Ghost Wars (7 page)

“ALL REPORTS INDICATE all of the people in the compound have been removed and taken to safety thanks to the Pakistani troops,” State Department spokesman Hodding Carter told reporters in Washington later that day. In a telephone call, President Carter thanked Zia for his assistance, and Zia expressed regret about the loss of life. The Pakistani ambassador in Washington accepted the Americans’ gratitude and noted that Pakistani army troops had reacted “promptly, with dispatch.” Secretary of State Cyrus Vance hurriedly summoned ambassadors from thirty Islamic countries to discuss the Pakistan embassy attack and its context. Asked about the recent wave of Islamic militancy abroad, Vance said, “It’s hard to say at this point whether a pattern is developing.”
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It took a day or two to sort out the dead and missing. Putscher, the kidnapped auditor, was released by the students at Quaid-I-Azam around mid-night. They had called him “an imperialist pig” and found America guilty “of the trouble in Mecca and all the world’s problems,” but they decided in the end that he was personally innocent. He wandered back to the embassy, wounded and shaken.

Rescue workers found two Pakistani employees of the embassy in a first-floor office. They had died of apparent asphyxiation, and their bodies had been badly burned. In the compound’s residential section, workers found an American airman, Brian Ellis, twenty-nine, lying dead on the floor of his fire-gutted apartment. A golf club lay beside him; he had apparently been beaten unconscious and left to burn.

On Friday, a Pan American Airlines jumbo jet evacuated 309 nonessential personnel, dependents, and other Americans from Pakistan and back to the United States.

Saudi Arabian soldiers and French commandos routed the armed attackers at the Grand Mosque on Saturday in a bloody gun battle. The Saudis never provided an accounting of the final death toll. Most estimates placed it in the hundreds. Saudi interior minister Prince Naif downplayed the uprising’s significance, calling the Saudi renegades “no more than a criminal deviation” who were “far from having any political essence.” Surviving followers of the Mahdi, who had been shot dead, fled to the mosque’s intricate network of basements and underground tunnels. They were flushed out by Saudi troops after a further week of fighting. The building contractor who had originally reconstructed the mosque for the Saudi royal family reportedly supplied blueprints that helped security forces in this final phase of the battle. The Bin Laden Brothers for Contracting and Industry were, after all, one of the kingdom’s most loyal and prosperous private companies.
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The American treasury secretary, William Miller, flew into the kingdom amid the turmoil. He hoped to reassure Saudi investors, who had about $30 billion on deposit in U.S. banks, that America would remain a faithful ally. He also urged the Saudi royal family to use their influence with OPEC to hold oil prices in check.
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Rising gasoline prices had stoked debilitating inflation and demoralized the American people.

Saudi princes feared the Mecca uprising reflected popular anxiety about small Westernizing trends that had been permitted in the kingdom during recent years. They soon banned women’s hairdressing salons and dismissed female announcers from state television programs. New rules stopped Saudi girls from continuing their education abroad. Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi intelligence chief, concluded that the Mecca uprising was a protest against the conduct of all Saudis—the sheikhs, the government, and the people in general. There should be no future danger or conflict between social progress and traditional religious practices, Turki told visitors, as long as the Saudi royal family reduced corruption and created economic opportunities for the public.

In Tehran, the Ayatollah Khomeini said it was “a great joy for us to learn about the uprising in Pakistan against the U.S.A. It is good news for our oppressed nation. Borders should not separate hearts.” Khomeini theorized that “because of propaganda, people are afraid of superpowers, and they think that the superpowers cannot be touched.” This, he predicted, would be proven false.
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The riot had sketched a pattern that would recur for years. For reasons of his own, the Pakistani dictator, General Zia, had sponsored and strengthened a radical Islamic partner—in this case, Jamaat and its student wing—that had a virulently anti-American outlook. This Islamist partner had veered out of control. By attacking the American embassy, Jamaat had far exceeded Zia’s brief. Yet Zia felt he could not afford to repudiate his religious ally. And the Americans felt they could not afford to dwell on the issue. There were larger stakes in the U.S. relationship with Pakistan. In a crisis-laden, impoverished Islamic nation like Pakistan, on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons, there always seemed to be larger strategic issues for the United States to worry about than the vague, seemingly manageable dangers of political religion.

On the night of the embassy’s sacking, Zia gently chided the rioters in a nationally broadcast speech. “I understand that the anger and grief over this incident were quite natural,” he said, referring to the uprising in Mecca, “but the way in which they were expressed is not in keeping with the lofty Islamic traditions of discipline and forbearance.”
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As the years passed, Zia’s partnership with Jamaat would only deepen.

The CIA and State Department personnel left behind in Islamabad felt deeply embittered. They and more than one hundred of their colleagues had been left to die in the embassy vault; it had taken Pakistani troops more than five hours to make what was at maximum a thirty-minute drive from army headquarters in Rawalpindi. Had events taken a slight turn for the worse, the riot would have produced one of the most catastrophic losses of American life in U.S. diplomatic history.

The CIA’s Islamabad station now lacked vehicles in which to meet its agents. The cars had all been burned by mobs. Gary Schroen found a Quaid-I-Azam University jeep parked near the embassy, a vehicle apparently left behind by the rioters. Schroen hot-wired it so that he could continue to drive out at night for clandestine meetings with his reporting agents. Soon university officials turned up at the embassy to ask after the missing jeep—the university now wanted it back. Schroen decided that he couldn’t afford to drive around Islamabad in a vehicle that was more or less reported as stolen. He drove the jeep one night to a lake on Islamabad’s outskirts. There he got out and rolled it under the water. Small satisfaction, but something.

