Directorate S

by Steve Coll

  Because Saleh was bright and had already taught himself English, Massoud’s lieutenants sent him to Pakistan in 1992, on a course provided by the United Nations titled “Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Management.” Saleh studied how to run humanitarian operations, in the eventual service of northern Afghanistan. Gradually, Saleh became the youngest man in Massoud’s circle of advisers.4

  In the mid-1990s he moved to Russia. He learned Russian and tried to evaluate the potential for a new partnership with Afghanistan’s former tormentor. (Russia had fallen into political and economic chaos under President Boris Yeltsin and Saleh returned to the Panjshir unconvinced that the Russian government could provide much help.) Later, Massoud dispatched Saleh to attend peace negotiations with the Taliban, sponsored by the United Nations. And Saleh began to work with the C.I.A.

  The main C.I.A. unit tasked to interact with Massoud’s guerrillas was called ALEC Station. Its mission was to capture or disrupt Osama Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders. The station comprised about twenty-five operations officers and analysts, and it was based at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Richard Blee, an experienced operations officer from the Africa Division of the clandestine service, took charge of ALEC in 1999. He inherited a group under rising pressure. After Al Qaeda bombed American embassies in Africa in 1998, C.I.A. officers working with foreign intelligence services from Egypt to Jordan to Kenya to Pakistan conducted raids on the homes of suspected Al Qaeda members and associates around the world. They seized computer drives and documents in Arabic, Urdu, English, and other languages and then dumped the materials on ALEC Station, to be sifted line by line for clues and names that might help to thwart upcoming terrorist attacks. By 2001, the station’s analysts transmitted an average of twenty-three formal reports per month to the F.B.I. about Al Qaeda. The work combined high stakes with numbing detail. Senior officers found that if they did not work from 7:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. or later Monday through Friday, plus a few hours on Saturday and Sunday, they could not keep up with the traffic.

  Blee had served multiple tours working the streets in unstable capitals. His C.I.A. tours had included postings to Bangui, the capital of Central African Republic; Niamey, the capital of Niger; Lagos, Nigeria; and Algiers. Blee was tall, with sandy hair. Some of his colleagues found him aloof and entitled. He was a second-generation C.I.A. officer, pegged by some to rise high in the agency, eventually. He was cerebral and well informed about international affairs, comfortable working in ambiguous conflict zones. Considering the problem of Al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Afghanistan, a landlocked nation where the United States had no embassy, Blee strongly favored working through Ahmad Shah Massoud, the most effective Afghan commander on the ground, who shared the C.I.A.’s antipathy toward Bin Laden.

  Blee had led a covert team of C.I.A. counterterrorism officers who flew into the Panjshir to meet Massoud in October 1999. “We have a common enemy,” Blee had told the commander. “Let’s work together.” He and C.I.A. officers who followed provided power supplies for Massoud’s intelligence equipment, better intercept gear, and an encrypted communications link that connected Massoud’s intelligence aides to ALEC Station, to send and receive secure typed messages. There was one encrypted terminal in Dushanbe and a second in the Panjshir. Massoud assigned Amrullah Saleh to be Blee’s main contact.5

  The following year, Al Qaeda suicide bombers supported from Afghanistan struck an American warship, the USS Cole, in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing seventeen American sailors. After that, in December 2000, Blee had drafted plans at the request of the expiring Clinton White House for a $150 million covert action program to arm, equip, and train Massoud for missions beyond the Bin Laden hunt, to help him fight the Taliban more effectively. Yet many American and European intelligence officers, generals, and diplomats did not see Massoud as a viable partner against Al Qaeda. Recalling the miserable fates of imperial Britain and the Soviet Union, they did not want to entangle the United States in Afghanistan’s civil war. The Panjshiris had committed mass killings during a period when they shared power in Kabul during the mid-1990s. They continued to smuggle gems and heroin, to fund their war. Massoud’s warnings about Al Qaeda could be dismissed as an element of a self-interested diplomatic campaign to win international aid for his losing factional struggle.

