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by
Steve Coll
The building contractor who had originally reconstructed the mosque for the Saudi royal family reportedly supplied blueprints that helped security forces in this final phase of the battle. The Bin Laden Brothers for Contracting and Industry were, after all, one of the kingdom’s most loyal and prosperous private companies.
He hoped the Soviets could be punished for invading Afghanistan, that they could be tied down and bloodied the way the United States had been in Vietnam. Yet he feared the Soviets would crush the Afghans mercilessly, just as they had crushed the Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechs in 1968.
“Our ultimate goal is the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan,” Brzezinski wrote in a Top Secret memo a week later. “Even if this is not attainable, we should make Soviet involvement as costly as possible.”31
In any event, policy makers back in Washington did not believe the Soviets could be defeated militarily by the rebels. The CIA’s mission was spelled out in an amended Top Secret presidential finding signed by President Carter in late December 1979 and reauthorized by President Reagan in 1981. The finding permitted the CIA to ship weapons secretly to the mujahedin. The document used the word harassment to describe the CIA’s goals against Soviet forces. The CIA’s covert action was to raise the costs of Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. It might also deter the Soviets from undertaking other
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Interesting parallel to today
Langley’s D.O. leaders did not want to organize exiled Afghan political parties on Pakistani soil. They did not want to build a provisional anticommunist Afghan government. They did not even like to help choose winners and losers among the jihad’s guerrilla leaders. Let the Pakistanis fuss over Afghan politics to the extent that it was necessary at all.
The nation had been created in Islam’s name, yet it lacked confidence about its identity. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder, belonged to a movement of secular, urban Muslim intellectuals. They saw Islam as a source of culture but not as a proselytizing faith or a basis of political order. Jinnah attempted to construct for Pakistan a secular democratic constitution tinted with Islamic values. But he died while the nation was young, and his successors failed to overcome Pakistan’s obstacles: divided territory, a weak middle class, plural ethnic traditions, an unruly western border facing
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Zia sought and obtained political control over the CIA’s weapons and money. He insisted that every gun and dollar allocated for the mujahedin pass through Pakistani hands. He would decide which Afghan guerrillas benefited. He did not want Langley setting up its own Afghan kingmaking operation on Pakistani soil.
Tens of millions of dollars in arms deals annually cemented a growing secret anti-Soviet collaboration between the CIA and Chinese intelligence. (The Chinese communists had broken with the Soviet communists during the early 1960s and were now mortal rivals.
Hart wanted the CIA’s supplies to reach Afghan commanders who would fight the Soviets hard, whatever their religious outlook. “Have you ever met anyone who could unite them all?”
The Saudi intelligence service—along with Saudi charities whose funds the spy agency sometimes directed—was becoming ISI’s most generous patron, even more so than the CIA.
It was the debut of a strategy employed by the Saudi royal family throughout the twentieth century: Threatened by Islamic radicalism, they embraced it, hoping to retain control. The al-Sauds’ claims to power on the Arabian peninsula were weak and grew largely from conquests made by allied jihadists. They now ruled the holiest shrines in worldwide Islam. There seemed to them no plausible politics but strict official religiosity. Many among the royal family were themselves true believers. Theirs was, after all, the only modern nationstate created by jihad.7
The Saudi spy service’s murky mix of alliance and rivalry with the kingdom’s Islamic ulama (scholars of Islamic law) became a defining feature of the Afghan jihad as it swelled during the 1980s.
Middle-class, pious Saudis flush with oil wealth embraced the Afghan cause as American churchgoers might respond to an African famine or a Turkish earthquake.
Even more ambiguous than the money trail was the legion of Saudis flocking to join or support the Afghan jihad. It was rarely clear who was acting as a formal agent of the kingdom’s intelligence service and who was acting as an independent religious volunteer. To the Pakistani generals and American intelligence officers who came to know of him, no Saudi more embodied that mystery than Ahmed Badeeb’s former pupil from Jedda, Osama bin Laden.
Osama never slipped into the jetstream that carried his half-brothers and half-sisters to Geneva and London and Aspen. Instead he enrolled in Jedda’s King Abdul Aziz University, a prestigious school by Saudi standards but one isolated from world affairs and populated by Islamist professors from Egypt and Jordan—some of them members of the Muslim Brotherhood or connected to its underground proselytizing networks.
it seems clear that bin Laden did have a substantial relationship with Saudi intelligence.
More than any other American, it was Casey who welded the alliance among the CIA, Saudi intelligence, and Zia’s army. As his Muslim allies did, Casey saw the Afghan jihad not merely as statecraft, but as an important front in a worldwide struggle between communist atheism and God’s community of believers.
