Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan & Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001

by Steve Coll

The CIA had no intricate strategy for this war. “You’re a young man; here’s your bag of money, go raise hell” was the way Hart understood his orders. “Don’t fuck it up, just go out there and kill Soviets, and take care of the Pakistanis and make them do whatever you need to make them do.”

Like dozens of nineteenth-century British colonial political agents before him—some of whose memoirs he had read—Hart regarded the Afghans as charming, martial, semicivilized, and ungovernable. Any two Afghans created three factions, he told his colleagues.

A champion of Saudi Arabia’s austere Islam, a promoter of women’s rights, a multimillionaire, a workaholic, a pious man, a sipper of banana daiquiris, an intriguer, an intellectual, a loyal prince, a sincere friend of Americans, a generous funder of anti-American causes, Prince Turki embodied Saudi Arabia’s cascading contradictions.

Casey mumbled. In business his secretaries refused to take dictation because they couldn’t understand what he was saying. He had taken a blow to the throat while boxing as a boy and he had a thick palate; between these two impediments the words refused to flow. Ahmed Badeeb, Turki’s chief of staff, called him “the Mumbling Guy.” Attempting to translate during meetings with Crown Prince Fahd, Badeeb could only shrug. Even President Reagan couldn’t understand him. During an early briefing Casey delivered to the national security cabinet, Reagan slipped Vice President Bush a note: “Did you understand a word he said?” Reagan later told William F. Buckley, “My problem with Bill was that I didn’t understand him at meetings. Now, you can ask a person to repeat himself once. You can ask him twice. But you can’t ask him a third time. You start to sound rude. So I’d just nod my head, but I didn’t know what he was actually saying.” Such was the dialogue for six years between the president and his intelligence chief in a nuclear-armed nation running secret wars on four continents.

Casey saw political Islam and the Catholic Church as natural allies in the “realistic counter-strategy” of covert action he was forging at the CIA to thwart Soviet imperialism.

“Here’s the beauty of the Afghan operation,” Casey told his colleagues. “Usually it looks like the big bad Americans are beating up on the natives. Afghanistan is just the reverse. The Russians are beating up on the little guys. We don’t make it our war. The mujahedin have all the motivation they need. All we have to do is give them help, only more of it.”

In the end ISI collaborated with the Islamabad station to set up a temporary—essentially fake—mujahedin training camp in the hills that sprawled to the north behind Islamabad, far away from the Afghan border. They loaded Casey in a jeep at night, declined at least initially to tell him where they were going, and bumped in circles along rough roads for about the time that would be required to reach the Afghan frontier. Then they unpacked him from the convoy and showed him a small crew of Afghans training on 14.5-millimeter and 20.7-millimeter antiaircraft guns. The Afghans made a lot of noise, and Casey wept tears of joy at the sight of his freedom fighters.

Afghan fighters also often refused to attack bridges or trade routes if they were important to civilian traders or farmers. The Afghan tolerance of civilian commerce in the midst of dire conflict frustrated visiting Americans. A congressman on tour would fly over Afghanistan, see a bridge standing unmolested, and complain loudly on his return to Washington that it ought to be blown up. But when the satellite-mapped attack plan was passed down through ISI to a particular Afghan commando team, the Afghans would often shrug off the order or use the supplied weapons to hit a different target of their own choosing. They took tolls from bridges. The livelihood of their clan often depended on open roads.

Clarridge wanted to kill the terrorists outright. He found the American government’s position against assassination of leaders who sponsored terrorism to be “hypocritical.” The president would authorize the military “to carry out air attacks that may or may not hit and kill the real target” but would not authorize the Counterterrorist Center to stealthily assassinate the same man. He asked, “ Why is an expensive military raid with heavy collateral damage to our allies and to innocent children okay—more morally acceptable than a bullet to the head?”32

All evidence that Soviet power might be weakening seemed to be systematically discounted in Washington and at Langley even as the data mounted in plain view. The CIA’s Soviet analysts continued to write reports suggesting that Moscow was a monolithic power advancing from strength to strength, and during Casey’s reign there seemed little penalty for tacking too far to the ideological right. CIA analysis had been at least partially politicized by Casey, in the view of some career officers. Besides, in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, especially in the Soviet/East Europe Division, all the analysts’ working lives, all their programs, budgets, and plans for the future were premised on the existence of a powerful and enduring communist enemy in Moscow. The Reagan administration was bound by a belief in Soviet power and skepticism about Gorbachev’s reforms.

