Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  Piekney’s station began to run more and more unilateral intelligence agents across the Afghan border. The swelling volume of weapons shipments, the rising number of questions from visiting congressmen about ISI ripoffs, and the worsening violence on the Afghan battlefield all argued for deeper and more independent CIA reporting. To some extent it was a matter of protecting the CIA from intensifying congressional oversight: The agency needed to be able to demonstrate that it was independently auditing the large new flows of weaponry. It could not do so credibly if it relied only on Pakistani intelligence for its reporting.

  Some of the CIA’s unilateral reporting agents were Afghans; Hart’s relationship with Abdul Haq was passed along to Piekney, for instance. But most of the new agents who traveled in Afghanistan on the CIA’s behalf during the mid-1980s were European adventurers. These included European journalists, photographers, and ex–foreign legion members. Piekney’s connections from his previous tour in Paris helped with the recruitments. Warren Marik, an undeclared CIA case officer operating out of the American consulate in Karachi, away from ISI surveillance in Islamabad, handled many of the Europeans. After they flew in to Karachi from France or Belgium, Marik would hook them up with trusted Afghan guides and sometimes provide false papers and cover identities. A few of the European agents were given secure communications gear so they could send in timely reports from the Afghan battlefield, but most went across the border carrying only notebooks and cameras. When they came out, Marik would fly them quickly to Europe for debriefings. The photographs these agents took provided the CIA with its own archive of close-up pictures of battlefield damage, Soviet weapons systems, and troop deployments. The agents’ firsthand reports about Afghan commanders also provided a check on ISI claims about weapons handouts. And the Europeans came cheap, usually taking in the range of only $1,000 a month. They weren’t in it for the money; they sought adventure.9

  For their part, politically savvy Afghan commanders began to understand by 1985 that one way to lobby for weapons and power—and to outflank ISI’s controlling brigadiers—was to build their own independent relationships in Washington or Riyadh. The Islamist radicals tended to cultivate wealthy patrons in Saudi Arabia. Sayyaf lectured there so often that he was awarded the kingdom’s King Faisal Intellectual Prize during 1985. The self-described “moderate” Afghan rebel leaders with ties to the old royal family or the country’s mystical Sufi brotherhoods relied more on support from Europe and Washington, particularly from Capitol Hill. A parade of well-tailored “Gucci muj,” as the CIA Near East officers derisively called them, began to fly in from Pakistan and march from office to office in Washington.

  Those Afghans who felt neglected by Pakistani intelligence tended to be the most active in Washington. These included the royalist Pashtuns from the Durrani tribal federation, whose political ancestry made them unattractive to the Pakistan army. They swore allegiance to former king Zahir Shah, who lived in exile in a villa outside Rome. They denounced Pakistani intelligence for its aid to Hekmatyar, from the rival Ghilzai tribal federation, whom they regarded as a dangerous megalomaniac.

  Gradually, too, Ahmed Shah Massoud’s brothers and Panjshiri aides began to make the rounds in Washington. Massoud’s now widely publicized record as a war hero in the harsh Panjshir gave him more clout and credibility than the Durrani Pashtuns, who tended to be dismissed, especially at Langley, as political self-promoters with weak battlefield records.

  The CIA’s Near East Division found itself under rising pressure to direct more of the money and weapons flowing from NSDD-166’s escalation toward Massoud. Yet the agency still had only the most tenuous connections to Massoud. The CIA tended to view all the Washington lobbying as evidence of innate Afghan factionalism, not as an expression of dissent about Pakistani intelligence policy. “It was quite a spectacle as the bearded and robed mujahedin political leaders went from office to office, building to building, making their personal and parochial cases for support,” Directorate of Intelligence chief Robert Gates wrote later. “No one should have had any illusions about these people coming together politically—before or after a Soviet defeat.”10

  The CIA’s leadership continued to regard Pakistani intelligence as the jihad’s main implementing agency, even as more and more American trainers arrived in Pakistan to teach new weapons and techniques. All this ensured that ISI’s Muslim Brotherhood–inspired clients—mainly Hekmatyar but also Sayyaf, Rabbani, and radical commanders who operated along the Pakistan border, such as Jallaladin Haqqanni—won the greatest share of support.

