Ghost Wars (90 page)

American intelligence and diplomatic reporting documented the Taliban’s weakening grip during 2000. The Taliban’s “popularity and legitimacy now appear to be in decline,” Inderfurth testified to Congress on July 20. “We believe the Taliban have reached their high-water mark.” Yet American policy remained paralyzed over whether to confront the Taliban or engage. Inderfurth described the Clinton administration’s evolving strategy as “two-pronged.” One track put “firm pressure” on the Taliban with threats and economic sanctions; on the other track they sought “to engage the Taliban in a serious dialogue.” Despite the new, promising links forged between Massoud and the moderate royalist Pashtuns, the United States refused to choose sides. “My strong criticism of the Taliban should not be read to imply U.S. recognition for the opposition Northern Alliance led by Ahmed Shah Massoud,” Inderfurth emphasized.
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It was in many ways the same failure of political vision that had shaped American policy toward Afghanistan between 1988 and 1992, under two Republican administrations. Then, as in 2000, the United States refused to commit to an emerging fragile alliance between Massoud and centrist Pashtuns. The effect of this refusal, in both periods, was to cede the field to Pakistan’s extremist clients: Hekmatyar earlier, and the Taliban later.

The CIA’s Near East Division, responsible for Afghan politics, did not regard the emerging anti-Taliban movement among Pashtuns as a serious force. CIA officers dismissed Abdul Haq as an egomaniac and a blowhard. They respected Karzai but saw him as a very small player. As they recruited among anti-Taliban Pashtuns, they struggled to find anyone who could really deliver. Jallaladin Haqqanni, a CIA favorite during the 1980s, pledged firm allegiance to the Taliban. Old warlords like Gul Agha Sherzai did not seem especially motivated or capable. The agency’s case officers revived many Pashtun contacts in search of recruitments but came away skeptical.

Conditioned by past experiences as well as their decades-old liaison with ISI, some Near East officers remained highly doubtful about Massoud even as the Counterterrorist Center–led contacts with him deepened. They did not see much potential, either, in a Massoud-royalist alliance as a basis for military rebellion. U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Bill Milam and the CIA’s Islamabad station chief both “felt Massoud and the Northern Alliance could not govern Afghanistan and that, secondly, they probably couldn’t beat the Taliban anyway,” recalled one American official. The CIA also concluded, as Gary Schroen put it, that “there was no Pashtun opposition. The Pashtuns were totally disorganized, fragmented, disarmed by the Taliban.”
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But this was a view shaped and distorted by Pakistani intelligence. As in the past, by refusing to take a risk and partner more aggressively with Massoud, the United States passively allowed Pakistan’s policy to become its own.

Richard Clarke’s counterterrorism group at the White House, which usually pressed for the most aggressive tactics against bin Laden, opposed a deep military alliance with Massoud during the summer of 2000. Clarke argued that the Northern Alliance was “not a very good group of people to begin with,” as one official involved put it. “They’re drug runners. They’re human rights abusers. They’re an ethnic minority. It’s just not something that you’re going to build a national government around.”
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Without full-fledged U.S. support, Karzai and Massoud took matters into their own hands. Karzai traveled that autumn to the Panjshir with a delegation of royalist Pashtuns. They hoped their meeting would send a signal to wavering Afghans that a new anti-Taliban alliance was in embryo.

In private talks Karzai told Massoud he was ready to slip inside Afghanistan and fight. “Don’t move into Kandahar,” Massoud told him, as Karzai recalled it. “You must go to a place where you can hold your base.” There were too many Arabs around Kandahar. It might be too early to mount a southern rebellion, Massoud warned. Perhaps Karzai should consider operating out of the north until their joint revolt was further developed. Karzai said he would consider that.