Najibullah exuded confidence and spoke effectively. His main liability as a national leader was that the great majority of his countrymen considered him a mass murderer.

As he tried to initiate quiet diplomatic talks to create ground for a withdrawal, Gorbachev seemed genuinely stunned to discover that the Americans didn’t seem to want to negotiate about Afghanistan or the future of Central Asia at all. They remained devoted to their militaristic jihad, and they did not appear to take the possibility of a Soviet withdrawal at all seriously. At times it made Gorbachev furious. “ The U.S. has set for itself the goal of disrupting a settlement in Afghanistan by any means,” he told his inner circle.

Shevardnadze had asked for American cooperation in limiting the spread of “Islamic fundamentalism.” Shultz was sympathetic, but no high-level Reagan administration officials ever gave much thought to the issue. They never considered pressing Pakistani intelligence to begin shifting support away from the Muslim Brotherhood–connected factions and toward more friendly Afghan leadership, whether for the Soviets’ sake or America’s. The CIA and others in Washington discounted warnings from Soviet leadership about Islamic radicalism. The warnings were just a way to deflect attention from Soviet failings, American hard-liners decided.

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.

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.”4 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.

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.”

Secular-minded royalist Afghans from the country’s thin, exiled tribal leadership and commercial classes said they had long warned both the Americans and the Saudis, as one put it, “For God’s sake, you’re financing your own assassins.” But the Americans had been convinced by Pakistani intelligence, they complained, that only the most radical Islamists could fight with determination.

Earlier, as Soviet troops prepared to leave Afghanistan, the United States had decided not to help Afghans negotiate a peaceful political transition because the CIA believed Najibullah would fall quickly. The CIA also feared that political talks would slow down the Soviet departure. McWilliams believed those arguments had now been overtaken by events. To prevent Pakistan from installing its anti-American clients in Kabul, to prevent further suffering by Afghan civilians, and to rebuild a stable and centrist politics in Afghanistan, the United States now had to ease off on its covert military strategy and begin to sponsor a broader political settlement, he argued.

All this detailed intelligence reporting about international Islamic radicalism and its sanctuary in Afghanistan gathered dust in the middle levels of the bureaucracy. The Gulf War, the reunification of Germany, the final death throes of the Soviet Union—these enormous, all-consuming crises continued to command the attention of the Bush administration’s cabinet. By 1991, Afghanistan was rarely if ever on the agenda. Milt Bearden, the former Islamabad station chief, found himself talking in passing about the Afghan war with President Bush. The president seemed puzzled that the CIA’s covert pipeline through Pakistan was still active, as Bearden recalled it. Bush seemed surprised, too, that the Afghans were still fighting. “Is that thing still going on?” the president asked.

“Afghans are weird. They turn off the wireless when they go to sleep—as if war will stop. So they switched the wireless off, we all went to sleep, and we woke up early in the morning. Prayed the dawn prayer. Spirits were high. Hekmatyar also made a very long prayer. The sun comes up again, they turn on the wireless—and the bad news starts pouring in.”

By 1992 there were more personal weapons in Afghanistan than in India and Pakistan combined. By some estimates more such weapons had been shipped into Afghanistan during the previous decade than to any other country in the world. The Soviet Union had sent between $36 billion and $48 billion worth of military equipment from the time of the Afghan communist revolution; the equivalent U.S., Saudi, and Chinese aid combined totaled between $6 billion and $12 billion.

