Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  In University Town, Peshawar, gunmen on motorcycles killed the Afghan poet and philosopher Sayd Bahudin Majrooh, publisher of the most influential bulletin promoting traditional Afghan royalist and tribal leadership. Majrooh’s independent Afghan Information Center had reported in a survey that 70 percent of Afghan refugees supported exiled King Zahir Shah rather than any of the Peshawar-based mujahedin leaders such as Hekmatyar.17 There were no arrests in Majrooh’s killing. The hit was interpreted among Afghans and at the CIA’s Islamabad station as an early and intimidating strike by Hekmatyar against the Zahir Shah option for post-Soviet Afghanistan.18

  The Ahmed Shah Massoud option came in for similar treatment: Around the same time that Majrooh was killed, Massoud’s older half-brother Dean Mohammed was kidnapped and killed by mysterious assailants hours after he visited the American consulate in Peshawar to apply for a visa. Massoud’s brothers believed for years afterward that ISI’s Afghan cell had carried out the operation, although they could not be sure.19

  In Quetta, McWilliams heard detailed accounts of how Pakistani intelligence had allied with Hekmatyar to isolate and defeat rival commanders around Kandahar. ISI’s local office regulated food and cash handouts so that those who now agreed to join Hekmatyar would have ample supplies for fighters and civilians in areas they controlled. Those who didn’t agree to join, however, would be starved, unable to pay their men or supply grain to their villages. ISI used a road permit system to ensure that only authorized commanders had permission to take humanitarian supplies across the Afghan border, McWilliams was told. At the same time, Pakistani intelligence and the Arab volunteers operating around Paktia used their access to newly built roads, clinics, and training camps to persuade local commanders that only by joining forces with them could they ensure that their wounded were evacuated quickly and treated by qualified doctors. Afghan witnesses reported seeing ISI officers with Hekmatyar commanders as they moved in force against rival mujahedin around Kandahar. They complained to McWilliams that Hekmatyar’s people received preferential access to local training camps and weapons depots. Secular-minded royalist Afghans from the country’s thin, exiled tribal leadership and commercial classes said they had long warned both the Americans and the Saudis, as one put it, “For God’s sake, you’re financing your own assassins.” But the Americans had been convinced by Pakistani intelligence, they complained, that only the most radical Islamists could fight with determination.

  A lifelong and passionate cold warrior, Ed McWilliams shared the conviction of conservative intellectuals in Washington that the CIA’s long struggle for Afghan “self-determination” was morally just, even righteous. It appalled him to discover, as he believed he had, that American authority and billions of dollars in taxpayer funding had been hijacked at the war’s end by a ruthless anti-American cabal of Islamists and Pakistani intelligence officers determined to impose their will on Afghanistan.

  In the middle of October 1988, McWilliams sat down in the diplomatic section of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad and tapped out on its crude, secure telex system a twenty-eight-paragraph cable, classified Secret and titled “ISI, Gulbuddin and Afghan Self-Determination.”20 It was at that stage almost certainly the most detailed internal dissent about U.S. support for Pakistani intelligence, Saudi Arabian intelligence, and the Islamist Afghan rebels ever expressed in official U.S. government channels. The cable was distributed to the State Department, the CIA, the National Security Council, and a few members of Congress.

  THERE IS A GROWING FRUSTRATION, BORDERING ON

  HOSTILITY, AMONG AFGHANS ACROSS THE IDEOLOGICAL

  SPECTRUM AND FROM A BROAD RANGE OF BACKGROUNDS,

  TOWARD THE GOVERNMENT OF PAKISTAN AND TOWARD

  THE U.S… . THE EXTENT OF THIS SENTIMENT APPEARS

  UNPRECEDENTED AND INTENSIFYING… . MOST OF THESE

  OBSERVERS CLAIM THAT THIS EFFORT [BY HEKMATYAR

  AND ISI] HAS THE SUPPORT OF THE RADICAL PAKISTANI

  POLITICAL PARTY JAMAAT ISLAMI AND OF RADICAL

  ARABS… . WHILE THESE CHARGES MAY BE EXAGGERATED,

  THE PERCEPTION THEY GIVE RISE TO IS DEEP

  AND BROAD—AND OMINOUS… .

