Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  Clarridge wanted to kill the terrorists outright. He found the American government’s position against assassination of leaders who sponsored terrorism to be “hypocritical.” The president would authorize the military “to carry out air attacks that may or may not hit and kill the real target” but would not authorize the Counterterrorist Center to stealthily assassinate the same man. He asked, “Why is an expensive military raid with heavy collateral damage to our allies and to innocent children okay—more morally acceptable than a bullet to the head?”32

  BY EARLY 1986, Brigadier Yousaf had constructed a large and sophisticated secret infrastructure for guerrilla training along the Afghan frontier. Between sixteen thousand and eighteen thousand fresh recruits passed through his camps and training courses each year. He also began to facilitate independent guerrilla and sabotage training by Afghan rebel parties, outside of ISI control. From six thousand to seven thousand jihadists trained this way each year, Yousaf later estimated. Some of these were Arab volunteers.33

  The syllabus offered by Pakistani intelligence became more specialized. New mujahedin recruits entered a two-to three-week basic training course where they learned how to maneuver and fire an assault rifle. The best were then selected for graduate courses in more complex weapons and tactics. Yousaf established specialized training camps for explosives work, urban sabotage and car bombing, antiaircraft weapons, sniper rifles, and land mines. Thousands of new graduates—the great majority Afghans, but also now some Algerians, Palestinians, Tunisians, Saudi Arabians, and Egyptians—fanned out across Afghanistan as mountain snows melted in the spring of 1986 and a new fighting season began. Across the Afghan border they established new camps in rock valleys and captured government garrisons; this allowed them to continue training on their own, to recruit new fighters, and to refine the sabotage and guerrilla techniques taught by Pakistani intelligence.

  “Terrorism is often confused or equated with … guerrilla warfare,” the terrorism theorist Bruce Hoffman once wrote. “This is not surprising, since guerrillas often employ the same tactics (assassination, kidnapping, bombings of public gathering-places, hostage-taking, etc.) for the same purposes (to intimidate or coerce, thereby affecting behavior through the arousal of fear) as terrorists.”34

  Ten years later the vast training infrastructure that Yousaf and his colleagues built with the enormous budgets endorsed by NSDD-166—the specialized camps, the sabotage training manuals, the electronic bomb detonators, and so on—would be referred to routinely in America as “terrorist infrastructure.” At the time of its construction, however, it served a jihadist army that operated openly on the battlefield, attempted to seize and hold territory, and exercised sovereignty over civilian populations. They pursued a transparent national cause. By 1986, however, that Afghan cause entangled increasingly with the international Islamist networks whose leaders had a more ambitious goal: the toppling of corrupt and antireligious governments across the Islamic world.

  In its first years the CIA’s new Counterterrorist Center placed virtually no emphasis on the Muslim Brotherhood–inspired networks. After Abu Nidal and Hezbollah, the center’s next largest branches all focused on secular leftist terrorist groups. These included multiple Palestinian groups, Marxist-Leninist terrorists in Europe, the Shining Path in Peru, and the Japanese Red Army.35

  Continued ferment in Tehran generated fears among CIA analysts that other weak Middle Eastern regimes might succumb to Islamic revolt. But now more than six years had passed since the Iranian Revolution, and no other similar insurgency had yet erupted. There were stirrings of religious dissent in places such as Algeria and a few Islamist bombings in France. Britain’s MI6, concerned about rising Islamic radicalism, commissioned a retired Arabist spy to travel for months through the Muslim world, from Morocco to Indonesia, to write a detailed report about contemporary Islamism on the street and in the mosques.36 But these were minor efforts that attracted little attention within the CIA or outside it.

  There was one other small blip on the Counterterrorist Center’s screen. From Pakistan arrived reports of a new group called the Islamic Salvation Foundation that had been formed in Peshawar to recruit and support Arab volunteers for the Afghan jihad, outside the control of any of the ISI-backed rebel parties. The network was operating offices and guesthouses along the Afghan frontier. Osama bin Laden, a wealthy young Saudi, was spreading large sums of money around Peshawar to help the new center expand. He was tapping into ISI’s guerrilla training camps on behalf of newly arrived Arab jihadists. The early reports of his activity that were passed along to the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center in this period suggested that bin Laden “certainly was not engaged in any fighting. He was not a warrior,” recalled Stanley Bedington, a senior analyst at the center from its beginning. Still, “When a man starts throwing around money like that, he comes to your notice.”37

