The Best American Magazine Writing 2015

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  She did. Tarzi liked the manuscript for The Valley of Bamiyan so much, he had the tourism ministry publish it. She went on to write guides to Balkh, Herat, and the National Museum. The books were increasingly handsome; Afghanistan was becoming a tourist destination, and, as Nancy put it to me, “They needed to be printed in some kind of form that these rich bitches would take notice of.” An Historical Guide to Kabul, the book that thirty years later would possess Tony Kushner, was published in 1965. Annie proofread it. In the acknowledgments, Nancy wrote, “I owe her for more than these labors, for her understanding of and sympathy for the city has been a constant guide since my arrival.”

  What happened next is still obscured by mystery and rumor. No two people tell the story the same way. Finally, the one fact that can be verified is the only essential one: At some point, the couples switched partners.

  Seven

  Some friends of the Duprees and Wolfes believe Annie and Alan fell in love first, leaving Louis and Nancy to do the same. Others maintain that it was the reverse. Charles Kolb had long suspected that Louis and Nancy were having an affair. She visited the camp at Aq Kupruk for no apparent practical reason. Kolb recalls flying into Kabul in 1966 to resume work at Aq Kupruk. Louis picked him up at the airport and, with his customary bluntness, announced, “I’ve divorced Annie and married Nancy.”

  “That’s all he said about it,” Kolb told me. “I said, ‘OK.’”

  When I asked Nancy about it, she did what she usually did when she didn’t want to discuss something—she recalled the most famous and most anodyne episode from the affair and then abruptly ended the conversation. When she finished writing The Valley of Bamiyan, she told me, she sent the manuscript to Dupree for fact-checking. For some time she heard nothing back. Finally, he summoned her. When she arrived at his home, he was sitting behind a large desk in a room full of plants that had been moved inside for winter storage. He handed her the manuscript without looking at her. At the top of the first page he’d written, “Adequate, but nothing original.”

  “After a curt riposte, I turned on my heel and stomped off,” she recalled. “I got to the door and he said, ‘Come back here.’ So I went back. And I never left.”

  They were married in the winter of 1966, in a blizzard. Minister Tarzi stood in for her father during the negotiation of the bride price, which Louis set at 10,000 sheep. “Even in a situation like that,” she told me, “he was a joker.”

  Alan and Annie Wolfe left Kabul, and Louis and Nancy Dupree became its expat nucleus. They lived in a compound in the modern Shar-e-Nau district. Nancy worked in the main house, Louis in a building in the courtyard. So many visitors stopped by that they had to instruct their guards not to admit anyone who hadn’t made an appointment. In the evenings, they hosted a recurring cocktail party known as the Five O’clock Follies. “An amazing troupe of people would come by: Americans, Europeans, Japanese, Afghans,” the archaeologist Rick Davis remembered. “He and Nancy were terrific, they were inseparable.” Everybody, he said, “wanted to be around them.”

  Otherwise, the Duprees could be found traveling Afghanistan’s rough mountains and deserts in Louis’s red Land Rover. “He was always looking for new caves. And I was always happy to go along because I might see something. And if there was something I needed for the guidebooks he was always happy to go along, because he might find another cave,” Nancy said. “Every time one of us would finish an article, he’d open a bottle of champagne. It was real companionship.” Together they fell in thrall to a country where, in the Homebody’s words, “one might seek in submission the unanswered need.”

  “I was happy then,” Nancy told me. “Going around and learning everything new with Louis Jan. So enthusiastic, like a teenager.”

  In 1973, Louis published his magnum opus, Afghanistan, the culmination of a quarter-century of work and travel. It’s still the definitive survey text on the country. For all his lack of sentimentality and his admiration of Afghan insolence, Dupree was an optimist, and the book’s keynote is one of hope for the country’s future. Bi-tarafi had allowed the Afghans not only to stay neutral in the Cold War, Dupree argued, but also to coax mortal enemies into cooperating. In their efforts to use Afghanistan as a proxy battlefield, the United States and the Soviet Union had ended up helping it. “The Soviets assisted the Afghans in building roads from the north, the U.S. from the south,” he wrote. “The Soviets helped construct the landing strips and buildings for the new International Airport at Kabul; the Americans installed the electrical and communications equipment.”

