But the introduction of each new silver bullet brought with it the problem of distribution to the resistance parties. Those who were issued the weapons were winners, and those who did not get the new weapons were the complainers. The new antitank systems were issued to commanders in eastern Afghanistan, where much of the fighting was taking place and where the systems would do the most good. Certainly they were of more use in Paktia and Nangarhar, where the Soviets were still mounting major assaults, than they’d be in the Panjshir Valley, which had settled into a quiet lull. Ahmad Shah Massoud appeared to have established an undeclared cease-fire with the Soviet 40th Army and now spent much of his time shoring up his position politically across the north of Afghanistan.
As negotiators in Geneva inched closer to a political settlement, the Afghan resistance parties began to jockey for position for the post-Soviet period. Ahmad Shah Massoud was far ahead of the other major resistance leaders as he formed his Supreme Council of the North, a loose union of northern commanders that would one day become known as the Northern Alliance. But Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Massoud’s archenemy, would not be far behind in preparing for a showdown after the Soviet withdrawal, which he believed would soon come. As these and other commanders and party leaders sought their own advantages, I would become increasingly embroiled in the fractious politics of a war drawing to a close.
Islamabad, March 1987
Congressional criticism of the CIA’s perceived favoritism of the Afghan fundamentalist parties over the moderates had been manageable as long as successes continued on the battlefield and there was no clear end in sight. But as evidence of a developing Soviet exit strategy grew, Washington’s distaste for the fundamentalists mounted, and it was only natural that their attention should focus on the dark and mistrustful favorite of the ISI, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and his Hisb-e-Islami.
At least some of the stories about Gulbuddin’s idiosyncratic evil deeds were, I knew, traceable to black propaganda originating with the KGB’s disinformation teams in Kabul. Others could be traced to Indian intelligence operations or to moderate Afghan party leaders working Capitol Hill. To deal with the growing stream of congressional inquiries on Hekmatyar and our alleged favoritism toward him, I needed a better measure of the man—something more than the “group therapy” observations I had made up until then. I told Akhtar I wanted a meeting with Gulbuddin—just the two of us, I insisted.
A couple of days after my request, Colonel Bacha brought Gulbuddin into a small interview room at ISI headquarters, bare except for three chairs and a low table. On Bacha’s heels came a steward with a pot of tea, three cups, and a plate of cookies. As the colonel was about to take a seat, I laid my hand on his shoulder and said that General Akhtar had given me his assurances that the meeting would be a strictly one-on-one affair. Bacha’s services would not be needed, as the engineer spoke excellent English. The colonel muttered something to Gulbuddin in Pashto, which I assumed was a reassurance that he’d be standing by outside the door if needed, and grudgingly left the room.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s family were Ghilzai Pashtuns of the nomadic Kharotai tribe, who had migrated from Ghazni in the Pashtun east to Kunduz in northern Afghanistan. Gulbuddin studied for two years in the military high school in Kabul, but he left before graduating. He entered the College of Engineering at the University of Kabul but failed to complete his studies there, too, and found his calling instead as a political activist and fervent Islamist, becoming involved in the Kabul campus Islamic Movement’s Muslim Youth branch. He took up violent opposition to the Communists, who were by then strengthening their hold on Afghan politics, and was jailed for two years for murdering a Maoist-Communist opponent. It was also during this period that he had his first of many confrontations with another student activist at the university, a young Tajik from the Panjshir Valley, Ahmad Shah Massoud. The two activists would vie for center stage in the Afghan drama for the next thirty years.
After his release from prison in the early 1970s, Hekmatyar fled to Peshawar, where, along with other Afghan Islamists, and with the support of Pakistan, he became a fundamentalist activist against the government of the Afghan Republic. In 1975, after the Islamist-instigated rebellion against the Afghan government failed, Gulbuddin formed his own radical party, the Hisb-e-Islami, the Party of Islam.
Gulbuddin pulled out his agate prayer beads and began to run the beads through his fingers, one at a time. He had come because he had been forced to and appeared in no hurry to open the conversation himself.
“I’d like to thank you, Engineer, for making yourself available to meet with me this morning,” I said, eager to get down to business. “I know how pressing matters are with you.”
There was the faintest nod, but no response.
I went directly to the point. “Engineer Gulbuddin, you know we’re committed to helping your people, but you go out of your way to irritate Americans. Is there something I ought to know, something I’m missing?” Gulbuddin wasn’t an engineer, and I knew it. But resistance party leaders came in only two categories—clerics and engineers. If a commander or party head wasn’t addressed by the clerical titles of “mullah” or “maulvi,” then it had better be “engineer.” So Engineer Gulbuddin it would be.
“I can’t answer for the irritation of the Americans,” he said with clipped impatience. “That would be your concern.”
This guy really doesn’t like us, I thought. “It started two years ago when you refused to meet with our President Reagan, and it continues. I don’t really care what you think of the United States, but your attitude makes it difficult for me to help your commanders in Afghanistan.”