  When they first learned of efforts by bin Laden and allied Islamic proselytizers to increase the number of Arab volunteers fighting the Soviets, some of the most ardent cold warriors at Langley thought this program should be formally endorsed and expanded. The more committed anti-Soviet fighters, the better, they argued. As more and more Arabs arrived in Pakistan during 1985 and 1986, the CIA “examined ways to increase their participation, perhaps in the form of some sort of ‘international brigade,’ but nothing came of it,” Robert Gates recalled.38

  At CIA headquarters Osama bin Laden was little more than a name in a file for now. But in tumultuous Peshawar he had begun to organize his own escalation of the Afghan war.

  8

  “Inshallah, You Will

  Know My Plans”

  MILTON BEARDEN REPLACED William Piekney as CIA station chief in Islamabad in July 1986. A large-boned, heavyset, boyish-faced, slang-slinging Texan who aspired to novel writing and seemed to conduct himself as if his life were a Hollywood casting call, Bearden had drawn close to Casey a few years earlier when he was station chief in Khartoum, Sudan. There he had smuggled besieged Israeli intelligence officers out of the country in crates labeled as diplomatic mail, just the sort of dashing operation Casey loved. When Casey traveled in Africa in his blackened Starlifter, Bearden was his escort to late-night meetings with murderous intelligence chiefs. They were both romantics who reveled in the spy’s life. The CIA director needed someone who could manage the massive escalation he had helped set in motion in Afghanistan. He called Bearden into his seventh-floor office at Langley and told him the new policy: “I want you to go out there and win.”1

  Bearden understood that Casey “had a giant vision” of global struggle against the Soviet Union through covert action and that “Afghanistan was a little part of it.” Yet Casey made clear that he saw this last push along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border as an urgent moral mission. As Bearden saw it, Casey believed that sacrificing Afghan lives without pursuing total victory over the communists was a strategy for “small minds.” Casey was “the best and worst director” the CIA had ever known, Bearden thought.

  Inside the Directorate of Operations, Bearden was a popular figure—“Uncle Milty,” an indulgent boss, an operator’s operator, full of humor and bluster. He landed in hot, shapeless Islamabad charged by Casey’s ambition. The station on the embassy’s rebuilt third floor was still modest in size compared to the amount of money and paperwork it now handled. Bearden tore through the antiseptic office suites like a bull rider. “He carried a swagger stick, and he was on a high,” a colleague remembered. He talked to everyone—including the stiff peacock, General Akhtar, the Pakistani intelligence chief—as if they were his personal guests at a Texas keg party. He buttonholed Soviet diplomats at polite receptions and quoted Shakespeare as Afghan policy: “Speak not of the manner of your leaving but leave at once.” At regional conferences for CIA chiefs of station, Bearden would brag, “All of you guys out there, you try to recruit Soviets. Me, I just kill them.” If he got angry at Pakistani intelligence over some problem in the weapons pipeline, he would refuse to take Ge
neral Akhtar’s calls for a week, just to let him stew. Still, he became a favorite of some Pakistani officers. When his family was snowed in on vacation, the Pakistani air force flew in a C-130 to get them out. Bearden cultivated an impression that the conspiracy-minded Pakistani elite were inclined toward anyway: that the CIA was the real power in the American government. Inside the walled U.S. embassy compound, Bearden’s colleagues noted the small touches: The diplomatic license plate on his official car ended with “01,” the number usually reserved for the ambassador.2

  Bearden tried to tame the huge flow of material and money coming to Pakistan. Along the northern border between Pakistan and China, Bearden helped arrange the truck transport of hundreds of mules being sold to the CIA by the Chinese communists for use in smuggling guns that would be fired against Soviet communists. Because there weren’t enough mules, Bearden ordered animals by ship from as far away as Texas and Djibouti. When a freighter from Djibouti went missing on the high seas, Bearden papered the world for several weeks with urgent classified cables headlined “SHIP OF MULES.”3