  In the course of his reporting, McWilliams had spoken with a number of American diplomats and analysts “who were not in a position to speak out, because indeed it was a rather intimidating atmosphere.” He felt that he was describing their views of the ISI-CIA-Hekmatyar-Arab problem as well as his own.21

  Within the U.S. embassy in Islamabad his cable detonated like a stink bomb. Normally a diplomatic officer had to clear his cabled analyses through the ambassador, but McWilliams had semi-independent status. Bearden was furious at “that little shit.” McWilliams was misinformed, the CIA’s officers felt. He didn’t have access to all their classified information documenting how the CIA managed its unilateral Afghan reporting network, including its support for Massoud and Abdul Haq, or how the agency played its hand with ISI, seeking to ensure that Hekmatyar did not dominate the weapons pipeline. Besides, Bearden discounted some of the criticism of Hekmatyar as KGB propaganda. He saw Hekmatyar “as an enemy,” he said later, but he did not regard Massoud as an adequate instrument for the CIA’s prosecution of the war. Bearden accepted the view, shared by Pakistani intelligence, that Massoud “appeared to have established an undeclared ceasefire” with the Soviets in the north. Massoud was “shoring up his position politically,” not fighting as hard as ISI’s main Islamist clients, Bearden believed.

  On a more personal, visceral level, the CIA officers found McWilliams uncompromising, humorless, not a team player. At the Kabul embassy McWilliams had been involved in an administrative controversy involving accusations of improper contacts with Afghans by a CIA case officer, and the reports reaching the Islamabad station suggested that McWilliams had squealed on the CIA officer involved. Bearden thought McWilliams had endangered the CIA officer by his conduct. His cable challenging CIA assumptions about the jihad sent Bearden and Oakley into a cold fury.22

  McWilliams found Oakley, his deputy Beth Jones, and Bearden unquestioning in their endorsement of current U.S. policy toward Pakistani intelligence. Oakley was a hardworking, intelligent diplomat, but he was also intimidating and rude, McWilliams thought. Oakley and Bearden were both Texans: double trouble when they were together, boisterous, and confident to the point of arrogance. “Everybody is saying that you’re a dumb asshole,” Bearden teased Oakley once before a group of embassy colleagues. “But I correct them. ‘Oakley is not dumb,’ I say.”

  For his part, McWilliams felt that he was only initiating a healthy debate about the assumptions underlying the U.S. alliance with ISI. Why should that anger his colleagues so intensely? But it did. McWilliams’s underground allies in the U.S. embassy and consulates in Pakistan opened a back channel to keep him informed about just how thoroughly he had alienated Oakley and Bearden, McWilliams recalled. In the aftermath of his cable about Hekmatyar and ISI, the U.S. embassy in Islamabad had quietly opened an internal investigation into McWilliams’s integrity, the envoy’s informants confided. The CIA had raised serious questions about his handling of classified materials. The embassy was watching his behavior and posing questions to those who knew him.Was McWilliams a homosexual? He seemed to be a drinker. Did he have some sort of problem with alcohol?

  THE RUSSIAN WRITER Artyom Borovik traveled with the Soviet Fortieth Army’s last brigades as they prepared to rumble out of Kabul and up the snowy Salang Highway in January and February 1989. It was an extraordinary time in Soviet journalism and military culture, a newly permissive moment of dissent and uncensored speech. “It’s been a strange war,” a lieutenant colonel named Ushakov told Borovik. “We went in when stagnation was at its peak and now leave when truth is raging.”

  At the iron-gated, heavy-concrete Soviet embassy compound in Kabul, just down the road from the city zoo, fallen eucalyptus leaves swirled in the bottom of the empty swimming pool. The embassy’s KGB chief insisted on his regular Friday
tennis game. His forty-minute sets “seemed quite fantastic to me,” Borovik wrote, “especially when the camouflaged helicopters that provided covering fire for the airborne troopers would fly above his gray-haired head.” The Cold War’s ending now seemed to echo far beyond Afghanistan. “Who knows where a person can feel safer these days—here or in Poland?” the Polish ambassador asked grimly. The old Soviet guard watched bitterly as the last tank convoys pulled out. A general read to Borovik from a dog-eared copy of a book about why Russia had been defeated in its war with Japan in 1904: “In the last few years, our government itself has headed the antiwar movement.”

