Ghost Wars (30 page)

Gorbachev was moving faster now than the CIA could fully absorb.

On December 4, 1987, in a fancy Washington, D.C., bistro called Maison Blanche, Robert Gates, now the acting CIA director, sat down for dinner with his KGB counterpart, Vladimir Kryuchkov, chief of the Soviet spy agency. It was an unprecedented session. They talked about the entire gamut of U.S.-Soviet relations. Kryuchkov was running a productive agent inside the CIA at the time, Aldrich Ames, which may have contributed to a certain smugness perceived by Gates.

On Afghanistan, Kryuchkov assured Gates that the Soviet Union now wanted to get out but needed CIA cooperation to find a political solution. He and other Soviet leaders were fearful about the rise to power in Afghanistan of another fundamentalist Islamic government, a Sunni complement to Shiite Iran. “You seem fully occupied in trying to deal with just one fundamentalist Islamic state,” Kryuchkov told Gates.
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Gorbachev hoped that in exchange for a Soviet withdrawal he could persuade the CIA to cut off aid to its Afghan rebels. Reagan told him in a summit meeting five days later that this was impossible. The next day Gorbachev tried his luck with Vice President George Bush. “If we were to begin to withdraw troops while American aid continued, then this would lead to a bloody war in the country,” Gorbachev pleaded.

Bush consoled him: “We are not in favor of installing an exclusively pro-American regime in Afghanistan. This is not U.S. policy.”
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There was no American policy on Afghan politics at the time, only the de facto promotion of Pakistani goals as carried out by Pakistani intelligence. The CIA forecasted repeatedly during this period that postwar Afghanistan was going to be an awful mess; nobody could prevent that. Let the Pakistanis sort out the regional politics. This was their neighborhood.

Gates joined Shultz, Michael Armacost, Morton Abramowitz, and Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead for a lighthearted luncheon on New Year’s Eve. They joked their way through a serious debate about whether Shevard-nadze meant what he said when he had told Shultz in September that they were getting out. At the table only Gates—reflecting the views of many of his colleagues at the CIA—argued that it would not happen, that no Soviet withdrawal was likely, that Moscow was engaged in a political deception.

The CIA director bet Armacost $25 that the Soviets would not be out of Afghanistan before the end of the Reagan administration. A few months later he paid Armacost the money.
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9

“We Won”

EDMUND MCWILLIAMS was a wiry, dark-haired American foreign service officer, intense, earnest, precise, and serious. He had a reputation as a tough anticommunist, hardworking, and skilled at languages. He had come of age in Rhode Island during the 1960s. His father was a mill worker, and his mother earned modest wages as an aide in a cafeteria. At the height of America’s upheavals over Vietnam he was enrolled at the University of Rhode Island, concentrating in Southeast Asian studies and becoming increasingly involved in conservative causes. Even late in the war he was so certain that his country’s involvement in Vietnam was just that he volunteered for the army, studied Vietnamese for forty-seven weeks, and rotated to Saigon in 1972 as a U.S. Army intelligence officer. He specialized in interrogations of Vietcong and North Vietnamese prisoners, moving between detention centers and extracting and analyzing details about communist battlefield operations, supplies, and strategic plans.When his tour was finished, he joined the diplomatic service. He added Russian to his language portfolio and moved to the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1983; as a political officer he would concentrate on Soviet human rights violations. He traveled extensively in Central Asia, reporting on Soviet repression of nationalism and Islam. He became used to living under continuous KGB surveillance. He studied Dari, moved to Kabul in 1986 at the height of the Afghan war, and was number two in the small and pressured U.S. embassy. With a handful of case officers in the CIA station he drove the wide streets of the Afghan capital, a small camera often placed discreetly on the seat, photographing Soviet military equipment, deployments, troop movements—anything that might be helpful back in Washington. His cables from the embassy provided details about Soviet atrocities, battlefield failures, and political abuses. McWilliams and his embassy colleagues—who were surveilled by KGB and Afghan intelligence officers, prohibited from traveling outside the city, and limited largely to interactions with other diplomats and spies—had become “very much cold warriors,” and “many of us felt it in a very sadistic way. . . . What we were being paid to do was to write, really, propaganda pieces against the Soviets.”
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Early in 1988 there were two big questions at the U.S. embassy in Kabul: Were the Soviets really going to leave? And if they did, what would happen to the Afghan communist government they left behind, presided over by the former secret police chief Najibullah?