“How so?” Gulbuddin heard a threat in what I’d just said. Perhaps I was going to tell him that I would see that his commanders were cut off from the supply lines.
“Because your reputation as a brutal fundamentalist,” I said, using the terminology to provoke him, “who hates the United States as much as he hates the Soviet Union is well known in Washington. The story is spread around Washington by your brothers in the jihad, with their complaints that you receive more support from your Pakistani brothers than you deserve. These complaints end up with me. Some in my government say we should provide you with nothing. That distracts me. And it could cause problems for your commanders.”
“What is brutal fundamentalism?” Gulbuddin said, clicking his prayer beads.
“You know as well as I do the stories of your throwing acid in the faces of young women at Kabul University for not wearing the veil—”
“Fantasy. That never happened.”
“That you personally killed your own party members for disloyalty. That you execute the prisoners your commanders take, particularly Hazaras and Jowzjanis.”
“This is more fantasy. It is trivial. My party is disciplined, but—”
“Is it fantasy or is it trivial, Engineer Gulbuddin? There is a difference.”
To this he did not respond.
“These things are important to me because my government thinks they’re important,” I continued. “I wouldn’t have taken your time or mine if these matters were either fantasy or trivial.”
“I am fighting an enemy that is brutal, and I match their brutality. But the stories are lies, and they are unimportant. It’s not important what your government thinks of me. I don’t need support from you or your Congress. I can capture enough weapons from the enemy to fight the jihad.”
“Stingers, Engineer? Can you capture Stingers?” It was widely known that Engineer Ghaffar, the commander of the Stinger team that brought down the first MI-24Ds at Jalalabad the previous September, was from Gulbuddin’s party.
“The means to fight belong to the people of Afghanistan.”
This guy is a tough nut, I thought. His world shifts seamlessly between fact and fantasy. “Engineer Gulbuddin, what matter is there of importance that you’d like to discuss?”
“Let’s talk about why you plan to kill me. I know what you’re planning to do.”
/> “I’m planning to kill you?”
“Yes, maybe even you. Maybe now. You’re armed. I can see that.” Hekmatyar was looking under my left arm at what he must have thought was a weapon pressing against my jacket. I opened my jacket so that he could see there was no weapon, just a wallet.
Gulbuddin smiled slightly. “They say you are always armed.”
“The colonel says this?”
Gulbuddin smiled but did not answer. The truth was I was armed, but the Makarov I usually carried was in the small of my back where he couldn’t see it.
“Why would I want to kill you?” I said, and for a fleeting moment thought that Hekmatyar had actually come up with a good idea. I would in later years often wonder how it might have played out if I had dropped him then and there.
“Because the United States has understood that we have now defeated the Soviet Union, a superpower like the United States. And the United States can no longer feel safe with me alive. That’s why you feel you must kill me.”
“I think the engineer flatters himself,” I said.
Gulbuddin fingered his beads and smiled, but his dark eyes showed nothing. “Yes, perhaps I flatter myself.”
The meeting ended with the same tension with which it had begun. I accomplished nothing beyond having spent some time alone with the man who would be a problem for the rest of my time in Pakistan. I would have two more such meetings with Hekmatyar, and other officers on my staff would meet with his closest deputies. But of the leaders of the Peshawar Seven, it would be only Gulbuddin Hekmatyar whom I would have to count as an enemy, and a dangerous one. And, ironically, I would never be able to shake the allegations that the CIA had chosen this paranoid radical as its favorite, that we were providing this man who had directly insulted the President of the United States with more than his share of the means to fight the Soviets. Gulbuddin would later claim that at one of our meetings I had tried to buy him off with an offer of several million dollars, which, of course, he claimed he’d turned down.
Islamabad, March 1987
The CIA’s covert action program in Afghanistan was congressionally mandated and funded, an arrangement that brought more oversight from Congress than was the case with any other agency activity, with the exception of the covert action in Central America. On balance, congressional interest in the Afghan program was positive. If anything, we at the CIA felt that Congress might just love what we were doing in Afghanistan a little too much. Some members of Congress seemed more determined to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan than many in the executive branch directly involved with the war. One of these was Congressman Charlie Wilson, the flamboyant Texas Democrat from the rural second district deep in the piney woods northeast of Houston.
A 1956 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Charlie Wilson was elected to the Texas State Legislature while he was still on active duty in the U.S. Navy. Having served aboard a destroyer in his early Navy days, Wilson ended up in the Intelligence Directorate (G-2) on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. He was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1972, arrived in Washington in 1973, and by the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he was an established member of the Democratic machine, a man whose personal flair and flashy womanizing masked a deep substance and a steadfast loyalty to the cause he had chosen to champion. Well over six feet tall and rail thin, Charlie would be described by one profiler as a Texan who could “strut while sitting down.” He reveled in telling stories of his womanizing, particularly if there was the slightest chance that a prude was within earshot. He told and retold the story of how Bill Casey had noted in wonderment that all the young women working in Charlie’s Washington office were uniformly and strikingly attractive. Charlie’s response, which he later only mildly regretted, was, “Bill, you can teach ’em how to type, but you can’t teach ’em how to grow tits.” That comment and others would make Charlie a standing target of opportunity for Washington feminists, but it added panache to a man whose main cause as a congressman would be tormenting the Soviets until they turned around and left Afghanistan.
