Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  Yet Zia strongly encouraged personal religious piety within the Pakistan army’s officer corps, a major change from the past. He encouraged the financing and construction of hundreds of madrassas, or religious schools, along the Afghan frontier to educate young Afghans—as well as Pakistanis—in Islam’s precepts and to prepare some of them for anticommunist jihad. The border madrassas formed a kind of Islamic ideological picket fence between communist Afghanistan and Pakistan. Gradually Zia embraced jihad as a strategy. He saw the legions of Islamic fighters gathering on the Afghan frontier in the early 1980s as a secret tactical weapon. They accepted martyrdom’s glories. Their faith could trump the superior firepower of the godless Soviet occupiers. “Afghan youth will fight the Soviet invasion with bare hands, if necessary,” he assured President Reagan in private.15

  He feared that Kabul’s communists would stir up Pashtun independence activists along the disputed Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Pashtuns comprised Afghanistan’s dominant ethnic group, but there were more Pashtuns living inside Pakistan than inside Afghanistan. A successful independence campaign might well shatter Pakistan once and for all. Within a year of the Soviet invasion, about one million Afghan refugees had poured into Pakistan, threatening social unrest. Soviet and Afghan secret services had begun to run terrorist operations on Pakistani soil, as far inland as Sind province. A stronghold of the Bhutto family, Sind was a hotbed of opposition to Zia. The KGB’s Afghan agents set up shop in Karachi, Islamabad, Peshawar, and Quetta. They linked up with one of the hanged Bhutto’s sons, Murtaza, and helped him carry out hijackings of Pakistani airliners.16Zia suspected that India’s intelligence service was involved as well. If Soviet-backed communists took full control in Afghanistan, Pakistan would be sandwiched between two hostile regimes—the Soviet empire to the west and north, and India to the east. To avoid this, Zia felt he needed to carry the Afghan jihad well across the Khyber Pass, to keep the Soviets back on their heels. A war fought on Islamic principles could also help Zia shore up a political base at home and deflect appeals to Pashtun nationalism.

  Zia knew he would need American help, and he milked Washington for all he could. He turned down Carter’s initial offer of $400 million in aid, dismissing it as “peanuts,” and was rewarded with a $3.2 billion proposal from the Reagan administration plus permission to buy F-16 fighter jets, previously available only to NATO allies and Japan.17Yet as he loaded up his shopping cart, Zia kept his cool and his distance. In private meetings with President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Secretary of State Shultz, and others, Zia lied brazenly about Pakistan’s secret efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Reagan had come into office criticizing Carter for alienating American allies by harping on human rights. The new president assured Zia that Washington would now be a more faithful friend. “Given the uncertainty and sensitivity surrounding certain areas of our relationship,” Shultz wrote in a classified memo as the Pakistani general prepared to visit Washington late in 1982, President Reagan should “endeavor to convince Zia of his personal interest in these concerns and his sensitivity to Zia’s views.” Shultz added, “We must remember that without Zia’s support, the Afghan resistance, key to making the Soviets pay a heavy price for their Afghan adventure, is effectively dead.”18

  Zia sought and obtained political control over the CIA’s weapons and money. He insisted that every gun and dollar allocated for the mujahedin pass through Pakistani hands. He would decide which Afghan guerrillas benefited. He did not want Langley setting up its own Afghan kingmaking operation on Pakistani soil. Zia wanted to run his own hearts-and-minds operation inside Afghanistan. As it happened, this suited the Vietnam-scarred officers at Langley just fine.19

  For the first four years of its Afghan jihad, the CIA kept its solo operations and contacts with Afghans to a minimum. That was why Hart had sneaked into Peshawar for his initial contact with Abdul Haq. Such direct encounters between CIA officers and Afghan rebels were officially forbidden by Zia’s intelligence service. The CIA held the meetings anyway but limited their extent. The agency’s main unilateral operations early in the war were aimed at stealing advanced Soviet weaponry off the Afghan battlefield and shipping it back to the United States for examination.

