by Steve Coll
Casey and Zia both emphasized that Soviet ambitions were spatial. For them, Soviet strategy echoed the colonial era’s scrambles among European powers for natural resources, shipping lanes, and continental footholds. Pakistan’s generals, stepchildren of imperial mapmakers, understood this competition all too well. Separately, Casey and Zia each had developed a presentation for visitors about Soviet expansionism involving red-colored maps. Zia used his to drive home his belief that Moscow had invaded Afghanistan in order to push toward the Middle East’s oil. He displayed a regional map and then pulled out a red triangular celluloid template to illustrate the Soviets’ continuing southwestern thrust toward warm water ports and energy resources. In one meeting he told Casey that the British colonialists had drawn a firm line across northern Afghanistan during the nineteenth century to halt Russian encroachments, and as a result the Russians hadn’t moved south for ninety years. Now the United States had a “moral duty” to enforce a line against the Soviets. Casey had developed a similar briefing about Soviet geopolitical ambitions, only on a global scale. He had ordered the CIA’s Office of Global Issues in the Directorate of Intelligence to draw a map of the world that showed Soviet presence and influence. It was splotched in six different shades to depict the categories of Soviet imperial accomplishment: eight countries totally dominated by the Soviets; six that were Soviet proxies; eighteen that had been significantly influenced by Moscow; twelve that confronted Soviet-backed insurgencies; ten that had signed treaties of friendship and cooperation; and three more that were highly unstable. A second annotated map showed how the Soviets, using the KGB as well as economic and military aid, had increased their influence in country after country between 1970 and 1982.21
A pinktinted country in Casey’s red-splattered world was India, which had signed wide-ranging treaty agreements with Moscow even while it maintained its democratic independence. Casey briefed Zia periodically on Indian military movements. Zia often lectured that India was the region’s true danger. The Americans might be reliable allies against communism, but they had proven fickle about the Indo-Pakistani conflict. Zia told Casey that being an ally of the United States was like living on the banks of an enormous river. “The soil is wonderfully fertile,” he said, “but every four or eight years the river changes course, and you may find yourself alone in a desert.”22
ISI tried to keep CIA officers away from the border camps where Afghan rebels trained, but Casey insisted that he be allowed to visit. In early 1984, the first time he asked, the panicked Pakistanis turned to the Islamabad CIA station for help in dissuading him. Soviet special forces had become active across the Pakistani borders, and ISI feared the Russians might pick up word of Casey’s movements or accidentally encounter him in an ambush. It was hard to imagine a more nightmarish scenario for Pakistan’s national security than the prospect, however slim, that the CIA director might be kidnapped by the KGB on Pakistani soil. But Casey refused to be put off. In the end ISI collaborated with the Islamabad station to set up a temporary—essentially fake—mujahedin training camp in the hills that sprawled to the north behind Islamabad, far away from the Afghan border. They loaded Casey in a jeep at night, declined at least initially to tell him where they were going, and bumped in circles along rough roads for about the time that would be required to reach the Afghan frontier. Then they unpacked him from the convoy and showed him a small crew of Afghans training on 14.5-millimeter and 20.7-millimeter antiaircraft guns. The Afghans made a lot of noise, and Casey wept tears of joy at the sight of his freedom fighters.23
Back in Washington that summer he heard more and more complaints from Congress and from ideological conservatives that the CIA’s cautious, hands-off approach to the Afghan war was hurting the rebel cause. Spurred by Charlie Wilson’s romanticized tales and envious of his battlefield souvenirs, more and more congressional delegations toured Pakistan and the frontier. Visiting congressmen heard complaints from Afghan commanders such as Abdul Haq about ISI corruption, ISI control over weapon distribution, and the erratic quality of the weapons themselves. They lobbied Casey for more sophisticated arms and more direct American involvement in the jihad. At Langley, McMahon balked. Case officers in the Near East Division detected the birth of a classic Washington syndrome: When any government program is going well, whether a foreign covert action or a domestic education plan, every bureaucrat and congressman in town wants to horn in on it. Suddenly CIA officers began to hear whispers from the Pentagon that perhaps the mujahedin would be more effective if the U.S. military played a greater role. Casey’s CIA colleagues spit nails over such gambits, but he hardly cared at all. He thought the critics of CIA caution were probably right. On July 28, 1984, Casey told McMahon by memo that with all the new money beginning to wash into the Afghan pipeline and because of the rising complaints, “a thorough review and reevaluation of the Afghan program is in order.”24
