Ghost Wars Part 10

Niyazov insisted that Unocal stir up some publicity for their agreement. The Father of All Turkmen was traveling to New York for the fiftieth birthday celebration of the United Nations, and he wanted to throw a party to announce his new pipelines that would free him once and for all from Russia's grip. Unocal hired a venue planner, dressed an elegant Manhattan building in celebratory bunting, and hired Henry Kissinger to make a speech.

There were no Afghans invited to the Manhattan affair. John Imle promised that Unocal would open negotiations soon with "the appropriate parties."12 Kissinger noted the number of Afghan factions battling over the land where the Unocal pipeline might one day run and could not help but feel skeptical. Unocal's plan, Kissinger quipped, quoting Dr. Samuel Johnson, appeared to represent "the triumph of hope over experience."13

WITH TURKMENISTAN SEWED UP, Marty Miller now opened a Unocal lobbying campaign in two cities: Was.h.i.+ngton and Islamabad.

It was an easy time for an American oil executive to find an audience in the Clinton White House. Clinton had lost control of Congress to the Republican Party during the 1994 election, and his political team sought to raise ma.s.sive campaign funds for a comeback attempt, plus Clinton's own reelection bid in 1996. Campaign finance rules had been greatly loosened. The White House wanted to a.s.sure corporate donors that the administration would listen to their concerns. Clinton's America-first policies emphasized the promotion of corporate interests abroad. American oil companies doing business in Central Asia also advanced the administration's efforts to contain Iran. For all these reasons, when Miller came knocking on doors in Was.h.i.+ngton, he found they opened quickly.

Miller flew to Was.h.i.+ngton from Houston every month or two. At the White House he met regularly with Sheila Heslin, the director of energy issues at the National Security Council, whose suite next to the West Wing coursed with visitors from American oil firms. Miller found Heslin responsive, full of information and ideas, and very supportive of Unocal's agenda in Afghanistan.

Across the river in Langley, some dissidents at the CIA saw Heslin's office that year as afloat on a "sea of self-absorption," as the Near East Division's Robert Baer put it. To him "the White House and the National Security Council became cathedrals of commerce where the interests of big business outweighed the interest of protecting American citizens at home and abroad." Because of what he described as sloppy oversight of his portfolio, Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger held $90,000 worth of stock in Amoco at a time when he oversaw an interagency committee that worked with Heslin to devise U.S. policy toward the Caspian Sea, where Amoco had large contracts. Even Berger's political opponents did not argue that he had acted corruptly, but there was so much money in the air, so much talk of billion-dollar contracts and politically sensitive Central Asian negotiations, that it seemed to dictate American priorities.14 An advocacy center at Clinton's Department of Commerce lobbied for American corporations in overseas contract compet.i.tions where there was only one U.S. company fighting against a foreign firm, as in Unocal's case. An advocacy center at Clinton's Department of Commerce lobbied for American corporations in overseas contract compet.i.tions where there was only one U.S. company fighting against a foreign firm, as in Unocal's case.

For their part, Berger, Heslin, and their White House colleagues saw themselves engaged in a hardheaded synthesis of American commercial interests and national security goals. They wanted to use the profit-making motives of American oil companies to thwart one of the country's most determined enemies, Iran, and to contain the longer-term ambitions of a restless Russia. This was a traditional and creative form of American statecraft, they believed. The previous generation had produced America's crucial security and oil alliances with Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf emirates. Now big oil and gas deals could secure a new belt of American allies from Turkey to China.

Marty Miller found Robin Raphel, the a.s.sistant Secretary of State for South Asia, who oversaw policy toward Afghanistan, "very helpful." He met with her whenever they were both in Was.h.i.+ngton. They compared notes about trips they each took to the region, the conversations they had, and the impressions they formed about Afghan and Pakistani politics.

Raphel believed the Unocal pipeline could help bring peace and jobs to Afghanistan. Pakistan and India needed the gas. The Afghans needed the revenue they would receive from transit fees if the pipeline were built. Here was a business deal that might literally tie Afghanistan together, she believed, creating new incentives for regional cooperation. In an administration where Raphel struggled to find any cause that would draw attention and resources toward Afghanistan, the Unocal pipeline offered a new and salable rationale for U.S. engagement in Afghanistan, which Raphel favored for many reasons, not only because of the pipeline.15 Moreover, the pipeline's economics seemed to promote the kind of all-party peace negotiations, including the Taliban, favored by Raphel and her State Department colleagues. Commercial banks were not likely to lend money to finance a project as risky as this one. If they did, their high interest rates would probably bust the deal. The most realistic way for Unocal to find the sums it needed, Miller said, would be to borrow from multilateral lenders such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. These development banks were funded by rich governments to promote economic growth in poor countries. They would lend money only if Unocal's pipeline linked countries with recognized, stable governments. With the Taliban militia on the march from Kandahar and with the Kabul government's prime minister at war with its president, Afghanistan obviously was not such a place. Unocal could only achieve its goals, then, if it used the lure of its pipeline revenues to persuade Afghanistan's factions to unite around a single government blessed by the United Nations. This was also the stated goal of American policy toward Afghanistan, albeit a policy that was lightly examined, adrift, and poorly funded. As they examined the details of the pipeline project, Raphel and the Clinton White House persuaded themselves that what was good for Unocal might also be good for Afghanistan.

