzai had no choice—the Panjshiris constituted the main armed power in Kabul at the time, and he was in effect their international representative.
Arif was a problematic partner for the C.I.A. He had contacts with Russians and Iranians dating back years. The N.D.S. still carried the influence of its years as a stepchild of the K.G.B. Also, before September 11, Massoud had entrusted Arif with selling the Panjshir’s gemstones to fund their war effort—emeralds, rubies, and lapis lazuli mined in Northern Alliance territory. Each year, Arif would load up trunks the size of coffee tables and fly to Las Vegas for the American Gem Trade Association exhibition. He would make $3 million to $4 million for the Northern Alliance cause, but along the way, he seemed to develop a taste for comfortable hotels and condominiums. He flew on the supersonic Concorde at least once—quite possibly the only Panjshiri ever to do so.14