Art of Betrayal

by Gordon Corera

  Bodman was a British spy, but he was not Bodman and he was not dead. The identity was one of those used by MI6 for the increment soldiers it smuggled into the Panjshir for the same mission as the four men who had travelled in with a guide. The fake Bodman had spent a few weeks training Massoud’s men. As their time came to an end, Massoud turned to the Britons. ‘The Russians know you are here,’ he told them. ‘Bodman’ and two colleagues had slipped into a vast convoy that smuggled lapis lazuli through Logar to Peshawar in Pakistan. Hundreds of horses carried the motley band of travellers, which included a team of French doctors, one of whose female members a British soldier had taken rather a shine to. At local villages they would stop for water. The Soviet airbase at Bagram was close, but the mujahedeen controlled the countryside. At one point, they came across a group of wandering Afghan nomads who had pitched their own tents. The nomads appeared unusually anxious, the accompanying mujahedeen noticed. Half an hour later, they learnt why.27

  It was the dead of night when flares lit up the sky followed by the sound of gunfire. They were on a plain not far from Bagram airbase and bullets whizzed past. Then helicopter gunships roared overhead. No one could see where the Soviets were coming from and the convoy scattered in a thousand directions. Horses were cut down. One of the Britons was half trampled by one of their animals panicking. An Afghan hauled him out. One guide crawled to a nearby river. He could see Russian tanks scouring the landscape and kept his head down until the next morning when he began to walk again. Eventually in the second village he visited, the guide found the British men. Battered and bruised, they resumed their journey, still hunted by the Soviets. Twice more they came close to being ambushed by commandos and changed their route to try and evade their pursuers. ‘It was a very lucky escape for the British,’ reckons one of Massoud’s lieutenants. They finally made it over the border around two in the morning. Two of the British men, still dressed in Afghan garb, were barely able to walk and were virtually dragged by their guides.

  The Russians, who had been tipped off about the route, had failed to capture their main prize. But in the chaos the team had abandoned their equipment including their secure radios, satellite phones and fake documentation. Within two hours, realising that they had a useful haul, the Soviets sent four helicopters from Kabul which took the equipment to Moscow. Some of the documentation was later put on display at a Kabul press conference in October when the Soviets through their Afghan clients decided to publicise the find. Stuart Bodman was dead, they said. In fact his body was that of a Panjshiri horseman.28 They said he also had with him a video camera and a modern communications unit with a computer encoding system. There was also a diary, they said, which mentioned twenty-five time fuses, twenty-five electric fuses and fifty detonators for the manufacture of mines and bombs as well a list of chemicals and instructions on how to make explosives and where to place them. An explosives specialist named Tom may also have been part of the group, they said.29

  The Afghan and Soviet press did their best to expose what the British were up to. ‘A good pay is taken by the hired instructors training Afghan terrorists in Pakistan to carry out acts that are not worthy of gentlemen. One of the instructors … is making remote-controlled high-explosive bombs that are launched on peaceful Afghan villages. It is an open secret that some important highways in Afghanistan have been blown up with British mines.’30 At other times, the Afghans accused the CIA of sending in undercover spies with film cameras from Peshawar.31 The CIA did run a programme which sent non-Americans, often Europeans, into the country posing as journalists on false passports and with communications and filming equipment to report back on what they saw.32 Groups of private individuals and small charities providing medical and humanitarian aid would soon follow the journalists in the pilgrimage to see Massoud which caused some awkwardness for the secret MI6 teams which had to be careful not to run into them.

