Ghost Wars (54 page)

“But that’s extortion!” Simons shot back forcefully. He did not elaborate, but it was clear that he was referring to Zardari, suggesting that her husband would only permit a Unocal deal if he was paid.

The word
extortion
sent Bhutto into a fury. “You cannot say that!” she exclaimed. “You cannot be speaking for your president!”

“Well, maybe it’s not the right word, but . . .”

It was too late. Bhutto told Simons to leave. She ordered one of her advisers to draft a letter to the Clinton administration that night, complaining that the American ambassador had no right to treat Pakistan’s prime minister this way. When Simons got back to the embassy, his phone began to ring from Washington. He drafted his own letter of apology.
19

Simons explained sheepishly to Unocal’s executives that he had not been a great help with Bhutto. Pakistan was not going to endorse Unocal’s deal anytime soon. If Marty Miller was to secure the political agreements he needed, he would have to start finding friends elsewhere—inside Afghanistan.

MILLER FLEW THE UNOCAL JET into Quetta in the late spring of 1996. He and his colleagues checked into a comfortable hotel and began to organize a convoy to Kandahar. They hired a small caravan of Toyota double-cab pickup trucks, the Japanese sport utility vehicle favored by the CIA and its Afghan clients during the anti-Soviet jihad. To accompany himself and several other Unocal executives, Miller hired four drivers and about a dozen Afghan interpreters and guides. They called the Taliban to say they were coming.
20

Miller did not mind admitting that he was scared. He did not know what to expect. The Taliban seemed to follow a lot of bizarre rules, and he had never been to a place like Kandahar. He had worked up a colorful slide show with maps and numbers that showed the benefits of Unocal’s pipeline plans. He had paid to have the slides translated into Pashto and printed up as handouts for the Taliban. He threw the printouts and a few gifts into his truck and embarked on his way across the desert hills from Quetta.

They crossed at Spin Boldak, where the Taliban uprising had begun about eighteen months before. They rolled through the treeless mud-rock hills toward the vineyards east of Kandahar. Miller was shocked by what he saw. After all these years there was still rubble everywhere, the residue of the anti-Soviet war. There was no wire between the telephone poles. In Kandahar there was no running water. Everywhere he looked, it seemed, there was a sign saying STAY AWAY—LANDMINES.

They were directed to a Taliban guest house with no furniture inside. There were some rugs on the floor, and that was it, so Miller and his team rolled out their sleeping bags.

As non-Muslims, they could not meet Mullah Omar, they were told. Other Taliban officials tried to absorb the slide show printouts. Miller talked about the millions of dollars that would flow into Afghanistan. “These are the good things that can come,” he told the Taliban, carefully listing the benefits. He felt that selling these people was like “dangling the carrot in front of the donkey.”

Miller went to a public park in Kandahar one afternoon and saw some Afghan boys playing. He had thought the Taliban had banned ball games, but now it looked as if maybe some games were okay. As possible gifts Miller had stashed in his truck dozens of neon orange soccer balls and Frisbees. They were leftovers from a Unocal marketing campaign in the United States. All the balls and Frisbees were emblazoned with the Unocal logo. He went back to ask his Taliban hosts if it would be okay to hand out his gifts. They said it would be fine, so he returned to the park and distributed them. Soon the dirt park looked like a neon orange pinball machine with dozens of balls in play and Frisbees sailing through the air.

A little later, as he tried to schedule a meeting with the Taliban’s assistant foreign minister, Miller shrugged when the minister wondered aloud about when afternoon prayers would be held. A Taliban member at the back of the room, a Caucasian with a long beard and turban, called out in a pungent New York accent: “I think prayer time is at five o’clock.” Miller looked up, startled.

“Are you an American?”

He was. His adopted Muslim name was Salman. He had grown up in New Jersey with his mother and sister. As a teenager he had struck out for Pakistan to fight with Kashmiri separatists. He ended up in a training camp in Afghanistan, he said, run by a colonel from Pakistani intelligence.

“They found out I was an American, and the ISI colonel flipped out!” Salman later told Charlie Santos, Miller’s business partner on the pipeline deal. Salman said he had been ordered to leave the training camp. He enlisted with the Taliban, who did not seem to mind having an American in their midst. “These guys are so pure, and they’re such good guys,” Salman said.

