Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  Newly disclosed material has also allowed me to make the narrative’s chronology more precise.While conducting the original research, I attempted to persuade people to describe highly classified intelligence operations, especially in the period after 1998. Generally, I found that my sources were very confident about what had happened but less confident about when it had happened. Even for the best-placed sources, checking exact dates by going back to file rooms full of secret documents was often difficult, so I usually had to rely on a painfully laborious and imprecise process of cross-checking memories about dates and sequences among multiple sources. I did have the benefit of the Joint Inquiry Committee’s published chronology, but the committee’s investigators were unable to obtain and declassify material about some sensitive CIA operations in Afghanistan. Astute readers will have recognized my authorial wobbles in the first edition, where I sometimes turned into a controversial episode with an elastic phrase about time, such as, “Early that year… .”

  Overall, I feel very fortunate that the documents and testimony obtained by the 9/11 Commission confirmed rather than contradicted my original narrative. In the end a journalist is only as good as his sources, and now that the commission has laid bare such a full record, I am more grateful than ever for the honesty, balance, and precision displayed by my most important sources during my original research. Still, there are a few significant chronological errors in the third part of the first edition. Some involve the exact timing of the several cases where President Clinton and his national security cabinet secretly considered firing cruise missiles at Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. The commission’s investigation shows that the last of these episodes occurred in the spring of 1999, not the autumn of 2000, as I had originally reported, relying on a published interview with Clinton for the date. The commission’s work also makes clear that some of my sources, in talking to me about these incidents, occasionally conflated or combined in their memories episodes that had occurred separately. Beyond the intrinsic benefits of precision, these discrepencies are probably significant mainly because, now untangled, they locate specifically the political moments in which Clinton made his crucial decisions in his secret campaign against bin Laden—in one episode, for instance, the president had to decide whether to fire cruise missiles in the same week that he faced an impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. The commission’s efforts still leave a few small mysteries in the record. For instance, it is still not clear to me when the Pakistani government first proposed collaborating with the CIA to train a commando team to try to capture or kill bin Laden—in December of 1998, as my interview sources place it, or the following summer, when the training clearly began in earnest. On these and other chronology issues I have made adjustments in the main text and clarified sourcing in the notes. I have also corrected a dozen or so small, embarrassing unforced errors from the first edition, such as faulty spellings and garbled numbers.

  A more subjective and interesting question, perhaps, is whether any of the history in Ghost Wars should be reinterpreted in light of the commission’s disclosures. In at least one important area, recent revelations do clearly transform our understanding. The interrogation statements of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, and Abu Zubaydah disclosed by the commission substantially alter our understanding of the origins of the specific plot carried out by the Hamburg cell on September 11. These interrogation statements were given by unreliable witnesses under duress in unknown circumstances, and should therefor be treated with caution. Yet the statements were taken separately and they do seem consistent about key issues, such as how the idea to turn hijacked airplanes into cruise missiles originated, the role played by bin Laden, and the internal dynamics among the hijackers as they prepared for their attack. I have incorporated these disclosures into the text of this edition. A fuller history of the specific September 11 plot may yet become available, if bin Laden or other al Qaeda leaders are eventually taken into custody.

  On the broader questions of American foreign policy and intelligence operations during the two decades leading up to September 11, the commission’s final report is perhaps generous toward the Saudi government and the Pakistan army, but many of these favorable judgments involve conspiracy theories that my book did not address at all, such as whether the Saudi embassy in Washington aided the September 11 hijackers while they were in the United States. Also, the commissioners saw themselves, as they wrote, “looking backward in order to look forward,” and they may have managed their published criticisms of Riyadh and Islamabad with future American counterterrorism partnerships in mind.

