Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  Most of the reporting that began to flow from the unilateral agents focused on the impact of Stingers, weapons deliveries, and propaganda campaigns. But for the first time came complaints from some Afghan fighters to the CIA about a rising force in their jihad: Arab volunteers. Thousands of them were arriving in Afghanistan.

  Afghan commanders would send out notes to the Islamabad station, sometimes with pictures showing a truckload of Arab jihad fighters driving through their territory. The Afghans called them “Wahhabis” because of their adherence to rigid Saudi Islamic doctrine banning adornment and the worship of shrines. Early on, some Afghan fighters clashed with Arab jihadists over the issue of decorated graves. Most Afghan mujahedin buried their dead in rough dirt and stone graves marked by green flags and modest adornments, following Sufi-influenced traditions. Echoing the methods of the Saudi Ikhwan near Jedda more than half a century earlier, the Wahhabis swept through and tore down these markers, proclaiming that they encouraged the worship of false idols. In at least a few cases the Afghans attacked and killed these Arab graveyard raiders. Bearden recalled the thrust of the very early reports arriving from Afghan commanders in the field: “They say we are dumb, and we do not know the Koran, and they are more trouble than they are ever going to be worth.”10

  OSAMA BIN LADEN moved his household (he had married and fathered his first children) from Saudi Arabia to Peshawar around the same time that Milton Bearden arrived in Islamabad as CIA station chief. He rented a two-story compound in a quiet, relatively prosperous, pine-tree-cooled section of the city called University Town, where charities, Western aid groups, diplomats, Arab preachers, and wealthy Afghan exiles all lived as uneasy neighbors in walled-off villas.11

  From his regular visits, his work with Ahmed Badeeb and Saudi intelligence, his patronage of Arab charities, and his importation of bulldozers and other construction equipment, bin Laden was already a well-known figure among Muslim Brotherhood–connected Afghan rebels. He was closest to Hekmatyar and Sayyaf. His acquaintances in Peshawar viewed bin Laden as a young, sweet-tempered, soft-mannered, and above all fabulously wealthy patron of worthy jihad causes. He was a rising young sheikh, not much of an orator but a smiling visitor to the hospitals and orphanages, and, increasingly, an important discussion group member in Peshawar’s radical Arab circles.

  Bin Laden rode horses for pleasure, sometimes in the eastern tribal frontier, but for the most part his was a tea-pouring, meeting-oriented life in damp concrete houses where cushion-ringed reception rooms would fill with visiting Kuwaiti merchants and Syrian professors of Islamic law. Days would drift by in loose debates, fatwa (religious edict) drafting, humanitarian project development—a shifting mix of engineering, philanthropy, and theology.

  “He speaks like a university professor,” remembered an Arab journalist who met with bin Laden frequently in Peshawar. “‘We will do this, we will do that,’ like he is at the head of the table of the political committee.” His quiet style was unusual: “He is not your typical Arabic popular speaker.”

  Peshawar by late 1986 was a city of makeshift warehouses and charities swelling and bursting from the money, food, trucks, mules, and medicine being shipped to the Afghan frontier in quantities double and triple those of six months before. The humanitarian aspects of the jihad were expanding as rapidly as the military campaign. In part this was a result of National Security Decision Directive 166, but in addition United Nations agencies, European charities such as Oxfam, proselytizing Christian missionaries, and government relief agencies such as U.S. AID had all come swarming into Peshawar after 1985 to build hospitals, schools, feeding stations, clinics, and cross-border ambulance services, much of it paid for by the American government. These projects operated on an unprecedented scale: One University of Nebraska–run school program worked at 1,300 sites inside Afghanistan. In one dusty University Town compound, profane, hard-traveled U.N. food specialists might be tossing sacks of seed onto blue-flagged trucks while neighboring American Baptist missionaries sat on wooden benches reading to Afghan children in English from the New Testament, while over the next wall bearded young volunteers from the Persian Gulf bent toward Mecca in chanted prayer.

