Ghost Wars Part 6

As Bearden put it years later, "Did we really give a s.h.i.+t about the long-term future of Nangarhar? Maybe not. As it turned out, guess what? We didn't."5 The CIA's Near East hands were increasingly annoyed at the State Department diplomats who were now wheedling onto the CIA's turf at the moment of victory, continually questioning the agency's a.s.sumptions, harping on the Pakistani support for Hekmatyar and the Islamists, and wringing their hands about peace settlements. Where had these pin-striped a.s.sholes been when it counted, the grumbling at Langley went, when the CIA had been slogging away amid skepticism that they could ever succeed? What naive earnestness led State's diplomats and their allies in Congress to believe that they could unscramble the Afghan war, hold a few conferences in Europe, and welcome the exiled Afghan king back to his Kabul palace, with a bra.s.s band playing on the lawn? The Afghans would have to figure things out themselves. The Americans couldn't help, and it was not in the interests of the United States to try. How much of this thinking within CIA's Near East Division was carefully considered and how much of it was an emotional rebellion against second-guessing from State and Congress was difficult to measure. They felt they had taken more than ample guff about the most successful covert action program in CIA history. The Soviets were leaving. Enough.

As to Afghan politics, the CIA was content to let Pakistani intelligence take the lead even if it did mean they installed their client Hekmatyar in Kabul. So what? Pakistani hegemony over Afghanistan, whether or not it was achieved through the ideology of political Islam, did not seem to pose any significant threat to American interests, the Near East Division's officers felt. Besides, if they had qualms about Hekmatyar-and most of them did-they did not see what they could do at this stage to block ISI's plans. So they moved to help ISI succeed. After consulting with Prince Turki, the CIA and Saudi intelligence both accelerated s.h.i.+pments of weapons to Pakistan, hoping to beat any diplomatic deadlines that might constrict supplies.

The new Pakistani intelligence chief, Hamid Gul, had taken over with fresh plans to push the rebels toward more formal military operations that could put pressure on major Afghan cities. Gul felt his job was "to get the Russians out. I'm not concerned about anything else." He was not as close personally to Hekmatyar as some of the colonels and brigadiers who had become fixtures in ISI's Afghan bureau, a bureau where Gul had little experience. Based on military liaison contacts with Gul in Islamabad, the Defense Intelligence Agency produced a biography of the new ISI chief that emphasized his pro-Western att.i.tudes. The sketch of Gul's character turned out to be almost entirely wrong. A full-faced, fast-talking general who rolled easily through American idioms, Gul could change stripes quickly. From 1987 onward he worked very closely with Prince Turki, Turki's chief of staff Ahmed Badeeb, and other officers in Saudi intelligence. The Saudis knew Gul as a pious, committed Muslim and provided him with multiple gifts from the Saudi kingdom, including souvenirs from the holy Kaaba in Mecca. Yet his American partners in 1988 believed that Gul was their man. Gul described himself to Bearden as a "moderate Islamist."6 Gul was going to give money and guns to Hekmatyar and other Islamists mainly because they were willing to fight, he said. He was going to operate on a professional military basis. He certainly was not going to help out exiled Afghan intellectuals, technocrats, royalists, or other such politicians. Gul was determined to shut out those Afghans "who live a very good life [abroad] in the capitals of the world." In this he had the full support of the CIA station chief. Bearden regarded the Westernized Afghan rebel leaders such as Sibghatullah Mojaddedi as corrupt and ineffective. The "only real strength" of Mojaddedi's party "was its gift for public relations," as Bearden saw it. Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani attended meetings with Bearden in "a silk-and-cashmere suit," and he "rarely, if ever, strayed into Afghanistan," earning Bearden's disdain. Bearden encouraged ISI to provide the most potent high-technology weapons, such as Stingers and Milan ant.i.tank missiles, to Islamist Pashtun commanders who fought along the Pakistan-Afghan border, especially in Paktia and Nangarhar provinces. These were the regions where "the Soviets were still mounting major a.s.saults," as Bearden saw it.7 President Zia had wanted some sort of interim Afghan government to be agreed on before the Soviets left, to help ensure stability on Pakistan's western border. When it became clear that the Americans weren't interested, Zia said openly that Pakistan's army and intelligence service would work to install a friendly government in Kabul, one that would protect Pakistan's interests in its rivalry with India and prevent any stirrings of Pashtun nationalism on Pakistani territory. Zia felt this was only Pakistan's due: "We have earned the right to have [in Kabul] a power which is very friendly toward us. We have taken risks as a frontline state, and we will not permit a return to the prewar situation, marked by a large Indian and Soviet influence and Afghan claims on our own territory. The new power will be really Islamic, a part of the Islamic renaissance which, you will see, will someday extend itself to the Soviet Muslims."8 In Was.h.i.+ngton that winter, much more than the liberals it was the still-vigorous network of conservative anticommunist ideologues in the Reagan administration and on Capitol Hill who began to challenge the CIA-ISI combine. These young policy makers, many of whom had traveled at one point or another to the Khyber Pa.s.s and stared across the ridges for a few hours with mujahedin commanders, feared that a CIA pullback from Afghanistan would sell out the Afghan rebel cause. America could not give up now; its goal should be "Afghan self-determination," a government chosen by the "freedom fighters," and if Najibullah's thuggish neocommunist regime hung on in Kabul, the mujahedins' brave campaign would be betrayed. Opinion about Hekmatyar and the Islamists in these conservative American circles was divided; some admired him as a stalwart anticommunist, while others feared his anti-Americanism. But there was a growing belief that some counterforce to CIA a.n.a.lysis and decision-making was now required inside the American government. Senator Gordon Humphrey, among others, agitated in the spring of 1988 for the appointment of a special U.S. envoy on Afghanistan, someone who could work with the rebel leaders outside of ISI earshot, a.s.sess their needs, and make recommendations about U.S. policy. America needed an expert, someone who spoke the language and knew the region but who also had proven credentials as a hard-line anticommunist.

The State Department recommended Edmund McWilliams. He was nominated as U.S. special envoy to the Afghan rebels and dispatched to the U.S. emba.s.sy in Islamabad in the late spring of 1988. McWilliams was energized by his a.s.signment. He would be able to report independently about the late stages of the Afghan jihad, circulate his cables to the CIA, State Department, and Congress, and provide a fresh, independent voice on the main controversies in U.S. policy at a critical moment.

It took only a few weeks after his arrival in the redbrick Islamabad emba.s.sy compound for CIA chief Milt Bearden to bestow upon McWilliams one of his pet nicknames. "That Evil Little Person," Bearden began to call him.9

SIGNED BY RANKING DIPLOMATS on April 14, 1988, the Geneva Accords ratified by treaty the formal terms of the Soviet withdrawal. It was an agreement among governments-Afghanistan's communist-led regime, Pakistan, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The Afghan rebels had no part in the negotiations, and some of them denounced the accord as a conspiracy against their cause. In fact, it a.s.sured that the rebels would remain militarily potent for years ahead. Gorbachev had hoped his willingness to get out of Afghanistan would persuade the Americans to end CIA aid to the mujahedin. But it was Ronald Reagan personally, apparently unscripted, who told a television interviewer early in 1988 that he just didn't think it would be fair if the Soviets continued to provide military and economic aid to Najibullah while the United States was forced to stop helping the Afghan rebels. Reagan's diplomatic negotiators had been preparing to accept an end to CIA a.s.sistance. Now they scrambled to change course. They negotiated a new formula called "positive symmetry," which permitted the CIA to supply guns and money to the mujahedin for as long as Moscow provided a.s.sistance to its allies in Kabul's government.

