Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  Massoud husbanded his supplies that spring, built up his alliances across the north, and waited. The long anticommunist jihad’s last act still lay ahead.

  HEKMATYAR’S EAGERNESS to conspire with a hardline communist general and the willingness of Pakistani intelligence to support the plot appalled many Afghans and bolstered support for Peter Tomsen’s new policy approach in Washington. The coup attempt made plain that Afghanistan’s Cold War divides were dissolving rapidly. Extremists from seemingly opposite poles in the post–Soviet-Afghan war had linked up. It was all the more crucial, Tomsen and his allies argued, for the United States to build up moderate centrists in the Afghan rebel movement and to search for stable postwar politics.

  It was by now conventional wisdom within the State Department that Saudi intelligence had become the Afghan war’s most important hidden hand and that no new approach could be constructed without Prince Turki al-Faisal’s personal support. Peter Tomsen and his team traveled frequently to Riyadh.16

  Prince Turki remained an elusive, ambiguous figure. In the decade since his first meetings with Pakistan’s General Akhtar and his Afghan clients in 1980, the prince had evolved into one of Saudi Arabia’s most important leaders, a high-level interlocutor between American officials and the Saudi royal family, and a frequent and mysterious traveler to Middle Eastern capitals. He maintained palatial residences in Jedda and Riyadh. He summered at luxurious resorts in Europe. Now forty-five and no longer the boyish foreign policy expert he had been at the start of his career, Turki had become an elegant professional, an attentive consumer of satellite television news, and a reader of serious policy journals. He had built personal relationships with senior officers in every intelligence service in Europe and the Arab world. In addition to Pakistan he poured subsidies into the intelligence services of moderate Saudi allies such as Morocco and Jordan, buying access to information and people.17 He seemed most at home on the luxurious circuit of foreign policy and international security conferences held at Davos, Switzerland, or the Aspen Institute in Colorado, where diplomats and generals debated the challenges of the post–Cold War world while smoking Cuban cigars. Within the Saudi royal family, Turki’s influence was constrained by his relative youth. In a political system based on family and seniority, he languished in the second tier, tied by blood and political outlook to the family’s most liberal and modernizing branch but not old or well placed enough to be its leader. Still, as CIA and other American officials identified Turki as perhaps the most reliable individual in the Saudi cabinet and as his reputation for serious work grew, Turki established an authority within the Saudi government far greater than his years would otherwise permit. On Afghanistan he was without question the man to see.

  Whisked to the General Intelligence Department’s boxy Riyadh headquarters in a long stretch limousine, Tomsen and his team, usually including the CIA’s Riyadh station chief, sat for long hours with Turki in the spring of 1990 to talk about the new American approach to the covert war. These were languid sessions on overstuffed Louis XIV furniture in air-conditioned offices laden with tea and sweets. Turki seemed to revel in such conversation. The meetings would begin at 10 or 11 P.M. and drift toward dawn. The prince was unfailingly polite and persistently curious about the details—even the minutia—of the Afghan war. He tracked individual commanders, intellectual figures, and the most complex nuances of tribal politics. He had questions, too, about American policy and domestic politics, and like many other Georgetown University alumni influenced by Jesuit rigor, he seemed to enjoy abstract, conceptual policy issues.

  Tomsen and others at the State Department tried to persuade Prince Turki that Saudi interests as well as American interests now lay in moving away from the Islamists backed by his own operatives and by Pakistani intelligence. Tomsen wanted Saudi funding to help build up his alternative shura of independent Afghan rebel commanders, outside of ISI control but with a strong role in the new movement for Massoud. In Washington, Tomsen arranged for a meeting between one of Massoud’s representatives and the influential Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, in the hope that Bandar would cable back his support for the commanders’ shura to Prince Turki and others. Turki handled the appeal that spring the way Saudi intelligence usually dealt with sticky conflicts: He opened his checkbook, and he played both sides. Turki handed over millions of dollars to support Tomsen’s new commanders’ initiative.18 At the same time Turki increased his support to Pakistani intelligence, Tomsen’s nemesis, outstripping the CIA’s contributions for the first time.

