Ghost Wars
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By 2000 the Saudi royal family, like Pakistan’s army, had developed multi-layered defenses against American pressure on terrorism issues. Like Pakistan’s elite, the liberals in Saudi Arabia’s royal family positioned themselves in Washington as America’s lonely and besieged allies, doing all they could—thanklessly—to protect the United States from the Islamist hatred of their country’s Muslim masses. The Saudis continued to prove their loyalty month after month by managing global oil prices with American interests firmly in mind. By cooperating on the fundamental questions of oil and military basing rights, the Saudis acquired the freedom to pursue their own agenda on secondary issues: the Palestinians, rapprochement with Iran, and the threat of Saudi-born Islamic extremism. They pushed forward a clean-shaven, well-dressed spokesman, Adel al-Jubeir, who defended Saudi policy in a fluent American idiom. From a kingdom where politics arose from family ties and power was bargained through personal contacts, the Saudi royals concentrated nearly all their effort on networks of friends at the highest levels of the American government. This approach insulated the Saudi elite from their country’s harsh and sometimes fulminating critics at the working levels of the U.S. police and intelligence bureaucracies.
The Americans struggled to understand just how much support reached bin Laden in Afghanistan from Saudi sources. It appeared to be substantial, even into 2000. A Saudi government audit of the National Commercial Bank, the kingdom’s largest, showed that at least $3 million had flowed from its accounts to bin Laden. One of Saudi Arabia’s largest charities, the International Islamic Relief Organization, acknowledged that it had sent about $60 million to the Taliban.25
But when Michael Sheehan, the State Department’s counterterrorism chief, tried to send a cable urging American embassies to push their host governments to crack down on Islamic charity groups, other State diplomats managed to suppress the cable and overturn its recommendations. They argued that Sheehan did not understand all the good works Islamic charities performed worldwide.26
The pattern was repeated elsewhere in the national security bureaucracy. When they attacked Saudi Arabia as uncooperative or dangerous, counterterrorism specialists were chided by their colleagues at State or the Pentagon as narrow-minded cops who were unable to fit their concerns into the larger context of the U.S.-Saudi alliance. Describing the global terrorist threat in 2000, the State Department’s official annual report made no mention of Saudi Wahhabi proselytizing, and it referred only to “allegations” that Saudi Islamic charities might be aiding terrorists. The Saudi royal family had “reaffirmed its commitment to combating terrorism,” the State Department reported, but it was “not clear,” the department continued gently, whether all of the government’s regulations “were enforced consistently.” American investigators later reported that they could find “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials within the Saudi government funded al Qaeda. Still, al Qaeda found fertile fundraising ground in the kingdom” in part because of “very limited oversight” of private charitable donations.27
Prince Turki faded further. After his break with Mullah Omar in 1998, he tried to facilitate cooperation with the CIA on terrorism but was rarely able to deliver, at least in the view of midlevel American officers.
Turki’s own fear about bin Laden’s ability to strike at Saudi interests “kept rising” during 1999 and 2000, he recalled, because “the leadership of the Taliban had committed themselves 100 percent to bin Laden. And hence he would have even more leeway to act than he did before.” Turki considered trying to plant an agent inside bin Laden’s circle in Afghanistan “many, many times,” but he could not come up with a plausible plan. He tried to turn captured Islamists back on al Qaeda as agents working for Saudi intelligence “without much success,” as he recalled. But he would not send his own intelligence officers on such a mission to Afghanistan. “It was too dangerous, and I never did it… . I would not sacrifice one of our people.” Congressional investigators later concluded that the CIA and other American intelligence agencies “did not effectively develop and use human sources to penetrate the al Qaeda inner circle” and that “in part, at least,” this failure was “a product of an excessive reliance on foreign liaison services.”28