Circulating to policy makers in Washington and by diplomatic cable, the CIA’s classified analysis in those weeks made two main points. Gates and the Soviet Division of the Directorate of Intelligence remained doubtful that Gorbachev would actually follow through with a troop withdrawal. And if the Soviet Fortieth Army did leave Afghanistan, Najibullah’s communist government would collapse very quickly. In multiple reports the CIA’s analysts asserted confidently in January and February that the Afghan communists could not possibly hold on to power after the Soviet troops left. Najibullah’s generals, seeking survival, would defect with their equipment to the mujahedin one after another.

McWilliams debated these speculations with European diplomats at receptions and dinners that winter in the grim, snowy capital. McWilliams shared the CIA’s belief that Najibullah was a puppet of Soviet military power and that he could not stand in Afghanistan on his own. But the British and French diplomats he talked with questioned the CIA’s assumptions. There was a great deal of anxiety within the Afghan military and the city’s civilian population about the prospect of a Pakistani-backed Islamic radical government coming to power, especially one led by Hekmatyar. However deprived and battered they were, Afghan civilians in Kabul enjoyed certain privileges they did not wish to surrender. There were ample if unproductive government jobs. Tens of thousands of women worked in offices, arriving each day in rough-cut East European–style skirts and high heels.What would their lives be like under the Islamists? The Afghan people hated Najibullah, but they feared Hekmatyar. What if Najibullah began to negotiate cease-fires with ambitious rebel commanders—perhaps even Massoud? If he preached Afghan nationalism, might not he be able to hang on? What if the Soviets poured billions of dollars of economic aid into Kabul even after their troops evacuated, providing Najibullah with a way to buy off warlords from the mujahedin’s ranks?

That January, McWilliams sat down in his office and tapped out a confidential cable to Washington and Langley about this “nightmare scenario,” emphasizing that it was not the Kabul embassy’s viewpoint but rather a possibility “that some of the old hands in Kabul are beginning to fear could enable the current regime to survive largely intact.” After describing in detail how Najibullah might construct his survival, McWilliams concluded, on behalf of the embassy, “We find this scenario troublingly plausible. It would achieve peace and the withdrawal of Soviet forces at the cost of [Afghan] self-determination.”
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Gates joined Shultz and his top aides at Foggy Bottom on February 19. The CIA’s analysts were united in the belief that post-Soviet Afghanistan “would be messy, with a struggle for power among different mujahedin groups, and that the outcome would most likely be a weak central government and powerful tribal leaders in the countryside.” But as to Najibullah, most of the CIA’s analysts simply did not believe his government could survive without active military support by Soviet forces.

John Whitehead and Morton Abramowitz said they thought the CIA was wrong. Najibullah would start cutting deals with rebel commanders, they predicted, allowing him to stay in power much longer than Langley assumed.

Colin Powell, recently appointed as Reagan’s national security adviser, asked Gates directly: Could Najibullah last, and how long? How good is the Afghan army? Powell worried that the CIA had “very strong assumptions” about these “two givens,” and he wanted them to rethink.
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Under Gates’s supervision the entire American intelligence community reviewed the issues and produced a special National Intelligence Estimate, “USSR: Withdrawal from Afghanistan,” classified Secret. “We judge that the Najibullah regime will not long survive the completion of Soviet withdrawal even with continued Soviet assistance,” the estimate declared. “The regime may fall before withdrawal is complete.”

The replacement government the CIA expected “will be Islamic—possibly strongly fundamentalist, but not as extreme as Iran. . . . We cannot be confident of the new government’s orientation toward the West; at best it will be ambivalent, and at worst it may be actively hostile, especially toward the United States.”
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If Kabul’s next government might be “actively hostile” toward Washington, why didn’t the United States push quickly for political negotiations that could produce a more friendly and stable Afghan regime, as they were being urged to do by Afghan intellectuals and royalists? If Najibullah’s quick collapse was inevitable, as the CIA believed, wasn’t the need for such political mediation more urgent than ever, to help contain Hekmatyar and his international Islamist allies?