Marty Miller's second mission was to persuade Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto that what was good for Unocal might also be good for Pakistan. This was a more difficult sell. Prince Turki's friend Carlos Bulgheroni continued to fight for his own rival pipeline project. With the aid of Prince Turki's introduction, Bulgheroni had established close ties with officials in Bhutto's government.

Miller knew that until Pakistan agreed to buy the gas piped by Unocal across Afghanistan, there was no way he could finance the project. It was essential that Bhutto be convinced to drop Bulgheroni's pipeline and embrace Unocal's. Miller asked Robin Raphel, Sheila Heslin, and other Clinton administration officials for help in Islamabad. They agreed to pitch in.

THE AMERICAN AMBa.s.sADOR to Pakistan early in 1996 was Tom Simons. He was a career foreign service officer and a specialist in East European and Soviet affairs. Like Miller, he was at the end of a long career. As a young boy he had spent a year in Karachi, from 1948 to 1949. Pakistan had just been born and was struggling to find its footing. Simons thought of himself as an honorary Pakistani and arrived at the U.S. emba.s.sy in Islamabad with few preconceptions. He had not followed South Asian affairs closely in decades. His last amba.s.sadorial post had been in Poland, and he had seen the vast transformations in that country after it embraced capitalism. Surely Pakistan, with its established commercial cla.s.ses, could find a way to break out of its old thinking and seize the opportunities of a post-Soviet world, Simons believed.16 As for neighboring Afghanistan, "There basically was no policy," he recalled.

When Simons settled in Islamabad, he quickly heard from Marty Miller and John Imle. Simons met with them or other Unocal executives at the emba.s.sy compound about every two to four weeks. They showed him computer-generated slides with "these wonderful graphics that, for a person of my age, it kind of wows you."

Persuading Bhutto's government to drop the Argentine pipeline and embrace Unocal was a policy to which n.o.body in Was.h.i.+ngton "ever objected," Simons recalled. "You did it in as quiet a way as possible. You didn't go beat the drums for it, and you tried to find practical ways." Simons educated himself about the deal and met with officials at Pakistan's petroleum ministry every few months to lobby on Unocal's behalf. Simons came to believe that construction of the pipelines could go a long way toward stabilizing Afghanistan. He even tried to persuade Unocal to incorporate small power stations along the route to allow Afghan regions more autonomy from Kabul.

But it wasn't clear how Unocal was going to persuade Bhutto to change her mind. At issue was not whether the pipeline was a good thing-Bhutto had already endorsed it in principle-but which oil company should benefit. Bhutto's government had a partner already.

Bhutto had entered into what many of her Westernized friends regarded as an unfortunate marriage. Her husband, Asif Zardari, was a Karachi businessman who seemed to style his ambitions on the G.o.dfather characters in Bollywood movies. Allegations about his corrupt business dealings had contributed to Bhutto's first sacking as prime minister in 1990. During Bhutto's second term Robin Raphel and other American officials gave her the benefit of the doubt. They a.s.sumed Zardari engaged in some corrupt dealings, but they had no firm evidence that he was stealing on a ma.s.sive scale. For her part, Bhutto denounced the rumors about her husband as political trickery concocted by her s.e.xist opponents to discredit her. She was emotional and unyielding in defense of her husband. She said her opponents were exploiting her unconventional marriage for political gain-a claim the Clintons, for two, could understand.17 Unocal's executives picked up rumors that Bhutto had decided to stick with her Argentinian pipeline deal because payoffs had been made to her husband. Unocal lobbyists began to drop hints to the Pakistani emba.s.sy in Was.h.i.+ngton that the company knew about the supposed payoffs. The message, as Bhutto and her allies understood it, seemed unmistakable: If Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto wanted to avoid trouble over the corruption issue, she should come clean and do business with Unocal.18 In Islamabad, Tom Simons also received indications that someone in Bhutto's government had been paid off on the Argentinian pipeline contract. Near the end of a spring day in 1996 he visited the prime minister in her office with an agenda three items long, each one having to do with an American corporation that wanted to do business in Pakistan. Bhutto arrived after long hours of boisterous political meetings. Her eyes were red, and she looked exhausted.

Simons said directly that Bhutto should cancel her memo of understanding with Bridas and sign with Unocal instead. Bhutto didn't like his tone. Members of her government had been under U.S. pressure over the Unocal pipeline for months. Simons seemed to be issuing a demand, not a request. "We could never do that because that's breaking the contract," she told him.

"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 extortion sent Bhutto into a fury. "You cannot say that!" she exclaimed. "You cannot be speaking for your president!" 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 amba.s.sador had no right to treat Pakistan's prime minister this way. When Simons got back to the emba.s.sy, his phone began to ring from Was.h.i.+ngton. 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 j.a.panese 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 b.a.l.l.s and Frisbees. They were leftovers from a Unocal marketing campaign in the United States. All the b.a.l.l.s 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 b.a.l.l.s in play and Frisbees sailing through the air.

