Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  A popular rebellion had erupted late in 1989 across Pakistan’s border in the disputed territory of Kashmir, a vale of mountain lakes with a largely Muslim population that had been the site of three wars in four decades between India and Pakistan. Inspired by their success against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence officers announced to Bhutto that they were prepared to use the same methods of covert jihad to drive India out of Kashmir. They had begun to build up Muslim Brotherhood militant networks in the Kashmir valley, using religious schools and professional organizations. ISI organized training camps for Kashmiri guerrillas in Afghanistan’s Paktia province where the Arab volunteers had earlier organized their own camps. According to the CIA’s reporting that year, the Kashmiri volunteers trained side by side with the Arab jihadists. The Kashmir guerrillas began to surface in Indian-held territory wielding Chinese-made Kalashnikov rifles and other weapons siphoned from the Afghan pipeline. The CIA became worried that Pakistani intelligence might also divert to Kashmir high-technology weapons such as the buffalo gun sniper rifles originally shipped to Pakistan to kill Soviet military officers. The United States passed private warnings to India to protect politicians and government officials traveling in Kashmir from long-range sniper attacks.30

  The Afghan jihad had crossed one more border. It was about to expand again.

  BY LATE 1990, bin Laden had returned to his family’s business in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. He remained in cordial contact with Ahmed Badeeb, the chief of staff to Saudi intelligence, who offered bin Laden “business advice when he asked for it.”31

  Badeeb learned that bin Laden had begun to organize former Saudi and Yemeni volunteers from his days in Afghanistan to undertake a new jihad in South Yemen, then governed by Soviet-backed Marxists.Working from apartment buildings in Jedda, he had funded and equipped them to open a guerrilla war against the South Yemen government. Once bin Laden’s mujahedin crossed the border, the Yemeni government picked up some of them and complained to Riyadh, denouncing bin Laden by name.32

  By the autumn of 1990, bin Laden was agitated, too, about the threat facing Saudi Arabia from the Iraqi army forces that had invaded and occupied Kuwait in August. Bin Laden wanted to lead a new jihad against the Iraqis. He spoke out at schools and small gatherings in Jedda about how it would be possible to defeat Saddam Hussein by organizing battalions of righteous Islamic volunteers. Bin Laden objected violently to the decision of the Saudi royal family to invite American troops to defend the kingdom. He demanded an audience with senior princes in the Saudi royal family—and King Fahd himself—to present his plans for a new jihad.

  Uncertain what to make of bin Laden’s rantings and concerned about the violence he was stirring up in Yemen, a senior Saudi prince, along with a pro-government Islamic theologian named Khalil A. Khalil, traveled to Jedda to hear bin Laden out and assess his state of mind. Bin Laden brought bodyguards to the private meeting. He carried a proposal of about sixty pages, typed in Arabic, outlining his ideas.

  Khalil found bin Laden “very formal, very tense.” Bin Laden demanded to meet with King Fahd. He declared, “I want to fight against Saddam, an infidel. I want to establish a guerrilla war against Iraq.” Khalil asked how many troops bin Laden had. “Sixty thousand,” bin Laden boasted, “and twenty thousand Saudis.” Khalil and the prince knew this was foolishness, but bin Laden boasted, “I don’t need any weapons. I have plenty.”

  Finally, the senior prince at the meeting told bin Laden that the Saudi king would not meet with him. The king only met with ulama, religious scholars, he said. But since bin Laden was making a military proposal and since he was a respected scion of an important Saudi family, the prince agreed to arrange a meeting between bin Laden and Prince Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s defense minister.

  “I am the commander of an Islamic army. I am not afraid of being put in jail or being in prison. I am only afraid of Allah,” bin Laden announced as the meeting ended, as Khalil recalled it.

  The senior prince told bin Laden that what he had just said “is against the law and against principles. But it is not our custom to arrest someone whom you have agreed to meet in good faith. My advice is to examine yourself very carefully. We are not afraid of you. We are not afraid of your army. We know what to do.”

