The Best American Magazine Writing 2015

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  The next day he was interrogated for nine hours. He was instructed to make a list of all the Afghan intellectuals he knew. Suspecting it would be used as a kill list, he refused, telling his captors, “I know practically everyone.” He was told instead to make a list of all the Kabulis he knew. He consented, and the first name he wrote down was that of Nur Mohammed Taraki, the new president and possibly the man who’d ordered him arrested. No more lists were requested. Asked what he would say if someone accused him of working for the CIA, Dupree replied, “If you want to accuse me of working for the CIA, don’t go through this God damn nonsense,” according to an account of his incarceration that he later dictated to Nancy. “Just go ahead and accuse me.”

  The translator who fingered him was brought in. The man was shaking, and according to Dupree “his face was not his face, it had about a month or more of growth of beard. It was totally misshapen, his eyes were not his own, his lips were swollen and almost dropping down to his lower jaw, he could hardly talk.”

  An interrogator questioned the translator in front of Dupree.

  “Is Dupree CIA?” he demanded.

  “Yes, everybody knows Dupree is CIA,” the translator whimpered.

  Uninvited, Dupree jumped in.

  “Did I ever tell you I was CIA?” he asked. The translator said no. “Did I ever try to recruit you for CIA?” No again.

  The next night, Dupree was made to watch as a cellmate was beaten by a guard. “He just picked him up with one hand and started slapping the bejesus out of him,” he told Nancy. “One kicked him in the balls and the other one hit him in the stomach.” Then a guard brought in an electrical device with wires hanging out of it, “wiggling like the tentacles of a Medusa trying to escape.” The cellmate “just went to pieces.”

  Through it all, Dupree managed to keep his sense of humor. “I made friends with the cop who brought the food around,” he recounted. He found he liked the jail bread. “I always insisted on the end piece, being an old Southern boy, I love the end piece of bread and it’s much better to make spoons out of.” His attempts to go to sleep were thwarted by “some noises of human beings in distress that occasionally came through the walls and naturally this did not improve my frame of mind at the time.” And “little buggies,” he went on, “were busy chewing my ass off all the night.” The next morning: “No one brought me bed tea; highly pissed off.” At one point in the transcript of Dupree’s account is the following aside: “Interruption now, because it is 5 o’clock and time for delicious martinis.”

  After five days, Dupree was brought to the Ministry of Interior. Women demanding to know where their husbands and sons had been taken were being thrown around by their burkas. An official recognized Dupree and, forgetting himself for a moment, shook his hand. Then he stiffened and handed Dupree a statement to sign. “You are hereby informed that you are ordered out of the country never to return,” it read. “If you ever do return to Afghanistan, you will be responsible for the consequences.” Dupree signed it, but not before appending a statement of his own in the margin: “I would like to add that I have great love and affection for the people of Afghanistan and I hope that eventually a true experiment in socialism will succeed in Afghanistan for the benefit of all the people.”

  He found Nancy, who’d somehow kept it together during his incarceration. They drove in the red Land Rover to the border. There they were officially expelled from Afghanistan.

  To this day, she maintains that none of the rumors about Louis had any basis in fact—that he’d never been connected with the CIA in any way. The translator and others named him, she said, because he was a gossiped-about American and because they didn’t want to die. “Some of these characters, I’ve run into them,” she said. “It takes them a long time, but eventually they’ll get me into a room all by ourselves, and they’ll let it all spill out. They feel so guilty because they turned him in. But it was life or death for them. They were killing people all over the place.”

  Eleven

  Louis and Nancy drove over the Khyber Pass to Peshawar, where other expatriate and Afghan friends who’d made it out were gathering. They moved into Dean’s, a Victorian hotel, a hangout for people with information about what was happening in Afghanistan. Their rooms came to be known as the Dupree Suite. They tried to approximate their old life, confident that soon enough everything would calm down and they’d return.