A little later, as he tried to schedule a meeting with the Taliban's a.s.sistant 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 ent.i.ty" 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 Ma.s.soud'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. 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 a.s.signments, 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. amba.s.sador in Islamabad, Tom Simons, was startled to find the CIA "had nothing" in Afghanistan. "They had taken out all their a.s.sets. 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 a.s.sist 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. 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 a.s.sist 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 Ma.s.soud's Kabul government. The Islamabad station could recruit Afghan agents if they were reporting on terrorism, drugs, or Stinger missiles. But the default a.s.signment 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 Was.h.i.+ngton during the 1960s as a "whiz kid" a.n.a.lyst 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 He was. Many of the CIA's career officers revolted against Deutch's change message. They saw his management reform campaign as just the latest wave in a series of attacks against the agency's core mission and culture. To them President Clinton seemed indifferent about the CIA's health. The agency's budget continued to shrink. In mid-1995 there were only a dozen new case officers being trained at the Farm as career spies. The Directorate of Operations now had fewer than eight hundred case officers worldwide, about a 25 percent decline from the peak years of the Cold War. Stations had closed not only in Afghanistan but across the Third World. There was a strong sense in the Directorate of Operations that the CIA was getting rolled in the budget process by the Pentagon and the FBI. After the Ames case, internal investigations into other possible spies operating at Langley placed dozens of case officers under suspicion, contributing to an atmosphere of distrust and uncertainty. When Deutch's new managers arrived, they emphasized gender and racial diversity as a prime CIA hiring goal, a mission that angered and dismayed the many white males among the agency's veterans. New management techniques promoted open criticism of supervisors, discussions about the CIA's purpose, focus groups, more interaction with the media-"California hot tub stuff," as one unhappy veteran called it. To achieve personnel reductions without firing anyone, CIA managers had to look for experienced officers who were vested enough in their pensions to be able to retire early without hards.h.i.+p. They sought out such veterans and encouraged them to leave. The retirements became wrenching and disruptive.7 On the day he accepted early departure, longtime Soviet a.n.a.lyst Fritz Ermarth filled out paperwork with his retirement counselor, an old acquaintance he had known since the days of CIA directors Stansfield Turner and William Casey. Ermarth posed the kind of question that he used to ask about the Soviet bureaucracies he a.n.a.lyzed: "Look, you process four hundred to five hundred people a year through this little cubicle, right? What's your portrait of the place?"

The counselor's eyes filled with tears. "I've never seen it so bad," she said, as Ermarth recalled it. He asked what she meant.

"Everybody says it's hard to put your finger on it," she replied, "but it's the growth in the importance of stuff that shouldn't matter relative to stuff that should."8

THE CIA'S COUNTERTERRORIST CENTERE began to emerge as a modest exception to the agency's downward trend. For the first two years of the Clinton presidency, budgeting and policy making about terrorism had been dispersed and confused. The shock of the Oklahoma City bombing in the spring of 1995 created a new sense of urgency at the National Security Council, however. The bombers turned out to be a domestic cell of antigovernment militia. But their audacious strike coincided with a shocking chemical weapons attack by a j.a.panese-based cult in Tokyo.White House terrorism a.n.a.lysts believed the j.a.panese case showed that the United States was vulnerable to terrorists using weapons of ma.s.s destruction. Spurred by Clinton, the National Security Council organized its first terrorism policy review during the early months of 1995.

In June, Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive-39, cla.s.sified Secret, t.i.tled "U.S. Policy on Counterterrorism." The doc.u.ment echoed the presidential directive that President Reagan had signed during the last great wave of anti-American terrorism during the mid-1980s. It was also the first official recognition by any American president of the danger posed to the United States by terrorists who acquired nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.9 The CIA was instructed to undertake "an aggressive program of foreign intelligence collection, a.n.a.lysis, counterintelligence, and covert action." If necessary, CIA operations would seek to return terrorist suspects "by force ... without the cooperation of the host government" so that the accused could face justice in American courts.

"The acquisition of weapons of ma.s.s destruction by a terrorist group, through theft or manufacture, is unacceptable," the directive continued. "There is no higher priority than preventing the acquisition of this capability or removing this capability from terrorist groups potentially opposed to the U.S."10 On paper, at least, American policy was now more forceful and clearly stated than it had been in years. The doc.u.ment also centralized authority on counterterrorism policy at the White House for the first time. The challenge now was to put the words into practice.

