Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (16 page)

Still, when it came to attacking Soviet facilities with high technology, we were undeterred. Shortly after he was detailed to the task force, Clifton Dempsey began developing a long-range precision weapon. The 107-millimeter and 122-millimeter rockets were highly inaccurate, and we couldn’t rely on luck to win the war, no matter how spectacular the mujahideen attack on the Kharga ammunition dump had been. Dempsey had to not only develop the weapon but make sure it could be carried on the back of a mule. In his research, he came across a Finnish Tampella 120-millimeter mortar that could travel almost four miles. This weapon was licensed and manufactured in Spain with monies from a special R&D fund Charlie Wilson had set up at DOD. We purchased 20 mortars and 125 rounds. With the army’s help, we increased the mortar’s precision by replacing the sight with a north-seeking precision module and changing out the tripod design with a bipod. The army also helped us adapt a computer that provided the azimuth (arc), propellant, and elevation needed to improve the mortar’s accuracy. The Tampella eventually became standard in all U.S. Army mortar systems.

But the most exciting addition Dempsey introduced was the now-ubiquitous global positioning system, a constellation of Pentagon satellites that none of us had ever heard of. Smaller, shorter-range mortars left the mujahideen vulnerable to Soviet counterbattery fire, which enabled the Soviets to quickly determine a mortar’s location and return fire before those manning the weapon had a chance to move. But from about four miles away, mujahideen fighters firing the giant Spanish-made mortars would be out of the Russians’ counterpunch range, and the GPS satellites would tell them how to guide their mortars to the target. Once the coordinates of the mujahideen location were fed into a computer, along with the coordinates of their target, the computer could tell them the exact compass direction and elevation at which to aim the mortar tube. There was some skepticism about this at the Agency, but Dempsey convinced me to go with him to Fort A.P. Hill, about an hour and a half south of Washington, for a demonstration.

It was pouring rain when we arrived. I had on a business suit, so I reached for a sensible umbrella as I started to get out of our car.

“Jack, I’ll do anything you want, but please put that umbrella away,” Clifton said.

In the army, when it rained on the battlefield, you got wet. So I put the umbrella away, got drenched, and watched the GPS-guided simulated mortar hit its target with stunning accuracy.

I also went to the Nevada desert to see the GPS 120 system tested, originally intending to use all the rounds in the testing. But I was so impressed with the system that I stopped the test after several volleys and decided to deploy the system to Afghanistan immediately, as we were in a rush to ramp up the pressure in sync with the deployment of the Stinger. The only disagreeable part of the test involved the CIA project manager coordinating the effort. It was his job to provide all of the necessary logistical support. He seemingly did not have his heart in it and was dragging his feet. His attitude was getting in the way. When that happens, there is no choice but to remove the manager from the project, which I told his superior needed to happen as soon as possible. The man was quickly replaced with a quality officer, who helped make the GPS-guided mortar work, and fast.

But making sure it worked was only half the battle. We had to figure out how we were going to deliver this large, heavy weapon to Afghanistan. Burton, my logistics genius, began working with his staff to develop a special saddle, so that mules could carry the mortars on their backs into the country. We had to procure the mortars from the Spanish without telling them what we planned to do with them. In the end, we sent about twenty of them to the field, and about seven of these were used in a devastating attack on the Spetsnaz battalion in the Kunar Valley, in eastern Afghanistan, in November 1987. This was the first time the GPS system was used in combat. A mujahideen team launched the mortar barrage right through the Soviet installation there, almost destroying it entirely. The Russians had no idea what hit them and had nothing in place with which to counterattack. Before and after photographs from spy satellites showed how completely the GPS-guided mortars devastated the Spetsnaz base.

The White House also started pushing for the introduction of the French-made Milan antitank missile once Soviet armored tanks replaced Hind helicopter gunships as the most lethal threat on the battlefield. My feeling was if the Milan worked to knock out the tanks, put in the Milan. After the Stinger went in, concern about sophisticated weapons, which the Milan was, dissipated. The Milan, guided by a thin copper wire, had ten times the range (about two miles) of an RPG-7, which was then the preferred shoulder-held antitank rocket-propelled grenade launcher. After we decided to deploy the missile and created the procurement pipeline, the Milan made it out to the field. By this time it was 1987 and Anderson had taken over the task force. The Milan soon did to tank formations what the Stinger had done to helicopter squadrons. By the fall of that year, Anderson said, the field report on troop illnesses and other tactical information made it clear to those running the task force that the Soviets were fighting with a “dead army” and we were winning the fight against them.

