Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  Despite the loss of their embassy in Washington, Massoud’s closest aides pressed their worldwide lobbying campaign to rally support for their war against the Taliban. In Washington that fall, Abdullah, now officially deputy foreign minister in Massoud’s rump government, told State Department officials that bin Laden was financing the Taliban. He tried to persuade the handful of Afghan experts he met at Foggy Bottom that the Taliban should be seen as part of a regional network of Islamist radicalism funded by bin Laden and other wealthy Persian Gulf sheikhs.

  In comments such as Albright’s, Abdullah could see “signs of some change” in American attitudes, but at the working level of the State Department, all he heard about was the need for Massoud to negotiate with the Taliban. There seemed little belief that the Taliban posed a serious threat. Most of all, “what was lacking there was a policy,” Abdullah recalled. The path of least resistance at the State Department was “to accept the presence of the Taliban as a reality” in Afghanistan and try to negotiate solutions “through Pakistan,” as Abdullah recalled it. On the American side, “We wanted to see if there was a way to bring about a peaceful settlement of the continuing civil war,” remembered Karl F. “Rick” Inderfurth, then assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs. The State Department’s analysts believed late in 1997 that “the Taliban had to be dealt with, it couldn’t be wished away.”26

  UNOCAL CONTINUED TO FLOOD Foggy Bottom and the National Security Council with the same advice: The Taliban were a reality, and they could also be part of a new Afghan solution. Marty Miller searched energetically during 1997 for a way to convert the Taliban’s triumph in Kabul into a final pipeline deal. He met regularly with Sheila Heslin at the White House. He announced that the Taliban might earn as much as $100 million annually from transit fees if they would only allow the pipeline to be built.

  Miller had decided early in 1997 that Unocal needed better contacts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He began to rely more on Robert Oakley, the former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and a member of the Unocal advisory board. Oakley’s wife, Phyllis, was at this time the chief of the State Department’s intelligence wing, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. She had access to virtually all of the U.S. government’s most sensitive intelligence reporting.27

  Robert Oakley advised Miller to reach the Taliban by working through Pakistan’s government. He also suggested that Unocal hire Thomas Gouttierre, an Afghan specialist at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, to develop a job training program in Kandahar that would teach Pashtuns the technical skills needed to build a pipeline. Gouttierre had worked on U.S.-funded humanitarian aid inside Afghanistan during the late years of the anti-Soviet jihad when Oakley was ambassador in Islamabad. Now Unocal agreed to pay $900,000 via the University of Nebraska to set up a Unocal training facility on a fifty-six-acre site in Kandahar, not far from bin Laden’s compounds. Gouttierre traveled in and out of Afghanistan and met with Taliban leaders. Oakley lobbied Nawaz Sharif’s government in Islamabad on the oil company’s behalf. In December 1997, Gouttierre worked with Miller to arrange for another Taliban delegation to visit the United States, this time led by Mullah Wakil Ahmed, Omar’s chief aide.28

  By now it was reasonable for the Taliban to believe that Unocal was effectively an arm of the United States government. The Taliban had more intimate, more focused, and more attentive contact with Unocal executives and their paid consultants than with any American officials. The Unocal executives did not just talk about oil pipelines, they talked about a path to negotiated peace in Afghanistan.

  Miller’s team provided escorts and transportation for the Taliban that December and helped arrange a meeting for three Taliban ministers at the State Department. Assistant Secretary of State Inderfurth expressed his strongest concerns to the visitors about the condition of Afghan women. He also admonished the Taliban about their tolerance of drug trafficking. He talked about demining, the peace process, and other subjects, never even raising the topics of terrorism or bin Laden. Only after Inderfurth left for another meeting did the subject come up. One of the Taliban ministers explained that his movement had inherited the bin Laden problem, as he was already in Afghanistan “as a guest of the previous regime.” The Taliban, this minister said, had stopped allowing bin Laden “to give public interviews and had frustrated Iranian and Iraqi attempts to get in contact with him,” according to a Confidential State Department account of the meeting prepared at the time. As for the Unocal pipeline, one of Inderfurth’s deputies told the delegation that it was “unlikely to be financed unless there was peace in Afghanistan.”29

  Miller also rented a meeting room for the Taliban delegation at the Watergate Hotel. The itinerary included a visit to NASA headquarters and Mount Rushmore. The idea was to stir the Taliban with images of American ambition and tradition, to build a connection with Mullah Omar’s closest aides that went beyond money and jobs. Marty Miller had been aggravated by Albright’s public denunciations of Taliban human rights violations. He needed to convince the Taliban that they could do business with the United States.