  Operating in self-imposed isolation, major Saudi Arabian charities and such organizations as the Saudi Red Crescent, the World Muslim League, the Kuwaiti Red Crescent, and the International Islamic Relief Organization set up their own offices in Peshawar. Funded in ever-rising amounts by Saudi intelligence and annual zakat contributions from mosques and wealthy individuals, they, too, built hospitals, clinics, schools, feeding stations, and battlefield medic services. European charities such as Médicins sans Frontières recruited volunteer surgeons from Brussels and Paris for short rotations to treat mujahedin victims in Peshawar, and the Islamic charities begin to recruit doctors from Cairo, Amman, Tunis, and Algiers for volunteer tours. Since the Muslim Brotherhood had a strong presence in the Arab professional classes—especially among Egyptian doctors and lawyers—the recruitment network for humanitarian volunteer work became intertwined with the political-religious networks that raised money and guns for the Islamist Afghan leaders such as Hekmatyar and Sayyaf.

  Typical of the Brotherhood-recruited volunteers was Ayman al-Zawahiri, a young doctor, scion of a wealthy Egyptian family long active in the Islamist movement. Al-Zawahiri had been imprisoned in Cairo during the early 1980s for activity on the edges of the plot to assassinate Anwar Sadat. After his release he found his way via the Brotherhood’s Islamic Medical Society to Peshawar, volunteering as a doctor at the Kuwaiti-funded Al Hilal Hospital on the Afghan frontier. “I saw this as an opportunity to get to know one of the arenas of jihad that might be a tributary and a base for jihad in Egypt and the Arab region,” al-Zawahiri recalled. An Arab snob of sorts, he saw Egypt as “the heart of the Islamic world, where the basic battle of Islam was being fought.” But to prevail back home, “a jihadist movement needs an arena that would act like an incubator, where its seeds would grow and where it can acquire practical experience in combat, politics and organizational matters.” Peshawar seemed to him such a place. Al-Zawahiri settled there in 1986.12

  Abdullah Azzam was by far the best known Arab Islamist in Peshawar at the time bin Laden and al-Zawahiri took up residence. He helped run a council of Peshawar’s Arab and Islamic charities. Born in a village near the West Bank city of Jenin, Azzam earned a doctorate in Islamic law from Al-Azhar University in Cairo during the 1970s. He became close to the Egyptian exile Mohammed Qutb and began to preach and adapt the radical jihadist doctrines of Qutb’s deceased brother. After teaching in Jedda during the late 1970s, he transferred as a lecturer to the new Islamic University in Islamabad, down the hill from Quaid-I-Azam’s campus. In 1984 he moved down the Grand Trunk Road to Peshawar.

  The title of the new humanitarian organization Azzam founded that year, the Office of Services, signaled his own thinking about the Afghan jihad: He wanted mainly to aid the Afghans. He traveled the Persian Gulf and lectured at Friday prayers in wealthy mosques from Jedda to Kuwait City, and as the charitable funds flowed, he used them to provide medical and relief services as well as military support.

  Bin Laden, his former pupil in Jedda, became an important source of money and then an operations partner beginning in 1984. Together they recruited other volunteers from across the Arab world. Azzam announced that bin Laden would pay the expenses—about $300 per month—of any Arab who wanted to fight on Afghanistan’s battlefields. In 1986 they opened their first office in the United States amid the large Arab community in Tucson, Arizona.13

  Overall, the U.S. government looked favorably on the Arab recruitment drives. An international brigade of volunteers—modeled on the international socialist volunteers who had joined the Spanish civil war against Franco during the 1930s—would provide a way to broaden the formal coalition of nations involved in the anti-Soviet jihad, this argument went. As more and more Arabs arrived in Pakistan during 1985 and 1986, “the CIA examined ways to increase their
participation,” then-deputy CIA director Robert Gates recalled. An Afghan specialist in the State Department’s intelligence bureau argued that “we should try and coordinate with them.” The idea was “not to see them as the enemy.” But the proposals never moved beyond the talking stage. At the Islamabad station Milt Bearden felt that bin Laden himself “actually did some very good things,” as Bearden recalled it. “He put a lot of money in a lot of the right places in Afghanistan.” Bin Laden was not regarded as “someone who was anti-American.” The CIA did receive negative reports about the Arab volunteers from its Afghan agent network and from Western and Christian aid organizations. Their complaints coursed through the CIA and State Department cabling system, but the issue was only an occasional subject for reporting and analysis. No policy or action plan was ever developed.14

  Abdullah Azzam preached stridently against the United States. He would soon help found Hamas. Prince Turki al-Faisal and Saudi intelligence became important supporters. Azzam circulated in a world apart from the official Americans in Pakistan. Even relatively neutral European aid workers living in Peshawar had only sporadic contact with him.

