Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  Tenet quickly followed this appointment with another: He named Cofer Black as director of the entire Counterterrorist Center. It had been just four years earlier that Black had left Khartoum, Sudan. As station chief there he had supervised intensive undercover intelligence collection operations against bin Laden, chasing the Saudi and his men around in jeeps and cars. Black had disrupted rehearsals by bin Laden’s lieutenants to ambush and kill him on a road near the U.S. embassy. He took the bin Laden case personally.

  “This is bad business,” Tenet told Black, as an official involved in the transition recalled. “These guys are getting stronger and stronger. We’re going to get struck. We’ve got to engage this target. We’ve got to get more penetrations. We’ve got to go out after these guys.”9

  Black’s bluff speech, vaguely British inflections, and love of warrior metaphors created a new table-thumping martial air at the Counterterrorist Center. He and the new bin Laden unit chief knew each other well from their years in the Directorate of Operations. They wanted to shake up the unit’s strategy.

  Cofer Black was not a natural partner for Paul Pillar, the intellectual terrorism analyst who was the Counterterrorist Center’s long-serving deputy director. Pillar’s emphasis on managing permanent terrorist threats, and his skepticism about how the Clinton administration had personalized its campaign against bin Laden, stood in some contrast to Black’s gung-ho ambitions. After years of exhausting, nerve-racking service, Pillar soon left the center for a fellowship at a Washington think tank.

  Black and his new bin Laden unit wanted to “project” into Afghanistan, to “penetrate” bin Laden’s Afghan sanctuaries. They described their plan as military officers might. They sought to surround Afghanistan with secure covert bases for CIA operations—as many bases as they could arrange. Then they would mount operations from each of these platforms, trying to move inside Afghanistan and as close to bin Laden as they could get to recruit agents and to attempt capture operations.

  Sometimes they would work with regional intelligence services, Black announced. Other times they would work on their own. They would not try to pick and choose their partners fastidiously. Black declared that he wanted to develop liaison operations especially aimed at agent recruitment with every intelligence service in the Middle East and South Asia that might possibly offer a way to get at bin Laden and his lieutenants.

  “Eight to eighty, blind, crippled or crazy, we don’t care what you are, we want to be in contact,” Black told his colleagues. “We are at war,” declared a document presented to a closed Counterterrorist Center meeting on September 10. They had to continue to sow doubt in bin Laden’s mind about the “security of his operations.” And Black did not want to sit around in restaurants and exchange written reports, the traditional emphasis of intelligence liaison. He wanted recruitments, and he wanted to develop commando or paramilitary strike teams made up of officers and men who could “blend” into the region’s Muslim populations.10

  Even with Tenet’s support they struggled for resources. In the same weeks that he began to talk at the White House, FBI, and Pentagon about what he called “The Plan” for revived global operations against bin Laden, Black was forced to implement a 30 percent cut in cash operating budgets at the Counterterrorist Center—including in the bin Laden unit. The CIA had started to reverse its decline in personnel, but by the end of 1999 it still had 25 percent fewer operations officers than it had fielded when the decade began. The annual cash crunch at the Counterterrorist Center could often be partly offset by budgetary scavenging at the end of a fiscal year, but these were distracting and uncertain efforts. As he developed briefing slides for Tenet and the White House that summer, Black boasted that “The Plan” was comprehensive, global, and newly ambitious. But his colorful slides masked a threadbare checking account. A study commissioned by Black and presented to a CIA conference on September 16, 1999, concluded that the Counterterrorist Center could not carry out its more ambitious plans against al Qaeda without more money and people.11

  Worse, the geopolitical map that Black and the new bin Laden unit chief pored over did not look promising. Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was a “denied area” in CIA parlance, with no secure bases for permanent operations. Pakistan seemed a highly unreliable partner, Black and the new bin Laden unit chief agreed. Pakistani intelligence was so penetrated by Taliban and bin Laden sympathizers, they believed, that there was little basis to rely on joint operations such as the commando training the CIA was providing. Iran shared a long border with Afghanistan but was out of the question as a partner. Turkmenistan, another neighbor, wanted nothing to do with the CIA. A civil war engulfed Tajikistan to the northeast.