  Boris Gromov was the Fortieth Army’s last commander. He was short and stout, and his face was draped by bangs. He feared the Panjshir Valley. “There’s Massoud with his four thousand troops, so there’s still plenty to worry about,” he told Borovik. The last Russian fatality, a soldier named Lashenenkov, was shot through the neck on the Salang Highway by a rebel sniper. He rode out of Afghanistan on a stretcher lashed to the top of an armored vehicle, his corpse draped in snow.23

  On February 15, the day appointed by the Geneva Accords for the departure of the last Soviet troops, Gromov staged a ceremony for the international media on the Termez Bridge, still standing despite the multiple attempts by ISI to persuade Afghan commanders to knock it down. Gromov stopped his tank halfway across the bridge, climbed out of the hatch, and walked toward Uzbekistan as one of his sons approached him with a bouquet of carnations.24

  At CIA headquarters in Langley the newly appointed director, William Webster, hosted a champagne party.

  At the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, too, they threw a celebration. Bearden sent a cable to Langley: “WE WON.” He decided on his own last act of private theater. His third-floor office in the CIA station lay in the direct line of sight of the KGB office in the Soviet embassy across barren scrub land. Bearden had made a point of always leaving the light on in his office, and at diplomatic receptions he would joke with his KGB counterparts about how hard he was working to bring them down. That night he switched off the light.25

  Shevardnadze flew into snow-cradled Kabul that same night with Kryuchkov, the Soviet KGB chief. Najibullah and his wife hosted them for dinner. All autumn and winter the Afghan president had been working to win defections to his cause, hoping to forestall a mujahedin onslaught and the collapse of his government, still being forecast confidently by the CIA. Najibullah had offered Massoud his defense ministry, and when Massoud sent a message refusing the job, the president had decided to leave the seat open, signaling that it could be Massoud’s whenever he felt ready. Najibullah pushed through pay raises to special guard forces trained to defend Kabul. He organized militias to defend the northern gas fields that provided his government’s only reliable income. He was doing what he could, he told his Soviet sponsors.

  But by now the KGB shared the CIA’s assumption that Najibullah was doomed without Soviet troops to protect him. That night over dinner Shevardnadze offered Najibullah and his wife a new home in Moscow if they wanted to leave Kabul. Shevardnadze worried about their safety. Najibullah’s wife answered: “We would prefer to be killed on the doorsteps of this house rather than die in the eyes of our people by choosing the path of flight from their bitter misfortune. We will all stay with them here to the end, whether it be happy or bitter.”26

  It would be bitter.

  PART TWO

  THE ONE-EYED MAN

  WAS KING

  March 1989 to December 1997

  10

  “Serious Risks”

  THERE WERE TWO CIA STATIONS crammed inside the U.S. embassy in Islamabad in the late winter of 1989 as the last Soviet soldiers withdrew across the Amu Darya River, out of Afghanistan.

  Gary Schroen, newly appointed as Kabul station chief, arrived in Pakistan in temporary exile. Schroen had been away from Islamabad since student rioters sacked the embassy a decade earlier. He had been working in the Persian Gulf and on the CIA’s Iranian operations. He was appointed to Kabul in the late summer of 1988, but he had been forced to wait in Langley as the White House debated whether to close the U.S. embassy in the Afghan capital. When the mission was ordered shut, mainly for security reasons, Schroen flew to Islamabad to wait a little longer. He and several Kabul-bound case officers squeezed themselves into Milton Bearden’s office suite. As soon as Najibullah fell to the mujahedin that winter—in just a matter of weeks, CIA analysts at headquarters felt certain—Schroen and his team would drive up to Kabul from Pakistan, help reopen the embassy, and set up operations in a liberated country.

  Weeks passed and then more weeks. Najibullah, his cabinet, and his army held firm. Amid heavy snows the Afghan military pushed out a new defensive ring around the capital, holding the mujahedin farther at bay. Najibullah put twenty thousand mullahs on his payroll to counter the rebels’ religious messages. As March approached, the Afghan regime showed no fissures.

  In Islamabad, Schroen told his colleagues that not for the first or last time the CIA’s predictions were proving wrong. He moved out of a cramped dormitory in the walled embassy compound, fixed up a room in an anonymous guest house, requisitioned four-wheel-drive vehicles for his case officers, and told them to settle in for the long haul. They might as well make themselves useful by working from Islamabad.