  For the period from October 1989 through October 1990, Congress cut its secret allocation for the CIA’s covert Afghan program by about 60 percent, to $280 million. Saudi intelligence, meanwhile, provided $435 million from the kingdom’s official treasury and another $100 million from the private resources of various Saudi and Kuwaiti princes. Saudi and Kuwaiti funding continued to increase during the first seven months of 1990, bettering the CIA’s contribution. Saudi intelligence organized what it called the King Fahd Plan for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan, a $250 million civil project of repair and construction. This tsunami of Gulf money ensured that even if the CIA’s operatives cooperated fully with the new U.S. policy designed to isolate extremists such as Hekmatyar, the agency’s efforts would be dwarfed by the unregulated money flowing from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf.19

  What was Prince Turki’s motivation in this double game? The Americans who interacted with him, who mainly admired him, could only speculate. They accepted that Turki—like Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, or Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister—belonged to the pro-Western, modernizing wing of the Saudi royal family. Compared to some other senior princes, Turki embraced American and European culture and sought to emulate the West’s models of economic development. Clearly he imagined a Saudi Arabia in the future where the kingdom’s economy interacted closely with the United States and Europe, and where economic prosperity gradually produced a more open, tolerant, international culture in Saudi Arabia, albeit one still dominated by Islamic values. Yet Turki’s funding of radical Islamists in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere empowered leaders and movements violently opposed to the very Western systems Turki professed to admire. Why? Like the CIA, the Saudi government was slow to recognize the scope and violent ambitions of the international Islamist threat. Also, Turki saw Saudi Arabia in continual competition with its powerful Shiite Islamic neighbor, Iran. He needed credible Sunni, pro-Saudi Islamist clients to compete with Iran’s clients, especially in countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, which had sizable Shiite populations. The Saudis inevitably saw Massoud and his northern coalition through the prism of language: Massoud’s followers predominantly spoke Farsi, or Persian, the language of Iran, and while Massoud and his Panjshiri group were Sunnis, there were Shias in their northern territory. Within Saudi Arabia itself, Prince Turki’s modernizing wing of the royal family was attacked continually by the kingdom’s conservative ulama who privately and sometimes publicly accused the royals of selling out to the Christian West, betraying Saudi Arabia’s role as steward of the holiest places in the Islamic world. The internal struggle between the austere Ikhwan militia and the royal House of Saud, less than a century old, was far from over. Prince Turki and other liberal princes found it easier to appease their domestic Islamist rivals by allowing them to proselytize and make mischief abroad than to confront and resolve these tensions at home.

  American motivations during this period were easier to describe. Indifference was the largest factor. President Bush paid hardly any attention to Afghanistan. CIA officers who met the president reported that he seemed barely aware that the war there was continuing. His National Security Council had few high-level meetings on the subject. The Soviet Union was dissolving and Germany was reuniting: These were the issues of the day. With Soviet troops gone, Afghanistan had suddenly become a third-tier foreign policy issue, pushed out to the edges of the Washington bureaucracy. The covert action policy, while for
mally endorsed by the president, by 1990 moved to a great extent on automatic pilot. Still, American negotiators made clear in public that they were trying to chart a new policy direction, however far they might operate from the center of White House power. Undersecretary of State Robert Kimmitt announced that the United States would not object if Najibullah participated in elections organized to settle the Afghan war. After the initial delay caused by the CIA, Tomsen opened the first direct talks between the United States and exiled king Zahir Shah.

