Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  For nearly two decades the KGB had secretly funded and nurtured communist leadership networks at Kabul University and in the Afghan army, training and indoctrinating some 3,725 military personnel on Soviet soil. Afghan president Mohammed Daoud played Moscow and Washington against each other during the 1970s, accepting financial aid and construction projects from each in a precarious balancing act. In April 1978, Daoud fell off his beam. He arrested communist leaders in Kabul after they staged a noisy protest. Soviet-backed conspirators seeded within the Afghan army shot him dead days later in a reception room of his tattered palace. Triumphant Afghan leftists ripped down the green-striped national flag and unfurled red banners across a rural and deeply religious nation barely acquainted with industrial technology or modernism. Hundreds of Soviet military and political advisers were barracked in Afghan cities and towns to organize secret police networks, army and militia units, small factories, and coeducational schools. Advised by the KGB, Kabul’s Marxists launched a terror campaign against religious and social leaders who might have the standing to challenge communist rule. By 1979 about twelve thousand political prisoners had been jailed. Systematic executions began behind prison walls.2

  No less than America’s modernizing capitalists, Russia’s retrenching communists underestimated the Iranian revolution. They failed initially to detect the virus of Islamist militancy spreading north and east from Tehran through informal underground networks. The Kremlin and its supporting academies possessed few experts on Islam.3 The Soviet Union’s closest allies in the Middle East were secular regimes such as Syria and Iraq. Like the Americans, the Soviets had directed most of their resources and talent toward the ideological battlefields of Europe and Asia during the previous two decades.

  In the early spring of 1979 religious activists inspired by Khomeini’s triumphant return carried their defiant gospel across Iran’s open desert border with Afghanistan, particularly to Herat, an ancient crossroads on an open plain long bound to Iran by trade and politics. A Persian-accented desert town watered by the Hari Rud River, Herat’s traditional cultures and schools of Islam—which included prominent strains of mysticism—were not as severe toward women as in some rural areas of Afghanistan to the east. Yet it was a pious city. Its population included many followers of Shiism, Iran’s dominant Islamic sect. And as elsewhere, even non-Shias found themselves energized in early 1979 by Khomeini’s religious-political revival. Oblivious, Kabul’s communists and their Soviet advisers pressed secular reforms prescribed in Marxist texts. In addition to their literacy campaigns for girls they conscripted soldiers and seized lands previously controlled by tribal elders and Islamic scholars. They abolished Islamic lending systems, banned dowries for brides, legislated freedom of choice within marriages, and mandated universal education in Marxist dogma.

  A charismatic Afghan army captain named Ismail Khan called for jihad against the communist usurpers that March and led his heavily armed Herat garrison into violent revolt. His followers hunted down and hacked to death more than a dozen Russian communist political advisers, as well as their wives and children.4 The rebels displayed Russian corpses on pikes along shaded city streets. Soviet-trained pilots flew bomber-jets out of Kabul in vengeful reply, pulverizing the town in remorseless waves of attack. By the time the raids were finished, on the eve of its first anniversary in power, the Afghan communist government had killed as many as twenty thousand of its own citizenry in Herat alone. Ismail Khan escaped and helped spread rebellion in the western countryside.

  As Herat burned, KGB officers seethed. “Bearing in mind that we will be labeled as an aggressor, but in spite of that, under no circumstances can we lose Afghanistan,” Andropov told a crisis session of the Soviet Politburo meeting secretly behind Moscow’s Kremlin ramparts on March 17, 1979.5

  Records of the Kremlin’s private discussions in Moscow that spring, unavailable to Americans at the time, depict a Soviet leadership dominated by KGB viewpoints. Andropov was a rising figure as Brezhnev faded. His Kabul outpost, the KGB Residency, as it was called, maintained many of the contacts and financial relationships with Afghan communist leaders, bypassing Soviet diplomats.

  The Afghans were confusing and frustrating clients, however. Andropov and the rest of Brezhnev’s lieutenants found their Afghan communist comrades dense, self-absorbed, and unreliable. The Afghan Marxists had taken their Moscow-supplied revolutionary textbooks much too literally. They were moving too fast. They had split into irreconcilable party factions, and they argued over petty privileges and arid ideology.

