Art of Betrayal (50 page)

The dusty, dangerous city of Peshawar in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, long the redoubt for spies and adventurers, was home to the leading political figures of the Afghan mujahedeen. The so-called Peshawar seven, who almost without exception despised each other and feuded incessantly, were to be the conduits for the money and weapons coming in. They would then distribute them to their field commanders, who were rooted in local villages and tribes. Six of the seven political leaders were Pashtuns, the tribe which straddled the Pakistan and Afghanistan border and which was closest to Pakistan and its military intelligence agency, the ISI. The ISI chief General Akhtar Abdur Rahman was a Pashtun. Only one leader, Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former law professor at Kabul University, was not Pashtun. He was a Tajik, from the group that made up about a third of the Afghan population. Pakistan was the key to the covert war. The mujahedeen's success relied on the sanctuary and training camps over the border. President Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan had come to power in a military coup and was deeply religious and committed to the operation but also calculating in his approach. ‘The water in Afghanistan must boil at the right temperature,' he told his top brass. Make it too hot and the Soviets might decide to punish Pakistan.
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He wanted control over how the CIA's largesse was distributed and to whom. Everything would be done through the ISI.

With his jet-black hair and eyes, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was a ruthless, violent fundamentalist. When they looked into his eyes the Americans sensed a dislike of them that could not be hidden. Yet he received more of the American money and arms than anyone else. The reason was simple. He was the most aggressive when it came to killing Soviets and he was the favourite of the ISI and Pakistan's
President. The CIA had tried to build their own contacts only from 1978 and so were dependent on the ISI (although MI6 did introduce one man called Abdul Haq who proved highly popular with the Americans and with the media who christened him ‘Hollywood Haq' for his love of the camera).
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Long mule caravans snaked into Afghanistan carrying weapons. At first they were largely small arms of Soviet provenance in order to prevent the programme being traced back to the US. Large quantities from Egypt would be shipped up to Karachi in Pakistan and then trucked up the border by the ISI to be taken across (the mules were so important that the Soviets targeted them and the CIA shipped in more in response).
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It was hardly the most covert operation in the world since it involved thousands of people. The mujahedeen would be trained in and recruited from the massive refugee camps, four near Peshawar and three around Quetta. They would also receive detailed satellite maps of Soviet positions courtesy of the CIA.

When the CIA officers running the programme visited Century House they would always have to hide their surprise at the shabbiness of their cousins' headquarters. Only when promoted to a certain level were the British officers allowed curtains and a desk which even vaguely looked like it was made of wood. Still, the British did their best to keep up the show. Some of the blue-collar CIA officers found the lunches and dinners in the stuffy old gentlemen's clubs and the introductions to tailors during their London visits a touch tiresome. They wanted to talk business. The British officers were forthright in saying they could not contribute any cash. The piggy bank was rather empty. Anything else we could help with? they would ask. Britain was supplying a few weapons and even winter coats from Ministry of Defence stores whose regimental buttons had been removed. How about ammunition? one American asked. In particular there was a need for more .303 ammunition for the old British Lee-Enfield rifle. The weapon had been first introduced in 1895 when Britain was still in Afghanistan the first time round and remained the staple of many a mujahedeen warrior partly because of its reliability. The CIA man explained they had swept the world for more stocks and wondered if the UK had some in reserve since it used to be their standard-issue weapon in Empire days. MI6 duly went away and checked with the Ministry of Defence. They said they had 2.25 million rounds but
since the old rifles were a reserve weapon they could spare only a few thousand. Some bargaining ensued. When the CIA representative passed through town a few months later and checked up on the request, the British proudly said they had rustled up half a million. Thanks, the CIA man said, thinking to himself that the old Empire was not quite what it used to be.
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His shopping list had a requirement to obtain 400 million rounds. The CIA's covert war was to be fought on a previously unimagined scale and no one else could compete when it came to resources. On another occasion, an MI6 officer explained to a CIA counterpart that there were not enough mine detectors to clear a particular route for supplies. ‘How many could you use?' the CIA officer asked. ‘Would ten be too much?' the MI6 man responded. The CIA provided twenty-five. They cost only $300 each.
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The CIA's Afghan programme would eventually become a $700-million-a-year operation, dwarfing the entire budget not just of MI6 but of all Britain's intelligence agencies combined.