Charlie made his first trip to Pakistan in 1982 and on that visit struck up a personal relationship with President Zia that would last and deepen until the president’s death six years later. That visit would be followed by many more, plus a few cross-border forays into Afghanistan. But it would be in Washington that Charlie Wilson would make the most difference to the CIA’s effort in Afghanistan. By the early 1980s, the Texas congressman was a member of the Defense Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, a position that enabled him to identify and generate funding for the CIA’s Afghanistan program. More than any other member of either house, Charlie fashioned Congress into the engine that drove the CIA’s program for Afghanistan. He understood early on that if he was able to get an assignment to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), that assignment, linked with work on the House Appropriations Committee, would put him in charge of the congressional component of the CIA effort in Afghanistan.
But House Speaker Jim Wright had problems with Charlie going on the HPSCI; the Democrats on the committee were blocking the maverick Texan because he had voted on the floor for continuing aid to the Nicaraguan contras. That vote had elicited the ire of what Charlie referred to as “the liberals” in his party, in particular Jim Wright, who was deeply committed to cutting off all aid to the contras. Behind the scenes, Dick Cheney lobbied for Wilson’s assignment to the HPSCI, and after Charlie gave Wright his assurances that he would concentrate on Afghanistan and, as he would later characterize it, that he “wouldn’t fuck around in Central America,” he got the HPSCI assignment. From that point on, he was perfectly situated to concentrate on his central political passion—driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan and tormenting them in the process.
A man of his word, Charlie never touched the Central American tar baby again, even when Bill Casey was in desperate need of just such a congressional champion. After Jim Wright fell afoul of the House Ethics Committee and was replaced by Tom Foley, Wilson stayed focused on Afghanistan and left Central America to others.
My first contact with Charlie came in June 1986, just before I went out to Islamabad. Since we were both from Texas, Charlie and I spoke the same language and hit it off immediately. I had come to appreciate greatly what he was doing for us—it seemed that whenever we needed another $20 million urgently for the development of some new system for the Afghan resistance, Charlie would find us $40 million. And so it went. After I arrived in Pakistan, Charlie would be the first of many congressional delegations coming our way, and always my most challenging. The very term codel for “congressional delegation” would normally strike something close to fear in the heart of a U.S. mission abroad. But a Codel Wilson would mix delight and confusion with the usual dose of fear.
If Charlie’s central political passion was pushing the Soviets out of Afghanistan, the congressman was not without other delights. His constant traveling companion in those days was Annelise Ilschenko, a stunning woman from the Cleveland Ukrainian community who had come to Washington as a member of an Ohio congressman’s staff. In the mid-1970s, Annelise had managed to capture the Miss World USA crown, an achievement that qualified her to fit neatly into the dazzling retinue of the colorful congressman from Texas. How she blended into the scheme of the rigidly Islamist North-West Frontier Province, where she was a frequent fixture with Charlie, was another matter. With Annelise often wearing leather pants in the Khyber Agency, I was never sure whether the rugged Afridis in the Khyber Agency thought she was a woman or a boy, or whether it even mattered to them. Annelise, to put it mildly, made an impression in the North-West Frontier Province.
Islamabad, March 1987
Akhtar’s aide had called me at the office with a curt request. “A car is on the way,” he said. “The general needs to see you right away.”
I was escorted past the Pakistan Army guards at the entrance to ISI headquarters and directly into Akhtar’s conference room. The normal five-
minute wait—engineered, I thought, as a reminder of the general’s sense of our pecking order—was cut to less than a minute. Akhtar breezed into the room alone, sat down, and got right to business. He ignored the mess steward who set a pot of black tea and cookies on the table between us. I steeled myself for a possible tirade from the general and imagined any number of possible complaints.
“It’s Charlie,” Akhtar said. “He’s very unhappy.”
Leaning back in my chair with a sense of relief that the issue “only” involved the Texas congressman, I scrolled back and considered Charlie’s activities over the last few months. He had made a couple of short forays into Afghanistan before I took over the program, and I knew he’d planned another, more grandiose visit a few weeks back. But as he’d reached zero line near Miram Shah, he was stopped by the Pakistani Frontier Forces on the orders of his friend General Akhtar. Charlie had told me he’d been stopped cold at the border, but he’d concealed how disappointed he’d been.
“Charlie is not happy,” the general repeated, still trying to prompt a comment from me.
“This is true, I suppose. He told me he was stopped at zero line. Why’d you stop him? It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d gone in.”
“I stopped him because it wasn’t safe. Everybody in the North-West Frontier knew he was going in. What would I do if someone killed him?”
The Main Enemy Page 31