The first Soviet troops rolled out of Jalalabad a month later, some twelve thousand men and their equipment. Along with ISI's brigadiers, Bearden and his case officers spent many hours that spring of 1988 trying to persuade rebel commanders not to slaughter the Soviets during their retreat, as Afghan militia had done to retreating British imperial soldiers a century earlier. For the most part, rebel commanders allowed the Soviets to pa.s.s.

As the troops withdrew, Andrei Sakharov, the physicist and human rights activist whose freedom to speak signaled a new era of openness in Moscow, addressed the Congress of Peoples' Deputies. "The war in Afghanistan was in itself criminal, a criminal adventure," he told them. "This crime cost the lives of about a million Afghans, a war of destruction was waged against an entire people. . . . This is what lies on us as a terrible sin, a terrible reproach. We must cleanse ourselves of this shame that lies on our leaders.h.i.+p."10

EARLY IN AUGUST, Bearden took a call at the Islamabad station from an excited ISI officer. A Soviet SU-25, an advanced military aircraft, had been hit by antiaircraft fire near Parrot's Beak on the Pakistani border. The Soviet pilot had bailed out, but the plane came down softly, grinding to a stop with little damage.

How much would you be willing to pay? the ISI officer asked.

Bearden inquired if the plane's nose cone, which carried its instrumentation, was in good condition and whether its weapons had survived. They had, he was a.s.sured. He began negotiating. In the end, ISI sold the plane to the CIA for about half a dozen Toyota double-cab pickup trucks and some BM-12 rockets. Bearden arranged to inspect it, and he summoned a joint CIAAir Force team out from Was.h.i.+ngton to help load the prize onto a transport plane.

The next morning ISI called back. The pilot had survived and had been captured by Afghan rebels. "Jesus, tell them not to put him in the cook pot," Bearden said. The last thing they needed was a Soviet officer tortured or murdered in the middle of the troop withdrawal. Bearden offered some pickup trucks for the pilot, and ISI accepted. Pakistani intelligence interrogated the captive for four or five days. Bearden pa.s.sed through the usual CIA offer to captured pilots: "The big-chested homecoming queen blonde, the ba.s.s boat, and the pickup truck with Arizona plates." But ISI reported the Soviet officer declined to defect. Bearden contacted the Soviets and arranged for a handover. The pilot's name was Alexander Rutskoi. Several years later he would lead a violent uprising against Russian president Boris Yeltsin.11 BEARDEN'S PHONE RANG again at home just a few days after he purchased the SU-25. It was August 17, 1988. The emba.s.sy officer said they had a very garbled report that President Zia's plane had gone down near Bhawalpur where Zia, General Akhtar, Arnold Raphel (the American amba.s.sador to Pakistan), and other Pakistani and American military officers had been watching the demonstration of a new tank that the Americans wanted to sell.

Bearden sent a "critic" cable to Langley, the most urgent. If Zia was dead, the entire American government would have to mobilize quickly to a.s.sess the crisis. By the next morning it was confirmed. After the tank demonstration Zia had invited Akhtar, Raphel, an American brigadier general, and most of his own senior bra.s.s into the VIP compartment of his American-made C-130 for the short flight back to Islamabad. Minutes after takeoff the plane plummeted to the ground, its propellered engines churning at full force. All the bodies and much of the plane burned to char.

Langley sent a cable to Bearden suggesting that he dispatch the Air Force team in Pakistan for the SU-25 to investigate the Zia plane crash. The team was qualified to examine the wreckage. Bearden sent a reply cable that said, as he recalled it, "It would be a mistake to use the visiting technicians. Whatever good they might be able to do would be outweighed by the fact that the CIA had people poking around in the rubble of Zia's plane a day after it went down. Questions would linger as to what we were doing at the crash site and what we'd added or removed to cover up our hand in the crash." There was no sense aggravating the suspicions and questions about how Zia died by getting the CIA involved in the investigation. He could already imagine ISI's conspiracy-obsessed minds thinking: Why wasn't Bearden sahib on that plane? How did he know to stay away?12 In Was.h.i.+ngton, Powell convened a meeting in the White House Situation Room. Thomas Twetten, then running the Near East Division of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, attended for the agency. Robert Oakley, the National Security Council's director for the region, backed up Powell. Richard Armitage was there from the Pentagon and Michael Armacost from State. The Pakistanis were fearful that this might be a deliberate attack, perhaps the first in a series of strikes aimed at the country's very existence. The interagency group decided to send a senior team from Was.h.i.+ngton to Islamabad immediately, "to let the Paks know that we were solidly in support of them, whatever the threat might be, to mount the maximum intelligence search for what might have happened to this plane and what else might be coming," as Oakley later described it.13 The Americans weren't sure themselves what to think. Had the Russians done this, a final KGB act of revenge for Afghanistan? Was it the Iranians? The Indians? They began cabling warnings all over the world, saying, in Oakley's paraphrase, "Don't mess with the Paks, or the United States is going to be on your a.s.s." They ordered every available intelligence a.s.set to focus on intercepts, satellite pictures, anything that might turn up evidence of a conspiracy to kill Zia. They found nothing, but they were still unsure.

That night most of those in the Situation Room found their way to the Palm restaurant on 19th Street for a booze-soaked wake in remembrance of Amba.s.sador Raphel, a well-known and well-liked foreign service officer. Shultz, in New Orleans for the Republican convention, called Oakley at the restaurant. He told him to get out to Andrews Air Force Base outside Was.h.i.+ngton to accompany him to Pakistan for Zia's funeral-and to pack heavy because Oakley was going to stay in Islamabad as the new U.S. amba.s.sador, succeeding Raphel.

Charlie Wilson flew out on the plane with Shultz, as did Armitage and Armacost. They huddled together across the aisles, talking about contingencies, and they scratched out a new American policy toward Pakistan, literally on the fly. The United States would deepen ties to the Pakistani military, including Pakistani intelligence. They would need this intimate alliance more than ever now to get through the post-Zia transition. They would also support democratic elections for a new civilian government. Zia had been moving in this direction anyway; a date for national voting had been set. And they would help defend Pakistan from any external threats.14 It took weeks for the jitters to settle down. A joint U.S.-Pakistani air force investigation turned up circ.u.mstantial evidence of mechanical failure in the crash, although the exact cause remained a guess at best. The intelligence sweep turned up no chatter or other evidence about a murder conspiracy. Zia's successor as army chief of staff-a mild and bookish general, Mirza Aslam Beg-announced that the army would go forward with the scheduled elections and withdraw from politics. And the Soviets showed no sign of wavering from their planned withdrawal from Afghanistan. By October it appeared that the transition from Zia's long dictatorial reign would be smoother than anyone had had reason to expect at the time of his death.

