Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  From the concealed caves surrounding the Panjshir where Massoud reestablished his organization, he cautiously plotted his return. His men launched operations from the ridgelines, shooting down at the helicopters that canvassed the valley floor. They ambushed the enemy, created diversions, and fought at night when the Soviets were most vulnerable.

  But the introduction of the elite Spetsnaz, along with their advanced Mi-24D Hind attack helicopters and communications gear, gradually shifted war-fighting tactics in the Soviets’ favor. As many as two thousand Spetsnaz were deployed in Afghanistan during 1984, and the Mi-24’s armor-coated belly repulsed nearly all the antiaircraft guns available to the mujahedin. Massoud’s men found themselves pursued on foot by heavily armed Spetsnaz troops who could scramble up the valley’s rugged cliffs almost as fast as the locals. Kabul Radio reported that Massoud had been killed in action.When an interviewer late that spring asked Afghan President Babrak Karmal whether Massoud was alive or dead, Karmal dismissed the question. “Who is this Massoud that you speak of?” he asked contemptuously. “U.S. propaganda creates artificial personalities and false gods… . As an actor, Reagan knows well how to create puppets on the international stage… . These creations are clay idols that disintegrate just as fast. Massoud was an instrument of the imperialists. I don’t know if he is alive or dead and I don’t care. The Panjshir issue has been resolved.”32

  It had not been, but Massoud was reeling. “It has become a very hard war, far harder than before,” the commander acknowledged to a visitor in between sips of tea while ensconced deep within one of his innumerable caves. “Their commandos have learned a great deal about mountain guerrilla warfare and are fighting much better than before.”33

  CIA analysts said the same in reports they circulated from Langley. The Soviet campaign in the Panjshir that spring featured “increased use of heli-borne assaults,” one such report said, along with “an unprecedented high-altitude bombing” campaign. Yet Massoud’s advance warning of the assault and his covert evacuation of civilians made the difference because “Soviet intelligence apparently failed to discover that most guerrillas and their civilian supporters had left the valley.” At the same time the CIA knew that the civil war now gathering momentum between Massoud and Hekmatyar was undermining the jihad. Intramural battles between the two groups “have hampered operations and resupply efforts of Massoud’s Panjshir Valley insurgents,” the CIA’s classified report said.34

  Until late 1984 and early 1985, Massoud had received relatively little outside assistance. The British intelligence service, MI6, which operated out of a small windowless office in Britain’s Islamabad embassy, made contact with Massoud early in the war and provided him with money, a few weapons, and some communications equipment. British intelligence officers taught English to some of Massoud’s trusted aides, such as his foreign policy liaison, Abdullah. The French, too, reached out to Massoud. Unburdened by the CIA’s rules, which prohibited travel in Afghanistan, both intelligence services sent officers overland into the Panjshir posing as journalists. The CIA relied on British intelligence for reports about Massoud. At Langley “there was probably a little penis envy” of these border-hopping European spies, “you know, they were going in,” as one officer involved put it. The French especially grated: “trying to find some liberator character” in the person of Massoud, making him out as an Afghan “Simon Bolivar, George Washington.”35

  Massoud charmed his British and French visitors. He dressed more stylishly than other Afghans. He spoke some French. His manner was calm and confident, never blustery. “He was never emotional or subjective,” as his aide Khalili put it. “Always he was objective.”36 He horsed around lightly with his trusted senior commanders, pushing them in the water when they went swimming or teasing them as they went off together on dangerous missions. And while he prayed five times a day and fought unyieldingly in Allah’s name, drawing on the radical texts he had learned at Kabul Polytechnic Institute, he seemed to outsiders more tolerant, more humane, and more rooted in the land than many other Afghan resistance commanders.

