88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (42 page)

“What was going on with Hank?” I inquired. “Is he up to this?”

“Don’t get me started,” he said. His theory was that Hank was upset
that CENTCOM had allowed an Australian liaison officer into the proceedings. He had therefore said the minimum necessary and shut the conference down as quickly as he could.

Throughout the first half of December 2001, the heavy bombing of Tora Bora continued. Following the message traffic from across the border, I was getting a rather sketchy and confusing picture of how the situation was evolving. My hope was to get some degree of advance warning as to when and precisely through which passes the al-Qa’ida fighters might flee the American bombardment. As I read the map, there were five passes that were the most likely avenues of escape, the lowest of which had an elevation around 11,000 feet. I was absolutely forbidden by CTC, however, to provide the Pakistanis with any sort of advance warning, as this might provide them an indication of the key points of U.S. attack, information which might then be shared with al-Qa’ida elements in the mountains. This was the sort of unhelpful paranoia with which I routinely had to deal. Nonetheless, the Paks were fully expected to capture any al-Qa’ida members who eluded our grasp, despite not being given any assistance in doing so.

I
was
told by CTC/SO that if any Americans or allied Afghan forces were about to cross the Pakistani border in hot pursuit, I was to have a mechanism in place for informing the Pakistanis so that we and our allies would not be fired upon. I reached Jafar at his office at 1:00
AM
one morning to ask him to work out the modalities for channeling such a warning to Pakistani troops in the mountains, in the event a warning was necessary. Conveying a rapid message to Pak troops in the mountains would not be a problem, he said.

“If any Americans approach the border, please let me know right away,” he added. “But if any Afghans try to cross the border, we will shoot them regardless.” On the subject of Afghans, he was very consistent. This sounded like an argument in the making, but I decided to save it until it was needed.

By December 15, after two solid weeks of heavy bombardment, the Arabs had been driven well up onto the snow-covered north face of the Safed Koh. Soon the Pakistanis were picking up half-frozen, half-starved Arabs stumbling down the other side. On December 17, I paid
a call on a then little known major general, Ashfaq Pervaiz Kayani, the director-general for military operations of the Pak Army, at the Pak Army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi. I didn’t know it then, but he would have an illustrious future. He reported that the Pakistanis had detained some forty Arabs in the past two days. Many more would follow in the days to come, some 130 in all.

This raised the question of what to do with them. I had been left in no doubt as to CTC’s views when I had proposed in writing, back in mid-November, a joint international detention and interrogation center for al-Qa’ida captives on Pakistani soil, the proposal to which Hank referred so unfavorably during our chat of November 18.

“We will not agree to Pakistani detention of any al-Qa’ida prisoners,” the cable stated. “Appropriate arrangements for their internment are being made with our loyal Afghan allies.”

CTC got a better idea what those Afghan detention arrangements might look like in late November, when Berntsen sent three of his people back up into the Panjshir Valley to inspect a Northern Alliance prison where a large number of captured Arabs were already being held. They were not prepared for what they found. Large groups of prisoners circulated freely in and out of the camp, while their guards frequently could not be found. The “inspectors” were horrified.

“You’ll want to look at this,” Dave smiled, as he handed me their report during one of our morning meetings. All I could compare it to was the scene in
Lawrence of Arabia
when an uninitiated British officer enters a captured Turkish military hospital in Damascus for the first time. Staring in shock at the filth and gore around him, the red-faced man can only shout,
“This is outrageous!”
again and again at the top of his lungs. The tone of this cable was not dissimilar.

“There is simply no question of our placing al-Qa’ida prisoners in Northern Alliance detention,” it concluded. I was curious what CTC would come up with now.

