Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (15 page)

Indeed, by late 1986 and early 1987, the situation on the ground in Afghanistan was clear. From the field, Milt Bearden and a case officer were reporting the Soviet retreat. “The reality was that we never looked back after August 1986, and by 1987, I figured, I knew the Russians weren’t going to prevail and would withdraw,” Bearden said.
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With the Russians on the ropes and our success ever more likely, a steady flow of government officials from Washington wanted to go out and have a look for themselves. “You have to remember this was the hottest thing the U.S. government was doing—we were the only ones actually fighting the Soviets and were authorized by the president to do so,” the case officer said.
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“Everyone wanted to get a piece of the action.” One of the first to travel from Washington was Bob Gates, when he was Casey’s deputy. Gates, a Russia expert and experienced analyst who would later serve as director of central intelligence and secretary of defense, was among those who were beginning to realize the Soviets were in deep trouble. Bearden and I took him to a mujahideen camp along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, which was a fascinating experience for him. This place was so remote that they had to haul water up a steep hill to the camp by hand from the stream below the outpost.

The night before we left Peshawar, Gates told Bearden he was concerned about food contamination in the bush, and asked that box lunches be brought along instead. When we arrived, one of the mujahideen leaders stepped out of his tent overhang and motioned us under it for a local feast.

“Where are the box lunches?” Gates asked Bearden.

“Where the hell are the box lunches?” Bearden barked at one of the drivers. “I told you to put them on the truck. Where are they?”

He turned back to Gates. “The Pakistani drivers forgot to bring them,” he told him.

Of course, there never were any box lunches. Bearden was simply acting to keep everyone happy. I’m afraid Gates went without lunch that day as he moved his mujahideen food artfully around his plate so it looked as though he had partaken in their feast.

When we headed back to the airport after the Gates visit, Bearden glibly noted that the deputy director of central intelligence and his security team would have been horrified if they’d known that the safe house where we had spent the evening was located on top of a weapons warehouse. I’m sure he was right, and I wasn’t exactly delighted to learn about it, either, since one misfire would have brought down the entire building. From there on in, I was extra careful in getting the lay of the land of any place I went with Bearden. He was not an inordinate risk taker, but when you reside in a war zone, your sensitivities wear down and you become used to a higher risk standard.

Among the many trips to Afghanistan with eager observers, one that remains memorable was with the then third-ranking official at the Department of Defense, Fred Iklé, who oversaw special operations, foreign arms sales, and military assistance during the Reagan administration and had pushed hard to deploy the Stinger in Afghanistan. When we arrived at the airport in Islamabad, the Pakistanis handed out dozens of little green books to senior officials from both governments that listed members of the arriving party, including “Fred Iklé of DOD and Jack Devine of the CIA.” I was still undercover, which I took very seriously. “Milt, what the hell is this?” I asked Bearden, fuming. Somebody should have made sure that we didn’t have the names of undercover people printed in a widely circulated little green book. Bearden and I had a curt back-and-forth over this, but it lasted only a few minutes.

Sometime later I made a trip to the Afghan border with Charlie Wilson. Before we left, Tom Twetten called and told me the congressman wanted to go to the region and was taking with him a journalist, George Crile of
60 Minutes
. Both of us felt this was nonsense, very unprofessional, and very un-CIA-like. It was virtually unheard-of to have covert CIA operations officials travel abroad with a journalist. But Casey himself had agreed to it. And if Wilson was going, he needed someone from CIA to go along. Despite Crile’s presence, I was glad to be going, because it would give me another opportunity to develop an even closer relationship with Wilson. I also needed to be there so that Pakistani officials didn’t come to the mistaken conclusion that Wilson was negotiating on behalf of the U.S. government and that they could orchestrate an end run around the CIA through him. “Charlie was a complicated handling problem,” Twetten said. We stopped over in Egypt on the way to Karachi and unexpectedly met with President Hosni Mubarak. Wilson and I talked with him in between tennis matches; I wouldn’t exactly call it a meeting. But Wilson had arranged this on his own and didn’t notify Ambassador Frank Wisner, a friend of the Agency whose father was the first head of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, then known as the Directorate of Plans. Wisner, needless to say, was annoyed.