  The CIA, honoring its agreement with Zia to work solely through ISI, had no direct contacts with Massoud during the early 1980s. ISI officers in the Afghan bureau saw the British “playing their own game” with Massoud, which provided yet another reason to withhold support from him. But the CIA did begin in late 1984 to secretly pass money and light supplies to Massoud without telling Pakistan.37

  “He was never a problem in any sense that he was the enemy or that we were trying to cut him off,” according to one CIA officer involved. But neither was the CIA “ready to spend a lot of time and energy trying to push” Massoud forward. Massoud swore fealty to Rabbani, but relations between them were badly strained. Rabbani received ample supplies from ISI at his Peshawar offices but often did not pass much along to Massoud. “Rabbani was not a fool, he’s a politician,” the ISI’s Yousaf recalled. “He cannot make a man stronger than him.”38 Rabbani wanted to build up his own influence across Afghanistan by recruiting Pashtun, Uzbek, and Shiite commanders, securing their loyalty with weapons. In doing so he sought to limit Massoud’s relative power.

  As a result almost everything Massoud’s forces owned they scavenged from the enemy, including Massoud’s own clothes: Red Army fatigues and Afghan army boots. Occasionally, Rabbani might send him a care package, originating with ISI or the Saudis, in the form of all the supplies that a dozen horses can carry. But Western journalists who spent months with Massoud’s fighters in the early 1980s returned from the Panjshir with reports that U.S.-funded assistance to the mujahedin was nowhere to be found.

  As the fighting grew more difficult, Massoud had to admit he needed outside help. He refused to leave Afghanistan, but he began to send his brothers out of the country, to Peshawar, London, and Washington, to make contact with the CIA officers and Pakistani generals who controlled the covert supply lines.

  Among the items on his wish list were portable rations and vitamins to help his troops stay nourished; an X-ray machine to diagnose the wounded; infrared goggles and aiming devices for nighttime fighting; radios to improve coordination among commanders; and, above all, shoulder-fired antiaircraft rockets to defend against helicopters and planes. With that kind of support Massoud thought he could force the Soviets back to the negotiating table within six months. Without it, the war “could last 40 years.”39

  Massoud didn’t know it, but in Washington that spring of 1985 some of his American admirers had reached similar conclusions.

  7

  “The Terrorists

  Will Own the World”

  IN HIS RISING E NTHUSIASM for the Afghan war and in his determination to punish the Soviets to the greatest possible degree, William Casey found that he needed allies outside of CIA headquarters. Time did little to shake his belief that the CIA’s career clandestine officers were too timid. But there were influential conservatives in the executive branch who could aid his push for a more potent covert war. The Reagan administration had attracted to Washington “an awful lot of Soldier of Fortune readers,” recalled Frank Anderson, a clandestine service officer involved in the Afghan program. These mercenary voyeurs included blunt paramilitary types such as Casey’s friend Oliver North and more cerebral anticommunist hawks who came from right-wing think tanks.1

  Casey connected with these allies as they developed a new plan for the Afghan jihad. Known as National Security Decision Directive 166, with an annex classified Top Secret/Codeword, the blueprint they produced became the legal basis for a massive escalation of the CIA’s role in Afghanistan, starting in 1985.

  The new policy document provided a retroactive rationale for the huge increases in covert funds forced into the Afghan program late in 1984 by Charlie Wilson. It also looked forward to a new era of direct infusions of advanced U.S. military technology into Afghanistan, intensified training of Islamist guerrillas in explosives and sabotage techniques, and targeted attacks on Soviet military officers designed to de
moralize the Soviet high command. Among other consequences these changes pushed the CIA, along with its clients in the Afghan resistance and in Pakistani intelligence, closer to the gray fields of assassination and terrorism.

  The meetings that produced NSDD-166 changed the way the United States directed its covert Afghan program. For the first time the CIA lost its near-total control. The peculiar Washington institution known as “the interagency process” became dominant. This was typical of national security policy making by the 1980s. Representatives from various agencies and Cabinet departments, selected for their relevance to the foreign policy issue at hand, would form under supervision from the White House’s National Security Council. The committee often selected a vague name with a tongue-twisting acronym that could be bandied about as a secret membership code. During the Reagan administration the CIA worked continuously with one such group, the Planning and Coordination Group, or PCG, the president’s unpublicized body for the oversight of all secret covert actions. With Casey’s cooperation the sweeping review of Afghan covert action was taken on early in 1985 by a PCG subset, the Policy Review Group, which began to meet in a high-ceilinged warren of the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the West Wing of the White House.