Casey appointed a new station chief to succeed Howard Hart in Islamabad. William Piekney rotated to Pakistan that summer from Paris, where he had been deputy. A former officer in the Navy and a veteran of CIA stations in Tunisia and Guinea, Piekney was a smoother, more cerebral spy than Hart. He had none of Hart’s sharp elbows and none of his fascination with antique weaponry. Nor was he a firebrand conservative. He saw McMahon as the victim of right-wing baiting and sympathized with his colleague’s frustrations. Piekney was a balancer, a fine-tuner, a team-builder. He would take visiting congressmen and senators into the Islamabad embassy’s secure “bubble” and deliver an articulate briefing about the war’s hidden course and the punishment being inflicted on the Soviets. As more and more Pentagon visitors began to turn up in Pakistan, rubbing their hands and asking to help, Piekney tried to smother them with kindness while keeping them well away from the CIA’s business. Dealing with the Pentagon was always a tricky equation for the agency. The Pentagon dwarfed the CIA in resources. The CIA’s annual budget was a Pentagon rounding error. It was in the CIA’s interest, Piekney believed, to try to keep the relationship balanced.25
With the Pentagon’s acquiescence, Casey helped arrange an annual feat of budgeting gimmickry that siphoned Defense Department money to pump up the funds available for Afghan covert action. As each fiscal year ended in October, mujahedin sympathizers in Congress, led by Wilson, scrutinized the Pentagon’s massive treasury for money allocated the year before but never spent. Congress would then order some of those leftover sums—tens of millions of dollars—transferred to the Afghan rebels. Charles Cogan, the old-school spy who ran the Near East Division, resisted accepting these new funds, but as Gates recalled, “Wilson just steamrolled Cogan—and the CIA for that matter.”26
The funding surge in October 1984 was so huge that it threatened to change the very nature of the CIA’s covert action in Afghanistan. Congress that month shoveled another enormous injection of leftover Pentagon money to the CIA for use in support of the mujahedin, bringing the total Afghan program budget for 1985 up to $250 million, about as much as all the previous years combined. If Saudi Arabia’s GID matched that allocation, that would mean the CIA could spend $500 million on weapons and supplies for the mujahedin through October 1985, an amount so large in comparison to previous budgets that it was hard to contemplate. In late October, Casey cabled the Saudis and the Pakistanis to say that the United States planned to commit $175 million immediately and place another $75 million in reserve, pending further discussions with them. Under Wilson’s spur, Casey had tripled funding for the Afghan covert war in a matter of weeks.
Casey wanted to stretch the war’s ambitions to a similar degree. “Unless U.S. policy is redesigned to achieve a broader attack on Soviet vulnerabilities it cannot restore independence to Afghanistan,” Casey wrote in a classified memo to McMahon and other senior CIA officers on December 6, 1984. “Continuation of the current U.S. program will allow the Soviets to wear down the Afghan resistance at a cost affordable and tolerable to themselves.” He insisted that the CIA take a close look at the Pentagon’s late
st proposals to provide satellite intelligence about Soviet targets in Afghanistan. Casey concluded: “In the long run, merely increasing the cost to the Soviets of an Afghan intrusion, which is basically how we have been justifying the activity when asked, is not likely to fly.”27
Casey was rewriting his own presidential authority. “Restoring independence to Afghanistan” was not a goal spelled out for CIA covert action in the January 1980 presidential finding renewed by President Reagan. Nor was it a possibility deemed plausible by many of Casey’s own Soviet analysts. No longer would the CIA be content to tie the Soviets down, Casey was saying. They were going to drive them out.
