88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  It was not an accident that the one foreign leader in attendance at President Bush’s September 20 State of the Union speech was Prime Minister Tony Blair. Even before the speech, in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, a number of senior British intelligence officers, including Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, traveled to CIA Headquarters to offer their support. I had no idea, of course, what our British friends might have raised in those discussions; but in the last week of September 2001, I began to get strange cables.

  First I received a message from CTC/SO, the newly formed Special Operations Group of the Counterterrorist Center (CTC), now being given the primary role in providing headquarters support to CIA operations in Afghanistan. CTC/SO had been briefed concerning the alleged existence of a British-led militia force based in Quetta, which they were willing to place at CIA disposal. With an aggressiveness that foretold much about my future dealings with them, they asserted—asserted, mind you—that a number of paramilitary officers would be coming to my station in order to set up a base in the Baluch capital, from which they would begin to mount paramilitary operations into the south of Afghanistan employing our newly discovered militia allies.

  This may sound anodyne to the casual observer, but it was not the CIA way. Headquarters could give the orders and set the objectives, but it was up to chiefs of station in the field to set the plan for how to achieve them. That’s not to suggest that a station chief would have carte blanche; he or she would have to make the case for their proposed actions and seek headquarter’s concurrence, but the process was always consultative, and the clear tendency was to defer to a COS’s superior on-the-ground knowledge—particularly if the COS were a senior officer.

  In any case, I had no idea what in blazes they were talking about. I had had a close relationship with a just-departed British diplomat, and I knew from him that the British government was involved in arming, training, and providing operational guidance to a Quetta-based unit of the Pakistani Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) used to ambush drug-smuggling convoys in Baluchistan, but this didn’t come anywhere close to the breathless description I had received from headquarters. The unit in question was not a militia, but part of Pakistani law enforcement. Unless the Paks were about to launch military operations into Afghanistan on our behalf, which they assuredly were not, this unit wasn’t going anywhere outside Pakistan. For that matter, if the Paks wanted to invade Afghanistan, this would not be the unit they would send to do it. On the one occasion that the unit in question had crossed the border to attack drug-processing labs, it had been surrounded by a drug militia, captured, and its members sent back across the border minus their weapons and most of their clothing.

  I paid a call on my British friend’s newly arrived successor. The poor fellow was at a loss to explain these antics, and hardly knew what to say to me. He didn’t want to directly contradict what we were being told from London, but in all honesty he couldn’t confirm any of it. He admitted there was no independent militia. Not only were the two British advisors to the ANF not hijacking their drug-interdiction unit to lead cross-border operations into Afghanistan, but they had been confined for their own safety to their villa in the Pakistani military cantonment in Quetta, and were about to be withdrawn altogether.

  It got worse. I received another cable conveying instructions from the deputy director for operations, my old friend and mentor Jim Pavitt. Following on his recent meetings with our allies, I was to provide all possible support to the British who, in addition to their “militia unit” in Quetta, had a number of impressive operational contacts that could prove of great value to our joint efforts. Details, he said, would be forwarded from London.

  The details followed quickly enough. First, our friends claimed to be “in touch” with six named Afghan figures who could be instrumental in toppling the Taliban. Two we knew quite well, and didn’t need British help in communicating with them. A third we also knew—and knew to avoid as a flagrant fabricator. As for the other three, we recognized the careful wording of the British claims to be a dead giveaway: it was clear that our British cousins were not actually in contact with any of them. Claiming the friend of a friend of a friend as your “contact” is one of the oldest tricks in the intelligence book, and one to which our British cousins often resorted when they wanted to stake a claim to a potential source and guard against CIA reaching him first. Now was hardly the time for this sleight-of-hand.

  The cap to this whole sorry drama, however, was yet another claimed British contact, whom we’ll call “Spectre.” A senior, respected official, who will remain nameless for his own protection, had recently met for several hours with a wealthy and elderly expatriate Afghan businessman in the Persian Gulf. The old man had spun quite a tale, which the officer in question had apparently accepted uncritically. Glowingly described as a revered and prominent figure, with both religious and tribal authority, Spectre’s followers, we were told, would gladly lay down their lives for him. Despite the fact that he had admittedly lived outside Afghanistan for decades, and had no means to communicate with any of his purported supporters—most of whom he had not yet identified to his British friend—he asserted that Kandahar was his for the taking. There were many more boasts along these lines; it was hard to decide which was most preposterous. There was a little wrinkle in Spectre’s plans, however: the devotion of his followers notwithstanding, if he were to return on his own to Pakistan, he said, his life would be in mortal danger.

  The senior British official was therefore demanding several things from us. He planned to travel to Pakistan on October 2, and wished to meet immediately upon his arrival with the director-general of the ISI. I was to set up that meeting, where I was also to make clear to the Pakistanis that they would be responsible to ensure Spectre’s safety while he made contact with his people inside Afghanistan; the ISI’s agreement in this regard would be a “test” of U.S.-Pakistani relations.