The Soviets were pursuing a strategy of “creeping imperialism,” and they had two specific targets: “the isthmus between North and South America” and “the oil fields of the Middle East, which are the lifeline of the Western alliance.” The latter target explained the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Casey believed.15
The Soviets were pursuing their aims in the Islamic world by recruiting “young revolutionaries” who would change their nation’s education systems in order to “uproot and ultimately change the traditional elements of society,” Ames said, as Casey recalled it. “This meant undermining the influence of religion and taking the young away from their parents for education by the state.” Religious education such as Casey himself had enjoyed could counter this Soviet tactic—whether the education was in Islamic or Christian beliefs. Because the Soviets saw all religious faith as an obstacle, they
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Casey knew that the Soviet economy depended on hard currency revenue from oil exports. He urged the Saudis to use their power in the oil markets to moderate prices and deprive the Soviets of any OPEC-generated windfalls. Of course, lower oil prices would aid the American economy, too. The Saudis understood their leverage over both the Soviets and the Americans, and they traded oil favors with a merchant’s cold eye.18
Casey was rewriting his own presidential authority. “Restoring independence to Afghanistan” was not a goal spelled out for CIA covert action in the January 1980 presidential finding renewed by President Reagan. Nor was it a possibility deemed plausible by many of Casey’s own Soviet analysts. No longer would the CIA be content to tie the Soviets down, Casey was saying. They were going to drive them out.
Beginning in the late 1970s, the CIA’s covert action staff had produced proposals for secret publishing and propaganda efforts targeting Muslims living in Soviet Central Asia as well as Ukrainians. Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was among the most passionate advocates for a covert American program to stir up nationalism in the Soviet Union’s non-Russian border republics. But the State Department balked at the plans. Fomenting rebellion inside the Soviet Union could provoke unpredictable retaliation by Moscow, even including attempts to launch attacks inside the United
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Fear of such a public relations catastrophe, or worse, persuaded many analysts at Langley and at the State Department that ISI’s guerrilla attacks on Soviet soil were reckless.
The north of Afghanistan lay separated from Pakistan by steep mountain ranges, snow-clogged passes, and large Soviet deployments, and was populated by Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen, and adherents of Islam’s minority Shia faith. The mujahedin commanders operating along the Soviet border had few connections to ISI’s Pashto-speaking colonels and brigadiers who were handing out the big bags of money and guns in Peshawar. For the Soviets, too, the north of Afghanistan was exceptionally important. The region possessed natural gas resources, vital roads, and ethnic populations whose clans spilled into
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For centuries religious faith in Afghanistan had reflected the country’s political geography: It was diverse, decentralized, and rooted in local personalities.
Across a hundred years all these events created new strains of xenophobia in Afghanistan and revived Islam as a national political and war-fighting doctrine. Still, even the country’s most radical Islamists did not contemplate a war of civilizations or the proclamation of jihad in distant lands.
It was during the 1960s, and then largely in the city of Kabul—on its treeshaded university campuses and in its army barracks—that radical doctrines carried in from outside the country set the stage for cataclysm. As the KGB-sponsored Marxists formed their cabals and recruited followers, equally militant Afghan Islamists rose up to oppose them. Every university student now confronted a choice: communism or radical Islam.
Muslim Brotherhood members believed that the only way to return the Islamic world to its rightful place of economic and political power was through a rigid adherence to core Islamic principles. Initiated brothers pledged to work secretly to create a pure Islamic society modeled on what they saw as the lost and triumphant Islamic civilizations founded in the seventh century. (One French scholar likened the brothers to the conservative, elite lay Catholic organizations in the West such as Opus Dei.5 Throughout his life CIA director William Casey was attracted to these secretive lay Catholic
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When Massoud secretly returned to the Panjshir Valley once again in 1978, however, he did so on his own. He no longer trusted the other Afghan leaders, and he had no faith in Pakistan. He simply showed up in the Panjshir with thirty supporters, seventeen rifles, the equivalent of $130 in cash, and a letter asking the local people to declare jihad against their Soviet-backed government.14
By the time he repelled his sixth Soviet offensive, in 1982, Massoud had made a name for himself nationwide. He was the “Lion of the Panjshir.” The word Panjshir itself had become a rallying cry across Afghanistan and abroad, a symbol of hope for the anticommunist resistance.
Hekmatyar, on the other hand, wanted to destroy his enemies. These included not only communist and Soviet occupation forces but mujahedin competitors. He recognized Massoud as his most formidable military rival and began early on to attack him in the field and through maneuverings in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
AT LEAST HEKMATYAR KNEW who the enemy was, the CIA’s officers and analysts assured themselves. Massoud’s truce with the Soviets, on the other hand, was his first public demonstration that in addition to being a military genius, he was also willing to cut a deal with anyone at any time and in any direction if he thought it would advance his goals. Massoud felt the truce would raise his stature by placing him on equal footing with a superpower. “The Russians have negotiated with a valley,” his aide Massoud Khalili crowed. The deal also bought Massoud time to regroup for what he had determined
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a massive escalation of the CIA’s role in Afghanistan, starting in 1985.