  From its earliest days the Afghan war had been brutal, characterized by indiscriminate aerial bombing and the widespread slaughter of civilians. After six years the CIA, ISI, KGB, and Soviet special forces had all refined their tactics. Now, as the new American policy blueprint put it, each side sought to demoralize, sabotage, frighten, and confuse its enemy by whatever means necessary.

  AS THE AFGHAN operations director for Pakistani intelligence between 1983 and 1987, Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf was Akhtar’s “barbarian handler,” as one CIA colleague put it, quoting an old Chinese moniker. Yousaf ran the clandestine training camps, kept the books on weapons handouts, received the new satellite maps, and occasionally accompanied mujahedin groups on commando missions. His strategy was “death by a thousand cuts.” He emphasized attacks on Soviet command targets in Kabul. He saw the capital as a center of gravity for the Soviets. If the city became a secure sanctuary, Soviet generals might never leave.11

  ISI-supplied Afghan guerrillas detonated a briefcase bomb under a dining room table at Kabul University in 1983, killing nine Soviets, including a female professor. Yousaf and the Afghan car bombing squads he trained regarded Kabul University professors as fair game since they were poisoning young minds with Marxist anti-Islamic dogma. Mujahedin commandos later assassinated the university’s rector. Seven Soviet military officers were reported shot dead by Kabul assassins in a single year. By Yousaf’s estimation, car bombing squads trained by Pakistan and supplied with CIA-funded explosives and detonators made “numerous” attempts to kill the chief of the Afghan secret police, the notorious torturer Najibullah, but they repeatedly failed to get him.12

  Fear of poisoning, surprise attacks, and assassination became rife among Russian officers and soldiers in Kabul. The rebels fashioned booby-trapped bombs from gooey black contact explosives, supplied to Pakistani intelligence by the CIA, that could be molded into ordinary shapes or poured into innocent utensils. Russian soldiers began to find bombs made from pens, watches, cigarette lighters, and tape recorders. “Hidden death has been camouflaged so masterfully that only someone with a practiced eye can see it,” the independent Russian writer Artyom Borovik reported during his travels. Kabul shopkeepers poisoned food eaten by Russian soldiers. Assassins lurked in the city’s mud-rock alleys. A rhyme invented by Russian conscripts went:

  Afghanistan

  A wonderland

  Just drop into a store

  And you’ll be seen no more13

  Across the Pakistan border Yousaf saw himself treading a careful line between guerrilla war and terrorism. “We are as good or bad [a] civilized nation as anyone living in the West,” he said later, “because when you carry out this sort of operation it has a double edge.” His squads bombed Kabul cinemas and cultural shows, but the attacking Afghan guerrillas knew that most of their victims “would be the Soviet soldiers.” Otherwise, Yousaf said, “You will not find any case of poisoning the water or any use of chemical or biological.” Car bombs were supposed to be targeted only at military leaders, he said later. By all accounts there were few car bombings aimed at civilians during this period. However, once the uncontrolled mortaring of Kabul began in 1985, after the CIA shipped in Egyptian and Chinese rockets that could be remotely fired from long range, random civilian casualties in the city began to mount steadily.

  The CIA officers that Yousaf worked with closely impressed upon him one rule: Never use the terms sabotage or assas
sination when speaking with visiting congressmen.14

  The KGB had no such worries. By 1985, Soviet and Afghan intelligence operatives played a greater role in the counterinsurgency campaign than ever before. Najibullah, the secret police chief, was elevated to the Afghan Politburo in November 1985. By the following spring Moscow had sacked Babrak Karmal and appointed Najibullah as Afghanistan’s president. His ruling councils were filled with ruthless intelligence operatives. The KGB-trained Afghan intelligence service swelled to about 30,000 professionals and 100,000 paid informers. Its domestic directorates, lacking cooperative sources among the population, routinely detained and tortured civilians in search of insight about mujahedin operations. The Afghan service also ran foreign operations in Iran and Pakistan. It maintained secret residencies in Quetta, Peshawar, Islamabad, New Delhi, Karachi, and elsewhere, communicating to Kabul through Soviet embassies and consulates. By planting agents in refugee camps Afghan intelligence gradually penetrated the mujahedin.15