  The Islamabad station had warned in a broad July assessment cable that the pace of mujahedin attacks appeared to be slowing under the relentless helicopter assaults mounted by Soviet special forces, especially along the Pakistani border.4 Langley analysts and Pakistani generals shared a fear in the summer of 1986 that the new Soviet assault tactics might be tipping the war’s balance against the CIA-backed rebels. On September 26, 1986, about two months after Bearden’s arrival, the balance began to tip back. Crouching in scrub rocks on a barren plain near the Jalalabad airport in eastern Afghanistan, just two hours’ drive from Peshawar, a commander named Engineer Ghaffar (“the forgiver”) and two bearded colleagues lifted onto their shoulders the first of a new type of antiaircraft weapon supplied to the rebels by the CIA. Powered by batteries and guided by the most effective portable heat-seeking system yet invented, the Stinger weapon was an American-made marvel of modern frontline arsenals. Its infrared tracking system made it impervious to countermeasures normally taken by Soviet pilots.

  A military engineer trained in the Soviet Union, Ghaffar had been selected by Pakistani intelligence to attempt the first Stinger mission, and he had trained in secret in an ISI compound near Rawalpindi. Eight Soviet army Mi-24D helicopter gunships approached the Jalalabad runway. Ghaffar sighted his missile, pushed its black rubber “uncage” button on the grip stock, and pulled the trigger. His first shot pinged, misfired, and rattled in the rocks a few hundred yards away, but another flashed across the plain and smashed into a helicopter, destroying it in a fireball. More missiles flew in rapid succession, and two other helicopters fell, killing their Russian crews.

  Akhtar called Bearden as soon as he received the radio report. The station chief sent a cable to Langley describing the strikes but warned there was no confirmation. A day later the Islamabad embassy’s communications vault rattled with a startling reply: By sheer coincidence a U.S. KH-11 spy satellite had been passing overhead, taking routine pictures of the Afghan battlefield. The satellite had transmitted a clear photo of the Jalalabad airport showing three charred balls of steel scrap, formerly helicopters, lying side by side across an active runway. The incoming cable from Langley was triumphant:

  SATELLITE IMAGERY CONFIRMS THREE KILLS AT JALALABAD AS REPORTED. PLEASE PASS OUR CONGRATULATIONS FOR A JOB WELL DONE.

  The CIA had learned years before that Ronald Reagan was not much of a reader. Dense, detailed briefings about global affairs rarely reached his desk. But Reagan loved movies. Casey encouraged his colleagues to distill important intelligence so the president could watch it on a movie screen. Before Reagan met visiting heads of state, he would sometimes screen a short CIA-produced classified bio movie about his visitor. Thinking partly of its most important customer, the CIA had equipped Engineer Ghaffar’s team with a Sony video camera to record the Stinger’s debut.

  “Allahu Akhbar! Allahu Akhbar!” the shooters cried as they fired the Afghan war’s first Stingers. By the time Ghaffar had hit the third helicopter, the videotape looked “like some kid at a football game,” as Bearden later described it. “Everybody is jumping up and down—all you’re getting is people jumping up and down—and seeing the earth kind of go back and forth.” The tape’s last sequence showed Ghaffar’s crew unloading Kalashnikov rounds into the crumpled corpses of the Soviet crew as they lay sprawled on the Jalalabad tarmac. Within weeks the highly classified video had been ferried from Islamabad. President Reagan screened it at the White House. As the tape and the KH-11 satellite pictures were passed around the Old Executive Office Building and shared with a few members of Congress, a triumphal buzz of excitement spread in Washington.

  The decision to supply Stingers had been made against the CIA’s initial advice. Not long after National Security Decision Directive 166 took force, members of the interagency group on Afghanistan had begun to push for the missiles, arguing that they could repulse the Spetsnaz’s helicopter assault tactics. Introducing a made-in-the-U.S.A. weapon on the Afghan battlefield would hand the Soviets a propaganda victory, the CIA’s Near East Division feared. But Morton Abramowitz, the State Department’s intelligence director, backed the idea. After a long and emotional debate, the CIA capitulated. Even then, months of secret negotiations were required with the Chinese and with Pakistani president Zia before all were satisfied that the risks of Soviet retaliation were worth bearing.5