The new policy document provided a retroactive rationale for the huge increases in covert funds forced into the Afghan program late in 1984 by Charlie Wilson. It also looked forward to a new era of direct infusions of advanced U.S. military technology into Afghanistan, intensified training of Islamist guerrillas in explosives and sabotage techniques, and targeted attacks on Soviet military officers designed to demoralize the Soviet high command. Among other consequences these changes pushed the CIA, along with its clients in the Afghan resistance and in Pakistani intelligence, closer to the
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For the first time the agency could use satellite photographs of the Afghan battlefield to help the mujahedin plan attacks on Soviet targets. The agency would soon send in secure “burst communications” sets that would allow the rebels to use advanced American technology to thwart Soviet interception of their radio traffic. The CIA would begin for the first time to recruit substantial numbers of “unilateral” agents in Afghanistan—agents who would be undeclared and unknown to Pakistani intelligence. Also for the first time, by at least one account, the document explicitly endorsed direct attacks
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Fear of poisoning, surprise attacks, and assassination became rife among Russian officers and soldiers in Kabul. The rebels fashioned booby-trapped bombs from gooey black contact explosives, supplied to Pakistani intelligence by the CIA, that could be molded into ordinary shapes or poured into innocent utensils. Russian soldiers began to find bombs made from pens, watches, cigarette lighters, and tape recorders.
The Afghans whom Yousaf trained uniformly denounced suicide attack proposals as against their religion. It was only the Arab volunteers—from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria, and other countries, who had been raised in an entirely different culture, spoke their own language, and preached their own interpretations of Islam while fighting far from their homes and families—who later advocated suicide attacks. Afghan jihadists, tightly woven into family, clan, and regional social networks, never embraced suicide tactics in significant numbers.18
CIA lawyers and operators at Langley were more sensitive than ever about second-guessing from Congress and the press. Casey’s Nicaragua operations were going sour just as the covert Afghan war began to escalate. The agency was criticized sharply for placing mines in Nicaragua’s harbors. There was a feeling taking hold in the Directorate of Operations by late 1985 that perhaps Casey had gone too far, that the agency was headed for another political crash.
Terrorism is theater.”22 In its modern form it was a theater invented largely by a stateless Palestinian diaspora whose leftist leaders sought dramatic means to attract attention to their national claims.
The memo stirred sharp opposition from the Directorate of Operations. Among other things its officers feared the new center would poach resources and talent. Some spies in the D.O. sniffed at counterterrorism operations as “police work” best left to cops or the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But Robert Gates, then running the Directorate of Intelligence, weighed in to support Clarridge’s ideas, and Casey lined up, too. The CIA’s Counterterrorist Center was born on February 1, 1986.
Was terrorism a law enforcement problem or a national security issue? Should the CIA try to capture terrorists alive in order to try them on criminal charges in open courts, or should the goal be to bring them back in body bags? The policies set out in NSDD-207 came down on both sides of these questions. Yes, in some cases terrorism was a law enforcement problem, but in others it should be handled as a military matter. Terrorists should be captured for trial when possible, but that would not always be a requirement.
The initial draft finding authorized the new action teams Clarridge and Casey sought, and it permitted the CIA to undertake secret operations to defeat terrorism, both on its own and in liaison with foreign governments. The purpose of such covert action would be to detect, disrupt, and preempt terrorist strikes. This could include capturing terrorists for trial or striking militarily if the enemy were on the verge of launching a terrorist operation. Clarridge interpreted the new finding as authority “to do pretty much anything he wanted against the terrorists,” recalled Robert Baer, one of the
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I assumed this focus and broad authority came later, post-9/11.
Hezbollah, on the other hand, proved a very hard target. It was the new center’s first attempt to penetrate a committed Islamist terrorist organization that targeted American citizens. The experience offered ill omens for the future. A radical Islamic Shiite faction in Lebanon’s civil war that began to serve as a proxy force for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah had become a terrorist branch of the still-churning Iranian Revolution.
By 1986, however, that Afghan cause entangled increasingly with the international Islamist networks whose leaders had a more ambitious goal: the toppling of corrupt and antireligious governments across the Islamic world.
The Islamabad station had warned in a broad July assessment cable that the pace of mujahedin attacks appeared to be slowing under the relentless helicopter assaults mounted by Soviet special forces, especially along the Pakistani border.4 Langley analysts and Pakistani generals shared a fear in the summer of 1986 that the new Soviet assault tactics might be tipping the war’s balance against the CIA-backed rebels.
In at least a few cases the Afghans attacked and killed these Arab graveyard raiders. Bearden recalled the thrust of the very early reports arriving from Afghan commanders in the field: “ They say we are dumb, and we do not know the Koran, and they are more trouble than they are ever going to be worth.”10
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.
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
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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.
