Ghost Wars (28 page)

Abdullah Azzam thought some of the cave building and road construction was a waste of money. Bin Laden wanted to spend great sums on a hospital clinic in a remote Afghan border village in Paktia province called Jaji. The crude clinic would be built in a defensible cave, in the same region where bin Laden had been helping to build roads. “Abdullah felt there were twenty-nine or thirty provinces in Afghanistan—why spend so much on one elaborate place right on the border, practically in Pakistan?” recalled one Arab volunteer involved.

But bin Laden’s ambitions were widening: He wanted the Jaji complex so that he could have his own camp for Arab volunteers, a camp where he would be a leader. He opened his first training facility in 1986, modeled on those just over the barren hills run by Pakistani intelligence. Young Arab jihadists would learn how to use assault rifles, explosives, and detonators, and they would listen to lectures about why they had been called to fight. Bin Laden called his first training camp “the Lion’s Den,” by some accounts, “al Ansar” (a name of the earliest followers of the Prophet Mohammed) by others. And despite Abdullah Azzam’s questions, he declared that he was going ahead with his other projects at Jaji.

“
Inshallah
[if it is God’s will], you will know my plans,” bin Laden told his mentor.
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THE ANTI-SOVIET AFGHAN JIHAD was coming to an end, but hardly anyone knew it or understood why. Not bin Laden. Not the CIA.

On November 13, 1986, behind the Kremlin’s ramparts, the Soviet Politburo’s inner circle met in secret at the behest of Mikhail Gorbachev, the opaque, windy, and ambitious reformer who had taken power twenty months before.

Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the Soviet armed forces chief of staff, explained that the Fortieth Army had so far deployed fifty thousand Soviet soldiers to seal the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, “but they are unable to close all channels through which arms are being smuggled.” The pack mules kept coming. Blacktopped roads were now being constructed. There was no sign of a realistic military solution.

“People ask: ‘What are we doing there?’ ” Gorbachev observed. “Will we be there endlessly? Or should we end this war?”

If the Soviet Union did not get out of Afghanistan, “we’ll disgrace ourselves in all our relations,” Gorbachev answered himself. In the presence of the Politburo’s inner circle and his closest advisers on reform, he had been thinking aloud about the Afghan problem since he first took office. He publicly referred to the war as a “bleeding wound” early in 1986. As the Fortieth Army failed to make progress on the ground, Gorbachev became bolder about an alternative: leaving Afghanistan altogether. By November the issue seemed to be mainly one of timing. “The strategic goal is to finish the war in one, maximum two years, and withdraw the troops,” Gorbachev told his colleagues that day. “We have set a clear goal: Help speed up the process so we have a friendly neutral country, and get out of there.”
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It was one of the most significant Politburo discussions of the late Cold War, but the CIA knew nothing about it. The Americans would not learn of Gorbachev’s decision for another year. Analysts at the agency and elsewhere in the American intelligence community understood some of the intense pressures then facing Gorbachev and the Soviet leadership. The Soviet Union’s economy was failing. Its technological achievements lagged badly behind the computerized West. Its people yearned for a more normal, open politics. Some analysts captured some of these pressures in their classified reporting, but on the whole the CIA’s analysts understated the Soviet Union’s internal problems. Policy makers in Reagan’s Cabinet were also slow to grasp the determination of Gorbachev and his reformers to implement meaningful changes. Afghanistan was one litmus test for both sides.