  “The problem,” noted Ustinov at a March 18 Politburo meeting, “is that the leadership of Afghanistan did not sufficiently appreciate the role of Islamic fundamentalists.”

  “It is completely clear to us that Afghanistan is not ready at this time to resolve all of the issues it faces through socialism,” Andropov acknowledged. “The economy is backward, the Islamic religion predominates, and nearly all of the rural population is illiterate. We know Lenin’s teaching about a revolutionary situation.Whatever situation we are talking about in Afghanistan, it is not that type of situation.”6

  The group dispatched former premier Alexei Kosygin to telephone the Afghan communist boss, Nur Mohammed Taraki, an inexperienced thug, to see if they could persuade him to steer a more measured course. Taraki had spent the first year of the Afghan communist revolution constructing a personality cult. He had printed and tacked up thousands of posters that displayed his photograph and described him as “The Great Teacher.” As his countrymen rose in mass revolt, Taraki maneuvered Afghan communist rivals into exile. He had confided at a Kabul reception for a KGB delegation that he saw himself directly following Lenin’s example, forswearing any compromises with noncommunist Afghans and seizing the early period of his revolution to establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat, based on the Soviet model.” The murders of political prisoners under way in Kabul jails might be severe, Taraki once told his KGB handlers, but “Lenin taught us to be merciless towards the enemies of the revolution and millions of people had to be eliminated in order to secure the victory of the October Revolution” in the Soviet Union in 1917.

  Kosygin placed the call to Taraki on March 18, in the midst of the Politburo’s crisis sessions. “The situation is bad and getting worse,” Taraki admitted. Herat was falling to the newly emerging Islamic opposition. The city was “almost wholly under the influence of Shiite slogans.”

  “Do you have the forces to rout them?” Kosygin asked.

  “I wish it were the case,” Taraki said.

  The Afghan communists desperately needed direct Soviet military assistance, Taraki pleaded.

  “Hundreds of Afghan officers were trained in the Soviet Union. Where are they all now?” an exasperated Kosygin inquired.

  “Most of them are Muslim reactionaries… . What else do they call themselves—the Muslim Brotherhood,” Taraki said. “We are unable to rely on them. We have no confidence in them.”

  Taraki had a solution, however. Moscow, he advised, should secretly send in regiments of Soviet soldiers drawn from its Central Asian republics. “Why can’t the Soviet Union send Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Turkmens in civilian clothing?” Taraki pleaded. “No one will recognize them… . They could drive tanks, because we have all these nationalities in Afghanistan. Let them don Afghan costume and wear Afghan badges, and no one will recognize them.” Iran and Pakistan were using this clandestine method, Taraki believed, to foment the Islamic revolution, infiltrating into Afghanistan their own regular troops disguised as guerrillas.

  “You are, of course, oversimplifying the issue,” Kosygin sniffed. Afghanistan’s rising Islamic rebellion, he told Taraki, presented “a complex political and international issue.”7

  THE CIA SENT its first classified proposals for secret support to the anticommunist Afghan rebels to Jimmy Carter’s White House in early March 1979, just as the revolt in Herat began to gather force. The options paper went to the Special Coordination Committee, an unpublicized C
abinet subgroup that oversaw covert action on the president’s behalf. The CIA’s covering memo reported that Soviet leaders were clearly worried about the gathering Afghan revolt. It noted that Soviet-controlled media had launched a propaganda campaign to accuse the United States, Pakistan, and Egypt of secretly backing the Afghan Islamic insurgents. In fact, the United States had not done so until now. Perhaps this would be a good time to begin.8

  The upheaval in Iran had created new vulnerabilities for the United States in the Middle East. The KGB might seek to exploit this chaos. Here was an opportunity to deflect some of the fire spreading from Khomeini’s pulpit away from the United States and toward the Soviet Union. A sustained rebellion in Afghanistan might constrain the Soviets’ ability to project power into Middle Eastern oil fields. It also might embarrass and tie down Afghan and perhaps Soviet forces as they attempted to quell the uprising. Still, this was a risky course. The Soviets might retaliate if they saw an American hand in their Afghan cauldron. Carter’s White House remained undecided about the CIA’s initial options paper. On March 6 the Special Coordination Committee asked the CIA to develop a second round of proposals for covert action.