The Afghan jihad had lost its founding father. General Akhtar, too, the architect of modern Pakistani intelligence, was dead. But Zia and Akhtar had left expansive, enduring legacies. In 1971 there had been only nine hundred madra.s.sas madra.s.sas in all of Pakistan. By the summer of 1988 there were about eight thousand official religious schools and an estimated twenty-five thousand unregistered ones, many of them cl.u.s.tered along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier and funded by wealthy patrons from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. in all of Pakistan. By the summer of 1988 there were about eight thousand official religious schools and an estimated twenty-five thousand unregistered ones, many of them cl.u.s.tered along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier and funded by wealthy patrons from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.15 When Akhtar had taken over ISI almost a decade earlier, it was a small and demoralized unit within the Pakistan military, focused mainly on regime security and never-ending espionage games with India. Now ISI was an army within the army, boasting multiple deep-pocketed patrons, including the supremely deep-pocketed Prince Turki and his Saudi General Intelligence Department. ISI enjoyed an ongoing operational partners.h.i.+p with the CIA as well, with periodic access to the world's most sophisticated technology and intelligence collection systems. The service had welcomed to Pakistan legions of volunteers from across the Islamic world, fighters who were willing to pursue Pakistan's foreign policy agenda not only in Afghanistan but, increasingly, across its eastern borders in Kashmir, where jihadists trained in Afghanistan were just starting to bleed Indian troops. And as the leading domestic political bureau of the Pakistan army, ISI could tap telephones, bribe legislators, and control voting boxes across the country when it decided a cause was ripe. Outside the Pakistan army itself, less than ten years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, ISI had been transformed by CIA and Saudi subsidies into Pakistan's most powerful inst.i.tution.Whatever unfolded now would require ISI's consent. When Akhtar had taken over ISI almost a decade earlier, it was a small and demoralized unit within the Pakistan military, focused mainly on regime security and never-ending espionage games with India. Now ISI was an army within the army, boasting multiple deep-pocketed patrons, including the supremely deep-pocketed Prince Turki and his Saudi General Intelligence Department. ISI enjoyed an ongoing operational partners.h.i.+p with the CIA as well, with periodic access to the world's most sophisticated technology and intelligence collection systems. The service had welcomed to Pakistan legions of volunteers from across the Islamic world, fighters who were willing to pursue Pakistan's foreign policy agenda not only in Afghanistan but, increasingly, across its eastern borders in Kashmir, where jihadists trained in Afghanistan were just starting to bleed Indian troops. And as the leading domestic political bureau of the Pakistan army, ISI could tap telephones, bribe legislators, and control voting boxes across the country when it decided a cause was ripe. Outside the Pakistan army itself, less than ten years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, ISI had been transformed by CIA and Saudi subsidies into Pakistan's most powerful inst.i.tution.Whatever unfolded now would require ISI's consent.

ED MCWILLIAMS STRUCK OUT by jeep for the Afghan frontier soon after he arrived in Islamabad that summer. After the deaths of Zia and Amba.s.sador Raphel, the U.S. emba.s.sy was in chaos. The new regime led by Robert Oakley was only just settling in. It seemed an ideal time for McWilliams to disappear into the field, to use his prestigious-sounding t.i.tle of special envoy and his language skills to talk with as many Afghan commanders, intellectuals, and refugees as he could. He traveled on weekends to avoid escorts and official meetings set up by the emba.s.sy. He wanted to know what problems Afghan mujahedin were facing as the Soviets left, what American interests were in post-Soviet Afghanistan, and what was really happening on the ground.

For two months he traveled through Pakistan's tribal areas. In Peshawar he spent long hours with Abdul Haq and senior mujahedin leaders such as Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani and Younis Khalis. Ahmed Shah Ma.s.soud's brother Yahya had moved to Peshawar and set up an office for the Panjs.h.i.+ri militia. McWilliams drove up into the hills and talked with merchants, travelers on the roads, and rebel recruits in training camps. He flew down to Quetta and met with the Afghan exiles from the country's royalist clans, including the Karzai family. He talked to commanders who operated in the west of Afghanistan, in the central Hazara region, and also some who fought near Kandahar, the southern city that was Afghanistan's historical royal capital. He drove up to Chaman on the Afghan border and talked with carpet merchants shuttling back and forth into Afghanistan. It had been a long time since an American in a position to shape government policy had sat cross-legged on quite so many Afghan rugs or sipped so many cups of sugared green tea, asking Afghans themselves open-ended questions about their jihad. The accounts McWilliams heard began to disturb and anger him.

Nearly every Afghan he met impressed upon him the same message: As the Soviets withdrew, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar-backed by officers in ISI's Afghan bureau, operatives from the Muslim Brotherhood's Jamaat-e-Islami, officers from Saudi intelligence, and Arab volunteers from a dozen countries-was moving systematically to wipe out his rivals in the Afghan resistance. The scenes described by McWilliams's informants made Hekmatyar sound like a Mafia don taking over the territory of his rivals. Hekmatyar and his kingpin commanders were serially kidnapping and murdering mujahedin royalists, intellectuals, rival party commanders-anyone who threatened strong alternative leaders.h.i.+p. Pakistani intelligence was at the same time using its recently constructed network of border infrastructure-checkpoints, training camps, and the newly built roads and caves and depots around Parrot's Beak and Paktia province-to block the progress of mujahedin commanders who opposed Hekmatyar and to force independent commanders to join Hekmatyar's party. Added up, the circ.u.mstantial evidence seemed chilling: As the Soviet Union soldiers pulled out, Hekmatyar and ISI had embarked on a concerted, clandestine plan to eliminate his rivals and establish his Muslim Brotherhood dominated Islamic Party as the most powerful national force in Afghanistan.16 In University Town, Peshawar, gunmen on motorcycles killed the Afghan poet and philosopher Sayd Bahudin Majrooh, publisher of the most influential bulletin promoting traditional Afghan royalist and tribal leaders.h.i.+p. Majrooh's independent Afghan Information Center had reported in a survey that 70 percent of Afghan refugees supported exiled King Zahir Shah rather than any of the Peshawar-based mujahedin leaders such as Hekmatyar.17 There were no arrests in Majrooh's killing. The hit was interpreted among Afghans and at the CIA's Islamabad station as an early and intimidating strike by Hekmatyar against the Zahir Shah option for post-Soviet Afghanistan. There were no arrests in Majrooh's killing. The hit was interpreted among Afghans and at the CIA's Islamabad station as an early and intimidating strike by Hekmatyar against the Zahir Shah option for post-Soviet Afghanistan.18 The Ahmed Shah Ma.s.soud option came in for similar treatment: Around the same time that Majrooh was killed, Ma.s.soud's older half-brother Dean Mohammed was kidnapped and killed by mysterious a.s.sailants hours after he visited the American consulate in Peshawar to apply for a visa. Ma.s.soud's brothers believed for years afterward that ISI's Afghan cell had carried out the operation, although they could not be sure.19 In Quetta, McWilliams heard detailed accounts of how Pakistani intelligence had allied with Hekmatyar to isolate and defeat rival commanders around Kandahar. ISI's local office regulated food and cash handouts so that those who now agreed to join Hekmatyar would have ample supplies for fighters and civilians in areas they controlled. Those who didn't agree to join, however, would be starved, unable to pay their men or supply grain to their villages. ISI used a road permit system to ensure that only authorized commanders had permission to take humanitarian supplies across the Afghan border, McWilliams was told. At the same time, Pakistani intelligence and the Arab volunteers operating around Paktia used their access to newly built roads, clinics, and training camps to persuade local commanders that only by joining forces with them could they ensure that their wounded were evacuated quickly and treated by qualified doctors. Afghan witnesses reported seeing ISI officers with Hekmatyar commanders as they moved in force against rival mujahedin around Kandahar. They complained to McWilliams that Hekmatyar's people received preferential access to local training camps and weapons depots. Secular-minded royalist Afghans from the country's thin, exiled tribal leaders.h.i.+p and commercial cla.s.ses said they had long warned both the Americans and the Saudis, as one put it, "For G.o.d's sake, you're financing your own a.s.sa.s.sins." But the Americans had been convinced by Pakistani intelligence, they complained, that only the most radical Islamists could fight with determination.