IN JANUARY 1996 the CIA's Counterterrorist Center opened a new office to track Osama bin Laden. The agency had never before dedicated a unit of this kind to a single terrorist. Formally known as the "bin Laden Issue Station" and code-named "Alec," the group leased s.p.a.ce in a suburban Virginia office park just a few miles from CIA headquarters. Employing about twelve staff members, it was designated a "virtual station." This meant that within the CIA's budgeting and cable routing systems, the unit would have the administrative status, privileges, and autonomy enjoyed by more traditional stations abroad. The idea was born from discussions in the Counterterrorist Center's senior management group. Bin Laden was still seen by CIA a.n.a.lysts primarily as a money man, but he was an emerging symbol of the new mobility of international terrorism. 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 cla.s.sified memos started referring to him by the acronym "UBL" (which referred to a spelling of bin Laden's transliterated first name as Usama). In Was.h.i.+ngton having an acronym was the ultimate sign of importance, Lake recalled sardonically. Because he operated across borders, bin Laden presented challenges to the CIA's old system of country-based intelligence collection. The CIA's managers wanted to experiment with a new kind of unit, a prototype that might be used against other transnational targets. They would fuse intelligence disciplines into one office-operations, a.n.a.lysis, signals intercepts, overhead photography, and so on. The National Security Agency had tapped into bin Laden's satellite telephone and kept track of his international conversations. These intercepts could be used by the new station to track his payments and connections in multiple countries.11 They chose bin Laden because by early 1996 there was a rising recognition of his importance, both at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and at the White House. The unit's first project was to develop a strategic picture of bin Laden's activity. Some of the new focus on bin Laden came from Richard Clarke, a forceful career civil servant who in the summer of 1995 had been appointed Clinton's counterterrorism director, working from the National Security Council under the authorities spelled out in PDD-39. In addition, cla.s.sified evidence about bin Laden was piling up, circulating in cables throughout the intelligence community. The reporting from the CIA's Khartoum station was by now voluminous. Bin Laden's name surfaced continually in reports from Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Israel, and elsewhere. As one regular reader of these cables recalled, it seemed as if every other cable about terrorism from North Africa contained the phrase "Osama bin Laden, financier of terrorists." The CIA now viewed bin Laden as "one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world," as a rare public statement put it. There was some new money available for the CIA's counterterrorism budget by fiscal 1996. Tony Lake chaired an interagency meeting that approved spending it on the CIA's virtual bin Laden station. Richard Clarke said later that he asked the CIA and the Pentagon to develop plans for "operating against" al Qaeda in Sudan, instead of merely collecting intelligence, but that neither department "was able successfully to develop a plan." Operators inside the virtual station began drafting plans to capture bin Laden early on, but none of these ideas was approved or carried forward by superiors or the White House. The agency's plan offered a way to try something new: "Let's yank on this bin Laden chain and see what happens," as one partic.i.p.ant recalled.12 But before they could get a grip on him, bin Laden slipped beyond their reach into Afghanistan.

THE CIA STATION in the U.S. emba.s.sy in Khartoum, Sudan, had been conditioned during Cofer Black's 199395 tour to threats of violence from bin Laden's followers. After the aborted plot to a.s.sa.s.sinate or kidnap Black, an informant who walked into the emba.s.sy volunteered details about supposed plots to kill Tony Lake in Was.h.i.+ngton. (A State Department official relayed to Lake an a.s.surance from Sudan's foreign minister: "He says that he's not trying to kill you." Lake answered, "It's the darndest thing, but I'm not trying to kill him, either.") CIA officers and emba.s.sy diplomats regularly faced hostile surveillance by Sudanese and foreign Arab radicals on the streets of Khartoum. Two CIA contractors reported being threatened on a Khartoum street, although the seriousness of this incident was debated within the agency. Even when one of the station's walk-in sources proved to be a liar, there remained a thick file of threats against the U.S. emba.s.sy and its personnel. The chancery building faced a crowded street in central Khartoum, vulnerable to car bombs, but Sudan's government did not respond to requests for new protection measures. By the fall of 1995 the emba.s.sy's Emergency Action Committee-which included the CIA station chief, the State Department's security officer, and senior diplomats-had drafted a cable to Was.h.i.+ngton recommending that the Khartoum emba.s.sy be closed to protect American employees. Under this plan the CIA station housed in the emba.s.sy would also close, ending the agency's up-close perch for intelligence collection against bin Laden.13 The newly arrived U.S. amba.s.sador to Sudan, Timothy Carney, a feisty career diplomat, thought this was a terrible idea. Carney believed his colleagues overstated the dangers. Cofer Black agreed with him, but Black had transferred from Khartoum to another a.s.signment in the summer of 1995, and his successor at the Khartoum station expressed a more cautious att.i.tude. Carney questioned the integrity of some of the intelligence sources on which the Emergency Action Committee based its threat a.n.a.lysis. Moreover, he thought that closing the emba.s.sy would send exactly the wrong signal to Sudan. The United States sought to end Sudan's support for terrorists, among other goals. Carney believed this could only be achieved through direct engagement with the Khartoum government. If the United States shut its emba.s.sy and pulled out, it would leave Sudan all the more isolated and desperate. The United States could reduce the threat of Islamic radicalism if it learned to interact with Islamists in more sophisticated ways, distinguis.h.i.+ng between peaceful movements of religious revival and those bent on violence. Instead it was clinging to alliances in the Middle East with corrupt, failing secular regimes such as Egypt's, which encouraged Was.h.i.+ngton to lump all Islamic political groups into one "terrorist" camp. With this myopia, Carney believed, the United States was inadvertently pus.h.i.+ng governments such as Sudan's toward more radical postures.14 When Carney set up shop in Khartoum in November, he found a draft Emergency Action Committee cable recommending the emba.s.sy's closure. He was appalled at the tone of the cable and its conclusion. But he had been a diplomat in the Vietnam era and had vowed that he would never suppress a cable from an emba.s.sy where he served even if he disagreed with it. The lesson of Vietnam was that the American government worked best when decision makers had all the arguments, even the ones they did not want to hear, Carney believed. He let the cable recommending closure go through to Was.h.i.+ngton.15 Based on its arguments, CIA director John Deutch told the White House formally that he believed the Khartoum emba.s.sy should be shut. Clinton's national security cabinet met two or three times to discuss the issue. Past attempts to negotiate with Sudan had yielded no improvements in its record of coddling terrorists and waging a brutal civil war against Christian rebels in the south, the cabinet group concluded. If closing the emba.s.sy isolated Khartoum's government, perhaps that would be the right signal after all, some of the partic.i.p.ants in the meetings said. For his part Deutch focused on the security question: The risks of staying in Khartoum outweighed the benefits, he said.16 Carney flew to Was.h.i.+ngton and argued pa.s.sionately to Secretary of State Warren Christopher that closing the emba.s.sy would be a catastrophic error. "An emba.s.sy's a tool," he said. "You need to keep the tool in place." But Deutch persisted in his judgment that the Khartoum station was just too dangerous to operate. Late in January 1996, Christopher acceded to Deutch's request. Carney flew back to Khartoum and told Sudan's foreign minister that the United States was pulling out because of terrorist threats to American personnel.17 The Sudanese were outraged. The Khartoum government had lately moved to curtail the influence of Islamic radicals in the country. The American decision would say to the world that Sudan was unsafe for investment and travel, that it was an outlaw government.

