Art of Betrayal (51 page)

The British had a different view. They saw Massoud as an effective fighter and worked hard at meetings in Washington to persuade the Americans that they should back him – American buy-in, however reluctant, was important since the CIA would actually be funding much of the British support. The fact that the gargantuan CIA programme had left Massoud behind was something of an advantage to the British. He could be their man. It provided an opportunity for Britain to wield some influence and show that it knew best, an attitude the Americans were always aware of. The CIA thought the British popularised Massoud because he was the only contact they had. There was ‘always an underlying prickliness about the come-lately Americans taking the lead in their old backyard', reckoned the Texan Milt Bearden, who ran CIA operations in Afghanistan in the second half of the decade.
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Another senior CIA officer was aware of how the British were always trying to stay in the game. ‘They probably thought they knew more about Afghanistan than we did and they could play Athens to our Rome. There was a certain desire to be involved. They didn't want to be missing out.'
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The ISI meanwhile
ignored the British. Why talk to them when you have the Americans? They thought the British were playing their own game. Like the inhabitants of many former parts of the British Empire, the Pakistanis remained convinced that the conniving British had a devious plan and were playing divide and rule, manipulating everyone else. MI6 was not to be trusted, they thought. That at least left some space in which the British could operate, a chance to play the Great Game.

Stuart Bodman was a British journalist who died in a firefight near Bagram airbase on 1 July 1983. Except he was not and he did not. The confusion was both deliberate and accidental, all part of the world of deniable operations. The Afghan Foreign Ministry held a press conference a few months after he died proclaiming that Bodman was a spy, his work evidence of the ‘shameless interference of imperialist countries' and in particular of ‘the hellish organisation of the intelligence service of England'. He had been identified by the passport and driving licence found by his body, they said. The documents showed he was working for a press agency called Gulf Features Service.

Enterprising Fleet Street reporters tracked Stuart Bodman down two weeks later to a pub near London. ‘The closest I came to spies was when I caddied for Sean Connery at Kingston Hill Golf Club years ago,' explained the thirty-year-old, who worked in a warehouse.
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Records at the Passport Office showed that someone had falsely applied for a ten-year passport under Bodman's name in November 1982. ‘I've never been further than Jersey,' the real Stuart Bodman said.
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Gulf Features had been set up just a few months earlier by a successful, well-respected British industrialist named Sir Edgar Beck. It was rather a strange venture for a man who had a long career behind him in the construction and maintenance of major public buildings in London, including the Foreign Office and Downing Street. He denied all knowledge of Bodman and Afghanistan, saying it was all ‘a complete mystery'. So, no doubt, was the failure of his news agency to publish any stories.
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‘We know absolutely nothing about it,' was the Foreign Office response to inquiries.

Bodman was a British spy, but he was not Bodman and he was not dead. The identity was one of those used by MI6 for the increment soldiers it smuggled into the Panjshir for the same mission as the four men who had travelled in with a guide. The fake Bodman had
spent a few weeks training Massoud's men. As their time came to an end, Massoud turned to the Britons. ‘The Russians know you are here,' he told them. ‘Bodman' and two colleagues had slipped into a vast convoy that smuggled lapis lazuli through Logar to Peshawar in Pakistan. Hundreds of horses carried the motley band of travellers, which included a team of French doctors, one of whose female members a British soldier had taken rather a shine to. At local villages they would stop for water. The Soviet airbase at Bagram was close, but the mujahedeen controlled the countryside. At one point, they came across a group of wandering Afghan nomads who had pitched their own tents. The nomads appeared unusually anxious, the accompanying mujahedeen noticed. Half an hour later, they learnt why.
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It was the dead of night when flares lit up the sky followed by the sound of gunfire. They were on a plain not far from Bagram airbase and bullets whizzed past. Then helicopter gunships roared overhead. No one could see where the Soviets were coming from and the convoy scattered in a thousand directions. Horses were cut down. One of the Britons was half trampled by one of their animals panicking. An Afghan hauled him out. One guide crawled to a nearby river. He could see Russian tanks scouring the landscape and kept his head down until the next morning when he began to walk again. Eventually in the second village he visited, the guide found the British men. Battered and bruised, they resumed their journey, still hunted by the Soviets. Twice more they came close to being ambushed by commandos and changed their route to try and evade their pursuers. ‘It was a very lucky escape for the British,' reckons one of Massoud's lieutenants. They finally made it over the border around two in the morning. Two of the British men, still dressed in Afghan garb, were barely able to walk and were virtually dragged by their guides.

