88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (15 page)

General Franks generously allowed as that would be all right. Shortly after I started in, George excused himself, never to reappear. I’m sure he was busy, but his actions spoke volumes: as far as he was
concerned, the decision regarding the plan had been made; he saw no reason to waste time convincing General Franks to follow the orders he had already received from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and JCS chairman General Henry Shelton. Franks was doubtless going to be testy about receiving “guidance” from CIA, and I think George was just as happy to let me face the music on my own. I was faintly amused by all this; it was the boss’s prerogative, after all, and I saw no problem in dealing with the general. I was not subject to his command, and that made all the difference.

In the event, our discussion went very well. General Franks strongly shared the view that Afghans should be in the lead in ground combat, with U.S. forces—especially air forces—in support. He felt that the target sequencing we laid out, focusing initially on “political” targets, also made perfect sense, and could be fully accommodated in the context of the forces and rules of engagement he was going to employ. I acknowledged that although we would want to hold off from immediately striking deployed Taliban units to the extent possible at the outset of hostilities, I also understood that it would be necessary under U.S. military doctrine to attack Taliban air defenses in the first wave, so as to eliminate threats to U.S. aircraft. I reassured the general that we were not recommending that even low-level elements in the Taliban get a pass for long. If we couldn’t get traction, in George Tenet’s phrase, in generating fissures within the Taliban leadership very quickly, indeed in a matter of days, U.S. forces would have carte blanche to hit any legitimate military targets that could be identified.

All in all, General Franks seemed pleased. We were providing him with the “what”—the intent—of the strategy, and leaving the “how” to him—with just one exception. We spent some time discussing the psychology of the Taliban, and I stressed the importance, particularly in the early stages of the air campaign, of striking our political targets with overwhelming force, as an object lesson to others not yet on the target list. However devastating our initial attacks, I said, they were unlikely to be as bad as the Taliban leadership imagined. I could see the general straighten up in apparent umbrage at that, but at first he said nothing. Briefly reviewing some of the high-profile political targets
we had recommended for strikes at the very outset of the campaign—to include bin Laden’s primary residence compound at the Tarnak Qila, just southeast of Kandahar; the main al-Qa’ida training center at Garmabak; and Mullah Omar’s residential compound just to the west of the Taliban capital—I underscored the importance of reinforcing, not alleviating, the fear which currently was our greatest ally.

“If we give them reason to believe they can withstand the air campaign,” I said, “they will quickly conclude that they can outlast, and ultimately defeat us, just like they did the Soviets.” Any of the sequential political targets we hit, I stressed, must be destroyed utterly—and that went especially for Mullah Omar’s compound.

This brought General Franks into full cry: “It’ll be a smokin’ hole!” he howled.

SEPTEMBER 30, 2001

I
AM AN ANGLOPHILE,”
my
cable began. In fact, I had been an admirer of the British since boyhood, and my inclination in that direction had only been strengthened by my CIA experience. Winston Churchill once described the United States as “an imperial power—in the best sense of the word: That is, they define their interests broadly.” At the time, he saw the United States as a junior partner in the business of global dominion. Now, clearly, the situation is reversed. Although their power and their place in the world have vastly shrunk, to me the British remain admirable in part because they continue to see their interests in broad, “imperial” terms. Practically alone among our allies, they are willing to take on responsibility in the world, and not merely to pursue their interests as narrowly defined. I believe it is this common view of our responsibilities, even more than our shared history and heritage, which stands at the center of the “special relationship,” and which is responsible for the extraordinarily close ties between CIA and the British.

It was not an accident that the one foreign leader in attendance at President Bush’s September 20 State of the Union speech was Prime Minister Tony Blair. Even before the speech, in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, a number of senior British intelligence officers, including Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, traveled to CIA Headquarters to offer their support. I had no idea, of course, what our British friends might have raised in those discussions; but in the last week of September 2001, I began to get strange cables.

First I received a message from CTC/SO, the newly formed Special Operations Group of the Counterterrorist Center (CTC), now being given the primary role in providing headquarters support to CIA operations in Afghanistan. CTC/SO had been briefed concerning the alleged existence of a British-led militia force based in Quetta, which they were willing to place at CIA disposal. With an aggressiveness that foretold much about my future dealings with them, they asserted—asserted, mind you—that a number of paramilitary officers would be coming to my station in order to set up a base in the Baluch capital, from which they would begin to mount paramilitary operations into the south of Afghanistan employing our newly discovered militia allies.

This may sound anodyne to the casual observer, but it was not the CIA way. Headquarters could give the orders and set the objectives, but it was up to chiefs of station in the field to set the plan for how to achieve them. That’s not to suggest that a station chief would have carte blanche; he or she would have to make the case for their proposed actions and seek headquarter’s concurrence, but the process was always consultative, and the clear tendency was to defer to a COS’s superior on-the-ground knowledge—particularly if the COS were a senior officer.

In any case, I had no idea what in blazes they were talking about. I had had a close relationship with a just-departed British diplomat, and I knew from him that the British government was involved in arming, training, and providing operational guidance to a Quetta-based unit of the Pakistani Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) used to ambush drug-smuggling convoys in Baluchistan, but this didn’t come anywhere close to the breathless description I had received from headquarters. The unit in question was not a militia, but part of Pakistani law enforcement. Unless the Paks were about to launch military operations into Afghanistan on our behalf, which they assuredly were not, this unit wasn’t going anywhere outside Pakistan. For that matter, if the Paks wanted to invade Afghanistan, this would not be the unit they would send to do it. On the one occasion that the unit in question had crossed the border to attack drug-processing labs, it had been surrounded by a drug militia, captured, and its members sent back across the border minus their weapons and most of their clothing.

