Ghost Wars (32 page)

ED MCWILLIAMS STRUCK OUT by jeep for the Afghan frontier soon after he arrived in Islamabad that summer. After the deaths of Zia and Ambassador Raphel, the U.S. embassy was in chaos. The new regime led by Robert Oakley was only just settling in. It seemed an ideal time for McWilliams to disappear into the field, to use his prestigious-sounding title of special envoy and his language skills to talk with as many Afghan commanders, intellectuals, and refugees as he could. He traveled on weekends to avoid escorts and official meetings set up by the embassy. He wanted to know what problems Afghan mujahedin were facing as the Soviets left, what American interests were in post-Soviet Afghanistan, and what was really happening on the ground.

For two months he traveled through Pakistan’s tribal areas. In Peshawar he spent long hours with Abdul Haq and senior mujahedin leaders such as Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani and Younis Khalis. Ahmed Shah Massoud’s brother Yahya had moved to Peshawar and set up an office for the Panjshiri militia. McWilliams drove up into the hills and talked with merchants, travelers on the roads, and rebel recruits in training camps. He flew down to Quetta and met with the Afghan exiles from the country’s royalist clans, including the Karzai family. He talked to commanders who operated in the west of Afghanistan, in the central Hazara region, and also some who fought near Kandahar, the southern city that was Afghanistan’s historical royal capital. He drove up to Chaman on the Afghan border and talked with carpet merchants shuttling back and forth into Afghanistan. It had been a long time since an American in a position to shape government policy had sat cross-legged on quite so many Afghan rugs or sipped so many cups of sugared green tea, asking Afghans themselves open-ended questions about their jihad. The accounts McWilliams heard began to disturb and anger him.

Nearly every Afghan he met impressed upon him the same message: As the Soviets withdrew, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—backed by officers in ISI’s Afghan bureau, operatives from the Muslim Brotherhood’s Jamaat-e-Islami, officers from Saudi intelligence, and Arab volunteers from a dozen countries—was moving systematically to wipe out his rivals in the Afghan resistance. The scenes described by McWilliams’s informants made Hekmatyar sound like a Mafia don taking over the territory of his rivals. Hekmatyar and his kingpin commanders were serially kidnapping and murdering mujahedin royalists, intellectuals, rival party commanders—anyone who threatened strong alternative leadership. Pakistani intelligence was at the same time using its recently constructed network of border infrastructure—checkpoints, training camps, and the newly built roads and caves and depots around Parrot’s Beak and Paktia province—to block the progress of mujahedin commanders who opposed Hekmatyar and to force independent commanders to join Hekmatyar’s party. Added up, the circumstantial evidence seemed chilling: As the Soviet Union soldiers pulled out, Hekmatyar and ISI had embarked on a concerted, clandestine plan to eliminate his rivals and establish his Muslim Brotherhood– dominated Islamic Party as the most powerful national force in Afghanistan.
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In University Town, Peshawar, gunmen on motorcycles killed the Afghan poet and philosopher Sayd Bahudin Majrooh, publisher of the most influential bulletin promoting traditional Afghan royalist and tribal leadership. Majrooh’s independent Afghan Information Center had reported in a survey that 70 percent of Afghan refugees supported exiled King Zahir Shah rather than any of the Peshawar-based mujahedin leaders such as Hekmatyar.
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There were no arrests in Majrooh’s killing. The hit was interpreted among Afghans and at the CIA’s Islamabad station as an early and intimidating strike by Hekmatyar against the Zahir Shah option for post-Soviet Afghanistan.
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The Ahmed Shah Massoud option came in for similar treatment: Around the same time that Majrooh was killed, Massoud’s older half-brother Dean Mohammed was kidnapped and killed by mysterious assailants hours after he visited the American consulate in Peshawar to apply for a visa. Massoud’s brothers believed for years afterward that ISI’s Afghan cell had carried out the operation, although they could not be sure.
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In Quetta, McWilliams heard detailed accounts of how Pakistani intelligence had allied with Hekmatyar to isolate and defeat rival commanders around Kandahar. ISI’s local office regulated food and cash handouts so that those who now agreed to join Hekmatyar would have ample supplies for fighters and civilians in areas they controlled. Those who didn’t agree to join, however, would be starved, unable to pay their men or supply grain to their villages. ISI used a road permit system to ensure that only authorized commanders had permission to take humanitarian supplies across the Afghan border, McWilliams was told. At the same time, Pakistani intelligence and the Arab volunteers operating around Paktia used their access to newly built roads, clinics, and training camps to persuade local commanders that only by joining forces with them could they ensure that their wounded were evacuated quickly and treated by qualified doctors. Afghan witnesses reported seeing ISI officers with Hekmatyar commanders as they moved in force against rival mujahedin around Kandahar. They complained to McWilliams that Hekmatyar’s people received preferential access to local training camps and weapons depots. Secular-minded royalist Afghans from the country’s thin, exiled tribal leadership and commercial classes said they had long warned both the Americans and the Saudis, as one put it, “For God’s sake, you’re financing your own assassins.” But the Americans had been convinced by Pakistani intelligence, they complained, that only the most radical Islamists could fight with determination.