He asked how the Knicks were doing. Santos felt sorry that he did not have much of a standings update.

Miller had brought along a three-page, nonbinding agreement letter that he wanted the Taliban to sign. It would confirm the Taliban’s willingness to work with Unocal on the pipeline project. The leter outlined only a “preliminary basis for further discussions,” and it said that the pipelines could only go forward with “the establishment of a single, internationally recognized entity” running Afghanistan, a government “authorized to act on behalf of all Afghan parties.”
21

Miller and Santos explained that Unocal wanted to work with all Afghan factions. “But we want to dominate,” one of the Taliban’s negotiators replied.

The Unocal group began to think that maybe the Taliban weren’t the village idiots everyone thought they were. They wanted the pipeline contract, but only on their terms and only if it could be had without any involvement of Ahmed Shah Massoud’s faction in Kabul, or any other Afghan rivals. Time, the Taliban’s negotiators seemed to believe, was on their side.

Marty Miller gave up and drove west to meet with Taliban leaders in Herat. The long road from Kandahar was a potholed rut. Upon arrival the Taliban’s local governor welcomed Miller by looking him in the eye and asking menacingly, “Why don’t you convert to Islam?”

On the long, grinding drive back, Taliban militia forced Miller’s convoy to stay overnight in a tiny mud hut along the highway. There was trouble on the road, and it was too dangerous to go farther in the dark. Other Afghan villagers had gathered at the checkpoint as well. They pressed around Miller, curious. Miller didn’t like the attention, so he climbed back into his truck, lay down on the seat, and strapped his Walkman to his ears, trying to escape into his music. After a few minutes he looked up and saw dozens of Afghan eyes pressed against the truck window, staring at him. He stayed inside his truck cab all night.

The caravan stopped again briefly in Kandahar. The Taliban’s leaders still would not sign Unocal’s cooperation letter. Miller and his team climbed back in their pickups and left for Quetta.
22
When they crossed into Pakistan, Miller climbed out of his truck, kissed the ground, and did a little dance of celebration. There were some places even a Texas wildcatter did not belong.

18

“We Couldn’t Indict Him”

A CIA CASE OFFICER visited Marty Miller regularly at Unocal’s Sugarland, Texas, offices, usually after Miller had returned from a long overseas trip. Miller was not a CIA agent and did not take assignments, money, or instructions from the agency. But like some other American oil executives with access to the Middle East and Central Asia, he voluntarily provided briefings to the CIA’s Houston station. William Casey had revitalized the CIA’s contacts with American businessmen during the 1980s. He thought the agency overvalued its paid sources and missed out on the inside details that international businessmen picked up. Miller told the Houston officer about his negotiations in Turkmenistan and Pakistan, the gossip he overheard about corruption cases, and what he saw and heard when he traveled inside Afghanistan. The briefing sessions were dominated by Miller’s reports, but occasionally the CIA officer would provide some useful detail in exchange. At one stage the CIA became worried about threats to Unocal executives in Central Asia from Iranian intelligence operatives. The agency invited Miller to Langley for a briefing on how to manage his movements to reduce risk. Miller’s impression from his meetings was that the CIA was curious about Unocal’s Afghan pipeline plans but had no special interest in either the project or Afghanistan. In his efforts to win support for Unocal’s pipeline plan within the U.S. government, Miller maintained more active lobbying contacts at the White House and the State Department than at the CIA.
1

