by George Crile
Bearden recognized another stroke of good fortune: the New York Times man in Pakistan, Arthur Bonner, announced just as Bearden arrived that the war was, in effect, over. The headline read, “Guerrillas Are Divided and at Risk of Being Conquered.” Since the Times is a kind of American bible insofar as political judgments are concerned, Bearden realized that there was no place for his operation to go but up. Indeed, even the following year, Dan Rather would host a CBS special report concluding that all was lost, and henceforth no reporter would be able to go in.
In fact, as Gust had told him, the tide was already turning. No doubt one of the reasons why American reporters and politicians and, indeed, the public they represented didn’t pay any attention to the occasional references to how much this war was costing was because they had all learned to disregard money as being helpful in solving problems. Government wasted money. The poverty program didn’t solve poverty; it might have made it worse. The billions spent in Vietnam had backfired. Washington Post cartoonist Herb Block loved to draw Caspar Weinberger walking around with a thousand-dollar toilet seat around his neck. And everyone knew that the CIA screwed up everything it did.
Perhaps reporters felt some sympathy toward the poor Afghans. At that time the mujahideen cause was almost universally embraced throughout the world. Journalists seemed to find it difficult to undermine the CIA’s effort, which appeared to be inadequate in the first place. Whatever the underlying reason, Bearden thought it totally charming that no one was hunting him down, eager to humiliate and expose him and the giant operation he had just taken over.*
All of this was just the beginning for the station chief, compared to the great good fortune that began to erupt that summer. On August 26, the skies of Kabul burst into flames, and Milt, the Afghans, and even the CIA bathed in the glory. The unmistakable conclusion was that the biggest Soviet arms depot in Afghanistan had just been blown up as a result of a very skilled CIA-backed guerrilla maneuver.
Bearden, who does not shy from taking credit for his triumphs, offers a disarmingly humble explanation of the Agency’s role. “This was one that Allah really did do all by himself,” he says. But to properly enjoy Bearden’s explanation of how this killer blow against the 40th Army was delivered, you have to imagine yourself in the presence of a master storyteller using a Texas accent and knowing that his listener is likely to think that he was personally responsible for placing the C-4 explosives in just the right spot.
“Think of an old muj,” he begins. “Lucky Mohammed, I call him. He’s carrying a thirty-seven-pound rocket that costs ninety-two dollars. Now, Mohammed’s mule has died and he’s tired. He stops at a teahouse in the mountains on the outskirts of Kabul. And when he goes to lay the rocket down, it falls into a tandoori oven and it explodes. The rocket strikes a dove over the teahouse as it takes off. This changes its trajectory. As a result the rocket goes straight down the smokestack and blows up the whole dump.”
At this point Bearden’s audience understands that the much-ballyhooed incident in which a 107mm rocket knocked off fifty thousand tons of ammunition was not the product of the CIA’s ingenious planners. “A free-flight rocket is a free-flight rocket,” explains the station chief.
Bearden now reverts back to a straight briefing, explaining that news of this hit—complete with dramatic still photographs and video—was immediately picked up and shown all around the world. Meanwhile, the press corps’ favorite Afghan commander, Abdul Haq, immediately claimed credit for the hit. He began to include pictures of the explosions in his party’s brochures. Bearden thought this was just fine, since he wanted to give the impression to the Soviets that everything the mujahideen did was the result of precision planning. “So what if it happened by utter chance—you turn it into a precision operation and let Abdul Haq’s story stick. And shit, everyone needs a hero, so let Abdul Haq be a hero and write ballads about being the man who knocked off the 40th Army.”
Actually, it wasn’t all quite the piece of abstract luck that Bearden describes. By the time Lucky Mohammed launched his mortar round, the mujahideen had taken to launching rocket attacks on Kabul almost daily. These attacks were not very accurate because the Soviets had built up a defensive ring perimeter eleven miles out. On top of that, the mujahideen didn’t want to risk being caught by the gunships, so they tended to fire only at night, knowing they would have time to escape before first light, when the Hinds could lift off seeking revenge.