  In any event, it seems too early to radically reinterpret such a recent history, or to reallocate proportions of blame and responsibility. For those of us in Washington and New York, at least, the aftershocks of September 11 still rumble daily. We navigate to work past patrols of body-armored police dispatched by color-coded alert schemes that would seem fantastical even if encountered in science fiction. The pollsters’ fever charts from America, Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia depict an impassioned, sharply divided world in which, among other things, the standing of the United States in popular opinion has plummeted in a very short time. Holding their flag-draped ceremonies in secret, American military transport crews unload dead and wounded in twos and threes from Iraq and Afghanistan. In such a tempestuous present, an examination of the past seems a relative luxury. It is for now far easier for a researcher to explain how and why September 11 happened than it is to explain the aftermath.

  Steve Coll

  Washington D.C.

  August 2004

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  1. The account in this chapter of Schroen’s visit to Kabul, the details of his discussions with Massoud, and the history between them more than five years earlier is drawn from multiple interviews with U.S. government officials and Afghan government officials, including Gary Schroen, May 7 and September 19, 2002, Washington D.C. (SC).

  2. Massoud’s troops raged out of control against Hazaras, an Afghan Shiite group, in the Kabul neighborhood of Karte She in March 1995, committing rapes and looting stores. See “Afghanistan, Crisis of Impunity,” Human Rights Watch, July 2001, p. 22.

  3. CIA Operating Directives are derived from an annual assessment of American intelligence priorities as determined by a special interagency board meeting in Washington. The board’s goal is to ensure that intelligence collection conforms to the priorities of White House foreign and defense policies. Each CIA station receives its own specific O.D. In theory, the performance of a station chief may be judged based on how well he or she recruits agents who can report on the issues listed in the O.D. In practice, CIA station chiefs traditionally have enjoyed substantial autonomy and are not strictly measured against the O.D.

  4. That Afghanistan was assigned to Langley is from an interview with a U.S. government official.

  5. Christopher, during prepared testimony for his confirmation hearings on January 25, 1993, devoted only four out of more than four thousand words to Afghanistan, saying that “restoring peace to Afghanistan” was in America’s interest. Four months later, on May 28, Christopher told a CNN interviewer: “[W]e’re very concerned about the situation in Afghanistan and the fact that it does seem to be a breeding ground for terrorist activities around the world, and I think that we’re going to pay particular attention to that there. Some countries, unfortunately, in some areas of the world … seem to be sponsoring more terrorism as it leeches out with its ugly spokes of the pitchfork into other countries.” According to a Lexis-Nexis search, Christopher did not publicly mention Afghanistan again during his term as Secretary of State except in four passing references, none of which addressed American policies or interests there.

  6. That it was an Ariana Afghan plane: Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. xxvii. For a specific account of the Afghans who greeted him, see Kathy Gannon, Associated Press, July 6, 2002.

  7. Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., pp. 93-94.


  8. Interviews with U.S. government officials. See also “Usama bin Ladin: Islamic Extremist Financier,” publicly released CIA assessment, 1996.

  9. Interviews with U.S. government officials. The unit’s existence has also been described in numerous press reports.

  10. The numbers cited here are from interviews with U.S. government officials, as is the description of the Stinger recovery program. For an early account of the program, see Molly Moore, The Washington Post, March 7, 1994.

  11. The prices and commission system cited are from interviews with U.S. government officials and Pakistani intelligence officials, including an interview with Lt. Gen. Javed Ashraf Qazi (Ret.), who was director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence from 1993 to 1995, May 19, 2002, Rawalpindi, Pakistan (SC). Qazi said the Pakistanis charged the Americans $80,000 per returned missile, which he said is also what ISI had to pay to buy a missile from the Afghans.

  12. The quotations are from interviews with Schroen, May 7 and September 19, 2002, confirmed by Afghan officials involved.