By the time I left the program in 1987 to become chief of station in Rome, the war was winding down. The Soviets under Gorbachev announced their plans to withdraw, but the covert war raged on as the CIA continued arming rebels fighting to topple the Communist government of Mohammad Najibullah. When the last Soviet unit rumbled out of Afghanistan across the Friendship Bridge into Uzbekistan in February 1989, Bearden sent out a simple cable from Islamabad: “
WE WON
.” It had been a huge team effort. With the Soviets gone, the Bush administration quickly lost interest in Afghanistan. The Berlin Wall fell in November, consuming the administration’s foreign policy focus. The CIA kept pushing arms through the mountain passes as the rebel factions tried to close in on the Najibullah regime, but with the Soviets gone from the equation, Congress cut its secret appropriation for Afghanistan by 60 percent in 1990. The 1991 Gulf War made Afghanistan a distant memory. The CIA’s authority to arm the warring rebel factions formally lapsed on January 1, 1992. The Najibullah government finally fell later that year, but there was no outside power with enough interest left to broker a peace. Kabul descended into civil war among rebel factions, and paved the way for the rise of the Taliban in 1994.

With a quarter century’s hindsight, it’s hard now not to conclude that there was a better way to exit Afghanistan. America’s abandonment of the country is an often-cited mistake for which many believe we are still paying. For years after leaving the Afghan Task Force, I believed, along with Charlie Wilson, that we should have extended our covert presence, as well as provided substantial overt U.S. aid to help rebuild the country, despite all the advice to the contrary from the area experts inside and outside the Agency. With the passage of time and considerable reflection, however, I’m honestly not sure today that in the end it would have made a difference. One way or another, Afghanistan would have fallen into a chaos of tribal rivalry, and terrorists would have found their way there under one of the tribes’ protection. Because of this, I have little hope in the substantial U.S. efforts going on today to build a democratic Afghanistan.

Our close alliance with Pakistan’s ISI throughout the covert war is also worth noting, in terms both of our ongoing relationship with Pakistani intelligence and of the ISI’s role in shaping Afghanistan’s future once we lost interest. As we draw down in Afghanistan, if we have any hope of having a stable outcome there, we will need Pakistan and the ISI’s support. Pakistan not only shares the most important border with Afghanistan, but a large segment of its population belongs to the same Pashtun tribes that reside in Afghanistan. While the relationship has rough edges today, we have a long history of cooperation, and I hope we will return to a strong partnership.

Critics of our covert war also look at the CIA’s alliance with Saudi intelligence and its arms pipeline to rebel factions across the ethnic and ideological spectrum, which helped provide the underpinnings for the network of armed Arab jihadists that would spring up across the region. However, it is important to emphasize that there is no evidence that Osama bin Laden ever received weapons or other matériel support from the CIA. He was a minor blip on our screen and his support came directly from the Arab states. To connect the dots and conclude that the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan created al-Qaeda and led directly to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001—as some of the CIA’s most virulent critics have done—is wrong. The CIA’s network of tribal relationships established in the 1980s made it possible for the CIA and U.S. Special Forces, along with devastating American air power, to topple the Taliban within months of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

