Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  Howard Hart had spent the first years of his life in a Japanese internment camp in the Philippines. His father had gone to Manila in the late 1930s as a banker and had been trapped when Japan invaded as World War II began. The Hart family spent three years in a Japanese garrison with about two thousand other Americans, Europeans, and Australians. In early 1945, when Japan’s military collapsed, the camp commander decided to commence executions and ordered adult men to dig trenches in the parade ground to receive the dead. General Douglas MacArthur ordered airborne troops to liberate the prisoners. Hart recalled being carried across a Philippine beach under the left arm of a young American paratrooper who held a tommy gun in his right hand. Hart’s mother jogged behind. They were loaded into a landing craft and pushed out to sea. He was five years old.

  Later his father took up banking again, moving first to Calcutta and then back to Manila. Hart grew up with Filipino boys whose fathers had fought the Japanese in the jungles. In his childhood games, guerrilla warfare figured as baseball did for other American kids.

  He studied Asian politics and learned to speak Hindi and Urdu at American universities, completing graduate school as the Vietnam War swelled in 1965. He thought about enlisting in the Marines but chose the CIA. At “the Farm” at Camp Peary, Virginia, the agency gave Hart the standard two-year course for career trainees, as aspiring case officers were called: how to run a paid agent, how to surveil targets and avoid being surveilled, how to manage codebooks, how to jump out of airplanes. Upon graduation Hart joined the Directorate of Operations, the clandestine service. He was posted to Calcutta, scene of his youth. Later he served in Bahrain and Tehran. When Iranian students seized the American embassy, he was assigned as a country and paramilitary operations specialist to the secret team that attempted a rescue. The mission, called Desert One, ended catastrophically when sand-blown helicopters crashed at a desert staging area far from Tehran on April 24, 1980.

  Although young, he was a natural choice to run the Islamabad station in 1981 because of his passion for weapons and paramilitary tactics. He collected knives, pistols, rifles, assault guns, machine guns, bullets, artillery shells, bazookas, and mortars. Eventually he would accumulate in his home one of the CIA’s largest private collections of antique and modern American weaponry. In Islamabad he would act as a quartermaster for the Afghan mujahedin. He ordered guns from CIA headquarters, helped oversee secret training programs for the mujahedin in Pakistani camps, and evaluated weapons to determine which ones worked for the rebels and which did not.

  The CIA had no intricate strategy for this war. “You’re a young man; here’s your bag of money, go raise hell” was the way Hart understood his orders. “Don’t fuck it up, just go out there and kill Soviets, and take care of the Pakistanis and make them do whatever you need to make them do.”2

  At Langley a new generation of case officers was coming of age. Many were Vietnam-era military veterans and law enforcement officers. Their influence within the CIA now competed with the Kennedy-era, northeastern, Ivy League officers who had dominated the agency during the 1950s and early 1960s. “The tennis players were being replaced by the bowlers,” as one of the self-styled bowlers put it.

  By the early 1980s many Ivy League graduates sought Wall Street wealth, not a relatively low-paid civil service career. American liberals saw the CIA as discredited. Instead of prep school graduates came men like Gary Schroen, working-class midwesterners who had enlisted in the army when others their age were protesting the Vietnam War. They acquired their language skills in CIA classrooms, not on Sorbonne sabbaticals. Many were Republicans or independents. Ronald Reagan was their president. A few of this group inside the Directorate of Operations saw themselves as profane insurgents waging culture and class war against the old CIA elite. Yet as Hart arrived in Islamabad the CIA was still led by the generation of elite clandestine officers, many of them Democrats from the northeast, whose outlook had been shaped by the idealism of the early Cold War and the cultural styles of the Kennedys. Hart’s supervisor in Langley, for instance, was Charles Cogan, a Francophile, polo-playing Harvard graduate who wore an Errol Flynn mustache and read history like a scholar. When he served as station chief in Paris, Cogan “spent his free time riding in the Bois de Boulogne with his French aristocratic friends,” as a colleague put it. Rising beside him in the D.O.’s leadership was Clair George. He was a postman’s son who had grown up in working-class Pennsylvania but had adopted the manners of an East Coast Democrat with country club élan. Thomas Twetten was soon to become the overall head of the clandestine service. After his retirement Twetten became an antique bookseller in Vermont. None of these men bowled regularly.3