Carney said there was nothing he could do; the decision had been made. On February 6, 1996, he attended a farewell dinner at the Khartoum home of Sudanese vice president Ali Osman Taha. That night he and Taha fell into their first serious conversation about Sudan's support for terrorists. Carney said that if the Sudanese ever expected Was.h.i.+ngton to reconsider its decision, they had to show they were serious. Osama Bin Laden was one of Sudan's biggest sources of grief in Was.h.i.+ngton, Carney said. Sudan should expel him and provide information to the United States about his finances and his support for North African terrorists.18 With Carney's a.s.sistance Sudan arranged one month later to send a secret envoy, General Elfatih Erwa, to Was.h.i.+ngton for more talks. Erwa met with Carney and two CIA officers from the Africa Division in the Hyatt Hotel in Rosslyn, Virginia. On March 8, 1996, meeting alone with Erwa, the CIA officers handed him a list of demands that had been developed and endorsed by a working group at the White House. The CIA, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and the State Department had all helped formulate this list. The two-page proposal was t.i.tled "Measures Sudan Can Take to Improve Relations with the United States." The second item on the list asked for intelligence about bin Laden's Khartoum followers: "Provide us with names, dates of arrival, departure and destination and pa.s.sport data on mujaheddin that Usama Bin Laden has brought into Sudan." The memo also demanded details about the owners of specific cars and trucks that had been surveilling CIA personnel in Khartoum.19 The doc.u.ment did not specifically request bin Laden's expulsion from Sudan, but that idea surfaced in the discussions with Erwa and others. Bin Laden seemed to pick up on the talks. For the first time he granted an interview to an American journalist at his compound in Khartoum. "People are supposed to be innocent until proved guilty," bin Laden pleaded. "Well, not the Afghan fighters. They are the 'terrorists of the world.' But pus.h.i.+ng them against the wall will do nothing except increase the terrorism."20 Years later the question of whether Sudan formally offered to turn bin Laden over to the United States became a subject of dispute. Sudan's government has said it did make such an offer. American officials say it did not. "We told the Americans we would be willing to hand him over if they had a legal case," according to a Sudanese official. "We said, 'If you have a legal case, you can take him.' " But several of the most senior American officials involved said they had never received such a message. Investigators with the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks later concluded there was no "reliable evidence" to support Sudanese claims of such an offer.21 At the White House, counterterrorism aides held a hypothetical discussion about whether the United States had a legal basis to take bin Laden into custody. Would the Justice Department indict him? Was there evidence to support a trial? At the meeting, a Justice representative said there was no way to hold bin Laden in the United States because there was no indictment, according to Sandy Berger, then deputy national security adviser. Berger, for his part, knew of no intelligence at the time showing that bin Laden had committed any crime against Americans.22 That was all the insight the White House and the CIA could obtain from Justice. Privately, federal prosecutors were considering a grand jury investigation of bin Laden's support for terrorism, a probe that could eventually produce an indictment. American law prohibited Justice prosecutors or the FBI agents who worked with them from telling anyone else in government about this investigation, however. They kept their evidence strictly secret.23 Saudi Arabia seemed the most logical place to send bin Laden if it was possible to detain him. Bin Laden had been expelled from the kingdom for antigovernment agitation. There was also a chance that another Arab country, under a.s.sault from violent Islamists who took money from bin Laden, might be willing to accept him for trial. Through CIA channels the United States separately asked Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan whether they would accept bin Laden into custody. Nothing came of it. Overall the White House strategy about bin Laden at the time was "to keep him moving," Lake remembered. American officials told Sudan that Saudi Arabia would not accept bin Laden for trial. The Saudis did not explain themselves, but it seemed clear to Clinton's national security team that the royal family feared that if they executed or imprisoned bin Laden, they would provoke a backlash against the government. The Saudis "were afraid it was too much of a hot potato, and I understand where they were," Clinton recalled. "We couldn't indict him then because he hadn't killed anybody in America. He hadn't done anything to us." As for Egypt and Jordan, if Saudi intelligence and the Saudi royal family were unwilling to accept the political risks of incarcerating bin Laden, why should they?24 Nonetheless, Sudan's government opened discussions with Saudi Arabia about expelling bin Laden back to the kingdom, according to senior officials on both sides. Around the time of General Erwa's secret visit to Was.h.i.+ngton, the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bas.h.i.+r, traveled to Saudi Arabia for the annual hajj hajj pilgrimage to the holy sites at Mecca. He met there with Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah. Accounts of this meeting differ. According to Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal, Abdullah told Bas.h.i.+r that Saudi Arabia would be "happy" to take bin Laden into custody. But he quoted Bas.h.i.+r as insisting that bin Laden "must not face prosecution" in Saudi Arabia. "n.o.body is above the law in the kingdom," Abdullah replied, according to Turki. By his account Saudi Arabia refused to accept bin Laden only because of the conditional terms proposed by Sudan. pilgrimage to the holy sites at Mecca. He met there with Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah. Accounts of this meeting differ. According to Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal, Abdullah told Bas.h.i.+r that Saudi Arabia would be "happy" to take bin Laden into custody. But he quoted Bas.h.i.+r as insisting that bin Laden "must not face prosecution" in Saudi Arabia. "n.o.body is above the law in the kingdom," Abdullah replied, according to Turki. By his account Saudi Arabia refused to accept bin Laden only because of the conditional terms proposed by Sudan.25 A Sudanese official recalled the discussion differently. By his account Abdullah and Prince Turki both announced that Saudi Arabia was not interested in accepting bin Laden for trial. Bas.h.i.+r did ask Abdullah during the Mecca meeting to pardon bin Laden for his provocative political writings. But Sudan never insisted on a Saudi promise to forgo prosecution, according to this account. Bas.h.i.+r recalled that in multiple conversations with Saudi officials about bin Laden, the Saudis "never mentioned that they accused Osama bin Laden of anything. The only thing they asked us was to just send him away." The Saudi att.i.tude at Mecca, according to the Sudanese official, was "He is no more a Saudi citizen. We don't care where he goes, but if he stays [in Sudan], he may be a nuisance in our relations."26 The Saudis did make clear that bin Laden's "presence in Sudan was considered an obstacle to the development of relations," said the Sudan cabinet minister Sharaf al-Din Banaqa, who was involved in the talks. The Saudis did make clear that bin Laden's "presence in Sudan was considered an obstacle to the development of relations," said the Sudan cabinet minister Sharaf al-Din Banaqa, who was involved in the talks.27 It is difficult to know which account to credit. Either way, the long personal ties between bin Laden and Saudi intelligence may also have been a factor in the Saudi decision. Ahmed Badeeb, Prince Turki's chief of staff, recalled being torn over bin Laden's fate when the possibility of his expulsion from Sudan first arose. One of bin Laden's brothers told Badeeb, "Osama is no longer the Osama that you knew." This pained Badeeb: "I loved Osama and considered him a good citizen of Saudi Arabia."28 For their part White House counterterrorism officials regarded Sudan's offer to turn bin Laden over to Saudi Arabia as disingenuous. Sudan knew Saudi Arabia was unlikely to accept bin Laden for trial, the White House officials believed. They interpreted Sudan's offer as a safe way to curry favor in Was.h.i.+ngton since Khartoum knew it would never be called upon to act.29 By all accounts, Saudi Arabia had a serious chance early in 1996 to explore taking bin Laden into custody. Crown Prince Abdullah declined to press. The Saudi royal family regarded bin Laden as an irritation, but it would not confront him.