  Blee became one of Massoud’s most ardent defenders in Washington, regarding the commander as a great historical figure, comparable to Che Guevara. Massoud’s wispy beard had grown gray and dark bags hung beneath his eyes, but he remained highly energetic on the battlefield. Massoud’s argument was that the United States had a “huge problem” in Afghanistan, much bigger than Bin Laden. The essence of Massoud’s message was: “You’ve got all of these extremists. You’ve got the Taliban. And I’m the only friend you’ve got in this neighborhood.”

  Blee agreed with Massoud entirely but he could not win the foreign policy argument in Washington. He told Massoud, “Look, nobody gives a damn about Afghanistan. They care about Bin Laden. I can’t talk to you about taking over the government of Afghanistan. I’m only empowered to talk to you about getting Bin Laden. But we can build on that. Who knows where that goes?” Massoud understood. All of his allies and foreign suppliers were constrained in one way or another.6

  ALEC Station ran some of its covert operations against Al Qaeda, including Predator drone surveillance flights, from the C.I.A. station in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Amrullah Saleh worked with officers there as well as those in Virginia. That summer of 2001, amid the frustration over America’s hesitancy to back Massoud fully, Saleh fell into conversation with one of Rich Blee’s colleagues, Jim Lewis, a Counterterrorist Center case officer posted to Tashkent. Lewis urged Saleh to watch The Siege, a 1998 movie about terrorism written by the journalist and author Lawrence Wright and starring Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis. In the film, a terrorist group carries out bombings inside the United States and the government imposes martial law. Lewis predicted, “Something similar to that will happen to my country. But nobody is listening to us.”7

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  From Frankfurt, Saleh returned to Dushanbe. He met Massoud there on Friday, September 7. Massoud had arrived to speak with a visiting Iranian delegation. In the absence of more robust American support, Massoud depended on Iran, India, and Russia for weapons, money, and medical aid. Iran was perhaps his most reliable ally. Iranian Revolutionary Guards and intelligence operatives worked in northern Afghanistan alongside Massoud’s guerrillas.

  While they were together in Dushanbe, Saleh asked Massoud, “Where shall I send the equipment?” He was referring to the C.I.A.’s latest gear. Massoud told him to keep it in Tajikistan for the time being and to invite some Panjshiri colleagues up to Dushanbe. “You can train them,” Massoud instructed.8

  That weekend Massoud returned to Afghanistan, to his compounds near the Tajikistan border in Khoja Bahauddin. Two Arab television journalists carrying Belgian passports had been waiting there for days to interview the commander.

  —

  On the morning of September 9, 2001, Muhammad Arif Sarwari, who was commonly referred to as Engineer Arif, because he had studied electronics at a technical university in Kabul before dropping out to join Massoud at war, was at work in his basement office, where he oversaw a wire-strewn rat’s nest of ultra-high-frequency radios, intercept boxes, and satellite telephones. Arif was Massoud’s senior intelligence operations leader, in charge of all reporting agents and intercept collection in the day-to-day war effort.

  Arif was a gregarious, energetic man with thinning hair. A C.I.A. officer who worked with him called Arif “scruffy, verbose, crafty, corrupt, and a good, reliable partner.” He was born to a Panjshiri family in Kabul in 1961 and grew up in Karte Parwan, the neighborhood where Ahmad Shah Massoud had also lived as a boy. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Arif was still in school, but in 1982 he left for the Panjshir to join the rebellion. Initially he worked as a guard and a cle
rk, but after a year, when Massoud learned that he was from a trusted Panjshiri family, spoke Russian, and knew electronics, the commander asked him to set up a listening post in the Panjshir, to monitor Russian military communications.9