Even so, the fact was that the mujahideen were shelling Kabul virtually every day by the time Bearden arrived on the scene. If you fire enough rockets for long enough at the same general target, one day one of them is bound to strike. And this one didn’t just explode a lot of enemy ammunition; it made everyone suddenly think that the mujahideen were finally learning how to really hurt the enemy.
That, in fact, was exactly what was happening in the sealed-off indoor-training area just outside the Pakistan capital the month Bearden arrived to take up his job. There a select group of mujahideen had been tapped to learn how to fire the Stinger.
Engineer Ghaffar was one of the Afghans’ most successful gunners, a member of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s archfundamentalist Hezb-i-Islami party. Like his leader, Ghaffar is not the kind of Muslim who smiles on America. So one might wonder how the good engineer felt when he was first handed the dull green seven-foot tube. And how he felt when the red-faced Texan, the American named Milt, went with him to the border to wish him well as he walked off with his band of men.
As Ghaffar crossed the Pakistan border, moved into the tribal zone, and then began traveling across the dry and wasted landscape of southern Afghanistan, he and his men looked little different from their great-grandfathers, who had twice shattered British invasions in the nineteenth century. The green tubes they carried with them hardly seemed menacing, and if the truth were known, no one at the CIA or the ISI knew whether they would be effective. The Stinger had never yet been deployed in actual combat.
The eyes of the CIA, in the form of satellites specially detailed for the operation, were very much upon the holy warriors as they continued on their way. Only the green tubes offered an evidentiary link to their American suppliers. They carried with them a map of the target area, drawn so artfully as to resemble a quick mujahid scroll but actually derived from the subtlest of American satellite photographs. The sketch depicted the best approach and escape routes from the airfield at the Soviet garrison in Jalalabad.
This was approximately the same spot where, 144 years earlier, Dr. Brydon had struggled alone along the Kabul road, bringing the appalling news that he was the lone survivor of the British expeditionary force that had ridden into Afghanistan ten months earlier to take control of Kabul. The grisly story of Dr. Brydon and the fate of the nineteenth-century British invaders was told over and over again with great pleasure by U.S. ambassadors and CIA men once the Afghans started to look as if they might actually defeat the Soviets.
Brydon had been part of the proud British Indian army that had marched into Kabul with their fine uniforms and lethal weapons to install their own king. After more than a year of being hacked away by snipers and attackers, the British realized they had no choice but to withdraw. They thought they had negotiated an agreement of safe passage for their troops and dependents. But from the first day of retreat, the mountain men began to take their revenge, cutting off sections of the column, destroying the infidels one by one, as often as possible in the most horrible manner. Dr. Brydon’s good fortune is assumed to be the consequence of an old tactic of Muslim warfare: to leave behind one man to tell the tale. And so the doctor carried the message that would echo down through the centuries—of the fate that awaits any future enemy of the faith.
Ghaffar stood proudly in the tradition of his Afghan ancestors. It was about 3 P.M. on September 26, 1986, when he and his men approached the Jalalabad airfield. They moved in closer to the landing zone than their ISI trainers, running off the CIA target studies, had specified.
Until this mome
nt the three-man crews that flew the Hinds had never really known fear. Never in the six years of the war. They could kill at will, and no one could kill back. But now, preparing to pierce that invulnerability, Engineer Ghaffar sighted his shouldered weapon and he and his fellow soldiers looked out near dusk at four Hinds flying into Jalalabad.
To explain the functioning of a Stinger is demanding—just as it takes far more time to explain how a clock works than it does to teach a person that the clock’s purpose is to tell time. Engineer Ghaffar may not have known what electrical forces cause the Stinger’s warhead to launch out of its tube or what makes it turn and twist in the air in pursuit of its target. That sort of detail was between the weapons designer and Allah. But he did know that the Stinger was what the Americans call a fire-and-forget weapon. Somehow, with its infrared sensors it could chase through the skies seeking heat from the exhaust of the Hind’s engines. For Ghaffar the task was to lock the beast in the Stinger’s sights and then pull the trigger.