Sudan did not act promptly on the list of demands presented in March by the CIA. President Bas.h.i.+r concluded that he could never win back Was.h.i.+ngton's confidence-or American investment dollars-as long as bin Laden maintained his headquarters in Khartoum. Through an intermediary, Bas.h.i.+r told bin Laden to move out. Bin Laden replied, according to a Sudanese official involved in the exchange, "If you think it will be good for you, I will leave. But let me tell you one thing: If I stay or if I go, the Americans will not leave you alone."30 Osama bin Laden now had every reason to believe that the United States was his primary persecutor. His political theology identified many enemies, but it was America that forced him into flight. Osama bin Laden now had every reason to believe that the United States was his primary persecutor. His political theology identified many enemies, but it was America that forced him into flight.

Whether bin Laden explored alternatives to exile in Afghanistan is not known. Mohammed al-Ma.s.sari, a prominent Saudi dissident, recalled that he had often warned bin Laden that "Sudan is not a good place to stay. One day they will sell you to the Saudis." He urged bin Laden to find an alternative base. At some stage that spring bin Laden did contact Afghans in Jalalabad whom he had known during the anti-Soviet jihad. "They said, 'You are most welcome,' " according to a Sudanese official. "He was like a holy man to them." Sudan's government leased an Ariana Afghan jet and arranged to aid bin Laden's departure. It required two flights back and forth to move bin Laden, his three wives, his children, his furniture, and his followers to Jalalabad, according to the Sudanese official.31 According to Prince Turki and his chief of staff, Ahmed Badeeb, bin Laden arranged with the small Persian Gulf state of Qatar to land for refueling. Qatar, a tiny country on Saudi Arabia's flank that was perennially at odds with its larger neighbor, was in the midst of a succession crisis in its royal family. Radical Islamists held office in its ministry for religious affairs. Bin Laden chose Qatar because it "had good relations with both Sudan and Yemen," according to Badeeb, and because it was "safer than any other country" between Sudan and Afghanistan. American investigators later reported that according to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bin Laden refueled not in Qatar, but in nearby United Arab Emirates. In any event, his tank replenished, bin Laden lifted off a few hours later for Afghanistan.32 Sudan's government informed Carney and the White House of bin Laden's departure only after he was gone. The CIA station in Islamabad did not monitor bin Laden's arrival at Jalalabad's airport because it had no active sources in the area.33 The Americans were the "main enemy" of Muslims worldwide, an angry bin Laden told a British journalist who visited him in an eastern Afghan mountain camp weeks after his arrival in Jalalabad. Saudi Arabian authorities were only "secondary enemies," he declared. As bin Laden saw it, the world had now reached "the beginning of war between Muslims and the United States."34

THE UNCHALLENGED FLIGHT from Sudan was an inauspicious beginning of the CIA's experimental bin Laden station and the White House's beefed-up counterterrorism office. In those first months of 1996 it got worse.