  Pakistan’s government, nervous about where these independent contacts between the Taliban and the United States might lead, sent an ISI officer with the Taliban delegation to keep watch on them.30

  Marty Miller arranged for Zalmay Khalilzad, the leading Republican expert on Afghanistan, to meet with the Taliban at the luxury Four Seasons Hotel in Houston. Over dinner Khalilzad opened a debate with the Taliban’s information minister, Amir Khan Mutaqqi, over the Taliban’s treatment of women. They argued over exactly what the Koran said about this issue.

  Marty Miller invited the Taliban for dinner at his suburban home overlooking a golf course. He was nervous that some of the decorations in his house might offend the Taliban. Before they arrived for dinner, he invited one of Unocal’s consultants, an Afghan named Dr. Izimi, to walk through the house looking for potential causes of offense. He had pictures on the walls and all sorts of knickknacks, and he worried that “what is innocuous to us might be offensive to them.” Izimi found some statues near Miller’s swimming pool that had been bought in Indonesia. The statues were originally grave markers made for indigenous tribes, and they depicted nude people. The statues made it very obvious “who the guy and who the gal are,” as Miller put it.

  Izimi gave them a good look and said, “Hmm, I don’t think these are going to cut it.”

  “Do you want me to take them down?” Miller asked.

  “No, I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” Izimi said. “Why don’t we just put a burqa on them?”

  They went into Miller’s kitchen and found some trash bags, returned to the pool, and tied the bags over the statues.

  Miller’s wife was involved in a group that raised funds for court-appointed advocates for children. This year the Miller house was part of a fundraising tour of seven or eight suburban houses fixed up with Christmas decorations. As a result, Miller had seven Christmas trees in his house, each elaborately decorated with tinsel, gleaming balls, and blinking lights, plus many other Christmas decorations in every room.

  The Taliban “were just stunned to see all these Christmas trees,” Miller recalled. They kept asking Miller what the Christmas tree meant in the larger story of Jesus and the Christmas holiday. Miller actually had no idea how the Christmas tree had become a symbol of Jesus’s birthday, but he talked about it as best he could.31

  The Taliban leaders asked Miller if they could have their photographs taken standing in front of a Christmas tree. One or two members of the visiting delegation declined to participate, adhering even in Houston to the Taliban’s ban on representative images of the human form. But Mullah Wakil and the rest of the long-bearded Taliban leaders stood before one of the blinking Christmas trees, scrunched shoulder to shoulder and grinning.

  GEORGE TENET WAS AWARE of Osama bin Laden. He supported the small bin Laden tracking unit in the Counterterrorist Center. But by the end of 1997, neither the new CIA director nor the agency placed bi
n Laden very high on their priority lists. The agency’s view of bin Laden remained similar to Prince Turki’s: He was a blowhard, a dangerous and wealthy egomaniac, and a financier of other radicals, but he was also isolated in Afghanistan.

  Tenet was “most concerned,” he told a Senate panel, about the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons around the world, “because of the direct threat this poses to the lives of Americans.” Statistically, the threat of terrorism remained steady, although the number of attacks against American targets was rising slightly. But in comparison to the potential devastation of a nuclear-armed missile launched against an American city, the threat posed by independent terrorists such as bin Laden appeared modest. As Tenet scanned the horizon in search of potential Pearl Harbors, he saw unstable countries such as Russia and China that already had the capacity to launch such a surprise attack, and he saw governments such as Iran, North Korea, and Iraq that might have the motivation to do so if they could acquire the means. Stacked up against these challenges, bin Laden looked to many officers and analysts at the CIA like a dangerous criminal but not an existential threat.32

