88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  There were other little wrinkles in the plan with which we did not burden the general. As Shirzai would be entering Afghanistan by road, and in armed force, I would need to make advance arrangements with the ISI to ensure there would not be any armed confrontations with Pakistani troops at any of the border checkposts. Given the possibility that advance warning of Shirzai’s plans could find its way through the Pakistanis to the Taliban, I would have to seek my headquarters’ permission before doing so; and with CTC’s rabid distrust of the Pakistanis, I knew, this would be hard to obtain.

  There was yet another cloud forming on the horizon. As with so many of these recurring issues, Dave had a clever, if obscure, phrase for it. “The game’s on the radio,” he would say. “Everyone wants to get into the game.” With Afghanistan and Pakistan suddenly at the top of the U.S. national security agenda, everyone wanted a piece of it. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, a number of CIA domestic field offices suddenly managed to find an immigrant pizza deliveryman who could claim a second cousin/brother who was an Afghan warlord ready to lead a revolt against the Taliban, or a Pakistani tribal malik who knew where bin Laden was. Most of these stories were transparent fabrications and easily brushed aside, even if they required precious time and effort to do so. One of them, though, seemed to hold at least marginal promise.

  The chief of one of our domestic offices, a capable and respected officer whom we’ll call “Mark C,” had made indirect contact, through a tortuous line of intermediaries, with an infamous Afghan heroin smuggler known as Haji Juma Khan Baluch. A native of remote Nimruz Province, in the far southwest of Afghanistan near Iran, Haji Juma Khan offered to put us in touch with Abdul Karim Brahvi, a former governor of Nimruz Province who had been driven into exile by the Taliban. Although some might have balked at dealing with a notorious international drug dealer, it seemed to me that we could not afford to be too selective in choosing whom we might associate with, so long as we kept our eyes open and did not allow ourselves to be manipulated. Juma Khan was clearly attempting to do just that, and had the advantage of dealing with stateside American contacts whose ignorance of Afghanistan made them ripe for exploitation. Perhaps his most outrageous gambit, breathlessly reported to us, was his offer to “permit” American forces to use a desert airstrip in the Registan Desert, some 100 miles southwest of Kandahar. Juma Khan’s permission wasn’t terribly valuable, as he didn’t control the strip or any territory remotely close to it; in fact, he had nothing to do with it. The landing field and an associated compound had been built by royal princes from the United Arab Emirates for their use, for a few weeks each year, in hunting the migrating houbara bustard through the trackless desert south of Kandahar. We encouraged Mark’s pursuit of the lead, making clear that under no circumstances should any long-term commitments be made to Juma Khan; any assistance provided to him should be calibrated, we said, solely for the limited purpose of making contact with Brahvi, and encouraging his return to Nimruz.

  Dave and I were suspicious, to say the least, of the response from CTC/SO. Guarded as they were about Gul Agha, they could hardly have been more enthusiastic about Karim Brahvi, though his tribal base in the far southwest would make him a minor irritant to the Taliban, at best. We could only guess at the combination of factors behind their eagerness. The Clandestine Service greatly values loyalty: like many closed societies, at its best it is a band of brothers and sisters; but at its worst it is a scrum of competing mafias. I had no idea what links existed between Mark C and the leaders of CTC/SO, but suspected they were significant. I supported the effort to encourage and empower Brahvi: it would do no harm, I reasoned, and might do some good. But I was wary.

  Now, having sat patiently through Gul Agha’s enthusiastic exposition on the past military triumphs of his family and his tribe, as well as his expressions of gratitude for American assistance against the Communists, and having made a show of solemn respect for Engineer Pashtun’s prowess as a military tactician, General Franks smiled, and thanked them for their excellent briefing. With a nod to Mark and me, he said he was sure they would continue their preparations in close coordination with us, and he looked forward to further word on their progress. As he stood to leave, I could almost see him wink.