  To make his complex liaison with the CIA work, Zia relied on his chief spy and most trusted lieutenant, a gray-eyed and patrician general, Akhtar Abdur Rahman, director-general of ISI. Zia told Akhtar that it was his job to draw the CIA in and hold them at bay. Among other things, Zia felt he needed time. He did not want to take big risks on the Afghan battlefield—risks that might increase Soviet-backed terrorism in Pakistan or prompt a direct military attack. Again and again Zia told Akhtar: “The water in Afghanistan must boil at the right temperature.” Zia did not want the Afghan pot to boil over.20

  ABOUT EVERY OTHER MONTH Howard Hart drove the dozen miles from Islamabad to Rawalpindi to have a meal with General Akhtar at ISI headquarters and catch up on the Afghan jihad. They would talk in Akhtar’s office or in a small dining room, attended by servants in starched uniforms. Outside, gardeners trimmed shrubbery or washed sidewalks. Pakistan’s army bases were the cleanest and most freshly painted places in the country, conspicuous sanctuaries of green lawns and whitewashed walls.

  ISI and the CIA had collaborated secretly for decades, yet mutual suspicion reigned. Akhtar laid down rules to ensure that ISI would retain control over contacts with Afghan rebels. No American—CIA or otherwise—would be permitted to cross the border into Afghanistan. Movements of weapons within Pakistan and distributions to Afghan commanders would be handled strictly by ISI officers. All training of mujahedin would be carried out solely by ISI in camps along the Afghan frontiers. No CIA officers would train Afghans directly, although when new and complex weapons systems were introduced, ISI would permit the CIA to teach its own Pakistani instructors.

  Akhtar banned social contact between ISI officers and their CIA counterparts. His men weren’t allowed to attend diplomatic functions. ISI officers routinely swept their homes and offices for bugs and talked in crude codes on the telephone. Howard Hart was “H2.” Certain weapons in transit might be “apples” or “oranges.” The CIA was no more trusting. When Akhtar and his aides visited CIA training facilities in the United States, they were forced to wear blindfolds on the internal flight to the base.21

  Akhtar himself kept a very low profile. He rarely surfaced on the Islamabad social circuit. He met Hart almost exclusively on ISI’s grounds.

  He was the son of a Pathan medical doctor from Peshawar, on the Afghan frontier. (Pathan is the term used by Pakistanis to refer to members of the Afghan Pashtun tribes that straddle the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.) He had joined the British colonial army in Punjab just before independence, as Zia had done. They had risen through the ranks together, and Zia trusted him. As a young artillery officer Akhtar had been a champion boxer and wrestler. He had grown over the years into a vain, difficult, self-absorbed general who operated within the Pakistani army as Zia’s most loyal cohort. “If Zia said, ‘It is going to rain frogs tonight,’ Akhtar would go out with his frog net,” Hart recalled. Zia had appointed him to run ISI in June 1979; Akhtar would hold the position for eight influential years.

  “His physique was stocky and tough, his uniform immaculate, with three rows of medal ribbons,” recalled an ISI colleague, Mohammed Yousaf. “He had a pale skin, which he proudly attributed to his Afghan ancestry, and he carried his years well… . He hated to be photographed, he had no real intimates, and nobody in whom to confide… . He was a tough, cold, and a hard general who was sure he knew wrong from right… . In fact many of his subordinates disliked him as a martinet.”22

  Hart found Akhtar stubborn and unimaginative, but also quite likable. Akhtar’s “self-image was sort of a cross between Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great.” The success of Hart’s tour as CIA station chief depended on his ability to work effectively with the ISI chief. In spy parlance, Hart sought to recruit Akhtar—not formally, as a paid agent is recruited
with money, but informally, as a friend and professional ally.

  As the months passed, Hart would ask the colonel who took notes at all of Akhtar’s private meetings to leave them alone for what Hart called “executive sessions.” Gradually the meetings grew less formal. The core questions they discussed were almost always the same: How much CIA weaponry for the Afghan rebels would Moscow tolerate? How much would Zia tolerate?

  ISI’s treasury began to swell with CIA and Saudi Arabian subsidies. Headquartered in an unmarked compound in Rawalpindi, ISI was a rising force across Pakistan. Among other things, the service enforced Zia’s ironfisted martial law regime. Its missions included domestic security, covert guerrilla operations, and espionage against India. ISI functioned as a quasi-division of the Pakistan army. It was staffed down the line by army officers and enlisted men. But because ISI’s spies were always watching out for troublemakers and potential coup makers within the army, many regular officers regarded the agency with disdain. Akhtar’s bullying personality exacerbated its unpopularity within the ranks.