  But the Afghanistan they’d known was disappearing. In February 1979, the American ambassador was kidnapped by Islamic extremists and later killed in a shootout. Washington began supplying anticommunist rebels. In September, Taraki’s prime minister had him strangled in his bed and took power. The next month Afghans went into open revolt against the Moscow-backed regime and its heavy-handed religious and social reforms. Officials, Soviet advisers, and their families were tortured and murdered, their bodies paraded on pikes in the streets. On Christmas Day, the Soviets invaded.

  From its start, the invasion’s brutality was matched by its clumsiness. (A Soviet general staff officer remarked that “no one ever actually ordered the invasion of Afghanistan.”) The Kremlin promised a months-long operation; a ten-year occupation followed. In that time, over 600,000 Russian troops would be sent to Afghanistan. Fourteen thousand of them would be killed, according to official estimates (unofficial estimates go as high as 75,000) and 400,000 injured or taken ill. Roughly a million and a half Afghans—most of them civilians—would die, and numberless villages and towns would be leveled.

  All of it was in vain. It was not long before Russians were referring to the war in Af-gavni-stan: Afshitstan. The Afghans simply would not submit. Calling on the old traditions of the jirgas and the shuras, they created an endlessly brave and hugely effective network of resistance, joined by deserters from the Afghan army and fighters from around the Muslim world. At first they fought with nineteenth-century muskets and WWII-era Lee Enfield rifles and made bullets by hand from spent shell casings. One Afghan attempted a suicide attack by setting himself on fire and rushing at a Russian tank. Eventually, a disorderly coalition of world powers and adversaries that included the United States, China, Pakistan, Israel, Britain, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia provided the mujahideen, as they called themselves—warriors of God—with serious weaponry. Decades worth of grudges against the USSR were avenged on television screens around the world as grainy footage of shoulder-launched rockets turning Russian helicopters into fireballs emerged from the Hindu Kush.

  American support for the resistance was run out of CIA headquarters. Among its choreographers there was Alan Wolfe, who had moved to Washington with Annie. By now he was the chief of the Near East Division, known as its Grand Old Man. Shortly after the 1978 coup, Wolfe flew to Islamabad to confer with agents. He told them a story. “I came home the other day, and my wife and I were having our evening martini, and the Washington Post was on the coffee table,” Wolfe said. “The photo on the front page was of the new Afghan flag being raised in Kabul. I picked it up and showed it to my wife. ‘They’re fucking with our country, dear!’ I can’t have that. I am going to change that fucking government, toss those commie bastards out on their asses.”

  “I sat there looking at Wolfe as he spoke,” the agent who worked under him told me. “It was clear to me that this was one of those moments that you hear about but rarely are lucky enough to witness.” Years later he bumped into Wolfe, and they reminisced about the meeting. “I reminded him that he had indeed started the process that removed the communist regime. He looked at me like I was from outer space. ‘Of course I did. Did you think that I wouldn’t succeed?’”

  On the ground, the Afghan resistance was run by Pakistani intelligence from Peshawar, where armies of refugees, many eager to fight, were massing. Nancy worked in the overflowing refugee camps, while back at Dean’s, rebel leaders conferred with Louis, whose understanding of guerilla warfare and connections with influential leaders across Afghanistan were invaluable. He no longer harbored any illusions about the communists
. Word spread. One day someone walked into the hotel with a copy of the Los Angeles Times. In it was an op-ed, by a Russian political commentator, entitled “CIA Perfidy Necessitated Rescue by Soviet Union.” It read: “In May, 1979, the American intelligence men in Pakistan who were engaged in training Afghan rebels were led by the well-known CIA operative Louis Dupree.”

  Twelve

  There is no evidence Dupree led a rebel army, much as he probably would have liked to, but he did much else to assist the mujahideen. He had known most of its field commanders since they were young men. He snuck into Afghanistan to advise and fight with them. “Actually,” claims Nancy, “it was Louis who taught them how to make a Molotov cocktail.”