The Russians, who had been tipped off about the route, had failed to capture their main prize. But in the chaos the team had abandoned their equipment including their secure radios, satellite phones and fake documentation. Within two hours, realising that they had a useful haul, the Soviets sent four helicopters from Kabul which took the equipment to Moscow. Some of the documentation was later put on display at a Kabul press conference in October when the Soviets through their Afghan clients decided to publicise the find. Stuart Bodman was dead, they said. In fact his body was that of a Panjshiri
horseman.
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They said he also had with him a video camera and a modern communications unit with a computer encoding system. There was also a diary, they said, which mentioned twenty-five time fuses, twenty-five electric fuses and fifty detonators for the manufacture of mines and bombs as well a list of chemicals and instructions on how to make explosives and where to place them. An explosives specialist named Tom may also have been part of the group, they said.
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The Afghan and Soviet press did their best to expose what the British were up to. ‘A good pay is taken by the hired instructors training Afghan terrorists in Pakistan to carry out acts that are not worthy of gentlemen. One of the instructors … is making remote-controlled high-explosive bombs that are launched on peaceful Afghan villages. It is an open secret that some important highways in Afghanistan have been blown up with British mines.'
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At other times, the Afghans accused the CIA of sending in undercover spies with film cameras from Peshawar.
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The CIA did run a programme which sent non-Americans, often Europeans, into the country posing as journalists on false passports and with communications and filming equipment to report back on what they saw.
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Groups of private individuals and small charities providing medical and humanitarian aid would soon follow the journalists in the pilgrimage to see Massoud which caused some awkwardness for the secret MI6 teams which had to be careful not to run into them.

As well as being able to go into the country, the British were also able to support activities that the CIA could not. The Americans were still struggling under the burden of the Congressional inquiries of the mid-1970s into assassination and covert war. A few of the more wily CIA officers saw a way of getting round their own lawyers and restrictions by bankrolling the British to undertake certain actions. ‘They had a willingness to do jobs I couldn't touch. They basically took care of the “How to Kill People” department,' one CIA officer claimed later in an account of the war. ‘The Brits were eventually able to buy things that we couldn't because it infringed on murder, assassination, and indiscriminate bombings. They could use guns with silencers. We couldn't do that because a silencer immediately implied assassination – and heaven forbid car bombs! No way I could even suggest it, but I could say to the Brits, “Fadallah in Beirut was
really effective last week. They had a car bomb that killed three hundred people.” I gave MI6 stuff in good faith. What they did with it was always their business.'
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British officials involved at the time shy away from American talk of ‘assassination' but say fighters were trained in the use of silencers and sniper rifles as well as in the manufacture and planting of improvised explosive devices to blow up Soviet convoys. Fortunately for the British, these fighters allied to Massoud would be on their side in 2001 and in the battles that followed. This was not the case for those the Americans worked with like Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani who received the bulk of American aid.

For Margaret Thatcher it was all simple. They were freedom fighters not terrorists. Abdul Haq came to visit Downing Street, one of his feet having recently been blown off. He had subsequently admitted to being behind a bomb blast at Kabul airport that killed twenty-eight people. When questioned as to why the Prime Minister refused to meet members of the Palestinian PLO or Nelson Mandela's ANC, a spokesman for the Prime Minister said it was different as the Afghan rebels were fighting a foreign invader.
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‘They were good terrorists so we supported them. The ANC were bad. That caused her no moral problem at all,' explains one of Thatcher's former officials. The Chief of MI6, and his Director of Operations Colin McColl, would occasionally brief the Prime Minister on operations, but contact was sporadic – perhaps a forty-minute meeting every six months. Just as there was little contact on the ground between MI6 and CIA teams in Pakistan, there was relatively little co-ordination at the level of political leaders. MI6 was left to get on with its own business.

