THE CIA’S LEGAL AUTHORITY to conduct covert action in Afghanistan effectively ended on January 1, 1992. By then the Soviet Union had formally dissolved. Peter Tomsen suggested a new finding that would allow unilateral CIA clients to be used to bolster the U.N. negotiations seeking a moderate coalition government in Afghanistan, but the CIA and other diplomats in the State Department opposed the idea. The Islamabad station retained some of its Afghan agents for months into the new year, but these were now classified only as reporting relationships—traditional spying.