  All this was breathtaking on several counts. Neither we nor anyone we knew in Afghanistan had ever heard of Spectre. The man was an obvious fraud. Many a naive, first-tour diplomat has been initially taken in by a story such as Spectre’s, and later felt humiliated at the memory, but for a very senior, respected person to put forward such claptrap on the basis of a single meeting, with no attempt to vet any of the claims made, and then to demand, on top of it, that the United States make support for such an individual a “test” of a critically important foreign relationship—well, it was almost unimaginable. The whole thing would obviously fall of its own weight in due course, but I had no intention of wasting effort and valuable equities with the Pakistanis on it in the meantime. Unfortunately, the British sales job on the seventh floor of my own headquarters was going to make this whole thing extremely complicated and time-consuming to unwind.

  All this could not have come at a worse moment. The demands on the station were almost overwhelming. We were thoroughly remaking our tribal reporting networks, taking organizations that had been built for peacetime intelligence reporting and adapting them to provide real-time support to the coming war effort: spotting military targets and making bomb-damage reports. Satellite communications and GPS devices were being pushed out as fast as we could get them to the far fringes of these networks, so that we wouldn’t have to wait days and weeks for reports to filter up through the “principal agents” who led them. We had set up a war room, manned twenty-four hours, lined with campaign maps and shelves holding banks of satellite receivers, each of which bore a card identifying the source calling on it, his handler, the language the caller would require, and what response the caller should be given if his handler were not present. Newly trained officers, elderly contract annuitants, anyone Langley could find was being sent on temporary assignment to Islamabad. As non-essential staff were evacuated, carpenters were working far into the night subdividing their vacant offices to accommodate the new intelligence personnel flooding in. Meanwhile, we were feverishly trying to press reluctant Afghan tribal leaders forward to take t
he fight to the Taliban. Everyone was working punishing hours, seven days a week. I simply didn’t have the time to waste on anything that didn’t contribute to the effort.

  I called the chief of the Near East Division (C/NE), on the secure line to headquarters, pleading with him to intercede with the senior leadership and make all this go away. He apparently had his head handed to him when he tried: his complaints regarding the British were dismissed as the sort of jealous rivalry we could not afford and that would not be tolerated at a time of crisis. In fairness, with U.S. officials caught up in the emotional wave created by these steadfast expressions of allied support, it must have been hard for them to imagine that the British would be handing up half-truths, exaggerations, and outright fabrications in their effort to gain a place at our side.

  And so, on September 29, I began a secure video conference with my division chief by assuring him that I was a sincere friend of the British, and doing all I could to foster cooperation during the current crisis. I then went on to catalogue the fraudulent details of what we were being told by London regarding their Afghan capabilities.

  That they should in fact lack the ability to do much inside Afghanistan, I said, was no surprise. I had been told some two years earlier that the UK had made a strategic decision to confine its Afghan-related intelligence gathering strictly to al-Qa’ida-related terrorist threats to the home island. In light of scarce resources, the British had had to make hard decisions as to what they would and would not try to cover; internal developments in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, understandably, had fallen well shy of their threshold.

  “Good,” he said. “Write it up.” When I protested, he cut me off. “Write it up,” he said again, beginning with the phrase I had used to start the SVTC: “I am an anglophile.” It was a tacit and embarrassing admission that he simply couldn’t help me. I was going to have to get this turned off by myself.

  But first, I was going to need some insurance. The British demand that we make Pakistani support for Spectre a test of U.S.-Pakistani relations sounded like diplomacy to me, and something far beyond my purview as an intelligence officer. I briefed Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, who had replaced Bill Milam just a few weeks before, on what was going on. She got it immediately: “Tell them the American Ambassador forbids any involvement by this Mission in support of this British scheme.” I thanked her warmly, and left: not a bad thing to have in my pocket, in case I needed it.

  On September 30, taking some liberties with conventional format, I sent headquarters a cable entitled “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: [Britain] and the War in Afghanistan.” I laid it all out, trying with limited success to keep sarcasm in check. But at the outset, I was careful to detail the extraordinarily close relationship with our British counterparts which I had fostered over the previous two years, even sharing operational information with them. I was prepared, I stressed, to support any British activity that promised even a marginal contribution to the common effort—which pointedly did not include any of what was purportedly being offered to us by London.

  The cable must have worked. Late that night of the 30th, I received a phone call from someone with a pronounced British accent indicating that the Spectre initiative was being suspended. There would be no senior British visitor on October 2. It was the last I heard of the whole sorry mess; the last, that is, until several months later, when the senior official involved with Spectre finally did make a visit to Islamabad. I wasn’t about to raise any of it. I was embarrassed for him. To his credit, though, he apologized profusely.

  I certainly was not a direct witness, and can only speculate as to what caused our British colleagues to temporarily take leave of their senses at a most inopportune time. But on reflection, one can readily see how it happened. Here was the British prime minister, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in solidarity with his friend the American president on the floor of the House chamber, offering any and all support in the aftermath of the greatest one-day calamity to befall the United States since Pearl Harbor. He then turns to his senior subordinates to ask what they can do to help. Putting myself in their place, “Nothing, sir,” does not seem like an adequate response.

