88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  There remains much confusion about what Abu Zubayda represented. Some say that we erred in considering him a senior leader. I don’t think they understand the way we perceived him. After tracking the man for two and a half years, I did not believe he was a senior leader; he was merely a senior, and a very important one. The distinction is significant. If al-Qa’ida were an army, Abu Zubayda would certainly not be a commander, or even an executive officer. He was more like a sergeant major. He wasn’t hatching plots and giving orders: he was the guy who got things done. I did not expect that he would know the time or place of the next attack; in fact, I would have been surprised if he did know such things. I had little doubt, however, that he would know the names, the aliases, the phone numbers, the points of contact that would enable us to find and capture the operatives who would be involved in those future attacks.

  That was what we, the entire U.S. government, and indeed the American people most feared in those days: the next attack. CIA was supposed to make sure it didn’t happen. Given the importance of what we were sure was in Abu Zubayda’s head, extracting it was not a responsibility we could delegate to someone else. We would have to do it ourselves, and quickly. This was the thinking and the unbearable pressure which led us, starting with Abu Zubayda and continuing with the even more important captures made subsequently, down the road that led to CIA “black sites” and coercive interrogation techniques. I couldn’t know it in 2002, but it would someday fall to me to deal with that legacy.

  Chapter 42

  * * *

  THE SAGE

  EARLY APRIL 2002

  THE MOST SURPRISING THING about the man was the softness of his voice. The timbre was deep, but the volume was barely above a whisper. Sitting a few feet away, I had to lean forward to hear him—to the point where I thought this must be a ploy to gain advantage. It was hard to argue with someone when you were devoting all your energies simply to hearing what he had to say.

  The post of Director-General for Military Operations, or DGMO, in the Pakistan Army is only a two-star slot, its occupant nominally on a par with all the divisional commanders in the Pakistani armed forces, of which there are many. The leaders of Pakistan’s Army, the three-star Corps commanders, are far more prominent than the DGMO, their support carefully cultivated by the four-star chief of Army Staff. But in this case, rank is deceiving, even in the ultra-rank-conscious Pakistan Army. In fact, the DGMO has enormous power, essentially controlling the day-to-day operations of Pakistan’s military, and exercising great influence, even if from behind the scenes. That was why I was sitting across a desk from this slight, chain-smoking army officer inside a brick bungalow flanking the central courtyard at the General Headquarters of the Pakistan Army. Major General Ashfaq Pervaiz Kayani, I would soon learn, was the ultimate behind-the-scenes operator. What he clearly lacked in command presence he more than made up for in intelligence, clarity of thought, and deftness of maneuver. To me, he was the Sage. The truth was that I was caught, once again, in the fog of mutual incomprehension between Washington and Islamabad. I was looking for an ally, and badly needed his help.

  Ironically, in view of CTC’s distrust of the Pakistanis, the first reports I was aware of concerning al-Qa’ida fighters in the area of Afghanistan’s Shahi Kot Valley came to us from Brigadier Suhail Majid, the ISI Afghanistan expert. According to his sources, as of late January 2002, Arabs were regularly descending from the mountains near Zormat, in Afghanistan’s eastern Paktia Province, to buy food from villagers in the valleys below. They appeared well equipped, and had money to spend. These reports were followed by others from American sources, and soon it was clear that there were at least several hundred foreign fighters in and around Shahi Kot. One had to wonder how many had escaped Kandahar, from under our noses.

  By early February 2002, CIA and the U.S. military command in Afghanistan were collaborating on a strategy to attack them. The plan, as I understood it, appeared intended as a refinement of the one that had largely come to grief in Tora Bora. Again, an Afghan militia organized by CIA, guided and supplemented by U.S. Special Forces, was intended to be the main fighting force. It would sweep into the Shahi Kot Valley from the west. But this time, the expected escape routes at the northern and southern ends of the valley, and through the mountains to the east, would be blocked by a combination of U.S. conventional and Special Operations forces. That was the plan.