  Frustrated by the copious new supplies pouring into Afghanistan, the Soviet Fortieth Army deployed intelligence teams and helicopter-borne Spetsnaz special forces to try to seal the Pakistan border during 1985. They failed, but they wreaked havoc in the effort. Spetsnaz units dispatched high-tech communications intercept vehicles called “Omsk vans” to track mujahedin movements from Peshawar or Quetta. When they located a convoy, they sent the new, fearsome Mi-24D helicopters on intercept missions across the barren Pakistani hills. The helicopters would fly five or ten miles inside Pakistan, then swing around and move up behind the mujahedin as they slouched along canyon paths or desert culverts. Spetsnaz commandos poured out and ambushed the rebels. Increasingly Russian special forces captured mujahedin equipment, such as their ubiquitous Japanese-made pickup trucks, which were shipped in by the CIA. The Russian special forces began to operate in disguise, dressed as Islamic rebels. The KGB also ran “false bands” of mujahedin across Afghanistan, paying them to attack genuine rebel groups in an attempt to sow dissension.16

  Mujahedin operating along the Pakistan border took heavy casualties in these Spetsnaz helicopter raids. They also had a few rare successes. Pakistani intelligence captured from Soviet defectors and handed over to Piekney the first intact Mi-24D ever taken in by the CIA. Langley ordered a team to Islamabad to load the dismantled prize on to a transport jet and fly it back to the United States; its exploitation saved the Pentagon millions of dollars in research and development costs, the Pentagon later reported.17

  Encouraged by the CIA, Pakistani intelligence also focused on sabotage operations that would cut Soviet supply lines. But the missions often proved difficult because even the most ardent Afghan Islamists refused to mount suicide operations.

  In his Wile E. Coyote–style efforts to blow up the Salang Tunnel north of Kabul, Yousaf tried to concoct truck bomb missions in which ISI would help load fuel tankers with explosives. Soviet soldiers moved quickly to intercept any truck that stalled inside the strategic tunnel, so there seemed no practical way to complete such a mission unless the truck driver was willing to die in the cause. The Afghans whom Yousaf trained uniformly denounced suicide attack proposals as against their religion. It was only the Arab volunteers—from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria, and other countries, who had been raised in an entirely different culture, spoke their own language, and preached their own interpretations of Islam while fighting far from their homes and families—who later advocated suicide attacks. Afghan jihadists, tightly woven into family, clan, and regional social networks, never embraced suicide tactics in significant numbers.18

  Afghan fighters also often refused to attack bridges or trade routes if they were important to civilian traders or farmers. The Afghan tolerance of civilian commerce in the midst of dire conflict frustrated visiting Americans. A congressman on tour would fly over Afghanistan, see a bridge standing unmolested, and complain loudly on his return to Washington that it ought to be blown up. But when the satellite-mapped attack plan was passed down through ISI to a particular Afghan commando team, the Afghans would often shrug off the order or use the supplied weapons to hit a different target of their own choosing. They took tolls from bridges. The livelihood of their clan often depended on open roads.

  Still, the CIA shipped to Pakistani intelligence many tons of C-4 plastic explosives for sabotage operations during this period. Britain’s MI6 provided magnetic depth charges to attack bridge pylons, particularly the bridge near Termez that spanned the Amu Darya. After 1985 the CIA also supplied electronic timing and detonation devices that made it easier to set off explosions from a remote location. The most basic delay detonator was the “time pencil,” a chemical device that wore down gradually and set off a bomb or rocket after a predictable period. It had been developed by the CIA’s Office of Technical Services. Guerrillas could use these devices to set an explosive charge at night, retreat, and then watch it blow up at first light. After 1985 the CIA also shipped in “E cell” delay detonators, which used sophisticated electronics to achieve similar effects. Thousands of the delay timers were distributed on the frontier.