  “But since the West and the Soviet Union are both interested in winning, the question of ‘Who’s winning, the Americans or the Russians?’ should be considered,” he went on. “In all honesty, one must answer ‘Neither—the Afghans are winning.’”

  Nancy likes to deny what everyone knows, which is that she was essential to the research and composition of Afghanistan. She claims she merely transcribed it. “You’ve seen his book?” she asked me one day. I said yes, I’d read it. “Alright, and it’s a thick one. I typed that dumb thing three times over—on a manual typewriter! Three times, and I was happy to do it.”

  The false modesty of this claim was demonstrated when her An Historical Guide to Afghanistan was published. Where Afghanistan is a monument to fact, her book is an exercise in style and wit, and it’s still an indispensable guide for diehard Afghanophiles, who—like Kushner—don’t read it so much for the information as for her voice. (“We were totally committed to her guidebooks as we traveled around the country,” Ted Eliot, the former ambassador, told me.) In the acknowledgments she wrote, “From my husband, Louis Dupree, I draw a constant charge of excitement and enthusiasm for this land and its people. Together we find new depths and new values. I shall be well pleased if this book succeeds in conveying our continuing affection for Afghanistan.”

  Eight

  After the two hour-long drive north, Nancy, Mashall, and I arrived in Charikar in the late morning. From Western news coverage one can get the idea that, twelve years after the American invasion, the Taliban is still confined to Afghanistan’s peripheries. This isn’t the case. The Taliban controls much of the countryside, it’s true, but it also wields influence and fear in just about every city and major town, including Kabul. Nancy’s first stop was at the offices of the provincial council in Charikar, which had been attacked recently. They sit behind blast-shielding berms and a pair of guards whose faces suggest they don’t expect to be much help when the next bomb explodes.

  For years, Dupree has been sending books, thousands of them, to provincial councils—on history, administration, farming science, public health, and anything else she can have printed—in the hopes that local officials will use them to better govern. “Mr. Karzai and the government, they don’t like it, because it takes away from their own power,” she says. “But until the people get a voice, Afghanistan’s not going anywhere.” after three and a half decades of war, however, the country is still mostly run by small groups of old men, many of them illiterate.

  She and Mashall were led into a narrow, dark room lined with overstuffed green felt chairs and coffee tables. A policeman with a limp put out bowls of pistachios and poured tea as provincial officials, all of them old and hirsute—reesh safeda, or whitebeards, they’re called—shuffled in. Without greeting Nancy, they sank into chairs. She has forgotten most of her Dari, so she asked them questions through an interpreter.

  “Is Kabul listening to you?”

  Murmurs.

  “Are you getting the money for the projects you want to do?”

  Fewer murmurs.

  “Do you listen to the women and get them money?”

  Silence.

  The whitebeards knew who she was, perhaps they even appreciated her help, but they couldn’t have been less interested in her presence. Dupree elicited somewhat more adamant murmuring when she asked about the recent murder of a local woman. An official spoke to the interpreter, who turned to Dupree and sa
id, “They are totally against the things which are bad.” Dupree frowned. The official was now talking into his phone. The meeting was over.

  As the officials shuffled out, a younger man introduced himself as the secretary. In precise English, he explained that the council valued her books. They had tried to set up a public library, as she’d requested, but people borrowed the books and neglected to return them. So he’d moved them into a locked office. Now officials neglected to return them.

  As he and Dupree talked, he unburdened himself. “The problem in Afghanistan is everything is based on theory,” he told her. The council had no money. He hadn’t been paid a salary in a year and half. A local merchant had donated the big green chairs. Dupree listened intently, made suggestions. She said she wanted him to connect the council to her organization online, so she could distribute the newsletter he wrote and send him materials. He looked at the floor. “We don’t have Internet.”