  When he wasn’t with the rebels or in Peshawar, Dupree traveled to American universities and think tanks to lecture about the war and urge people to get involved; cofounded groups to support the fighters and refugees; and wrote reports and op-eds. He always stressed that this was not a proxy fight between capitalism and communism, that Afghanistan was not a “client” of the West—a position offered with increasing bluster as the mujahideen became celebrities in Georgetown sitting rooms. Afghanistan was its own country fighting for its own future, Dupree reminded his audiences.

  In 1981, he was in a near fatal car accident. In the hospital for a year, he underwent two brain surgeries. Still partially paralyzed after being discharged, he went to Washington to urge lawmakers to send the rebels more weapons. Testifying before the Senate, he said, “This is, in my opinion, the most important political and moral issue that faces us at this time and is probably the most important since the Second World War.”

  In Dupree’s personal papers, one finds dozens of letters he sent—to politicians, employers, deans—on behalf of Afghan exiles. More poignant, however, are the letters written to him by the exiles themselves. “Since the year that the Russian took over Afghanistan, many people have been died and many were slaughtered by Russians army,” wrote a student turned fighter named Hafizullah who’d fled to Iran. “I was charged for the crime that [I] worked for and with Americans in Kabul. Now I am in Tehran have no passport and I am eager to come over to USA for my further studies or if not possible to take refugee there at that part of the world.”

  Life got worse for the Duprees, too. Still suspected of being a spy, Louis was expelled from Pakistan in 1979. “I have been followed, harassed and hounded by various elements in the Pakistani government,” he wrote in a letter of complaint to (who else?) Pakistani president Muhammed Zia-ul-Haq. “Somewhere in the bowels of the Pakistani bureaucracy exists a hard-core belief that I am a CIA agent.” Eventually, he was readmitted.

  Although Louis had taken up a professorship at Duke University, he and Nancy never entertained the thought of moving permanently to North Carolina. When I asked her why, she said, “These people were in trouble. Refugees were coming in. It never occurred to me leave. They had given us so much.” She choked up. “How could you turn your back on them at that time?”

  By 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, two things were obvious. The first was that the USSR had lost the war in Afghanistan. Though the conflict wouldn’t officially end for another four years, withdrawal talks were already under way. The second was that Afghanistan was, in a more profound sense, lost. Five and a half million people—one-third of the population—would flee the country by the end of the decade, and another two million would be displaced internally. Louis called it a “migratory genocide.”

  If the human toll wasn’t enough, there was the cost to Afghan history. As the White Hun and Mongol invaders had tried to do centuries earlier, the Soviets seemed to want to punish Afghanistan for its resistance by trying to make the world forget there had ever been indigenous culture there. The policy was known, with the Russian flair for bloody-minded understatement, as “rubblization.” Whole swaths of the country were laid waste; mosques, libraries, schools, museums, and archaeological sites were razed. It was as though some horrible wind had swept in from the north and erased epochs.

  As the crisis worsened, so did Louis. Still disabled from the car accident, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He remained the final authority on Afghan history, however, so when a consortium of charity organizations dealing with the preservation of Afghan culture needed to assemble a bibliography of scholarship on the country, he was the obvious choice. No sooner had he submitted the bibliography, however, than he convinced the consortium it wasn’t what they wanted. What they wanted, he said, was the stuff produced during the war: the underground newspapers, the home footage of fighting, the testimonies of Russian defectors, and so on—the documents that would tell a generation living in exile what their country was like while they were gone. “In the camps around Peshawar, they had an unprecedented phenomenon—Afghans from all over the country, populations that had never interacted with each other, gathering in one place,” Nancy said. “The possibilities to create a legacy of learning for when they repatriated were enormous.” She and Louis began collecting. It was the start of her library.

  Louis was always sure the refugees would repatriate and reclaim their country from the Soviets. “He had every faith,” said Nancy. “He said, ‘The Afghans will throw them out.’” In January of 1989, as he lay dying in Durham, North Carolina, the last Soviet tanks rolled out of Afghanistan. The mujahideen had captured everything except Kabul.

  “Well, darling, you were right,” she told him.

  Louis looked up at her. “The problems are just beginning.”