  As well as being able to go into the country, the British were also able to support activities that the CIA could not. The Americans were still struggling under the burden of the Congressional inquiries of the mid-1970s into assassination and covert war. A few of the more wily CIA officers saw a way of getting round their own lawyers and restrictions by bankrolling the British to undertake certain actions. ‘They had a willingness to do jobs I couldn’t touch. They basically took care of the “How to Kill People” department,’ one CIA officer claimed later in an account of the war. ‘The Brits were eventually able to buy things that we couldn’t because it infringed on murder, assassination, and indiscriminate bombings. They could use guns with silencers. We couldn’t do that because a silencer immediately implied assassination – and heaven forbid car bombs! No way I could even suggest it, but I could say to the Brits, “Fadallah in Beirut was really effective last week. They had a car bomb that killed three hundred people.” I gave MI6 stuff in good faith. What they did with it was always their business.’33

  British officials involved at the time shy away from American talk of ‘assassination’ but say fighters were trained in the use of silencers and sniper rifles as well as in the manufacture and planting of improvised explosive devices to blow up Soviet convoys. Fortunately for the British, these fighters allied to Massoud would be on their side in 2001 and in the battles that followed. This was not the case for those the Americans worked with like Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani who received the bulk of American aid.

  For Margaret Thatcher it was all simple. They were freedom fighters not terrorists. Abdul Haq came to visit Downing Street, one of his feet having recently been blown off. He had subsequently admitted to being behind a bomb blast at Kabul airport that killed twenty-eight people. When questioned as to why the Prime Minister refused to meet members of the Palestinian PLO or Nelson Mandela’s ANC, a spokesman for the Prime Minister said it was different as the Afghan rebels were fighting a foreign invader.34 ‘They were good terrorists so we supported them. The ANC were bad. That caused her no moral problem at all,’ explains one of Thatcher’s former officials. The Chief of MI6, and his Director of Operations Colin McColl, would occasionally brief the Prime Minister on operations, but contact was sporadic – perhaps a forty-minute meeting every six months. Just as there was little contact on the ground between MI6 and CIA teams in Pakistan, there was relatively little co-ordination at the level of political leaders. MI6 was left to get on with its own business.

  The great terror for the mujahedeen remained the Mi-24 Hind gunships which flew out of Bagram airbase and which provided the Soviets with control of the skies. After four years it was clear that the Soviets were hurting, but not enough. They had also begun to use more special forces, their Spetsnaz troops, to carry out commando raids, often dropping on to hills by helicopter. There were those in Washington who wanted to escalate the covert war, to supply more advanced weaponry and to shift from just hurting the Soviets to trying to drive them out. Politicians like Charlie Wilson were pushing the CIA to send more advanced weapons systems, especially surface-to-air missiles, and to up the funding. The first attempt to counter Soviet advantage in the air was a British-made device which London was keen to deploy. There had been resistance in some quarters to using more advanced weaponry because of a fear that the Western hand in the war would be made all too clear, but resistance in London and Washington was eventually overcome (Thatcher personally pushing it through in London).

  The Afghan warriors employing the British-supplied Blowpipe missile quickly saw that their task required something approaching a death-wish. It was a shoulder-fired surface-to-air weapon but a pretty inept one. The user had to launch it while standing directly in front of an attacking aircraft and then guide the missile to the target by manipulating a joystick with his thumb as he stared death in the face, like playing some suicidal video game. The operator would be looking, literally, down the barrel of a gun. The general opinion of British soldiers who had used them in the Falklands was that they were ‘a pile of crap’ and they were being phased out in the British army
in favour of the new Javelin weapon.35 Still, hundreds were smuggled into Afghanistan via Pakistan. A British team came out to provide the extensive training required. The results, even when tried out on ‘gently descending parachute flares’, were miserable. Half of the first batch would not accept the command signal and went astray. After a British expert had flown over and agreed that something was wrong they were all taken back to England to be modified before being returned for action.36 No one is able to recall a single aircraft being shot down using a Blowpipe.37 At one battle, Pakistani officers tried to show the mujahedeen how to fire them and launched thirteen with no hits and with one Pakistani captain and an NCO severely wounded by the unscathed attacking aircraft.38 The British military were mortified by the failure of their kit.

