Art of Betrayal (52 page)

Towards the end of the war, there was an element of theatre to proceedings, a sense that much of it was being played out for the now extensive audience of visiting journalists. Massoud was a master of the media. He understood its value. His soldiers also grew used to the presence of journalists. When the cameras came out, they would immediately strike a pose. The only way into the country was under the protection of a particular commander, so media accounts almost always tended to fête their protector. Massoud was widely glamorised even though he could be as brutal as any commander. Hacks paid for mujahedeen to attack a particular Russian post so that they could film it. There was talk that some had offered $10,000 for a picture of the execution of a Russian soldier. The Pakistanis had always been very adept at the theatrics. The performances had been well rehearsed for visiting dignitaries from Washington, including Congressmen like Charlie Wilson (who at one point introduced his latest girlfriend, who was called Snowflake, to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an unlikely meeting if ever there was one).
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When the custom-fitted, unmarked and blacked-out Starlifter aircraft pulled up at Islamabad airport it meant that the CIA Director,
Bill Casey, had travelled out to see the show. When Casey paid his first visit to the country he was made to believe he was being driven by jeep into Afghanistan. In fact that was considered far too dangerous and he was actually taken to a fake training camp in Pakistan. He cried tears of joy at the sight of so many willing warriors. Eventually he would be allowed to see a real camp.
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The mumbling Casey, who had fought with the CIA's forerunner the OSS during the Second World War, was in many ways a throwback to the CIA of Frank Wisner and the early Cold War. He did not care much for intelligence analysis or Congressional oversight. He wanted the CIA to be a tool to wage a clandestine war against the Soviet Union. President Reagan's strategy was to pressure the Soviets on all fronts and all around the world, whether in Central America or Central Asia. It was the 1980s version of that old Cold War notion of rollback. Part of the idea was propaganda. The Soviets were worried about the spread of radical Islam in these years. The Americans were not. Ten thousand Korans were printed and distributed in Central Asia, religion being used to undermine the godless Soviets.
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Casey also wanted to take mujahedeen operations into the Soviet Union itself, a step further than even the Albania operation of the early 1950s. He wanted to have strategic bridges and roads blown up to impede the movement of Soviet supplies into Afghanistan. This did happen, although the CIA always denied that it had authorised the attacks and said that the mujahedeen had acted on their own or with Pakistani support.

The ISI sent its own men undercover into Afghanistan to act as advisers and eyes and ears. Two-man teams would go in for three months, growing thick beards to blend in. They were told to deny any connection to the Pakistani government and to avoid being captured alive. The ISI's head of Afghan operations, Mohammad Yousaf, was explicit about the training provided for sabotage and assassination, including how to spot Soviet officers in order to kill them. ‘These attacks could range from a knife between the shoulder blades of a Soviet soldier shopping in the bazaar to the placing of a briefcase bomb in a senior official's office.'
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The attacks became more aggressive and less clearly military, more what most would call terrorism. A bomb under a dining table at Kabul University in late 1983 killed nine Soviets including a female professor. ‘Educational
institutions were considered fair game as the staff were all Communists indoctrinating their students with Marxist dogma,' according to Yousaf. Shots were fired at a Soviet cinema; remote-controlled car bombs began to go off; rockets were lobbed into Kabul killing civilians. Boats carrying supplies towards Afghanistan were also targeted. ‘We required limpet mines that a small recce boat or a swimmer could carry, which could be clamped to the side of the boat just below the water line,' Yousaf recalled later. ‘For these we turned to the British, via MI6. They obliged and it was the UK's small but effective contribution to destroying a number of loaded barges on the Soviet side of the Amu throughout 1986.'
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CIA officials supplied electronic timers, plastic explosives and other items which could have military uses but which could also be deployed against civilians. They told the ISI never to use words like sabotage or assassination when Congressmen came through. No one wanted an inquiry.
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Moscow began to issue warnings, hinting that it would strike training camps in Pakistan. The water was getting too hot and the temperature was soon turned down a notch.

