Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  MASSOUD TOLD HIS AIDES he was confident that the Taliban would wither. They would overextend themselves, and opposition among Pashtuns would gradually rise.23

  Twice Massoud spoke by satellite telephone to Mullah Omar. As his aides listened, Massoud told the Taliban leader that history clearly showed Afghanistan could never be ruled by one faction, that the country could only be governed by a coalition. But the only history Omar had ever read was in the Koran, and he refused to compromise.

  Massoud persisted. He dispatched his intelligence aide, Amrullah Saleh, to Switzerland to meet secretly with Taliban representatives. They also held back-channel talks in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. But the Taliban were buoyed by their support from ISI, Saudi, and other Persian Gulf donors. “They were very arrogant,” recalled one of Massoud’s aides.

  Still, Massoud counseled patience. His strategy in 1999, recalled his brother Ahmed Wali, was similar to what it had been a decade earlier, when Soviet troops withdrew: He planned to outlast and eventually outmaneuver Pakistani intelligence. Eventually, Massoud said, the United States would recognize that the Taliban was its enemy.When that happened, he would be ready to receive American help. Meanwhile, through the Stinger missile recovery program and occasional meetings with CIA officers at safehouses in Tajikistan and in the Panjshir, Massoud kept his lines to Langley open.

  At the State Department, Pickering and Inderfurth evolved a more nuanced policy toward Massoud by the summer of 1999. They still strongly opposed American arms supplies, but they privately made clear to Russia and Iran that the United States had no objections to the covert arms those countries supplied Massoud. They defended this policy by saying they did not want to see the Northern Alliance completely overrun. If Massoud’s forces were expelled from Afghanistan, that would leave the Taliban triumphantly unchallenged—and less willing than ever to negotiate.24

  Inderfurth traveled to Tashkent that July for multiparty peace talks with Afghan leaders sponsored by the United Nations. Massoud also decided to attend. Inderfurth’s opening statement offered olive branches to every group, including the Taliban. The conference’s “Tashkent Declaration on Fundamental Principles for a Peaceful Settlement of the Conflict in Afghanistan” was a testament to muddled policy and dead-end negotiations. Its preamble expressed “profound concern” about the status of Afghan minorities and women and then declared that the signatories were “deeply distressed” about drug trafficking and, thirdly, were “also concerned” about terrorism. Pakistan and Iran pledged to end arms shipments to their favored Afghan militias, pledges they did not intend to keep, as the United States well understood.25

  On the night the talks broke up, Inderfurth met with Massoud and his aides in a side room of the behemoth Soviet-era hall where the conference had been held. Massoud swept in wearing pressed khaki robes and a wool cap, radiating “charisma and presence,” as Inderfurth recalled it. As the American envoy reviewed diplomatic issues, Massoud seemed bored, but when Inderfurth asked about the war, Massoud lit up and leaned forward to describe his defenses and plans.26

  Inderfurth asked if Massoud needed military equipment to undertake his summer operations. Massoud demurred. His aides said later they did not request weapons because they knew the Clinton administration had ruled out such supplies. Also, Russia, Iran, and India “were finding themselves comfortable providing us means to counter the Taliban because there was no objection from the U.S. on shipment of arms,” one of Massoud’s aides recalled.

  Massoud expressed disappointment about U.S. indifference to Afghanistan, as Inderfurth recalled it. Massoud’s aides remember him as more than disappointed. He liked Inderfurth better than some other U.S. diplomats, they said, but Massoud saw American policy as profoundly misguided, and he could not understand why it was so slow to change. At the Tashkent sessions the Americans kept talking about the Taliban and the Northern Alliance as two equally culpable “warring factions.” This seemed outrageous to Massoud. It showed expediency and a loss of perspective in American foreign policy, he thought. As the Taliban became more powerful, even the United States moved to appease them, Massoud believed.27

  Massoud tried to inventory for Inderfurth the massacres of civilians carried out by Taliban and al Qaeda forces. Summoning an argument designed to resonate in Washington, he described the Taliban as among the world’s most egregious human rights violators, a regime that systematically repressed women and Shiite minorities. “We said, ‘The United States is the only major power in this world pursuing a policy basically oriented on human rights. Let us see the reality,’ ” recalled a senior Massoud aide who was present. Massoud sought to convince Inderfurth that the Taliban were beginning to weaken, his aide recalled. Now was the time for the United States to pressure Pakistan to cut off aid to the Taliban, Massoud argued.

