I never understood why.
In the almost ten years of war, the Soviet Union admitted to having lost around fifteen thousand troops killed in action, with several hundred thousand wounded or disabled from disease. General Gromov’s brilliantly staged exit from Afghanistan would grow rapidly into a national disaster for the USSR, yet he was the hero of Afghanistan. The Soviet adventure ended as it began, with fantasy and make-believe.
Islamabad, February 15, 1989
My telecommunications chief stepped into my office with his report.
“He’s out.”
I nodded and said, “Send it now.”
And with that order we sent an immediate cable to Langley with two words etched out of Xs covering the whole page:
CITE: ISLAMABAD 222487
IMMEDIATE DIRECTOR
WNINTEL INTEL
SUBJECT: SOVIET OCCUPATION OF AFGHANISTAN
FILE DEFER:
That same night I ended a ritual. My office was about three-quarters of a mile away in a straight line from the Soviet embassy. Since I had arrived in Pakistan in the summer of 1986, I had kept a table lamp lit in my window twenty-four hours a day, covering a period now approaching three years. Word had come back to me from a number of sources that the KGB Rezident in the fortresslike Soviet embassy just a rifle shot away had often commented that my office appeared to be occupied at all times of the day or night. On one occasion, a KGB man had even said to me directly that he had noticed I worked late each evening, since the lights in my officer were always burning.
As the sun dropped beyond the Margalla Hills on the night of February 15, 1989, I turned off all the lights in my office, including the table lamp that had burned steadily for the last three years.
First Chief Directorate Headquarters, 1230 Hours, February 15, 1989
It was over. Fortieth Army commander General Boris Gromov’s staged exit from Afghanistan had profound propaganda value. It added a sense of finality, Shebarshin thought, to the final act of a drama that had turned to a tragedy. Before Gromov had made his dramatic return home as the symbolic last Soviet soldier to walk out of Afghanistan, there had been calls from Najibullah for a “small Soviet force to carry out limited functions.” There were additional calls for Soviet air strikes in eastern Afghanistan, in Paktia near Zhawar and Khowst, and at other bandit strongholds. But Shebarshin had been dead set against any more Soviet intervention. There was no stomach for more adventures in Afghanistan.
Leonid Shebarshin was under no illusions that the Soviet Union had acted nobly at the end of its Afghan adventure. On the contrary, he was convinced that Gromov’s splendid performance before the world press was just another step in the betrayal of Afghanistan. Betrayal or not, it was irreversible. The USSR would have to live with whatever deal Shevardnadze had cut in backroom meetings with his counterparts, George Shultz and James Baker. And eventually the USSR would have to live with its shame.
Shebarshin had been through it all, the good, what little there was of it, and all of the bad. He had been the KGB man on the spot in Kabul in May 1986, when the Soviet Union decided that its man Babrak Karmal was the source of the failures and had to go. But there was a problem. The old man hadn’t quite gotten the message when he passed through Moscow a few weeks earlier, when he’d been told that his time to let go of power had come. Shebarshin was sent to Kabul to help Karmal exit gracefully. He had actually edited the text of Karmal’s abdication speech, a most dishonorable task, he thought, one that at times brought bitter outbursts from the Afghan leader: “Who knows Dari, General, you or I?”
Shebarshin knew he had compromised his own conscience and that Karmal’s premonitions of “bad times” for both Afghanistan and the Soviet Union were not based on personal hysteria. The old man threatened and cursed, and at no point did he yield to the temptation of pitying his “soulless opponents.” If Karmal had been a Russian, Shebarshin thought as he slugged it out verbally with the old man, he’d have simply said, “Fuck you! Do what you want.” But Karmal was Afghan, and in the end he did yield, and he made his speech, handing over to Moscow’s new “chosen one,” Najibullah.
And now it was over. Shebarshin thought he should be recovering from his own sense of dishonor. But he wasn’t. The small wound that had been inflicted so long ago by the proud old man had grown into an ulcer. And it would continue to grow. Shebarshin would add the betrayal of Najibullah to that of Babrak Karmal, a disloyalty that had even greater consequences for Afghanistan and the USSR.