MASSOUD BELIEVED by the summer of 2000 that he had regained some military and political momentum against the Taliban. He had repeated his great survival feat of the 1980s anti-Soviet war. By fierce personal will, by his refusal to leave Afghan soil, by his ability to lead and hold the loyalty of his Tajik followers, he had weathered the worst periods of hopelessness and isolation after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. Now he had passable supply lines to Iran. He had commercial deals to buy ammunition from Russia. India chipped in about $10 million and built a hospital in his territory. He had modest intelligence aid from the CIA. His enemies remained formidable, especially the suicide platoons of al Qaeda and the seemingly inexhaustible waves of Pakistani volunteers bused from madrassas to the northern battlefields. Yet to many Afghans there were more and more signs that the Taliban were weakening. In February 2000 the famed leader of the original 1979 Afghan mutiny against Soviet occupiers in Herat, Ismail Khan, escaped from a Kandahar prison, fled to Iran, and stirred new revolts against the Taliban in western Afghanistan. Pashtun tribal leaders staged protests against Taliban conscription. Prominent Pashtun exiles—Abdul Haq, King Zahir Shah, Hamid Karzai—opened talks with Massoud’s representatives about a grand anti-Taliban political alliance that would unite Afghanistan’s north and south.29
Massoud encouraged these political discussions. He was skeptical of exiles who refused to risk their lives and their comfort by fighting from Afghan soil. He and Abdul Haq remained uncomfortable rivals. Massoud’s aides had suspicions about Pashtuns like Karzai who lived in Pakistan and who had earlier supported the Taliban. But with the help of private intermediaries such as Peter Tomsen, the former American ambassador to the Afghan mujahedin, the Taliban’s Pashtun opponents linked up with Massoud. Some of them wanted Massoud to participate in political talks that would create a unified Afghan government in exile, symbolically blessed by the king, to which disaffected Taliban commanders could defect. Others, like Hamid Karzai, wanted Massoud’s help to mount armed rebellions against the Taliban in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.
During 2000, Massoud envisioned a military campaign against the Taliban that would unfold in stages. His first goal was to rebuild the strength of the Northern Alliance. The Taliban remained weakest in the north because it lacked an ethnic and tribal base. Massoud hoped that Ismail Khan, Aburrashid Dostum, and other anti-Taliban commanders could seed small pockets of sustainable rebellion in isolated, defensible mountain areas. His strategy was to light little brush fires all around northern and western Afghanistan, wherever the Taliban were weak, and then fan the flames. As these rebel pockets emerged and stabilized, Massoud would drive toward them with his more formal armored militia, trying to link up on roadways, choking off Taliban-ruled cities and towns and gradually expanding the territory under his control.
Once he had more solid footing in the north, Massoud planned to pursue the same strategy in the Pashtun south, helping rebels like Karzai seed themselves first in defensible mountain areas, then moving gradually to attack towns and cities. “Commander Massoud’s idea was that Karzai should send commanders to these areas where it was liberated so they could revolt,” recalled Massoud’s foreign policy adviser, Abdullah. Karzai could also establish bases in safer Northern Alliance territory such as the Panjshir “and then expand.” Massoud dispatched Abdullah and other aides to meet with Karzai’s people to develop these ideas. “He was thinking it would not be easy,” Abdullah remembered. “It will not be overnight. It will be a long-term struggle.” Massoud “was absolutely confident of liberating the north sooner or later,” recalled one of his senior intelligence aides. “And he was projecting a force for the south for a longer struggle.”30
To develop this plan in a serious way Massoud needed
helicopters, jeeps, and trucks. He needed to resupply allied rebels separated by vast distances. The country’s few passable roads were tightly controlled by the Taliban. Massoud wanted to leapfrog quickly around the north to avoid frontal battles, get behind Taliban and al Qaeda lines, and emerge from his defensive crouch in the Panjshir. But to do this effectively he would need greater mobility.