  Soon after Ghaffar’s video trailer was screened at the White House, dozens of mujahedin commanders in eastern Afghanistan began to launch Stingers at Soviet helicopters and lumbering transport planes, with devastating results. Apprehensive Russian and Afghan crews ascended as often as possible above the Stinger’s effective ceiling of about 12,500 feet, severely diminishing their ability to carry out low-flying attack raids. Soviet forces stopped evacuating the wounded by helicopter, demoralizing frontline officers. Within months Bearden had cabled Langley to declare that Stingers had become the war’s “most significant battlefield development.”6

  If diverted from Afghanistan, a Stinger could easily be used as a terrorist weapon against passenger aircraft, the agency warned. Their spread in Afghanistan added urgency to the CIA’s need for agents to monitor rebel commanders and Pakistani intelligence. What if Hekmatyar sold Stingers to terrorist groups? What if the missiles were stolen? How would the CIA even know? The agency needed more of its own reporting sources.

  Even by its own rich standards, the jihad was now swimming in money. Congress secretly allocated about $470 million in U.S. funding for Afghan covert action in fiscal year 1986, and then upped that to about $630 million in fiscal 1987, not counting the matching funds from Saudi Arabia. With support from headquarters, Bearden expanded the CIA’s unilateral recruitment of independent Afghan agents and commanders without the involvement of Pakistani intelligence. The money needed for such a payroll amounted to crumbs in comparison to the new budgets. The recruited commanders were asked to help the CIA keep track of weapons handouts, Pakistani corruption, and battlefield developments. The payroll had several tiers. A regional commander might draw an agency retainer of $20,000 or $25,000 a month in cash. A somewhat more influential leader might draw $50,000 a month. A commander with influence over one or more provinces might receive $100,000 monthly, sometimes more. An effective commander used these retainers not solely to enrich himself but to hold together clan or volunteer militias that required salaries, travel expenses, and support for families that often lived in squalid refugee camps.

  Abdul Haq remained on the CIA’s unilateral payroll. The CIA also continued to deliver payments and supplies directly to Ahmed Shah Massoud. (Unilateral CIA assistance had first been delivered to Massoud in 1984.) The CIA later sent in secure communications sets, allowing Massoud to interact with dispersed commanders and allies in Peshawar without fear of Soviet interception.

  Bearden’s Islamabad station expressed skepticism about Massoud. Some people involved thought it might be in part because o
f the testosterone-fed jockeying between the CIA and the British: Massoud was a British favorite, therefore the CIA didn’t like him much.7 Then, too, there was a residue of distrust dating to the truce deals that Massoud had cut with Soviet forces in 1983. Bearden told colleagues that he respected Massoud’s track record as a fighter but saw Massoud already positioning himself to take power in postwar Kabul, hoarding supplies and limiting operations. “Ahmed, I know what you’re doing, and I don’t blame you, but don’t do it on my nickel” was the thrust of Bearden’s message. A CIA officer at Langley told a French counterpart, referring to the agency’s support for Hekmatyar, “Gulbuddin is not as bad as you fear, and Massoud is not as good as you hope.”8

  The CIA’s network of Afghan unilaterals swelled to about four dozen paid commanders and agents. That was a large number of running contacts to keep hidden for long from Pakistani intelligence, given that CIA case officers had to meet regularly with their clients. ISI routinely surveilled known CIA case officers even in the midst of a nominally friendly liaison. Practicing standard tradecraft, the Islamabad station organized its Afghan network so that no one CIA officer, not even Bearden, knew the real names of every agent in the system. Commanders on retainer were given cryptonyms for cabling purposes. Massoud was too well known to be hidden behind code names, but even so, knowledge of that liaison within the U.S. embassy was limited very tightly.

  Because of the large sums of dollars now arriving, the Islamabad station tried to streamline its cash distributions to minimize the number of times when American officers had to travel on Pakistani roads carrying fortunes worthy of robbery and murder. The agency began to use electronic transfers for its subsidies to Pakistani intelligence, routing money through the Pakistan Ministry of Finance. To deliver cash to commanders, the CIA also began to use the hawala system, an informal banking network in the Middle East and South Asia that permits an individual to send money to a small trading stall in, say, Karachi, for instant delivery to a named recipient hundreds or thousands of miles away. Especially after the Iran-Contra scandal erupted in Washington late in 1986, the Islamabad station took great pains to document every transfer. Given the amounts now involved, it was as easy to misplace $3 million or $4 million as it was to leave your keys on your desk.9