88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (16 page)

“Good,” he said. “Write it up.” When I protested, he cut me off. “Write it up,” he said again, beginning with the phrase I had used to start the SVTC: “I am an anglophile.” It was a tacit and embarrassing admission that he simply couldn’t help me. I was going to have to get this turned off by myself.

But first, I was going to need some insurance. The British demand that we make Pakistani support for Spectre a test of U.S.-Pakistani relations sounded like diplomacy to me, and something far beyond my purview as an intelligence officer. I briefed Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, who had replaced Bill Milam just a few weeks before, on what was going on. She got it immediately: “Tell them the American Ambassador forbids any involvement by this Mission in support of this British scheme.” I thanked her warmly, and left: not a bad thing to have in my pocket, in case I needed it.

On September 30, taking some liberties with conventional format, I sent headquarters a cable entitled “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: [Britain] and the War in Afghanistan.” I laid it all out, trying with limited success to keep sarcasm in check. But at the outset, I was careful to detail the extraordinarily close relationship with our British counterparts which I had fostered over the previous two years, even sharing operational information with them. I was prepared, I stressed, to support any British activity that promised even a marginal contribution to the common effort—which pointedly did not include any of what was purportedly being offered to us by London.

The cable must have worked. Late that night of the 30th, I received a phone call from someone with a pronounced British accent indicating that the Spectre initiative was being suspended. There would be no senior British visitor on October 2. It was the last I heard of the whole sorry mess; the last, that is, until several months later, when the senior
official involved with Spectre finally did make a visit to Islamabad. I wasn’t about to raise any of it. I was embarrassed for him. To his credit, though, he apologized profusely.

I certainly was not a direct witness, and can only speculate as to what caused our British colleagues to temporarily take leave of their senses at a most inopportune time. But on reflection, one can readily see how it happened. Here was the British prime minister, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in solidarity with his friend the American president on the floor of the House chamber, offering any and all support in the aftermath of the greatest one-day calamity to befall the United States since Pearl Harbor. He then turns to his senior subordinates to ask what they can do to help. Putting myself in their place, “Nothing, sir,” does not seem like an adequate response.

It is a tired axiom that war brings out the best and the worst in us. The extremes to which people can be driven by the pressures of a sustained national crisis take many forms, as I was beginning to see for myself. The disease was by no means confined to the British. Already, I was noting patterns of behavior in my own headquarters to suggest that my bureaucratic problems were just beginning.

OCTOBER 1, 2001

I
T WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT.
I was feeling bone-weary. We had already been at it for sixteen hours, and there was no end in sight; bad diet and too little sleep were beginning to take their toll. But as “Dave,” my deputy, and I gazed up at the video screen, where images from the Pentagon were coming dimly into view, I could feel the familiar rush of adrenaline: “Showtime,” I thought.

I was especially pleased to have Dave with me. In a departure from our routine, he had returned to the office after dinner specifically for this teleconference. Dave had been with me only a few months, assigned as my deputy in midsummer 2001. During the previous year, he had been the deputy chief of the South Asia Task Force in the Near East Division, charged with supporting us in the field. He knew all of our operations when he arrived, and had needed little time to be brought fully up to speed.

More important, Dave had knowledge and experience I lacked, which would be especially significant now. As a junior officer he had been directly involved in supporting the Afghan
jihad
of the 1980s, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the old
jihad
-era commanders. Apart from those serving with the Northern Alliance, many of these men had since faded into obscurity. Our outreach campaign, begun in the latter half of 2000 in hopes of fomenting an insurgency against the Taliban, had brought us back into contact with a number of them, but they were unfamiliar to me. I knew a great deal about the Taliban and the power structure they had built up since 1994; but with the
old commanders now coming into renewed prominence, Dave’s firsthand knowledge of these reemerging personalities from the
jihad
days would prove, again and again, to be invaluable.