A lifelong and pa.s.sionate cold warrior, Ed McWilliams shared the conviction of conservative intellectuals in Was.h.i.+ngton that the CIA's long struggle for Afghan "self-determination" was morally just, even righteous. It appalled him to discover, as he believed he had, that American authority and billions of dollars in taxpayer funding had been hijacked at the war's end by a ruthless anti-American cabal of Islamists and Pakistani intelligence officers determined to impose their will on Afghanistan.

In the middle of October 1988, McWilliams sat down in the diplomatic section of the U.S. emba.s.sy in Islamabad and tapped out on its crude, secure telex system a twenty-eight-paragraph cable, cla.s.sified Secret and t.i.tled "ISI, Gulbuddin and Afghan Self-Determination."20 It was at that stage almost certainly the most detailed internal dissent about U.S. support for Pakistani intelligence, Saudi Arabian intelligence, and the Islamist Afghan rebels ever expressed in official U.S. government channels. The cable was distributed to the State Department, the CIA, the National Security Council, and a few members of Congress. It was at that stage almost certainly the most detailed internal dissent about U.S. support for Pakistani intelligence, Saudi Arabian intelligence, and the Islamist Afghan rebels ever expressed in official U.S. government channels. The cable was distributed to the State Department, the CIA, the National Security Council, and a few members of Congress.

THERE IS A GROWING FRUSTRATION, BORDERING ON.

HOSTILITY, AMONG AFGHANS ACROSS THE IDEOLOGICAL.

SPECTRUM AND FROM A BROAD RANGE OF BACKGROUNDS,.

TOWARD THE GOVERNMENT OF PAKISTAN AND TOWARD.

THE U.S. . . . THE EXTENT OF THIS SENTIMENT APPEARS.

UNPRECEDENTED AND INTENSIFYING. . . . MOST OF THESE.

OBSERVERS CLAIM THAT THIS EFFORT [BY HEKMATYAR.

AND ISI] HAS THE SUPPORT OF THE RADICAL PAKISTANI.

POLITICAL PARTY JAMAAT ISLAMI AND OF RADICAL.

ARABS. . . . WHILE THESE CHARGES MAY BE EXAGGERATED,.

THE PERCEPTION THEY GIVE RISE TO IS DEEP.

AND BROAD-AND OMINOUS. . . .

In the course of his reporting, McWilliams had spoken with a number of American diplomats and a.n.a.lysts "who were not in a position to speak out, because indeed it was a rather intimidating atmosphere." He felt that he was describing their views of the ISI-CIA-Hekmatyar-Arab problem as well as his own.21 Within the U.S. emba.s.sy in Islamabad his cable detonated like a stink bomb. Normally a diplomatic officer had to clear his cabled a.n.a.lyses through the amba.s.sador, but McWilliams had semi-independent status. Bearden was furious at "that little s.h.i.+t." McWilliams was misinformed, the CIA's officers felt. He didn't have access to all their cla.s.sified information doc.u.menting how the CIA managed its unilateral Afghan reporting network, including its support for Ma.s.soud and Abdul Haq, or how the agency played its hand with ISI, seeking to ensure that Hekmatyar did not dominate the weapons pipeline. Besides, Bearden discounted some of the criticism of Hekmatyar as KGB pro-paganda. He saw Hekmatyar "as an enemy," he said later, but he did not regard Ma.s.soud as an adequate instrument for the CIA's prosecution of the war. Bearden accepted the view, shared by Pakistani intelligence, that Ma.s.soud "appeared to have established an undeclared cease-fire" with the Soviets in the north. Ma.s.soud was "shoring up his position politically," not fighting as hard as ISI's main Islamist clients, Bearden believed.

On a more personal, visceral level, the CIA officers found McWilliams uncompromising, humorless, not a team player. At the Kabul emba.s.sy McWilliams had been involved in an administrative controversy involving accusations of improper contacts with Afghans by a CIA case officer, and the reports reaching the Islamabad station suggested that McWilliams had squealed on the CIA officer involved. Bearden thought McWilliams had endangered the CIA officer by his conduct. His cable challenging CIA a.s.sumptions about the jihad sent Bearden and Oakley into a cold fury.22 McWilliams found Oakley, his deputy Beth Jones, and Bearden unquestioning in their endors.e.m.e.nt of current U.S. policy toward Pakistani intelligence. Oakley was a hardworking, intelligent diplomat, but he was also intimidating and rude, McWilliams thought. Oakley and Bearden were both Texans: double trouble when they were together, boisterous, and confident to the point of arrogance. "Everybody is saying that you're a dumb a.s.shole," Bearden teased Oakley once before a group of emba.s.sy colleagues. "But I correct them. 'Oakley is not dumb,' I say."

For his part, McWilliams felt that he was only initiating a healthy debate about the a.s.sumptions underlying the U.S. alliance with ISI. Why should that anger his colleagues so intensely? But it did. McWilliams's underground allies in the U.S. emba.s.sy and consulates in Pakistan opened a back channel to keep him informed about just how thoroughly he had alienated Oakley and Bearden, McWilliams recalled. In the aftermath of his cable about Hekmatyar and ISI, the U.S. emba.s.sy in Islamabad had quietly opened an internal investigation into McWilliams's integrity, the envoy's informants confided. The CIA had raised serious questions about his handling of cla.s.sified materials. The emba.s.sy was watching his behavior and posing questions to those who knew him.Was McWilliams a h.o.m.os.e.xual? He seemed to be a drinker. Did he have some sort of problem with alcohol?

THE RUSSIAN WRITER Artyom Borovik traveled with the Soviet Fortieth Army's last brigades as they prepared to rumble out of Kabul and up the snowy Salang Highway in January and February 1989. It was an extraordinary time in Soviet journalism and military culture, a newly permissive moment of dissent and uncensored speech. "It's been a strange war," a lieutenant colonel named Ushakov told Borovik. "We went in when stagnation was at its peak and now leave when truth is raging."