I paid a call on my British friend’s newly arrived successor. The poor fellow was at a loss to explain these antics, and hardly knew what to say to me. He didn’t want to directly contradict what we were being told from London, but in all honesty he couldn’t confirm any of it. He admitted there was no independent militia. Not only were the two British advisors to the ANF not hijacking their drug-interdiction unit to lead cross-border operations into Afghanistan, but they had been confined for their own safety to their villa in the Pakistani military cantonment in Quetta, and were about to be withdrawn altogether.

It got worse. I received another cable conveying instructions from the deputy director for operations, my old friend and mentor Jim Pavitt. Following on his recent meetings with our allies, I was to provide all possible support to the British who, in addition to their “militia unit” in Quetta, had a number of impressive operational contacts that could prove of great value to our joint efforts. Details, he said, would be forwarded from London.

The details followed quickly enough. First, our friends claimed to be “in touch” with six named Afghan figures who could be instrumental in toppling the Taliban. Two we knew quite well, and didn’t need British help in communicating with them. A third we also knew—and knew to avoid as a flagrant fabricator. As for the other three, we recognized the careful wording of the British claims to be a dead giveaway: it was clear that our British cousins were not actually in contact with any of them. Claiming the friend of a friend of a friend as your “contact” is one of the oldest tricks in the intelligence book, and one to which our British cousins often resorted when they wanted to stake a claim to a potential source and guard against CIA reaching him first. Now was hardly the time for this sleight-of-hand.

The cap to this whole sorry drama, however, was yet another claimed British contact, whom we’ll call “Spectre.” A senior, respected official, who will remain nameless for his own protection, had recently met for several hours with a wealthy and elderly expatriate Afghan businessman in the Persian Gulf. The old man had spun quite a tale, which the officer in question had apparently accepted uncritically. Glowingly described as a revered and prominent figure, with both religious
and tribal authority, Spectre’s followers, we were told, would gladly lay down their lives for him. Despite the fact that he had admittedly lived outside Afghanistan for decades, and had no means to communicate with any of his purported supporters—most of whom he had not yet identified to his British friend—he asserted that Kandahar was his for the taking. There were many more boasts along these lines; it was hard to decide which was most preposterous. There was a little wrinkle in Spectre’s plans, however: the devotion of his followers notwithstanding, if he were to return on his own to Pakistan, he said, his life would be in mortal danger.

The senior British official was therefore demanding several things from us. He planned to travel to Pakistan on October 2, and wished to meet immediately upon his arrival with the director-general of the ISI. I was to set up that meeting, where I was also to make clear to the Pakistanis that they would be responsible to ensure Spectre’s safety while he made contact with his people inside Afghanistan; the ISI’s agreement in this regard would be a “test” of U.S.-Pakistani relations.

All this was breathtaking on several counts. Neither we nor anyone we knew in Afghanistan had ever heard of Spectre. The man was an obvious fraud. Many a naive, first-tour diplomat has been initially taken in by a story such as Spectre’s, and later felt humiliated at the memory, but for a very senior, respected person to put forward such claptrap on the basis of a single meeting, with no attempt to vet any of the claims made, and then to demand, on top of it, that the United States make support for such an individual a “test” of a critically important foreign relationship—well, it was almost unimaginable. The whole thing would obviously fall of its own weight in due course, but I had no intention of wasting effort and valuable equities with the Pakistanis on it in the meantime. Unfortunately, the British sales job on the seventh floor of my own headquarters was going to make this whole thing extremely complicated and time-consuming to unwind.

All this could not have come at a worse moment. The demands on the station were almost overwhelming. We were thoroughly remaking our tribal reporting networks, taking organizations that had been built for peacetime intelligence reporting and adapting them to provide
real-time support to the coming war effort: spotting military targets and making bomb-damage reports. Satellite communications and GPS devices were being pushed out as fast as we could get them to the far fringes of these networks, so that we wouldn’t have to wait days and weeks for reports to filter up through the “principal agents” who led them. We had set up a war room, manned twenty-four hours, lined with campaign maps and shelves holding banks of satellite receivers, each of which bore a card identifying the source calling on it, his handler, the language the caller would require, and what response the caller should be given if his handler were not present. Newly trained officers, elderly contract annuitants, anyone Langley could find was being sent on temporary assignment to Islamabad. As non-essential staff were evacuated, carpenters were working far into the night subdividing their vacant offices to accommodate the new intelligence personnel flooding in. Meanwhile, we were feverishly trying to press reluctant Afghan tribal leaders forward to take the fight to the Taliban. Everyone was working punishing hours, seven days a week. I simply didn’t have the time to waste on anything that didn’t contribute to the effort.

I called the chief of the Near East Division (C/NE), on the secure line to headquarters, pleading with him to intercede with the senior leadership and make all this go away. He apparently had his head handed to him when he tried: his complaints regarding the British were dismissed as the sort of jealous rivalry we could not afford and that would not be tolerated at a time of crisis. In fairness, with U.S. officials caught up in the emotional wave created by these steadfast expressions of allied support, it must have been hard for them to imagine that the British would be handing up half-truths, exaggerations, and outright fabrications in their effort to gain a place at our side.

And so, on September 29, I began a secure video conference with my division chief by assuring him that I was a sincere friend of the British, and doing all I could to foster cooperation during the current crisis. I then went on to catalogue the fraudulent details of what we were being told by London regarding their Afghan capabilities.

That they should in fact lack the ability to do much inside Afghanistan, I said, was no surprise. I had been told some two years earlier that
the UK had made a strategic decision to confine its Afghan-related intelligence gathering strictly to al-Qa’ida-related terrorist threats to the home island. In light of scarce resources, the British had had to make hard decisions as to what they would and would not try to cover; internal developments in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, understandably, had fallen well shy of their threshold.