  ISI’s Afghan bureau, overseen by several brigadiers, managed Pakistan’s support for the mujahedin day to day. By 1983 the bureau employed about sixty officers and three hundred noncommissioned officers and enlisted men. It often recruited Pathan majors and colonels who spoke the eastern and southern Afghan language of Pashto. These Pakistani officers belonged to border-straddling tribes and could operate undetected in civilian dress along the frontier or inside Afghan territory. Some officers, especially these Pathans, would make decades-long careers within ISI’s Afghan bureau, never transferring to other army units. The bureau was becoming a permanent secret institution.23

  At their liaison sessions Hart and Akhtar often traded bits of intelligence. Hart might offer a few CIA intercepts of Soviet military communications or reports on battlefield damage in Afghanistan obtained from satellite photography. Akhtar, who had excellent sources inside the Indian government, would half-tease Hart by telling him how, in private, the Indians espoused their disgust with America. “You should hear what they’re saying about you,” he would say, reading from a tattered folder.

  Much of their work involved mundane details of shipping and finance. Congress authorized annual budgets for the CIA’s Afghan program in each of the October-to-October fiscal years observed by the U.S. government. The amounts approved soared during Hart’s tour in Islamabad, from about $30 million in fiscal 1981 to about $200 million in fiscal 1984. Under an agreement negotiated between the Saudi royal family and President Reagan—designed to seal the anticommunist, oil-smoothed alliance between Washington and Riyadh—Saudi Arabia effectively doubled those numbers by agreeing to match the CIA’s aid dollar for dollar. (Still, the CIA’s Afghan program paled beside the Soviet Union’s aid to Kabul’s communists, which totaled just over $1 billion in 1980 alone and continued to grow.24) Hart consulted with Akhtar as each new fiscal year approached. They would draw up lists of weapons needed by the Afghan rebels, and Hart would cable the orders to Langley. Their careful plans were often overtaken by obscure funding deals struck secretly in Congress just as a fiscal year ended. Suddenly a huge surge of weapons would be approved for Pakistan, taxing ISI’s storage and transport capabilities. Hart’s case officers and their ISI counterparts had to get the weapons across to the Afghan frontier.

  New and more potent weapons began to pour in. From hundreds of thousands of Lee Enfield .303s they branched out to Chinese-made AK-47s, despite Hart’s reservations about the rifle. They bought RPG-7s in vast quantities, 60-millimeter Chinese mortars, and 12.7-millimeter heavy machine guns in batches of two thousand or more. Hart bought ISI a fleet of trucks to roll at night down the Grand Trunk Road from Rawalpindi depots to warehouses along the Afghan frontier.

  There was so much cash washing through the system by 1983 that it was hard for Hart to be sure who was making a reasonable profit and who was ripping off the CIA. The headquarters task force that made the purchases prided itself on buying communist weapons through global arms markets and putting them into the hands of anticommunist Afghans. Dissident Polish army officers accepted payoffs to sell surplus Soviet weaponry in secret to the CIA. The agency then shipped the Polish guns to Afghanistan for use against Soviet troops. The Chinese communists cleared huge profit margins on weapons they sold in deals negotiated by the CIA station in Beijing. Tens of millions of dollars in arms deals annually cemented a growing secret anti-Soviet collaboration between the CIA and Chinese intelligence. (The Chinese communists had broken with the Soviet communists during the early 1960s and were now mortal rivals. “Can it possibly be any better than buying bullets from the Chinese to use to shoot Russians?” asked one CIA officer involved in the Afghan program.) American allies in the Third World jumped in just to make a buck. The Egyptians were selling the CIA junky stores of old weapons previously sold to them by the Soviets. Turkey sold sixty thousand rifles, eight thousand light machine guns, ten thousand pistols, and 100 million rounds of ammunition—mainly of 1940–42 vintage. ISI logistics officers grumbled but accepted them.25

