Ghost Wars (24 page)

Encouraged by the CIA, Pakistani intelligence also focused on sabotage operations that would cut Soviet supply lines. But the missions often proved difficult because even the most ardent Afghan Islamists refused to mount suicide operations.

In his Wile E. Coyote–style efforts to blow up the Salang Tunnel north of Kabul, Yousaf tried to concoct truck bomb missions in which ISI would help load fuel tankers with explosives. Soviet soldiers moved quickly to intercept any truck that stalled inside the strategic tunnel, so there seemed no practical way to complete such a mission unless the truck driver was willing to die in the cause. The Afghans whom Yousaf trained uniformly denounced suicide attack proposals as against their religion. It was only the Arab volunteers—from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria, and other countries, who had been raised in an entirely different culture, spoke their own language, and preached their own interpretations of Islam while fighting far from their homes and families—who later advocated suicide attacks. Afghan jihadists, tightly woven into family, clan, and regional social networks, never embraced suicide tactics in significant numbers.
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Afghan fighters also often refused to attack bridges or trade routes if they were important to civilian traders or farmers. The Afghan tolerance of civilian commerce in the midst of dire conflict frustrated visiting Americans. A congressman on tour would fly over Afghanistan, see a bridge standing unmolested, and complain loudly on his return to Washington that it ought to be blown up. But when the satellite-mapped attack plan was passed down through ISI to a particular Afghan commando team, the Afghans would often shrug off the order or use the supplied weapons to hit a different target of their own choosing. They took tolls from bridges. The livelihood of their clan often depended on open roads.

Still, the CIA shipped to Pakistani intelligence many tons of C-4 plastic explosives for sabotage operations during this period. Britain’s MI6 provided magnetic depth charges to attack bridge pylons, particularly the bridge near Termez that spanned the Amu Darya. After 1985 the CIA also supplied electronic timing and detonation devices that made it easier to set off explosions from a remote location. The most basic delay detonator was the “time pencil,” a chemical device that wore down gradually and set off a bomb or rocket after a predictable period. It had been developed by the CIA’s Office of Technical Services. Guerrillas could use these devices to set an explosive charge at night, retreat, and then watch it blow up at first light. After 1985 the CIA also shipped in “E cell” delay detonators, which used sophisticated electronics to achieve similar effects. Thousands of the delay timers were distributed on the frontier.

Speaking in an interview in July 1992, seven months before the first Islamist terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, a U.S. official closely involved in the CIA supply program was asked by the author to estimate the amount of plastic explosives that had been transferred by Pakistani intelligence to the mujahedin with CIA and Saudi support. The official spontaneously chose these words: “We could have probably blown up half of New York with the explosives that the Paks supplied.”

CIA lawyers and operators at Langley were more sensitive than ever about second-guessing from Congress and the press. Casey’s Nicaragua operations were going sour just as the covert Afghan war began to escalate. The agency was criticized sharply for placing mines in Nicaragua’s harbors. There was a feeling taking hold in the Directorate of Operations by late 1985 that perhaps Casey had gone too far, that the agency was headed for another political crash.