  13. Gannon, Associated Press, July 6, 2002.

  14. Anthony Davis, “How the Taliban Became a Military Force,” in William Maley, ed., Fundamentalism Reborn, p. 68.

  15. Glyn Davies, State Department Regular Briefing, September 27, 1996, Federal Document Clearing House. Davies also said during the briefing that the Taliban had announced “that Afghans can return to Kabul without fear, and that Afghanistan is the common home of all Afghans and we [take] those statements as an indication that the Taliban intends to respect the rights of all Afghans.” When asked about the Taliban’s imposition of strict Islamic law in other areas under their control, Davies responded, “We’ve seen some of the reports that they’ve moved to impose Islamic law in the areas that they control. But at this stage, we’re not reading anything into that. I mean, there’s-on the face of it, nothing objectionable at this stage… . Remember, we don’t have any American officials in Kabul. We haven’t had them since the Soviets left because we’ve judged it too dangerous to maintain a mission there. So what we’re reacting to for the most part are press reports, reports from others who, in fact, have sources there-in other words, second-, third-hand reports.”

  16. Interview with a U.S. government official. The circumstantial evidence of Schroen’s ill-timed trip also seems a powerful indicator that the U.S. intelligence community did not expect Massoud to collapse so quickly. The U.S. ambassador to Islamabad at the time, Tom Simons, said that the embassy did not forecast the fall of Kabul in any of its reporting to Washington. Author’s interview with Tom Simons, August 19, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

  CHAPTER 1: “WE’RE GOING TO DIE HERE”

  1. Associated Press, November 22, 1979.

  2. Associated Press, November 30, 1979.

  3. The detailed account in this chapter of how the attack unfolded, and how embassy personnel responded, is drawn from multiple interviews with U.S. officials, including Lloyd Miller,November 18, 2002, Quantico, Virginia (GW), and Gary Schroen, August 29, 2002, Washington D.C. (SC). The account also draws from interviews given to reporters in Islamabad at the time. Among the latter were multiple eyewitness Associated Press dispatches of November 21 and 22, 1979; Stuart Auerbach’s first-day narrative in The Washington Post, November 22, 1979; and Tom Morganthau, Carol Honsa, and Fred Coleman in Newsweek, December 3, 1979. Marcia Gauger, the only journalist to see the riot unfold from inside the embassy, wrote an account for the December 3, 1979, Time magazine in which she directly contradicted the Carter administration’s claim that the Pakistani government had been instrumental in saving U.S. personnel. The man Gauger was supposed to meet for lunch that day, political counselor Herbert G. Hagerty, later provided a comprehensive reconstruction of the attack in a chapter for the book Embassies Under Siege, edited by Joseph G. Sullivan. See also Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000, pp. 242-45.

  4. Three Western reporters interviewed Jamaat student union officers at Quaid-I-Azam University immediately after the riots. The union officers appeared to accept responsibility for organizing the demonstrations, expressed regret over the loss of life, but adamantly defended their cause. Stuart Auerbach, “Politics and Religion: A Volatile Mix for Zia in Pakistan,” The Washington Post, November 26, 1979. Michael T. Kaufman, “Students in Islamabad See a Growing Islamic Uprising,” The New York Times, November 26, 1979. The most detailed account of Jamaat’s role at the university during this period is in The Economist, December 1, 1979.

  5. For a deep account of the impact of Saudi funding on Jamaat and other similar organizations at major universities in the Islamic world and elsewhere, see Gilles Kepel, Jihad, pp. 61-105.

  6. Associated Press, November 21, 1979.

  7. Alexei Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia, pp. 395-96; Fortune, March 10, 1980; Joshua Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou, pp. 20-21; Newsweek, December 3, 1979.

  8. The Muslim, November 21, 1979. The day’s paper, a special edition, offered some of the first signs that trouble was brewing. Below the first two stories on the front page-“Unidentified Armed Men Occupy Kaba” and “U.S.May Use Force”-was a third story titled “Anger in ‘Pindi.” The story reported that shopkeepers in Rawalpindi shuttered their stores “and came out in the streets in a spontaneous reaction. By midday all shops in the main bazaars and shopping centres were closed and large processions were forming tomarch… . They were shouting anti-Zionist and anti-Imperialist slogans.”