  “The impression is being created that the Americans are actually concerned with the danger of the spread of Islamic fundamentalism,” Gorbachev confided to Najibullah in private that August. “They think, and they frankly say this, that the establishment today of fundamentalism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran would mean that tomorrow this phenomenon would encompass the entire Islamic world. And there are already symptoms of this, if you take Algeria, for example. But the Americans will remain Americans. And it would be naïve if one permitted the thought that we see only this side of their policy, and do not notice the other aspects.”20

  In Islamabad the CIA-ISI partnership was under pressure. There was continual turnover at the top of both intelligence agencies. Benazir Bhutto fired Hamid Gul as ISI chief because she learned that Gul was conspiring to overthrow her government. She tried to bring in a Bhutto family loyalist, a retired general, to run ISI, but the new man could never control the Afghan bureau and resigned. The next ISI chief, Asad Durrani, quickly discovered the outlines of the CIA Islamabad station’s unilateral network of paid Afghan commanders, including the agency’s extensive independent contacts with Massoud.21 This discovery reinforced the rising suspicions of Pakistani intelligence officers that the Americans, in bed with Bhutto, were now playing their own double game.

  Peter Tomsen deepened these Pakistani doubts by flying in and out of Islamabad, convening meeting after meeting to push both the CIA and Pakistani intelligence to support his new “grassroots” National Commanders Shura. The assembly convened for the first time in Paktia, attracting about three hundred mostly Pashtun commanders. To aid the effort, to bolster Massoud, and to improve Massoud’s supply lines, the U.S. Agency for International Development built all-weather roads from Pakistan to northern Afghanistan. At first the CIA objected to the emphasis on Massoud. The station had just cut Massoud’s stipend because of his failure to attack the Salang Highway. (Because of the agency’s secrecy rules, CIA officers could not tell most of their State counterparts about what had happened, which exacerbated tensions between the two groups.) Still, under continual pressure the agency agreed to give Massoud another chance.

  Pakistani intelligence continued to build up Hekmatyar’s Army of Sacrifice, integrating Tanai and other former Afghan army officers into its command. In October 1990 the CIA station’s unilateral Afghan network reported a new alarm: A massive convoy of seven hundred Pakistani trucks carrying forty thousand long-range rockets had crossed the border from Peshawar, headed to Kabul’s outskirts. There Hekmatyar planned to batter the capital into final submission with a massive artillery attack, the largest of the war by far, a barrage that would surely claim many hundreds of civilian lives. On October 6, Tomsen met in Peshawar with ten leading independent commanders, including Abdul Haq and Massoud’s representatives. Hekmatyar’s planned rain of death on Kabul would be “worse than Jalalabad,” the commander Amin Wardak warned. As a Confidential cable to Washington describing Tomsen’s meeting put it, “The commanders were keenly aware that an unsuccessful military attack with heavy civilian casualties would rebound against the mujahedin.” They would be seen in the eyes of the world as complicit in mass killings. Also, if Kabul fell without a replacement government, there would be “political chaos,” Abdul Haq warned. Massoud and other commanders who could not accept Hekmatyar would wage war against him. Wardak estimated “further destruction, perhaps 200–300 thousand casualties,” the October 10 cable reported. As it happened, this was a grimly accurate forecast of Kabul’s future.22

  Only after Oakley warned of the gravest consequences for American-Pakistani relations if Pakistani intelligence did not abandon the plan did Durrani, the ISI chief, agree to call off the attack and turn the trucks back. “Tanai Two,” as the planned mass rocket attack came to be known in the Islamabad embassy, had been aborted in the nick of time, but it signaled the Pakistani army’s deepening break with American priorities. Oakley, now more firmly opposed to Pakistani intelligence than he had been during McWilliams’s tour, denounced ISI as “a rogue elephant” in a meeting with Pakistan’s president. Had the CIA known about this Hekmatyar rocket assault plan all along? Had Harry endorsed or acquiesced in it despite the prospect of thousands of civilian deaths in Kabul? Tomsen and others at State believed he had. They saw this episode as an example of the independent CIA war being commanded in secret from the Islamabad station while State’s diplomats followed their own policies. Tomsen and Harry met at the station chief’s house in Islamabad, and over tuna sandwiches and soup the CIA chief recounted the history of the October rocket attack plan as he knew it. He described a meeting he had attended with ISI and Hekmatyar at which Hekmatyar, boasting of his ability to capture Kabul for the mujahedin, had exclaimed, “I can do it!” The station chief said he had insisted that Hekmatyar work with other Afghan commanders. Tomsen concluded that the Islamabad station had likely endorsed the operation and perhaps even authorized weapons and other supplies. Tomsen regarded the decision as “not only a horribly bad one” but symptomatic of a larger danger. “It reflected all of the ills of the CIA’s own self-compartmentalization and inability to understand the Afghan political context,” Tomsen wrote at the time.23