At the iron-gated, heavy-concrete Soviet emba.s.sy compound in Kabul, just down the road from the city zoo, fallen eucalyptus leaves swirled in the bottom of the empty swimming pool. The emba.s.sy's KGB chief insisted on his regular Friday tennis game. His forty-minute sets "seemed quite fantastic to me," Borovik wrote, "especially when the camouflaged helicopters that provided covering fire for the airborne troopers would fly above his gray-haired head." The Cold War's ending now seemed to echo far beyond Afghanistan. "Who knows where a person can feel safer these days-here or in Poland?" the Polish amba.s.sador asked grimly. The old Soviet guard watched bitterly as the last tank convoys pulled out. A general read to Borovik from a dog-eared copy of a book about why Russia had been defeated in its war with j.a.pan in 1904: "In the last few years, our government itself has headed the antiwar movement."

Boris Gromov was the Fortieth Army's last commander. He was short and stout, and his face was draped by bangs. He feared the Panjs.h.i.+r Valley. "There's Ma.s.soud with his four thousand troops, so there's still plenty to worry about," he told Borovik. The last Russian fatality, a soldier named Lashenenkov, was shot through the neck on the Salang Highway by a rebel sniper. He rode out of Afghanistan on a stretcher lashed to the top of an armored vehicle, his corpse draped in snow.23 On February 15, the day appointed by the Geneva Accords for the departure of the last Soviet troops, Gromov staged a ceremony for the international media on the Termez Bridge, still standing despite the multiple attempts by ISI to persuade Afghan commanders to knock it down. Gromov stopped his tank halfway across the bridge, climbed out of the hatch, and walked toward Uzbekistan as one of his sons approached him with a bouquet of carnations.24 At CIA headquarters in Langley the newly appointed director, William Webster, hosted a champagne party.

At the U.S. emba.s.sy in Islamabad, too, they threw a celebration. Bearden sent a cable to Langley: "WE WON." He decided on his own last act of private theater. His third-floor office in the CIA station lay in the direct line of sight of the KGB office in the Soviet emba.s.sy across barren scrub land. Bearden had made a point of always leaving the light on in his office, and at diplomatic receptions he would joke with his KGB counterparts about how hard he was working to bring them down. That night he switched off the light.25 Shevardnadze flew into snow-cradled Kabul that same night with Kryuchkov, the Soviet KGB chief. Najibullah and his wife hosted them for dinner. All autumn and winter the Afghan president had been working to win defections to his cause, hoping to forestall a mujahedin onslaught and the collapse of his government, still being forecast confidently by the CIA. Najibullah had offered Ma.s.soud his defense ministry, and when Ma.s.soud sent a message refusing the job, the president had decided to leave the seat open, signaling that it could be Ma.s.soud's whenever he felt ready. Najibullah pushed through pay raises to special guard forces trained to defend Kabul. He organized militias to defend the northern gas fields that provided his government's only reliable income. He was doing what he could, he told his Soviet sponsors.

But by now the KGB shared the CIA's a.s.sumption that Najibullah was doomed without Soviet troops to protect him. That night over dinner Shevardnadze offered Najibullah and his wife a new home in Moscow if they wanted to leave Kabul. Shevardnadze worried about their safety. Najibullah's wife answered: "We would prefer to be killed on the doorsteps of this house rather than die in the eyes of our people by choosing the path of flight from their bitter misfortune. We will all stay with them here to the end, whether it be happy or bitter."26 It would be bitter.

PART TWO.

THE ONE-EYED MAN.

WAS KING.

March 1989 to December 1997

10.

"Serious Risks"

THERE WERE TWO CIA STATIONS crammed inside the U.S. emba.s.sy in Islamabad in the late winter of 1989 as the last Soviet soldiers withdrew across the Amu Darya River, out of Afghanistan.

Gary Schroen, newly appointed as Kabul station chief, arrived in Pakistan in temporary exile. Schroen had been away from Islamabad since student rioters sacked the emba.s.sy a decade earlier. He had been working in the Persian Gulf and on the CIA's Iranian operations. He was appointed to Kabul in the late summer of 1988, but he had been forced to wait in Langley as the White House debated whether to close the U.S. emba.s.sy in the Afghan capital. When the mission was ordered shut, mainly for security reasons, Schroen flew to Islamabad to wait a little longer. He and several Kabul-bound case officers squeezed themselves into Milton Bearden's office suite. As soon as Najibullah fell to the mujahedin that winter-in just a matter of weeks, CIA a.n.a.lysts at headquarters felt certain-Schroen and his team would drive up to Kabul from Pakistan, help reopen the emba.s.sy, and set up operations in a liberated country.

Weeks pa.s.sed and then more weeks. Najibullah, his cabinet, and his army held firm. Amid heavy snows the Afghan military pushed out a new defensive ring around the capital, holding the mujahedin farther at bay. Najibullah put twenty thousand mullahs on his payroll to counter the rebels' religious messages. As March approached, the Afghan regime showed no fissures.

In Islamabad, Schroen told his colleagues that not for the first or last time the CIA's predictions were proving wrong. He moved out of a cramped dormitory in the walled emba.s.sy compound, fixed up a room in an anonymous guest house, requisitioned four-wheel-drive vehicles for his case officers, and told them to settle in for the long haul. They might as well make themselves useful by working from Islamabad.

Bearden agreed that Schroen's Kabul group should take the lead in running the Afghan rebel commanders on the CIA's payroll. These numbered about forty by the first months of 1989. There were minor commanders receiving $5,000 monthly stipends, others receiving $50,000. Several of them worked for Hekmatyar. The CIA had also increased its payments to Hekmatyar's rival, Ma.s.soud, who was by now secretly receiving $200,000 a month in cash. Ma.s.soud's stipend had ballooned partly because the CIA knew that Pakistani intelligence shortchanged him routinely. Under pressure from Ma.s.soud's supporters in Congress, and hoping that the Panjs.h.i.+ri leader would pressure the Afghan government's northern supply lines, the agency had sent through a big raise. The CIA tried to keep all these payments hidden from Pakistani intelligence.1 Ma.s.soud and other Afghan commanders in the CIA's unilateral network had by now received secure radio sets with messaging software that allowed them to transmit coded reports directly to the Islamabad emba.s.sy. The message traffic required time and attention from emba.s.sy case officers. And there was a steady stream of face-to-face contact meetings to be managed in Peshawar and Quetta. Each contact had to be handled carefully so that neither Pakistani intelligence nor rival mujahedin caught on. The plan was that once Schroen's group of case officers made it to their new station in Kabul, they would take many of their Afghan agent relations.h.i.+ps with them.

All this depended on wresting the Afghan capital from Najibullah's control, however. For this, too, the CIA had a plan. Bearden and his group collaborated closely with Pakistani intelligence that winter, even as they tried to s.h.i.+eld their unilateral agent network from detection.