Shebarshin, along with the KGB Chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, had been the two strongest voices saying that Najib would hold on much longer than the naysayers suggested. The pessimists gave the Afghan leader a month or two before his Army would collapse, mutiny, and then turn on him. But Shebarshin knew Najib well and was convinced that if there was any form of aftercare by the withdrawing superpowers, Najib might even pull off a few deals and survive over the long run.
He had spent enough time with the big bear of a man to appreciate his quick mind and flexibility. He might even make it, Shebarshin thought. But deep down he knew the USSR would let him down. It was one of the reasons he tried to avoid becoming personally involved with the likable Afghan, a thirsty man with a quick wit—he favored Chivas Regal Scotch. Shebarshin had been to Najibullah’s home on the grounds of the old palace. He had met Fatan, his dutiful wife, and their three daughters, who always seemed to be giggling about something, maybe just about the KGB man’s presence in the family home. Shebarshin steeled himself to resist any instinct of developing a personal friendship with the Afghan president, though they would have been friends under almost any other circumstances. He even decided against asking him to autograph a photograph of the two men together. That might imply a connection he didn’t want to have to deal with later. No, Shebarshin decided, he’d keep it strictly business with the Afghan leader. That way it would be easier to betray the man when the time came.
Karmal had made his peace with Afghanistan. Fate had moved him from Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif and the protection of General Dostum, and finally to Moscow, where he would live out his last years, all but forgotten. Shebarshin would never see him in Moscow. He was too ashamed. And he was deeply ashamed to see the way the Afghan affair would end, with the Soviets betraying their old friends and the Americans pressing for their usual unconditional victory, whatever that would mean. Shebarshin was convinced that the Americans could, if they were realists, make a deal with Najib that would have a better chance than any other approach to peace. But he was also convinced that the Americans would have nothing to do with such a deal. They’d eventually come to regret it, he thought. The only other possible statesman on the Afghan scene, the only other man who might look beyond the dangerous, narrow view of ethnic conflict, was Ahmad Shah Massoud. The Soviet side could live with Massoud, Shebarshin thought, but could the Pakistanis and the Americans? Probably not, he decided. And they’d come to regret that, too.
Islamabad, May 1989
The 40th Army was a fading memory as spring gave way to summer, but Najibullah was hanging tough as ever. Far from collapsing as soon as darkness fell on the Soviet withdrawal, the Soviet puppet leader held on, and the confrontation between the mujahideen and the Najibullah regime was settling into a low-attrition standoff as all sides jockeyed for advantage, none willing to commit to a major engagement.
Pakistan was off on another of its infrequent experiments with democracy, having elected as prime minister Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the man Zia had hanged a decade earlier. In the late spring, the fledgling government of the Radcliffe- and Oxford-educated Bhutto pushed ISI to mount a major attack on Jalalabad, hoping to seize the city in what was hoped would be the first of a series of victories. The Peshawar Seven had been against it, as had most of the commanders in eastern Afghanistan, but the prime minister was eager for a victory to coincide with her attendance at the Organization of the Islamic Conference meeting that spring. So the assault on the provincial capital went forward.<
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The battle turned into a fiasco; the failure of the resistance to take the city gave Najibullah a psychological second wind. I made a few trips through the Khyber Agency during the Jalalabad campaign and found the siege a halfhearted effort that senselessly piled up casualties on both sides. Pickup trucks smeared with mud in hand-painted camouflage raced toward Jalalabad, their beds jammed with fighters and weapons. Threading their way back along the old Grand Trunk Road more slowly toward Torkham, the same trucks carried the wounded and the stacks of dead from the stalemated battle.
On one trip to Torkham while Jalalabad was under siege, I took along the visiting DDO, Richard Stolz. While viewing the movement of supplies into Afghanistan and of the wounded out, one of the Pakistani officers traveling with us approached and whispered in my ear, “We’ve caught a man photographing you and Mr. Stolz! He says he’s an American working for The Washington Post.”