Organizers of this nascent anti-Taliban alliance traveled to Washington in the summer of 2000 to ask for American political support and practical aid. Senator Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican who was one of the few members of Congress to take an interest in Afghanistan, held hearings. Hardly anyone paid attention. Danielle Pletka, who ran the Afghan issue at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, cringed whenever she arranged meetings for Karzai and Massoud’s aides because she feared that not a single member or congressional aide would bother to show up, and she would be left red-faced and alone at the conference table. “No one cared,” she recalled. At typical meetings on Afghanistan “anywhere from none to two” members or staff would attend.31
The State Department offered modest support for the political track of the Massoud-Karzai alliance. Inderfurth traveled to Rome and met the exiled king, Zahir Shah. State contributed a few hundred thousand dollars to organize meetings, but that was as far as the department was willing to go. Pickering met the well-dressed Abdullah, Massoud’s envoy, in Washington and told colleagues that he worried the Northern Alliance was another liberal insurgent movement like the Iraqi National Congress—professional rebels and exiles.32
American intelligence and diplomatic reporting documented the Taliban’s weakening grip during 2000. The Taliban’s “popularity and legitimacy now appear to be in decline,” Inderfurth testified to Congress on July 20. “We believe the Taliban have reached their high-water mark.” Yet American policy remained paralyzed over whether to confront the Taliban or engage. Inderfurth described the Clinton administration’s evolving strategy as “two-pronged.” One track put “firm pressure” on the Taliban with threats and economic sanctions; on the other track they sought “to engage the Taliban in a serious dialogue.” Despite the new, promising links forged between Massoud and the moderate royalist Pashtuns, the United States refused to choose sides. “My strong criticism of the Taliban should not be read to imply U.S. recognition for the opposition Northern Alliance led by Ahmed Shah Massoud,” Inderfurth emphasized.33
It was in many ways the same failure of political vision that had shaped American policy toward Afghanistan between 1988 and 1992, under two Republican administrations. Then, as in 2000, the United States refused to commit to an emerging fragile alliance between Massoud and centrist Pashtuns. The effect of this refusal, in both periods, was to cede the field to Pakistan’s extremist clients: Hekmatyar earlier, and the Taliban later.
The CIA’s Near East Division, responsible for Afghan politics, did not regard the emerging anti-Taliban movement among Pashtuns as a serious force. CIA officers dismissed Abdul Haq as an egomaniac and a blowhard. They respected Karzai but saw him as a very small player. As they recruited among anti-Taliban Pashtuns, they struggled to find anyone who could really deliver. Jallaladin Haqqanni, a CIA favorite during the 1980s, pledged firm allegiance to the Taliban. Old warlords like Gul Agha Sherzai did not seem especially motivated or capable. The agency’s case officers revived many Pashtun contacts in search of recruitments but came away skeptical.
Conditioned by past experiences as well as their decades-old liaison with ISI, some Near East officers remained highly doubtful about Massoud even as the Counterterrorist Center–led contacts with him deepened. They did not see much potential, either, in a Massoud-royalist alliance as a basis for military rebellion. U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Bill Milam and the CIA’s Islamabad station chief both “felt Massoud and the Northern Alliance could not govern Afghanistan and that, secondly, they probably couldn’t beat the Taliban anyway,” recalled one American official. The CIA also concluded, as Gary Schroen put it, that “there was no Pashtun opposition. The Pashtuns were totally disorganized, fragmented, disarmed by the Taliban.”34 But this was a view shaped and distorted by Pakistani intelligence. As in the past, by refusing to take a risk and partner more aggressively with Massoud, the United States passively allowed Pakistan’s policy to become its own.
Richard Clarke’s counterterrorism group at the White House, which usually pressed for the most aggressive tactics against bin Laden, opposed a deep military alliance with Massoud during the summer of 2000. Clarke argued that the Northern Alliance was “not a very good group of people to begin with,” as one official involved put it. “They’re drug runners. They’re human rights abusers. They’re an ethnic minority. It’s just not something that you’re going to build a national government around.”35
Without full-fledged U.S. support, Karzai and Massoud took matters into their own hands. Karzai traveled that autumn to the Panjshir with a delegation of royalist Pashtuns. They hoped their meeting would send a signal to wavering Afghans that a new anti-Taliban alliance was in embryo.
In private talks Karzai told Massoud he was ready to slip inside Afghanistan and fight. “Don’t move into Kandahar,” Massoud told him, as Karzai recalled it. “You must go to a place where you can hold your base.” There were too many Arabs around Kandahar. It might be too early to mount a southern rebellion, Massoud warned. Perhaps Karzai should consider operating out of the north until their joint revolt was further developed. Karzai said he would consider that.