  It is a tired axiom that war brings out the best and the worst in us. The extremes to which people can be driven by the pressures of a sustained national crisis take many forms, as I was beginning to see for myself. The disease was by no means confined to the British. Already, I was noting patterns of behavior in my own headquarters to suggest that my bureaucratic problems were just beginning.

  Chapter 12

  * * *

  A DIP IN THE SHARK TANK

  OCTOBER 1, 2001

  IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT. I was feeling bone-weary. We had already been at it for sixteen hours, and there was no end in sight; bad diet and too little sleep were beginning to take their toll. But as “Dave,” my deputy, and I gazed up at the video screen, where images from the Pentagon were coming dimly into view, I could feel the familiar rush of adrenaline: “Showtime,” I thought.

  I was especially pleased to have Dave with me. In a departure from our routine, he had returned to the office after dinner specifically for this teleconference. Dave had been with me only a few months, assigned as my deputy in midsummer 2001. During the previous year, he had been the deputy chief of the South Asia Task Force in the Near East Division, charged with supporting us in the field. He knew all of our operations when he arrived, and had needed little time to be brought fully up to speed.

  More important, Dave had knowledge and experience I lacked, which would be especially significant now. As a junior officer he had been directly involved in supporting the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the old jihad-era commanders. Apart from those serving with the Northern Alliance, many of these men had since faded into obscurity. Our outreach campaign, begun in the latter half of 2000 in hopes of fomenting an insurgency against the Taliban, had brought us back into contact with a number of them, but they were unfamiliar to me. I knew a great deal about the Taliban and the power structure they had built up since 1994; but with the old commanders now coming into renewed prominence, Dave’s firsthand knowledge of these reemerging personalities from the jihad days would prove, again and again, to be invaluable.

  Dave complemented me in many other ways as well. His jocular, good-natured manner belied a hardheadedly realistic, often cynical view of others’ motives. Where I was instinctively optimistic and willing to give others the benefit of the doubt, Dave was always there to point out the potential error of my ways, highlighting the consequences if my appraisals should prove wrong. He was always loyal in carrying out my directives, but for him it was a mark of loyalty to make sure I was looking at an issue from all sides before making a decision. We quickly developed a shorthand communication. He would look at me doubtfully when I would propose bringing someone into the fold and making him a party to one or another of our conspiracies, whether it was some other CIA element, the military, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, or a foreign intelligence service. “Big tent, Dave,” I would say. Dave would shake his head. “My tent’s not as big as yours.”

  He thought I was often ignoring his warnings, and indeed I usually ruled—contrary to prevailing CIA culture—in favor of sharing and inclusion, but his warnings were invaluable to me, and I often hedged my bets in response. A regular glance over the shoulder should be the natural instinct of the intelligence officer, and Dave was there to remind me.

  Our differences also extended, fortunately, to our circadian rhythms. When 9/11 plunged us into permanent crisis, my work hours quickly shifted. I tended to be a night owl anyway, frequently returning to the office late in the evening after having dinner with the family and seeing my son off to bed. This tendency became more pronounced after families were evacuated, and particularly given the nine- or ten-hour time difference with Washington. Just as our day should have been winding down at 6:00 PM, Washington would be surging back to life at the start of their day, generating a
new wave of immediate demands. I would remain to field them, taking dinner at my desk.

  Dave would typically leave the office by 7:00 PM, much to my consternation at first. After a couple of days of this, I was about to bring him in for a closed-door session to sort things out, but just as quickly realized that Dave was absolutely right to do what he was doing. I was naturally staying at least until 2:00 AM, sometimes later, and not getting to bed until three or sometimes four. There was little point in Dave duplicating my efforts. When he left at 7:00 PM, he’d be back in the office at five or six in the morning, ready to review the overnight traffic and cull the most significant pieces requiring action and discussion. These I would find on my desk, neatly stacked and highlighted, when I returned to the office between 9:00 and 9:30 AM, and Dave would have me fully ready for the station ops meeting to make assignments and set the daily agenda at ten. The system worked brilliantly for us, and meant that the front office was typically covered for twenty-one out of twenty-four hours every day.

  For me, though, perhaps the greatest blessing of our partnership was Dave’s personality. He had a marvelous way with subordinates, able to provide them guidance and deliver sharp criticism when necessary, but always in a way that left them positive and well motivated. It was a rare gift. He was clever and funny, with a keen appreciation for the sheer absurdity we dealt with on a daily basis, whether it involved the quirks of the Afghan mind, the frequent mutual incomprehension of CIA and the military, or the outrages, intentional and otherwise, perpetrated by our own headquarters. Given the hours, the pressures, and the tensions we faced, I found that if we didn’t laugh we’d go crazy, which was probably as good an explanation as any for the behavior of Washington, where manifestly no one was laughing.