  Inderfurth and Pickering believed they were pushing Pakistan as hard as they could, yet they had limited leverage in Islamabad. Counterterrorism officials such as the State Department’s Michael Sheehan argued in internal memos during this period that State could push harder by placing terrorism at the very top of the American agenda. But State’s brain trust—Albright, Pickering, and Strobe Talbott—felt that the United States could not afford to take such a narrow approach. America had other compelling interests: nuclear weapons, Kashmir, and the stability of Pakistani society. The support flowing to the Taliban from the Pakistani army and ISI had to be challenged in this broader context of American concerns, State’s leadership insisted. Clinton agreed. The United States had a full agenda with Pakistan—the threat of war with India, nuclear weapons, terrorism, democracy, Kashmir—and all of it was important, Clinton believed.28

  A decade before, it had been the State Department’s Peter Tomsen, among others, who pushed a reluctant CIA to move closer to Ahmed Shah Massoud and away from Pakistani intelligence. Now the bureaucratic chairs had been reversed. It was State Department diplomats, along with some officers at the CIA, who resisted calls for a closer alliance with Massoud during 1999. Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser and political gatekeeper on foreign policy, endorsed their view. There were isolated, individual advocates for a new alliance with Massoud at State, the White House, and in Congress, but it was mainly at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center—especially in the bin Laden unit—that Massoud had the most ardent believers.

  Whatever the doubts about his independent outlook, whatever the fears about his drug trafficking, the CIA’s Manson Family knew one thing for certain: Ahmed Shah Massoud was the enemy of their enemy.

  COFER BLACK INITIATED paperwork and approvals with Richard Clarke’s White House counterterrorism office late that summer. Black said he wanted to send a CIA team, led by his new bin Laden unit chief, inside Afghanistan to meet with Massoud and his lieutenants, in order to reenergize Massoud’s efforts against bin Laden. This would be the fifth CIA mission to the Panjshir since the autumn of 1997, code-named JAWBREAKER-5. The mission’s goal was to establish a renewed counterterrorism liaison. The CIA would offer to train, equip, and expand Massoud’s existing intelligence service based in the Panjshir Valley and help it operate as widely and securely as possible in Afghan cities and provinces. The agency would offer Massoud more cash, more secure communications, listening devices, and other nonlethal spy gear.29

  Black and his bin Laden unit hoped to establish with Massoud a robust program of intelligence exchange, concentrating on the daily mystery of bin Laden’s whereabouts. Tenet and his colleagues overseeing technical collection moved a satellite to obtain better coverage of Afghanistan, and the National Security Agency developed intercept equipment for use inside the country. The bin Laden unit hoped Massoud would enhance these technical approaches on the ground. In his war against the Taliban and its allies, Massoud often maneuvered in battle against bin Laden’s Arab brigade, Pakistani volunteers, and Chechen irregulars. Ultimately the CIA hoped Massoud would order his militia to capture bin Laden during one of these engagements and either kill him or hand him over
to the United States.

  The new CIA program would eventually complement commando training in Uzbekistan and Pakistan as well as continuing work with the longer-established tribal tracking team in southern Afghanistan, Black explained. The Counterterrorist Center hoped to surround al Qaeda militias with trained, equipped forces drawn from local populations. Then it would seek to locate bin Laden or his lieutenants and maneuver them into a trap.

