Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  In May 1991 an underground Saudi network of Islamist preachers and activists obtained scores of signatures on a petition called the “Letter of Demands” that was submitted to King Fahd. The petition blended calls for quasi-democratic political reform with radical Islamist ideology. It sought the unquestioned primacy of Islamic law, equal distribution of public wealth, more funding for Islamic institutions, religious control of the media, and a consultative assembly independent of the royal family. The letter’s publication shocked the Saudi royal family, in part because it revealed an extensive organization in the kingdom rallying in secret around a subversive agenda. Cassette tapes circulated that summer by the underground Islamist preachers grew in number and vitriol. A popular tape titled “America as I Saw It” informed its listeners that the United States was a “nation of beasts who fornicate and eat rotten food,” a land where men marry men and parents are abandoned as they age.8

  Pushed to its limit, the Saudi royal family retaliated, making scores of arrests. But the government managed its repression gently. Senior princes did not want their crackdown to be seen as violent or arbitrary or to create new waves of dissidents, stoking unrest. The Awakening Sheikhs were placed under house arrest, but the government quickly opened negotiations to address some of their demands. Senior princes quietly sent messages to the official ulama acknowledging that, yes, the presence of American troops in the kingdom was undesirable, and their numbers and visibility would be reduced as soon as possible. Saudi princes stepped out in public to emphasize their devotion to Islamic causes—especially in places outside of Saudi Arabia, such as Afghanistan and Bosnia. The kingdom’s Ministry of Pilgrimage and Religious Trusts announced that the government had spent about $850 million on mosque construction in recent years, employed fifty-three thousand religious leaders in mosques, and planned to hire another 7,300 prayer leaders. King Fahd announced his intention to ship millions of free Korans to the newly independent, predominantly Muslim countries of Central Asia. The proper and legal outlet for Islamic activism, the royal family made clear, lay not inside the kingdom but abroad, in aid of the global umma, or community of Muslim believers.9

  The rise of the Awakening Sheikhs and the emergence of the Letter of Demands prompted CIA officers and State Department diplomats to open talks with the Saudi royal family about the dangers of Islamic radicalism. American analysts were determined to intervene early with the Saudi royals, to encourage the Saudis to be alert and responsive to signs of serious internal dissent.

  For the first time the CIA began to see evidence that Arab jihadists trained in Afghanistan posed a threat in Saudi Arabia itself. Gary Schroen, now in the CIA’s Riyadh station, discussed with Prince Turki the problem of Saudi radicals moving in and out of Afghanistan. “There are a lot of Saudi citizens there who are fighting,” Schroen said, as he recalled it. “They’re being trained. They’re young men who are really dedicated, really religious, and a lot of them are coming back. They’re here.”

  “We understand that,” Turki assured him. “We’re watching that. There is no problem.We’ll take care of it.” The Saudi royal family had begun to worry. In Islamabad the Saudi ambassador to Pakistan sat down with American officials to warn them about Islamist charity organizations on the Afghan frontier that were raising funds in the United States, then spending the money on radical and violent causes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and beyond. “You should know about this,” the Saudi envoy warned. The U.S. consulate in Peshawar composed a classified cable for Washington based on the Saudi envoy’s information. The cable listed charity organizations in California and Texas that were sending cash and fighters to the Islamist networks swirling around Hekmatyar and Sayyaf. The cable was routed to the FBI and CIA, but the State Department officers who helped compile it never heard of any follow-up investigation.10

  Peter Tomsen and other emissaries from Washington discussed the rising Islamist threat with Prince Turki in the summer of 1991. Turki listened to their concerns, made few commitments, but repeated that he was on top of the problem. As so often, Turki, the most accessible contact for American spies and diplomats on the subject of political Islam, seemed reassuring. Turki was one of the liberals under assault from the underground Islamists. His sister had taken part in some of the attempts by women in Riyadh to win greater rights and visibility. She had been singled out and denounced as a prostitute by a preacher during Friday services at a Riyadh mosque. The next Friday, Turki attended the mosque, rose from the audience, and asked to speak. He denounced the slander against the women of his family, making clear that the attacks against liberals had gone too far.11 Impressed by his willingness to take a public stand, the Americans who met him were quick to believe that Turki was on their side and that he had the Islamist threat under control.