Faithful to our directives, as the Tora Bora escapees fell into Pakistani hands, we arranged for the Pakistanis to move the captured Arabs, Chechens, Turks, Chinese Uigurs, and others in groups down to Chaklala Airbase in Rawalpindi, where they were loaded onto U.S. Air
Force C-17 transports. They were flown first to Bagram Airbase north of Kabul, where the U.S. military was quickly establishing a base of operation, and then immediately onward to Kandahar Airport, which the Marines had occupied after al-Qa’ida and the Taliban had fled. A temporary, open-air prisoner holding facility had been set up. We heard later on television that the Department of Defense had decided to ship the detainees from there to facilities being hastily built in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Given the subsequent controversy over “Gitmo,” CIA “black sites,” interrogation policy, and all the rest, which together have caused the United States to bear alone the opprobrium that comes of implementing unilateral solutions to what are really global problems, or where alternatively America has stood accused of “outsourcing torture” by selectively repatriating al-Qa’ida captives to repressive allied regimes, it seems to me that my modest idea of a joint international facility might have had some merit after all. It would have harnessed the talents, and gained the support and moral complicity, of many of the nations that have in fact benefited from U.S. actions, while taking little of the responsibility.

In early December, I received a cable from the office of John McLaughlin, the deputy director of Central Intelligence, Tenet’s number two. It informed me that McLaughlin had met with Arnaud de Borchgrave, the longtime journalist, who had a lead as to where bin Laden might be hiding, and would be arriving shortly in Islamabad. It asked that I provide him assistance.

As we finished shaking hands at the Islamabad Marriott Hotel, Arnaud got to the point. He would be meeting with a well-known and politically prominent Pakistani tribal figure. This man claimed to have precise information about bin Laden’s whereabouts. Due to political sensitivities, he would meet in Pakistan only with de Borchgrave, and no other American. As had been agreed in Washington, Arnaud reported, I was to arrange for the Pakistani’s immediate, discreet air transport to an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea, from which he would then be conveyed to Washington. He would reveal his information in George Tenet’s office, and to Tenet alone.

I was dumbstruck. McLaughlin had somehow neglected to mention any of this. I had considerable respect for de Borchgrave, but there was no way I was going to suggest a scheme like this—even if the Pakistani gentleman in question could back up his assertion, whatever it was, with compelling evidence, which I was reasonably certain he could not. A glance at my face told Arnaud that I was entirely in the dark. He was miffed.

“Well, I don’t think McLaughlin was just trying to humor me.” I was reasonably certain that in fact he was. Perhaps McLaughlin had been a shade too polite.

“Look,” I said, “if this gentleman has reliable information on the whereabouts of bin Laden, it will surely be very perishable, and something on which action will need to be taken immediately. We won’t have time to bring him halfway around the world to meet with George Tenet in order to hear it. If he is really motivated by the desire to help us find bin Laden, and will only speak with you, surely he should tell you immediately what he knows. The fact that he insists only on revealing his information to Tenet suggests to me that he has some other agenda.”

It was still Ramadan, the month when devout Muslims fast during daylight hours. Over
iftar
, the post-sunset breaking of the fast, de Borchgrave found that his contact’s previously firm convictions on the whereabouts of bin Laden softened with scrutiny. Within a couple of days, Arnaud’s plans had changed. Now he would journey out to the Tribal Areas with one of his contact’s kinsmen to meet with other members of the tribe, and see where the path led from there. He wanted to get as close to Tora Bora as possible from the Pakistani side. Unable to dissuade him, I offered him the use of a sat phone. I had some trepidation as he set off; he was not a young man.

A little over twenty-four hours later, I returned to the office from a late-afternoon meeting at ISI Headquarters to find a red light blinking on my “black” or unclassified phone: a voicemail message. Arnaud had been turned back at the Chapri Post on the road to Parachinar, in the Pakistani Tribal Areas. Darkness had fallen, and he and his companion had nowhere to stay. Perhaps they would have to sleep in the car. As the message ended, his voice trailed away: “It’s getting cold. . . .”

“Swell,” I thought. “A high-profile Washington journalist is going to freeze to death in Pakistan, and it’s going to be on my watch.” I phoned General Jafar to seek his help. Jafar, unfortunately, was quite familiar with Arnaud’s recent work.

“He criticizes us at every opportunity,” he grumbled. Ah, I pointed out, but that’s what would make this a great opportunity. If the Pak Army garrison at Thall would take him in, they could brief him on all that was being done to stiffen the borders. If a skeptic like de Borchgrave could be shown all that had been done in recent days to guard against incursions by bin Laden’s Arabs, Jafar could turn this into a PR coup. The general was still less than enthusiastic as he rang off, but within a few hours, de Borchgrave was being fed and housed at Thall.