  People traveled from around the world to attend the memorial service at Duke. Dupree’s eulogy, read by the director of its Islamic and Arabian Development Studies Department, Ralph Braibanti, was entitled “Tribute to a Mujahid.” Louis and Nancy, he told the mourners, had “appeared in a moment in history when the culture they so admired was in crisis. It was this transmigration of their spiritual being that enabled each of them to preserve some part of the national character which now became part of their persona.”

  In the service program was printed a photograph of Louis taken a few years before, during a mission with the mujahideen. He’s wearing large, professorial eyeglasses, an Afghan vest, and a traditional pakol cap, gray hair flowing from its brim. He looks haggard but highly pissed off. Aged but eager. A boyish mischievousness dances across his face, halfway between a smile and a frown. “I know a lot,” his unyielding eyes and pursed mouth seem to say, “but I’m not going to tell you a fucking thing.”

  Thirteen

  After Louis died, Nancy wound up his affairs, taught his classes through the end of the term, and broke down. She considered “joining Louis”—i.e., killing herself. It didn’t help that there were Afghan exiles living in America who could help her mourn. “The Afghans have a terrible habit,” she told me. “I mean, it’s a lovely habit, but it’s awful. When somebody loses a husband or a wife, they come and they sit and they tell you all about how wonderful they were. You say thank you and you cry and you cry and you cry. That’s the whole point I suppose.”

  But she didn’t just miss Louis; she missed Afghanistan. They had been her two greatest loves. So when she was invited to return to Peshawar to head an Afghan cultural organization, she thought it might be an opportunity to carry on his work, and she accepted before she could refuse.

  Civil war persisted for seven years after the Soviet departure. Kabul, which had made it out of the occupation mostly unscathed, was torn apart. The rebel leaders Louis had helped were now warlords. They battled block by block for control of the city while the last Soviet-backed president, Muhammed Najibullah, tried in vain to hold on to power. Rockets slammed into the National Museum, and soldiers and militiamen looted the collection. In 1993, Nancy traveled to Kabul to assess the damage for the United Nations. “Artifacts [were] strewn among the rubble, and filing cabinets of museum records and catalogs indiscriminately dumped,” she later recounted in an article. “Hasps had been unscrewed and locks ripped off steel
storage boxes, and drawers and crates had been methodically emptied onto the floor.” It was rumored that thieves were using her guidebook to the museum to value stolen pieces. Seventy percent of the collection, she estimated, was gone. Among the missing pieces, it appeared, was Daddy’s Head.

  In 1996, the warlords were swept from Kabul by the Taliban, which at first was more respectful than anyone had dared hope. The Taliban leader, Muhammad Omar, appointed a cultural minister and decreed the smuggling of relics illegal. He allowed the UN to repair part of the museum. But in 2001 he changed course, ordering the Bamiyan Buddhas—the subject of Nancy’s first guidebook—destroyed. When footage of Talibs blowing up the statues was broadcast around the world, it became clear that hardliners loyal to the polite Saudi she’d met years before, Osama bin Laden, had taken control. Next, Omar ordered what remained of the museum’s collection destroyed. Heavies from the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice arrived, hammers in hand.

  When Dupree went to the museum afterward, “there were pieces no bigger than this,” she told me, holding up her thumb and index finger close to each other. “And the rest was all dust. I stood there watching the museum staff collecting these pieces, including the dust. They were sweeping it up, putting it in bags, and I thought, God, you know, what do you think the Taliban is going to do to us?”

  Later that year, however, the United States invaded. In 2004, the museum reopened. The curators returned to work. They took the salvaged artifacts from their hiding places and began the slow process of recataloguing them. Nancy, who had been splitting her time between Peshawar and North Carolina, began the process of moving back to Kabul the same year. One day, she received an e-mail from a curator who had “found a remarkable little bundle wrapped in brown paper,” Dupree said, recounting the message. “She tore off the paper only to come to another layer of paper, newspaper. She continued peeling the bundle, and under the newspaper she found toilet paper and then tissue paper.”