At the start of the conflict, Gerry Warner had asked his desk officer, a former soldier, to seek out the best commander to support. ‘I want you to find Napoleon while he is still an artillery colonel,' Warner instructed him. Even though the scale of the American effort vastly overshadowed that of Britain, MI6 was able to do things the Americans could not because of a strict line in the sand drawn in Washington. It had been decreed that there should be no chance of Americans coming face to face with Soviets on the ground. That risked sparking a war, so CIA personnel were banned from going into the country. The British meanwhile were allowed in and out; they also were not locked into the same tight relations with Pakistan that the CIA enjoyed. So they began to seek out their own niche. Warner's desk officer examined reports from the field and intercepted Soviet communications. He looked all over the map, including at some individuals fighting in Helmand, but he kept coming back to one guerrilla leader who was giving the Soviets a bloody nose. Ahmad Shah Massoud's importance lay not just in his fighting skills but in the terrain into which he melted after each attack on the Soviets. The Panjshir Valley, beginning only fifty or so miles north-east of Kabul and running for nearly one hundred miles in all, was Massoud's home. A river wound through the valley with a dusty track and then verdant fields by its side and it was home to about 150,000 people.
The Soviets were pounding the countryside to try and drain support away from the mujahedeen but to no avail. The strategic importance came from its proximity to the Salang highway which snaked its way through the valley. This carried three-quarters of the ground traffic of Soviet supplies heading for Kabul. It offered a perfect target for hit-and-run guerrilla warfare.

The guide greeted four British men in the lobby of a Peshawar hotel. He had been asked by Massoud's brother to take them into the Panjshir. They told him and everyone else they met that they were freelance journalists reporting on the suffering of Afghan civilians. But the guide – who had spent some time in a military academy – noticed that the bearing and manner of the men was more typical of soldiers. They travelled for five days, mainly by night, covering ground quickly accompanied by packhorses carrying their equipment. By day the heat on the plains would be unbearable; at night up in the mountains the cold would penetrate even the thickest layers. The men – despite their training – struggled to keep up with their guide and a succession of stomach bugs slowed them down. Occasionally, they would pass so close to Russian soldiers that they could hear them talking. Sometimes they would be spotted and bullets would fly. They never fought back and simply kept moving. When they at last reached Massoud, their guide quickly realised from their reception and the large bundles of cash he glimpsed that these men were not normal journalists.
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The first British teams which had gone out to meet Massoud under journalistic cover were relieved to find him receptive, partly because he felt short-changed by the CIA–ISI operation. ‘Massoud fought the enemy with empty hands,' argues Abdullah Anas, one of his commanders.
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Massoud complained that the Pakistanis cheated him out of weapons. ‘We get a top layer in each box of what we ordered. Then underneath them, the numbers are made up with old models,' he told a visiting (genuine) British journalist. ‘We pay for our own arms from donations from workers in Kabul, and from money from emeralds. The rest we capture ourselves from the Russians.' He explained to the first British team to arrive that what he needed most was not regular weapons but specialist military training and supplies.

The British men who arrived were soon taken to see Massoud, who drove around in a captured Russian jeep with bullet holes in the
windscreen and his short-wave radio always tuned to the BBC World Service. Massoud would be turned into an almost mythic character, a Che Guevara of the East, an image whose value he understood and which he carefully cultivated. He was from a well-off background and was well educated, having attended the lycée in Kabul where he learnt French. Slim with a wispy beard, he had a cool, quiet, almost feline manner and rarely became angry. He was an adept tactician and had become a student of the great thinkers of guerrilla warfare – including Che and Mao Tse-tung. He was deeply religious, always working closely with the mullahs in what he called a holy war. But he was not as radical as some other commanders like Hekmatyar, with whom a long feud had begun in the 1970s when the latter's men had failed to join Massoud as agreed for an uprising. Massoud barely left the valley for the rest of his life, moving from village to village night by night, usually sleeping beneath a tree or sometimes in a cave. His strength was also his weakness. In his home terrain of the Panjshir, he commanded undivided support and inspired a fierce loyalty; elsewhere he was seen as too rooted in one place and in one ethnic group ever to be a national leader.