During the earlier debates in Washington about the Afghan jihad, the National Security Council had obtained sensitive intelligence about discussions within the Politburo on Afghanistan. According to this reporting, which was classified at the highest possible level, known then as VEIL, Gorbachev had decided when he first took power in the spring of 1985 that he would give the Soviet Union’s hard-line generals one or two years to win the war outright. This assessment seemed to justify an American escalation in reply. But as it turned out, the VEIL intelligence was just an isolated, even misleading fragment. It may have been accurate when it first surfaced, but by the autumn of 1986 the Politburo policy it described had been overtaken by Gorbachev’s gathering plans to leave Afghanistan.
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The CIA’s analysts understood the pressures buffeting Soviet society better than they understood decision-making at the top. The agency would not learn what was really happening inside the Politburo until after the Soviet Union had dissolved. “Our day-to-day reporting was accurate but limited by our lack of inside information on politics at the top level,” Robert Gates, one of the CIA’s leading Soviet analysts, would concede years later. “We monitored specific events but too often did not draw back to get a broader perspective.”
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This included the basic insight that the Soviet Union was so decayed as to be near collapse. Some of the agency’s analysts were relentlessly skeptical of Gorbachev’s sincerity as a reformer, as were Reagan, his vice president, George Bush, Casey, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, and other key presidential advisers. All evidence that Soviet power might be weakening seemed to be systematically discounted in Washington and at Langley even as the data mounted in plain view. The CIA’s Soviet analysts continued to write reports suggesting that Moscow was a monolithic power advancing from strength to strength, and during Casey’s reign there seemed little penalty for tacking too far to the ideological right. CIA analysis had been at least partially politicized by Casey, in the view of some career officers. Besides, in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, especially in the Soviet/East Europe Division, all the analysts’ working lives, all their programs, budgets, and plans for the future were premised on the existence of a powerful and enduring communist enemy in Moscow. The Reagan administration was bound by a belief in Soviet power and skepticism about Gorbachev’s reforms.

At the same time that Gorbachev was deciding secretly to initiate a withdrawal of his battered forces from Afghanistan, the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence circulated a report that the Afghan war “has not been a substantial drain on the Soviet economy” and that Moscow “shows continued willingness to incur whatever burden is necessary.” At the CIA station in Islamabad “it still looked as though the war might just go on indefinitely or that the Soviets might even be on the verge of winning it.”
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Gorbachev summoned his Afghan client, President Najibullah, to Moscow on a Friday in early December 1986. A medical student at Kabul University in the same years that Hekmatyar studied engineering there, Najibullah was a more plausible Afghan nationalist than some of the KGB’s previous selections. He was a Ghilzai Pashtun with roots in eastern Afghanistan, and his wife hailed from tribal families with royal connections. Najibullah exuded confidence and spoke effectively. His main liability as a national leader was that the great majority of his countrymen considered him a mass murderer.

Gorbachev privately told Najibullah to try to strengthen his political position in Afghanistan in anticipation of a total withdrawal of Soviet forces within eighteen months to two years.
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As he tried to initiate quiet diplomatic talks to create ground for a withdrawal, Gorbachev seemed genuinely stunned to discover that the Americans didn’t seem to want to negotiate about Afghanistan or the future of Central Asia at all. They remained devoted to their militaristic jihad, and they did not appear to take the possibility of a Soviet withdrawal at all seriously. At times it made Gorbachev furious. “The U.S. has set for itself the goal of disrupting a settlement in Afghanistan by any means,” he told his inner circle.What were his options? Gorbachev wanted to end Soviet involvement. He doubted the Afghans could handle the war on their own, but in any settlement he wanted to preserve Soviet power and prestige. “A million of our soldiers went through Afghanistan,” he observed. “And we will not be able to explain to our people why we did not complete it. We suffered such heavy losses! And what for?”
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ON DECEMBER 15, 1986, the Monday following Gorbachev’s secret meeting with Najibullah, Bill Casey arrived at CIA headquarters to prepare for the upcoming Senate testimony about the Iran-Contra scandal. Just after ten o’clock, as the CIA physician took his blood pressure in his office, Casey’s right arm and leg began to jerk violently. The doctor held him in his chair.

“What’s happening to me?” Casey asked helplessly.

“I’m not sure,” the doctor said. An ambulance rushed him to Georgetown Hospital. The seizures continued. A CAT scan showed a mass on the left side of the brain.

Casey never recovered. His deputy Robert Gates visited him in his hospital room a month later. “Time for me to get out of the way,” the CIA director said. The next morning Gates returned with Attorney General Edwin Meese and White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan, a silver-haired former Wall Street executive.

Casey had tears in his eyes and could barely speak. Regan tried to ask him about the future of the CIA. “All I got was more ‘argh, argh, argh,’ ” Regan recalled. Casey’s wife, Sophia, interpreted: “Bill, what you mean is ‘Get the best man you can,’ right?”