  “You listen to America—your master,” bin Laden answered.33

  In Riyadh, bin Laden arrived at the Defense Ministry with military maps and diagrams. Abdullah al-Turki, secretary-general of the Muslim World League, the largest worldwide Saudi proselytizing organization, joined the meeting. He was there to explain to bin Laden that the American troops invited to the kingdom had religious sanction. Mohammed had intended for no religion but Islam to dominate the Saudi peninsula, al-Turki said. But the Prophet had never objected to Jews and Christians traveling in the region or helping to defend it.

  The Saudi kingdom could avoid using an army of American infidels to fight its war, bin Laden argued, if it would support his army of battle-tested Afghan war veterans.

  Prince Sultan treated bin Laden with warmth and respect but said that he doubted that bin Laden’s plan would work. The Iraqi army had four thousand tanks. “There are no caves in Kuwait,” Prince Sultan said. “You cannot fight them from the mountains and caves. What will you do when he lobs the missiles at you with chemical and biological weapons?”

  “We will fight him with faith,” bin Laden said.34

  The meeting ended inconclusively, with respectful salutations. Even if his ideas seemed crazy, bin Laden belonged to one of the kingdom’s most important families. He had worked closely with the Saudi government. In situations like this, Saudi mores encouraged the avoidance of direct conflict.

  Prince Turki saw bin Laden’s meeting at the Defense Ministry as a watershed. From that time on the Saudi intelligence chief saw “radical changes” in bin Laden’s personality: “He changed from a calm, peaceful, and gentle man interested in helping Muslims into a person who believed that he would be able to amass and command an army to liberate Kuwait. It revealed his arrogance and his haughtiness.”35

  IT WAS NOT ONLY bin Laden who shocked Prince Turki that autumn by rejecting the kingdom’s alliance with the United States against Iraq. So did Hekmatyar and Sayyaf, despite all the millions of dollars in aid they had accepted from Saudi intelligence. As the prime minister of the Afghan interim government, Sayyaf delivered public speeches in Peshawar denouncing the Saudi royal family as anti-Islamic. The Bush administration dispatched diplomats to urge Pakistan and the Saudi royal family to rein in their Afghan clients. “Whereas before, their anti-Americanism did not have more than slight impact beyond the Afghan context, during the current crisis they fan anti-U.S. and anti-Saudi sentiment in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as beyond,” noted a State Department action memorandum. Furious, Turki sent Ahmed Badeeb to Pakistan.

  By the time he arrived in Peshawar, Badeeb could barely contain his rage. “When I am upset, I lose my mind,” Badeeb explained later. He barged into a public meeting where Sayyaf was denouncing Saudi Arabia for its bargain with the American devils.

  “Now you are coming to tell us what to do in our religion?” Badeeb demanded. “Even your own name—I changed it! To become a Muslim name!” If the Afghan interim government wanted to send a delegation of mujahedin to help defend Saudi Arabia against the Iraqis, that might be a way to help people “recognize that there is something in the world called an Afghan Islamic republic.” But if Sayyaf refused, “I am going to make you really regret what you have said.”

  In case he had not made himself clear, the chief of staff of Saudi intelligence told Sayyaf directly: “Fuck you and your family and the Afghans.” And he stormed out.36

  The threads of the Cold War’s jihad alliance were coming apart.

  12

  “We Are in Danger”

  BY EARLY 1991 the Afghan policies pursued by the State Department and the CIA were in open competition with one another. Both departments sought a change of government in Kabul, but t
hey had different Afghan clients. Peter Tomsen and his supporters in State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research pursued what they saw as a bottom-up or grassroots strategy. They channeled guns and money to the new rebel commanders’ shura, which attracted members from across Afghanistan, and they emphasized the importance of Massoud. They also continued to negotiate for a broad political settlement that would include popular national figures such as the exiled king. The CIA sometimes cooperated with these efforts, however grudgingly, but it also continued to collaborate with Pakistani intelligence on a separate military track that mainly promoted Hekmatyar and other Islamist commanders operating near the Pakistani border. That winter the ISI and the CIA returned to the strategy that had been tried unsuccessfully in the two previous years: a massed attack on an eastern Afghan city, with direct participation by covert Pakistani forces.