Hamid Gul, the Pakistani intelligence chief, proposed to rattle Najibullah by launching an ambitious rebel attack against the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, just a few hours' drive across the Khyber Pa.s.s from Peshawar. Once the mujahedin captured Jalalabad, Gul said, they could install a new government on Afghan soil and begin to move on Kabul. The short distance and open roads between Jalalabad and Peshawar would make it easy for ISI and the CIA to truck in supplies.2 Pakistani intelligence had put together a new Islamist-dominated Afghan government that could move to Jalalabad as soon as the city was captured. In February 1989, at a hotel in Rawalpindi, Afghan delegates were summoned to a consultative shura shura to elect new political leaders. Flush with about $25 million in cash provided by Prince Turki al-Faisal's Saudi intelligence department, Hamid Gul and colleagues from ISI's Afghan bureau twisted arms and spread money around until the delegates agreed on a cabinet for a self-declared Afghan interim government. To prevent either Hekmatyar or Ma.s.soud from seizing power, the delegates chose weak figurehead leaders and agreed to rotate offices. There was a lot of squabbling, and Hekmatyar, among others, went away angry. But at least a rebel government now existed on paper, Hamid Gul argued to his American counterparts. He felt that military pressure had to be directed quickly at Afghan cities "to make the transfer of power possible" to the rebels. Otherwise, "in the vacuum, there would be a lot of chaos in Afghanistan." to elect new political leaders. Flush with about $25 million in cash provided by Prince Turki al-Faisal's Saudi intelligence department, Hamid Gul and colleagues from ISI's Afghan bureau twisted arms and spread money around until the delegates agreed on a cabinet for a self-declared Afghan interim government. To prevent either Hekmatyar or Ma.s.soud from seizing power, the delegates chose weak figurehead leaders and agreed to rotate offices. There was a lot of squabbling, and Hekmatyar, among others, went away angry. But at least a rebel government now existed on paper, Hamid Gul argued to his American counterparts. He felt that military pressure had to be directed quickly at Afghan cities "to make the transfer of power possible" to the rebels. Otherwise, "in the vacuum, there would be a lot of chaos in Afghanistan."3 For the CIA, Pakistan was becoming a far different place to carry out covert action than it had been during the anti-Soviet jihad. The agency had to reckon now with more than just the views of ISI. Civilians and the army shared power, opportunistic politicians debated every issue, and a free press clamored with dissent. Pakistan's newly elected prime minister was Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto, at thirty-six a beautiful, charismatic, and self-absorbed politician with no government experience. She was her country's first democratically elected leader in more than a decade. She had taken office with American support, and she cultivated American connections. Raised in a gilded world of feudal aristocratic ent.i.tlements, Bhutto had attended Radcliffe College at Harvard University as an undergraduate and retained many friends in Was.h.i.+ngton. She saw her American allies as a counterweight to her enemies in the Pakistani army command-an officer corps that had sent her father to the gallows a decade earlier.

She was especially distrustful of Pakistani intelligence. She knew that Hamid Gul's ISI was already tapping her telephones and fomenting opposition against her in the country's newly elected parliament. Stunned by Zia's death, the Pakistani army leaders.h.i.+p had endorsed a restoration of democracy in the autumn of 1988, but the generals expected to retain control over national security policy. The chief of army staff, Mirza Aslam Beg, tolerated Bhutto's role, but others in the army officer corps-especially some of the Islamists who had been close to Zia-saw her as a secularist, a socialist, and an enemy of Islam. This was especially true inside ISI's Afghan bureau. "I wonder if these people would ever have held elections if they knew that we were going to win," Bhutto remarked to her foreign policy adviser Iqbal Akhund on a flight to China in 1989. Akhund, cynical about ISI's competence, told her: "You owe your prime ministers.h.i.+p to the intelligence agencies who, as always, gave the government a wishful a.s.sessment of how the elections would-or could be made to-turn out."

The U.S. amba.s.sador Robert Oakley told emba.s.sy colleagues to tiptoe delicately. The CIA should continue to collaborate closely with ISI to defeat Najibullah in Afghanistan. At the same time Oakley hoped to sh.o.r.e up Bhutto as best he could against subterranean efforts by Pakistani intelligence to bring her down.4 The unfinished Afghan jihad loomed as Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto's first foreign policy challenge, her first attempt to establish authority over ISI on a major national security question. On March 6 she called a meeting in Islamabad of the interagency "Afghan cell" to discuss Hamid Gul's proposal to attack Jalalabad. There were no Afghans in the room. Bhutto was so anxious about ISI that she invited Oakley to attend the meeting. Oakley had no guidance from Was.h.i.+ngton about how to conduct himself before Pakistan's national security cabinet, but he went anyway.

They debated several questions. Should Pakistan and perhaps the United States immediately recognize the ISI-arranged Afghan interim government or wait until it captured territory inside Afghanistan? Yaqub Khan, Bhutto's foreign minister, thought the rebels needed to demonstrate they were "not just some Johnnies riding around Peshawar in Mercedes." Should they encourage Afghan fighters to hurl themselves at heavily defended Jalalabad or go more slowly? Pakistani intelligence and the CIA had already developed a detailed military plan for attacking Jalalabad, and they wanted to move fast. ISI had a.s.sembled five thousand to seven thousand Afghan rebels near the city. They were being equipped for a conventional frontal military a.s.sault on its garrisons. This approach was much different from the hit-and-run guerrilla tactics of the anti-Soviet campaign. Yet Hamid Gul promised Bhutto that Jalalabad would fall to the rebels within a week if she was "prepared to allow for a certain degree of bloodshed." The ISI chief's eyes were "blazing with pa.s.sion," as Bhutto remembered it, and Gul spoke so forcefully that she thought Jalalabad would "fall in twenty-four hours, let alone in one week." "There can be no cease-fire in a jihad against the Marxist unbeliever," Gul declared. "War must go on until Darul Harb Darul Harb [house of war] is cleansed and becomes [house of war] is cleansed and becomes Darul Amn Darul Amn [house of peace]!" Oakley, too, was optimistic. [house of peace]!" Oakley, too, was optimistic.5 The CIA plunged in to help. Bearden's case officers, Schroen's case officers, and military officers from ISI's Afghan bureau-often led by the committed Islamists Brigadier Janjua and Colonel Imam-met frequently in Rawalpindi and Peshawar. CIA officers unveiled a covert plan to cut off the main supply line between Kabul and Jalalabad. There was only one motor route between the two cities, the Sarobi Road, which ran for miles through a narrow chasm, crisscrossing flimsy bridges. The CIA had imported specially shaped conical explosive charges, designed like very large household flower pots, that could blow huge craters in the road.

Pakistani intelligence summoned about a dozen commanders from the Sarobi area to a meeting at a safehouse in Peshawar. CIA officers spread out satellite photographs of the Sarobi Road on the floor. They all kneeled around the satellite images-bearded Afghans in draping turbans, CIA case officers in blue jeans, Pakistani intelligence officers in civilian salwars. salwars. They planned where to place the explosives and where to install machine gun nests for ambush attacks on Najibullah's convoys. They planned where to place the explosives and where to install machine gun nests for ambush attacks on Najibullah's convoys.

