Ghost Wars (102 page)

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. Good-son,
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 on 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.

15. "Report to the CPSU CC on the Situation in Afghanistan," June 28, 1979, Top Secret, Special Folder. Translated by the Cold War International History Project. The original Russian source was "The Tragedy and Valor of the Afghani" by A. A. Likhovskii, Moscow: GPI "Iskon," 1995.

16. "To the Soviet Ambassador," June 28, 1979, Top Secret, translated by the Cold War International History Project. Kremlin records make clear that Taraki continued to ask for Soviet troops, in disguise if necessary, through the summer of 1979.

17. The date of the finding is from Gates,
From the Shadows,
pp. 143 and 146. Years later Brzezinski would tell an interviewer from
Le
Nouvel Observateur
(January 15 and January 21, 1998, p. 76) that he had "knowingly increased the probability" that the Soviets would intervene in Afghanistan by authorizing the secret aid. Brzezinski implied that he had slyly lured the Soviets into a trap in Afghanistan. But his contemporary memos-particularly those written in the first days after the Soviet invasion-make clear that while Brzezinski was determined to confront the Soviets in Afghanistan through covert action, he was also very worried that the Soviets would prevail. Those early memos show no hint of satisfaction that the Soviets had taken some sort of Afghan bait. Given this evidence and the enormous political and security costs that the invasion imposed on the Carter administration, any claim that Brzezinski lured the Soviets into Afghanistan warrants deep skepticism.

18. The Hughes-Ryan Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, passed into law in 1974, established the need for a formal presidential "finding" for covert action. Several subsequent executive orders and presidential security directives provided for the detailed process by which presidential covert action findings are drafted, approved, and implemented within the executive branch, including at the CIA, which is identified by the law as the primary federal agency for covert action. (If the president wants another U.S. agency to participate in a covert action, this must be spelled out in a finding; otherwise, the CIA is the default agency for such programs.) The provisions of Hughes-Ryan were overtaken in U.S. law by the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal year 1991. This law spells out what had previously been a more informal standard, namely, that covert action must be "necessary to support identifiable foreign policy objectives" and also must be "important to the national security of the United States." For a definitive review of U.S. law governing covert action, see Michael W. Reisman and James E. Baker,
Regulating
Covert Action,
from which these quotes and citations are drawn.

19. Gates,
From the Shadows,
p. 146.

20. "The KGB in Afghanistan," by Vasiliy Mitrokhin, English edition, Working Paper No. 40, Cold War International History Project, introduced and edited by Odd Arne Westad and Christian F. Ostermann, Washington, D.C., February 2002. Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who defected to Great Britain as Soviet communism collapsed, has provided in this paper detailed citations of KGB files and cables relevant to Afghanistan dating back to the early 1960s.

21. This account is drawn in part from recollections by American and Soviet participants in the events who appeared at the conference "Toward an International History of the War in Afghanistan, 1979-1989," in Washington, D.C., April 29-30, 2002. That the KGB planted stories that Amin was a CIA agent is from Mitrokhin, "KGB in Afghanistan," p. 50. The Indian document is from the recollection of a senior officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations at that time. See also "Partners in Time" by Charles G. Cogan,
World Policy Journal,
Summer 1993, p. 76. Cogan ran the Near East Division of the Directorate of Operations beginning in mid-1979. He wrote that the Soviets had "unfounded" suspicions that Amin worked for the CIA because of "Amin's supposed American connections (he had once had some sort of loose association with the Asia Foundation)."

22. Mitrokhin, "KGB in Afghanistan," p. 93.

23. Amstutz offered his recollections at the April 2002 conference. Recollections of the Near East Division officers are from the author's interviews.

24. Account of the Kabul station's priorities and its failure to predict the 1978 coup is from the author's interview with Warren Marik, March 11, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC). Marik served as a CIA case officer in Kabul from late 1977 until early 1980. The general outline of his account was confirmed by other U.S. officials familiar with the Kabul station during those years.

25. "What Are the Soviets Doing in Afghanistan?" memorandum is from Thomas Thornton, assistant to the president for national security, to Zbigniew Brzezinski, September 17, 1979, released by the Cold War International History Project.

26. "Personal Memorandum, Andropov to Brezhnev," in early December 1979, is from notes taken by A. F. Dobrynin and provided to the Norwegian Nobel Institute, translated and released by the Cold War International History Project.

27. Multiple sources cite Politburo records of the tentative decision to invade on November 26, including Goodson,
Afghanistan's
Endless War,
p. 51. The infiltration of Karmal on December 7 and the account of the attempts to poison Amin are from "New Russian Evidence on the Crisis and War in Afghanistan" by Aleksandr A. Lyakhovski, Working Paper No. 41, draft, Cold War International History Project. The KGB assault plans are from Mitrokhin, "KGB in Afghanistan," pp. 96-106.

28. Gates,
From the Shadows,
p. 133.

29. Mitrokhin, "KGB in Afghanistan," p. 106.

30. "Reflections on Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan," memorandum for the president from Zbigniew Brzezinski, December 26, 1979, released by the Cold War International History Project.

31. "Memorandum for the Secretary of State," January 2, 1980, released by the Cold War International History Project.

CHAPTER 3: "GO RAISE HELL"

1. Interviews with Howard Hart, November 12, 2001, November 26, 2001, and November 27, 2001, in Virginia, as well as subsequent telephone and email communications (SC). Abdul Haq was killed by Taliban troops inside Afghanistan in October 2001. He had entered eastern Afghanistan, against the advice of the CIA, in order to stir up opposition to the Taliban in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. That Hart and the CIA maintained a close relationship with Haq until the late 1980s comes not only from Hart but from the author's interviews with several other U.S. officials.

2. Interviews with Hart, November 12, 26, and 27, 2001. His biography is also described in George Crile,
Charlie Wilson's War,
pp. 117-21, also based on interviews with Hart.

3. Interviews with former CIA officials from this period. That George was a post-man's son is from Crile,
Charlie Wilson's War,
p. 62.

4. Lessard's conflict with Hart and the worries he expressed around the time of his death are from interviews with U.S. officials who knew Lessard.

5. Quotes and Hart's point of view are from interviews with Hart, November 12, 26, and 27, 2001.

6. Interviews with U.S. officials familiar with the 1979 presidential findings. See also Steve Coll,
The Washington Post,
July 19 and 20, 1992.

7. Charles G. Cogan, "Partners in Time,"
World Policy Journal,
Summer 1993. Cogan has written that the first Lee Enfield rifles authorized for the mujahedin by Carter's amended finding arrived in Pakistan about ten days after the Soviet invasion. Details of other weapons supplied are from the author's interviews with Hart and other U.S. officials.

8. Martin Ewans,
Afghanistan,
p. 158. The KGB archivist Vasiliy Mitrokhin, in "The KGB in Afghanistan," cites KGB statistics, unavailable to the CIA at the time, showing more than five thousand reported rebel actions in 1981 and almost twice as many the next year. "Using the methods of terror and intimidation and playing on religious and national sentiments, the counterrevolutionaries have a strong influence on a considerable part of the country's population," the Soviet Fortieth Army's headquarters admitted to Moscow in June 1980. See "Excerpt from a report of 40th Army HQ," released by the Cold War International History Project.