Once we landed in Pakistan, we experienced a clash of titans. The momentary rift I had had with Bearden during the Iklé trip was nothing compared to Bearden’s first meeting with Wilson. The two got off to a bad start. Maybe it was because they were both Texans; I’m not sure. Wilson didn’t like the feel of Bearden, and Bearden had read too much about Wilson’s celebrity status. He had a perception of Wilson as a policy dilettante, lacking in substance. I tried to play the role of peacemaker, and it took them a little while to reset their relationship. Things got better as the trip proceeded. Eventually, they became very friendly and mutually respectful.

We headed up to Peshawar, where we went into the Afghan refugee camps. There were more than three million people living in these camps along the border. It was a daunting challenge for the Pakistanis to take care of their needs, especially the hundreds of children who had been maimed by land mines. When we approached one of the medical tents, Swedish doctors asked us to donate blood. Wilson sat down and without hesitation rolled up his sleeve. I advised the doctors that I had been taking malaria tablets because of my international travel. With that, the doctor gestured me into the tent and pointed to the many maimed children. Do you think that matters? he said. That was the end of the discussion, and the reused needle was shoved into my arm to draw the blood. While I hoped the needle had at least been sterilized, it was a privilege to help these children.

Later, we met under a huge tent, fifty yards by fifty, with all the Afghan tribal leaders, who had gathered for a conference moderated by Abdul Rahman Akhtar, the head of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. At one point I whispered to Wilson that you could cut the tension in the room with a knife. He replied, “If you think this is bad, last year we had to bring the tribal leaders in a half hour apart and disarm them.” He was right. We were in fact making slow progress with the likes of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani, and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Hekmatyar was the most powerful mujahideen leader and the ISI’s favorite. We considered him adept at fighting Soviets despite his anti-Western, radical Islamist views. Rabbani, an Islamic scholar trained in Egypt, based in Pakistan, and supported by the ISI, had built his militia with Pashtun, Uzbek, and Shi’ite fighters. Sayyaf, like Rabbani a Cairo-educated Islamic scholar, enjoyed strong Saudi backing.

Meanwhile, my deputy, Joe Malpeli, was responsible for running unilateral operations in Afghanistan—operations that we did not handle through the Pakistanis. We obviously worked closely with the ISI, but we also wanted to make sure we had eyes and ears trained on the Afghan program independent of the Pakistanis, so we knew what they were doing and not doing. We also ran operations directly with Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Tajik guerrilla commander in the Panjshir Valley who had turned back four Soviet assaults between 1980 and 1982 before agreeing to a truce in 1983 that deeply angered Hekmatyar and the ISI. We considered him one of the best and most reliable fighters. He and Hekmatyar were rivals and squared off in a civil war after the Soviet withdrawal. Massoud would go on to form the Northern Alliance before he was killed by suicide bombers immediately before the 9/11 attack, for fear that he would be at our side in the inevitable fight afterward.

After Akhtar’s meeting with mujahideen commanders in Peshawar, Wilson and I went down to Darra, in the unruly North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, close to the Afghan border. It was a “Wild West” town and an open-air gun market about twenty-five miles south of Peshawar. The Pakistanis were not enthused about the idea of our side trip, but they did not want to say no to Wilson. At the gun market, people fired guns into the air, and it would have been easy enough to get off a round directed at Wilson’s entourage. But we were under very heavy military guard the entire time, to discourage anyone from taking a shot.

The market was exactly what it advertised itself to be: every store was literally a gun store, and you could buy every make of weapon (and knives and swords), including some from when the Brits were in Pakistan in the nineteenth century. The visit gave me a firsthand opportunity to see for myself if any of our weapons were being sold on the black market. We didn’t see any of them, and there was never significant reporting of anything turning up in Darra or the other gun-toting towns.

At one point, Milt wandered off and came back with a ratty-looking, bloodstained Soviet army vest. I asked him what that was about, and he proceeded to tell me that one of the CODEL (Congressional Delegation) members we had left behind in Islamabad had requested a bloodstained relic from the fighting with the Russians. We rolled our eyes contemptuously. What a crass request; how demeaning of the loss of life associated with warfare. Before I had a chance to express my misgivings, Milt said he had picked up the vest in the market and had had one of the locals smear it with chicken blood. I hope the congressman didn’t mount his souvenir on his office wall for display.