  A striking gray gabled building imitating the styles of the French Renaissance, with capped peaks and sloping bays that spoke elaborately to 17th Street’s bland marble office boxes, the Old Executive Office Building housed many of the national security personnel who couldn’t fit inside the cramped West Wing. Casey kept an office there. Behind most of its tall doors lay regional National Security Council directorates. Here delegates from Langley, the Pentagon, and the State Department’s headquarters building in the nearby Washington neighborhood known as Foggy Bottom would all tramp in to review operations, debate policy, and prepare documents for presidential signature.

  The new interagency group on Afghanistan, meeting in Room 208, forced the CIA to share a table with civilians and uniformed officers from the Pentagon. In early 1985 the most influential new figure was Fred Iklé, a former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and an elegant anticommunist hardliner. With him came Michael Pillsbury, an eager former congressional aide.

  With Iklé’s support, Pillsbury pushed a draft of NSDD-166 for Reagan’s signature. For a midlevel aide with little authority on paper beyond his high-level security clearances, he defined his mission ambitiously. To help Afghan rebels overcome rising Soviet military pressure, he wanted to provide them with the best guerrilla weapons and satellite intelligence. To do this Pillsbury needed new legal authority for CIA covert action that went beyond the Carter-era policy goal of “harassing” Soviet occupation forces. He sought to expand dramatically the stated aims and the military means of the CIA’s Afghan jihad.

  The agency’s career officers at the Near East Division saw Pillsbury as a reckless amateur. Pillsbury saw himself as a principled conservative who refused to be cowed by cautious agency bureaucrats. He wanted to define the purpose of the CIA’s efforts in Afghanistan as “victory” over the Soviet forces. That language seemed too stark to CIA officers and State diplomats. Falling back, Pillsbury suggested they define the jihad’s goal as “to drive the Soviets out.” This, too, seemed provocative to other committee members. In the end they settled on language that directed the CIA to use “all available means” to support the mujahedin’s drive for a free Afghanistan.

  Pillsbury attracted support by offering budgetary blank checks to every agency remotely involved in Afghanistan—State, the Agency for International Development, the United States Information Agency, and the Pentagon. Casey’s CIA would remain in the lead, working mainly through Pakistan’s ISI. But the CIA would also be given new authority to operate on its own outside of Pakistani eyesight. Other departments were encouraged to submit ambitious plans that could be integrated with the CIA’s work. The new policy was that “everybody gets to do what everybody wants to” in support of the mujahedin, Pillsbury recalled. “Everybody got what they wanted into this document and, in return for all this harmony, the goal got changed.”2

  President Reagan signed the classified NSDD-166, titled “Expanded U.S. Aid to Afghan Guerrillas,” in March 1985, formally anointing its confrontational language as covert U.S. policy in Afghanistan. His national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, signed the highly classified sixteen-page annex, which laid out specific new steps to be taken by the CIA.

  For the first time the agency could use satellite photographs of the Afghan battlefield to help the mujahedin plan attacks on Soviet targets. The agency would soon send in secure “burst communications” sets that would allow the rebels to use advanced American technology to thwart Soviet interception of their radio traffic. The CIA would begin for the first time to recruit substantial numbers of “unilateral” agents in Afghanistan—agents who would be undeclared and unknown to Pakistani intelligence. Also for the first time, by at least one account, the document explicitly endorsed direct attacks on individual Soviet military officers.3

  Rapidly ebbing now were the romanticized neocolonial days of Howard Hart’s tour in the Islamabad station, a hands-off era of antique rifles, tea-sipping liaisons, and ink-splotched secret shipping manifests. Some of the agency’s career officers in the Near East Division were not enthusiastic about the changes, especially the ones that contemplated attacks on Soviet officers. They saw Pillsbury and his cowboy civilian ilk as dragging the CIA out of its respectable core business of espionage and into the murky, treacherous realm of an escalating dirty war.