  “This is so typical,” she said to Mashall as they left. “He’s got the spirit. He wants to do something, not for himself, but for other people. But he can’t break out.”

  “It’s true, Nancy Jan.”

  Some days later, Nancy and Mashall visited a boys’ school in an impoverished village on Kabul’s fringe. Its mud-brick homes were not old, but the Afghan summers and winters and dust had left them looking like ruins. In the school’s drab courtyard, makeshift classrooms were set up under plastic tarps. A geography teacher led them around. Nancy asked him what he could use. “Maps,” he said. He taught geography, but there were no maps.

  The teacher brought them to the library, a disheartening sight. It was doing double-duty as a storeroom for an old generator and for laboratory equipment that some foreign government had donated, which might have been useful if the school had a laboratory. “They don’t have a card catalogue, they don’t have a computer. How do they know what’s here?” she asked Mashall between coughs. He pointed to a handwritten list of books taped to the side of a cabinet.

  An English teacher who spoke very little English brought me to his classroom. Boys sat on windowsills, on top of one another. There were no books, no paper, no pencils. “Most students don’t know what books are here,” he told me. But they were unbelievably disciplined and, their eyes suggested, dying to learn something, anything. I asked if they liked to read.

  “Yes!” they shouted in unison. I asked what they liked to read.

  “Histories!” one boy said.

  His name was Saddiq, and he obviously took school quite seriously. Though he looked no more than thirteen, he was wearing a pink dress shirt and a frayed brown blazer. Saddiq loved Dupree’s library, the teacher said. He was borrowing books all the time. I asked Saddiq what period of Afghan history he liked to read about. “The Ghaznavids,” he said, referring to the Turkic dynasty that ruled much of what would become Afghanistan in the tenth through twelfth centuries. Many Afghans regard the period as the high point of their history. When I asked whether he didn’t want to learn about more recent events, about the time in which he lived, he considered the question. “No,” Saddiq said. “It’s all war.”

  In the car on the way back to Kabul, Dupree looked out the window silently and sank lower and lower into her seat. A friend of hers had told me that, left to herself, her thoughts always drifted back to Louis. “If you just watch her body language,” he’d said, “it’s very distressing.” He was right. As we drove by a hillside blooming with redbud, she muttered, “Redbud … I wanted red-bud for Louis’s memorial service, but I couldn’t get it. Protected species.”

  Nine

  In 1973, in Afghanistan, Louis had expressed great hope for the country’s future—too much, as it turned out. He didn’t mention that radical communism and radical Islamism were on the rise, nor that the halting attempts at modernization and religious and social reforms undertaken by Mohammed Daoud—who’d been removed from the prime ministership by his cousin, King Zahir Shah, nearly a decade earlier—hadn’t made it out of the cities. The gaps between the increasingly secular urban elite and the poor, illiterate, and devout peasantry were more glaring than ever. In 1972, when the country was overcome by famine and hundreds of thousands died, an official remarked, “If the peasants eat grass, it’s hardly grave. They’re beasts. They’re used to it.” The next year, after Dupree had completed his book, Daoud staged a palace coup and took back control of the government.

  Louis knew the autocratic but generous-spirited Daoud as well as any foreigner did. “You must understand one thing in the beginning: Afghanistan is a backward country,” he’d once told Dupree during an interview. “We accept this. We know that we must do something about it or die as a nation.” Daoud wanted America to support Afghanistan, he said, but not at the price of its independence. “We first turned to the Unites States for aid, because we believe in the American ideology. The idea of freedom for all is the idea that we have for Afghanistan … but any aid which any country gives to us must be with no strings attached.”

  Daoud delivered the same message, with less tact, to Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev. By the late 1970s, Moscow was largely keeping Daoud’s government afloat, but still he liked to “light Soviet cigarettes with American matches,” as one KGB officer put it. “We will never allow you to dictate to us how to run our country,” Daoud reportedly told Brezhnev, dispensing with the subtleties of bi-tarafi, after the Kremlin had instructed him to expel workers from NATO countries. “Afghanistan shall remain poor, if necessary, but free in its acts and decisions.”