  After the Blowpipe the Stinger arrived in Afghanistan. This was an American ‘fire and forget’ weapon that locked on to the heat source of an aircraft. In a sign of how much this had become a media war, the mujahedeen fighters given the privilege of firing the first missile were also given a video camera on which to record the event. They came, unsurprisingly, from Hekmatyar’s party. The result of their foray into TV journalism was filmic chaos. At three in the afternoon on 25 September 1986, a group of Hind gunships came in to land. As they made their final approach, the words ‘Allahu Akbar’ could be heard repeatedly on the tape as three missiles blazed away. Two hit their target. The picture then shook as people, including the cameraman, jumped up and down in celebration. It then zoomed into the wreckage and on to the grisly image of the corpses. Mujahedeen began cursing and firing shots into a body before a final close-up of one deceased member of the Soviet aircrew barely out of his teens. The video would be shown by the CIA to President Reagan in the White House.39 Massoud received almost none of the Stingers: only eight came his way at the end of the war out of 2,000 provided to the mujahedeen (600 of which were estimated to be still at large in 1996).40 Abdullah Anas and others would occasionally purchase some on the black market from other corrupt Afghan commanders. The missiles certainly boosted morale, but even they were not as effective as sometimes claimed. Only 16 per cent actually hit their targets, according to one official involved at the time.41 Soviet aircraft flew higher, and more of them remained in base for longer, although this also may have been due to a political decision. Journalists kept offering to pay money to see a Stinger being fired and bringing down a Soviet aircraft, but they never got the picture.42

  Towards the end of the war, there was an element of theatre to proceedings, a sense that much of it was being played out for the now extensive audience of visiting journalists. Massoud was a master of the media. He understood its value. His soldiers also grew used to the presence of journalists. When the cameras came out, they would immediately strike a pose. The only way into the country was under the protection of a particular commander, so media accounts almost always tended to fête their protector. Massoud was widely glamorised even though he could be as brutal as any commander. Hacks paid for mujahedeen to attack a particular Russian post so that they could film it. There was talk that some had offered $10,000 for a picture of the execution of a Russian soldier. The Pakistanis had always been very adept at the theatrics. The performances had been well rehearsed for visiting dignitaries from Washington, including Congressmen like Charlie Wilson (who at one point introduced his latest girlfriend, who was called Snowflake, to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an unlikely meeting if ever there was one).43

  When the custom-fitted, unmarked and blacked-out Starlifter aircraft pulled up at Islamabad airport it meant that the CIA Director, Bill Casey, had travelled out to see the show. When Casey paid his first visit to the country he was made to believe he was being driven by jeep into Afghanistan. In fact that was considered far too dangerous and he was actually taken to a fake training camp in Pakistan. He cried tears of joy at the sight of so many willing warriors. Eventually he would be allowed to see a real camp.44 The mumbling Casey, who had fought with the CIA’s forerunner the OSS during the Second World War, was in many ways a throwback to the CIA of Frank Wisner and the early Cold War. He did not care much for intelligence analysis or Congressional oversight. He wanted the CIA to be a tool to wage a clandestine war against the Soviet Union. President Reagan’s strategy was to pressure the Soviets on all fronts and all around the world, whether in Central America or Central Asia. It was the 1980s version of that old Cold War notion of rollback. Part of the idea was propaganda. The Soviets were worried about the spread of radical Islam in these years. The Americans were not. Ten thousand Korans were printed and distributed in Central Asia, religion being used to undermine the godless Soviets.45 Casey also wanted to take mujahedeen operations into the Soviet Union itself, a step further than even the Albania operation of the early 1950s. He wanted to have strategic bridges and roads blown up to impede the movement of Soviet supplies into Afghanistan. This did happen, although the CIA always denied that it had authorised the attacks and said that the mujahedeen had acted on their own or with Pakistani support.