  Speaking in an interview in July 1992, seven months before the first Islamist terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, a U.S. official closely involved in the CIA supply program was asked by the author to estimate the amount of plastic explosives that had been transferred by Pakistani intelligence to the mujahedin with CIA and Saudi support. The official spontaneously chose these words: “We could have probably blown up half of New York with the explosives that the Paks supplied.”

  CIA lawyers and operators at Langley were more sensitive than ever about second-guessing from Congress and the press. Casey’s Nicaragua operations were going sour just as the covert Afghan war began to escalate. The agency was criticized sharply for placing mines in Nicaragua’s harbors. There was a feeling taking hold in the Directorate of Operations by late 1985 that perhaps Casey had gone too far, that the agency was headed for another political crash.

  In the Afghan program the CIA was now supplying many “dual use” weapons systems, meaning weapons that could be used against legitimate military targets but also could be employed in terrorism or assassination. These included the new electronic detonators, the malleable plastic explosives, and sniper rifle packages. The rough rule at Langley was that the CIA would not supply any weapon where “its most likely use would be for assassination or criminal enterprise,” as one official involved put it. Since the CIA was not running the commando operations itself but was relying on Pakistani intelligence, “most likely use” could only be approximated. Langley’s Afghan task force chief, the rough and aggressive anticommunist Gust Avrakatos, tried to evade CIA lawyers. “These aren’t terrorist devices or assassination techniques,” Avrakatos told his colleagues when weapons such as sniper rifles had to be described in cables and memos. “Henceforth these are individual defensive devices.” He discouraged officers from putting too much in writing. When the Islamabad station sent a cable describing a borderline guerrilla tactic, he wrote back that the message had been garbled and that the station should not send “anything more on that subject ever again.” He shopped in Egypt for sabotage devices such as wheelbarrows rigged as bombs that could be used to target Soviet officers in Kabul. “Do I want to order bicycle bombs to park in front of an officers’ headquarters?” Avrakatos recalled asking. “Yes. That’s what spreads fear.” He endorsed a system run by Pakistani intelligence that rewarded Afghan commanders for the number of individual Soviet belt buckles they brought in.19

  American law about assassination and terrorism was entering another of its periods of flux. The executive order banning assassination, enacted by President Ford in response to the exposure of CIA plots from the 1960s, had been sitting unexamined on the books for a decade. Not even the hardliners in the Reagan Cabinet wanted the ban removed, but they had begun to question its ambiguities.When did targeting a general or head of state in war or in response to a terrorist attack drift across the line and become assa
ssination? Was the decision to target that general or head of state the issue, or was it the means employed to kill him? What if a preemptive assassination was undertaken to stop a terrorist from attacking the United States? The questions being debated were both strategic and pragmatic. For American national security, what policy was morally defensible and militarily effective? What, technically, did the Ford-era assassination ban cover? This had to be spelled out, CIA officers argued, or else agents and even civilian policy makers might inadvertently expose themselves to criminal prosecution.

  Reagan’s lawyers at the White House and the Justice Department believed that preemptive attacks on individuals carried out in self-defense—such as against a terrorist about to launch a strike—were clearly legal. But there were many questions about how such a standard should be defined and implemented.

  In the Afghan program sniper rifles created the greatest unease. They were known as “buffalo guns” and could accurately fire large, potent bullets from distances of one or two kilometers. The idea to supply them to the Afghan rebels had originated with a Special Forces enthusiast in Washington named Vaughan Forrest, who wrote a long report for the CIA and the National Security Council about how the mujahedin might counter Soviet Spetsnaz tactics by hitting Soviet commanders directly. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you need to hit them hard, you need to hit them deep, and you need to hit his heart and brains,” Forrest said. His enthusiasm extended to a broader campaign of urban sabotage that some on the NSC interagency committee regarded as outright terrorism. But the idea of targeting Soviet commanders with the sniper rifles found support. “The phrase ‘shooting ducks in a barrel’ was used,” one participant recalled. The sniper program’s advocates wanted to “off Russian generals in series.”20