  At some of the meetings between Turki and the CIA, Osama bin Laden’s name came up explicitly. The CIA continued to pick up reporting that he was funding radicals such as Hekmatyar in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar, Sayyaf, and Haqqanni all had officers around Saudi Arabia who collected money from mosques and wealthy sheikhs; bin Laden was one part of this wider fundraising system. “His family has disowned him,” Turki assured the Americans about bin Laden. Every effort had been made to persuade bin Laden to stop protesting against the Saudi royal family. These efforts had failed, Turki conceded, and the kingdom was now prepared to take sterner measures.12

  Bin Laden learned of this when Saudi police arrived at his cushion-strewn, modestly furnished compound in Jedda to announce that he would have to leave the kingdom. According to an account later provided to the CIA by a source in Saudi intelligence, the Saudi officer assigned to carry out the expulsion assured bin Laden that this was being done for his own good. The officer blamed the Americans. The U.S. government was planning to kill him, he told bin Laden, by this account, so the royal family would do him a favor and get him out of the kingdom for his own protection. Two associates of bin Laden later offered a different version while under interrogation: They said a dissident member of the royal family helped him leave the country by arranging for bin Laden to attend an Islamic conference in Pakistan during the spring of 1991. So far as is known, bin Laden never returned to the kingdom.13

  VODKA-SOAKED SOVIET HARDLINERS, including leaders at the KGB, tried and failed to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev on August 19, 1991. Within weeks the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, nemesis of the United States for almost half a century, collapsed as an effective political organization. Russian liberals, Russian nationalists, Baltic nationalists, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and Uzbeks now ruled what remained of the Soviet Union. A nation constructed from Stalin’s terror hurtled toward its final dissolution.

  Gorbachev’s weakening cabinet, in search of rapid compromises with Washington, decided to abandon its aid to Najibullah in Afghanistan. In turn, the Bush Cabinet felt free at last to drop all support to the mujahedin. On September 13, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Boris Pankin pledged a mutual cutoff of arms to Najibullah and the Afghan rebels as of January 1, 1992.14

  Twelve years after the Politburo decided to commit military force to defend communism in Afghanistan—twelve years and two months after Zbigniew Brzezinski had presented Jimmy Carter with a draft presidential finding for CIA covert action to support anticommunist rebels—both superpowers agreed to stop fueling the Afghan war. Yet the war continued.

  The brigadiers and colonels in Pakistani intelligence had never trusted that the CIA would see the Afghan jihad through to the end. Some of them had never really trusted the Americans, period. Bitterly, Pakistan’s military officers congratulated themselves on how right they had been.

  In Kabul, Najibullah remained in power. The former Afghan king, Zahir Shah, remained at his villa in Rome. United Nations diplomats shuttled in their blue-stenciled airplanes between Kabul and Islamabad by the week, but the prospects for a peaceful political settlement appeared dim. Hekmatyar and other Islamists backed by Pakistani intelligence were creeping toward K
abul in their captured Iraqi tanks. Ahmed Shah Massoud had assembled a rival invasion force, including captured Soviet tanks, to Kabul’s north, poised for a decisive drive on the capital.

  “An extremist seizure of Kabul would plunge Afghanistan into a fresh round of warfare, which could affect areas adjoining Afghanistan,” Peter Tomsen warned in a Secret cable to Washington that September 1991. “Should Hekmatyar or Sayyaf get to Kabul, extremists in the Arab world would support them in stoking Islamic radicalism in the region, including the Soviet Central Asian republics, but also in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Arab world.” In December, Tomsen repeated his warnings in another cable, classified Secret and distributed throughout the national security bureaucracy in Washington. He feared “a scramble for power” that would “further attenuate central authority in favor of local warlords… . A political settlement must be put into place as rapidly as possible to forestall scenarios of continued instability and civil war in Afghanistan.”

