Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  As the Taliban neared Mazar, Pakistani intelligence signaled to Sharif that when the city fell, it would be time to formally recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government. The announcement was made by Pakistan’s foreign ministry on May 26. Sharif first learned about it when the news flashed across his television. “He was furious,” recalled his aide Mushahid Hussain. “He said, ‘Who made that decision?’ ”28

  Prince Turki’s chief of staff at Saudi intelligence, Ahmed Badeeb, met with ISI in Rawalpindi as Mazar fell, and “they asked that we recognize [the] Taliban.” Badeeb felt that the Taliban leaders “had no clue how to run a country,” but he could see that Pakistani intelligence was deeply invested in them. Badeeb flew back to Riyadh and told the Saudi royal family, “They are very religious people… . I think we have to give them a chance.” Prince Turki argued that if the Saudis granted the Taliban recognition, the kingdom would have a strong channel for engagement. “Due to Pakistani insistence and to the lack of any other options,” Badeeb recalled, the kingdom decided to grant recognition “so as to fill the obvious vacuum” in Afghanistan. The United Arab Emirates, whose senior princes regularly embarked on luxurious falcon-hunting trips in Taliban country, joined in.29

  But they had moved too fast. Mazar became a Taliban death trap. Within days of the three recognition announcements, the city’s Uzbek and Shia populations revolted against their Pashtun occupiers. They massacred three hundred Taliban soldiers. They took another thousand prisoner and sent the militia reeling back down the Salang Highway toward Kabul. Suddenly the Taliban no longer possessed any meaningful piece of northern Afghanistan. But for Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E., the deed was done: All three anointed the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government.

  To win the full privileges of recognition, the Taliban needed the United States to go along. As Mazar smoldered, a small coup attempt erupted half a world away, inside the decaying embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, D.C., a stately brick mansion on Wyoming Avenue that had earlier been the home of a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Like Afghanistan’s distant war the embassy coup unfolded for the Americans at first as a nuisance, until it reached a stage where the threat of violence could no longer be ignored.

  The Clinton administration declined to recognize the Taliban government. The Afghan embassy in Washington spoke for President Rabbani and Ahmed Shah Massoud even after their expulsion from Kabul by the Taliban. Since late 1994, Afghanistan had been represented in the United States by Yar Mohabbat, a Pashtun architect and longtime resident of Germany who was close to Rabbani. Mohabbat had lobbied in Congress, at the State Department, and at the CIA, even as the Taliban rose up from Kandahar. At the State Department, Mohabbat was shunted off to meetings with the lowest-ranking desk officers. “They were always looking at Afghanistan through Pakistan’s eyes,” he recalled. The CIA was more sympathetic. He opened up a channel at Langley when Massoud started buying back Stingers. The agency gave Mohabbat the telephone number of a third party in Washington he could call when he wanted to talk to a CIA officer. His main Langley contact knew Massoud well and obviously had spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. When Mohabbat complained that the United States underestimated the dangers of the Taliban and failed to recognize Massoud’s potential as an ally, the CIA man “was shaking his head. ‘I tell the State Department the same things that you’re saying. They don’t listen to me, either. They all think that Massoud is the problem.’ ” A woman from the FBI once dropped by to interview Mohabbat about Arab extremists training in Afghanistan. Otherwise, hardly anyone from the American government ever visited his embassy.30

  Mohabbat was away for Memorial Day weekend in 1997 as the Taliban stormed Mazar. His deputy, Seraj Jamal, gave an interview to Voice of America’s Pashto service and suddenly declared that he had switched sides to the Taliban. He proclaimed that under his leadership the Washington embassy now took orders from Mullah Omar.

  Mohabbat feared a Taliban coup at the embassy would create momentum for official American recognition. He rushed to the building and saw the Taliban’s white flag fluttering on the pole outside. Stunned, he announced to Seraj—who had given no hint of his budding conversion in their months working together—that he was going to pull the Taliban banner down the next day and raise again the Rabbani government’s black, white, and green flag.