  Howard Hart did not fall neatly into either camp. He read deeply about British colonial experience in Afghanistan, especially about the tribal complexities of the Pashtuns, to prepare himself for the Islamabad station. He saw himself as an intellectual activist. But he was also a blunt, politically conservative gun afficionado who favored direct paramilitary action against the Soviets. He had little time for subtle political manipulations among the Afghans. He wanted to get on with the shooting.

  In Tehran and then while working on the Iran account at headquarters Hart had alienated some of his colleagues, who saw him as unreliable and self-aggrandizing. Because of its intensity and claustrophobic secrecy, the CIA sometimes engenders bitter office politics, the kinds of eyeball-tearing rivalries that develop among roommates or brothers. Hart’s opponents included Bob Lessard, who had been deputy station chief during the sacking of the Islamabad embassy in 1979. Lessard had returned to teach at Camp Peary, convinced that his career was in shards—not only because he and Hart didn’t get along but because of his earlier troubles with the double agent in Kabul. Few within the Near East Division understood how deeply depressed Lessard had become. On Christmas morning 1980, in his CIA quarters at the Farm, he committed suicide with a shotgun.4

  Hart arrived in May 1981 at an Islamabad embassy still under reconstruction. The CIA station was crammed into the old U.S. AID building. It was a relatively small station—a chief, a deputy, and three or four case officers. Fearing another Pakistani riot, Hart announced that he wanted a nearly “paperless station.” Typed classified documents would be burned immediately if at all possible. To retain a small number of records, Hart showed his team a secret writing method. They were to place a standard piece of wax paper over their blank sheets and type. To read it later, the case officers were to sprinkle it with cinnamon powder and then blow; the cinnamon would stick to the wax and illuminate the text. “This is the best headquarters could do for me,” Hart told them sheepishly.

  Hart’s instructions emphasized the clandestine Afghan war and espionage directed at Pakistan’s nuclear program. He announced that the Islamabad station would not collect intelligence on internal Pakistani politics. The State Department’s diplomats could handle that subject.

  Like dozens of nineteenth-century British colonial political agents before him—some of whose memoirs he had read—Hart regarded the Afghans as charming, martial, semicivilized, and ungovernable. Any two Afghans created three factions, he told his colleagues. “Every man will be king,” Hart believed of the Afghans. This political tendency could not be overridden by American ingenuity, he thought. Hart sought to encourage the mujahedin to fight the Soviets in small, irregular bands of fifty or one hundred men. He did not want to plan the rebels’ tactics or field operations. “One of the ways to manage a war properly is don’t worry about the little details,” he said later.

  There might be twenty thousand to forty thousand war-fighting mujahedin guerrillas in the field at any one time, Hart figured. Hundreds of thousands more might be visiting family in Pakistani refugee camps, farming, smuggling, or just hanging around until the weather improved. The disorganized, part-time character of the mujahedin didn’t bother Hart. His strategy was to supply hundreds of thousands of rifles and tens of millions of bullets en masse to the guerrillas and then sit back in Isla
mabad and watch. The Afghans had ample motivation to fight the Soviets, he thought. They would make effective use of the weapons against Soviet and Afghan communists in their own way, on their own timetables.5

  In any event, policy makers back in Washington did not believe the Soviets could be defeated militarily by the rebels. The CIA’s mission was spelled out in an amended Top Secret presidential finding signed by President Carter in late December 1979 and reauthorized by President Reagan in 1981. The finding permitted the CIA to ship weapons secretly to the mujahedin. The document used the word harassment to describe the CIA’s goals against Soviet forces. The CIA’s covert action was to raise the costs of Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. It might also deter the Soviets from undertaking other Third World invasions. But this was not a war the CIA was expected to win outright on the battlefield. The finding made clear that the agency was to work through Pakistan and defer to Pakistani priorities. The CIA’s Afghan program would not be “unilateral,” as the agency called operations it ran in secret on its own. Instead the CIA would emphasize “liaison” with Pakistani intelligence.6

