Intel Wars (13 page)

If there is a nerve center for the Afghan intelligence war, it is Bagram Air Base, a sprawling 5,000-acre military complex thirty miles north of Kabul that is populated by almost 18,000 U.S. and NATO troops and civilian contractors.

The flightline and hangars at Bagram are jammed with a host of publicity-shy intelligence-gathering aircraft and unmanned drones. There is a U.S. Army unit called Task Force ODIN-A (Observe, Detect, Identify, Neutralize–Afghanistan), which flies both unmanned drones and some very secretive C-12 King Air aircraft that are equipped with reconnaissance cameras and sensitive SIGINT collection gear. This unit's planes hunt for Taliban IED teams. Next to them on the flightline is a U.S. Air Force squadron that flies a dozen or so MC-12W aircraft that are equipped with high-resolution video cameras and SIGINT collection equipment to track the movements of Taliban commanders in southern Afghanistan.

Keeping these mission-critical drones and aircraft flying in Afghanistan has always been a major challenge. Depending on the time of the year, these drones and reconnaissance aircraft spend more time idling on the tarmac than flying missions because of bad weather. During the summer months, winds aloft of fifty knots or more are not uncommon, and massive dust storms can cause brownouts that last days at a time. Army and air force drone maintenance crews at Bagram and Kandahar complain that they have had difficulty keeping their systems flying because of the massive amount of windblown sand and dust that gets ingested into the engines of their aircraft.

The west side of the Bagram base is honeycombed with over a dozen barbed-wire-enclosed compounds housing a plethora of secretive intelligence units. On one corner of the base is a heavily guarded building with a sign posted out front that identifies it as the home of the Remote Operations Cryptologic Center, where Taliban and al Qaeda cell phone calls are intercepted and translated. Just down the road is another compound, which houses the Joint Document Exploitation Center, where all captured Taliban documents go to be translated and analyzed.

And in a remote corner of the base is Parwan, the new military prison built in 2009, which currently houses about eight hundred Taliban prisoners. Most of the prisoners are undergoing reeducation classes, which it is hoped will eventually lead to their release back into Afghan society. There is also a maximum security wing of the prison, which houses about forty hardcore Taliban commanders who probably will be held indefinitely.

Everything about the Afghan capital of Kabul, population 1.5 million, has a surreal quality to it. Just as in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War, you would never know that there was a war going on just outside the city gates. Kabul has become a boomtown, thanks to the billions of dollars of U.S. and foreign reconstruction aid that have been pumped into the city since 2001. The city's streets teem with life. There are so many cars, SUVs, motorcycles, and mopeds that snarling traffic jams are the norm downtown. Every inch of sidewalk space is crammed with hawkers selling their wares, and the city's bazaars are packed full of every conceivable type of goods for sale, including one stall that the author found selling U.S. military computers with their classified hard drives still in them.

Despite the vast poverty of the city's population, Kabul has a vibrant nightlife complete with coffee bars, teahouses, discos, and hundreds of restaurants and cafés, many of which cater to foreigners, all doing a booming trade. According to an Australian aid official stationed in Kabul in 2009, the prevailing sentiment is “Live for today because there may be no tomorrow.”

Over the past decade Kabul has become a spy's paradise, surpassing Berlin and Vienna during the Cold War era in the pantheon of great spy meccas of history. According to an Afghan security official interviewed in 2010, today there are more spies working the streets and the diplomatic cocktail circuit in Kabul than anywhere else in the world.

The embassy of virtually every major foreign power in Kabul
has a contingent of intelligence officers on staff who openly trawl the city looking for any tidbits of information that they can report to their capitals, as well as SIGINT listening posts hidden inside the chanceries, which intercept the cell phone calls of Afghan government officials, foreign diplomats, United Nations officials, private security contractors, aid workers, and just about anyone else of importance in Kabul.

The two top luxury hotels, the Hotel InterContinental in the northern part of the city, and the Serena Hotel in downtown Kabul, are veritable dens of spies. The Serena's four restaurants, especially the chic Café Zarnegar, are favorite meeting places for Afghan government officials, diplomats, spies, and a smattering of underpaid journalists, foreign aid workers, and UN officials. You figuratively cannot turn around without accidentally hitting someone trying to eavesdrop on your conversation. And for a modest gratuity, the business-savvy hotel porters will tell you which of the suites they believe have electronic surveillance devices installed inside, although they claim they have no idea who is listening in on the conversations or what other nefarious activities may be taking place in these rooms.