Dave complemented me in many other ways as well. His jocular, good-natured manner belied a hardheadedly realistic, often cynical view of others’ motives. Where I was instinctively optimistic and willing to give others the benefit of the doubt, Dave was always there to point out the potential error of my ways, highlighting the consequences if my appraisals should prove wrong. He was always loyal in carrying out my directives, but for him it was a mark of loyalty to make sure I was looking at an issue from all sides before making a decision. We quickly developed a shorthand communication. He would look at me doubtfully when I would propose bringing someone into the fold and making him a party to one or another of our conspiracies, whether it was some other CIA element, the military, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, or a foreign intelligence service. “Big tent, Dave,” I would say. Dave would shake his head. “My tent’s not as big as yours.”

He thought I was often ignoring his warnings, and indeed I usually ruled—contrary to prevailing CIA culture—in favor of sharing and inclusion, but his warnings were invaluable to me, and I often hedged my bets in response. A regular glance over the shoulder should be the natural instinct of the intelligence officer, and Dave was there to remind me.

Our differences also extended, fortunately, to our circadian rhythms. When 9/11 plunged us into permanent crisis, my work hours quickly shifted. I tended to be a night owl anyway, frequently returning to the office late in the evening after having dinner with the family and seeing my son off to bed. This tendency became more pronounced after families were evacuated, and particularly given the nine- or ten-hour time difference with Washington. Just as our day should have been winding down at 6:00
PM
, Washington would be surging back to life at the start of their day, generating a new wave of immediate demands. I would remain to field them, taking dinner at my desk.

Dave would typically leave the office by 7:00
PM
, much to my consternation at first. After a couple of days of this, I was about to bring
him in for a closed-door session to sort things out, but just as quickly realized that Dave was absolutely right to do what he was doing. I was naturally staying at least until 2:00
AM
, sometimes later, and not getting to bed until three or sometimes four. There was little point in Dave duplicating my efforts. When he left at 7:00
PM
, he’d be back in the office at five or six in the morning, ready to review the overnight traffic and cull the most significant pieces requiring action and discussion. These I would find on my desk, neatly stacked and highlighted, when I returned to the office between 9:00 and 9:30
AM
, and Dave would have me fully ready for the station ops meeting to make assignments and set the daily agenda at ten. The system worked brilliantly for us, and meant that the front office was typically covered for twenty-one out of twenty-four hours every day.

For me, though, perhaps the greatest blessing of our partnership was Dave’s personality. He had a marvelous way with subordinates, able to provide them guidance and deliver sharp criticism when necessary, but always in a way that left them positive and well motivated. It was a rare gift. He was clever and funny, with a keen appreciation for the sheer absurdity we dealt with on a daily basis, whether it involved the quirks of the Afghan mind, the frequent mutual incomprehension of CIA and the military, or the outrages, intentional and otherwise, perpetrated by our own headquarters. Given the hours, the pressures, and the tensions we faced, I found that if we didn’t laugh we’d go crazy, which was probably as good an explanation as any for the behavior of Washington, where manifestly no one was laughing.

Now, on the screen above us, I could see George Tenet leaning over to speak into Secretary Rumsfeld’s ear, while gesturing in my direction. The participants on the other side were arrayed in tiers, in some sort of amphitheatre. In addition to Tenet and “Hank,” the newly appointed head of CTC/SO, the headquarters support unit, I could make out Rumsfeld and, if I squinted, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz. Air Force general Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was also present, but I didn’t know it. I had no clue at the time what he looked like; in fact, it was his first day on the job. No one apparently felt the need to make introductions.

George invited me to walk the secretary through the war plan approved by the president and discussed with General Franks of CENTCOM a week before. I began by laying out the general concept of what we were trying to do, of employing military means as part of a broader political effort to remove the terrorist safehaven in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance would necessarily be a part of the new political construct we hoped would follow, but we should be careful at the outset, I said, in providing them with bombing support. Too much progress too quickly in the north would cause the Pashtuns to re-coalesce around Mullah Omar. It was critical for the long term, I stressed, that we have Pashtun involvement in the effort to move Omar aside and change Afghan policy toward al-Qa’ida.