The CIA chief in Islamabad, Milt Bearden, and his ISI counterpart, Brigadier Yousaf, increasingly began to argue as the decade came to a close. The ISI man had an abiding distrust of the Americans, a distaste for the fact that Yankee money was funding his jihad and tried to assert control, which Bearden resisted. The Americans began to perceive risks in their reliance on the Pakistanis and tried to go around the ISI's back to build their own relations with commanders. They engaged sources to provide reports on what weaponry was reaching the front line and find out whether the Pakistanis were actually passing on all the material they claimed (the CIA reckoned at least a third of the weaponry was siphoned off by the ISI for other projects). The CIA also tried building relations with Massoud, although officers did not see him face to face, instead working through intermediaries. One officer assigned to work with Massoud learnt that Hekmatyar had put word out to have him (the American) killed.
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In Moscow, a few in the Soviet leadership realised early on that they were not going to win the war in a conventional sense. But there were always voices calling for more troops and tougher tactics and there was an unwillingness early in the 1980s to accept that the
intervention had become a war which was now being lost. As the decade stretched on and the coffins returned home and the mothers of the soldiers began to protest, the conflict increasingly became the Soviets' Vietnam. The leadership struggled to find a way to extricate itself from a war which sapped morale and underscored the decay of hardline Communist power and policy. Thatcher could see by the second half of the 1980s that Gorbachev was looking for a way to disengage from Afghanistan. He told her it would be easier to find a solution if she stopped supplying the rebels with weapons.
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But Britain and the US did not stop. They were determined to drive home the advantage, to keep the pressure on the Soviet Union. They continued even after the Geneva accords were signed in 1988 when it became clear that the war-weary Soviets were pulling out.

As the end of the war approached, CIA and MI6 officers in Pakistan increasingly argued about what – and who – would come next. Senior Americans remained opposed to Massoud, the British supportive. When the dangers of backing certain commanders like Hekmatyar were explained by a British officer to visiting American Congressmen, a message came back from Downing Street through headquarters and out to the field: ‘Don't rock the boat.' The British pushed for working with the UN to try and forge a political compromise between the different factions. A few in Washington agreed, but the CIA was determined to keep going. Milt Bearden pointed out that the British had lost two wars in Afghanistan already.

Soviet soldiers finally marched out of Afghanistan on 15 February 1989. General Boris Gromov was the last to leave, solemnly walking across the Friendship Bridge that connected the two countries. Fourteen thousand of his comrades had been killed in the preceding years. Perhaps a million, perhaps two million Afghans had died. No one had counted. Some 300,000 to 400,000 had been armed over the decade.
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Milt Bearden sent a high-priority ‘Immediate' cable back to Langley. Subject: ‘Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan'. The content of the message was a page which spelt out the words ‘We won' in Xs across an entire page. For the first time Bearden switched off the light in his office, which he had previously kept on every night to make the Soviets across the road think he never stopped working.
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‘Vietnam avenged,' one person remembers Bearden saying with his fist in the air.

They had won. But had their Afghan allies won? No institutions had been built. That had never been the point of the war in Western eyes. And the Soviets might have gone, but their Communist government was still in place and would last until 1992, much longer than many expected. An attempt by the mujahedeen to take Jalalabad in a frontal assault failed dismally. ISI figures like Mohammad Yousaf became bitter and suspicious, believing that the Americans were trying both to sabotage Pakistan's interests and to spread disunity among the Peshawar seven, though they hardly needed American help for that.
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Without American largesse to keep them on board, old feuds among the Peshawar seven predictably bubbled back up to the surface. Massoud and Hekmatyar squared off for a fight. For all his tactical skill, Massoud lacked the ability to transcend his narrow position. The Americans had lost interest in Afghanistan after 1989 and walked away. Job done. Having been swept up in the superpower conflict like many other parts of the world, Afghanistan was suddenly dropped to earth with a jolt. But, uniquely, the country would have its revenge for being jilted so swiftly.