The Taverna du Liban, a popular Lebanese restaurant in downtown Kabul, is another favorite watering hole for the legion of spies and diplomats who now call Kabul home. So is Kabul's only golf club, where, weather permitting, one can almost always find some American, French, or Russian intelligence officer trying to extract secrets from a gaggle of Afghan government officials who, from the look of things, are just trying to learn how to putt.

The largest contingent of spies in the Afghan capital belongs to the CIA's Kabul station, which occupies the entire top floor of the new $736 million U.S. embassy on Great Massoud Road in the heart of the Green Zone in downtown Kabul. The CIA station chief, whose cover position is Counselor for Regional Affairs works here, as do his top deputies, a sizable group of case officers from the National Clandestine Service, and most of the station's intelligence analysts. Also on the top floor of the U.S. embassy is an ultrasophisticated NSA-CIA listening post, which monitors cell phone calls and radio traffic throughout Kabul. Access to the various sections of the station is protected by armed U.S. Marine guards, surveillance cameras, and the latest security devices.

The CIA's massive presence is an open secret. It seems that virtually every foreign diplomat and Afghan government official in Kabul knows the names of the CIA station chief and his top deputies. One Afghan security official gave me the private office telephone number at the U.S. embassy for the agency's station chief in the hope that I might say a good word about him if the occasion ever arose. It never did.

The Kabul station has grown dramatically since President Obama was inaugurated. In early 2009, DNI Denny Blair ordered the immediate transfer from Iraq to Afghanistan of many of the CIA's best case officers and intelligence analysts. By the end of the year, the size of the CIA station in Afghanistan doubled from three hundred people to almost seven hundred agency officers and contract employees, instantly becoming the agency's largest station in the world. The station has become so large that one agency analyst who served in Kabul referred to it as “the Archipelago.”

Up at Bagram Air Base is a large contingent of paramilitary operatives assigned to the CIA base on the west side of the airfield. These operatives, in conjunction with the thousand-plus Green Berets and Navy SEALs stationed just a few hundred yards away at a separate compound called Camp Vance, conduct what are referred to as “direct action” operations, which is a polite way of referring to commando raids designed to capture or kill Taliban commanders. The main CIA resource for these operations is three thousand Afghan mercenaries known as the Counterterrorist Pursuit Teams (CTPT), who were first publicly identified in Bob Woodward's 2010 book
Obama's Wars
.
The CTPT teams, which are deployed at twenty-six firebases
in southern and eastern Afghanistan, are rated as some of the most effective combat units in Afghanistan because, unlike their Afghan army and police counterparts, they are well armed, well trained, and combat tested, and their loyalty is not an issue because they are paid four times the monthly salary of an average Afghan soldier or policeman.

Besides the station in Kabul and the paramilitary base at Bagram, the CIA has three large bases along the Afghan-Pakistani border at Kandahar, Khost, and Jalalabad, which recruit and operate agent networks inside northern Pakistan. Small CIA bases have recently been established inside the new U.S. consulates in Herat in western Afghanistan, which monitor activities in eastern Iran; and at Mazar-e-Sharif in the northern part of the country, from which the CIA monitors Muslim extremist activities in neighboring Uzbekistan. There are also a host of smaller CIA bases along the Afghan-Pakistani border,
like the small agency-run listening post called Cardinal
, which is located directly adjacent to the Pakistani border above the Ghaki Pass in Kunar Province.

The CIA maintains very close relations with the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate for Security (NDS), which it completely subsidized until 2008, when the Afghan government assumed responsibility for funding the organization. Despite the NDS's well-deserved reputation for abusing prisoners, American officials interviewed for this book admitted that they depended heavily on the Afghan intelligence agency.