  The first guns shipped in were single-shot, bolt-action .303 Lee Enfield rifles, a standard British infantry weapon until the 1950s. With its heavy wooden stock and antique design, it was not an especially exciting weapon, but it was accurate and powerful. Hart regarded it as a far superior weapon to the flashier communist-made AK-47 assault rifle, which looked sleek and made a lot of noise but was less powerful and more difficult to aim. CIA logistics officers working from Langley secretly purchased hundreds of thousands of the .303 rifles from Greece, India, and elsewhere, and shipped them to Karachi. They also bought thousands of rocket-propelled grenade launchers from Egypt and China. The RPG-7, as it was called, was cheap, easy to carry, and could stop a Soviet tank.7

  As battlefield damage assessments poured in from the CIA’s Kabul station and from Afghan liaisons such as Abdul Haq, Hart began to think that the jihad had greater potential than some of the bureaucrats back in Langley realized. The initial popular Afghan reaction to invading Soviet troops had been broad and emotional. In Kabul at night tens of thousands gathered on their rooftops and sang out the Muslim call to prayer, “Allahu Akbar” (God is Great), in eerie and united defiance. Soviet tanks and troops had killed hundreds of Afghan civilians to quell street demonstrations. As the months passed, Afghan intellectuals, civil servants, and athletes defected to the mujahedin. By late 1981 the rebels roamed freely in nearly all of Afghanistan’s twenty-nine provinces. They mounted frequent ambushes on Soviet convoys and executed raids against cities and towns. The pace of their attacks was escalating.8

  Hart concluded within months of his arrival that the war should be expanded. In the fall of 1981 he attended a regional conference of CIA station chiefs in Bangkok. On a piece of paper in his back pocket he had hand-scrawled a new list of weapons that would make the mujahedin more effective. The questions debated at Bangkok included “What would the Pakistanis tolerate? What will the Soviets tolerate before they start striking at Pakistan?” Officers from Langley worried that they might go too far, too fast.

  Back in Islamabad, Hart sat in his house at night and drafted long cables to Langley on yellow legal pads, describing a Soviet convoy of tanks destroyed here, a helicopter shot down there. With CIA help the mujahedin were crippling heavily equipped Soviet detachments, Hart wrote, while using dated weaponry and loose guerrilla tactics. In January 1982, Hart cabled headquarters to ask again for more and better weapons.9

  Hart and other case officers involved sometimes reflected that it might have been a relatively uncomplicated war, if only the CIA had been able to run it on its own. But the United States did not own a subcontinental empire, as the British had a century before. If the CIA wanted to pump more and better weapons into Afghanistan, it had to negotiate access to the Afghan frontier through the sovereign nation of Pakistan. When the jihad began to gather strength by 1982, Hart found himself increasingly forced to reckon with Pakistan’s own agenda in the war. This meant reckoning with the personal goals of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq. It also meant accommodating Zia’s primary secret service, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.

  After Vietnam and the stinging Washington scandals of the 1970s, many case officers feared local political entanglements, especially in violent covert operations. Many of them had vowed after Vietnam that there would be no more CIA-led quixotic quests for Third World hearts and minds. In Afghanistan, they said, the CIA would stick to its legal authority:mules, money, and mortars.10

  For many in the CIA the Afghan jihad was about killing Soviets, first and last. Hart even suggested that the Pakistanis put a bounty out on Soviet soldiers: ten thousand rupees for a special forces soldier, five thousand for a conscript, and double in either case if the prisoners were brought in alive.11This was payback for Soviet aid to the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, and for many CIA officers who had served in that war, it was personal. Guns for everyone! was Howard Hart’s preference. Langley’s D.O. leaders did not want to organize exiled Afghan political parties on Pakistani soil. They did not want to build a provisional anticommunist Afghan government. They did not even like to help choose winners and losers among the jihad’s guerrilla leaders. Let the Pakistanis fuss over Afghan politics to the extent that it was necessary at all.

