Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  When the lobby had completely filled with smoke, the Marines retreated upstairs to join the rest of the embassy staff in the third-floor vault. Just before going in, they dropped a few final tear gas canisters down each of the stairwells in the hope that would dissuade the rioters from climbing to the embassy’s last remaining refuge.

  Outside at the motor pool the rioters poured gasoline into embassy cars and set them burning one after another; in all, more than sixty embassy vehicles would go up in flames. Some rioters attacked the embassy residences, a cluster of modest brick town houses that were home to midlevel American personnel and their families. Quaid-I-Azam University student leaders rounded up a group of hostages from these quarters and announced their intention to drive them to the campus to put them on trial as American spies. An enterprising Pakistani police lieutenant, one of the few guards who had refused to surrender his weapon to the mob in the riot’s earliest moments, pretended to go along with the students’ plan, loaded the hostages into a truck, and promptly drove them off to safety. He was not the only Pakistani to risk himself for the Americans. At the American School in Islamabad several miles away from the embassy, a retired army colonel armed an impromptu squad of Pakistani guards with cricket bats and broomsticks. They successfully beat off rioters who attacked the school while children lay cowering in locked rooms. Although these and other individuals acted heroically, Pakistan’s government did not. Despite dozens of pleas from Arthur Hummel, the ambassador, and John Reagan, the CIA station chief, hour after hour passed and still no Pakistani troops or police arrived to clear the rioters. By midafternoon enormous black clouds of gasoline-scented smoke poured out from the American compound, visible from miles away.

  Many of the rioters joined the melee spontaneously, but as the rampage unfolded, it also revealed evidence of substantial coordinated planning. On the embassy grounds CIA personnel spotted what appeared to be riot organizers wearing distinctive sweater vests and carrying weapons. Some were Arabs, likely members of the sizable Palestinian population at Quaid-I-Azam. The speed with which so many rioters descended on the embassy also suggested advanced preparation. Thousands arrived in government-owned Punjab Transport Corporation buses. Rioters turned up nearly at once at multiple American locations: the embassy compound, the American School, American information centers in Rawalpindi and Lahore, and several American businesses in Islamabad. Professors at Quaid-I-Azam later reported that some students had burst into classrooms very early in the morning, before the rumor about American involvement in the Grand Mosque uprising had spread very far, shouting that students should attack the embassy to take vengeance in the name of Islam.

  Around 4 P.M. Pakistani army headquarters finally dispatched a helicopter to survey the scene. It flew directly above the embassy, its whirring rotors fanning flames that raked the building. Then the helicopter flew away. Zia’s spokesmen later said the smoke had been too thick to make a visual assessment. The CIA reported that its sources in Zia’s circle told a different story. When the helicopter returned to base, the crew advised Zia that the fire in the embassy was so hot and so pervasive that there was no way the American personnel inside could have survived. Since it seemed certain that the Americans had all been killed, there was no sense in risking further bloodshed—and a possible domestic political cataclysm—by sending army troops to forcibly confront the Islamist rioters. According to the CIA’s later reports, Zia decided that since he couldn’t save the Americans inside the embassy anyway, he might as well just let the riot burn itself out.9

  By this time the Americans and Pakistanis in the vault were nearing the end of their tolerance. They had been inside for more than two hours, and there was no rescue in sight. In the State Department’s chamber they lay drenched with sweat and breathing shallowly through wet paper towels. Tear gas had blown back to the third floor, and some were gagging and vomiting. Temperatures rose as fires in the offices below burned hotter. Carpet seams burst from the heat. Floor tiles blistered and warped.

  In the adjacent CIA code room, Miller, Schroen, Lessard, and a crew of CIA officers and Marine guards stared at a bolted hatch in the ceiling that led up to the roof. They wondered if they should try to force the hatch open and lead everyone to the fresh air above. A previous Islamabad station chief had installed the hatch for just this purpose. But about an hour into the attack, the rioters had discovered the passageway. They pounded relentlessly on the iron lid with pieces of a brick wall they had torn apart, hoping to break in. Some rioters poked their rifles into nearby ventilation shafts and shot. The sound of bullets crashing down from above was occasionally punctuated by even more jolting explosions as the fire crept up on oxygen tanks stored elsewhere in the building.