  In the previous campaign the CIA had tried to support such an attack by paying Massoud to close the Salang Highway, and the agency had been greatly disappointed. This time officers in the Directorate of Operations’ Near East Division came up with a new idea. Early in March 1991, overwhelmed and in retreat, Saddam Hussein’s army abandoned scores of Soviet-made tanks and artillery pieces in Kuwait and southern Iraq. The discarded weaponry offered the potential for a classical covert action play: The CIA would secretly use spoils captured from one of America’s enemies to attack another enemy.

  The CIA station in Riyadh, working with Saudi intelligence, assigned a team of covert logistics officers to round up abandoned T-55 and T-72 Iraqi tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery pieces. The CIA team worked with the U.S. military in southern Iraq to loot abandoned Iraqi armories and ammunition stores. They refurbished the captured equipment and rolled it to Kuwaiti ports for shipment to Karachi. From there Pakistani intelligence brought the armor and artillery to the Afghan border. Officers from ISI’s Afghan bureau used the equipment to support massive new conventional attacks on the eastern city of Gardez, in Paktia province, the ISI-supplied stronghold of Jallaladin Haqqanni, Hekmatyar, and the Arab volunteers.1

  Officers in the CIA’s Near East Division had come to believe that the Afghan rebels needed more conventional assault equipment to match the firepower of Najibullah’s Afghan army. There had been earlier talk of shipping in U.S.-made 155-millimeter howitzers, but now the Iraqi gambit seemed a better idea; it was cheaper, and the equipment could not be traced directly to Washington. Soviet-made Iraqi armor was of the same type that the mujahedin sometimes captured from Afghan government troops, so if a rebel force suddenly emerged on the outskirts of Khost or Gardez with a new tank brigade, it would not be obvious where their armor came from.

  Peter Tomsen and others at the State Department agreed to support the secret transfers of Iraqi weapons. They worried about declining morale among the rebels after months of military stalemate and thought the new equipment might provide a much needed jolt. At the same time they did not want the Iraqi tanks and artillery to strengthen the discredited anti-American Islamists around Hekmatyar.

  After Hekmatyar and Sayyaf failed to support Saudi Arabia publicly in its confrontation with Iraq, both the United States and Saudi intelligence initially vowed to cut them off. Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Pakistan, meeting at ISI headquarters with American diplomats and the chief of Pakistani intelligence, announced that all Saudi funding to Hekmatyar and Sayyaf should stop. But within months it became clear to the Americans that the Saudis were still secretly allowing cash and weapons to reach Hekmatyar and Sayyaf.2

  The CIA’s Afghan budget continued to shrink. Total funding allocated by Congress for the mujahedin fell again during calendar year 1991. What little aid there was should be used to build up the rebel leaders who opposed Hekmatyar, the State Department’s diplomats argued. But the CIA maintained that it had never been able to control how Pakistani intelligence distributed the weapons it received. The agreement had always been that title passed to ISI once the equipment reached Pakistani soil. Tomsen and others at State complained that the CIA surely was capable of controlling the destination of its weapons, but Langley’s officers said they could not. Besides, CIA officers argued, Hekmatyar’s coup attempt with Tanai demonstrated his tactical daring; most of the rebel commanders were just sitting on their haunches waiting for the war to end.3 Saudi intelligence endorsed the Iraqi tank gambit and fully supported the covert plan, the CIA reported. They would try to keep the tanks away from Hekmatyar and encourage Pakistani intelligence to send them to the rebel commander Jallaladin Haqqanni. After false starts in the two previous fighting seasons, here was a chance at last to help tip the military balance in Afghanistan against Najibullah, the agency’s operatives argued.

  With ISI officers helping to direct the attack from nearby hilltops, a coalition of mujahedin forces lay siege to Khost as spring arrived. Its main garrison fell in late March 1991, the most significant rebel victory since the withdrawal of Soviet troops. But Peter Tomsen’s hope that the victory would boost the power of his commanders’ shura was thwarted. Pakistani intelligence ensured that Hekmatyar reached the city with the first conquerors. He promptly claimed the victory as his own in public speeches. ISI chief Durrani drove across the Afghan border and made a triumphal tour of Khost, as did the Pakistani leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, Qazi Hussain Ahmed. Their appearances made plain the direct role of the Pakistani military and Muslim Brotherhood networks in the assault.4