  But few at Foggy Bottom or Langley were focused on the future of Islamic politics or stability in Central Asia. In Afghanistan the stage was set not for a triumphal reconciliation on one of the Cold War’s most destructive battlefields but for an ugly new phase of regional and civil war. The CIA’s analysts and operatives had long argued that after the withdrawal of Soviet forces, the Afghans would have to sort things out for themselves. They would have little choice now but to try.15

  THE CIA’S LEGAL AUTHORITY to conduct covert action in Afghanistan effectively ended on January 1, 1992. By then the Soviet Union had formally dissolved. Peter Tomsen suggested a new finding that would allow unilateral CIA clients to be used to bolster the U.N. negotations seeking a moderate coalition government in Afghanistan, but the CIA and other diplomats in the State Department opposed the idea. The Islamabad station retained some of its Afghan agents for months into the new year, but these were now classified only as reporting relationships—traditional spying. Some of the CIA’s Afghan commanders were converted to work on the secret Stinger buyback program, begun after the Soviet troop withdrawal and now the only covert action program authorized in Afghanistan. Others were directed to report on new post–Cold War priorities such as drug trafficking.

  From fertile Helmand in the south to the gorge valleys of the northeast, Afghanistan flowered each spring with one of the world’s largest crops of opium poppies. Untroubled by government, and funded by smugglers and organized crime networks rooted in Pakistan, Afghan poppy farmers supplied heroin labs nestled in cities and along the lawless Afghanistan-Pakistan border. By 1992 hundreds of tons of refined heroin flowed from these labs east through Karachi’s port or north through the new overland routes of the Russian mafia, destined for European cities. By the early 1990s, Afghanistan rivaled Colombia and Burma as a fountainhead of global heroin supply. The CIA opened a new CounterNarcotics Center, modeled on the Counterterrorist Center, and President Bush allocated secret funds for espionage in Afghanistan aimed at combatting the heroin rackets. Even so, within six months of the January 1 formal cutoff, the CIA’s Afghan operation had atrophied to a shadow of its former strength.

  The Islamabad station’s liaison with ISI deteriorated by the week. The CIA had little to offer anymore. At one point the agency found itself in the awkward, even perverse position of attempting to apply the legal rules of the Pressler Amendment to the secret shipments of captured Iraqi tanks and artillery that had reached Pakistan, bound for the Afghan rebels. Pressler required an end to all military equipment aid and sales by the United States to Pakistan. The CIA’s lawyers concluded that the law might apply even to covert supplies such as the Iraqi tanks, especially if the armor had not yet crossed the Afghan border, as was the case with dozens of the tanks. The CIA station in Islamabad informed ISI that it would have to destroy any stored armor and artillery. The agency wanted the weapons taken to an army test range and blown up—with CIA officers present to confirm the destruction. Surely you are joking, Pakistani intelligence officers told their CIA counterparts. Locked in an existential struggle with India, Pakistan was not about to blow up perfectly good tanks or artillery just because some lawyer in Langley was worried about a congressional subpoena. In the end the CIA gave up. Pakistan held on to as many as three or four dozen Iraqi tanks, by one CIA estimate, despite the Pressler restrictions.16

  EDMUND MCWILLIAMS had been assigned to the inaugural U.S. embassy in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, a newly independent, predominantly Muslim former Soviet republic bordering Afghanistan. In February 1992 travelers reaching the Tajik capital told McWilliams that one of Najibullah’s most important allies in northern Afghanistan, a communist Uzbek militia commander named Aburrashid Dostum, had defected to Massoud’s Supreme Council of the North. The word was out all across northern Afghanistan, the travelers said. Najibullah’s days were at last numbered. The sudden alliance of Massoud’s Tajik army with Dostum’s Uzbek militia—forty thousand strong, in control of tanks, artillery, and even aircraft—tilted the military balance against Najibullah just as his supplies from Moscow had been cut off. McWilliams cabled Washington: The fall of Kabul, so long predicted and so long delayed, appeared now to be finally at hand.17

  “We have a common task—Afghanistan, the U.S.A., and the civilized world—to launch a joint struggle against fundamentalism,” Najibullah told reporters in his palace office as the mujahedin closed to within rocketing distance. “If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a center for terrorism.”18

  Najibullah could see the future, but there was no one to listen. He had lost his Soviet patrons, and he was discredited, desperate. A United Nations mediator, Benon Sevan, spent long hours with Najibullah that month, urging him to resign and throw his support to a peaceful transitional government that might isolate violent Islamist radicals like Hekmatyar. Najibullah agreed and read a speech on national television written for him by Sevan, saying that he would quit the presidency as soon as a successor government was formed under U.N. auspices.