  The CIA did periodically obtain evidence that terrorist groups were interested in weapons of mass destruction. Tenet did not talk about it in public, but bin Laden now figured in this alarming, if fragmentary, CIA reporting. Late in 1996 a former bin Laden aide and courier, Jamal al-Fadl, entered an American witness protection program and provided detailed accounts of bin Laden’s earlier operations in Sudan. The CIA was involved in al-Fadl’s secret debriefings. Al-Fadl said that bin Laden had authorized attempts to buy uranium that might be used to fashion a nuclear bomb. This effort had failed as far as al-Fadl knew, but if he was telling the truth—and al-Fadl passed the polygraph tests he was given—his testimony suggested the scale of bin Laden’s ambitions. The CIA also had reports of contacts between bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence agents dating back to bin Laden’s years in Sudan, and there were some fragmentary indications that these Iraqi contacts had involved training in the development and use of chemical weapons.33 Still, neither the White House nor the CIA as yet had any covert action program targeting bin Laden that went beyond intelligence collection and analysis. The CIA’s Counterterrorist Center was trying to watch bin Laden. Its leaders had not yet seriously attempted to arrest or kill him.

  That planning was about to begin.

  PART THREE

  THE DISTANT ENEMY

  January 1998 to September 10, 2001

  21

  “You Are to

  Capture Him Alive”

  THE FIRST FORMAL CIA PLAN to capture or kill Osama bin Laden began as a blueprint to arrest Mir Amal Kasi, the Baluchi migrant who had shot up the entrance to the agency’s headquarters in 1993.

  Kasi remained a fugitive in the Afghanistan-Pakistan-Iran borderlands. The CIA’s Counterterrorist Center at Langley asked the Islamabad station for help recruiting agents who might be able to track him down. The station identified and contacted a family-based group of Afghan tribal fighters whose leadership had formal military training and who had worked for the CIA during the anti-Soviet jihad. Case officers met with the group and won their agreement to come back on the agency payroll to hunt for Kasi. At Langley, officers in the Counterterrorist Center’s Kasi cell secured budget approval for the recruitment. The headquarters unit shipped hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, AK-47 assault rifles, land mines, motorcycles, trucks, secure communications equipment, and electronic listening devices to put its new Afghan agents into business. Langley also supplied mobile beacons that could be used to pinpoint the exact location of buildings by connecting to satellites hovering miles overhead. The technology would allow an American counterterrorism team to swarm an obscure location quickly once it was lit up by the Afghan agents. The tribal team had been code-named GE/SENIOR during the anti-Soviet years. Now they were dubbed by a new cryptonym, FD/ TRODPINT. The suddenly enriched and provisioned Afghans set up residences around Kandahar, traveled back and forth to Pakistan, and began to track leads that might eventually take them to Kasi. In effect they had signed up as lethal, exceptionally well paid CIA bounty hunters.1

  There were clear authorities for the recruitment under U.S. law. Kasi had been indicted for murder in the United States. Under federal law such fugitives could be arrested abroad and returned to the United States for trial. By collecting intelligence overseas about a suspect’s whereabouts, the CIA could aid such an arrest under standing legal authorities approved by the president. Under these federal rules, the role played by CIA case officers and paid Afghan agents in tracking Kasi down need never be known. If the tracking team found Kasi in Pakistan, they were to contact the CIA station in Islamabad. Case officers would then attempt to work with Pakistani intelligence and police to make an arrest without revealing the existence of their paid Afghan agents.

  A trickier scenario would arise if the tribal agents found Kasi hiding in southern Afghanistan, however. The Taliban controlled most of the traditional Baluch territory where Kasi was presumed to be moving. Given the record of stilted, sometimes bizarre contacts between American officials and the Taliban’s Kandahar leadership, it was impossible to conceive of a cooperative approach with them. Legally, the United States did not even recognize the Taliban. Yet the Rabbani-Massoud government, which did have tentative legal standing, had no practical authority in Taliban country. If the CIA was going to take Kasi into custody in that area, it was going to have to find a way to do so on its own.