The Pakistanis saw Wilson as larger-than-life and key to U.S. support for them. They had seen the covert weapons program expand, and they rightfully believed that Wilson’s role in this was critically important. President Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq clearly respected and valued his relationship with Wilson. Wilson and I once met with Zia and General Akhtar during a trip to Islamabad. Wilson was smooth and used the right measure of Texas charm and wit, blended with a clear understanding of what was relevant on the ground from Zia’s perspective. (As for Zia, I’ve met a number of national leaders through the years, and by any measure, he was one of the most impressive. His presence projected power and stability, and his deep-set black eyes added more than a hint of mystery. He spoke in quiet, measured tones, which added to the overall effect of strength and left visitors hanging on his every word. It was a great tragedy for all of us when he perished in a C-130 airplane crash in 1988, along with General Akhtar and American ambassador Arnie Raphel. At the time of the crash, I felt sure it was a terrorist act, but the Defense Department’s official investigation declared it a mechanical failure.)

Despite Wilson’s stature in the eyes of the Pakistanis, it was always quite clear to me and everyone else at the CIA that aid to the mujahideen was a U.S. government program, which by law the Agency, not Wilson, was responsible for running. We greatly valued his support, but we kept him professionally at arm’s length while maintaining a productive and cordial personal relationship with him. “We all loved Charlie,” Bearden said, but it was “Charlie Wilson’s War” only in Charlie Wilson’s mind. “We had moved way beyond his involvement at that point, and it was then a major U.S. government program,” Bearden said. Indeed, this is one of my biggest problems with the movie about Wilson, which creates the impression that he and a handful of other quasi-rogue Agency operatives brought the Stinger to Afghanistan and ran the entire covert operation independent of policy or chain of command. Wilson had nothing to do with the Stinger decision. George Crile stated as much in his book, though this fact got lost in Hollywood. Nonetheless, Wilson was critically important to the effort because of his commitment and the amount of money he was able to appropriate. Wilson had developed a reputation as a hard-drinking partier, especially during his earlier years in Congress. But he was a complicated, serious person, too—very helpful to us and truly dedicated to the cause. He was a keen fan of the
Flashman
adventure series and fashioned himself in Flashman’s image: a swashbuckling adventurer. He tried to impart his enthusiasm for
Flashman
to all of us, and at one point, he presented key players on the Afghan team with leather jackets with
Flashman
and other warrior emblems sewn onto each. I have kept mine fondly, as a reminder of our time together. Charlie had found the jackets on a CODEL trip to South Korea on other business, but Afghanistan was obviously always on his mind. “When he was working on something he cared about, he was serious—and he was serious about the war,” said Tim Burton, our logistics chief. Anderson, my successor, remembered that Wilson was “constantly looking for things he could do to keep our feet to the fire.” There was a “prove it to Charlie Wilson” refrain at the Agency because of the amount of money Wilson brought in and his relationships with the Pakistanis, who from time to time would be convinced the Agency was not doing enough and would call Wilson directly to complain, Anderson said.
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But Anderson knew that Wilson was not calling the shots. I can’t remember him ever trying to ride roughshod over the task force. We just had to be responsive and keep him informed about what was going on. If it made sense, he stood aside.

At home, the task force team continued working on new weapons systems, even with the success of the Stingers. Wilson had about $30 million set aside in the defense budget for research and development. One of the things that really interested me were efforts to develop a device for clearing land mines, because they were such a terrible problem in Afghanistan, causing serious injuries to so many fighters and civilians, including children. We were also looking at bullets that would penetrate a tank and a device that would temporarily blind a helicopter pilot with a flash and cause him to come crashing down. The lawyers decided the flash device was not consistent with the Geneva Accords. I agreed. War is war, but if you have ground rules, you’ve got to follow them. Usually, the rules are predicated on sound reasoning. Do you want those same techniques applied to American troops? Shooting down a helicopter with a rocket is an acceptable action, because both sides authorize combatants, and the Hinds could fire back with everything they had. Blinding pilots, it seemed to me, was another matter. The lawyers also objected to a plan we were working on for developing a small drone that we could fly into the window of the Soviet officers’ quarters at Bagram Airfield outside Kabul and blow the place up. This struck them as a prohibited form of assassination. Interestingly enough, the mini-drone became the forerunner to the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that have become such a prominent part of the CIA arsenal and, like the Stinger, a game changer in the war on terrorism.