Though both Stolz and I were dressed in shalwar kameez, we were nonetheless obviously foreigners.
“Where is the guy?” I asked.
“Don’t worry. We’ve got his camera. We’ll take care of him.” The Pakistani officer winked and motioned about twenty yards away to a young man with a scraggly beard and dressed in Afghan garb talking to two of his officers. The colonel’s answer was far from reassuring.
“No, Colonel. Let’s not just ‘take care of him,’” I said. “Give him back his camera and let him go. But first let’s get Stolz out of here.”
If, by 1989, there was one man working at Langley who most clearly embodied the old-school traditions of the CIA, it was Richard Stolz. He was a throwback to the first crop of Ivy Leaguers who had joined the CIA in the years immediately after World War II. Born in 1925 and raised comfortably in New Jersey, Stolz enlisted in the Army at eighteen and by late 1944 was a combat infantryman with the 100th Division in France. After the war, he graduated from Amherst College and made his way to New York, where a college friend quietly contacted him and asked him if he was bored at work and would like to be part of something interesting going on in Washington. It was, at the time, the typical recruitment pitch at the fledgling CIA, which relied heavily on elite eastern college connections to fill its new officer corps.
Short and slight, and with a quiet, unassuming demeanor, Stolz took to the intelligence business and in the early 1960s was chosen to be the CIA’s first chief in Moscow. After just a few months in Moscow, Stolz was kicked out by the Soviets in retaliation for the FBI’s aggressive action against a KGB officer in Washington. Yet he continued his smooth rise up the CIA’s management ranks until 1981, when he decided he couldn’t work for President Ronald Reagan’s new CIA director, Bill Casey.
Stolz was London station chief when Casey took over at the CIA. Casey quickly asked him to return to headquarters to serve as one of two deputies to Max Hugel, a Republican crony whom Casey was going to name DDO. Stolz was deeply insulted that he was being asked to nursemaid an amateur and retired rather than accept the assignment.
Hugel was forced out by scandal in just a few months, and Casey ruefully put the professionals back in charge, first naming John Stein to be DDO and later replacing him with Clair George. At first, Stolz probably regretted his decision to leave, since it looked as though he could have been rapidly promoted to DDO if he’d just waited it out.
But in the long run, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It meant that he was out of the CIA, and untainted, when the Iran-contra scandal engulfed the DO’s leadership in the mid-1980s.
After Casey’s death in 1987, William Webster, the highly regarded FBI Director, was asked by President Reagan to take over the CIA and steer it out of the Iran-contra morass. Webster turned to Stolz, whom he had known at Amherst, and asked him to come out of retirement in 1988 and get the DO back on track. The fact that Stolz had been out of the CIA throughout Iran-contra made him a much more attractive candidate for Webster, who was then trying to deal with increasingly aggressive intelligence oversight committees in Congress. It also meant that Dick Stolz, who as a young case officer had experienced the earliest of the CIA’s battles against the Soviet Union, would return to lead the DO during the Cold War’s final days.
By early 1989, the upheaval in Eastern Europe was just beginning, but Stolz could already see that SE Division needed new leadership. Stolz and his deputy, Tom Twetten, believed that the entire Directorate of Operations had to change, but nowhere was the need for an overhaul more pressing than in the SE Division.
Stolz had run the division himself in the 1970s, when it was called the SB Division (for “Soviet Bloc”). He was old school, but still he recognized that the division had to be aired out to keep up with the accelerating pace of events. He knew that Burton Gerber was one of the best of the CIA’s Soviet operations officers, but he had been division chief for five years—far too long, in Stolz’s opinion.
Stolz and Twetten knew that the SE Division had to start thinking more broadly to seek out the kind of political intelligence that policy makers in Washington were hungry for as they tried to grapple with the accelerating pace of change in the Soviet empire. But they also worried that SE Division managers were still so focused on obtaining yet another microdot message from a spy inside the KGB that they were missing the big picture. Stolz realized that Burton Gerber and his deputy, Paul Redmond, were both products of the SE Division culture and were not the right people to try to change it. Stolz wasn’t certain how rapidly the division should or could be overhauled, but he knew that it had to change.