  The CIA’s chief analyst for Soviet affairs, Arnold Hoelick, wrote a worried memo to Admiral Stansfield Turner, the CIA’s director. Hoelick feared that Taraki’s communist regime might disintegrate, prompting the Soviets to intervene. A Soviet incursion might lead Pakistan, Iran, and perhaps China to augment secret support to the Afghan rebels. General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan might then ask the United States to openly oppose or deter any Soviet military thrust across Pakistan’s border. Here was a scenario for the outbreak of World War III, with all of its horrifying potential for nuclear escalation. As to Moscow’s attitude toward the floundering Kabul communists, Hoelick concluded that in at least some scenarios “the Soviets may well be prepared to intervene on behalf of the ruling group.”9

  As the CIA and KGB hurtled forward that spring, each had glimpses of the other’s motivations, but neither fully understood the other’s calculus.

  From CIA headquarters at Langley clandestine service officers in the Near East Division reached out to Pakistani and Saudi contacts to explore what might be done on the ground inside Afghanistan. At last, some of the CIA officers felt, the agency was taking initiative. The exploration of an Afghan covert action plan, however tentative, seemed to these Near East hands a rare exception to what had become a dismal, defensive, passive period at the CIA.

  Widely publicized congressional hearings a few years before had exposed agency assassination plots in Cuba, rogue covert operations in Latin America, and other shocking secrets. An American public and Congress already outraged about governmental abuses of power after Watergate had turned on the CIA, creating a hostile political environment for agency operations. Assassinations had been formally and legally banned by executive order. New laws and procedures had been enacted to ensure presidential and congressional control over CIA covert actions. Inside Langley the reforms produced anger and demoralization among the professional spy cadres, and even among those who welcomed some of the changes. The CIA had only been doing its job, following presidential directives, sometimes at great personal risk to the officers involved, many at Langley felt. Now there was a sense in Washington that the agency had all along been a kind of criminal organization, a black hole of outrageous conspiracies. By 1979 the public and congressional backlash far exceeded the scale of the original abuses, many career CIA officers believed. Meanwhile Jimmy Carter had sent a team of brass-polish outsiders, led by Navy Admiral Turner, to whip them into shape. To cut the CIA’s budget Turner had issued pink slips to scores of clandestine service case officers, the first substantial layoffs in the agency’s history. Inside the Directorate of Operations it felt as if they had hit rock bottom.10

  As they probed for options in Afghanistan that spring, officers in the CIA’s Near East Division reported that General Zia in Pakistan might be willing to step up his existing low-level clandestine support for the Afghan insurgents. The general was concerned, however, that unless the United States committed to protect Pakistan from Soviet retaliation, they “could not risk Soviet wrath” by increasing support to the anticommunist rebels too much, the CIA officers reported.11

  Diplomatic relations between the United States and Pakistan had reached a nadir in 1979, but the CIA had kept its liaison channels in Islamabad open. Zia understood that no matter how sternly Jimmy Carter might denounce him in public because of his poor human rights record or his secret nuclear program, he had backdoor influence in Washington through the CIA. Khomeini’s victory early in the year had led to the loss of vital American electronic listening stations based in Iran and trained on the Soviet Union. Zia had accepted a CIA proposal to locate new facilities in Pakistan. For decades there had been these sorts of layers within layers in the U.S.-Pakistani relationship. During the 1960s the first American U-2 spy planes had flown secretly out of Peshawar air bases. During the early 1970s Henry Kissinger had used Pakistani intermediaries to forge his secret opening to China. For his part, Zia saw covert operations as the most prudent way to pursue his regional foreign policy and military objectives. Pakistan had lost half its territory in a war with India eight years earlier. It was too small and too weak a country to openly challenge its neighbors with military force. Zia preferred to strike and hide.