  The group in the code room listened to the metallic clanging on the hatch for about an hour. Then one of the CIA communications specialists, an engineer of sorts, came up with a plan to wire a heavy-duty extension cord into the iron cover. “Those guys up there, I’m going to electrocute them!” he announced gleefully, as Gary Schroen later recalled it. He stripped to the waist and began to sweat as he attached large alligator clips to the hatch. “Now I’m going to plug this baby in, and the electricity’s going to kill them.” He was filthy and covered with bits of shredded documents. He thrust the plug into the wall. Four hundred volts of current seemed to fly up to the hatch, bounce off, and fly right back into the wall, where it exploded in sparks and smoke. “Goddamn it! The resistance is too much!”

  The idea had seemed dubious from the beginning—the device wasn’t even grounded properly—and there was laughter for the first time all afternoon when it failed. But what other options did they have? The heat had grown unbearable inside the vault. “What are we going to do?” they asked. “They’re up there. What are we going to do?”

  Another hour passed. Slowly the hatch bent under the rioters’ bricks. The concrete around it began to crumble into the code room. The CIA officers and Marines estimated they had about thirty minutes before the cover collapsed. But suddenly the banging stopped and the voices on the roof quieted. After a few minutes of silence the Gunney decided: “Let’s open the hatch and we’ll face what happens,” he said. The ambassador had given them the go-ahead to fire first to maintain security in the vault, and they had enough weaponry to make it a battle if it came to that.

  Lessard and Schroen climbed ladders and popped the hatch halfway off. Half a dozen colleagues crouched below, shotguns primed, as Schroen recalled it, ready to shoot as soon as the rioters poured in.

  “Guys, guys! When we open the hatch, if somebody’s up there, we’re going to drop down. Then shoot! Don’t shoot first!” They worked out a plan for sequential firing.

  Schroen looked across the ladder at Lessard. “We’re going to die here if anybody—”

  “Yeah, I think so, Gary.”

  But they couldn’t open the hatch. They beat on the bolt, but the contraption was now so bent and warped that it wouldn’t pop. They pushed and pushed, but there was nothing they could do.

  The sun set on Islamabad, and the noises outside began to drift off into the chilly November air. It was now about 6:30 P.M. Maybe the rioters were gone, or maybe they were lying in wait for the Americans to try to escape. David Fields, the administrative counselor, decided it was time to find out. He ordered the Gunney to lead an expedition out the third-floor hallway and up onto the roof. Fields told them they had the authority to fire on any rioters who got in their way.

  Miller and his team of five sneaked out of the vault and into a hallway thick with smoke. They ran their hands along the curved hallway wall to keep track of their position and felt their way to the end where a staircase led to the roof. The locked metal door normally guarding access to the stairs had been torn off its hinges. The rioters had already been here.

  With shotguns and revolvers locked and loaded, Miller cautiously guided his team up the stairs. As he poked his head out onto the roof, he fully expected a shootout. Instead, he saw a single Pakistani
running toward him with hands raised high in the air and yelling, “Friend! Friend!” Miller gave the man a quick pat-down and found a copy of Who’s Who in the CIA stuffed in one of his pockets, suggesting that student leaders had planned, Tehran-style, to arrest their own nest of spies. Miller took the book and told the straggler to get lost. The Gunney would not fire his weapon that day, nor would any of the Marines under his command.10 The riot had finally dissipated. During the last hour it had degenerated gradually into a smoky, sporadic carnival of looting.

  A few minutes after the expedition party set out, those still inside the vault heard the sound of the hatch being wrenched from above. An enormous U.S. Marine with hands like mallets ripped it off its moorings. Soon everyone from the CIA code room was up on the roof and staring over the chancery walls. Through the halo of smoke that ringed the building they looked across the embassy grounds and saw bright leaping flames where some of their homes had once stood. All of the embassy compound’s six buildings, constructed at a cost of $20 million, had been torched beyond repair.

  Using bicycle racks stacked end to end, the Marines set up makeshift ladders and led the large group huddled in the vault to safety. It was now dark and cold, and the footing was precarious. Vehicle lights and embers from fires illuminated the ground in a soft glow. Some Pakistani army troops had finally arrived. They were standing around inside the compound, mostly watching.