  In the month since our first videoconference and well before his meeting with Shirzai, General Franks and I had begun to develop an odd sort of indirect relationship. Shortly after hostilities commenced on October 7, the CIA representative to CENTCOM, Pat Hailey, forwarded to me a series of questions, for my eyes only, from the general soliciting my analysis of the progress of the campaign. I was happy to provide it, but this put me in a potentially awkward spot. I certainly didn’t want anyone at headquarters interfering in any way with the analysis I provided to the CENTCOM commander. On the other hand, if they were to find out about this channel from anyone other than me, it would look as though I were bypassing my own organization and chain of command to provide uncoordinated advice to a senior intelligence customer—which, of course, was precisely what I wanted to do. My excuse, valid as it went, was that this was what General Franks had requested, and I was responding in good faith. I therefore informed headquarters of the request, including the general’s desire that neither the questions nor the responses be disseminated, and nonchalantly told them I would fulfill it. Fortunately, no one raised an objection.

  This was but the first of a series of inquiries I received from the general throughout the war, to which I did my best to respond. I would send my analyses off to Pat to be conveyed to Franks, and wouldn’t hear another thing until eventually I received another set of questions.

  It wasn’t until months later that I learned directly from Pat about the typical sequence of events surrounding these exchanges. General Franks, apparently, was quite mercurial and exceedingly demanding of his staff, with various subordinates regularly coming into, or falling out of, his favor. According to Pat, one of the best ways to chart who was in and who out was to examine the list of authorized recipients of my bits of wisdom. The chosen would meet with the general in a closed-door session to review my recommendations and discuss the progress of the campaign. As my comments usually contained at least some implied criticism of whatever it was the military was doing at the time, General Franks would typically react badly to my pieces: He would fulminate aloud, asking what the hell I knew about thus-and-such, and questioning why he’d asked me in the first place. The first couple of times, Pat concluded that my advice was being dismissed out of hand. But then he would notice various things being tweaked in apparent response to my observations, and in a couple of weeks or so, another set of questions would emanate from the general’s staff for passage on to me.

  On only one occasion did I try to provide unsolicited advice. Catching wind that CENTCOM intended to launch an airborne Special Forces raid on Mullah Omar’s compound west of Kandahar City on October 19, I was incredulous. I phoned Pat.

  “Why are we doing this? Don’t they know no one’s there?” I asked. Omar’s compound had of course been struck with cruise missiles, at my suggestion, on the first night of the air campaign. Omar had not been back there since, and we knew from our sources in Kandahar that no one else was there, either.

  Pat cut in before I could go any further. He wanted to save me the trouble. “Bob,” he said. “God himself could not turn this off.” Let us say I got the clear impression from Pat that there was considerably more of intra-DoD politics than military necessity in this operation, and that the desire of the Rangers and of Delta Force to demonstrate the relevance of their airborne capabilities in what was shaping up to be a CIA/Green Beret fight might have had a great deal to do with it. It may also have been that General Franks and the Pentagon were eager to demonstrate visibly to the American public that action was in fact being taken against the Taliban on the ground, as well as from the air. Whatever the case, Mullah Omar’s compound was indeed empty when the special operators arrived. While extracting, they came under heavy fire from a Taliban force which rushed
to the scene, and one American was wounded. Worse, a helicopter staged at Dalbandin in Pakistan as part of a Quick Reaction Force associated with the operation rolled over in a “brownout” while attempting to land. Two Rangers were killed. It was cold comfort that we were not the only ones having to suffer politically inspired meddling from stateside; at least for us, the consequences thus far had not been lethal.

  In the valley of the blind, it is said, the one-eyed man is king. There are advantages to knowing a bit about an esoteric topic that is suddenly deemed important, and about which almost no one else knows anything. Although I was almost completely oblivious of it, I had gained some notoriety during this period at CENTCOM and in the West Wing of the White House, and a nickname to go with it. Just after General Franks’s arrival in Islamabad, I journeyed to the suite of offices commandeered by his staff to pay a call on General Jeff Kimmons, the CENTCOM “J-2,” or intelligence chief, with whom I had been regularly conferring on the secure phone from Tampa. Informed that he was not there, I began to spell my name for the enlisted clerk. A look of recognition immediately came over his face.

