At what we affectionately called “Camp Swampy,” I worked to make the training of the next generation of spies conform not to where our directorate was, but to where I thought it should be going. More and more I found that the key to implementing what I wanted at the Farm lay in changing what was being done with newly arriving officers elsewhere, both before they arrived in my charge, and after they left. I found myself spending an increasing amount of my time up north, in Washington. Some criticized me for it, but I had great people working for me, and I delegated freely.
It was passionate work. The basic operations course in CIA is a full-immersion, twenty-four-hour-a-day, life-changing experience. When I had completed my own training years before, I had sworn I’d never be back. But now, in preparing a new generation of spies, I felt tied to the organization and to its history as never before. Having a chance to step back and analyze what we did, I was taken anew with the uniqueness and the romance of our profession, and did all I could to convey that sense to our young officers. With characteristic immodesty, I sincerely felt I understood the essence of what we were about better than anyone else. Finding that we were teaching professional ethics without any central doctrine to work from, I wrote a formal professional code of ethics for the Clandestine Service, the first ever. Years later, it was formally adopted, not just as a training aide but as the code of professional conduct for the service. It was probably the most lasting contribution of my career, and in some ways the one of which I’m most proud.
Life among the forests, streams, and meadows of the sprawling compound was like a throwback to a simpler era. Socially dominated by residents of prime child-rearing age, the Farm away from the classrooms and firing ranges was very family-centered. Our son Doug learned to fish, to ride a bicycle, and to camp in the woods. Living among trusted colleagues behind high fences and security patrols, not only did we not lock our houses; most of us didn’t know where the keys were. Grade school children would ride their bikes to the bus stop, leave them unlocked, and find them unmolested. The only reminder that we were not living in Mayberry circa 1955 was the distant sound of gunfire wafting from the ranges in the afternoon, and the occasional thumping of special-ops helicopters as they whooshed overhead at treetop level during the night.
In those years I developed a relationship with our new director. George Tenet took an active interest in training, and insisted on regular briefings. He never missed a graduation exercise. While being driven back to the airstrip one night after listening to one of my graduation speeches, he asked of the DDO where I would be assigned next. Told it would be Islamabad, Pakistan, he demurred. “I think we need him in the Levant,” he said. The CIA was being actively drawn in as an intermediary between the Israeli and the Palestinian intelligence and security forces, as the Clinton administration pressed for a comprehensive peace agreement between them. George was personally engaged in the effort, and wanted someone he knew and could trust to manage it.
Once again, the benign forces of fate intervened. Shortly thereafter, Tenet went on a long trip to the Middle East in the company of the new chief of the Near East and South Asia Division. It was rumored the division chief wanted the peace process job for himself. Whatever his motivation, he convinced George that I should be sent to the Punjab, after all. It was a close call. Rather than facing three years of growing frustration and helplessness as the Arab-Israeli peace process foundered on the shoals of the second intifada, Paula, Doug, and I boarded a plane for South Asia.
* * *
We are all the products of our experiences. In my case, as I look back, I can see now that nature and events had conspired to produce, by the age of forty-four, an individual with a highly idiosyncratic, perhaps even contradictory, set of attributes. While still at the Farm in the late 1990s, and influenced by the organizational fads of the time, I began to meet with a so-called “executive coach.” My coach would not have been confused with Stephen Covey: she had the looks and manner of a Jewish grandmother. I loved her. “You know,” she said to me one afternoon, “there is no one more loyal to this organization than you. And yet your relationship to it is essentially subversive.”
I found the observation jarring at the time. But as I look back, she may have been right. Here was a highly idealistic and loyal member of an organization who never saw it quite for what it was, but rather for what he wanted it to be. His attitude toward authority was ambivalent. If he judged his leaders harshly, he could still empathize with their challenges and their foibles, and his judgments seldom carried over to the organization that recognized and empowered them. To him, organizations were not important in and of themselves—missions were. So long as the justifying mission was there, the organization existed to be reformed. It was no surprise that he had been subtly at war with every bureaucracy he had ever been a part of. Though understanding his place in the closed, insular world he occupied, he nonetheless was forever looking outside his own area of responsibility, and was constitutionally incapable of staying in his own lane.
Whether all that made me a subversive, as my coach alleged, I still don’t know. An iconoclast? Perhaps. A contrarian? Definitely. For better or worse, this was the person whom the CIA assigned as its chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan, in the summer of 1999.
Part Two
* * *
THE ROAD TO WAR: PAKISTAN, THE TALIBAN, AND AL-QA’IDA
Chapter 3
* * *
THE BEST OF TIMES
NOVEMBER 12, 1999
WITNESSES LATER SAID THAT there had been something very peculiar about that vehicle. For some reason, its driver appeared to be having no end of trouble parking. First he would move forward a few feet, and then he would reverse slightly; after a pause, he would advance, and then reverse again. He must have repeated the process a dozen times, each time just barely changing the vehicle’s orientation. There appeared to be no reason for what he was doing. After all, he was in the middle of an empty lot, located 100 yards or so beyond the back perimeter wall of the American Embassy, several hundred yards distant from the official Chancery building, on whose top floor I sat at that moment. There were no vehicles or other obstacles around him. Why so fussy? Was he having problems with the transmission? Peculiar indeed.