For his part, Gerber also recognized that he had been in the job too long. He had already quietly gone to Stolz to ask that he be allowed to move on to a new post.
Dick Stolz had come out to Pakistan not only to take a look at the endgame of the war, but to tell me that I would be returning to headquarters in July to take over SE Division from Burton Gerber. It was time for a change, was all that the DDO had said.
Islamabad, June 1989
June brought an end to predictions of a rapid collapse of the Kabul regime. Not only was it holding on, but the resistance had turned to deadly squabbling, splitting sharply along ethnic and regional lines. In the process, the warring parties made it nearly impossible for the international aid agencies to deliver desperately needed humanitarian assistance inside Afghanistan, and the bitter internecine fighting discouraged the millions of refugees piled up in Pakistan and Iran from returning home. The international community tired of the replay of the old Afghan drama and began to disengage.
There were few workable ideas of how to make the place whole again, and absent a major international effort—a waning possibility—Afghanistan would revert to its old unruly ways, this time armed to the teeth with the leftovers of a decade of proxy superpower warfare. Already the Afghan resistance, whose struggle against the overwhelming strength of a superpower had captured the West’s imagination, was losing even its most devoted supporters. Yesterday’s romantic freedom fighters were today’s scruffy thugs.
The Western media closed up shop in neighboring Pakistan to chase new and more dramatic stories in places like Tiananmen Square, where a new hero was born, a Chinese student staring down a People’s Liberation Army tank. The media’s departure was followed by the so-called Afghan Arabs, who began to trickle back to their homes in the Middle East, filled with a profound sense of accomplishment and with ideas for radical change at home. Among them was the son of a Saudi billionaire, Osama bin Laden, a construction engineer who had built a number of orphanages and homes for the widows of resistance fighters in North-West Frontier Province, as well as tunnels and ordnance depots burrowed into the mountains of Nangarhar and Paktia.
By the mid-1980s, the call to jihad had reached all corners of the Islamic world, attracting Arabs young and old and with a variety of motivations to travel to Pakistan to take up arms against the Soviet invaders. There were the genuine volunteers on missions of humanitarian value; there were the adventure seekers on the paths of glory; and there were the psych
opaths. As the war dragged on, a number of Arab states quietly emptied their prisons of their homegrown troublemakers and sent them off to the Afghan jihad with the hope that they might not return. By the end of the war, we had estimated that as many as twenty thousand Arabs may have passed through Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Afghan Arabs occasionally saw combat against Soviet and DRA forces, but their military role in the war would be greatly inflated after the Soviets withdrew. As fund-raisers, however, the Arabs played a positive, often critical, role in the rear areas. By 1989, the CIA estimated that Gulf Arabs raised as much as $20 million to $25 million each month for their humanitarian and construction projects. There was little concern at the time over the role of the Afghan Arabs in Pakistan or Afghanistan, with the exception of localized criticism by Western nongovernmental organizations of the harsh fundamentalism of the Saudi Wahhabis, whose influence in the refugee camps in Pakistan was pervasive. It was in these squalid camps that a generation of young Afghan males would be born into and raised in the strictest fundamentalism of the Deobandi and Wahhabi Islamic schools, the madrassas, setting the stage for new problems a decade later.
Thus, after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the interests of Western governments turned to East-Central Europe as the drama of 1989 began to play out. Pretty soon the world would lose interest in Afghanistan. And the Pakistan government, now bringing to an end another of its experiments with democracy, would rapidly discover that it could no longer escape the mood swings of the U.S. Congress. As soon as Benazir Bhutto was dismissed on charges of gross corruption in 1990, the United States would impose new sanctions on Pakistan as a nuclear proliferator, a program even Benazir endorsed. After Boris Gromov crossed the Amu Dar’ya, less than two years passed before the old friends, Pakistan and the United States, went their separate ways as the United States directed its attention elsewhere.
The Main Enemy Page 40