  “Are you ‘Islamabad Bob’?” he asked. “Oh, sir! You’re famous!”

  Chapter 22

  * * *

  NUCLEAR NIGHTMARES

  NOVEMBER 4, 2001

  TODAY’S BRIEFING WAS GOING to be different. You could tell immediately from the body language and the expressions on their faces. But no one let on. There was a protocol to be followed.

  As was the custom after every interrogation of Dr. Bashir, the lead interrogator reported to my office in the early evening, as soon as he had returned from the “Clubhouse,” a joint facility we had established with the ISI. We had observed this exercise off and on since October 27, when the station and ISI had begun joint interrogations of Dr. Bashir-ud-Din Mahmud, the president of Ummah Tameer-e Nau (UTN).

  UTN was founded in March 2000 as a non-governmental organization, devoted to providing humanitarian services in Afghanistan. It was one of many trying to provide relief and comfort to Afghans—including a number of Islamic NGOs of an extremist orientation, some of which were known or strongly suspected of providing financial support to terrorists. What distinguished UTN from all other NGOs active in Afghanistan was both the composition and orientation of its membership. Most of the nine leading members of the group were retired nuclear scientists or military officers; all were religious fundamentalists and devoted supporters of the Taliban. Their non-member “patron” and sponsor was none other than the infamous Hamid Gul, a retired lieutenant general of the Pakistan Army and former director-general of the ISI, who had become highly visible as a rhetorical promoter of global jihad and an outspoken advocate for the Taliban.

  Sultan Bashir-ud-Din Mahmud, UTN’s president, was the former director-general for nuclear power of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC). During the early part of his career, he had been at least indirectly involved in Pakistan’s atomic weapons program, and for a while was project manager for Kushab, a heavy-water nuclear reactor designed to produce plutonium for weapons. It was perhaps not incidental that after Pakistan’s first nuclear weapons tests in 1998, Dr. Bashir was honored with a significant civilian award, the Sitara–e-Intiaz, by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. What most attracted scrutiny to Dr. Bashir, though, was not his scientific background but his radical political orientation and bizarre pseudoscientific theories. He espoused the view that Pakistan’s nuclear weapon should be the common property of the entire Ummah, the global Islamic community. He wrote extensively about the impact of sunspots on human affairs, and made predictions about the role of terrorism and nuclear weapons in precipitating doomsday. In his later years at PAEC, some of his colleagues actually had doubts about his sanity.

  The fact that an Islamic extremist with crackpot ideas about the end of the world, substantial knowledge of nuclear weapons–related technology, and a belief that such knowledge should be spread widely was now actively engaged in Afghanistan and therefore in at least close physical proximity to al-Qa’ida was enough to give some pause. On that basis, it was natural that UTN would attract at least a certain amount of low-level suspicion in the West. The fact that it didn’t seem terribly active in Afghanistan—its overt activities appeared mostly limited to operation of a flour mill in Kandahar—gave rise to speculation as to what the organization might actually be up to. Beyond suspicion, though, there was little to go on. I made my first, low-level request of the ISI for information about UTN in January 2001, though I can no longer remember what triggered it.

  After 9/11, the context in which the Islamic NGO was viewed changed radically. With al-Qa’ida having graphically demonstrated its ability to strike a staggering blow against the United States, the fear was that this might only be a precursor, and that more devastating means might be employed against us at any time. Within weeks, we began receiving sketchy reports from two of our European allies concerning past activities of UTN, alleging that they may have been involved in passing nuclear-related information to rogue states—information which the Europeans had not shared with us previously. What they were now sharing was unspecific and provided neither corroborating details nor any clue as to how it was acquired, without which there was no way to judge its credibility. Intelligence services are loath to share anything that might point to the identity or nature of their sources, but what they had given us was almost useless; it seemed a combination of rumor and innuendo: “These people appear to be up to no good; we recommend you find out what they’re doing.” They refused to allow us to share even this sketchy information with anyone else.