As I wrote in
The Wall Street Journal
in July 2010, after 9/11 we should have concentrated on getting Bin Laden and destroying al-Qaeda, not on nation building and counterinsurgency, as a block against the Taliban. The Taliban was an indigenous Islamic fundamentalist force that was not involved in the 9/11 attacks against the United States and did not have international ambitions. The real culprits were foreign Arab terrorists who trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and have now dispersed to Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, North Africa, and other parts of the Middle East. Invading Iraq in 2003 on a false premise that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction only made us lose sight of Afghanistan’s true significance yet again. And when President Obama finally shifted the nation’s focus back to Afghanistan in early 2009, after six years of war in Iraq, it was essentially too late. The Taliban had regrouped, and we were replicating the Russian and British mistakes of trying to maintain a long-term military presence in the “graveyard of empires.” Many of my colleagues on the Afghan Task Force would agree. Milt Bearden has said it is “crazy to bring a big army into Afghanistan. There is no such thing as a well-conducted long war there … the Afghans don’t get defeated.” Bob Williams, our military analyst, who had fought in Vietnam, said that the best part of the Agency’s support to the mujahideen was that there was no loss of American lives. The reason for our success of the Afghan operation in the 1980s—as compared to the situation today—was that we empowered the Afghan people to fight the war themselves. Tom Twetten agreed that the key ingredient was the Afghan fighters. He said it did not matter how much suffering they went through: they were absolutely united in their goal of expelling the foreign invader, which strikes an ominous chord today. Frank Anderson has also expressed skepticism about the manner in which we have conducted the current war in Afghanistan: “Military force is only useful when killing people and destroying property advances your interests. That certainly happens. One needs to be alert for the point at which it is no longer true, however.” As the Obama administration pulls our troops out of Afghanistan, we should maintain a CIA covert action component aimed at al-Qaeda and other terrorists as part of a robust U.S. mission that includes diplomatic, economic, and antinarcotics components. If we’ve learned nothing else from the way we ended our involvement in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, it must be this: we need to leave in place a covert action structure. We simply cannot withdraw our troops in a way that leaves a vacuum to be filled by our adversaries.

SIX

Do I Lie to the Pope, or Break Cover?

Italy, 1988

As a reward for running the Afghan Task Force, the deputy director of operations, Clair George, offered me the plum job of Rome station chief. But in the hunting preserve of the Agency barons—highly experienced senior officers who had run multiple overseas stations and operational divisions—Rome for me possessed a special allure. It also came with a hazard that I came to sense only vaguely: my colleague from my precareer training days, Aldrich Ames. When I arrived in Rome in the fall of 1988, Rick had been posted there for more than two years, working against the Soviets. He supposedly considered me a friend and was pleased when he found out I was coming in as station chief.
1
My predecessor in Rome, Alan Wolfe, a hard-edged operator, had been critical of Ames’s performance. He’d reportedly been frustrated with Ames’s failure to file reports on his meetings with the one and only Soviet with whom he seemed to have contact at that time, Aleksey Khrenkov. Apparently, Wolfe had been pressing Ames on this, but Ames insisted there was little hope in recruiting Khrenkov. None of us knew at the time, of course, that Ames was working for the Soviets and that Khrenkov was his official go-between.

Shortly after we arrived in Rome, Ames and his second wife, Rosario, invited Pat and me over to dinner. The couple lived near the Forum, in a modest-size two-bedroom apartment, with one of the rooms converted into a study for Rosario. The walls were crowded mostly with bookcases. Whenever one of them filled up with books, Ames said, he would go out and buy another bookcase. The apartment had Danish-style furnishings, and on one wall hung a high-quality oil painting of which Ames was proud. Rosario, a Colombian, was friendly and sociable. A good deal younger than Rick, she had been taking courses for a master’s degree, and she was seven months pregnant. They were anxious about the arrival of the baby. Rosario had had a miscarriage the previous year, and Ames had asked to extend his tour of duty for a few months so that the baby could be born safely in Rome. The Agency was always sympathetic to such requests, and Ames was granted a six-month extension. Otherwise, he would have left shortly after I arrived.

I couldn’t help noticing, as they greeted us that evening, that Ames had spruced up his appearance since we last saw each other. I attributed this to Rosario—she wore a stylish maternity dress—remembering his unfashionable look back in Washington. He was dressed in good-quality slacks and an oxford cloth shirt. I noticed that his teeth were in the process of being fixed. Before we sat down for dinner, Rick went to one of the bookshelves and pulled down the volume I had lent him twenty years earlier, when we first joined the Agency: Harold Lasswell’s pre–World War II work
Psychopathology and Politics
. The ideas in the book were influenced by the Freudian theory that early upbringing results in predetermined adult behavior. In essence, by extrapolation, if you are weaned on the left, you will be liberal, and if weaned on the right, a conservative. I would come to appreciate the irony, since, to my mind, Ames’s upbringing and his father’s rather uninspiring CIA career were major factors in his decision to become a Soviet mole. I mentioned that I had enjoyed the book he had lent me,
A Coffin for Dimitrios
, the spy novel by Eric Ambler, whose writer-narrator descends into a netherworld of treachery and counterespionage and becomes indistinguishable from the characters in his books. More irony.