Ever since Ramzi Yousef's arrest early in 1995 and the discovery of evidence about his plot to blow up American planes over the Pacific Ocean, the CIA and the FBI had been on the lookout for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. After Yousef's arrest investigators discovered a $660 financial wire transfer sent by Mohammed from Qatar to New York to aid the World Trade Center bombers. When the CIA received the wire record and looked into it, officers determined that Mohammed was Yousef's uncle and had married a sister of Yousef's wife. Working from clues discovered among Yousef's possessions, investigators traced his movements. The CIA received evidence that Mohammed was hiding in Qatar. The agency eventually tracked him to Qatar's water department where he was employed as a mechanical engineer. The White House asked the CIA if it could quickly arrest Mohammed and fly him to the United States. The CIA reported that it did not have the officers or agents in Qatar to carry out such an operation. The Qatari minister of religious endowments, Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalid al-Tahni, was known to harbor Islamists loyal to bin Laden. If they asked the Qatar government for help in seizing bin Laden, it was likely that Mohammed would be alerted. The White House then turned to the Pentagon to plan a Special Forces raid to take Mohammed. The Pentagon came back with a large-scale plan that involved flying aircraft first into Bahrain and then launched a smaller attack force via helicopters for Qatar.Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger chaired a White House meeting to consider this option. One problem with the Pentagon plan was that Bahrain and Qatar had been feuding recently over disputed islands in the Persian Gulf.What if Qatar interpreted the helicopters as an attack force arriving from Bahrain? While seeking to arrest a single terrorist clandestinely, the United States might inadvertently start a war. The Justice Department cited legal problems with the Pentagon plan. The White House noted that it was negotiating an important air force basing agreement with Qatar. In the end the plan was discarded. Investigators awaited a sealed indictment against Mohammed. It was handed down in January 1996. The FBI moved to arrest him through regular diplomatic channels. Qatar's government waffled; Mohammed escaped. "I have received disturbing information suggesting that Mohammed has again escaped the surveillance of your Security Services and that he appears to be aware of FBI interest in him," an angry Louis Freeh, the FBI director, wrote to Qatar's foreign minister. Nor did the CIA have a clear understanding of Mohammed's growing affinity for bin Laden's global war: The CIA's Counterterrorist Center did not a.s.sign his case to its new bin Laden unit, but chased him separately as a freelance extremist.35 It was the start of a pattern that would persist for several years as the Clinton administration's secret war against bin Laden and his Islamist network deepened. They had few reliable allies in the Middle East and Central Asia. The CIA's paramilitary forces were small and sometimes less than nimble. The Pentagon's planners thought in terms of large attack operations. Tactical intelligence about the enemy was patchy, fleeting.

If their campaign against bin Laden was to be waged this way, they would have to learn to thread a very small needle.

AT THE TIME OF bin Laden's arrival, Jalalabad was controlled, if not governed, by a regional shura shura of eastern Pashtun tribal leaders and former anti-Soviet guerrilla commanders. Many of them were involved in lucrative smuggling and trade rackets across the Pakistan border. They had resisted overtures to join the Taliban but had also kept their distance from Hekmatyar and Ma.s.soud. Their most prominent leader was Haji Qadir, sometimes referred to as the mayor of Jalalabad. Their most prominent patron from the anti-Soviet era was Younis Khalis, now an octogenarian who took teenage wives. Khalis and other Jalalabad of eastern Pashtun tribal leaders and former anti-Soviet guerrilla commanders. Many of them were involved in lucrative smuggling and trade rackets across the Pakistan border. They had resisted overtures to join the Taliban but had also kept their distance from Hekmatyar and Ma.s.soud. Their most prominent leader was Haji Qadir, sometimes referred to as the mayor of Jalalabad. Their most prominent patron from the anti-Soviet era was Younis Khalis, now an octogenarian who took teenage wives. Khalis and other Jalalabad shura shura leaders maintained contacts with Pakistani intelligence. leaders maintained contacts with Pakistani intelligence.36 Bin Laden certainly knew some of the Jalalabad group from the 1980s and early 1990s, and he had kept in touch during his years in Sudan. He may also have remained in touch with ISI. It is notable that bin Laden did not fly into Afghan territory controlled by the Taliban. Some American a.n.a.lysts later reported that bin Laden had sent money to the Taliban even prior to his return to Afghanistan.37 Yet bin Laden apparently did not have a comfortable enough relations.h.i.+p with the Taliban's isolated, severe,mysterious leaders.h.i.+p group to place himself and his family under their control. Yet bin Laden apparently did not have a comfortable enough relations.h.i.+p with the Taliban's isolated, severe,mysterious leaders.h.i.+p group to place himself and his family under their control.