  When the last of those in the vault had been helped down, the Gunney turned to climb the ladder. The CIA men asked where he was going. “I’ve got to go get Steve,” he said. “I’m not going to leave my man up there.”

  Minutes later he emerged with Crowley’s inert form wrapped in a blanket, slung across his shoulder. Crowley had died when the oxygen supply in the vault ran out. In flickering light the Gunney carried the body down the ladder to the ground.

  “ALL REPORTS INDICATE all of the people in the compound have been removed and taken to safety thanks to the Pakistani troops,” State Department spokesman Hodding Carter told reporters in Washington later that day. In a telephone call, President Carter thanked Zia for his assistance, and Zia expressed regret about the loss of life. The Pakistani ambassador in Washington accepted the Americans’ gratitude and noted that Pakistani army troops had reacted “promptly, with dispatch.” Secretary of State Cyrus Vance hurriedly summoned ambassadors from thirty Islamic countries to discuss the Pakistan embassy attack and its context. Asked about the recent wave of Islamic militancy abroad, Vance said, “It’s hard to say at this point whether a pattern is developing.”11

  It took a day or two to sort out the dead and missing. Putscher, the kidnapped auditor, was released by the students at Quaid-I-Azam around midnight. They had called him “an imperialist pig” and found America guilty “of the trouble in Mecca and all the world’s problems,” but they decided in the end that he was personally innocent. He wandered back to the embassy, wounded and shaken.

  Rescue workers found two Pakistani employees of the embassy in a first-floor office. They had died of apparent asphyxiation, and their bodies had been badly burned. In the compound’s residential section, workers found an American airman, Brian Ellis, twenty-nine, lying dead on the floor of his fire-gutted apartment. A golf club lay beside him; he had apparently been beaten unconscious and left to burn.

  On Friday, a Pan American Airlines jumbo jet evacuated 309 nonessential personnel, dependents, and other Americans from Pakistan and back to the United States.

  Saudi Arabian soldiers and French commandos routed the armed attackers at the Grand Mosque on Saturday in a bloody gun battle. The Saudis never provided an accounting of the final death toll. Most estimates placed it in the hundreds. Saudi interior minister Prince Naif downplayed the uprising’s significance, calling the Saudi renegades “no more than a criminal deviation” who were “far from having any political essence.” Surviving followers of the Mahdi, who had been shot dead, fled to the mosque’s intricate network of basements and underground tunnels. They were flushed out by Saudi troops after a further week of fighting. The building contractor who had originally reconstructed the mosque for the Saudi royal family reportedly supplied blueprints that helped security forces in this final phase of the battle. The Bin Laden Brothers for Contracting and Industry were, after all, one of the kingdom’s most loyal and prosperous private companies.12

  The American treasury secretary, William Miller, flew into the kingdom amid the turmoil. He hoped to reassure Saudi investors, who had about $30 billion on deposit in U.S. banks, that America would remain a faithful ally. He also urged the Saudi royal family to use their influence with OPEC to hold oil prices in check.13 Rising gasoline prices had stoked debilitating inflation and demoralized the American people.

  Saudi princes feared the Mecca uprising reflected popular anxiety about small Westernizing trends that had been permitted in the kingdom during recent years. They soon banned women’s hairdressing salons and dismissed female announcers from state television programs. New rules stopped Saudi girls from continuing their education abroad. Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi intelligence chief, concluded that the Mecca uprising was a protest against the conduct of all Saudis—the sheikhs, the government, and the people in general. There should be no future danger or conflict between social progress and traditional religious practices, Turki told visitors, as long as the Saudi royal family reduced corruption and created economic opportunities for the public.