“He was very wise,” Karzai recalled. “I was sort of pushy and reckless.”36
Karzai’s friends warned him that if he became too vocal about his opposition to the Taliban, Pakistani intelligence would respond. Karzai still maintained a home in Quetta. His friends reminded him of his father’s fate and of the unsolved murders of Abdul Haq’s family members in Peshawar. Recalled Afrasiab Khattak, a Pashtun nationalist and Pakistani human rights activist who knew Karzai: “I pressed him to leave this country because he would be killed.”37
THE CIA STRUGGLED to maintain its liaison with Massoud. It was difficult and risky for the agency’s officers to reach the Panjshir. The only practical way in was through Dushanbe in Tajikistan. From there the CIA teams usually took one of the few rusting, patched-together Mi-17 transport helicopters the Northern Alliance managed to keep in the air. CIA officers alarmed Langley with the cables describing their travel. On one trip the Taliban scrambled MiG-21 jets in an effort to shoot down Massoud’s helicopter. If they had succeeded, they would have discovered American corpses in the wreckage. Even on the best days the choppers would shake and rattle, and the cabin would fill with the smell of fuel. The overland routes to see Massoud were no better: miles and miles of bone-jarring Afghan mountain ruts snaking along sheer cliffsides.When a Near East Division team drove in from Dushanbe, one of its vehicles flipped and a veteran CIA officer, a former station chief in Cairo, dislocated his shoulder.38
These reports accumulated in Langley on the desk of Deputy Director of Operations James Pavitt, who had overall responsibility for the management of CIA espionage. Pavitt was a blue-eyed, white-haired former case officer and station chief who had served in Europe during the Cold War, including tours in East and West Berlin. He had written speeches for a Democratic congressman as a young man, then served in the White House as a CIA liaison during the first Bush administration. Like Tenet, who had appointed him, he was a spy manager with a feel for politics. Pavitt began to ask why CIA officers were taking such huge physical risks to work with Massoud. Were they getting enough from the liaison to justify the possibility of death or injury? If a CIA officer was killed on one of these trips, Pavitt was the one who would have to visit his widow and explain why it had all mattered so much.Was it likely that Massoud would help capture or kill bin Laden, or were they taking unnecessary chances?
Pavitt’s questions provoked sometimes heated replies from working-level officers in the Counterterrorist Center. The bin Laden unit chief—who had flown
in Massoud’s helicopters himself—and the center’s operations chief, known to his colleagues as Hank, passionately argued that the Panjshir liaison had to continue, that the risks were worth it. The liaison with the Northern Alliance was by now producing several hundred CIA intelligence reports each year. It would be cowardly to drop contact with Massoud because of safety concerns, they implied. This was typical uncompromising Manson Family ardor, thought some officials who heard the debates. “There was a lot of concern about engagement in Afghanistan because it was very, very, very risky,” remembered one American official. Those opposed to the CIA’s Panjshir missions argued, as this official recalled, “You’re sending people to their deaths.” Cofer Black, mediating with Pavitt, took a more sympathetic view of Pavitt’s fears. He said he endorsed Pavitt’s worries about the helicopters. Counterterrorist officers were the ones who would die if one of these ungainly machines went down.39
The agency sent out a team of mechanics knowledgeable about Russian helicopters to try to resolve the issue. Massoud’s men took them to their Dushanbe airfield and opened up one of the Mi-17s. The CIA mechanics were stunned: Massoud had managed to patch an engine originally made for a Hind attack helicopter into the bay of the Mi-17 transport. It was a mismatched, gum-and-baling-wire machine, a flying miracle. The CIA mechanics were so appalled that they did not even want Massoud’s pilots to fire up the helicopter’s rotors. They were afraid the whole thing would come apart and send shrapnel flying.
At Langley the debates about risk and reward persisted. Cofer Black continued to worry aloud about the safety question but argued that the Counterterrorist Center had to maintain contact with Massoud to prepare for the day—a virtual certainty, he and the officers in the bin Laden unit said—when al Qaeda pulled off a major attack against the United States. Then the White House would change its policies toward the Taliban, and it would need Massoud. Black was not much for understatement. He told his colleagues that this aspect of the CIA’s Panjshir mission was about “preparing the battlefield for World War Three.”