Afghanistan fell off the requirement list for MI6 set by the Joint Intelligence Committee in Whitehall once the Soviets had left. In the new budget climate, that meant that even if someone told an MI6 officer something interesting or important about the country the officer would worry that pursuing a lead when there was no requirement would get them into trouble. Relationships atrophied. Just enough was done to keep contact with Massoud on life support. The CIA shut down its Afghan programme in 1992. Massoud was angry that the Americans had simply walked away. In later years when Afghanistan suddenly became important again, relationships would have to be rebuilt, often with money instead of trust. That would lead to the old familiar faces re-emerging, now as warlords, the kaleidoscope of allegiances shaken up only a little.

The war left a dark legacy not just in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan that would shape the country's path. There were the millions of Afghan refugees who came to Pakistan and stayed, along with their guns. There was the power of the military in society and of the ISI within the military. The US had turned a blind eye to Pakistan's acquisition of nuclear weapons during the years of their joint jihad.
CIA analysts who had criticised the policy of ignoring the sprawling black-market network in nuclear know-how run by Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan found their careers suddenly taking a sharp turn south.
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But then as soon as the war in Afghanistan was won, the US decided it did not need Pakistan any more. In 1990 long-deferred sanctions were imposed on Islamabad's nuclear programme. The Pakistanis were left high and dry. They would never trust the Americans again.

Pakistan also had to deal with a culture of jihad that had taken deep root in parts of the country. Saudi money, which matched CIA funding, helped build radical madrasas which offered free education for the poor but led to many young people coming out the other end enthused with the notion of jihad. That might be fine when it was jihad against the Soviets. It would become more problematic later. The Saudis had encouraged their own jihadists to head for Afghanistan, where they joined a small army of other volunteers or jihadists from across the Arab world and North Africa. Clustered around two of the Peshawar seven, Haqqani and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the 4,000-odd Arabs did not do much fighting. But when the war was over they looked for ways and means to continue their jihad. Some found an outlet in a new front in Kashmir promoted by the ISI. The Pakistani spy service had become adept at training in the techniques most would call terrorism and passed these skills on to a new generation of jihadists eager to fight against India. Other Arab jihadists looked further afield for an enemy.

Afghanistan would soon become the sanctuary for those who sought to attack the West. When the Communist government in Kabul fell in 1992, Hekmatyar and Massoud battled each other and Kabul was shelled to pieces and consumed in an orgy of rape and murder. The anarchy that resulted opened the way for a new force to emerge backed by Pakistan and the ISI in the form of the Taliban. These Muslim fundamentalists promised order and purity out of chaos and swept to power in Kabul in 1996. At the same time as the Taliban emerged triumphant, the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden flew in on a small plane from Sudan, returning to the country in which he had fought in the 1980s. Training camps drew in recruits from around the world, some run by old mujahedeen commanders from the 1980s with ISI trainers still offering free tuition, others
closer to bin Laden specialised in recruiting for operations abroad. The only significant region which did not fall to the Taliban was the Panjshir Valley and the north where Massoud held firm. In Peshawar, one of Massoud's brothers and closest aides met with his contact from MI6. ‘We were right,' the British officer told him with a touch of smugness, thinking no doubt more of the arguments with the Americans than the fate of Afghanistan. ‘Hekmatyar failed and Massoud succeeded.'
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The CIA had largely disengaged from the country. Its main operation was trying to buy back and recover its Stinger missiles. As it became clear that bin Laden was targeting the US, especially after the deadly 1998 attacks on its embassies in Africa, the CIA tried to rebuild its relationship with Massoud to get to bin Laden, hoping to reactivate the contacts it had developed at the end of the 1980s. Massoud was curious but wary. His sanctuary was being squeezed by the Taliban, but he could see little benefit in acting as the proxy for an agency which cared only about getting bin Laden. In the end, he was offered cash but no military assistance.