The Afghans could sense that the CIA's bank window was open, and suddenly it seemed that every commander within a hundred miles of Jalalabad needed new Toyota double-cab trucks to accomplish his part of the attack. The CIA purchased several hundred trucks in j.a.pan that winter, s.h.i.+pped them to Karachi, and rolled them up to Peshawar to support the Jalalabad a.s.sault.6 The rebels had to run through Soviet-laid minefields as they approached fixed positions around Jalalabad. The Afghans were trained to send mules ahead of their soldiers to clear the fields. They would tie long wooden logs on ropes behind the mules and drive them into a minefield to set off the buried charges.

"I know you don't like this," an Afghan commander explained to Gary Schroen as the Jalalabad battle began, "but it's better than using people."

"Yes, but just don't take any pictures," Schroen advised. n.o.body back in Was.h.i.+ngton "wants to see pictures of little donkeys blown up."7 The pictures they did see were worse. As the spring sun melted the snowy eastern pa.s.ses, hundreds of Afghan boys and young men recruited from refugee camps for the glorious Jalalabad campaign poured off the rock ridges and fell before fusillades of machine gun fire from terrified government conscripts. Soviet-made bombers flown by the Afghan air force out of Kabul struck the attackers in open plains from high alt.i.tude. Dozens of Scud missiles fired by Soviet advisers, who had clandestinely stayed behind after the official Soviet withdrawal, rained in deafening fury onto mujahedin positions. The rebels pushed toward Jalalabad's outskirts but stalled. Commanders squabbled over whose forces were supposed to be where. ISI officers partic.i.p.ated in the a.s.sault but failed to unify and organize their Afghan attacking force. A week pa.s.sed, and Jalalabad did not fall. Then two weeks, then three. "Fall it will," Hamid Gul a.s.sured Bhutto's civilian aides. Casualties mounted among the mujahedin. Ambulances from the Arab and international charities raced back and forth from Peshawar. By May their hand-scrawled lists of the dead and maimed numbered in the thousands. Still Jalalabad and its airport remained in Najibullah's hands. Despite all the explosives and trucks s.h.i.+pped in, the CIA plan to shut off the Sarobi Road fizzled.

In Kabul, Najibullah appeared before the international press, defiant and emboldened. His generals and his Soviet sponsors began to take heart: Perhaps a rebel triumph in Kabul was not inevitable after all. Gorbachev authorized ma.s.sive subsidies to Najibullah that spring. From air bases in Uzbekistan the dying Soviet government ferried as much as $300 million per month in food and ammunition to Kabul on giant transport planes, at least twice the amount of aid being supplied by the CIA and Saudi intelligence to the mujahedin.8 One after another, enormous white Soviet Ilyus.h.i.+n-76 cargo jets, expelling starburst flares to distract heat-seeking Stinger missiles, circled like lumbering pterodactyls above the Kabul Valley, descending to the international airport or Bagram air base to its north. The flour, mortar sh.e.l.ls, and Scud missiles they disgorged each day gradually buoyed the morale of Kabul's conscripts and bolstered the staying power of Najibullah's new tribal and ethnic militias. One after another, enormous white Soviet Ilyus.h.i.+n-76 cargo jets, expelling starburst flares to distract heat-seeking Stinger missiles, circled like lumbering pterodactyls above the Kabul Valley, descending to the international airport or Bagram air base to its north. The flour, mortar sh.e.l.ls, and Scud missiles they disgorged each day gradually buoyed the morale of Kabul's conscripts and bolstered the staying power of Najibullah's new tribal and ethnic militias.

Frustrated, the CIA officers working from Peshawar recruited an Afghan s.h.i.+te commander in western Kabul, known for vicious urban guerrilla bombings, to step up sabotage operations in the capital. They supplied his s.h.i.+te commandos with Stingers to try to shoot down one of the Ilyus.h.i.+n cargo planes, hoping to send a message to the Soviets that they would pay a price for such extravagant aid to Najibullah. The team infiltrated a Stinger on the outskirts of the Kabul airport and fired at an Ilyus.h.i.+n as it took off, but one of the plane's hot defensive flares caught the missile's tracking system, and the shot missed. The rebels sent out a videotape of the failed attack. The CIA also recruited agents to drop boron carbide sludge into the gas tanks or oil casings of transport vehicles to disable them.9 But none of these operations put much of a dent in Najibullah's supply lines. And still the garrisons at Jalalabad stood. But none of these operations put much of a dent in Najibullah's supply lines. And still the garrisons at Jalalabad stood.

The ISI bureaus in Peshawar and Quetta expanded propaganda operations against Najibullah. With CIA help they inserted anti-Najibullah commercials into bootleg videotapes of one of the Rambo movies, then greatly popular in Afghanistan, and they s.h.i.+pped the tapes across the border.10 Najibullah stepped up his own propaganda campaign. He filled radio and television airwaves with programs that demonized Hekmatyar and his fellow Islamists as devilish Neanderthals and Pakistani stooges who would tear Afghanistan away from its cultural moorings. Najibullah stepped up his own propaganda campaign. He filled radio and television airwaves with programs that demonized Hekmatyar and his fellow Islamists as devilish Neanderthals and Pakistani stooges who would tear Afghanistan away from its cultural moorings.

What ordinary Afghans made of all the fear-mongering was difficult to say. Refugees poured out of Nangarhar province to escape the terrible fighting at Jalalabad, but as the stalemate continued that spring, most Afghan civilians and refugees sat still, many of them enduring a long and persistent misery. They waited for one side or the other to prevail so that they might go home.

THE b.l.o.o.d.y DISASTER at Jalalabad only deepened Ed McWilliams's conviction that the CIA and ISI were careening in the wrong direction. He could not understand why Oakley tolerated Bearden's collaborations with Pakistani intelligence and its anti-American clients, especially Hekmatyar and Sayyaf. It appalled him that the United States was staking its policy that spring on the Afghan interim government, a f.e.c.kless fiction, as McWilliams saw it, bought and paid for by Pakistani and Saudi intelligence agents.

In February the incoming Bush administration had renewed the legal authority for CIA covert action in Afghanistan. (Each new president had to reaffirm ongoing covert action programs under a fresh signature.) President Bush adjusted the official goals of U.S. policy. The Reagan-era objective of Soviet withdrawal had been achieved. Under the revised finding, the most important purpose of continuing CIA covert action was to promote "self-determination" by the Afghan people. With its echoes from the American revolution, the phrase had been promoted by congressional conservatives who championed the mujahedin cause.11 McWilliams concluded that achieving true Afghan "self-determination" would now require the CIA to break with Pakistani intelligence. Increasingly, he believed, it was ISI and its Islamist agenda-rather than communism-that posed the greatest obstacle to Afghan independence.

Inside the Islamabad emba.s.sy, tensions deepened. The investigations of McWilliams's drinking and s.e.xual habits stalled-they turned up nothing-but a new inquiry opened about whether he had compromised cla.s.sified data. With Oakley's support, Bearden insisted that McWilliams be accompanied by CIA case officers on his diplomatic reporting trips to Peshawar and Quetta. McWilliams chafed; he was insulted, angry, and more determined than before to put his views across.