A lifelong and passionate cold warrior, Ed McWilliams shared the conviction of conservative intellectuals in Washington that the CIA’s long struggle for Afghan “self-determination” was morally just, even righteous. It appalled him to discover, as he believed he had, that American authority and billions of dollars in taxpayer funding had been hijacked at the war’s end by a ruthless anti-American cabal of Islamists and Pakistani intelligence officers determined to impose their will on Afghanistan.

In the middle of October 1988, McWilliams sat down in the diplomatic section of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad and tapped out on its crude, secure telex system a twenty-eight-paragraph cable, classified Secret and titled “ISI, Gulbuddin and Afghan Self-Determination.”
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It was at that stage almost certainly the most detailed internal dissent about U.S. support for Pakistani intelligence, Saudi Arabian intelligence, and the Islamist Afghan rebels ever expressed in official U.S. government channels. The cable was distributed to the State Department, the CIA, the National Security Council, and a few members of Congress.

THERE IS A GROWING FRUSTRATION, BORDERING ON

HOSTILITY, AMONG AFGHANS ACROSS THE IDEOLOGICAL

SPECTRUM AND FROM A BROAD RANGE OF BACKGROUNDS,

TOWARD THE GOVERNMENT OF PAKISTAN AND TOWARD

THE U.S. . . . THE EXTENT OF THIS SENTIMENT APPEARS

UNPRECEDENTED AND INTENSIFYING. . . . MOST OF THESE

OBSERVERS CLAIM THAT THIS EFFORT [BY HEKMATYAR

AND ISI] HAS THE SUPPORT OF THE RADICAL PAKISTANI

POLITICAL PARTY JAMAAT ISLAMI AND OF RADICAL

ARABS. . . . WHILE THESE CHARGES MAY BE EXAGGERATED,

THE PERCEPTION THEY GIVE RISE TO IS DEEP

AND BROAD—AND OMINOUS. . . .

In the course of his reporting, McWilliams had spoken with a number of American diplomats and analysts “who were not in a position to speak out, because indeed it was a rather intimidating atmosphere.” He felt that he was describing their views of the ISI-CIA-Hekmatyar-Arab problem as well as his own.
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Within the U.S. embassy in Islamabad his cable detonated like a stink bomb. Normally a diplomatic officer had to clear his cabled analyses through the ambassador, but McWilliams had semi-independent status. Bearden was furious at “that little shit.” McWilliams was misinformed, the CIA’s officers felt. He didn’t have access to all their classified information documenting how the CIA managed its unilateral Afghan reporting network, including its support for Massoud and Abdul Haq, or how the agency played its hand with ISI, seeking to ensure that Hekmatyar did not dominate the weapons pipeline. Besides, Bearden discounted some of the criticism of Hekmatyar as KGB pro-paganda. He saw Hekmatyar “as an enemy,” he said later, but he did not regard Massoud as an adequate instrument for the CIA’s prosecution of the war. Bearden accepted the view, shared by Pakistani intelligence, that Massoud “appeared to have established an undeclared cease-fire” with the Soviets in the north. Massoud was “shoring up his position politically,” not fighting as hard as ISI’s main Islamist clients, Bearden believed.

On a more personal, visceral level, the CIA officers found McWilliams uncompromising, humorless, not a team player. At the Kabul embassy McWilliams had been involved in an administrative controversy involving accusations of improper contacts with Afghans by a CIA case officer, and the reports reaching the Islamabad station suggested that McWilliams had squealed on the CIA officer involved. Bearden thought McWilliams had endangered the CIA officer by his conduct. His cable challenging CIA assumptions about the jihad sent Bearden and Oakley into a cold fury.
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McWilliams found Oakley, his deputy Beth Jones, and Bearden unquestioning in their endorsement of current U.S. policy toward Pakistani intelligence. Oakley was a hardworking, intelligent diplomat, but he was also intimidating and rude, McWilliams thought. Oakley and Bearden were both Texans: double trouble when they were together, boisterous, and confident to the point of arrogance. “Everybody is saying that you’re a dumb asshole,” Bearden teased Oakley once before a group of embassy colleagues. “But I correct them. ‘Oakley is not dumb,’ I say.”