  The United States stood to the side. Oakley had left Islamabad. The embassy’s chargé d’affaires, Beth Jones, preferred to defer to Pakistan. Tomsen could not do much to influence America’s outlook because Washington had just announced a new policy: hands off.

  JUST SOUTH OF KABUL, in a wide valley tucked beneath soaring peaks, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar slipped his forces into a village called Charasyab and set up military operations. There were barracks, a radio room, training areas, and a mosque set in a pine grove. Pakistani helicopters flew in and out carrying ISI officers for consultations. Tanks, armored personnel carriers, multiple rocket launchers, and artillery rolled into the base, lined up for the final thrust toward Kabul. From his command center Hekmatyar worked the radio, reopening talks with Afghan communists from the faction that had earlier allied with him in a coup attempt. Dozens of Arab jihadist volunteers, allies of Hekmatyar from the days of revolution in Peshawar, poured into Charasyab, and with them came Arab journalists prepared to document the final chapter of the Islamic revolution in Afghanistan.19

  Hekmatyar was determined to seize the capital. In Kabul the Afghan communist government was splitting rapidly. One faction of the old Communist Party prepared to surrender to Hekmatyar. Another faction planned to surrender to Massoud.

  In Peshawar, talks about a transitional government continued behind closed doors, led by ISI’s Durrani and Prince Turki. Saudi scholars flew in hurriedly to join the talks and provide them with religious sanction. Peter Tomsen and Benon Sevan tried to persuade Turki to support a broad political settlement, but they found Turki cool and remote. Prince Turki, they believed, was using his influence to stitch together an alternative compromise, one that would unite all of the Islamist leaders into a single government. To achieve this, Turki had to help prevent violence between Massoud and Hekmatyar.

  Even Osama bin Laden flew to Peshawar and joined the effort to forge coope
ration between Hekmatyar and Massoud. He contacted Hekmatyar by radio from Peshawar and urged him to consider a compromise with Massoud.20

  Bin Laden and other Islamist mediators arranged a half-hour radio conversation directly between Massoud and Hekmatyar. The essential question was whether the two commanders would control Kabul peacefully as allies or fight it out. Hekmatyar kept making speeches to Massoud. “I must enter Kabul and let the green flags fly over the capital,” Hekmatyar said. He kept announcing to Massoud that he would not allow communists to “pollute our victory,” a pointed reference to Massoud’s new partner, Dostum, a recent communist. Of course Hekmatyar had his own ex-communist allies.

  An Arab journalist with Hekmatyar at Charasyab during the radio talk remembered Massoud as soothing, respectful. “Massoud would answer him and say, ‘Engineer sahib, with all respect, Kabul has fallen. Kabul cannot be conquered twice. Kabul is in your reach, it is in your hand, Engineer sahib. Please. Come to Peshawar and come back to Kabul with the rest of our leaders. I will not enter Kabul until the rest of our leaders have arrived.’ ” But Hekmatyar had secretly prepared yet another coup attempt. Even as he talked by radio with Massoud, his forces moved toward the gates of Kabul. Green flags were attached to his tanks and his jeeps. The cars were washed so they would gleam triumphantly when Hekmatyar rolled into Kabul the next day. In Peshawar, Hekmatyar’s spokesman admitted, “Hekmatyar can’t agree to anything that includes Ahmed Shah Massoud.”21

  Bin Laden called Hekmatyar once more on the radio. “Go back with your brothers,” bin Laden said. He asked Hekmatyar once again to consider a grand compromise, including Massoud. Hekmatyar ignored him, recalled the Arab journalist who was present. Hekmatyar had already negotiated the surrender of the Kabul headquarters of the Interior Ministry, a few blocks from the Afghan presidential palace. He dispatched his agents to Kabul that night. Hekmatyar went to bed believing that he would roll into the capital in triumph in the morning. He led prayers with the Arabs who had come to Charasyab. He recited verses from the Koran that had been recited by the Prophet after the conquering of Mecca.