  That left only Uzbekistan, which bordered Afghanistan to the north, far from the southern and eastern Taliban strongholds where bin Laden mainly operated. But at least Uzbekistan’s government was not penetrated by Taliban sympathizers, Black and his colleagues calculated. A jowly, secular ex-communist autocrat named Islam Karimov ruled the country as if it were his estate. Karimov jailed and sometimes tortured democratic and Islamist opponents. He had no sympathy for bin Laden. Karimov’s hold on power was threatened by a violent radical group called the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan; its leaders had been inspired by Saudi proselytizing and later found exile with bin Laden in Afghanistan. By 1999, bin Laden and the Taliban leadership saw these Uzbek Islamists as important allies. The IMU fought as committed shock troops in the Taliban’s war against Massoud’s forces in northern Afghanistan. They were also a vanguard of bin Laden’s grandiose plans to sponsor a thrust by Islamist forces into Central Asia to overthrow the region’s secular leaders and establish new caliphates.

  Bin Laden provided the Uzbek radicals with funding, weapons, and access to training camps. The Taliban provided them with bases and housing in Kabul and farther north. Uzbek terrorist units began to sneak across the border to mount operations against Karimov’s government. On February 16, 1999, they announced themselves in the capital of Tashkent: As Karimov drove in a limousine to a cabinet meeting, the radicals detonated six car bombs in a downtown plaza. Karimov escaped, but sixteen people died. Within days Karimov arrested at least two thousand Islamic activists. Many of these arrests were indiscriminate, sweeping up peaceful democratic parties challenging Karimov’s ironfisted rule. But Karimov described the crackdown as war against bin Laden’s allies.12

  Cofer Black and his colleagues saw this turmoil as an opportunity. Through the CIA station in Tashkent they reached out to Karimov’s government and proposed a new intelligence alliance focused on their mutual enemies in Afghanistan. Karimov wanted CIA assistance but was nervous about the political price he might pay if his contacts with Langley became known. He agreed to explore the CIA’s proposals but insisted that all of his dealings be kept secret.

  Black and the new bin Laden unit chief, Rich, flew discreetly into Tashkent, a Soviet-style city of broad avenues and monumental government buildings in the Central Asian steppe, to outline a new CIA liaison program. Black proposed CIA funding and training for a counterterrorism strike force to be commanded by the Uzbek military. The CIA hoped the force, once fully trained and equipped, might carry out covert snatch operations against bin Laden or his lieutenants.13

  Karimov accepted the plan. He made Uzbek air bases available to the CIA for small-scale transit and helicopter operations. He allowed the CIA and the National Security Agency to install monitoring equipment designed to intercept Taliban and al Qaeda communications. He agreed to share what intelligence his government had about bin Laden’s bases in Afghanistan. Karimov and his aides hinted that they might be willing to join the CIA in military operations once the new commando force was ready.

  The CIA’s officers were excited and optimistic. They admired Karimov’s willingness to take political risks to go after bin Laden. Finally they had found a new partner less penetrated than Pakistan and less complicated than Saudi Arabia. Karimov and his intelligence aides agreed to just about every request the CIA
put forward.14

  At the White House, National Security Council aides drafted the highly classified legal approvals and budgetary papers for the new Uzbek liaison in a mood of jaundiced, sometimes acid skepticism. “Uzbek motivations were highly suspect to say the least,” recalled one official. To these skeptics the CIA liaison did not seem like “a plan that fit into anything larger than ‘Get something going with the Uzbeks.’ ” Tashkent was a long way from Kandahar, but it was “certainly closer than Langley,” so at least it was something. There were fears at the White House about Uzbek corruption, human rights abuses, and scandal. Some of the White House aides saw the CIA itself as “passive-aggressive” about the Uzbek outreach in the sense that Langley pushed to get the liaison going and then worried aloud about rules and financial audits. One White House official remembered a CIA counterpart announcing wearily, “We’re going to have to deploy hundreds of accountants to Uzbekistan to make sure every piece of equipment that we send to these people is accounted for.”15

  Formal CIA and Pentagon liaisons like the one in Uzbekistan had a natural bureaucratic shape and momentum that emphasized office meetings, long training sessions, equipment purchases, audits, and slide presentations. They often chewed up more time on process and planning than on covert operations.