For his part, McWilliams felt that he was only initiating a healthy debate about the assumptions underlying the U.S. alliance with ISI. Why should that anger his colleagues so intensely? But it did. McWilliams’s underground allies in the U.S. embassy and consulates in Pakistan opened a back channel to keep him informed about just how thoroughly he had alienated Oakley and Bearden, McWilliams recalled. In the aftermath of his cable about Hekmatyar and ISI, the U.S. embassy in Islamabad had quietly opened an internal investigation into McWilliams’s integrity, the envoy’s informants confided. The CIA had raised serious questions about his handling of classified materials. The embassy was watching his behavior and posing questions to those who knew him.Was McWilliams a homosexual? He seemed to be a drinker. Did he have some sort of problem with alcohol?

THE RUSSIAN WRITER Artyom Borovik traveled with the Soviet Fortieth Army’s last brigades as they prepared to rumble out of Kabul and up the snowy Salang Highway in January and February 1989. It was an extraordinary time in Soviet journalism and military culture, a newly permissive moment of dissent and uncensored speech. “It’s been a strange war,” a lieutenant colonel named Ushakov told Borovik. “We went in when stagnation was at its peak and now leave when truth is raging.”

At the iron-gated, heavy-concrete Soviet embassy compound in Kabul, just down the road from the city zoo, fallen eucalyptus leaves swirled in the bottom of the empty swimming pool. The embassy’s KGB chief insisted on his regular Friday tennis game. His forty-minute sets “seemed quite fantastic to me,” Borovik wrote, “especially when the camouflaged helicopters that provided covering fire for the airborne troopers would fly above his gray-haired head.” The Cold War’s ending now seemed to echo far beyond Afghanistan. “Who knows where a person can feel safer these days—here or in Poland?” the Polish ambassador asked grimly. The old Soviet guard watched bitterly as the last tank convoys pulled out. A general read to Borovik from a dog-eared copy of a book about why Russia had been defeated in its war with Japan in 1904: “In the last few years, our government itself has headed the antiwar movement.”

Boris Gromov was the Fortieth Army’s last commander. He was short and stout, and his face was draped by bangs. He feared the Panjshir Valley. “There’s Massoud with his four thousand troops, so there’s still plenty to worry about,” he told Borovik. The last Russian fatality, a soldier named Lashenenkov, was shot through the neck on the Salang Highway by a rebel sniper. He rode out of Afghanistan on a stretcher lashed to the top of an armored vehicle, his corpse draped in snow.
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On February 15, the day appointed by the Geneva Accords for the departure of the last Soviet troops, Gromov staged a ceremony for the international media on the Termez Bridge, still standing despite the multiple attempts by ISI to persuade Afghan commanders to knock it down. Gromov stopped his tank halfway across the bridge, climbed out of the hatch, and walked toward Uzbekistan as one of his sons approached him with a bouquet of carnations.
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At CIA headquarters in Langley the newly appointed director, William Webster, hosted a champagne party.

At the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, too, they threw a celebration. Bearden sent a cable to Langley: “WE WON.” He decided on his own last act of private theater. His third-floor office in the CIA station lay in the direct line of sight of the KGB office in the Soviet embassy across barren scrub land. Bearden had made a point of always leaving the light on in his office, and at diplomatic receptions he would joke with his KGB counterparts about how hard he was working to bring them down. That night he switched off the light.
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Shevardnadze flew into snow-cradled Kabul that same night with Kryuchkov, the Soviet KGB chief. Najibullah and his wife hosted them for dinner. All autumn and winter the Afghan president had been working to win defections to his cause, hoping to forestall a mujahedin onslaught and the collapse of his government, still being forecast confidently by the CIA. Najibullah had offered Massoud his defense ministry, and when Massoud sent a message refusing the job, the president had decided to leave the seat open, signaling that it could be Massoud’s whenever he felt ready. Najibullah pushed through pay raises to special guard forces trained to defend Kabul. He organized militias to defend the northern gas fields that provided his government’s only reliable income. He was doing what he could, he told his Soviet sponsors.