He flew back to Pakistan late in 1984. This time he would see true mujahedin training camps on the Afghan frontier—no more artificial training shows. Piekney met his Starlifter on the tarmac. Shortly after dawn one morning they boarded Pakistani military helicopters and flew toward Afghanistan. It was the first time any helicopter had ever landed at an ISI camp. Casey wore a round, flat Afghan cap and a zippered green nylon coat with cloth trim. He looked like an unlikely rebel. Akhtar, his chief escort, wore sunglasses. At the first camp ISI trainers showed Casey scores of mujahedin in the midst of a ten-day guerrilla course. They learned basic assault rifle tactics, how to approach and withdraw, rocket-propelled grenades, and a few mortar systems. American taxpayer dollars were hard at work here, Akhtar assured him. In his speeches to Afghan commanders and trainees, the ISI chief repeatedly emphasized the need to put pressure on the Soviets and the Afghan communists in and around the capital. “Kabul must burn!” Akhtar declared. At the second camp they showed Casey the Chinese mine-clearing equipment that could blast a narrow furrow across a Soviet-laid minefield. ISI brigadiers lobbied Casey for better equipment: The tracks cleared by the Chinese system weren’t wide enough for the mujahedin, and they were taking unnecessary casualties.28
Back at ISI headquarters in Rawalpindi, Casey raised the subject of the most sensitive operation then under way between the two intelligence services: pushing the Afghan jihad into the Soviet Union itself.
Beginning in the late 1970s, the CIA’s covert action staff had produced proposals for secret publishing and propaganda efforts targeting Muslims living in Soviet Central Asia as well as Ukrainians. Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was among the most passionate advocates for a covert American program to stir up nationalism in the Soviet Union’s non-Russian border republics. But the State Department balked at the plans. Fomenting rebellion inside the Soviet Union could provoke unpredictable retaliation by Moscow, even including attempts to launch attacks inside the United States. At Langley the idea stirred controversy.29
The CIA had strong contacts dating back decades among exiled nationalists from the Baltics and Ukraine. It knew far less about Soviet Central Asia, the vast and sparsely populated steppe and mountain region to Afghanistan’s immediate north. Pushed by Casey, American scholars and CIA analysts had begun in the early 1980s to examine Soviet Central Asia for signs of restiveness. There were reports that ethnic Uzbeks, Turkmen, Tajiks, and Kazakhs chafed under Russian ethnic domination. And there were also reports of rising popular interest in Islam, fueled in part by the smuggling of underground Korans, sermonizing cassette tapes, and Islamic texts by the Muslim Brotherhood and other proselytizing networks. The CIA reported on a May 1984 lecture in Moscow where the speaker told a public audience that Islam represented a serious internal problem. American diplomats operating out of the U.S. embassy in Moscow traveled regularly through Central Asia seeking evidence and fresh contacts, but they were closely shadowed by the KGB and could learn little.30
Drawing on his experiences running dissident Polish exiles as agents behind Nazi lines, Casey decided to revive the CIA’s propaganda proposals targeting Central Asia. The CIA’s specialists proposed to send in books about Central Asian culture and historical Soviet atrocities in the region. The ISI’s generals said they would prefer to ship Korans in the local languages. Langley agreed. The CIA commissioned an Uzbek exile living in Germany to produce translations of the Koran in the Uzbek language. The CIA printed thousands of copies of the Muslim holy book and shipped them to Pakistan for distribution to the mujahedin. The ISI brigadier in charge recalled that the first Uzbek Korans arrived in December 1984, just as Casey’s enthusiasm was waxing. ISI began pushing about five thousand books into northern Afghanistan and onward across the Soviet border by early 1985.31
At the same time, ISI’s Afghan bureau selected small teams among the mujahedin who would be willing to mount violent sabotage attacks inside Soviet Central Asia. KGB-backed agents had killed hundreds of civilians in terrorist bombings inside Pakistan, and ISI wanted revenge. Mohammed Yousaf, the ISI brigadier who was the Afghan operations chief during this period, recalled that it was Casey who first urged these cross-border assaults during a meeting at ISI headquarters late in 1984, on the same visit that the CIA director traveled to the rebel training camps by helicopter.