A bit later on, Jafar called again. “It’s all set,” he said. General Ali Jan Aurakzai, the bluff, imposing Pashtun commander of XI Corps in Peshawar, would stop in Thall by helicopter the following morning to pick up Mr. de Borchgrave before beginning an airborne inspection tour of the army’s newly established border positions in Upper Kurram. This was turning out better than I could have hoped.

There’s a saying in the military that in any operation, there’s always someone who doesn’t get the word. In this case, unfortunately, it was the young lieutenant who had been placed in charge of de Borchgrave. Rather than putting Arnaud on General Aurakzai’s helo in the morning, he instead escorted him to the gate and sent him on his way. Perhaps he thought the journalist would be chastened and head back to Islamabad. If so, he was wrong: with help from his friend, Arnaud disguised himself in local dress, reentered the tribal agency, and traveled for a full day on local jitneys and shuttle buses all over Kurram.

The following Sunday I was surprised to glance up at the television, only to see Arnaud on the screen, sitting with a group of his colleagues on one of the Sunday morning news talk shows. I turned up the volume in time to hear him describe his post-Thall journey around the Tribal Areas near Tora Bora. Despite his transparent disguise, he said, he had been able to travel all around the area unmolested, and hadn’t seen so much as a police officer. As far as he could detect, the Pakistan-Afghan border was a sieve, he frowned; precautions to intercept
bin Laden and other al-Qa’ida escapees from Afghanistan were nonexistent.

I shook my head. “I hope Jafar doesn’t hear about this,” I thought. At least no one could say I hadn’t tried.

It was not until over a month later, in late January 2002, that I learned what had happened when the al-Qaida cadres fled south from Tora Bora. Jafar and I traveled again for discussions with army and Frontier Corps commanders in North Waziristan and Kurram. This time, our concern was the threat of infiltration from the west rather than the north. But I was still curious about what had happened at Tora Bora. Unsurprisingly, each Kurram unit commander with whom we spoke claimed credit for the majority of the captures of the previous December. Not only were their stories contradictory, but none struck me as credible. It was not until the night of January 28, at a dinner hosted for me by the political agent in Parachinar, that I began to piece the story together. After Jafar had retired early with an oncoming case of the flu, I sat with the political agent and a number of local notables, including the bearded, fundamentalist ISI sector commander, all of whom seemed to regard me at the outset with a good deal of suspicion. It took a while to jolly them up, but soon we were all talking and laughing, and they began to lay out the recent events in considerable detail.

Although a significant number of bin Laden’s followers had fallen into Pakistan Army hands, as reported to me by General Kayani on December 17, it was later, on the night of the 18th, that the majority emerged from the peaks above. In the darkness, most managed to avoid the army outposts on the high slopes, and arrived undetected near the base of the mountains. It was there, in small groups, that they encountered the
lashgars
, the local temporary tribal militias set up under agreement with the governor of the North-West Frontier. Exhausted, dehydrated, half-frozen, and lacking any food, they were persuaded by the
maliks
to give themselves up and to turn over their weapons, in the apparent hope that once their immediate needs had been met, they might be turned loose. The
maliks
instead turned them over to the army, as promised.

One group of about forty militants, fed, watered, and loaded onto an
army bus for the trip south, revived sufficiently to attempt to seize control of the vehicle. In the fracas, the driver ran off the road and the bus overturned in a ditch. A number of the militants were badly injured, but the majority made off with weapons stolen from their guards. Once informed of the escape, the Kurram Militia organized local tribesmen into yet another
lashgar
and followed after them in hot pursuit. The militants were eventually located and surrounded at the village of Arawali in Lower Kurram, just south of Sadda, a town long known as a hotbed of sedition and religious extremism. It’s not clear how many weapons the militants commanded at that point, but they managed to keep up a firefight for the better part of a day before the survivors among them were recaptured. I told the group that on the trip north I had seen a large field just below Sadda dotted with what appeared to be fresh graves, decorated with a large number of prayer flags.