I suddenly heard a dull whump, the sort of sound you feel in your gut. In a split second I was on the floor. Several colleagues who had been conducting a briefing just stared at me in wonder, unmoving. “Get down,” I barked.
The first instinct of most people in such circumstances is to rush to the windows to see what’s happening. That’s what people had done the year before, in August 1998, when they heard shooting outside the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Many had been cut to pieces in a hail of shattered glass when the subsequent explosion went off. I ordered that we low-crawl into the central hallway, where we would be buffered by the offices on either side of the brick embassy building. For several long minutes the entire population of the embassy’s top floor waited, hunkered down; when at length I peered cautiously around the doorway and through a window, I could see a burning white truck in the middle distance.
The attackers had been quite clever. Three ordinary SUVs had been rigged to fire a pair of 109-millimeter Chinese-made rockets each, through rear windows whose glass had been replaced with semi-opaque plastic sheeting. In addition to the embassy in Islamabad, the plotters had simultaneously fired by remote control from a vehicle in another parking lot across town at the American Embassy’s Cultural Affairs building; the rear window of a third vehicle had been aimed at a tall downtown apartment building that housed several UN offices. Although the latter two buildings had been struck, no one was killed; a Pakistani guard at the U.S. Cultural Center was badly wounded by shrapnel. Subsequent forensic analysis would show that the two rockets fired at the Chancery had sailed in tandem over the building just above the second-story window where I’d been sitting, missing by a few feet. I and several of my colleagues had been saved by a slight miscalculation: alth
ough the rockets had been aimed at a proper degree of elevation to strike their target, the designers had failed to adjust for the vehicle’s suspension. The recoil had caused the front springs to depress, raising the rockets’ trajectory a few degrees. Had they been much closer, it wouldn’t have mattered. It was my fourth month in country: Welcome to Pakistan.
For a professional intelligence officer, trouble is good, and in Pakistan, then as now, there was more than enough trouble to go around. A turbulent country of over 160 million, Pakistan in 1999 had been independent for fifty-two years, a product of the Partition of former British India in 1947. Since then, it had fought four wars with its much larger South Asian neighbor, the last of which, the so-called “Kargil War,” ending just weeks before my arrival. Even to a foreigner living there, Pakistani hatred of India was palpable. Much, but by no means all of that animosity revolved around the status of the former princely state of Kashmir, in the far mountainous north. A majority Muslim region that Pakistan expected to receive at Partition, its princely ruler had decided otherwise. Now, most of it lay in Indian hands following the first Indo-Pakistani War of 1947; it remained divided along a highly militarized cease-fire line, the so-called “Line of Control.” Lacking the conventional military means to seize the rest of Kashmir outright, Pakistan had long encouraged and supported violent subversion there against the occupying Indian Army, whose political repression and rampant abuses against the local population further exacerbated the situation, and provided yet more motivation for Pakistani skulduggery.
Pakistan’s brief existence had largely coincided with the Cold War. The fact that India quickly aligned itself in the mid-1950s with the Soviet Union, and became a major recipient of Soviet military hardware, further encouraged anti-Communist Muslim Pakistan to align itself with America. When at about the same time the United States organized what later became known as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) to discourage Communist encroachment in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, Pakistan became an enthusiastic member. Collaboration against the Soviets, particularly in the intelligence sphere, between Pakistan and the United States may have been discreet, but it was both important and effective. It is largely forgotten now, but when Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union in a U-2 spy plane in 1960, precipitating a major diplomatic crisis, the airfield from which he took off was located in Peshawar, Pakistan.
Pakistani-American cooperation increased greatly after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when Pakistan’s intelligence service, a military organization known as the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, acted as a conduit for CIA-supplied money and weapons—eventually to include U.S.-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles—to the Afghan mujahideen, or Islamic resistance fighters. The joint program of support to the mujahideen was a signal success, and by 1989 mounting military losses forced the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan. In those days, CIA officers referred to the Afghan war as the “anti-Soviet jihad.” The term jihad, meaning “struggle,” had not yet become a pejorative.
The decade of the 1980s marked the zenith of U.S.-Pakistani intelligence cooperation, and perhaps of U.S.-Pakistan relations more generally. Partly by way of compensation for the important risks and expenses borne by Pakistan during the anti-Soviet jihad, America provided considerable military and economic assistance, including F-16 fighters and generous development programs.
But right from the start, hidden within this general regime of bonhomie and close cooperation were tensions and contradictions, which regularly came to the surface. For the United States, Pakistan was an important but problematic ally. Its development as a democracy was anything but smooth, and its regular military coups were an embarrassment for its American patrons. Its wars and near wars with India, and its brutal repression in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), were problematic, to say the least. More pointedly, as the jihad days of the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, Pakistan was seen increasingly by some to be working against broader American policy in the areas of counterproliferation and counterterrorism. That period also saw a growing tendency in Congress to try to legislate foreign policy, to make it more difficult for the executive branch to favor short-term, expedient goals over what Congress saw as more important, longer-range American interests. In most administrations, after all, there is a great temptation to focus on the most immediate and tangible challenges, rather than speculating over the potential long-term unintended consequences of present policy. And so the administrations of the eighties and early nineties sought to preserve as much flexibility as possible in dealing with a long-term problem case like Pakistan; Congress, from the late 1970s onward, sought assiduously to curtail that flexibility.