Woolsey spent several hours with Clinton at the Governor’s Mansion. They talked at length about University of Arkansas and University of Oklahoma football, good places to fish in the Ozarks, and, at less length, their visions for the future of the CIA. At one point Clinton said that he really did not think the CIA director should be a policy adviser to the president. Woolsey agreed that the director “ought to just call the intelligence straight.”6 Their meeting ended with no mention of a job offer, but the next day Warren Christopher called Woolsey at his hotel and summoned him to a press conference. “Does the president want me to be the director of the CIA?” Woolsey asked. “Sure. Just come over to the press conference, and we’ll get it sorted out.” Woolsey asked Christopher to be certain about the job offer. Christopher stuck his head in Clinton’s office, came back on the phone, and said, “Yeah, that’s what he wants.” In a living room of the mansion Woolsey found the Clintons, the Gores, Secretary of Defense nominee Les Aspin, Secretary of State nominee Warren Christopher, Tony Lake, Samuel L. “Sandy” Berger, and several political aides trying to anticipate questions they would hear from the press when Clinton introduced his new national security team. The president-elect’s media specialists worried that reporters would accuse Clinton of appointing a bunch of Carter administration retreads. Woolsey could understand why, since “we were, in fact, a bunch of Carter administr...

Try as he might, Woolsey could not get a meeting with the president. When a pilot on an apparent suicide mission crashed a single-engine Cessna into the south lawn of the White House in September 1994, the joke quickly circulated that it was Woolsey trying to get an appointment with Clinton. The joke angered Woolsey when he first heard it, but in time he became so accustomed to his pariah status that he began to tell it on himself.

Benazir Bhutto felt that she was losing control of her new Afghan policy. She did not want Pakistani intelligence to back the Taliban in a military drive on Kabul. Bhutto argued that Pakistan should use the Taliban’s rising strength as a new lever in negotiations for a coalition Afghan government. Some in the army and ISI agreed with her, but the Taliban did not care for these Pakistani diplomatic nuances. They still meant what they said: They did not want to negotiate with other Afghan leaders, they wanted to hang them.

MARTY MILLER stepped out of the climate-controlled interior of Unocal’s Gulfstream jet and into a blistering Turkmenistan summer. It was August 1995, and the new $89 million airport in Ashkhabad, the country’s capital, was still under construction. It would soon allow up to 4.5 million people to enter each year. The dreary city had never seen a tenth that many visitors, but Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s autocratic leader, expected that with guests like Miller, the country’s fortunes were about to change. Soon Turkmenistan would teem with European venture capitalists, Arab sheikhs, and American petroleum company executives. They would come to get rich on his oil and gas, or to entertain themselves at his planned Disneyland-style resort. Turkmenistan would become “the new Kuwait,” Niyazov boasted. There had been a few glitches, however. In his zeal to construct a truly distinctive airport, Niyazov had built the control tower on the wrong side of the runway. Air traffic controllers looking to guide pilots into Ashkhabad had their views blocked by the gaudy new terminal.

The Afghanistan pipeline project, Marty Miller believed, was “a nobrainer” if only “you set politics aside.” As the weeks passed, however, the politics only thickened.

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?”

National Security Adviser Tony Lake, who approved the bin Laden unit at the CIA, recalled that he realized the Saudi had become an important terrorist when classified memos started referring to him by the acronym “UBL” (which referred to a spelling of bin Laden’s transliterated first name as Usama). In Washington having an acronym was the ultimate sign of importance, Lake recalled sardonically.

The capital’s new laws were announced as edicts on Kabul Radio, quickly renamed the Voice of the Sharia, or Islamic law. Toothpaste should be abandoned in favor of the natural root favored by the Prophet, the radio announcers declared. Their lists of banned items and activities unfurled as a roll call of life’s small pleasures: marbles, cigarettes, dancing, music, singing, homing pigeons, kite-flying, television-watching. Businessmen and traders were warned that they should no longer wrap their goods in paper in case they inadvertently used pages from the Holy Koran. The Saudi-inspired Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice announced a ban on both sorcery and American-style haircuts. Taliban leaders ordered women to disappear.