  That night a Pashto-speaking Afghan called Mohabbat at home and threatened to kill him. “Death must come from God,” Mohabbat told the caller, as he remembered it. “This is not Afghanistan. This is not Pakistan. This is America. You can’t do that here.”

  “It’s easier to do here,” the caller said, “because all I need to do is give money to someone, and they’ll kill you for me.”31

  Officers from the FBI and State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security swarmed over the embassy’s grounds the next morning with bomb-sniffing dogs. They sent police to Mohabbat’s house and provided protection for his wife. Mohabbat moved back into an office on the embassy’s ground floor while Seraj claimed the second floor for the Taliban and turned it into living quarters. For weeks Seraj tried to harass Mohabbat into leaving the embassy. Each day was a new battle: Seraj would plaster photographs of Mullah Omar on the walls, and Mohabbat would promote Rabbani and Massoud. When Mohabbat toured the Taliban-occupied floor of the embassy, he saw computers, fax machines, and printers, each affixed with a label: PROPERTY OF THE EMBASSY OF SAUDI ARABIA, WASHINGTON, D.C.32

  The State Department’s South Asia bureau wanted nothing to do with this battle. They declined to choose a winner. They sponsored a few mediation sessions, but these produced no progress. Finally, in August, State’s Afghan desk officer called Mohabbat and Seraj in for a meeting. He told them that the United States had decided to close the Afghan embassy altogether. As far as the United States was concerned, Afghanistan’s existence as a government in the international system had been suspended.33

  Mohabbat moved to St. Louis, hoping to avoid Taliban reprisals. Seraj moved to the Taliban’s unofficial delegation at the United Nations.

  It was another tawdry season of American diplomacy. The United Nations estimated that Taliban-ruled Kabul now held fifty thousand widows unable to work or walk in the streets without the risk of beatings from religious police. Those widows were the mothers of some 400,000 children. The U.N. appealed for $133 million in humanitarian aid for Afghanistan during 1997 but received only $56 million.34 The United States was in the midst of an economic boom, but Congress, the State Department, and the White House were all convinced that nothing more could be done, that more aid to Afghanistan would only be wasted on warlords. Even the threat of terrorism emanating from Afghanistan did not attract much attention. The State Department, adhering to a new economic sanctions regime, announced its first list of officially designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations that autumn of 1997. Bin Laden and al Qaeda were not on the list.

  There were small changes stirring in American policy as Clinton entered his second term. Hillary Clinton had visited India in 1995 and became determined to push her husband toward greater involvement in the region. Madeleine Albright, who arrived as secretary of state, was more sharply attuned to human rights violators such as the Taliban than Warren Christopher had been. An anti-Taliban petition drive organized by the Feminist Majority and Mavis Leno, the wife of late-night comedian Jay Leno, captured Albright’s attention. Her new deputy, Thomas Pickering, a former ambassador to India, was also determined to reexamine American policy in South Asia. The former Special Envoy to the Afghan resistance, Peter Tomsen, now the U.S. ambassador to Armenia, wrote a pleading Secret cable to State principals: “We have long underestimated the geopolitical threat of Afghan instability to U.S. interests… . We should conduct a major Afghan policy review and implement a more resolute Afghan policy. A passive U.S. approach will continue to leave the field to the Pakistani and Arab groups supporting the Islamic extremists.”35

  The National Security Council led a South Asia policy review during
the first months of 1997, culminating in a memorandum to the president in August, just as the White House authorized the shutdown of the Afghan embassy in Washington. The policy memo concentrated mainly on India and Pakistan, urging more sustained American contacts with both Islamabad and New Delhi.

  On Afghanistan, however, the NSC memo merely reiterated American support for the U.N. peace process. It was essentially the same policy that the United States had pursued on Afghanistan since the CIA covert pipeline shut down on December 31, 1991.

  As it would turn out, a more significant transformation was beginning across the Potomac River that summer at CIA headquarters. John Deutch had quit after only nineteen months as director. He was the fifth director in ten years; the turnover and instability in the agency’s leadership seemed to be getting worse. When Deutch left, the president tried to nominate Tony Lake to run the CIA, but the Republican-controlled Senate made it clear that the confirmation process would be a political bloodbath. That left George J. Tenet, Deutch’s deputy, a former congressional aide with limited experience. Tenet might not have the burnished credentials of past CIA directors, but he had two qualities that appealed strongly to a Clinton White House with weak ties to Langley: He was well liked, and he could be easily confirmed by Congress.