  Jimmy Carter’s deputy national security adviser, David Aaron, chaired a second secret session of the Special Coordination Committee on March 30 to consider direct American covert aid to the Afghan rebellion. It was just two weeks after Kosygin’s stalemated telephone conversation with Taraki. The State Department’s David Newsom explained to the group that the Carter administration now sought “to reverse the current Soviet trend and presence in Afghanistan, to demonstrate to the Pakistanis our interest and concern about Soviet involvement, and to demonstrate to the Pakistanis, Saudis, and others our resolve to stop extension of Soviet influence in the Third World.” But what steps, exactly, should they take? Should they supply guns and ammunition to defecting Afghan army units? How would the Soviets react?

  Aaron posed the central question: “Is there interest in maintaining and assisting the insurgency, or is the risk that we will provoke the Soviets too great?”

  They decided to keep studying their options.12

  Within days Afghan army officers in Jalalabad followed Ismail Khan’s example and mutinied against the communists, murdering Soviet advisers. Afghan commanders climbed into their tanks and rumbled over to the rebel lines, declaring themselves allies of the jihad. To Jalalabad’s north, in a village of Kunar province known as Kerala, Afghan government forces accompanied by Soviet advisers carried out a massacre of hundreds of men and boys. As word of this and other executions spread in the Afghan countryside, defections and desertions from government army units mounted. Week by week that spring the communist-led army melted with the snow, its conscripts sliding away into the rock canyons and pine-forested mountains where mujahedin (“holy warrior”) rebel units had begun to acquire large swaths of uncontested territory.13

  Most analysts at CIA and other American intelligence agencies continued to predict that the Soviet forces would not invade to quell the rebellion. As summer neared, the CIA documented shipments of attack helicopters from the Soviet Union to Afghanistan and described increasing involvement by Soviet military advisers on the ground. But Langley’s analysts felt the Politburo would try to minimize direct involvement. So did the U.S. embassy in Moscow. “Under foreseeable circumstances,” predicted a Secret cable from the embassy on May 24, the Soviet Union “will probably avoid shouldering a substantial part of the anti-insurgency combat.”14

  The cable accurately reflected the mood inside the Kremlin. The KGB’s Andropov—along with Gromyko and Ustinov—formed a working group that spring to study the emerging crises in Afghan communism. None of their options seemed attractive. They completed a top-secret report for Brezhnev on June 28. The Afghan revolu
tion was struggling because of “economic backwardness, the small size of the working class,” and the weakness of the local Communist Party, as well as the selfishness of its Afghan leaders, they concluded.15

  Andropov’s team drafted a letter to Great Teacher Taraki urging him to stop squabbling with his rivals. They instructed him to involve more comrades in revolutionary leadership and soften his stance toward Islam. They advised him to work at recruiting mullahs onto the communist payroll and “convincing the broad number of Muslims that the socioeconomic reforms … will not affect the religious beliefs of Muslims.” For his part, Taraki preferred guns. He still wanted Soviet troops to confront the rebels.16

  In Washington that week, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the son of a Polish diplomat whose family was forced into exile by the Nazi invasion and later by Soviet occupation, recommended that President Carter endorse “nonlethal” covert support for the Afghan rebels. There were too few opportunities to embarrass the Soviets in the Third World, Brzezinski believed. One had now presented itself in Afghanistan. The risks could be managed. Brzezinski’s plan was a compromise that bridged unresolved arguments within the Special Coordination Committee. The CIA would funnel support to the Afghan insurgents, but no weapons would be supplied for now.

  On July 3, 1979, Carter scrawled his name on a presidential “finding” required under a recent law intended to ensure White House control over CIA operations.17 Under the new system, if the CIA intended to undertake “special activities” designed to influence political conditions abroad—as opposed to its more routine work of espionage, or stealing secrets—the president had to “find” or declare formally and in writing that such covert action promoted American national security. The president also had to notify a handful of congressional leaders of his decision.18