It was unclear during the fall of 1996 whether the United States regarded the Taliban as friend or foe. In the weeks after the fall of Kabul, midlevel American officials issued a cacophony of statements—some skeptical, some apparently supportive—from which it was impossible to deduce a clear position. American diplomats in Islamabad told reporters that the Taliban could play a useful role in restoring a strong, central government to Afghanistan. The Taliban themselves, worried about rumors that they received support from the CIA and were a pro-American force, refused to receive a low-level State Department visitor to Kabul. “ The U.S. does not support the Taliban, has not supported the Taliban, and will not support the Taliban,” the spurned envoy, Lee Coldren, announced in reply. Within days then-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright denounced the Taliban decrees in Kabul as “impossible to justify or defend.” But just three weeks after that Robin Raphel outlined the Taliban’s claims to legitimacy before the U.N. Security Council and pleaded that they not be isolated. It was difficult to tell which of these State Department officials spoke for themselves and which spoke for the United States.

Then seventy-four, Crown Prince Abdullah had emerged as a newly confident force. His flaccid older brother, King Fahd, remained incapacitated by a stroke suffered several years earlier. With the passage of time royal power had gradually consolidated around Abdullah. A goateed, bulky man with attentive black eyes and Asiatic cheeks, Abdullah had won praise within the kingdom for his straight talk, his hard-headed Saudi nationalism, his ease with ordinary Saudi soldiers and citizens, and his relatively austere lifestyle. He did not summer in Cannes casinos, indulge undisciplined sexual appetites, or recklessly pilot stunt planes, and in the context of the Saudi royal family, this made him a ramrod figure. In Saudi tradition he continued to marry younger wives and father children as he aged. By 1998 he lived in a series of manicured palace complexes that resembled midsized American colleges, with pathways and driveways weaving through watered lawns and stately rows of desert arbor. He kept an idiosyncratic schedule, sleeping in two four-hour shifts, once between 9 P.M. and 1 A.M., and then again between 8 A.M. and noon. In the wee hours he swam in his royal pool and busied himself with paperwork. Each Saturday he flew to Jedda with several of his brothers, boarded his yacht, motored into the Red Sea for a few hours, ate lunch, and retired for a nap, rocking on the waves. Each Wednesday he went via bus to a desert farm where he bred Arabian horses. He was hardworking and serio...

They were aware that bin Laden and his leadership group were probably planting disinformation to distract them. They assumed that the more they closed embassies and issued alerts, the more they encouraged this disinformation campaign. Yet they could see no alternative. They had to collect as much threat information as they could, they had to assess it, and they had to act defensively when the intelligence looked credible.

Their discussions were substantive, intellectual, and visceral. They involved basic questions about modern terrorism, bin Laden’s network, its threats, and American policy. All four men were exceptionally intelligent and well spoken. They were bookish, intense, well read, nervous, and argumentative. Their disagreements had the hyperarticulate character and unyielding passion of ideological disputes among Ivy League faculty. The hours they worked together were long beyond count, and the pay was mediocre. Yet they were debating day to day the most important issues in their country’s clandestine war against bin Laden. The pressure was almost unbearable. There was little reward for being right in these disputes. There was the continual potential of catastrophe for being wrong.

Simon and Benjamin recast the terrorism analyst Brian Jenkins’s 1970s-era observation that terrorists wanted a lot of people watching their attacks but not a lot of people dead. Osama bin Laden and his adherents, Simon and Benjamin warned, “want a lot of people watching and a lot of people dead.”

A few—like the four men who arrived secretly in Kandahar in the autumn of 1999: Atta, Jarrah, al-Shehhi, and Binalshibh—carried passports and visas that facilitated travel to Europe and the United States. These relatively elite volunteers moved like self-propelled shooting stars through al Qaeda’s global constellation. Their reasons to join were as diverse as their transnational biographies. In many ways they retraced the trails of radicalization followed in the early 1990s by Ramzi Yousef and Mir Amal Kasi. They were mainly intelligent, well-educated men from ambitious, prosperous families. They migrated to Europe, studied demanding technical subjects, and attempted—unsuccessfully—to establish themselves as modern professionals far from the family embrace and conservative Islamic culture they had known in their youths. As they joined a violent movement led by the alienated, itinerant son of a Saudi construction magnate and a disputatious, ostracized Egyptian doctor, they pledged their loyalty to men strikingly like themselves.