  In Tehran, the Ayatollah Khomeini said it was “a great joy for us to learn about the uprising in Pakistan against the U.S.A. It is good news for our oppressed nation. Borders should not separate hearts.” Khomeini theorized that “because of propaganda, people are afraid of superpowers, and they think that the superpowers cannot be touched.” This, he predicted, would be proven false.14

  The riot had sketched a pattern that would recur for years. For reasons of his own, the Pakistani dictator, General Zia, had sponsored and strengthened a radical Islamic partner—in this case, Jamaat and its student wing—that had a virulently anti-American outlook. This Islamist partner had veered out of control. By attacking the American embassy, Jamaat had far exceeded Zia’s brief. Yet Zia felt he could not afford to repudiate his religious ally. And the Americans felt they could not afford to dwell on the issue. There were larger stakes in the U.S. relationship with Pakistan. In a crisis-laden, impoverished Islamic nation like Pakistan, on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons, there always seemed to be larger strategic issues for the United States to worry about than the vague, seemingly manageable dangers of political religion.

  On the night of the embassy’s sacking, Zia gently chided the rioters in a nationally broadcast speech. “I understand that the anger and grief over this incident were quite natural,” he said, referring to the uprising in Mecca, “but the way in which they were expressed is not in keeping with the lofty Islamic traditions of discipline and forbearance.”15 As the years passed, Zia’s partnership with Jamaat would only deepen.

  The CIA and State Department personnel left behind in Islamabad felt deeply embittered. They and more than one hundred of their colleagues had been left to die in the embassy vault; it had taken Pakistani troops more than five hours to make what was at maximum a thirty-minute drive from army headquarters in Rawalpindi. Had events taken a slight turn for the worse, the riot would have produced one of the most catastrophic losses of American life in U.S. diplomatic history.

  The CIA’s Islamabad station now lacked vehicles in which to meet its agents. The cars had all been burned by mobs. Gary Schroen found a Quaid-I-Azam University jeep parked near the embassy, a vehicle apparently left behind by the rioters. Schroen hot-wired it so that he could continue to drive out at night for clandestine meetings with his reporting agents. Soon university officials turned up at the embassy to ask after the missing jeep—the university now wanted it back. Schroen decided that he couldn’t afford to drive around Islamabad in a vehicle that was more or less reported as stolen. He drove the jeep one night t
o a lake on Islamabad’s outskirts. There he got out and rolled it under the water. Small satisfaction, but something.

  2

  “Lenin Taught Us”

  YURI ANDROPOV was a rising force within the gray cabal that circled the Kremlin’s listless don, the hound-faced Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At sixty-five, Andropov knew—or thought he knew—how to smother a rebellion. As a young communist apparatchik he had soared to prominence as ambassador to Budapest when Soviet troops crushed the 1956 Hungarian uprising. He became KGB chief a decade later, managing the vast apparatus of Soviet internal security and external espionage. He was the leading spy in a political system constructed on deception. From his service’s headquarters in the Lubyanka on Moscow’s Dzerzhinsky Square, Andropov oversaw KGB foreign covert operations, attempted penetrations of the CIA, and campaigned to suppress dissent within the Soviet Union. Ashen-faced, he conformed outwardly to the drab personal norms of collective leadership. Because he also read Plato, led drives against Soviet corruption, and mentored younger reformers such as Mikhail Gorbachev, a few Kremlin watchers in the West saw tiny glimmers of enlightenment in Andropov, at least in comparison to decaying elder statesmen such as foreign minister Andrei Gromyko or defense minister Dimitri Ustinov.1 Yet Andropov’s KGB remained ruthless and murderous at home and abroad. In Third World outposts such as Kabul, his lieutenants tortured and killed with impunity. Communist allies who fell out of favor were murdered or exiled. Political detainees languished by the hundreds of thousands in cruel gulags.

  Neither Andropov nor the KGB saw Afghanistan’s anticommunist revolt coming. The first sharp mutiny erupted in Herat in March 1979, soon after Kabul’s recently installed Marxists announced a compulsory initiative to teach girls to read. Such literacy drives were a staple of red-splashed Soviet propaganda posters shipped by the trainload to Third World client states. Women workers on the march: muscled and unsmiling, progressive and determined, chins jutted, staring into the future. Earlier in the century, as the Bolsheviks swept through the republics that became Soviet Central Asia—Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan—they had transformed pastoral Islamic societies into insistently godless police states. Women poured into factories and onto collective farms. So it would be in neighboring Afghanistan, the KGB’s political specialists believed.