  On the ground in Afghanistan during that summer of 1999 there was only one leader waging war and collecting intelligence day in and day out against the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, and their international Islamist allies. His disputed government possessed no real capital, no international airport, and little credibility. His budget was cobbled together week to week, partly from heroin smuggling deals. He did not have much of an office and, for lack of electricity, could not rely much on slide projectors. He had acquired a few tanks, a good supply of mortars, many small arms, and a few tattered helicopters pasted together from incompatible spare parts and with rotors that continually threatened to detach and fly away.

  Ahmed Shah Massoud remained a charismatic force among his own Tajik people, especially in the northeastern Panjshir Valley. He was by far the most formidable military commander in Afghanistan yet to be defeated by the Taliban. The CIA had continued to maintain regular contact with Massoud in the two years since Gary Schroen’s visit to the commander in Taloqan in the spring of 1997. A series of clandestine CIA teams carrying electronic intercept equipment and relatively small amounts of cash—up to $250,000 per trip—had visited Massoud in the Panjshir Valley several times since then. Sometimes the teams were led by officers from the Near East Division of the Directorate of Operations, where Schroen was now deputy chief. Other times they were led by officers from the Counterterrorist Center. When Near East was in the lead, the missions were code-named NALT, for Northern Afghanistan Liaison Team. When the Counterterrorist Center was in charge, they were dubbed JAWBREAKER. The first group, NALT-1, flew on one of Massoud’s helicopters from Dushanbe to the Panjshir late in 1997. Three other CIA teams had gone in by the summer of 1999. They typically stayed in Barak village, near Massoud’s headquarters, for a week or two and met with the commander several times. The intercept equipment they delivered allowed Massoud to monitor Taliban battlefield radio transmissions. In exchange the CIA officers asked Massoud to let them know immediately if his men ever heard accounts on the Taliban radios indicating that bin Laden or his lieutenants were on the move in a particular sector. The agency teams established secure communications links to Langley so that Massoud could pass along such bin Laden alerts.

  Both the Near East Division and the Counterterrorist Center supported the liaison with Massoud, but they disagreed about its purpose and potential. Within Near East there were many, including Schroen, who remembered the commander’s stubborn independence in years past even when he was handsomely paid to follow the CIA’s lead. They wondered if Massoud could really be a reliable partner against bin Laden. In any event they wanted to support Massoud against the Taliban to keep his northern forces viable and to provide a foothold in Afghanistan for CIA intelligence collection and operations. The Near East officers did not doubt Massoud’s contempt for bin Laden and his Arab volunteers, but Schroen argued that geography and logistics made operations against bin Laden nearly impossible for Massoud. Even the Near East Division’s TRODPINT tracking team, operating on al Qaeda’s home turf around Kandahar, had been unable to produce reliable forecasts of bin Laden’s movements. Massoud was even more remote from the target.

  But Black and especially Rich argued that they had to renew their effort to bring Massoud into the campaign against bin Laden. They saw Massoud as many of his admirers in Europe did, as an epochal figure, extraordinarily skillful and determined. They had no personal history with him, no legacy of disappointments or conflicts involving Pakistani intelligence. If the CIA really intended to reinvent its plan to disrupt and capture bin Laden, they asked that summer, how could the agency possibly succeed if it did not begin to do serious business with Massoud?

  THE AFGHAN WAR was changing. The murder by Taliban agents of Abdul Haq’s family in Peshawar early in 1999 presaged new opposition to Mullah Omar among Pashtuns. That spring the Karzai family, who had backed the Taliban’s initial rise, began to explore armed opposition.