  The ISI sent its own men undercover into Afghanistan to act as advisers and eyes and ears. Two-man teams would go in for three months, growing thick beards to blend in. They were told to deny any connection to the Pakistani government and to avoid being captured alive. The ISI’s head of Afghan operations, Mohammad Yousaf, was explicit about the training provided for sabotage and assassination, including how to spot Soviet officers in order to kill them. ‘These attacks could range from a knife between the shoulder blades of a Soviet soldier shopping in the bazaar to the placing of a briefcase bomb in a senior official’s office.’46 The attacks became more aggressive and less clearly military, more what most would call terrorism. A bomb under a dining table at Kabul University in late 1983 killed nine Soviets including a female professor. ‘Educational institutions were considered fair game as the staff were all Communists indoctrinating their students with Marxist dogma,’ according to Yousaf. Shots were fired at a Soviet cinema; remote-controlled car bombs began to go off; rockets were lobbed into Kabul killing civilians. Boats carrying supplies towards Afghanistan were also targeted. ‘We required limpet mines that a small recce boat or a swimmer could carry, which could be clamped to the side of the boat just below the water line,’ Yousaf recalled later. ‘For these we turned to the British, via MI6. They obliged and it was the UK’s small but effective contribution to destroying a number of loaded barges on the Soviet side of the Amu throughout 1986.’47 CIA officials supplied electronic timers, plastic explosives and other items which could have military uses but which could also be deployed against civilians. They told the ISI never to use words like sabotage or assassination when Congressmen came through. No one wanted an inquiry.48 Moscow began to issue warnings, hinting that it would strike training camps in Pakistan. The water was getting too hot and the temperature was soon turned down a notch.

  The CIA chief in Islamabad, Milt Bearden, and his ISI counterpart, Brigadier Yousaf, increasingly began to argue as the decade came to a close. The ISI man had an abiding distrust of the Americans, a distaste for the fact that Yankee money was funding his jihad and tried to assert control, which Bearden resisted. The Americans began to perceive risks in their reliance on the Pakistanis and tried to go around the ISI’s back to build their own relations with commanders. They engaged sources to provide reports on what weaponry was reaching the front line and find out whether the Pakistanis were actually passing on all the material they claimed (the CIA reckoned at least a third of the weaponry was siphoned off by the ISI for other projects). The CIA also tried building relations with Massoud, although officers did not see him face to face, instead working through intermediaries. One officer assigned to work with Massoud learnt that Hekmatyar had put word out to have him (the American) killed.49

  In Moscow, a few in the Soviet leadership realised early on that they were not going to win the war in a conventional sense. But there were always voices calling for more troops and tougher tactics and there was an unwillingness early i
n the 1980s to accept that the intervention had become a war which was now being lost. As the decade stretched on and the coffins returned home and the mothers of the soldiers began to protest, the conflict increasingly became the Soviets’ Vietnam. The leadership struggled to find a way to extricate itself from a war which sapped morale and underscored the decay of hardline Communist power and policy. Thatcher could see by the second half of the 1980s that Gorbachev was looking for a way to disengage from Afghanistan. He told her it would be easier to find a solution if she stopped supplying the rebels with weapons.50 But Britain and the US did not stop. They were determined to drive home the advantage, to keep the pressure on the Soviet Union. They continued even after the Geneva accords were signed in 1988 when it became clear that the war-weary Soviets were pulling out.

  As the end of the war approached, CIA and MI6 officers in Pakistan increasingly argued about what – and who – would come next. Senior Americans remained opposed to Massoud, the British supportive. When the dangers of backing certain commanders like Hekmatyar were explained by a British officer to visiting American Congressmen, a message came back from Downing Street through headquarters and out to the field: ‘Don’t rock the boat.’ The British pushed for working with the UN to try and forge a political compromise between the different factions. A few in Washington agreed, but the CIA was determined to keep going. Milt Bearden pointed out that the British had lost two wars in Afghanistan already.

  Soviet soldiers finally marched out of Afghanistan on 15 February 1989. General Boris Gromov was the last to leave, solemnly walking across the Friendship Bridge that connected the two countries. Fourteen thousand of his comrades had been killed in the preceding years. Perhaps a million, perhaps two million Afghans had died. No one had counted. Some 300,000 to 400,000 had been armed over the decade.51 Milt Bearden sent a high-priority ‘Immediate’ cable back to Langley. Subject: ‘Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan’. The content of the message was a page which spelt out the words ‘We won’ in Xs across an entire page. For the first time Bearden switched off the light in his office, which he had previously kept on every night to make the Soviets across the road think he never stopped working.52 ‘Vietnam avenged,’ one person remembers Bearden saying with his fist in the air.