“He was very wise,” Karzai recalled. “I was sort of pushy and reckless.”
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Karzai’s friends warned him that if he became too vocal about his opposition to the Taliban, Pakistani intelligence would respond. Karzai still maintained a home in Quetta. His friends reminded him of his father’s fate and of the unsolved murders of Abdul Haq’s family members in Peshawar. Recalled Afrasiab Khattak, a Pashtun nationalist and Pakistani human rights activist who knew Karzai: “I pressed him to leave this country because he would be killed.”
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THE CIA STRUGGLED to maintain its liaison with Massoud. It was difficult and risky for the agency’s officers to reach the Panjshir. The only practical way in was through Dushanbe in Tajikistan. From there the CIA teams usually took one of the few rusting, patched-together Mi-17 transport helicopters the Northern Alliance managed to keep in the air. CIA officers alarmed Langley with the cables describing their travel. On one trip the Taliban scrambled MiG-21 jets in an effort to shoot down Massoud’s helicopter. If they had succeeded, they would have discovered American corpses in the wreckage. Even on the best days the choppers would shake and rattle, and the cabin would fill with the smell of fuel. The overland routes to see Massoud were no better: miles and miles of bone-jarring Afghan mountain ruts snaking along sheer cliffsides.When a Near East Division team drove in from Dushanbe, one of its vehicles flipped and a veteran CIA officer, a former station chief in Cairo, dislocated his shoulder.
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These reports accumulated in Langley on the desk of Deputy Director of Operations James Pavitt, who had overall responsibility for the management of CIA espionage. Pavitt was a blue-eyed, white-haired former case officer and station chief who had served in Europe during the Cold War, including tours in East and West Berlin. He had written speeches for a Democratic congressman as a young man, then served in the White House as a CIA liaison during the first Bush administration. Like Tenet, who had appointed him, he was a spy manager with a feel for politics. Pavitt began to ask why CIA officers were taking such huge physical risks to work with Massoud. Were they getting enough from the liaison to justify the possibility of death or injury? If a CIA officer was killed on one of these trips, Pavitt was the one who would have to visit his widow and explain why it had all mattered so much.Was it likely that Massoud would help capture or kill bin Laden, or were they taking unnecessary chances?

Pavitt’s questions provoked sometimes heated replies from working-level officers in the Counterterrorist Center. The bin Laden unit chief—who had flown in Massoud’s helicopters himself—and the center’s operations chief, known to his colleagues as Hank, passionately argued that the Panjshir liaison had to continue, that the risks were worth it. The liaison with the Northern Alliance was by now producing several hundred CIA intelligence reports each year. It would be cowardly to drop contact with Massoud because of safety concerns, they implied. This was typical uncompromising Manson Family ardor, thought some officials who heard the debates. “There was a lot of concern about engagement in Afghanistan because it was very, very, very risky,” remembered one American official. Those opposed to the CIA’s Panjshir missions argued, as this official recalled, “You’re sending people to their deaths.” Cofer Black, mediating with Pavitt, took a more sympathetic view of Pavitt’s fears. He said he endorsed Pavitt’s worries about the helicopters. Counterterrorist officers were the ones who would die if one of these ungainly machines went down.
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The agency sent out a team of mechanics knowledgeable about Russian helicopters to try to resolve the issue. Massoud’s men took them to their Dushanbe airfield and opened up one of the Mi-17s. The CIA mechanics were stunned: Massoud had managed to patch an engine originally made for a Hind attack helicopter into the bay of the Mi-17 transport. It was a mismatched, gum-and-baling-wire machine, a flying miracle. The CIA mechanics were so appalled that they did not even want Massoud’s pilots to fire up the helicopter’s rotors. They were afraid the whole thing would come apart and send shrapnel flying.

At Langley the debates about risk and reward persisted. Cofer Black continued to worry aloud about the safety question but argued that the Counterterrorist Center had to maintain contact with Massoud to prepare for the day—a virtual certainty, he and the officers in the bin Laden unit said—when al Qaeda pulled off a major attack against the United States. Then the White House would change its policies toward the Taliban, and it would need Massoud. Black was not much for understatement. He told his colleagues that this aspect of the CIA’s Panjshir mission was about “preparing the battlefield for World War Three.”

Tenet signed off on a compromise: The CIA would secretly buy its own airworthy Mi-17 helicopter, maintain it properly in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and use CIA pilots to fly clandestine teams into the Panjshir.

The helicopter issue was a symptom of a larger problem. By the late summer of 2000 the CIA’s liaison with Massoud was fraying on both sides. On the American side, the most passionate believers in Massoud were in the Counterterrorist Center, especially in the bin Laden unit. Officers with the unit who worked out of the Islamabad station were seen by their colleagues as “slightly over the top,” recalled one American official. Massoud’s intelligence network cooperated on collection and planning, but it became increasingly clear that Massoud did not intend to launch a snatch raid against bin Laden.