  None of those who supported his candidacy in that summer of 1997 predicted that George Tenet would become one of the longest-serving directors in the CIA’s history, its most important leader since William Casey, or an architect of the agency’s covert return to Afghanistan.

  20

  “Does America Need

  the CIA?”

  PRESIDENT CLINTON DID NOT attend George J. Tenet’s swearing-in ceremony at the White House on July 31, 1997. He sent Vice President Al Gore in his stead. In Deutch and now Tenet, Clinton had placed leaders at Langley whom he liked and trusted. Yet the president remained skeptical of the CIA as an institution. His exceptionally smart friend John Deutch had impressed upon him a belief that the Directorate of Operations just wasn’t very good at spying. A failed covert action program targeting Saddam Hussein in the summer of 1996 had embarrassed and frustrated the White House. Clinton was innately skeptical of covert action as a substitute for overt foreign policy, and the Iraq episode had only reinforced his instincts. Some of the agency’s career operatives had then revolted against Clinton’s nomination of Tony Lake as director. Tenet’s relationship with the new national security adviser, Sandy Berger, was excellent, and he could count on Clinton’s personal attention when he needed it. But he was being appointed that summer to run an agency whose most important client, the president, remained aloof and unimpressed.

  Tenet, just forty-four years old, was in many ways an unlikely candidate to repair the breach. He had never run for political office, managed a large organization, served in the military, worked as an intelligence officer, shaped American foreign policy, or authored a book or significant journal article. He had risen to the position of America’s chief spy partly by political accident but also because he was exceptionally gifted with people and with the Washington bureaucratic art typically called “process.” He was gregarious, direct, funny, unpretentious, hardworking, a natural coalition builder, and “the ultimate staff guy,” as his colleague Nick Burns put it. He was an insider, a creature of permanent Washington. He had arrived in the capital two decades before to study international relations at Georgetown University. His first job in the city, as a lobbyist, was a tongue-twisting classic of the enduring Washington: director of photovoltaics and international programs at the Solar Energy Industries Association. On Capitol Hill he worked for a decade as a staff professional for Republicans and Democrats alike. Some of his closest friends did not know his political affiliation (he was a registered Democrat) because he rarely spoke about partisan issues.1

  He had been appointed as Deutch’s deputy at the CIA in early 1995 for the same reason that Clinton appointed him as director in the summer of 1997: His personal connections on both sides of the Senate aisle made him very easy to confirm. Tenet was very loyal to Deutch, but he understood when he took charge in the summer of 1997 that the CIA was near rock bottom. Constant turnover in the director’s office had set the agency far adrift. Recruitment had stalled: Only 25 trainees became clandestine officers in 1995. Attrition and early retirement continued to drain off talent and spirit. This was true in every division. The Directorate of Operations was probably the worst, but the Directorate of Intelligence and even the Directorate of Science and Technology were suffering as well. The agency’s budget was overstretched, despite the new funds for counterterrorism. The morale problems caused by the Aldrich Ames case remained, exacerbated by minor arguments with Congress over agent recruitment in Central America, episodes which reinforced a sense at Langley that everything the agency touched was bound to turn to scandal, at least in the eyes of Congress and the press.

  In his two years as Deutch’s deputy, as liaison to the Directorate of Operations, Tenet had absorbed these problems the way a Geiger counter absorbs radiation signals. He was a student of people and institutions. He had uncanny intuition about their moods and sufferings, and he often seemed to know just the right thing to say. By far his strongest instincts about the CIA involved its internal health. He did not move into the director’s suite on the seventh floor that summer with grand, compelling ideas about global politics. Virtually all of his views about national security threats and foreign policy reflected the capital’s centrist consensus. Bill Casey had come to the CIA to wage war against the Soviet Union. George Tenet measured his ambitions at first largely by the CIA’s institutional needs: a more clearly defined mission, higher morale, better execution of core espionage and analysis, more recruits, better training, and more resources. “This is all about focusing on basics,” he told CIA staff at a meeting called to announce his priorities. He was going to break the pattern of the last decade. “It is truly unfortunate” that the agency had endured three directors in just five years, he said. “This one is staying.” His approach, he told them, would put “a premium on hard work for commonsense goals.”2