  In subsequent weeks, as Afghan forces were being trained and U.S. units moved into place, I received a pair of cables from CTC, describing the evolving battle arrangements for “Operation Anaconda.” Both expressed the peculiar view that the key to our success—and the chief weakness in the plan—would be the Pakistanis’ ability to seal their border and interdict foreign fighters fleeing the Shahi Kot battle zone. Given my past history with CTC, it was hard not to be paranoid about this. It seemed to me an obvious and gratuitous effort to shift the blame for possible failure onto the Pakistanis and, by extension, onto me.

  I shot back immediately to both cables. The Pakistani border, I pointed out, was a minimum of 50 kilometers distant from the area where we hoped to hem in the al-Qa’ida fighters. The further out one projected from the battle zone, the wider the area in which “squirters” could disperse, and the greater the consequent difficulty in intercepting them. There should be no illusions about the Pakistanis’ ability to control infiltration across their border, I said.

  In January, when General Jafar and I had made our second foray into the Tribal Areas, Colonel Wajahat Chaudry, the Tochi Scouts’ commander, had taken us to their elevated observation post at Ghulam Khan, northwest of Miram Shah. From there, we had an unobstructed view over many miles of the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier opposite Khost, Zormat, and the Shahi Kot Valley. The low, brown, treeless hills to our west offered little impediment to would-be infiltrators. Though Colonel Wajahat provided a spiritedly optimistic appraisal of his ability to control the area, it was obvious that with the few resources at his disposal, the border was essentially wide open, particularly at night. Lacking any sort of electronic sensors or other means of technical observation, the colonel’s system of static checkposts and infrequent foot patrols could be easily circumvented.

  I shared CTC’s reluctance to provide an advance indication to the Pakistanis concerning the timing or location of our intended attacks on al-Qa’ida. We had no assurances that the information would be protected as we would wish, and the risk of a leak to the enemy would be intolerable. But even my modest proposal to wait until after the battle was well under way, and then merely to make suggestions to the Pak military as to which sections of the border we would wish them to reinforce, was met with cold silence. Under the circumstances, I said, if we intended that the foreign fighters in and around Shahi Kot should be entrapped, we had better make sure we were in a position to do it ourselves.

  Others far closer to it than I can better describe the extended battle which took place over the first half of March 2002, but the results would have to be described as mixed. Battle plans, it is said, never survive contact with the enemy, but this one fared worse than most. A key U.S. blocking force in the valley had to be evacuated under fire, and two others in the mountain passes to the east were essentially overwhelmed. If the plan was to encircle and eliminate these foreign fighters, it failed. American losses were rather heavy, at least by the standards of the war up to that point: eight killed and over forty wounded. Post-contact tallies of the al-Qa’ida presence at Shahi Kot were bumped up sharply to between 500 and 1,000; U.S. commanders variously estimated enemy losses in the hundreds, although scarcely over 20 bodies and no graves were discovered after the fighting ended.

  Whatever the results of Operation Anaconda, the upshot was that now, America’s antiterrorism focus shifted in the direction of Pakistan’s Tribal Areas. The consensus was that the foreign fighters had fled east, across the Pakistani border. Various “special mission” forces of JSOC, anointed by the Pentagon with the counterterrorism lead in Afghanistan
, were roaming about the countryside in search of al-Qa’ida “high-value targets.” I was never quite sure which targets would qualify as “high value,” but in any case, they weren’t finding any. I began getting indications from the JSOC reps in Islamabad that our military brothers across the line were growing impatient. Convinced that their prey lurked just beyond their grasp, JSOC commanders looked at the international frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan as a mere abstraction. They were eager to expand their search to the other side.