For Musharraf, as for many other liberal Pakistani generals, jihad was not a calling, it was a professional imperative. It was something he did at the office. At quitting time he packed up his briefcase, straightened the braid on his uniform, and went home to his normal life.

Together they developed “a pretty good idea of where the bad guys were,” as one American official recalled. One visual signature they relied on was the clustering of luxury sport utility vehicles. Most Afghans did not own cars, much less SUVs. The CIA would put its satellites over Kabul, and its analysts would say, as an official remembered, “Well, eight Land Cruisers. Someone is bad in that house.”

When they tried to discuss these kinds of plans with Massoud’s men, the Americans found them evasive. As an American official recalled: “The Northern Alliance thought, ‘Oh, okay, you want us to capture him. Right. You crazy white guys.’ ”13

Clinton pleaded with Shelton after a Cabinet meeting for even a symbolic raid: “You know,” the president told the general, “it would scare the shit out of al Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp. It would get us enormous deterrence and show these guys we’re not afraid.”

The Saudis continued to prove their loyalty month after month by managing global oil prices with American interests firmly in mind. By cooperating on the fundamental questions of oil and military basing rights, the Saudis acquired the freedom to pursue their own agenda on secondary issues: the Palestinians, rapprochement with Iran, and the threat of Saudi-born Islamic extremism.

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.

Air Force drone pilots and CIA officers from the Counterterrorist Center and the bin Laden unit huddled in the darkened room on the wooded Langley campus from midnight to dawn, watching black-and-white aerials of Afghanistan unfurl eerily before them. Richard Clarke would drive out after midnight, clear the CIA’s security gates, park in the darkened parking lots, and wander through empty hallways to the flight center. Other curious visitors arrived at odd hours as well. They were like a secret society of video game junkies, role-players in a futuristic scenario, and they were well aware of their role in pioneering a kind of technical espionage that Hollywood might promote. They sipped coffee and talked to their pilot. “Oh, look at that truck! That truck looks like the one he uses! Follow that truck!” Remembered one participant: “It was very much the O.J. thing, with a helicopter following a car down the freeway.” Clarke wrote Berger that the images were “truly astonishing.”

The Taliban kept spinning off in new and bizarre directions, however. On March 1 the movement announced its intention to destroy all the statues in Afghanistan that depicted human form. Militiamen armed with rockets and assault rifles began blasting two ancient sandstone statues of Buddha believed to have been hewn in the third and fifth centuries when a Buddhist community thrived in central Afghanistan. One statue rose 120 feet, the other 175 feet. Their jewels had long ago been stripped away, and their faces had been hacked off by previous Muslim rulers. But the figures remained, glorious and dignified, legs draped by folded robes. The Taliban’s audacious vandalism provoked worldwide condemnation and shock that rarely followed the militia’s massacres of Afghan civilians. Curators and government spokesmen pleaded that the demolitions be suspended. Mullah Omar seemed puzzled. “We do not understand why everyone is so worried,” he said. “All we are breaking are stones.”

The Buddhas in Afghanistan were older even than Islam. Thousands of Muslim soldiers had crossed Afghanistan to India over the centuries, but none of them had ever felt compelled to destroy the Buddhas. “When they have spared these statues for fifteen hundred years, all these Muslims who have passed by them, how are you a different Muslim from them?” Haider asked. “Maybe they did not have the technology to destroy them,” Omar speculated.

The Afghan government that the United States eventually chose to support beginning in the late autumn of 2001—a federation of Massoud’s organization, exiled intellectuals, and royalist Pashtuns—was available for sponsorship a decade before, but the United States could not see a reason then to challenge the alternative, radical Islamist vision promoted by Pakistani and Saudi intelligence.