  This indirect approach was beginning to work, Hart believed. Yet as the mujahedin resistance grew and stiffened, the agency’s passivity about who led the Afghan rebels—who got the most guns, the most money, the most power—helped ensure that Zia-ul-Haq’s political and religious agenda in Afghanistan gradually became the CIA’s own.

  MOHAMMED ZIA-UL-HAQ was a young captain in a Punjabi unit of Britain’s colonial army when London’s exhausted government finally quit India in 1947. He had been born and raised on the Indian side of the new border with Pakistan, a line soon drawn in the blood of Hindu-Muslim religious riots. His father had been an Anglophilic civil servant but also a pious lay Islamic teacher. His family spoke in British accents and bandied slang as if in a Wiltshire country house.

  As with millions of Punjabi Muslims, the religious violence at Pakistan’s birth seared Zia’s memory. While escorting a train of refugees on a weeklong journey from northern India to Pakistan in 1947, he witnessed a nightmarish landscape of mutilated corpses. “We were under constant fire. The country was burning until we reached Lahore. Life had become so cheap between Hindu and Muslim.” Once in Pakistan, he said later, he “realized that we were bathed in blood, but at last we were free citizens.”12

  British-trained Punjabi Muslim army officers such as Zia became one of the new nation’s most powerful ruling groups. Three wars with India anointed them as Pakistan’s supreme guardians. Battlefield experience coalesced them into a disciplined brotherhood. Failed civilian governments and a series of army-led coups d’état conditioned rising young generals to see themselves as politicians.

  The nation had been created in Islam’s name, yet it lacked confidence about its identity. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder, belonged to a movement of secular, urban Muslim intellectuals. They saw Islam as a source of culture but not as a proselytizing faith or a basis of political order. Jinnah attempted to construct for Pakistan a secular democratic constitution tinted with Islamic values. But he died while the nation was young, and his successors failed to overcome Pakistan’s obstacles: divided territory, a weak middle class, plural ethnic traditions, an unruly western border facing Afghanistan, a hostile India, and vast wealth gaps.

  As Zia rose to his generalship, he embraced personal religious faith to a greater degree than many of his comrades in arms. He also believed that Pakistanis should embrace political Islam as an organizing principle. “We were created on the basis of Islam,” Zia said. He compared his country to Israel, where “its religion and its ideology are the main sources of its strength.” Without Islam, he believed, “Pakistan would fail.”13

  After 1977 he reigned as a dictator a
nd ceded few political privileges to others. But he did not decorate himself in ornate trappings of power. He was a courteous man in private, patient with his handicapped child, and attentive to visitors and guests. He wore his hair slicked down with grease, neatly parted in the style of film actors of a bygone era, and his mustache was trimmed and waxed. His deferential manner was easily underestimated. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had promoted him to army chief of staff apparently in the belief that Zia would be compliant. Zia not only overthrew Bhutto but hanged him.

  In the context of 1979’s upheavals Zia was not a radical. He declared Pakistan an Islamic state but did not move as forcefully as Khomeini did in Iran. He created no Pakistani religious police fashioned on the Saudi Arabian model. He did not bring Pakistan’s Islamic clergy to power. Zia believed deeply in the colonial-era army’s values, traditions, and geopolitical mission—a thoroughly British orientation. “Devout Muslim, yes, but too much a politician to have the fundamentalist’s fervor,” as an ISI brigadier put it. “Without Zia there could have been no successful jihad, but behind all the public image there was always the calculating politician who put his own position foremost.” He also sought to safeguard Pakistan, and at times he showed himself willing to compromise with the Soviets over Afghanistan, through negotiations.14