  By the summer of 1986 small signs of a split between bin Laden and Azzam had become visible to those involved in the closed circles of the Arab jihadists. Azzam was such a commanding figure, and bin Laden such a relatively minor pupil (however copious his wealth), that there was no question of an open challenge from the protégé, especially in a culture where seniority and scholarship were so respected. Yet bin Laden seemed to be heading in a new direction. The change arose partly from his swelling ego and partly from the political debates now developing in University Town’s Arab parlors:Who was the true enemy of the jihad? The communists? The Americans? Israel? The impious government of Egypt? What was the relationship between the Afghan war and the global goals of the Muslim Brotherhood?15

  Saudi and Pakistani intelligence had begun to collaborate on expensive road building and depot building projects along the Afghan frontier, hoping to create physical infrastructure that could withstand the Soviet Spetsnaz assaults. ISI created a sizable cell within its Afghan bureau devoted solely to humanitarian and building projects. When Soviets first attacked supply routes on the Pakistan border in 1984, Afghan rebels often fled. Their retreats disrupted supply flows to commanders inside Afghanistan—just as the Soviets intended. The new border infrastructure—roads, caves, warehouses, and military training camps—was designed to be defended against Soviet attacks. This would allow ISI to create forward supply dumps and more mechanized transport to push weapons into Afghanistan.

  Prince Turki and his chief of staff, Ahmed Badeeb, flew to Pakistan as the projects got under way, traveling on the General Intelligence Department’s Gulfstream jets. At ISI headquarters they were feted with elaborate meals and briefed on the war’s developments with charts and maps drawn with the help of American satellites. In the evenings the Saudi embassy would usually host a reception in Turki’s honor, inviting Arab diplomats, local Islamic scholars, and sometimes Osama bin Laden. Turki traveled occasionally to the Afghan border to inspect the new depots and roads. Badeeb stayed for longer periods at the safehouses he had established in Peshawar through the official Saudi charities.

  Bin Laden’s imported bulldozers were used for these civil-military projects between 1984 and 1986. Two regions received the most attention: a border area called Parrot’s Beak, almost directly west of Peshawar where a cone of Pakistani territory protruded into Afghanistan, and an area farther south, near Miram Shah, a mountainous region across the border from the Afghan town of Khost. Bin Laden worked mainly in the latter area.

  “It was largely Arab money that saved the system,” the Pakistani intelligence brigadier Mohammed Yousaf recalled. The extra sums were spent on transport as well as border infrastructure, largely in support of the Muslim Brotherhood–linked Afghan parties and commanders. Jallaladin Haqqanni attracted and organized the Arab volunteers. He fought in a border region populated by cantankerous, socially conservative Pashtun tribes, a place “steeped in cussedness,” as an American who traveled there put it. An unshaven, thin man who draped himself in bandoliers of assault rifle ammunition, Haqqanni emerged in the late 1980s as the ISI’s main anticommunist battering ram around Khost. Celebrated as a kind of noble savage by slack-bellied preachers in Saudi Arabia’s wealthy urban mosques, Haqqanni became a militant folk hero to Wahhabi activists. He operated fundraising offices in the Persian Gulf and hosted young Arab jihad volunteers in his tribal territory. In part because of Haqqanni’s patronage, the border regions nearest Pakistan became increasingly the province of interlocking networks of Pakistani intelligence officers, Arab volunteers, and Wahhabi madrassas.

  Abdullah Azzam thought some of the cave building and road construction was a waste of money. Bin Laden wanted to spend great sums on a hospital clinic in a remote Afghan border village in Paktia province called Jaji. The crude clinic would be built in a defensible cave, in the same region where bin Laden had been helping to build roads. “Abdullah felt there were twenty-nine or thirty provinces in Afghanistan—why spend so much on one elaborate place right on the border, practically in Pakistan?” recalled one Arab volunteer involved.