  In 1978, Afghan Marxists murdered Daoud and his family. Mayhem of the sort not seen since the Anglo-Afghan wars ensued. Officials, academics, businessmen, landowners, journalists, religious leaders, and anyone else deemed a threat to the socialist revolution were rounded up, tortured, and executed.

  Louis, of course, knew the Marxist cabal well, including the new president, Nur Mohammed Taraki, a sadistic KGB provocateur of long standing. Taraki, a firm believer in terror, liked to say, “Lenin taught us to be merciless towards the enemies of the revolution.” Despite this, Dupree was at first sanguine about his intentions—or startlingly naïve, depending on whom one asked. A month after the coup, Dupree wrote a letter to the New York Times emphasizing the nationalist character of Taraki’s regime. “One may deplore the bloodshed which accompanied the revolution and feel remorse for the dead, but an enlightened press should avoid the loose use of the term ‘Communist,’” he wrote. Ted Eliot recalled Dupree telling him, “These communists are friends from way back.” Eliot was amazed. “I said, ‘Louis, this is different. It’s the Soviet communists.’”

  Dupree’s delusional attitude derived in part from experience, one suspects, and in part from pride, but more than either from his love of the Afghans. He similarly assumed he wouldn’t be targeted, regardless of the persistent rumors about him, because so many Afghans loved him. “Louis’s conviction was that every Afghan knew he was a friend of Afghanistan and they wouldn’t hurt him,” Eliot said.

  One day in November 1978, Louis and Nancy went to the National Museum to pay a visit to Daddy’s Head. That afternoon, after Louis had returned to the hotel suite where they were staying at the time, secret policemen knocked on the door. An Afghan translator Dupree worked with had been arrested and, after being tortured, had identified Dupree as a spy. Others followed suit—maybe to save their skins, maybe because they knew something.

  In Kabul, it had long been suspected that Dupree’s relationship with Alan Wolfe extended beyond friendship and the eventual exchange of spouses. During the Cold War, it was common for American scholars to gather information for the CIA, and Dupree was a perfect candidate for recruitment: three Harvard degrees, military experience, unparalleled knowledge of the country. He’d been surrounded by spies of one type or another for much of his life. (Carleton Coon, his mentor at Harvard, had been an agent in the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s precursor.) And Dupree never really left military service. He always considered himself a soldier at h
eart. Before moving to Kabul, he’d worked as a researcher in troop behavior for the air force, writing field manuals and course curricula, and later taught at West Point. He didn’t officially retire from the army until 1967.

  It would have surprised no one, in other words, if Dupree had worked with the CIA. He always denied the rumors—adamantly, sometimes angrily. According to some people who knew him well, however, that may have been a front.

  As Kabul station chief, Wolfe had been tasked with providing the CIA with intelligence on the Russian-made hardware being used by the Afghan military. Most of it was in the north of the country, as is Aq Kupruk. The archaeologist Charles Kolb said that on their way to and from the excavation site, Dupree and he took detailed notes on the Russian equipment they saw. Dupree photographed it with a high-speed camera. Kolb believes he was doing this for Wolfe and that Wolfe or the CIA may have funded Dupree’s work in some capacity. “We were always looking for military installations,” Kolb told me. “He was working with Alan and providing information to Alan directly.” He also believes Dupree’s popular parties were a means for the pair to gather intelligence. His “soirees were very eye-opening, because you got people together who were theoretically political enemies, but in that environment they would talk. It was very good for Louis to learn what was going on and for Alan Wolfe to get what he needed.”

  Ten

  “Dupree, the biggest CIA agent!” the interrogator called out when the police brought the archaeologist to a seized government building. On a desk, while Dupree was questioned, sat a Kalashnikov, its barrel pointed at him. He was moved to another building, where a man took calls, calmly tabulating political assassinations, as two guards smiled at Dupree and drew their fingers across their necks.