  Agency case officers in Islamabad met with their tribal team to develop a formal, specific plan to capture Kasi in southern Afghanistan and fly him to the United States for trial. The plan would require the Afghan agents to hold Kasi securely in place long enough for an American arrest team to fly in secretly, bundle the fugitive aboard an airplane or helicopter, and lift off safely for the United States.

  Because of their military training, the tribal agents talked convincingly about their ability to mount such a capture operation. The Afghan team worked well with maps. They had a sense of time and military sequence. They could identify assembly points, rally points, escape routes. One question was how to insert an American squad into Afghanistan if the tracking team located and detained Kasi on its own. The CIA’s case officers provided their Afghan recruits with specifications for a suitable landing strip that could be prepared in advance. The chosen desert ground had to be hard and stable enough to support an aircraft landing and takeoff. It had to be secure from Taliban forces, preferably in a lightly populated and isolated valley. It had to be adequate for pilot navigation. The Afghan agents struck out on their motorcycles around Kandahar. They carried satellite measuring devices to pinpoint coordinates for possible airstrip sites. When they found a candidate location, they transmitted the data to Islamabad, and the station then ordered satellite photography to examine the site’s parameters from above. Eventually the CIA found a remote strip that looked suitable, at least from the vantage of satellites.

  The CIA and the Pentagon did not typically send American officers into harm’s way based solely on satellite pictures and the investigations of paid Afghan recruits.What if the dirt at the landing site proved too soft despite the agents’ assurances, and the American team’s plane got stuck in the sand?

  At Langley the Counterterrorist Center proposed and won approval for what CIA officers call a “black op,” a secret operation classified at the highest possible level. The mission would both confirm the desert landing site’s suitability and rehearse for the day when Kasi was actually in agent custody. A special operations team flew secretly into Afghanistan. Without Pakistan’s knowledge, they mounted a nighttime low-level flight, tested the chosen landing zone marked by the tribal agents, found it satisfactory, double-checked its satellite coordinates, and withdrew. The CIA’s Afghan capture plan for Mir Amal Kasi was now as ready as it could be for launch.

  But month after month passed during 1996 and early 1997, and Kasi could not be found. The CIA’s d
eteriorating relationship with Pakistani intelligence was one factor; the agency received little access to Pakistani police resources in the borderlands. The sprawling, centuries-rooted web of clan and tribal protection available to any Baluch in trouble in the territory of his birth was perhaps a greater problem. The CIA’s case officers sought to combat Kasi’s call on clan loyalty with appeals to greed. They offered multimillion-dollar rewards both openly and privately to anyone willing to reveal Kasi’s whereabouts. But for months there were no takers. Under traditional Baluch revenge codes, anyone exposed as Kasi’s betrayer risked not only his own life but his family’s as well. For a while the CIA picked up rumors that Kasi was staying in a massive fortress compound near the Afghan border, but the agency could not persuade Pakistani police to move against the place. The operation would have been unusually difficult because the compound was heavily defended. CIA officers tried a technical solution: They rigged a special television with a roving camera that looked out from behind the TV screen. They arranged to deliver the set inside the compound, hoping to catch a picture of Kasi on film. The operation turned up nothing, however. It was never clear whether Kasi had ever been inside the place.

  Finally their luck turned. In late May 1997 a Baluch man walked into the U.S. consulate in Karachi and told a clerk he had information about Kasi. He was taken to a young female CIA officer who was chief of base in Karachi (an agency “base” is a subunit of a countrywide station). She interviewed the informant and concluded he was credible. The CIA officer and the FBI’s attaché in Pakistan, Scott Jessie, arranged more interviews. The source claimed that about two years earlier Kasi had been placed under the protection of a prominent Baluch tribal leader; the pair had become confidants and business partners, and traveled together frequently. Now, the source explained, the tribal leader had decided to sell out Kasi to the U.S. government in exchange for the reward money. The source handed over an application for a Pakistani driver’s license filled out by Kasi under an alias; it contained a photo and a thumbprint that confirmed they had their man. The tribal leader who had befriended Kasi flew to Karachi and worked out an arrest plan with the CIA and the FBI. The tribal chief would be visiting a central Pakistani town called Dera Ghazi Khan on business in mid-June. He promised to lure Kasi to the Shalimar Hotel where the FBI could arrest him.