  The British foreign intelligence service, MI6, had recently provided Massoud with a Jaguar high-frequency radio network and computers. Someone needed to organize all this equipment and make tactical use of the intercepted messages. Arif became the Panjshir Valley’s de facto intelligence chief, often at Massoud’s side. Besides managing radio intercepts, he developed human sources. During the war’s late stages, Massoud built secret ties to an Afghan Communist faction in Kabul known as the Karmalites. When the Communist regime collapsed in the spring of 1992, Massoud seized Kabul. For the next four years, Massoud served as Afghanistan’s minister of defense while Engineer Arif worked as the number two at the Afghan intelligence and security service, formally known as Khadamat-i-Atala’at-I Dawlati, or Government Information Service, but notorious across the country by its acronym, K.H.A.D. Its officers had carried out brutal interrogations and thousands of extrajudicial executions during the Communist era. Arif kept some Soviet-trained Communist veterans in place. After the Taliban took Kabul in 1996 and Massoud retreated back to the Panjshir, Arif maintained contact with some of the former K.H.A.D. officers he had worked with; some of them now served as agents behind Taliban lines. Arif sent small satellite phones to agents in Kabul and Kandahar and arranged for them to cross into Panjshir to meet Massoud personally. “Are there Pakistani troops?” Massoud would ask. “What about Al Qaeda? What are their ammunition supplies?” Kabul was particularly easy to penetrate because of its mixed ethnic makeup and its proximity to the Panjshir. One of Massoud’s reporting agents was the head of all intelligence for the Taliban in Kabul.10

  Massoud owned thousands of books and was devoted to Persian poetry. In the early hours of Sunday, September 9, he stayed up with an old friend—a longtime political aide named Massoud Khalili—and read poetry aloud in a bungalow, as the two of them did regularly. The next morning, the commander summoned Engineer Arif to ask what should be done about the United States, “how to advance that relationship, what the issues were, what strategy to pursue.”

  The communications and radio intercept center Arif ran was located on the ground floor of a concrete house he used as an office when he stayed in Khoja Bahauddin. There was a reception room upstairs. Massoud said he was finally ready to grant the visiting Arab journalists an interview. The journalists set up their tripods and cameras in the room just above Arif’s intelligence center. It was by now almost noon. Arif was in and out. At one point, the commander took a call on his satellite phone. He learned that a Taliban and Al Qaeda force had attacked their front lines near Bagram Airfield and that eight Arabs had been seized. He asked Arif, “See what you can learn about the fighting.”

  Arif went downstairs. He was on the satellite phone when suddenly an explosion knocked the phone out of his hand. At first he thought it was a bomb dropped by one of the Taliban’s handful of fighter planes or an enemy rocket launched from long distance; such attacks were commonplace in Khoja Bahauddin. Then Arif smelled smoke and heard guards shouting. He ran upstairs to the reception room and saw Massoud’s body lying inert, blood everywhere. His friend Khalili, who had been translating for the commander during the “interview,” also lay unconscious. Arif called out for the commander’s Toyota Land Cruiser. He and other men carried the victims outside. They laid Massoud on the backseat of the Land Cruiser and put Khalili in the third-row seat. As they drove off, Arif called for a helicopter. He ordered the driver to head for a landing area five or six minutes away. By coincidence, there was a helicopter in the air nearby.

  “It’s an emergency,” Arif said. “We’re going to need that helicopter—but tell them not to shut down the engines. We’re coming.”

  They loaded the wounded men aboard. Arif tried to prevent the helicopter pilots from learning what had taken place. He told them to fly straight to a hospital not far from Khoja Bahauddin that had been built by the government of India and to land in the garden. Then he returned to his office and raised General Fahim Khan, Massoud’s most important military commander, on a satellite phone. Arif used the code word they employed for Massoud. “Something has happened to Khalid,” he said.11

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  September 9 is Independence Day in Tajikistan, a government and business holiday, so Amrullah Saleh was at home when his phone rang. It was a nephew of Massoud’s. “Don’t waste time packing—you are ordered to rush to the airport and fly to Kulyab,” a city in Tajikistan about 120 miles southeast of Dushanbe. Saleh left immediately.12