In 1985, the so-called “Pressler Amendment,” introduced by Senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota, mandated that the administration must certify, on a yearly basis, that Pakistan did not possess nuclear weapons in order for it to remain eligible for U.S. assistance of any kind. Desperate to preserve Pakistan’s help against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations certified Pakistan as a nuclear weapons–free state in the early years after the statute’s passage, despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary; they probably violated U.S. law in the process. But when the Soviets evacuated Afghanistan in 1989, the administration’s motivation to bend the law disappeared, and in 1990, Pakistan was sanctioned by the United States, losing virtually all of its U.S. military and economic assistance at a stroke.
The fact that the U.S. government had waited until Pakistan appeared no longer useful before deciding to enforce the Pressler Amendment was not lost on the Pakistanis. To them, the American measure was all the more galling because it was imposed selectively, at a time when they felt they had every legitimate right, and indeed a vital national security interest, in countering the perceived nuclear threat from India. New Delhi had tested a nuclear device as early as 1974. Pakistan, unlike India, was vulnerable to U.S. non-proliferation sanctions precisely because it had aligned itself with Washington; India had no corresponding fear of a Soviet version of the Pressler Amendment. For years, Washington and Islamabad had played a little diplomatic game: Islamabad would lie, denying its interest in developing nuclear weapons, while Washington would capitalize on the lie to maintain support for the Afghan mujahideen and bolster Pakistan as a regional ally. It all worked nicely, until Washington stopped playing.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s sponsorship of Islamic fighters, which had been useful to the United States when there were Soviet forces to be attacked in Afghanistan, began to seem much less so after the Soviet withdrawal. Pakistani patronage of the mujahideen had been part of a program pursued during the 1980s by Pakistan’s military dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to “Islamize” both foreign and domestic policy. General Zia died in a plane crash in 1988, but his policies survived him. Just as the Soviets were withdrawing from Afghanistan in 1989, Indian repression triggered a spontaneous popular uprising in Indian-held Kashmir. For the government of Pakistan, and particularly for the Pakistan Army, it was quite natural to encourage and support fundamentalist groups within Pakistan who had previously provided assistance to the Afghan mujahideen, and who now wished to infiltrate across the Line of Control to participate in the anti-Indian jihad in Kashmir. Within a few years, Pakistani militants, secretly supported by the Pakistan Army, had largely taken over the Kashmiri fight from the Kashmiris themselves. The fact that these militants frequently employed terrorist tactics did not much concern the Pakistanis, who considered them freedom fighters; but it threatened to put Pakistan on the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism List.
In yet another instance of congressional legislation of foreign policy, beginning in 1979 the secretary of state was mandated by statute every year to examine all available intelligence to determine which countries had provided material aid to terrorists. I commissioned the review on Pakistan in 1994, during the year I worked for the under secretary of state. For several years running during the nineties, Pakistan came
very close to being placed on the State Sponsors List. Had that happened, Pakistan, a key U.S. ally just a few years before, would have been relegated to the status of a rogue state, joining the likes of Iran and North Korea. Fearing the long-term consequences of such a move, U.S. policymakers took refuge, barely, in the fact that the damning intelligence on Pakistan could not quite meet a legal standard.
In May 1998, India formally tested a series of nuclear warheads. Despite strenuous efforts by the United States, which offered a lifting of sanctions, access to weapons, and other blandishments, Pakistan followed suit within days, conducting five weapons tests of its own. Washington was deeply annoyed. In the summer of 1999, Pakistan brazenly infiltrated regular army troops across the Line of Control in the mountainous Kargil district of Kashmir, setting off a brief but sharp conflict with India. By the time I arrived in July 1999, U.S. relations with Pakistan were at an absolute low; it was hard to imagine how they could be worse. But within a few months, on October 12, General Pervaiz Musharraf, the chief of Army Staff, overthrew Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s democratically elected prime minister, in a bloodless coup. Under Sharif, corruption had been so rampant, and his systematic abuse of democratic institutions so egregious, that the U.S. Embassy judged at the time that his overthrow in a military coup enhanced the chances for positive democratic change in the country. Nonetheless, for having toppled an elected government, U.S. law imposed yet further American sanctions on the military regime of General Musharraf.
None of this might have mattered very much to most Americans; after all, the United States had largely washed its hands of South-Central Asia after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. When the formerly Soviet-supported Afghan Communist government of Mohammed Najibullah finally fell in 1992, the many Afghan warlords formerly supported by the United States and Pakistan fell to fighting among themselves. Afghanistan descended into political anarchy, and Kabul was laid waste in fratricidal warfare. Thirteen years of continuous conflict had weakened traditional tribal structures throughout the country; warlords and petty strongmen commanding armed militias, free of the constraints and responsibilities of traditional tribal leadership, terrorized much of the country.
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