By early 1996 the agency was more estranged from its former Afghan and Pakistani contacts than at any time since the Soviet invasion in 1979. The U.S. ambassador in Islamabad, Tom Simons, was startled to find the CIA “had nothing” in Afghanistan. “They had taken out all their assets. They were basically past it.”
2
Stinger missile recovery remained the only well-funded covert action program in the region. The Islamabad station did continue to collect intelligence on regional terrorism. Its officers tracked and mapped Afghan guerrilla training camps that supplied Islamist fighters in Kashmir. They continued to look for Mir Amal Kasi in the tribal territories along the Afghan border. But the liaison between the CIA’s Islamabad station and Pakistani intelligence—the spine of American covert action and intelligence collection in the region for fifteen years—had cracked. Javed Qazi had been replaced as ISI chief by another mainstream general, Naseem Rana, a Punjabi officer with a background in the signals corps. Some of the Americans who dealt with him found Rana a dull-minded time server who was unwilling to go out of his way to help the United States. Pakistani intelligence offered little cooperation in the search for Karachi terrorists who murdered two Americans in 1995. After a raid on the Kasi family home in Quetta turned up nothing because of faulty intelligence supplied by the Americans, ISI essentially shut down its operations on that case. If the CIA developed hard, convincing evidence about Kasi’s location—evidence that Pakistan could confirm—then ISI would assist in his capture, Rana said. But that was about it. Commission payments to ISI for recovered Stingers provided a thin basis for cooperation, but meetings between the CIA and Pakistani intelligence in Rawalpindi were infrequent and desultory compared to the past.
3

Gary Schroen, the longtime CIA Afghan hand who had served two previous tours in Islamabad, arrived as station chief in January 1996. He told colleagues that the Unocal pipeline project was a fool’s errand and that he was not going to pay any attention to it. The pipeline would never be built, Schroen predicted. Besides, the Islamabad station no longer had Afghanistan on its Operating Directive. This bureaucratic designation meant that Schroen and his case officers had no authority to collect intelligence on the Taliban’s strengths, sources of supply, or military prospects. Nor could they develop similar intelligence about Hekmatyar’s militia or Massoud’s Kabul government. The Islamabad station could recruit Afghan agents if they were reporting on terrorism, drugs, or Stinger missiles. But the default assignment of the Afghan account to Langley created occasional confusion within the CIA about how to track the spillover effects of Afghanistan’s civil war.
4

CIA headquarters was distracted by scandal, shrinking budgets, a wave of early retirements, controversies in Congress, and leadership turmoil in the director’s office. Not since the late 1970s had so many career agency officers felt so miserable about the place.

Clinton fired James Woolsey in early 1995, after the Aldrich Ames spy case broke. Ames had worked for Russia inside Langley headquarters for years, and his betrayal had gone undetected. The president struggled to find a successor and finally turned to John Deutch, then deputy secretary of defense, who told Clinton adamantly that he did not want the CIA job. Clinton insisted; there was no one else available who could win confirmation, he said. An MIT-educated chemist who had first come to Washington during the 1960s as a “whiz kid” analyst in Robert McNamara’s Pentagon, Deutch was a large, bearish man with an ample belly. He had the independent, inquiring, self-certain mind of an accomplished scientist. He could be warm, sloppy, and professorial but also caustic, dismissive, and arrogant. He was happy at the Pentagon, where he worked with a friend and mathematician, William Perry. He had watched James Woolsey, whom he regarded as a very able man, fail spectacularly at Langley, and he had no desire to follow him. Yet once persuaded by the president, Deutch decided to hit the CIA with all of the force he could muster. Congress and the press were outraged over the Ames case. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a longtime CIA skeptic, had introduced legislation to abolish the agency and fold its role into other departments. Even the CIA’s supporters could not understand how the clues about Ames’s treachery—his outlandish personal spending, for instance—had been missed. Deutch joined the reformers: He pledged at his confirmation hearing to change the CIA “all the way down to the bare bones.”
5

Deutch openly described himself as “a technical guy, a satellite guy, a SIGINT guy,” referring to “signals intelligence,” or the art of communications intercepts. He used his early budget requests at Langley to direct more money proportionately to other agencies in the intelligence community, such as the National Reconnaissance Office at the Pentagon and the National Security Agency. He thought the CIA’s historical strength was scientific and technical intelligence collection, and he wanted to concentrate on that. He was not impressed with the agency’s human spying operations. He believed that the leadership of the Directorate of Operations had to be reformed. His sense was that the CIA’s spies were just not very good anymore at their core job of agent recruitment and intelligence collection. They had forgotten the basics of espionage. They were not living up to their own professional standards, and he was not afraid to tell them so. “From what I know, the junior officers are waiting for some new direction,” Deutch said publicly. “Now, I may be unhappily surprised.”
6