  But bin Laden’s ambitions were widening: He wanted the Jaji complex so that he could have his own camp for Arab volunteers, a camp where he would be a leader. He opened his first training facility in 1986, modeled on those just over the barren hills run by Pakistani intelligence. Young Arab jihadists would learn how to use assault rifles, explosives, and detonators, and they would listen to lectures about why they had been called to fight. Bin Laden called his first training camp “the Lion’s Den,” by some accounts, “al Ansar” (a name of the earliest followers of the Prophet Mohammed) by others. And despite Abdullah Azzam’s questions, he declared that he was going ahead with his other projects at Jaji.

  “Inshallah [if it is God’s will], you will know my plans,” bin Laden told his mentor.16

  THE ANTI-SOVIET AFGHAN JIHAD was coming to an end, but hardly anyone knew it or understood why. Not bin Laden. Not the CIA.

  On November 13, 1986, behind the Kremlin’s ramparts, the Soviet Politburo’s inner circle met in secret at the behest of Mikhail Gorbachev, the opaque, windy, and ambitious reformer who had taken power twenty months before.

  Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the Soviet armed forces chief of staff, explained that the Fortieth Army had so far deployed fifty thousand Soviet soldiers to seal the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, “but they are unable to close all channels through which arms are being smuggled.” The pack mules kept coming. Blacktopped roads were now being constructed. There was no sign of a realistic military solution.

  “People ask: ‘What are we doing there?’ ” Gorbachev observed. “Will we be there endlessly? Or should we end this war?”

  If the Soviet Union did not get out of Afghanistan, “we’ll disgrace ourselves in all our relations,” Gorbachev answered himself. In the presence of the Politburo’s inner circle and his closest advisers on reform, he had been thinking aloud about the Afghan problem since he first took office. He publicly referred to the war as a “bleeding wound” early in 1986. As the Fortieth Army failed to make progress on the ground, Gorbachev became bolder about an alternative: leaving Afghanistan altogether. By November the issue seemed to be mainly one of timing. “The strategic goal is to finish the war in one, maximum two years, and withdraw the troops,” Gorbachev told his colleagues that day. “We have set a clear goal: Help speed up the process so we have a friendly neutral country, and get out of there.”17

  It was one of the most significant Politburo discussions of the late Cold War, but the CIA knew nothing about it. The Americans would not learn of Gorbachev’s decision for another year. Analysts at the agency and elsewhere in the American intelligence community understood some of the intense pressures then facing Gorbachev and the Soviet leadership. The Soviet Union’s economy was failing. Its technological achievements lagged badly
behind the computerized West. Its people yearned for a more normal, open politics. Some analysts captured some of these pressures in their classified reporting, but on the whole the CIA’s analysts understated the Soviet Union’s internal problems. Policy makers in Reagan’s Cabinet were also slow to grasp the determination of Gorbachev and his reformers to implement meaningful changes. Afghanistan was one litmus test for both sides.

  During the earlier debates in Washington about the Afghan jihad, the National Security Council had obtained sensitive intelligence about discussions within the Politburo on Afghanistan. According to this reporting, which was classified at the highest possible level, known then as VEIL, Gorbachev had decided when he first took power in the spring of 1985 that he would give the Soviet Union’s hardline generals one or two years to win the war outright. This assessment seemed to justify an American escalation in reply. But as it turned out, the VEIL intelligence was just an isolated, even misleading fragment. It may have been accurate when it first surfaced, but by the autumn of 1986 the Politburo policy it described had been overtaken by Gorbachev’s gathering plans to leave Afghanistan.18

  The CIA’s analysts understood the pressures buffeting Soviet society better than they understood decision-making at the top. The agency would not learn what was really happening inside the Politburo until after the Soviet Union had dissolved. “Our day-to-day reporting was accurate but limited by our lack of inside information on politics at the top level,” Robert Gates, one of the CIA’s leading Soviet analysts, would concede years later. “We monitored specific events but too often did not draw back to get a broader perspective.”19