  The Karzais’ frustration with the Taliban had been rising for months. At Hamid Karzai’s April wedding in Quetta, his father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, the family patriarch and a former Afghan senator, called his sons and several other Pashtun leaders to a late-night meeting and declared, as Hamid’s brother Qayam remembered it, that “our country is gone and it’s somebody else’s country now, and it would remain that way unless we resisted.” The Karzai patriarch declared that “the only option left is that we have to start from within. We would have to be more diligent, we would have to be more stubborn. We would have to start talking to Massoud.” They decided to seek American assistance but agreed this would be a long shot.16

  Hamid Karzai worked with his father from the family compound in Quetta that spring and early summer to organize political resistance to the Taliban among prominent royalist Pashtuns. He coordinated meetings of tribal chiefs in Pakistan and in Rome. He promoted a formal loya jirga to reconsider Afghan politics, and his father agitated for the return of the Afghan king. Hamid Karzai wrote a letter to Mullah Omar, inviting him to attend some of these political meetings but also warning him that the Taliban had to change, “that they must remove the foreigners that were with them here killing and destroying our country, ruining our lives,” as Karzai recalled it.17

  The Taliban sent their reply on July 15. As the elderly Karzai patriarch walked home from a mosque through Quetta’s mud-rock alleyways, Afghan assassins on motorcycles roared up and opened fire, killing him instantly.

  Heir to his father’s political position, Hamid Karzai sought to avenge his death. Within weeks of Abdul Ahad’s grand Kandahar funeral—a mix of mourning and anti-Taliban politics—Hamid Karzai redoubled his efforts. He already had numerous American contacts and helped funnel humanitarian aid to Afghanistan from Quetta. Now he asked Bill Milam, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, for weapons. Milam told Karzai he was being reckless and unrealistic. The Taliban or their Arab allies would slaughter him if he attempted an uprising; the political ground had not been laid.18

  Karzai was inclined to concede the point, but he pressed anyway. He felt rash, he said later. Officers in the CIA’s Islamabad station believed that an armed uprising was unrealistic but urged continuing talks and cooperation. Karzai was a “small player,” one U.S. official recalled, but his political and tribal allies were well wired in Kandahar and could provide helpful information about the Taliban and bin Laden. Arms supplies seemed implausible, however. “I would go every week to Islamabad,” Karzai recalled of this period. “I would go to the Americans, I would go to the French, I would go to the English, I would go to the Germans, I would go to the Italians … [and] tell them about the readiness of the Afghan people to move against the Taliban. They wouldn’t trust me. They wouldn’t believe me… .
They didn’t see it. They didn’t even see it in Washington.”19

  Some State Department officials and some analysts at the CIA still believed—despite little supporting evidence—that the Taliban might voluntarily turn bin Laden over for trial in exchange for diplomatic recognition and relief from economic sanctions. Pressure from Karzai and other dissident Pashtuns might encourage the Taliban to compromise, but otherwise it was not something the State Department sought to encourage. Albright, Tom Pickering, and Rick Inderfurth declared publicly again and again that the United States would not take sides in the Afghan war.

  State Department intelligence analysts did report during the first half of 1999 that resistance to the Taliban was growing. Still, “We believe there is no military solution to this conflict,” Inderfurth said. “The United States supports no individual Afghan faction but maintains contacts with all to further progress toward a peaceful settlement.”20

  At interagency meetings CIA officials had raised the possibility of a new American alliance with Massoud, possibly involving covert arms supplies. But outside of the CIA, the Clinton administration remained deeply skeptical about the commander and his northern warlord allies. At an ambassadors’ meeting in Washington in May, Albright canvassed her envoys to Pakistan and Central Asia: What did they think about a new tilt toward Massoud? Milam was adamantly opposed. Arms supplies to Massoud would only deepen the war and kill more innocent Afghans, he and his colleagues at the Islamabad embassy firmly believed. Massoud could not defeat the Taliban on the battlefield. He was bottled up in the north and losing ground.21

  The influential Pickering argued that no Afghan policy could succeed if it did not involve the Pashtuns in the south. If the U.S. tilted toward Massoud in the north, it would only exacerbate Afghanistan’s ethnic divisions—and in a quixotic military cause.22 Other State and White House officials recalled the horrible violence against civilians in Kabul during the mid-1990s while Massoud was defense minister and pointed to persistent reports that he relied on drug trafficking. He was not a worthy ally of the United States, they argued.