In the Afghan program the CIA was now supplying many “dual use” weapons systems, meaning weapons that could be used against legitimate military targets but also could be employed in terrorism or assassination. These included the new electronic detonators, the malleable plastic explosives, and sniper rifle packages. The rough rule at Langley was that the CIA would not supply any weapon where “its most likely use would be for assassination or criminal enterprise,” as one official involved put it. Since the CIA was not running the commando operations itself but was relying on Pakistani intelligence, “most likely use” could only be approximated. Langley’s Afghan task force chief, the rough and aggressive anticommunist Gust Avrakatos, tried to evade CIA lawyers. “These aren’t terrorist devices or assassination techniques,” Avrakatos told his colleagues when weapons such as sniper rifles had to be described in cables and memos. “Henceforth these are individual defensive devices.” He discouraged officers from putting too much in writing. When the Islamabad station sent a cable describing a borderline guerrilla tactic, he wrote back that the message had been garbled and that the station should not send “anything more on that subject ever again.” He shopped in Egypt for sabotage devices such as wheelbarrows rigged as bombs that could be used to target Soviet officers in Kabul. “Do I want to order bicycle bombs to park in front of an officers’ headquarters?” Avrakatos recalled asking. “Yes. That’s what spreads fear.” He endorsed a system run by Pakistani intelligence that rewarded Afghan commanders for the number of individual Soviet belt buckles they brought in.
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American law about assassination and terrorism was entering another of its periods of flux. The executive order banning assassination, enacted by President Ford in response to the exposure of CIA plots from the 1960s, had been sitting unexamined on the books for a decade. Not even the hardliners in the Reagan Cabinet wanted the ban removed, but they had begun to question its ambiguities.When did targeting a general or head of state in war or in response to a terrorist attack drift across the line and become assassination? Was the decision to target that general or head of state the issue, or was it the means employed to kill him? What if a preemptive assassination was undertaken to stop a terrorist from attacking the United States? The questions being debated were both strategic and pragmatic. For American national security, what policy was morally defensible and militarily effective? What, technically, did the Ford-era assassination ban cover? This had to be spelled out, CIA officers argued, or else agents and even civilian policy makers might inadvertently expose themselves to criminal prosecution.

Reagan’s lawyers at the White House and the Justice Department believed that preemptive attacks on individuals carried out in self-defense—such as against a terrorist about to launch a strike—were clearly legal. But there were many questions about how such a standard should be defined and implemented.

In the Afghan program sniper rifles created the greatest unease. They were known as “buffalo guns” and could accurately fire large, potent bullets from distances of one or two kilometers. The idea to supply them to the Afghan rebels had originated with a Special Forces enthusiast in Washington named Vaughan Forrest, who wrote a long report for the CIA and the National Security Council about how the mujahedin might counter Soviet Spetsnaz tactics by hitting Soviet commanders directly. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you need to hit them hard, you need to hit them deep, and you need to hit his heart and brains,” Forrest said. His enthusiasm extended to a broader campaign of urban sabotage that some on the NSC interagency committee regarded as outright terrorism. But the idea of targeting Soviet commanders with the sniper rifles found support. “The phrase ‘shooting ducks in a barrel’ was used,” one participant recalled. The sniper program’s advocates wanted to “off Russian generals in series.”
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Through the CIA station in Islamabad, Pakistani intelligence endorsed a formal written request for the buffalo guns, plus supporting equipment such as night-vision goggles and high-powered scopes that would allow a shooter to hit his target from a mile away under cover of darkness. The incoming cable set off alarms in the general counsel’s office at the CIA. The night-vision equipment and scopes were clearly intended for missions that, if not outright assassination under the law, seemed uncomfortably close. Should the operation go sour, the Islamabad station chief might end up in handcuffs.

After several rounds of debate and teeth-gnashing, a compromise was reached: The guns could be shipped to Pakistan, but they would be stripped of the night-vision goggles and scopes that seemed to tilt their “most likely use” toward assassination. Also, the CIA would not provide ISI with target intelligence from satellites concerning where Soviet officers lived or how their apartment buildings might be approached stealthily. CIA officers tried to emphasize to ISI the guns’ value as “antimaterial” weapons, meaning that they could be used to shoot out the tires in a convoy of trucks from a distant mountaintop or to drill holes in a fuel tanker. American specialists traveled to Pakistan to train ISI officers on the rifles so that they, in turn, could train rebel commando teams. In the end, dozens of the sniper rifles were shipped to Afghanistan.
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THE TERRORIST ATTACKS came one after another during 1985, all broadcast live on network television to tens of millions of Americans. In June two Lebanese terrorists hijacked TWA Flight 847, murdered a Navy diver on board, and negotiated while mugging for cameras on a Beirut runway. In October the Palestinian terrorist Abu Abbas hijacked the cruise ship
Achille Lauro
in Italy, murdered a sixty-nine-year-old Jewish-American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, dumped his body overboard, and ultimately escaped to Baghdad with Egyptian and Italian collaboration. Just after Christmas, Palestinian gunmen with the Abu Nidal Organization opened fire on passengers lined up at El Al ticket counters in Vienna and Rome, killing nineteen people, among them five Americans. One of the American victims was an eleven-year-old girl named Natasha Simpson who died in her father’s arms after a gunman unloaded an extra round in her head just to make sure. The attackers, boyish products of Palestinian refugee camps, had been pumped full of amphetamines by their handlers just before the holiday attacks.