  The rising presence of radical Arab, Indonesian, Malaysian, Uzbek, and other volunteer fighters in Paktia was documented in the agency’s own reporting from the field. CIA cables from Pakistan during this period, drawing on reports from Afghan agents, provided Langley with detailed accounts of the jihadist training camps in Paktia. The CIA reported, for instance, that Saudi radical volunteers were training side by side with Kashmiri radicals and that the Kashmiris were being prepared by Pakistani intelligence for infiltration into Indian-held territory. The CIA also reported that substantial numbers of Algerian and other North African Islamist radicals were training in Paktia, some fighting with Hekmatyar’s Afghan forces and others with Sayyaf.5

  All this detailed intelligence reporting about international Islamic radicalism and its sanctuary in Afghanistan gathered dust in the middle levels of the bureaucracy. The Gulf War, the reunification of Germany, the final death throes of the Soviet Union—these enormous, all-consuming crises continued to command the attention of the Bush administration’s cabinet. By 1991, Afghanistan was rarely if ever on the agenda.

  Milt Bearden, the former Islamabad station chief, found himself talking in passing about the Afghan war with President Bush. The president seemed puzzled that the CIA’s covert pipeline through Pakistan was still active, as Bearden recalled it. Bush seemed surprised, too, that the Afghans were still fighting. “Is that thing still going on?” the president asked.6

  SAUDI ARABIA’S ROYAL FAMILY spent generously to appease the kingdom’s Islamist radicals in the years following the uprising at the Grand Mosque in 1979. Billions of dollars poured into the coffers of the kingdom’s official ulama, who issued their fatwas increasingly from air-conditioned, oak-furnished offices. Billions more supported mosque-building campaigns in provincial towns and oasis villages. Thousands of idle young Saudi men were recruited into the domestic religious police and dispatched to the kingdom’s gleaming new sandstone-and-glass shopping malls. There they harassed women who allowed high-heeled shoes to show beneath their black robes, and used wooden batons to round up Saudi men for daily prayers. New Islamic universities rose in Riyadh and Jedda, and thousands of students were enrolled to study the Koran. At the same time the royal family stoked its massive modernization drive, constructing intercity highways, vast new housing, industrial plants, and hospitals. Saudi women entered the workforce in record numbers, although they often worked in strict segregation from men. Secular princes and princesses summered in London, Cannes, Costa del Sol, and Switzerland. There were at least six thousand self-described princes in the Saudi royal famil
y by 1990, and their numbers grew by the year. Many of these royals paid little heed to the Islamic clergy who governed official Saudi culture.

  Osama bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia from Pakistan just as new fissures opened between its austere, proselytizing religious establishment and its diverse, undisciplined royal family. For many Saudis the Iraqi invasion and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of American troops to defend the kingdom shattered the myth of Saudi independence and ignited open debate about Saudi identity. To both Islamists and modernizers the war seemed a turning point. Saudi women staged protests against the kingdom’s ban on female drivers, defiantly taking the wheel on the streets of Riyadh and Dhahran. Liberal political activists petitioned for a representative assembly that might advise the royal family. Islamists denounced the arrival of Christian troops as a violation of Islamic law. Two fiery young preachers known as the “Awakening Sheikhs” recorded anti-American sermons on cassette tapes and circulated millions of copies around the kingdom in late 1990 and early 1991. “It is not the world against Iraq. It is the West against Islam,” declared Sheikh Safar al-Hawali, a bin Laden ally. “If Iraq has occupied Kuwait, then America has occupied Saudi Arabia. The real enemy is not Iraq. It is the West.” Al-Hawali’s best-known book, Kissinger’s Promise, argued that American-led “crusaders” intended to conquer the Arabian Peninsula to seize its oil reserves. He warned Saudi citizens: “It will not be long until your blood is shed with impunity or you declare your abandonment of your belief in God.” These were themes bin Laden himself propounded in informal lectures at Jedda mosques. He adopted al-Hawali’s politics and some of the preacher’s terminology. He found himself part of a widening movement in the kingdom. Other antiroyal agitators saw his participation as an indication of how serious the rebellion had become, recalled Saudi journalist and author Saudi Aburish, because bin Laden was a “member of the establishment” who had suddenly announced himself as “a radical Islamist against the regime.”7