  Bearden agreed that Schroen’s Kabul group should take the lead in running the Afghan rebel commanders on the CIA’s payroll. These numbered about forty by the first months of 1989. There were minor commanders receiving $5,000 monthly stipends, others receiving $50,000. Several of them worked for Hekmatyar. The CIA had also increased its payments to Hekmatyar’s rival, Massoud, who was by now secretly receiving $200,000 a month in cash. Massoud’s stipend had ballooned partly because the CIA knew that Pakistani intelligence shortchanged him routinely. Under pressure from Massoud’s supporters in Congress, and hoping that the Panjshiri leader would pressure the Afghan government’s northern supply lines, the agency had sent through a big raise. The CIA tried to keep all these payments hidden from Pakistani intelligence.1

  Massoud and other Afghan commanders in the CIA’s unilateral network had by now received secure radio sets with messaging software that allowed them to transmit coded reports directly to the Islamabad embassy. The message traffic required time and attention from embassy case officers. And there was a steady stream of face-to-face contact meetings to be managed in Peshawar and Quetta. Each contact had to be handled carefully so that neither Pakistani intelligence nor rival mujahedin caught on. The plan was that once Schroen’s group of case officers made it to their new station in Kabul, they would take many of their Afghan agent relationships with them.

  All this depended on wresting the Afghan capital from Najibullah’s control, however. For this, too, the CIA had a plan. Bearden and his group collaborated closely with Pakistani intelligence that winter, even as they tried to shield their unilateral agent network from detection.

  Hamid Gul, the Pakistani intelligence chief, proposed to rattle Najibullah by launching an ambitious rebel attack against the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, just a few hours’ drive across the Khyber Pass from Peshawar. Once the mujahedin captured Jalalabad, Gul said, they could install a new government on Afghan soil and begin to move on Kabul. The short distance and open roads between Jalalabad and Peshawar would make it easy for ISI and the CIA to truck in supplies.2

  Pakistani intelligence had put together a new Islamist-dominated Afghan government that could move to Jalalabad as soon as the city was captured. In February 1989, at a hotel in Rawalpindi, Afghan delegates were summoned to a consultative shura to elect new political leaders. Flush with about $25 million in cash provided by Prince Turki al-Faisal’s Saudi intelligence department, Hamid Gul and colleagues from ISI’s Afghan bureau twisted arms and spread money around until the delegates agreed on a cabinet for a self-declared Afghan interim government. To prevent either Hekmatyar or Massoud from seizing power, the delegates chose weak figurehead leaders and agreed
to rotate offices. There was a lot of squabbling, and Hekmatyar, among others, went away angry. But at least a rebel government now existed on paper, Hamid Gul argued to his American counterparts. He felt that military pressure had to be directed quickly at Afghan cities “to make the transfer of power possible” to the rebels. Otherwise, “in the vacuum, there would be a lot of chaos in Afghanistan.”3

  For the CIA, Pakistan was becoming a far different place to carry out covert action than it had been during the anti-Soviet jihad. The agency had to reckon now with more than just the views of ISI. Civilians and the army shared power, opportunistic politicians debated every issue, and a free press clamored with dissent. Pakistan’s newly elected prime minister was Benazir Bhutto, at thirty-six a beautiful, charismatic, and self-absorbed politician with no government experience. She was her country’s first democratically elected leader in more than a decade. She had taken office with American support, and she cultivated American connections. Raised in a gilded world of feudal aristocratic entitlements, Bhutto had attended Radcliffe College at Harvard University as an undergraduate and retained many friends in Washington. She saw her American allies as a counterweight to her enemies in the Pakistani army command—an officer corps that had sent her father to the gallows a decade earlier.

  She was especially distrustful of Pakistani intelligence. She knew that Hamid Gul’s ISI was already tapping her telephones and fomenting opposition against her in the country’s newly elected parliament. Stunned by Zia’s death, the Pakistani army leadership had endorsed a restoration of democracy in the autumn of 1988, but the generals expected to retain control over national security policy. The chief of army staff, Mirza Aslam Beg, tolerated Bhutto’s role, but others in the army officer corps—especially some of the Islamists who had been close to Zia—saw her as a secularist, a socialist, and an enemy of Islam. This was especially true inside ISI’s Afghan bureau. “I wonder if these people would ever have held elections if they knew that we were going to win,” Bhutto remarked to her foreign policy adviser Iqbal Akhund on a flight to China in 1989. Akhund, cynical about ISI’s competence, told her: “You owe your prime ministership to the intelligence agencies who, as always, gave the government a wishful assessment of how the elections would—or could be made to—turn out.”