  At one interagency committee meeting in the spring of 1985, Fred Ikle proposed skipping over Pakistani intelligence altogether by flying American C-130s over Afghanistan and dropping weapons caches to Afghan commanders by parachute. Someone asked: What if the Russians begin shooting down the U.S. planes and ignite World War III? “Hmmm,” Iklé answered, according to Thomas Twetten, a senior officer in the CIA’s clandestine service. “World War III. That’s not such a bad idea.” If he said such a thing, Iklé said later, he must have been kidding. But Twetten remembered “a roomful of dumbstruck people.”4

  Shooting Soviet officers was equally troubling to some at the agency. The CIA and KGB had settled during the 1980s into a shaky, unwritten gentlemen’s agreement that sought to discourage targeting each other’s salaried professional officers for kidnapping or murder. If that agreement broke down, there could be chaos in CIA stations worldwide. CIA officers in Pakistan made a point of treating gently the rare Soviet prisoners taken on the Afghan battlefield. The agency’s officers figured this would help American military officers and spies captured by Soviet forces on other Cold War proxy battlefields.5

  But the congressmen writing the CIA’s budgetary checks now wanted to start killing Soviet officers serving in Afghanistan. Senator Gordon Humphrey traveled to Kabul at one point and came home crowing about how you could see Soviet generals in the windows of their tattered concrete apartment blocks; all the mujahedin needed were some long-range sniper rifles, and they could start picking them off one at a time.6

  Increasingly, too, under ISI direction, the mujahedin received training and malleable explosives to mount car bomb and even camel bomb attacks in Soviet-occupied cities, usually designed to kill Soviet soldiers and commanders. Casey endorsed these techniques despite the qualms of some CIA career officers.

  Casey never argued for attacks on purely civilian targets, but he was inclined toward aggressive force. In the worldwide antiterror campaign Casey began to envision during 1985, Afghanistan offered one way to attack the Soviet aggressors.

  “We’re arming the Afghans, right?” Casey asked during one of the debates of this period. He wanted authority to strike at Middle Eastern terrorists preemptively. “Every time a mujahedin rebel kills a Soviet rifleman, are we engaged in assassination? This is a rough business. If we’re afraid to hit the terrorists because somebody’s going to yell ‘assassination,’ it’ll never stop. The terrorists will own the world.”
7

  AT THE CIA STATION in Islamabad the new era arrived in the form of visiting delegations from Washington: Pentagon officers carrying satellite maps, special forces commandos offering a course in advanced explosives, and suitcase-carrying congressional visitors who wanted Disney-quality tours of mujahedin camps and plenty of time to buy handwoven carpets. William Piekney tried to move them all cheerfully through the turnstiles. With senior delegations he might drive them to ISI’s unmarked headquarters for tea and talk with General Akhtar.

  Iklé and Pillsbury touched down in Islamabad on April 30, 1985. They could not legally disclose the existence of NSDD-166, but they wanted Akhtar to understand its expansive goals. During a two-hour private conversation at the ISI chief’s residence, Iklé was able “to convey the thrust of the President’s new decision directive,” as Pillsbury put it.8

  The visitors wanted to pump up Akhtar’s ambitions when he submitted quarterly lists of weapons needed by the mujahedin. The CIA’s Afghan supply system depended on these formal requests. Soon the classified lists cabled in from Islamabad included antiaircraft missiles, long-range sniper rifles, night-vision goggles, delayed timing devices for plastic explosives, and electronic intercept equipment. The new requests made it harder than ever to maintain plausible deniability about the CIA’s role in the jihad. This made the agency’s professional secret-keepers uncomfortable. But even the most reflexively clandestine among them recognized that by 1985 the Soviet leadership had already learned the outlines of the CIA’s Afghan program from press reports, captured fighters, intercepted communications, and KGB-supervised espionage operations carried out among the rebels. Even the American public knew the outlines of Langley’s work from newspaper stories and television documentaries. Increasingly, as the CIA and its gung-ho adversaries argued over the introduction of more sophisticated weapons, the issue was not whether the existence of an American covert supply line could be kept secret but whether the supply of precision American arms would provoke the Soviets into raiding Pakistan or retaliating against Americans.