The CIA’s Counter-Narcotics Center reported that Massoud’s men continued to smuggle large amounts of opium and heroin into Europe. The British reported the same. They could all readily imagine the headlines if their operation was exposed: CIA SUPPORTS AFGHAN DRUG LORD. The Counterterrorist Center’s view of Massoud’s strategic importance to the United States was “not embraced,” recalled one American official involved. “There was much gnashing of teeth and angst and clucking and hand-wringing.”

For their part, Massoud’s aides had hoped their work with the CIA would lead to wider political support in Washington and perhaps military aid. They could see no evidence that this was developing. Instead they were badgered repeatedly about an attack on bin Laden. “We never thought of capturing bin Laden alive in that type of Hollywood operation,” recalled one of Massoud’s intelligence aides. “It was never a consideration for people who knew the real situation in Afghanistan.” The Northern Alliance’s few shaky helicopters could barely clear the mountain passes. They had no air cover. Their forces were not very mobile on the ground. Bin Laden usually was surrounded not only by his own bodyguard but by hundreds if not thousands of Taliban soldiers. One of Massoud’s aides likened the mission urged on them by the CIA to a game of chess in which they would have to capture the king without touching any other piece on the board.
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Massoud and his men respected many of the individual CIA officers they dealt with but increasingly felt frustrated by the agency’s policies and tactics. Massoud’s men asked their CIA counterparts, as this intelligence aide recalled it: “Is there any policy in the government of the American states to help Afghanistan if the people of Afghanistan help you get rid of your most wanted man?” America’s decision to abandon Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal was never far from their minds. But the CIA officers could make no such promise. The most they could say was that bin Laden’s capture “would definitely influence policy in Washington,” creating goodwill toward the Northern Alliance.

This was not enough. Massoud’s men could easily imagine—and discussed among themselves many times—mounting a joint operation with the CIA to assassinate bin Laden by sniper fire, bombing, or a commando raid if this would result in a new American policy recognizing the Northern Alliance. But the CIA was not permitted to engage in that sort of military planning, and the agency had been unable to deliver any change in U.S. policy toward the Afghan war, either.
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“Daring Me

to Kill Them”

BY THE LATE SPRING OF 2000, Richard Clarke and his White House counterterrorism group had grown frustrated by the quality of intelligence reporting on Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. The CIA’s unilateral human sources and its liaisons with Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Massoud had generated volumes of fragmented hearsay but nothing solid enough to warrant missile strikes or a snatch operation. Clarke and his aides brainstormed for new ideas. Could they find a way to place a beacon on one of bin Laden’s aircraft so they could track the plane with bin Laden aboard and shoot it down in flight? Could they erect an enormous phony television tower near the Afghan border and use long-range spy cameras to watch for bin Laden? Clarke and his aides observed Pentagon Special Forces train British and French teams that planned to capture fugitive Balkan war criminals. Could one of these teams be inserted into Afghanistan?

Clarke asked his longtime acquaintance in the national security bureaucracy, Charles Allen, who ran all of the CIA’s intelligence collection efforts, to work with Admiral Scott Fry, head of operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on fresh approaches to the bin Laden problem. Clarke and his aides continued to hope the Pentagon would come up with a plan to use American commandos in Afghanistan. Their detailed tracking maps of bin Laden’s travels from Kandahar to Kabul to the eastern Afghan mountains seemed to offer a way forward. Clarke and the bin Laden unit at CIA felt they had established that it was highly probable, for instance, that bin Laden would return again and again to Tarnak Farm near the Kandahar airport. Wasn’t there a way to put reliable American eyes on that compound, equipped with secure communications that could be linked to missile submarines? Could a Special Forces team be provisioned to lie buried in the sand flats near Tarnak for a few weeks, ready to call in a strike whenever bin Laden turned up? As he pushed for answers, Clarke summoned the direct authority of President Clinton. In February 2000, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger had submitted a long memo to Clinton describing all the ongoing efforts to capture or disrupt bin Laden. Clinton had scribbled his dissatisfaction about the results in the margin. A savvy bureaucrat, Clarke photocopied the president’s scrawl and used it as a cudgel at interagency meetings.
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