As Yousaf recalled it, Casey said that there was a large Muslim population across the Amu Darya that could be stirred to action and could “do a lot of damage to the Soviet Union.” The CIA director talked about the propaganda efforts but went further. Casey said, according to Yousaf, “We should take the books and try to raise the local population against them, and you can also think of sending arms and ammunition if possible.” In Yousaf’s recollection, Akhtar voiced agreement about the Koran smuggling efforts but remained silent about the sabotage operations. Robert Gates, Casey’s executive assistant and later CIA director, has confirmed that Afghan rebels “began cross-border operations into the Soviet Union itself” during the spring of 1985. These operations included “raising cain on the Soviet side of the border.” The attacks took place, according to Gates, “with Casey’s encouragement.”32
If Casey spoke the words Yousaf attributed to him, he was almost certainly breaking American law. No one but President Reagan possessed the authority to foment attacks inside the Soviet Union, and only then if the president notified senior members of the congressional intelligence committees. The risks of such operations in the nuclear age were so numerous that they hardly needed listing. Colleagues of Casey’s at the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House later expressed doubt that he had sanctioned cross-border attacks.33 They suggested that Yousaf had probably conflated accurate recollections about Casey’s support for the Koran and propaganda book smuggling with ISI’s independent decision to begin secretly arming Afghan teams to penetrate Soviet Central Asia.
Perhaps. But Gates’s account appears unambiguous, and Yousaf’s recollections are precise. It would hardly have been unusual for Casey to pursue covert action outside the boundaries of presidential authority. ISI was the perfect cutout for operations on Soviet territory, providing the CIA with a layer of deniability. And as Gates reflected later, referring more generally to his sense of mission, Casey had not come to the CIA “with the purpose of making it better, managing it more effectively, reforming it, or improving the quality of intelligence… . Bill Casey came to the CIA primarily to wage war against the Soviet Union.”34
In any event, the CIA’s analysts and case officers knew what their Pakistani partners were doing across the Soviet border. Yousaf would pass along requests to the Islamabad station for such equipment as silent outboard motors, which he said he needed for river crossings on the Amu Darya. Piekney, the new station chief, lived in fear that one of these Afghan teams would be captured or killed in Soviet territory and that equipment in their possession would be traced to the CIA, creating an international incident on the scale of the 1960 U-2 shootdown.
Fear of such a public relations catastrophe, or worse, persuaded many analysts at Langley and at the State Department that ISI’s guerrilla attacks on Soviet soil were reckless. Morton Abramowitz, then chief of intelligence at the State Department, saw classified reports about the mujahedin crossing over and urged that ISI be told such assaults were unacceptable. Piekney delivered the message i
n informal meetings with General Akhtar. The CIA station chief insisted that ISI “not authorize or encourage the Afghans to take the battle into Soviet territory,” as Piekney recalled it. “We all understood, however, that the Afghans would exploit opportunities that arose and do pretty much what they wanted to do,” Piekney remembered. Pakistani intelligence “privately felt it would not be a bad thing” if the Afghan rebels hit targets inside Soviet territory from time to time. “Our only real option was to withhold official U.S. endorsement of that kind of activity and discourage it, which we did.” In any event, the less the CIA knew about the details, the better. Nobody could control armed Afghans determined to cross their northern border anyway, the CIA was prepared to argue if the operations became public.35
The north of Afghanistan lay separated from Pakistan by steep mountain ranges, snow-clogged passes, and large Soviet deployments, and was populated by Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen, and adherents of Islam’s minority Shia faith. The mujahedin commanders operating along the Soviet border had few connections to ISI’s Pashto-speaking colonels and brigadiers who were handing out the big bags of money and guns in Peshawar. For the Soviets, too, the north of Afghanistan was exceptionally important. The region possessed natural gas resources, vital roads, and ethnic populations whose clans spilled into Soviet republics. As the war went badly, the Soviets considered at times just hunkering down in northern Afghanistan to protect the Soviet Union’s southern rim.
But such a retreat was impractical. By the mid-1980s the Afghan rebels’ most effective military and political leader operated in the northern provinces, right in the Soviet Union’s mountainous backyard. Unlike the mujahedin commanders who would turn up for staged training camp demonstrations, this Afghan leader rarely traveled to Pakistan. He operated almost entirely from his own strategic blueprint. According to CIA reporting, his forces were responsible for some of the first attacks inside the Soviet Union in the spring of 1985. William Piekney wanted to arrange a meeting with him, but it was impossible to manage the logistics. He was too far away to visit.