  By October 1, with several such reports in hand, I decided I had seen enough. We needed to take action. CIA had long been in the business of collecting information on nuclear and other WMD proliferation, particularly where there was a threat of proliferation to terrorist groups. I had played a central role in setting up the Counter-Proliferation Division. Now CTC was setting up a separate office, CTC/WMD, to pull together all information and leads pertaining to al-Qa’ida’s efforts to develop nuclear and other mass destructive capabilities. I proposed to them that we approach the Pakistanis for help in investigating UTN.

  This was hardly my default position. After all, CIA is in the business of collecting intelligence, and whenever possible would prefer to do so on its own. But now time was of the essence. I was not so much concerned about what UTN might do in future. With open hostilities about to start, it was unlikely that the NGO would be able to maintain its previous pattern of travel and involvement in Afghanistan, and if it had al-Qa’ida clients, those individuals were unlikely to be available while ducking U.S. bombs. Opportunities to collect information on UTN activities going forward would probably be sparse. What we really needed to know was what capabilities it might have shared with al-Qa’ida in the past. For that, Dr. Bashir and company would need to be interrogated, and we could do that only with Pakistani assistance.

  At length, headquarters relented, and provided me with so-called “tear line” information: approved text, which could be cut out along a tear line from a cable and presented to a cooperating service. What I received was disappointing. It was essentially a number of vague and unsubstantiated assertions about Dr. Bashir’s involvement in sharing nuclear information with unauthorized parties, and reasons to suspect UTN might be doing the same with al-Qa’ida. When I presented it to General Jafar on October 10, he was unimpressed.

  “This is all circumstantial,” he said. Bashir was a national hero. Bringing him in for questioning was likely to create a political firestorm, particularly if it was done in response to foreign pressure. Jafar was going to need more than this.

  Two days later, thoroughly frustrated, I sent another message. By now those of us in Islamabad knew that one of our European partners did indeed have substantial information which could be used to convince the Pakistanis that Bashir posed a potentially significant threat, both to their interests and ours. The Europeans had come clean with us, but
still insisted that we could not use their information with the Pakistanis. To me this was completely unsatisfactory, given the potential threat, but headquarters insisted that we had given the Pakistanis enough: hadn’t we told them Bashir was a dangerous man? In exasperation, I cabled: “There is an important distinction between evidence and assertion, and unfortunately the Pakistanis are aware of it.” I proposed that George Tenet weigh in directly with the head of our sister service. With their information in hand, the U.S. government—probably Secretary of State Colin Powell—could approach President Musharraf. As Pakistan had cut its ties with the Taliban and was currently providing the United States with a platform from which to make war on both the Taliban and al-Qa’ida, the Paks had to realize that they were nearly as liable to retaliation as the Americans, and far easier to reach. Any credible indication that Bashir and UTN had shared dangerous technology with al-Qa’ida would have to be seen as a potential threat to them as well. The problem was that no Pakistani official was willing to concede that a revered scientist would do such a thing, absent compelling evidence.

  Our allies again would not accede to our wishes, and there was no high-level approach to Musharraf. As a result of my badgering, though, Jafar did consent to allow joint CIA/ISI interrogations of Bashir and his colleagues, including use of the polygraph.

  One of CIA’s most accomplished interrogators, Barry McManus, happened to be with us at that moment to advise on another issue. He agreed to stay, and he was introduced to Dr. Bashir on October 27. Playing on his North African appearance, McManus presented himself as a Moroccan journalist: “Dr. Abraham.” He could help Bashir to clear his name, he said, but only if the Pakistani scientist were willing to accept his methods of assuring the veracity of his sources. “Do you want all the world to see you as a terrorist?”