  9. Interview with a U.S. official familiar with the reports.

  10. Interviews with U.S. officials. The CIA later reconstructed a comprehensive account of the Islamabad embassy attack that became the basis of a lecture course in embassy security taught to young case officers.

  11. Associated Press, November 21, 1979.

  12. That the company supplied Grand Mosque blueprints to security forces: Financial Times, August 22, 1998. Osama bin Laden’s father, Mohammed bin Laden, the company’s founder and patriarch, had earlier received a large contract from the Saudi royal family to renovate and extend the Grand Mosque. His company also constructed highways leading to Mecca.

  13. Newsweek, December 3, 1979.

  14. What Prince Turki concluded about the Mecca uprising: “Memorandum of Conversation Between HRH Prince Turki and Senator Bill Bradley,” April 13, 1980, author’s files. Quotations from Tehran: The New York Times, November 23, 1979; The Washington Post, November 23, 1979.

  15. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, distributed November 23, 1979.

  CHAPTER 2: “LENIN TAUGHT US”

  1. Robert G. Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened, pp. 53-56.

  2. The figure of 3,725 military officers trained by the Soviets is from Larry P. Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War, p. 51, and Barnett B. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 71. The figure of twelve thousand political prisoners is from Martin Ewans, Afghanistan, p. 142. Rubin provides detailed accounts of early Afghan communist campaigns to destroy traditional tribal and religious leadership through mass imprisonments and murders.

  3. Svetlana Savranskaya, working paper, “Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War,” October 9, 2001.

  4. Robert Gates estimates “up to 20” Soviet officers killed in his unpublished manuscript, Chapter 11, pp. 36-37. Ewans cites the more typical estimate of “possibly one hundred.” The Soviets never provided a specific accounting.

  5. “Meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” March 17, 1979, transcript of proceedings, originally classified Top Secret, translated and released by the National Security Archive, Washington, D.C. This and other original American and Soviet documents cited in this chapter were first assembled in English as “Toward an International History of the War in Afghanistan, 1979-1989,” a notebook of documents compiled by Christian F. Ostermann and Mirceau Munteanu of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center. The documents were released at a conference organized by Ostermann o
n April 29-30, 2002. Also participating in the project were the Asia Program and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center; the George Washington Cold War Group at George Washington University; and the National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.

  6. Ibid., March 18, 1979.

  7. The original source for this transcript is in “Limited Contingent,” by Boris Gromov, the Soviet general who led the Fortieth Army’s retreat from Afghanistan, published in Russian by Progress, Moscow, 1994. The version here was translated into English and released by the Cold War International History Project, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

  8. The options paper and covering memo are in Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 144. The attitude of officers in the Near East Division is from the author’s interviews.

  9. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 131.

  10. Interviews with multiple officers who served in the Directorate of Operations, and particularly the Near East Division, during this period.

  11. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 144.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War, p. 57. Mohammed Yousaf, a brigadier general in the Afghan bureau of the Pakistani intelligence service, later estimated that massive defections dropped the size of the Afghan army from about 100,000 to about 25,000 men by 1980. Goodson uses similar figures, estimating a collapse from 80,000 to 30,000 men during the same period, primarily due to desertions to the rebels.

  14. “Afghanistan: Prospects for Soviet Intervention,” AMEMBASSY Moscow to SECSTATE, Moscow 13083, released by the Cold War International History Project. The American government’s system of document classification is richly complicated and constantly changing. Generally, “Confidential” is the lowest level of document classification, “Secret” is the next highest, then “Top Secret.” A Top Secret document can be further compartmented by limiting circulation to a short list of readers cleared with a particular temporary code word-this designation is usually called Top Secret/Codeword. The gradations of secrecy persist because they provide a crude system to determine which classes of government employees need to be investigated, supervised, and cleared to read certain classes of secret documents.