The great terror for the mujahedeen remained the Mi-24 Hind gunships which flew out of Bagram airbase and which provided the Soviets with control of the skies. After four years it was clear that the Soviets were hurting, but not enough. They had also begun to use more special forces, their Spetsnaz troops, to carry out commando raids, often dropping on to hills by helicopter. There were those in Washington who wanted to escalate the covert war, to supply more advanced weaponry and to shift from just hurting the Soviets to trying to drive them out. Politicians like Charlie Wilson were pushing the CIA to send more advanced weapons systems, especially surface-to-air missiles, and to up the funding. The first attempt to counter
Soviet advantage in the air was a British-made device which London was keen to deploy. There had been resistance in some quarters to using more advanced weaponry because of a fear that the Western hand in the war would be made all too clear, but resistance in London and Washington was eventually overcome (Thatcher personally pushing it through in London).

The Afghan warriors employing the British-supplied Blowpipe missile quickly saw that their task required something approaching a death-wish. It was a shoulder-fired surface-to-air weapon but a pretty inept one. The user had to launch it while standing directly in front of an attacking aircraft and then guide the missile to the target by manipulating a joystick with his thumb as he stared death in the face, like playing some suicidal video game. The operator would be looking, literally, down the barrel of a gun. The general opinion of British soldiers who had used them in the Falklands was that they were ‘a pile of crap' and they were being phased out in the British army in favour of the new Javelin weapon.
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Still, hundreds were smuggled into Afghanistan via Pakistan. A British team came out to provide the extensive training required. The results, even when tried out on ‘gently descending parachute flares', were miserable. Half of the first batch would not accept the command signal and went astray. After a British expert had flown over and agreed that something was wrong they were all taken back to England to be modified before being returned for action.
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No one is able to recall a single aircraft being shot down using a Blowpipe.
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At one battle, Pakistani officers tried to show the mujahedeen how to fire them and launched thirteen with no hits and with one Pakistani captain and an NCO severely wounded by the unscathed attacking aircraft.
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The British military were mortified by the failure of their kit.

After the Blowpipe the Stinger arrived in Afghanistan. This was an American ‘fire and forget' weapon that locked on to the heat source of an aircraft. In a sign of how much this had become a media war, the mujahedeen fighters given the privilege of firing the first missile were also given a video camera on which to record the event. They came, unsurprisingly, from Hekmatyar's party. The result of their foray into TV journalism was filmic chaos. At three in the afternoon on 25 September 1986, a group of Hind gunships came in to land. As they made their final approach, the words ‘Allahu Akbar'
could be heard repeatedly on the tape as three missiles blazed away. Two hit their target. The picture then shook as people, including the cameraman, jumped up and down in celebration. It then zoomed into the wreckage and on to the grisly image of the corpses. Mujahedeen began cursing and firing shots into a body before a final close-up of one deceased member of the Soviet aircrew barely out of his teens. The video would be shown by the CIA to President Reagan in the White House.
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Massoud received almost none of the Stingers: only eight came his way at the end of the war out of 2,000 provided to the mujahedeen (600 of which were estimated to be still at large in 1996).
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Abdullah Anas and others would occasionally purchase some on the black market from other corrupt Afghan commanders. The missiles certainly boosted morale, but even they were not as effective as sometimes claimed. Only 16 per cent actually hit their targets, according to one official involved at the time.
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Soviet aircraft flew higher, and more of them remained in base for longer, although this also may have been due to a political decision. Journalists kept offering to pay money to see a Stinger being fired and bringing down a Soviet aircraft, but they never got the picture.
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