  Given the doubts about Massoud inside the Clinton administration, the Panjshir missions faced close legal and policy review. “It was all CIA initiated,” recalled a senior White House official. The Counterterrorist Center needed approval to make its small cash payments to Massoud on each trip. “Well, how small is small?” the White House official asked. A few hundred thousand dollars, the CIA replied. Clarke and Berger assented.30

  The intelligence policy and legal offices at the National Security Council drafted formal, binding policy guidance for the JAWBREAKER-5 mission. Black got involved; he wanted everything written down clearly so there would be no recriminations later if CIA gear or cash was misused by Massoud. “Put it down in ‘Special English’ so people can understand,” Black would say sardonically to his colleagues. He wanted his men to be able to hold copies of the White House legal authorities in their hands when they met with Massoud and his intelligence aides in the Panjshir. He wanted the CIA officers to be able to literally read out their White House guidance in clear terms that were easy to translate. There would be no improvisation, Black said. The Counterterrorist Center chief occasionally cited the English king Henry II’s famous attempt in 1170 to commission the assassination of Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, by asking an ambiguous question. Henry II had asked open-endedly: “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Black ranted sarcastically to his colleagues: The CIA is not in the “rid me of this priest” business anymore. He wanted presidential orders that were specific and exacting. “You’ve got to spell it out,” he told the White House.31

  Massoud was at war with the Taliban. The United States declared a policy of strict neutrality in that war. The White House also wanted to ensure that the CIA’s counterterrorism mission to the Panjshir Valley did not become some kind of Trojan horse strategy for a rogue CIA effort to boost Massoud’s strength and capability in his battles against the Taliban. Clinton said he was prepared to work with Massoud on intelligence operations, despite his record of brutality, but he was not ready to arm the Northern Alliance. The Pentagon and intelligence community both provided analysis to Clinton, as he recalled it years later, arguing that Massoud was receiving all the weapons he could handle from other suppliers, and that in any event he would never be able to defeat the Taliban or govern Afghanistan from Kabul. This certainly was Shelton’s consistent view from the Pentagon. At Langley, the CIA was divided on the question. After absorbing the briefs, Clinton made clear that he was not prepared to have the United States join the Afghan war on Massoud’s side, against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Clinton hand-wrote changes to a February 1999 authorizing memo to emphasize that Massoud’s men could only use lethal force against bin Laden in self-defense. The National Security Council approved written guidance to authorize intelligence cooperation with Massoud, while making clear that the CIA could provide no assistance that would “fundamentally alter the Afghan battlefield.”32

  Black underlined this point to the bin Laden unit as its chief prepared to fly to Central Asia. The CIA would be interpreting this White House policy rule at its peril. It would be up to the agency’s colonel-level officers to decide, day in and day out, what kind of intelligence aid would “fundamentally alter” Massoud’s military position against the Taliban and what would not. If they did not get this right, they could wind up in a federal courtroom, Black warned.

  Rich, the Algiers veteran and bin Laden unit chief, led the JAWBREAKER team to the Panjshir in October 1999. They flew secretly to Dushanbe, the pockmarked capital of the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, a desolate city recovering from postcommunist civil war. At an airfield where Massoud maintained a clandestine logistics base, they boarded an old Soviet-made Mi-17 transport helicopter and swooped toward Afghanistan’s jagged, snow-draped northern peaks.

  Beyond the Anjuman Pass, two miles high, they descended into the narrow, cragged river valley that was Massoud’s fortress homeland. He had agreed to receive the CIA team at his principal residence, in a compound near where his family had lived for generations and where Massoud’s own legend as an anti-Soviet guerrilla leader had been born. They stayed for seven days. Most of the time they worked with Massoud’s intelligence officers on operations, equipment, and procedures for communication. The CIA set up secure lines between Massoud, his Dushanbe safehouses, and the Counterterrorist Center at Langley so that any fix on bin Laden’s whereabouts could be instantly transmitted to CIA headquarters and from there to the White House.33