The shock of these events followed the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Lebanon, which claimed the lives of some of the CIA’s brightest minds on the Middle East, and the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in which 241 Marines died. The Shiite terrorist organization Hezbollah had seized American hostages in Lebanon. Casey and Reagan had been galvanized by this violence in Lebanon against official Americans and journalists. Now they confronted a new, wider wave of attacks targeting American civilians and tourists.

During 1985 about 6.5 million Americans traveled overseas, of whom about 6,000 died for various reasons, mainly from illnesses. Seventeen were killed by terrorists. Yet by the end of the year millions of Americans were canceling travel plans and demanding action from their government. Palestinian and Lebanese Shiite terrorists had captured America’s attention just as they had hoped to do.

“When we hijack a plane, it has more effect than if we killed a hundred Israelis in battle,” the Palestinian Marxist leader George Habash once said. “At least the world is talking about us now.” By the mid-1980s the American analyst Brian Jenkins’s observation had become famous: “Terrorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people listening and not a lot of people dead.” He coined another oft-repeated phrase: “Terrorism is theater.”
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In its modern form it was a theater invented largely by a stateless Palestinian diaspora whose leftist leaders sought dramatic means to attract attention to their national claims. In the new academic specialty of terrorist studies it was common to date the first modern terrorist event as the Habash-led hijacking of an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv on July 22, 1968. Thereafter inventive Palestinian terrorists attacked the vulnerabilities of aviation and exploited the new global reach of television, creating a succession of made-for-TV terrorist events that emphasized the spectacular. At the same time, because a purpose of their movement was to negotiate for statehood, they often sought to limit and calibrate their violence to create the greatest impact without alienating important political allies. As at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and at the Rome and Vienna airports in late 1985, these efforts to control public relations sometimes failed. In Washington especially the politics of antiterrorism were becoming angrier and angrier.

Shortly after the airport attacks Casey summoned the chief of the CIA’s European Division, Duane R. “Dewey” Clarridge, to his office on Langley’s seventh floor. A New Hampshire Yankee educated at Brown University, Clarridge was a cigar-chomping career officer who craved action and bridled at supervision. He had served in Nepal and India during the early Cold War, running anti-Soviet operations on obscure frontiers. He had impressed Casey as a hearty risk-taker, and the director rewarded him with full control over his secret war in Nicaragua. There Clarridge pushed the operation to the limits, running speedy Q-boats to smuggle guns and plant mines. When his harbor-mining operations created a congressional uproar, Casey moved Clarridge to the European Division in the Directorate of Operations. Now the director wanted his help again.

Reagan was putting intense pressure on the CIA to show more initiative in the fight against terrorism, Casey told Clarridge. The director wanted to reply by forming action teams that could put the CIA on the offensive in a global campaign against terrorist groups. Clarridge told Casey what the director already believed: To succeed, the CIA had to attack the terrorist cells preemptively. If not, “The incidents would become bolder, bloodier, and more numerous.”
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Casey erupted in a “sudden burst of animation” and told Clarridge to interview terrorism specialists around Washington and write up a proposal for a new covert CIA counterterrorist strategy. Clarridge found an office down the hall and started work just after New Year’s Day 1986. By late January Clarridge had drafted his blueprint, an eight- or nine-page double-spaced memo addressed to Casey.

The CIA had several problems in confronting the global terrorist threat, Clarridge wrote. The biggest was its “defensive mentality.” Terrorists operated worldwide “knowing there was little chance of retribution or of their being brought to justice.” Clarridge wanted a new legal operating system for the CIA that would allow offensive strikes against terrorists. He proposed the formation of two super-secret “action teams” that would be funded and equipped to track, attack, and snatch terrorists globally. The action teams would be authorized to kill terrorists if doing so would preempt a terrorist event, or arrest them and bring them to justice if possible. One action team would be made up of foreign nationals who could blend more easily into landscapes overseas. The other action team would be Americans.