The four men who arrived in the Panjshir were part of an annual mission that MI6 had begun organising. The SAS was keen to get involved but it was considered too dangerous for serving British soldiers to travel into the country. If they were captured they would not be deniable. So MI6 built on its existing paramilitary capability – known as the ‘increment' – which consisted of soldiers who had ‘officially' retired but were in fact available for special operations. Soldiers with the right skills would be interviewed in a London hotel and provided with false identity documents and training in intelligence techniques. A team consisting of seven or eight MI6 and increment officers would typically travel into Afghanistan twice a year, heading in through Chitral to the top end of the Panjshir on foot and horseback, dressed in the local shalwar kameez to blend in as far as possible. During their visits they would also teach English to Massoud's aides, such as Abdullah Anas. A secret training base was established in a small, narrow valley in the Panjshir with a large cave. At night, the men would communicate with London through satellite phones. They had brought with them laser binoculars and special sights for weapons. During their two- to three-week stay, the
teams would train the mujahedeen on the use of explosives, sniper rifles, silencers and the manufacture of improvised explosive devices. They would also teach the use of mortars and accompany the Afghans out on attacks to help instruct them on their use.

The secure radios provided by the British team were particularly valuable since they allowed tactical co-ordination of attacks by different groups of fighters without the fear that the Soviets were listening in and preparing an ambush. These were still being used in the late 1990s. One of Massoud's commanders, Muslem Hayat, says that in his area of operations which covered two square miles and three villages, he was able to destroy 100 tanks and armoured vehicles and 400 trucks using improvised explosive devices. He personally laid a thousand devices over the years.
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One substance popular with the Afghans looked like camel dung and if put in the petrol tank of a Soviet vehicle would damage the engine. The flow of weapons was not one way. The conflict provided a unique opportunity for the West to get its hands on the latest Soviet military technology, and MI6 and the CIA were both issued with collection-guidance lists from their defence ministries on what kit was wanted for closer examination. This ranged from small arms like the latest AK-47 assault rifle to the real prizes like the new avionics systems for Soviet helicopters. Both the CIA and MI6 managed to extract helicopters from the battlefield, MI6 taking one out in parts on the back of mules.

Leafy rural Britain as well as the Panjshir was the site of mujahedeen training. Massoud personally selected a small number of educated and reliable fighters who could be sent abroad. Some of these battle-hardened men were taken to the Gulf where perhaps they might be able to blend in. But others were deposited in the rather more unusual surroundings of Scotland and rural Sussex. They were trained at a facility run by a small security company. The locals, who might well wonder who the rather exotic new arrivals might be, were to be told that the company had a contract in the Gulf. Ten to twelve men would be instructed at a time, living in an old barn. ‘They were well armed and ferocious fighters but they lacked battlefield organisation,' recalled one person involved in the training.
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They were tutored in ‘specialist skills' including planning ambushes and attacking aircraft on the ground before being taken
back into Afghanistan via Pakistan where they could get on with killing Russians and coaching their comrades. Many of those who received this training would years later go on to prominent positions in the Afghan parliament and government.

The Americans and the Pakistanis did not buy into Massoud – the Pakistanis because he was a Tajik, not a Pashtun, the Americans because he had called a ceasefire with the Soviets in early 1983 which lasted around a year. In the previous two years he and his 3,000-odd men had fought off six Soviet assaults, including one comprising 15,000 soldiers accompanied by a massive bombing campaign.
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The Soviets feared, admired and hated Massoud at once. His frustrating of their forces had led to his being christened ‘The Lion of the Panjshir'. His ceasefire had been a tactical move to buy some time to regroup as supplies were running low. But the Americans, egged on by the Pakistanis, saw it as an unwillingness to fight. ‘Massoud's biggest interest in life was Massoud. And he was particularly good at it,' argued one CIA chief in Islamabad.
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‘He could have done a lot more than he did.' Massoud's own people were angered by America's aloofness. ‘The Americans wanted to fight the Cold War. He wanted to fight for the Afghans,' declares Abdullah Anas.
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