For example, the CIA and the NDS jointly ran a number of important surveillance operations targeting the movements and activities of all Pakistani and Iranian intelligence officers based in Kabul and elsewhere inside Afghanistan. In the summer of 2008, surveillance of the movements of Pakistani intelligence officers assigned to their embassy in Kabul revealed that these individuals were closely monitoring the Indian embassy and the activities of Indian diplomats and businessmen in Kabul just weeks before a car bomb destroyed the embassy on July 7, 2008, killing more than forty people.

While the level of cooperation between the CIA and the NDS is close, the CIA deliberately keeps the details of its most sensitive operations away from its Afghan counterparts. In particular, there is no sharing of information about the CIA station's top target, Afghan president Hamid Karzai, whom the agency had been carefully watching since he first came to power after the U.S. invasion in 2001.

Spying on Karzai has proven to be relatively easy, thanks to the array of sources the CIA has recruited inside the Afghan government over the past decade. Published newspaper reports have disclosed that President Karzai's brother, Mahmoud Karzai, and his half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who was assassinated in July 2011, were at one time or another on the CIA's payroll. In addition to members of Karzai's family, the CIA also has dozens of paid informants within the Afghan Ministries of Defense, Interior, and Foreign Affairs, the office of the Afghan national security adviser, and even the NDS.

The files are stuffed with thousands of intelligence reports about virtually every aspect of Karzai's personal and professional life. Reading through the Karzai files, several recurring themes emerge. Beset from all sides, Karzai worries constantly about maintaining his independence while at the same time resisting what he views as the increasingly pervasive influence of the United States in the conduct of his government's affairs. Karzai makes no secret that he detests Vice President Joe Biden and the former U.S. ambassador in Kabul Karl W. Eikenberry. He takes as a personal affront the repeated efforts by the Obama administration to push him to be more aggressive in countering corruption inside his own government, and he has taken to resisting attempts by the U.S. embassy in Kabul to influence key government appointments. He complains constantly that the economic aid that he has been promised by the United States and European countries has never been delivered. Karzai is also convinced that the Pakistani government is actively seeking to overthrow his government.

If you want to find the real war in Afghanistan, not the “feel good” version of the conflict that you usually see on the nightly news across America, drive thirty minutes southwest of Kabul on the nation's only fully paved road, Highway 1, into Wardak Province. The moment you cross the line into Wardak, you leave behind the twenty-first century and enter a rough-and-tumble, inhospitable world that has not changed appreciably since the birth of Christ.

Time has stood still in the 383 poor and isolated villages of Wardak for centuries. Village life continues to revolve around the
qalah
(pronounced
kala)
, the picturesque whitewashed compounds that have been the homes of the same families going back generations. The villages have none of the basic services that even the smallest and most impoverished town in America would take for granted: no town hall, police station, fire house, post office, hospital, school, stores, or telephones. Basic infrastructure is nonexistent. Absent are paved roads, running water, electricity, or even cars. The venerable donkey is still the preferred means of transport in the province.

For years after the U.S. invasion, Wardak was a sleepy, peaceful provincial backwater, its 540,000 inhabitants largely untouched by the war raging to the south. The U.S. military's public relations people in Kabul routinely directed reporters to Wardak if they wanted to see what a peaceful Afghan province looked like. Cut off from the rest of the world, the average Wardaki knew little about the war going on all around them. In their lifetime, average Afghan villagers rarely venture any farther than ten to twenty miles from the village where they were born. With no newspapers (80 percent of all Afghans cannot read), radio, or television, their knowledge of the world outside their village or valley is largely limited to what they hear on the local grapevine.

But behind its peaceful façade, Wardak was seething with discontent, and nobody on the ISAF intelligence staff in Kabul seems to have noticed. In 2007, the Taliban infiltrated into Wardak from Pakistan some young field commanders and recruiters whose mission was to organize a guerrilla force from among the local Pashtun villages. Once the Taliban recruiters reached Wardak, they found the province ripe for recruiting. The local Pashtun tribesmen, who made up 70 percent of the province's population, were angry. Since the U.S. invasion in 2001, they had been treated as second-class citizens by their own government and had been forsaken by the American military, who had promised both to protect them and lift them out of poverty but did neither. Their economic lot in life had deteriorated sharply because little reconstruction money had ever made it to their impoverished villages, and what money had gotten through was promptly stolen by venal local Afghan government officials and police commanders.