  This was the way he had been raised. His father was Greek by ancestry but Albanian by birth. John Tenet left Albania when he was thirteen and spent the next seven years working in French coal mines. With little money and few possessions, he came through Ellis Island on the eve of the Great Depression. George Tenet’s mother escaped communism by fleeing her native Epirus (a region on the border between Greece and Albania) in the hull of a British submarine at the end of World War II. She never saw her parents again. She met John Tenet in New York, married, and on January 5, 1953, gave birth to a son, William, and six minutes later to his fraternal twin, George.3

  They lived in a two-story row house on Marathon Parkway in Little Neck, Queens. The house faced a quiet, tree-lined residential road where the boys played stickball. George Tenet was renowned for his hitting power, capable of knocking a spaldeen two sewers from home. He also played guard on the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church basketball team. His father opened the 20th Century Diner around the block from the family home. George and Bill worked as busboys throughout their teens. They were little alike. Bill was reserved, precise, and studious; he would become a cardiologist. George was loud, sloppy, and boisterous. At the diner he was called “The Mouthpiece.” Sol Winder, a family friend, recalled that he “was always talking, that kid. He was the type of guy who could never keep a secret.” He was also a news junkie. At age eight he wrote a series of letters to the host of a local current affairs show, who sent back an autograph: “To the future editorial page editor of The New York Times.” His parents drove home the immigrant creed: hard work, education, family, faith, ambition. His father worked sixteen-hour days so the twins could make it in America. Both apparently took internal vows to do so or die trying.4

  In 1982, at twenty-nine, George Tenet landed his first job on Capitol Hill, as legislative assistant to Senator John Heinz, a Republican from Pennsylvania. Tenet was a “guy
’s guy, a sports nut,” as a colleague recalled. He had season tickets to Georgetown University basketball. He was so devoted to the Hoyas that he wrote an outraged, sardonic letter to Sports Illustrated after the magazine published a critical article about the team’s recruitment practices. But Tenet had no fixed political ideology, his colleagues remembered, other than wanting to ensure that the United States maintained its advantage over the rest of the world. He stood out because he could connect at a personal level with senators and staff. Heinz was a demanding, detail-oriented boss who consumed data and pushed his staff hard. He tested new arrivals early on to see if they could meet his standards; if not, he froze them out until they left. Tenet failed the initial test; he was new to the Hill, did not know the role of staff members, and was not an especially strong writer. But he fought his way back into Heinz’s good graces. “He was the only person I ever saw there that slid downhill and then pulled himself back up,” recalled his colleague Bill Reinsch. Tenet did it by “force of personality and hard work.”5

  Hill staffers often went out in the evening, but Tenet never finished his first beer,much less ordered a second round. He was already married, to Stephanie Glakas, the outgoing daughter of a career foreign service officer. She worked as a dorm mother at the all-female Marymount College on Foxhall Road, near Georgetown, and when they settled in Washington together, Tenet moved into the dorm—it was cheap housing. Later they bought the Maryland house Glakas had grown up in. Tenet organized his life around Capitol Hill, his suburban home, his newborn son, Georgetown basketball, and occasional rounds of golf on cheap public courses. He was profane and comical, not sanctimonious or naïve, but also a very straight arrow, his colleagues felt. At the office or passing on a street corner he was quick with “typical New York, in-your-face” banter, but it was “friendly, not hostile,” and he managed not to bruise people, a colleague remembered. He worked Senate hearing rooms the way he had worked the Queens diner counter, vamping for attention. He was a bulky man, overweight, and a chronic poacher of office junk food. His friends worried about his health, but he seemed to be completely comfortable in his own skin. “George has a powerful personality,” recalled his Senate staff colleague Gary Sojka. “He could have been a longshoreman.”6