  In Kulyab, still following cryptic instructions, he made his way to a hospital. He found four or five of Massoud’s commanders and aides there. A little later General Fahim Khan arrived. Engineer Arif turned up near sunset, his clothes still covered in blood. A liaison officer from Tajikistan’s intelligence service joined the group, as did an officer of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Abdullah Abdullah, a medical doctor and the longtime foreign policy adviser to Massoud who ran many of his overseas liaisons, had been summoned from a diplomatic trip to New Delhi. For the first time, the commanders told Amrullah Saleh the truth: Massoud was dead.

  His corpse was inside the hospital. They had flown the body up from the Indian hospital on the Afghan border.

  In the garden, they talked about what to do. There were now about a dozen of them gathered. They were in shock; some of the men wept. Al Qaeda and the Taliban had tried to kill Massoud many times before, but he had seemed invincible. (The two Arab suicide bombers, who had been prepped for their martyrdom by Al Qaeda, had hidden their explosives in their camera equipment.) As they talked, the Panjshiri leaders concluded quickly that they would have to lie publicly about Massoud’s death. They would have to put out word that he had only been lightly injured and would survive. Otherwise they feared that their fighters on the front lines at the mouth of the Panjshir Valley, facing a mass of Taliban and vicious, death-seeking Al Qaeda volunteers, would panic and retreat, allowing the Taliban to swarm into the valley and carry out a slaughter. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards adviser with them volunteered that if it seemed too difficult to keep the secret of Massoud’s killing while his corpse was lying in Kulyab, the guards and Tajikistan’s intelligence service could transfer the body to Mashhad, in Iran, and “keep his death secret for one month, six months, whatever you need.”

  Others in the group suggested that they move the corpse back to the Panjshir Valley. Yet this carried the danger that the truth would leak out prematurely, before they had prepared commanders on the front lines. Abdullah had no doubt that the resistance would collapse if news spread that Massoud was gone. The officer from Tajikistan intelligence said there was a morgue nearby the hospital. They could secretly keep the body there for at least a few days while Fahim consulted with commanders. They all decided that was the best plan.13

  They also agreed to inform the six countries that were most important to their cause about what had really happened: the United States, Russia, Iran, India, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. They gave instructions to Amrullah Saleh: Call the C.I.A. Tell them the truth about Massoud’s assassination and ask for weapons. The argument Saleh was to deliver to ALEC Station was, in essence, “If resistance to the Taliban and Al Qaeda means something to you, we can hold. We can fight. We will fight. But if you wanted to help Commander Massoud only—he is not with us anymore. To compensate for his loss, we need more help than in the time when he was alive.”

  Saleh flew back to Dushanbe and put a message in for Richard Blee at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center. He said he needed to speak urgently. When Blee called on an encrypted line, Saleh followed the script given to him at Kulyab. He confirmed to Blee that Massoud was dead but emphasized that Panjshir’s leaders wanted to keep the news secret as they tried to forestall a collapse of their lines.

  After
they hung up, Blee notified the White House. Within hours, news services quoted anonymous Bush administration officials saying that Massoud had probably been assassinated.

  Saleh called back. You are causing me great difficulty with my comrades, he said evenly. My instructions were to keep this secret.

  Blee agreed that it was unfortunate. The C.I.A. was obligated to inform policy makers of such important information as soon as it arrived but the agency had no control over how the White House or State Department handled reporters’ questions.

  Saleh pressed. He knew that Blee and ALEC Station had advocated for arms supplies to Massoud and had earlier taken their arguments to the White House and lost. But the Bush administration had now settled in and here was a new threat to American intelligence collection on Bin Laden—if the Panjshir fell, the C.I.A. would lose a vital listening station. Would America try to save the Council of the North, or would it leave the Panjshiris to their fate?