  While my station and the ISI were doing a land-office business in rounding up escaping foreign fighters in the urban areas of Pakistan, there were growing indications that the combination of our success and the hospitable environment for fleeing Islamic extremists in the Tribal Areas were causing some of these fighters, at least, to reassess their options and to collect in the wild areas just east of the Durand Line. The escape from Shahi Kot added measurably to that impression. The question was: If they were there, then precisely where were they? Much of the intelligence that gave us such an edge in the Pakistani settled areas was unavailable to us in the remote tribal territories. And most of what little we had concerning the goings-on in the Pakistani Tribal Areas was from Afghan sources across the border.

  During this time, Secretary Rumsfeld made one of his periodic visits to Islamabad. Again, I was summoned for a private consultation, with Steve Cambone, then the principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy and one of the defense secretary’s closest acolytes, sitting in. I described the “post-conflict” intelligence beginning to come out of Afghanistan during that period as the worst I had ever seen.

  Congress had reacted to the supposed intelligence failure behind 9/11 not only with recriminations but with an avalanche of new money and people. Already, inexperienced graduates of the Farm were being issued carbines and rushed, on their first assignments, into Afghanistan. It normally takes years to learn the art of espionage, and early mentoring is crucial, but now the Afghan intelligence-scape was being overwhelmed with raw novitiates, operating with woefully insufficient supervision.

  It’s fair to say that a large number of wily Afghans were getting rather the better of their overeager CIA contacts. In just one example, an Afghan intelligence “source” of no particular account, with natural access to practically nothing, was able nonetheless to demonstrate for his new American friend a great nose for intelligence and a positively uncanny sense of timing. While wandering along the Pakistan border, he happened upon a large group of armed men, among whom he noted Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s second in command, speaking furtively with a Pakistani Army colonel in full uniform. Some days later, he fortuitously came upon this same Pak officer, and even managed to espy his credential, which identified him as a senior ISI operative. Within days, he succeeded in getting himself recruited by the ISI as a source. This went on for a couple of weeks, each story more outrageous than the one preceding it, all of it reported breathlessly in CIA channels by this credulous young man, who no doubt counted himself an intelligence prodigy rivaling Allen Dulles himself.

  When at last I’d seen enough, I sent out a personal message addressed not only to the officer concerned but to his management in both Afghanistan and Washington. This chain of reporting, I noted drily, would be highly significant if true. If indeed the ISI were in league with bin Laden and Zawahiri, we needed to get to the bottom of it, and as quickly as possible. I proposed that this source be brought to a secure location where he could be properly questioned by an experienced counterintelligence specialist from outside, and possibly polygraphed.

  Thus confronted, our young paragon from eastern Afghanistan informally indicated to one of my officers that he had no intention of doing any such thing. I was curious how he would propose to justify such an incorrigible stand, but before he could be obliged, CTC came to his rescue. Islamabad’s preoccupation with counterintelligence was all very well, their message read, but one could not impose the standards of classic Soviet-era espionage on rough Afghan sources. Headquarters’ response was doubly unfortunate, I then wrote: not only was it embarrassingly wrongheaded on its merits, but it would have a pernicious effect on the development of any junior officers exposed to it.

  In this environment, one might have been excused for a bit of skepticism about reports emanating from Afghanistan alleging that al-Qa’ida fighters in groups of up to 1,500 strong were being spotted in South Waziristan, on the Pak side of the border. Even when allowing for Afghan math—to begin, one should divide by ten—one could not dismiss these reports out of hand. There were too many strong indications from several quarters that we had a serious problem in the Tribal Areas.

  For the JSOC colonel in Islamabad who had replaced Marco, the solution was simple: I should convince the Pakistanis to allow a squad of JSOC operatives, in American uniforms, to patrol with the Frontier Corps throughout Waziristan, thus inuring the locals to their presence. Once this pattern was established, small groups of JSOC operatives could begin dropping out of these patrols, unseen, to reconnoiter the reported al-Qa’ida hiding places. I did what I could to advocate for the military, usually with their representatives in tow, but I knew what they were asking was a non-starter for the Pak military, understandably so. The mere presence of uniformed American military personnel patrolling in an area where Osama bin Laden was considered a hero would set off unrest among the tribals.