There was one thing more—something the instructors had not taught the Afghans but that none ever forgot. As the missile rocketed past Ghaffar’s eyes at twelve hundred miles per hour, he uttered the cry of the faithful: “Allahu Akbar,” God is Great.
But now the engineer’s faith was put to the test, because the Stinger had misfired and three of the Hinds were closing in.
At CIA headquarters that day, Mike Vickers was nowhere to be found. He had, by then, left the CIA. For Gust Avrakotos, returning from the front a few months earlier, the news that his irreplaceable strategist had decided to quit had been traumatic.
Avrakotos was not one to become dependent on anyone, but over the course of just a year and a half, Vickers had become Gust’s right hand: his tutor, his troubleshooter, his counselor on all aspects of the war. Vickers had taught Avrakotos to look at the big picture and not get caught up in the details or panic at temporary setbacks. He had created an entirely new vision of how to arm and train this mass of primitive individualists. And already they were transforming themselves into a force that could torment and defy the invincible Red Army.
It was Vickers who had taught Avrakotos that his own instincts had been right: the Afghan war was winnable. But it was also Vickers who had given Avrakotos the shock of his life by showing him that the monetary price for getting into the winning game was far, far higher than he or anyone else at the CIA could have imagined.
Early on Avrakotos decided that Vickers was a military and tactical genius and that he would let him call the military shots. As he backed his strategist’s brash plan to build the largest operation the CIA had ever run, Avrakotos came to rely on an almost unreal aspect of Vickers’s performance: he didn’t seem to make mistakes.
In early 1985, when the program had hit a half billion a year and a nervous John McMahon had called in the Pentagon to review the strategy, the Joint Chiefs could find nothing to criticize. When the White House had become alarmed about corruption charges and had ordered a full policy review, Vickers had managed to turn the exercise on its head. He’d not only put down the corruption concerns, he’d also successfully argued that the president should abandon the old “bleeding policy” and sign off on a new U.S. policy to drive the Red Army out “by all means available.”
In February 1986, as Avrakotos sat contemplating life without his strategist, he realized that he had bet the store on Vickers and he had never once been disappointed. He now realized that he loved this young man—this bright, hardworking, patriotic ethnic kid who reminded him of what he had been like when he’d first joined the Agency in the early 1960s. Vickers wasn’t burdened with quite the same rough edges that Gust had brought with him from Aliquippa, but still he was an ethnic and Gust had found it rewarding to see how the kid flourished when given the right kind of assignment by the right kind of boss. It was as if he had been proving what Gust might have been able to do for the Agency and for his country had he been given the same chance that Archie Roosevelt’s prep school roommate would have had.
For Avrakotos, the idea of running the Afghan program without Vickers was like being told he had to have an arm amputated. He felt almost betrayed—or perhaps abandoned.* At a time when the press was still predicting defeat and ruin, and before Vickers’s new mix of weapons and training and theories had been given a chance to kick in, their guide and all-important strategist was just walking out.
Bert Dunn got into the act, offering to make sure that after the Afghan program, Mike would get an assignment to whatever overseas post he wanted. But by then Vickers had analyzed his situation and reached several surprising conclusions simultaneously, all of which told him it was time to leave.
His first conclusion was typical of this wildly confident intellect. Vickers told Gust that his work was basically done. It would be another year or two before the full impact of what they had set in motion would surface on the battlefield, but the weapons decisions had all been taken, the contracts let, the training programs developed, the logistical system and delivery schedules established. He had put it all into the task force plans, and for all practical purposes the rest of the CIA’s efforts could go on automatic pilot.
It was hard for Avrakotos to accept this until Vickers began to break it down for him. While Gust had been in Pakistan, Vickers explained, he had put into place the last major element of the weapons program—the Stinger training and deployment strategy.