That support, I noted, was slow in coming. Most of the Pashtun tribal leaders and others with whom we were in contact were firmly on the fence, waiting to see if the Americans were serious, and wanting to know who was likely to prevail in a military confrontation before committing themselves. If U.S. airstrikes in the south were sequenced correctly, beginning with targets directly associated with Mullah Omar and al-Qa’ida, and executed with devastating force, it might change the psychology in the subordinate ranks of the Taliban leadership sufficiently to induce them to make a deal. Failing that, our early attacks could embolden independent tribal elements with whom we could treat much more easily, and perhaps induce them to seize the available opportunity to rise up against the Taliban.

Rumsfeld had sat through this exposition unmoved. I paused to get some sort of reaction, or to see if he had any questions. He was apparently unused to having briefers stop without being invited to do so.

“Well,” he blurted with some irritation, “do you have anything else to say?” His hostility took me a bit by surprise. It wasn’t until considerably later that I would see for myself, firsthand, just how terrified even senior Pentagon generals were of him.

“Well, sir,” I replied tartly. “I’ve just laid out the conceptual outline of what we’re trying to do. I could go on to walk you through each phase in chronological order, if that’s what you’d like.” I paused again. The secretary was apparently used to a bit more deference. He said
nothing, evidently unwilling to give me the satisfaction of a response. I simply went on to describe the phases I’d proposed in my cable.

Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, interjected with a question. Was I proposing that we should withhold offensive military support from the Northern Alliance indefinitely? That, too, surprised me. In the plan, I had made an analogy between the current situation of the Northern Alliance and the position the Israelis found themselves in during the Gulf War of 1991. Although themselves the target of Iraqi missile attack, the Americans had impressed upon the Israelis that the most effective contribution they could make to the war effort was to stay out of it, lest their involvement break up the Arab coalition the United States had painstakingly cobbled together to confront Baghdad. Similarly, I said, we should try to keep the UIFSA commanders in the north from moving forward aggressively at the outset of the conflict, lest a U.S.-facilitated offensive from the north cause previously restive Pashtuns to fall in line solidly, once again, behind the Taliban. Knowing that this advice would run sharply against the grain within CTC, and perhaps elsewhere in the U.S. government as well, I had perhaps overstressed it in order to make the point. But I thought I had made it clear that we would know rather quickly whether our political strategy in the south was going to work or not. If not, indefinitely withholding military support from those in the north both capable of striking the Taliban and eager for our help, even if we had been spurned by potential allies in the south, would be more than stupid. At the end of the day, we would have to go with the allies we could get. Was his question a trap? It almost seemed that Wolfowitz was trying to set me up as a straw man, so that Defense could press an alternative approach. I could only guess at what was happening in the inter- and intra-agency shark tank back there.

“Not at all,” I said. “As we go through the different phases of the plan, we will try to motivate first the Taliban, and then others in the south, to join the international coalition against al-Qa’ida. But if they fail to do so, and quickly, we will have to throw in with the Northern Alliance and take our chances.”

Wolfowitz wouldn’t let it go. “Oh?” he said, his voice trailing off. “That wasn’t the way I read it.”

George jumped in. “We’ll go through the phases quickly. If we don’t get traction on one phase, we move to the next. We expect this to play out in a matter of days.” George was always quick on the uptake. You could speak to him in shorthand, and he always understood exactly where you were going.

There was another point I wanted to stress. During the critical period after our air attacks began, Afghans would continue to behave like Afghans. They would operate on their own timetable and in their own way, not ours; and if we hoped to influence them, we would have to calibrate our timetable to suit. If senior elements in the Taliban were tempted to push Omar aside and to change policy on al-Qa’ida, they would have to meet and consult with one another; it would take time, and they couldn’t meet in large groups if the leadership were under active air attack. As and when we had intelligence to indicate such a political dynamic was under way, we might want to pause our air operations selectively to give the process time to play out.