  Convincing the Pakistanis to take risks to address a problem was all the more difficult when they would not acknowledge the problem’s existence in the first place. I arranged for senior U.S. military to meet with Lieutenant General Ali Jan Aurakzai, the commander of XI Corps, responsible for the security of all northwest Pakistan, including the Tribal Areas. Well known for his aggressiveness and outsize personality, the strapping Pathan argued vociferously that our intelligence was simply wrong. If there were al-Qa’ida in his area he would know about it, he said. His comments were no doubt influenced by the consideration that if our reports were true, they would constitute a very inconvenient fact.

  At length, I did convince General Kayani to arrange for a JSOC unit to join my friend Colonel Wajahat of the Tochi Scouts, in North Waziristan. In the interim, in an attempt to provide Washington with a little perspective on the problem, I invited one of Hank’s deputies to join me on a tour of both North and South Waziristan, where the alleged al-Qa’ida armies were reported by our imaginative Afghan sources. As we were escorted about the area by the commander of the South Waziristan Scouts, the local Frontier Corps unit, it was obvious that a dozen or so militants could be easily accommodated in any of the fortresslike reddish mud compounds that dotted the high plateau surrounding Wana, the South Waziristan capital, but that the presence of hundreds of outsiders would be impossible to hide.

  Assigning JSOC to join the Tochi Scouts proved a near disaster. I had once heard General Franks say that the reason he liked his JSOC people was that they were “asocial.” Indeed they were, and properly so. Their job was to operate as an efficient, narrowly targeted, unilateral killing machine, designed to find, fix, and finish the enemy, operating in stealth and entirely on their own. I contemplated their dealings with Colonel Wajahat and the Frontier Corps with some trepidation.

  Sure enough, the American commandos were highly mistrustful of their Pak colleagues. Wajahat’s reluctance to take actions which might stir up local resentment they took as evidence of complicity with the terrorists. They declined the tented on-base accommodations offered by the Pakistanis in favor of an abandoned brick school, which could be more easily defended against their hosts. Although they were to adopt Frontier Corps dress and otherwise blend in, they were easily distinguished among the tribal levies, and refused to forsake their distinctive, high-tech weapons in favor of AK-47s. Despite the valiant efforts of the CIA operative I had assigned to liaise between them and Colonel Wajahat, the experiment was short-lived.

  This failure was all the more frustrating as I had argued with the military in vain that thi
s mission should be assigned to the Green Berets, the so-called “white” Special Operations Forces, who had collaborated with us so successfully in support of the anti-Taliban Afghan tribals. Their job, unlike the “black” SOF of JSOC, was to work with indigenous forces. My hope was that over time they would build trust with their Frontier Corps hosts, and provide them with training and mentoring that would permit the Scouts to operate more effectively in a counterterrorism mode. When I reported on all this to headquarters, I described JSOC as “the wrong force, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.”

  This was the sad history which then brought me, alone this time, to General Kayani’s door. As seemed so often to be the case, I had no friends: the Pakistanis were in denial about the al-Qa’ida presence in the Tribal Areas, and the Americans were asking for all the wrong things. I pointed out to the general that the al-Qa’ida presence would manifest itself over time. And as it did, the Pakistanis would come under overwhelming American pressure either to do something about it themselves or permit unilateral U.S. means to deal with it. If CIA provided precise information, including satellite imagery, of the suspected al-Qa’ida hide sites, could not the Pakistani Special Services Group, their respected special forces, do something against them?

  Kayani looked at me coolly and empathetically. With the lucid logic that would always characterize my dealings with him, he replied that yes, they could. “But consider this,” he said. “If we operate as you suggest, within a short period of time, we will have a major tribal uprising on our hands.” That would be all right, he said; the Pakistan Army had dealt with such uprisings before. “But if an uprising comes, it will require three brigades of troops to put it down, and there is only one place those brigades can come from.”