He was confident that the Stinger would add a lethal new dimension to the anti-aircraft mix that was already beginning to pay off. He had gone to great lengths to make sure the Afghans would be properly trained. In the past, U.S. trainers had taught the Pakistanis how to use new weapons, and the Pakistanis had then instructed the mujahideen. This time Vickers proposed that the American specialists go into the camps dressed like mujahideen to personally supervise the training.
He was also hopeful about the hunter-killer strategy he and Nick Pratt, the marine colonel in charge of training, were implementing with the Stingers. Instead of using them just to counter planes or helicopters that might attack Afghan positions, the mujahideen would be trained to take them to where they knew or suspected Soviet aircraft would be taking off or landing. The idea was to turn the tables and let the mujahideen hunt the gunships for a change. It had worked with the SA-7s and Blowpipes, but the Stinger made the strategy all the more effective.
Now that the anti-aircraft strategy was in place, Vickers insisted that his master plan, spelling out precisely how the CIA should support the Afghans for the next three years was complete. Had it been anyone else making this claim, Avrakotos might have doubted that such a thing was possible. But he knew better than to question Vickers. At times Gust felt that his young military adviser was almost inhuman. “He could be frightening when he started talking numbers,” Gust says.
Avrakotos remembered his amazement when he’d first watched the way Vickers had gone about making his decisions about the number of rounds the mujahideen would need to keep their AK-47s fed, factoring in not only combat engagements but also joy shots, hoarding, and black marketeering. Including such details had become an integral part of the effortless art of Mike Vickers, allowing for life as it is on the battlefield but applying science, discipline, and accountability whenever possible. Logistics, supply lines, medical care—such things are fundamental to war but are particularly challenging in covert warfare. Every aspect of trying to support the Afghan holy warriors had its own special logistical challenge. And so all of Vickers’s calculations had to take into account maneuvers with Swiss bank accounts, shadowy purchasing agents, safe houses, phony corporations, contracts, lawyers, disguised boats, fleets of trucks, trains, camels, donkeys, mules, warehouses, disguised satellite-targeting studies, and secret payments to the families of the fighters.
Almost all of this work was done from a rather dull, colorless set of offices tucked away in the peaceful woods of Langley, Virginia. That wasn’t at all the kind of work Mike Vickers had envisioned doing when he’d signed on wit
h the CIA; he’d had visions then of becoming a modern T. E. Lawrence. But Vickers was, above all, a man of modern times and new technologies and he quickly came to feel that had Lawrence spent his time with the mujahideen, he might not have made much of a difference at all.
The Agency’s paramilitary cowboys were always coming upstairs, urging him and Gust to let them mount special operations in Afghanistan. In his own daydream, Vickers would head off into the Panjshir Valley to advise Massoud, the Afghan he most admired. The two men were born the same year, and he would have loved nothing more than to disappear into the mountains with the Lion of the Panjshir to trap and hunt and harass the common foe. But Vickers knew it was of no value for a few Americans to run operations in Afghanistan. The mujahideen (and, when needed, the Pakistan ISI) were doing that kind of work for themselves. The creative thing in this war was for the CIA to transform these men into technoguerrillas.
It required a certain kind of imagination to visualize from paper the army Vickers was sculpting. Vickers had read long and deep into the history of unconventional warfare. He knew he had a historic commission. He was designing a new prototype, and to him it was a work of military art. Vickers is one of those rare men who basically mark their own report cards, and in February 1986 he was able to peer into the future, see the creature he had been bringing to life, and pronounce it a full-blown success.
Upon seeing those satellite photos of the carnage on the Gardez-to-Kabul Highway, Vickers had felt great satisfaction. From then on he had little doubt that the CIA’s strategy would succeed, and he told Gust this when he said he had reached his decision to leave the Agency. But in all fairness, it’s highly unlikely that Mike Vickers, after almost three years in the CIA, would have suddenly decided to leave simply because he believed that the important creative contribution he had to offer was largely complete.