  Days after the excitement over Hekmatyar’s aborted attack, Tomsen drove to the northern Pakistani town of Chitral to prepare a second National Commanders Shura. Massoud attended, as did prominent commanders from around Afghanistan. The organizers, who included Abdul Haq, banned Hekmatyar’s commanders. Sayyaf ordered his commanders to boycott. But hundreds of other Afghan rebel leaders gathered for days of political and military discussions. It was the largest gathering of wartime Afghan field commanders in years. ISI’s Durrani insisted on attending. He stayed in a tent nearby but was excluded from the meetings. Still, the ISI chief managed to get a message through to Massoud, and he invited him to Islamabad for a meeting.24

  Massoud’s representatives met with Prince Turki in Riyadh for the first time. Turki agreed to facilitate a new rapprochement with ISI. Massoud, who had been stung by the cutback of his CIA subsidy, agreed to travel to Pakistan for the first time in a decade. He was prepared to compete with Hekmatyar for support from Pakistani intelligence as the war’s endgame approached. In Islamabad he met with Durrani and with Harry, the CIA station chief.25

  Durrani, who sought to build trust with Massoud and enlist him in a unified rebel push against Najibullah, promised to resume military supplies to Massoud. Harry agreed to restore some of Massoud’s retainer, increasing his stipend from $50,000 to $100,000 per month. The CIA instructed Pakistani intelligence to send more weapons convoys across the now half-built American road to the north. Some of these ISI shipments to Massoud, convoys as large as 250 trucks, did get through. On direct orders from the American embassy in Islamabad, Massoud received his first, albeit small, batch of Stinger missiles. But in other cases, heavy convoys dispatched by Pakistani intelligence to Afghanistan’s north mysteriously disappeared, never reaching the Panjshir. The Americans suspected that Pakistani intelligence was doing all it could to resist their pressure to aid Massoud.26

  A pattern in the CIA-ISI liaison was emerging: Faced with ardent demands from the Americans, ISI officers in the Afghan bureau now nodded their heads agreeably—and then followed their own policy to the extent they could, sometimes with CIA collaboration, sometimes unilaterally.

  The dominant view among Pakistani generals, whether they were Islamists or secularists, was that Hekmatyar offered the best hope for a pro-Pakistan governme
nt in Kabul. The strong feeling even among the most liberal Punjabi generals—whose sons cavorted in London and who spent their own afternoons on the army’s Rawalpindi golf course—was “We should settle this business. It’s a sore on our backside.”27

  The Islamabad CIA station spent much of its time worrying about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. In 1990, just as the agency’s partnership with ISI on the Afghan frontier was fraying, the CIA’s sources began to report that Pakistan’s generals had pushed their nuclear program to a new and dangerous level. After a visit to Washington, Robert Oakley returned to Islamabad carrying a private message for Pakistan’s army. Pakistan was now just one or two metaphorical turns of a screw away from possessing nuclear bombs, and the CIA knew it. Under an American law known as the Pressler Amendment, the CIA’s conclusion automatically triggered the end of American military and economic assistance to the government of Pakistan—$564 million in aid that year.28 After a decade of intensive U.S.-Pakistan cooperation, the United States had decided, in effect, to file for divorce.

  American fears of nuclear proliferation from Pakistan were well grounded. Mirza Aslam Beg, the army chief of staff, opened discussions in Tehran with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard about the possibility of Pakistani nuclear cooperation with Iran. Beg discussed a deal in which Pakistan would trade its bombmaking expertise for Iranian oil. Oakley met with the Pakistani general to explain “what a disaster this would be, certainly in terms of the relationship with the United States,” and Beg agreed to abandon the Iranian talks.29 But it seemed now that in their relations with the Pakistan army, American officials were racing from one fire to the next.