  Hart knew the Pakistanis were stealing from the till but thought the thefts were modest and reasonable. The Pakistani army was perhaps the least corrupt organization in the country, which might not be saying a lot, but it was some solace. Anyway, Hart felt there was little choice but to hand over unaccountable cash in a covert program like this one. Either you thought the larger goals of the program justified the expense or you didn’t; you couldn’t fuss over it like a bank auditor. ISI needed money to run training programs for the mujahedin, for example. Zia’s government was genuinely strapped. If the CIA wanted thousands of Afghan rebels to learn how to use their new weapons properly, there had to be stipends for Pakistani trainers, cooks, and drivers. The CIA could hardly set up this kind of payroll itself. By 1983, Hart and his supervisors in Langley felt they had no choice but to turn millions of dollars over to Akhtar and then monitor the results at the training camps themselves, hoping that the “commission” stripped from these training funds by the ISI was relatively modest. Saudi Arabia was pumping cash into ISI as well, and the Saudis were even less attentive to where it ended up.

  To try to detect any large-scale weapons thefts, the CIA recruited Abdul Haq and a few other Afghan contacts to monitor gun prices in the open markets along the Afghan frontier. If .303 or AK-47 prices fell dramatically, that would indicate that CIA-supplied weapons were being dumped for cash.

  Still, the Pakistanis beat the CIA’s systems. In Quetta in 1983, ISI officers were caught colluding with Afghan rebels to profit by selling off CIA-supplied weapons. In another instance, the Pakistan army quietly sold the CIA its own surplus .303 rifles and about 30 million bullets. A ship registered in Singapore picked up about 100,000 guns in Karachi, steamed out to sea, turned around, came back to port, and off-loaded the guns, pretending they had come from abroad. The scheme was discovered—the bullets were still marked “POF,” for “Pakistan Ordnance Factory.” ISI had to pay to scrub the Pakistani bullets of their markings, so if they were used in Afghanistan and picked up by the Soviets, they couldn’t be exploited by the communists as evidence of Pakistani support for the mujahedin.26

  Akhtar, who seemed embarrassed about the scale of the skimming, told Hart that he was going to organize a more formal system of weapons distribution, using ISI-backed Afghan political parties to hand them out. That way ISI could hold the Afghan party leaders accountable. It was also a way for ISI to exercise more control over which Afghan guerrilla leaders would receive the most weaponry and become the most powerful.

  Many of ISI’s favored Afghan leaders, such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, were Muslim Brotherhood–linked Islamists. Especially after 1983, Akhtar and his colleagues tended to freeze out traditional Afghan royalty and tribal leaders, depriving them of weapons. Akhtar told Hart this was because the Pashtun royalists didn’t fight vigorously enough. As with every other facet of the covert war, the CIA accepted ISI’s approach with little dissent. Hart and
his colleagues believed the policy not only agreed with Zia’s personal faith, but it weakened the Afghan rebels most likely to stir up Pashtun nationalism inside Pakistani territory.27

  Hart wanted the CIA’s supplies to reach Afghan commanders who would fight the Soviets hard, whatever their religious outlook. “Have you ever met anyone who could unite them all?” Hart asked Akhtar, as Hart recalled it. “You’re going to try to bring your power of the purse, meaning guns and some money, to force them into something? Fine, if you can, but don’t put too much reliance on it.”

  By 1983 some diplomats within the U.S. embassy in Islamabad had begun to worry that the CIA’s dependence on ISI was creating disunity within the Afghan resistance. “A change in approach would probably require some differentiation of our policy from that of Pakistan,” a Secret cable from the embassy to the State Department reported. “Since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, we have largely been content to follow Pakistan’s lead.”28

  But few within the U.S. government could see any reason to question the CIA’s heavy dependence on ISI. The Soviets were becoming bogged down in Afghanistan. The war continued to embarrass Moscow internationally. And by 1983 the CIA’s covert action program had become cost effective, according to Hart’s calculations, which he cabled to Langley. The money allocated secretly by Congress each year for weapons for the mujahedin was destroying Soviet equipment and personnel worth eight to ten times that amount or more, Hart reported.

  “Howard, how can you help these people when, in the end, they will all be killed or destroyed by the Soviets?” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan asked Hart during a visit to Pakistan.

  “Senator,” Hart replied, “what they are saying to us is Winston Churchill: ‘Give us the tools and we will do the job.’ ”