The Taliban were entering a new phase of power and ambition just as bin Laden arrived. They were no longer the humble, consultative Pashtun country folk of late 1994 and early 1995. They had evolved into a political-military movement with national goals. Some of their leaders, such as Prince Turki's favorite, Mullah Rabbani, continued to hint to foreign visitors and United Nations diplomats that the Taliban were just a transition force. He and other "moderate" Taliban leaders, as they were now being called by American diplomats, said the Taliban would cleanse Afghanistan of its criminal warlords and create a fresh political start, perhaps including a return of the exiled king. But increasingly such claims had to be reconciled with menacing scenes of the Taliban's appet.i.te for power. Its leaders openly denounced the Ma.s.soud-defended government in Kabul as "the root cause of all evils in Afghanistan."38 Omar summoned more than one thousand Pashtun religious scholars and tribal leaders to Kandahar for a two-week grand a.s.sembly in the early weeks of spring 1996. It was the most overt political meeting of Pashtuns under Taliban leaders.h.i.+p since the movement's birth. Omar chose his ground and his symbols carefully. At the meeting's climax he called the delegates to the great stone-and-tile square across from the Kandahar governor's house. Within the square's gates stood the tomb of the eighteenth-century king Ahmed Shah Durrani and the tile-inlaid Mosque of the Cloak of the Holy Prophet.

Omar climbed to the mosque's roof and unveiled the holy cloak. As the crowd roared approval, he wrapped himself dramatically in the relic. The a.s.sembled delegates formally ratified him as Amir-ul-Momineen, "Commander of the Faithful." They created and sanctified a new name for the expanding territory under Taliban control: The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They called for jihad against Ma.s.soud. Some denounced Zahir Shah as a criminal. Surrounded by the symbolic remnants of a lost Durrani empire, they had proclaimed their own one-eyed king.39

VIRTUALLY BY HERSELF in the Clinton administration, Robin Raphel tried to drum up a climate of urgency about all-party Afghan peace talks then being sponsored by the United Nations. Raphel had support from a few members of Congress but hardly any backing from the White House. The State Department's South Asia bureau, which Raphel ran, saw the Taliban as a distasteful but well-established faction on the Afghan checkerboard. The United States now endorsed Pakistan's view that peace talks must include the movement's leaders. By its secret support for the Taliban and its continual public lies, Pakistan had made the Taliban a fact of international diplomacy-and the Americans accepted their legitimacy. At the same time Raphel's public statements made clear that State opposed all efforts to solve the Afghan war by military victory, whether by the Taliban or Ma.s.soud.

Raphel traveled to Kabul, Kandahar, and Islamabad on April 19 and 20, 1996. "Tell President Clinton and the West that we are not bad people," a Taliban leader told her in the Pashtun capital. Raphel and U.S. amba.s.sador Tom Simons concluded that the Taliban's humble, simplistic messages might reflect "a growing awareness, previously absent, of their own limitations," as Simons wrote in a cable to Was.h.i.+ngton. Raphel and the amba.s.sador believed-wrongly-that "a consensus has emerged" in the Pakistan government's civilian and military leaders.h.i.+p about the need to broaden their policies toward Afghanistan. As she had done before, Bhutto lied to Raphel in meetings and "emphasized that Pakistan was not providing military support to the Taliban and insisted that only minimal, nonlethal aid was being delivered." Raphel absorbed Pakistan's hostility toward Ma.s.soud and carried it into her meetings with the commander in Kabul. "Ma.s.soud outlined a vision for a bottom-up democracy" in Afghanistan, but Raphel and Simons dismissed this "rosy scenario" in a Confidential cable to Was.h.i.+ngton and denounced the "self-righteousness" of Ma.s.soud's besieged government. For their part, Ma.s.soud and his aides were put off by what they saw as Raphel's lecturing. Raphel seemed to treat Afghanistan "as a wilderness threatening the stability of Pakistan," as one of Ma.s.soud's intelligence officers put it. Ma.s.soud and his intelligence advisers worried that the CIA had covertly joined with ISI to engineer a Taliban takeover of Kabul to create favorable conditions for the Unocal pipeline. Ma.s.soud's government had signed an agreement with Unocal's Argentine rival, banking a $1 million payment in a New York account belonging to one of Ma.s.soud's advisers. They feared they had been branded as Unocal's-and therefore America's-enemy.40 In truth, n.o.body in Was.h.i.+ngton cared enough to conspire about Afghan politics. Still, Raphel and her State Department colleagues heard accusations about a CIA-led, Unocal-driven plot in Afghanistan over and over that spring. A decade of covert action in the 1980s had conditioned many Afghans and Pakistanis to see the CIA as a powerful force in their affairs. Raphel and her colleagues heard the CIA-Unocal-Taliban conspiracy stories so often and in such credible detail that they privately asked Langley a few times for confirmation that there was no fire beneath all this smoke. They were a.s.sured that the CIA was clean.

More than any other American official at the time, Raphel outlined publicly the dangers an unstable Afghanistan posed to the world. The country "has become a conduit for drugs, crime, and terrorism that can undermine Pakistan [and] the neighboring Central Asian states and have an impact beyond Europe and Russia," she predicted. She warned that terrorist