  Rich and his team met with Massoud twice, once at the beginning of the visit and once at the end. The CIA officers admired Massoud greatly. They saw him as a Che Guevara figure, a great actor on history’s stage. Massoud was a poet, a military genius, a religious man, and a leader of enormous courage who defied death and accepted its inevitability, they thought. Among Third World guerrilla leaders the CIA officers had met, there were few so well rounded. Massoud prayed five times a day during their visit. In his house there were thousands of books: Persian poetry, histories of the Afghan war in multiple languages, biographies of other military and guerrilla leaders. In their meetings Massoud wove sophisticated, measured references to Afghan history and global politics into his arguments. He was quiet, forceful, reserved, and full of dignity, but also light in spirit. The CIA team had gone into the Panjshir as unabashed admirers of Massoud. Now their convictions deepened even as they recognized that the agency’s new partnership with the Northern Alliance would be awkward, limited, and perhaps unlikely to succeed.

  The meetings with Massoud were formal and partially scripted. Each side spoke for about fifteen minutes, and then there was time for questions and answers.

  “We have a common enemy,” the CIA team leader said. “Let’s work together.”34

  Massoud said he was willing, but he was explicit about his limitations. Bin Laden spent most of his time near Kandahar and in the eastern Afghan mountains, far from where Massoud’s forces operated. Occasionally bin Laden visited Jalalabad or Kabul, closer to Massoud’s lines. In these areas Massoud’s intelligence service had active agents, and perhaps they could develop more sources.

  Because he had a few helicopters and many battle-tested commanders, the CIA team also hoped to eventually set up a snatch operation in which Massoud would order an airborne assault to take bin Laden alive. But for now the Counterterrorist Center had no legal authority from the White House to promote lethal operations with Massoud. The initial visit was to set up a system for collection and sharing of intelligence about bin Laden, and to establish connections with Massoud for future operations.

  The agency men recognized that in their focus on bin Laden they were promoting a narrow “American solution” to an American problem in the midst of Afghanistan’s broader, complex war. Still, they hoped Massoud would calculate that if he went along with the CIA’s capture operation, it might lead eventually to a deeper political and military alliance with the United States.35

  Massoud told the CIA delegation that American policy toward bin Laden was myopic and doomed to fail. The Americans put all their effort against bin Laden himself and a handful of his senior aides, but they failed to see the larger context in which al Qaeda thrived. What about the Taliban? What about Pakistani intelligence? What about Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates?

  Even if the CIA succeeded in capturing or killing bin Laden, Massoud argued to his CIA visitors, the United States would still have a huge problem in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda was now much bigger than bin Laden or al-Zawahiri alone. Protected by the Taliban, its hundreds and even thousands of international jihadist
s would carry on bin Laden’s war against both the United States and secular Central Asian governments.

  “Even if we succeed in what you are asking for,” Massoud told the CIA delegation, as his aide and translator Abdullah recalled it, “that will not solve the bigger problem that is growing.”36 This part of the conversation was tricky for the Americans. The CIA team leader and his colleagues privately agreed with Massoud’s criticisms of American policy. The CIA men saw little distinction between al Qaeda and the Taliban. They felt frustrated by the State Department diplomats who argued moderate Taliban leadership might eventually expel bin Laden bloodlessly.

  The Americans told Massoud they agreed with his critique, but they had their orders. The policy of the United States government now focused on capturing bin Laden and his lieutenants for criminal trial. Yet this policy was not static. Already the CIA was lobbying for a new approach to Massoud in Washington—that was how they had won permission for this mission in the first place. If they worked together now, built up their cooperation on intelligence collection, the CIA—or at least the officers in the Counterterrorist Center—would continue to lobby for the United States to choose sides in the Afghan war and support Massoud. The CIA could not rewrite government policy, but it had influence, they explained. The more Massoud cooperated against bin Laden, the more credible the CIA’s arguments in Washington would become.

  Massoud and his aides agreed they had nothing to lose. “First of all it was an effort against a common enemy,” recalled Abdullah. “Second, we had the hope that it would get the U.S. to know better about the situation in Afghanistan.” As the counterterrorism and intelligence work grew, the United States might finally intervene in the Afghan war more forcefully, “perhaps in the later stages,” Massoud calculated, as Abdullah recalled it.37