But the councils of the American government were by now deeply divided on the most basic questions. Gorbachev’s initiative on Afghanistan had neither been anticipated nor carefully reviewed. Individuals and departments pulled in different directions all at once. The CIA and the State Department were much more focused on Gorbachev and the Soviet Union than on Afghanistan. The entire nuclear and political balance of the Cold War seemed suddenly at stake as 1988 passed. Central Asia’s future did not rank high on the priority list by comparison.

Gates continued to doubt Gorbachev’s intentions. Shultz, isolated in his own cabinet and running out of time, wanted to find a formula for Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan that would ensure the fastest, least complicated Soviet pullout possible, without restricting the ability of the mujahedin to fight their way into Kabul when the Soviets were gone. Trying to negotiate some sort of transitional government in Afghanistan seemed out of the question: It would make the pace of Soviet withdrawal dependent on American success in Afghan politics—a very poor bet.

For its part, the CIA’s Near East Division, led by the Afghan task force director Frank Anderson, began to argue that the CIA’s work in Afghanistan was finished. The agency should just get out of the country when the Soviets did. The covert action had been all about challenging Soviet power and aggression; it would be an error to try to convert the program now into some sort of reconstruction project. There was no way to succeed with such a project, the CIA’s Near East officers argued.

As Bearden put it years later, “Did we really give a shit about the long-term future of Nangarhar? Maybe not. As it turned out, guess what? We didn’t.”
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The CIA’s Near East hands were increasingly annoyed at the State Department diplomats who were now wheedling onto the CIA’s turf at the moment of victory, continually questioning the agency’s assumptions, harping on the Pakistani support for Hekmatyar and the Islamists, and wringing their hands about peace settlements. Where had these pin-striped assholes been when it counted, the grumbling at Langley went, when the CIA had been slogging away amid skepticism that they could ever succeed? What naïve earnestness led State’s diplomats and their allies in Congress to believe that they could unscramble the Afghan war, hold a few conferences in Europe, and welcome the exiled Afghan king back to his Kabul palace, with a brass band playing on the lawn? The Afghans would have to figure things out themselves. The Americans couldn’t help, and it was not in the interests of the United States to try. How much of this thinking within CIA’s Near East Division was carefully considered and how much of it was an emotional rebellion against second-guessing from State and Congress was difficult to measure. They felt they had taken more than ample guff about the most successful covert action program in CIA history. The Soviets were leaving. Enough.

As to Afghan politics, the CIA was content to let Pakistani intelligence take the lead even if it did mean they installed their client Hekmatyar in Kabul. So what? Pakistani hegemony over Afghanistan, whether or not it was achieved through the ideology of political Islam, did not seem to pose any significant threat to American interests, the Near East Division’s officers felt. Besides, if they had qualms about Hekmatyar—and most of them did—they did not see what they could do at this stage to block ISI’s plans. So they moved to help ISI succeed. After consulting with Prince Turki, the CIA and Saudi intelligence both accelerated shipments of weapons to Pakistan, hoping to beat any diplomatic deadlines that might constrict supplies.

The new Pakistani intelligence chief, Hamid Gul, had taken over with fresh plans to push the rebels toward more formal military operations that could put pressure on major Afghan cities. Gul felt his job was “to get the Russians out. I’m not concerned about anything else.” He was not as close personally to Hekmatyar as some of the colonels and brigadiers who had become fixtures in ISI’s Afghan bureau, a bureau where Gul had little experience. Based on military liaison contacts with Gul in Islamabad, the Defense Intelligence Agency produced a biography of the new ISI chief that emphasized his pro-Western attitudes. The sketch of Gul’s character turned out to be almost entirely wrong. A full-faced, fast-talking general who rolled easily through American idioms, Gul could change stripes quickly. From 1987 onward he worked very closely with Prince Turki, Turki’s chief of staff Ahmed Badeeb, and other officers in Saudi intelligence. The Saudis knew Gul as a pious, committed Muslim and provided him with multiple gifts from the Saudi kingdom, including souvenirs from the holy Kaaba in Mecca. Yet his American partners in 1988 believed that Gul was their man. Gul described himself to Bearden as a “moderate Islamist.”
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