Each cable to Was.h.i.+ngton now became a cause for gaming and intrigue in the emba.s.sy's communications suite. Oakley would scribble dissenting comments on McWilliams's drafts, and McWilliams would erase or ignore them and cable ahead on his own authority. McWilliams believed that Oakley had repressed a memo he wrote reporting the capture of Stinger missiles by Iran. On another occasion when he wandered by the cabling machine, he saw an outgoing high-level message from Oakley to Was.h.i.+ngton arguing that it was in America's interest to accept a Pakistani sphere of influence in Afghanistan. Appalled, McWilliams quietly photocopied the cable and slipped it into his private files-more ammunition.12 McWilliams's criticisms of the CIA now extended beyond his earlier view that Pakistani intelligence and Hekmatyar were dangerous American allies. By endorsing ISI's puppet Afghan interim government, the United States had become involved in Afghan politics for the first time, and in doing so it had betrayed American principles and self-interest, McWilliams argued.

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.

The Afghan interim government, a paper cabinet formed to occupy cities captured by ISI's Islamists, "is the wrong vehicle to advance the entirely correct U.S. policy objective of achieving a genuinely representative Afghan government through Afghan self-determination," McWilliams wrote that spring in a confidential cable sent through the State Department's dissent channel. (The dissent channel was a special cable routing that permitted diplomats to express their personal views without having them edited by an emba.s.sy's amba.s.sador.) Many Afghans had now "called for an early political settlement to the war," McWilliams wrote. Only a "relatively stable government will be able to address the ma.s.sive problems of rehabilitation and refugee return in postwar Afghanistan." A large pool of Afghan intellectuals living abroad "would be prepared to give their talent and credibility to a neutral administration which could serve as a bridge rising above the current stalemated military situation and the sterile dialogue of propaganda exchanges." But the United States apparently intended to wait out the summer "fighting season" before considering such political talks. This decision "entails serious risks . . . [and] is not justifiable on either political or humanitarian grounds. We should press ahead now for a political settlement."13 As McWilliams's cables circulated in Was.h.i.+ngton, and as gossip about his tense disagreements with Bearden and Oakley spread, his policy prescriptions attracted new converts. The State Department's intelligence bureau privately endorsed McWilliams, citing in part the detailed evidence in his cables. British intelligence officers in Islamabad and London also weighed in on his behalf. After earlier backing the anti-Soviet jihad, they now wanted the CIA to move away from Hekmatyar and an ISI-led military solution. Military supplies to the mujahedin should continue, the British argued, and battlefield pressure on Najibullah's government forces should be maintained, but the time had also come to work with the United Nations to develop a political compromise for Afghanistan. This might involve a neutral transitional government of Afghan intellectuals living in Europe and the United States, Kabul technocrats, Kandahar royalists, and politically astute rebel commanders such as Ma.s.soud.14 The CIA remained adamant about its support for Pakistani intelligence, however. Bearden regarded McWilliams as little more than a nuisance. He took himself and his office much too seriously, Bearden felt. The State Department's real policy on Afghanistan was made by Michael Armacost and others on the seventh floor at headquarters, where the most senior officials worked. Anyway, McWilliams, his midlevel supporters at State, and the British (who had lost two wars in Afghanistan, Bearden noted pointedly) made the mistake of believing that there was was such a thing as a political Afghanistan, separate from Pakistan, "just because a few white guys drew a line in the sand" in northwestern British India a century earlier, as Bearden saw it. Still, the more State Department officials mouthed the McWilliams line, the more Langley argued the contrary. Interagency debates grew caustic as the CIA's forecasts of a lightning rebel victory over Najibullah yielded to a grinding stalemate. such a thing as a political Afghanistan, separate from Pakistan, "just because a few white guys drew a line in the sand" in northwestern British India a century earlier, as Bearden saw it. Still, the more State Department officials mouthed the McWilliams line, the more Langley argued the contrary. Interagency debates grew caustic as the CIA's forecasts of a lightning rebel victory over Najibullah yielded to a grinding stalemate.15 The agency's operatives felt they had adjusted their approach in Afghanistan in many ways since the Soviets began to withdraw. They had responded to outside criticism by bypa.s.sing ISI and opening secret, direct lines with important Afghan commanders such as Ma.s.soud. They had directed CIA funding and logistical support toward ma.s.sive humanitarian efforts on the Afghan border, to accompany the policy of military pressure. The problem with McWilliams, they told those with the proper clearances, was that he was cut out of the highly cla.s.sified information channels that showed the full breadth of CIA covert policy. For instance, in May 1989, just as McWilliams was composing his most heated dissents, Gary Schroen had personally delivered a $900,000 lump sum payment to Ma.s.soud's brother, Ahmed Zia, over and above Ma.s.soud's $200,000 monthly stipend, to help fund a humanitarian reconstruction program in northern Afghanistan. Ma.s.soud pa.s.sed through to the CIA photographs of road repair and irrigation projects under way, although the agency's officers doubted that the projects shown had been directly stimulated by their funding. In any event, the CIA argued, their cash payment represented a fresh political initiative: Ma.s.soud would have the resources that summer to win civilian support for his militias and local councils, and to start rebuilding the Panjs.h.i.+r. McWilliams knew nothing of this secret money. Besides, McWilliams seemed reflexively anti-American in his a.n.a.lysis, some of the CIA officers said. They denounced as naive the prescriptions for a political solution pushed by McWilliams, the British, and the State Department. No stable government could be constructed in Kabul without Pakistani support, they argued. None was likely in any case. Afghan rebels from all parties, whether Islamist or royalist, extremist or moderate, were determined to finish their military jihad. That was what "self-determination" meant to them. Hekmatyar and the Muslim Brotherhood networks could be managed and contained.16 Increasingly, Oakley felt caught in the middle. He tacked carefully between the two sides. The problem with McWilliams, Oakley believed, was that he was trying to reshape White House policy from the middle levels of the bureaucracy. This simply could not be done. The State Department and the CIA clearly disagreed now about Afghanistan, but this disagreement had to be resolved in Was.h.i.+ngton, by the president and his Cabinet, not inside the Islamabad emba.s.sy.

James Baker, the Texas lawyer who had served as White House chief of staff and then treasury secretary during the Reagan administration, was the new secretary of state. He displayed little personal interest in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Oakley could see that Baker was not willing to challenge the CIA over Afghanistan policy. Unless he was willing to do so, all the Islamabad emba.s.sy could do was work with the current guidance, which put the CIA in a commanding position and kept the United States locked in its embrace with Pakistani intelligence.17 McWilliams, meanwhile, had to go, Oakley felt. McWilliams had persistently angered the emba.s.sy's three most powerful figures: Oakley, his deputy Beth Jones, and Bearden. An opportunity arrived that spring when members of Congress finally appointed a formal amba.s.sadorial-level special envoy to the Afghan resistance, a pet project of Gordon Humphrey. McWilliams was too junior in the Foreign Service to be elevated to this new post, so the question arose as to whether he should become the new envoy's deputy. Oakley stepped in and arranged for McWilliams to be transferred abruptly out of the Islamabad emba.s.sy and back to Was.h.i.+ngton. The first McWilliams knew of his transfer was a cable telling him that his "request for curtailment" of his tour of duty in Islamabad had been accepted-a request that McWilliams did not know he had made. Leaving only