Regan jumped in. “Bill, what you’re saying is you want us to replace you, right?” Casey made more noises. “That’s very generous and probably in everybody’s best interest,” Regan said. Then Casey’s tears flowed again. “I gripped his hand. It was done,” Regan recalled. “But there had been no real communication.”
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Casey had served as CIA director for six years and one day. Four months later, at his estate on Long Island, he died at age seventy-four.

AS THE YEAR TURNED, Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf, the ISI Afghan operations chief who had been one of Casey’s most enthusiastic admirers, planned for new cross-border attacks inside Soviet territory—missions that Yousaf said he had heard Casey endorse.

In April 1987 as the snows melted, three ISI-equipped teams secretly crossed the Amu Darya into Soviet Central Asia. The first team launched a rocket strike against an airfield near Termez in Uzbekistan. The second, a band of about twenty rebels equipped with rocket-propelled grenades and antitank mines, had been instructed by ISI to set up violent ambushes along a border road. They destroyed several Soviet vehicles. A third team hit a factory site more than ten miles inside the Soviet Union with a barrage of about thirty 107-millimeter high-explosive and incendiary rockets. The attacks took place at a time when the CIA was circulating satellite photographs in Washington showing riots on the streets of Alma-Ata, a Soviet Central Asian capital.
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A few days later Bearden’s secure phone rang in the Islamabad station. Clair George, then chief of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, was on the line, and his voice was formal, measured.

“I want you to think very carefully before you answer the question I am about to ask,” he said. “Were you in any way involved in an attack on an industrial site deep inside the Soviet Union . . . in Uzbekistan . . . anytime in the last month?”

“If anything like that is going on, we’re not involved here,” Bearden said, equally careful.

He knew that American law prohibited his involvement in such operations; they went far beyond the scope of the CIA’s authority. Iran-Contra and its related inquiries were now in full tilt. The agency was under political fire as it had not been since the 1970s. There were lawyers crawling all over the Directorate of Operations. Bearden and Clair, confronting similar dilemmas in the past, had long taken the view that once the CIA supplied weapons to Pakistani intelligence, it lost all title of ownership and therefore all legal responsibility for the weapons’ use. “We stand by our position that once the stuff is delivered to the Paks, we lose all control over it,” Bearden said.

The Soviets were fed up with the attacks on their own soil. As they counted their dead in Central Asia that April, they dispatched messengers with stark warnings to Islamabad and Washington. They threatened “the security and integrity of Pakistan,” a euphemism for an invasion. The Americans assured Moscow that they had never sanctioned any military attacks by the mujahedin on Soviet soil. From army headquarters in Islamabad, Zia sent word to Yousaf that he had to pull back his teams. Yousaf pointed out that this might be difficult because none of his Afghan commandos had radios. But his superiors in ISI called every day to badger him: Stop the attacks.

Bearden called Yousaf for good measure. “Please don’t start a third world war,” he told him.
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The attacks ended. They were Casey’s last hurrah.

THAT SAME MONTH, freed from the winter snows, Soviet forces in Afghanistan moved east again, attacking the mountain passes near Khost. On April 17, 1987, Soviet helicopters and bomber jets hit Osama bin Laden’s new fortified compound at Jaji, an assemblage of small crevices and caves dug into rocky hills above the border village.

The battle lasted for about a week. Bin Laden and fifty Arab volunteers faced two hundred Russian troops, including elite Spetsnaz. The Arab volunteers took casualties but held out under intense fire for several days. More than a dozen of bin Laden’s comrades were killed, and bin Laden himself apparently suffered a foot wound. He also reportedly required insulin injections and had to lie down periodically during the fighting. Eventually he and the other survivors concluded that they could not defend their position any longer, and they withdrew.
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Chronicled daily at the time by several Arab journalists who observed the fighting from a mile or two away, the battle of Jaji marked the birth of Osama bin Laden’s public reputation as a warrior among Arab jihadists. When Winston Churchill recounted an 1897 battle he fought with the British army not far from the Khyber Pass, he remarked that there was no more thrilling sensation than being shot at and missed. Bin Laden apparently had a similar experience. After Jaji he began a media campaign designed to publicize the brave fight waged by Arab volunteers who stood their ground against a superpower. In interviews and speeches around Peshawar and back home in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden sought to recruit new fighters to his cause and to chronicle his own role as a military leader. He also began to expound on expansive new goals for the jihad.