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“Lenin Taught Us”

YURI ANDROPOV was a rising force within the gray cabal that circled the Kremlin’s listless don, the hound-faced Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At sixty-five, Andropov knew—or thought he knew—how to smother a rebellion. As a young communist apparatchik he had soared to prominence as ambassador to Budapest when Soviet troops crushed the 1956 Hungarian uprising. He became KGB chief a decade later, managing the vast apparatus of Soviet internal security and external espionage. He was the leading spy in a political system constructed on deception. From his service’s headquarters in the Lubyanka on Moscow’s Dzerzhinsky Square, Andropov oversaw KGB foreign covert operations, attempted penetrations of the CIA, and campaigned to suppress dissent within the Soviet Union. Ashen-faced, he conformed outwardly to the drab personal norms of collective leadership. Because he also read Plato, led drives against Soviet corruption, and mentored younger reformers such as Mikhail Gorbachev, a few Kremlin watchers in the West saw tiny glimmers of enlightenment in Andropov, at least in comparison to decaying elder statesmen such as foreign minister Andrei Gromyko or defense minister Dimitri Ustinov.
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Yet Andropov’s KGB remained ruthless and murderous at home and abroad. In Third World outposts such as Kabul, his lieutenants tortured and killed with impunity. Communist allies who fell out of favor were murdered or exiled. Political detainees languished by the hundreds of thousands in cruel gulags.

Neither Andropov nor the KGB saw Afghanistan’s anticommunist revolt coming. The first sharp mutiny erupted in Herat in March 1979, soon after Kabul’s recently installed Marxists announced a compulsory initiative to teach girls to read. Such literacy drives were a staple of red-splashed Soviet propaganda posters shipped by the trainload to Third World client states.
Women workers on the march:
muscled and unsmiling, progressive and determined, chins jutted, staring into the future. Earlier in the century, as the Bolsheviks swept through the republics that became Soviet Central Asia—Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan—they had transformed pastoral Islamic societies into insistently godless police states. Women poured into factories and onto collective farms. So it would be in neighboring Afghanistan, the KGB’s political specialists believed.

For nearly two decades the KGB had secretly funded and nurtured communist leadership networks at Kabul University and in the Afghan army, training and indoctrinating some 3,725 military personnel on Soviet soil. Afghan president Mohammed Daoud played Moscow and Washington against each other during the 1970s, accepting financial aid and construction projects from each in a precarious balancing act. In April 1978, Daoud fell off his beam. He arrested communist leaders in Kabul after they staged a noisy protest. Soviet-backed conspirators seeded within the Afghan army shot him dead days later in a reception room of his tattered palace. Triumphant Afghan leftists ripped down the green-striped national flag and unfurled red banners across a rural and deeply religious nation barely acquainted with industrial technology or modernism. Hundreds of Soviet military and political advisers were barracked in Afghan cities and towns to organize secret police networks, army and militia units, small factories, and coeducational schools. Advised by the KGB, Kabul’s Marxists launched a terror campaign against religious and social leaders who might have the standing to challenge communist rule. By 1979 about twelve thousand political prisoners had been jailed. Systematic executions began behind prison walls.
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No less than America’s modernizing capitalists, Russia’s retrenching communists underestimated the Iranian revolution. They failed initially to detect the virus of Islamist militancy spreading north and east from Tehran through informal underground networks. The Kremlin and its supporting academies possessed few experts on Islam.
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The Soviet Union’s closest allies in the Middle East were secular regimes such as Syria and Iraq. Like the Americans, the Soviets had directed most of their resources and talent toward the ideological battlefields of Europe and Asia during the previous two decades.

In the early spring of 1979 religious activists inspired by Khomeini’s triumphant return carried their defiant gospel across Iran’s open desert border with Afghanistan, particularly to Herat, an ancient crossroads on an open plain long bound to Iran by trade and politics. A Persian-accented desert town watered by the Hari Rud River, Herat’s traditional cultures and schools of Islam—which included prominent strains of mysticism—were not as severe toward women as in some rural areas of Afghanistan to the east. Yet it was a pious city. Its population included many followers of Shiism, Iran’s dominant Islamic sect. And as elsewhere, even non-Shias found themselves energized in early 1979 by Khomeini’s religious-political revival. Oblivious, Kabul’s communists and their Soviet advisers pressed secular reforms prescribed in Marxist texts. In addition to their literacy campaigns for girls they conscripted soldiers and seized lands previously controlled by tribal elders and Islamic scholars. They abolished Islamic lending systems, banned dowries for brides, legislated freedom of choice within marriages, and mandated universal education in Marxist dogma.

A charismatic Afghan army captain named Ismail Khan called for jihad against the communist usurpers that March and led his heavily armed Herat garrison into violent revolt. His followers hunted down and hacked to death more than a dozen Russian communist political advisers, as well as their wives and children.
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The rebels displayed Russian corpses on pikes along shaded city streets. Soviet-trained pilots flew bomber-jets out of Kabul in vengeful reply, pulverizing the town in remorseless waves of attack. By the time the raids were finished, on the eve of its first anniversary in power, the Afghan communist government had killed as many as twenty thousand of its own citizenry in Herat alone. Ismail Khan escaped and helped spread rebellion in the western countryside.

As Herat burned, KGB officers seethed. “Bearing in mind that we will be labeled as an aggressor, but in spite of that, under no circumstances can we lose Afghanistan,” Andropov told a crisis session of the Soviet Politburo meeting secretly behind Moscow’s Kremlin ramparts on March 17, 1979.
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Records of the Kremlin’s private discussions in Moscow that spring, unavailable to Americans at the time, depict a Soviet leadership dominated by KGB viewpoints. Andropov was a rising figure as Brezhnev faded. His Kabul outpost, the KGB Residency, as it was called, maintained many of the contacts and financial relationships with Afghan communist leaders, bypassing Soviet diplomats.

The Afghans were confusing and frustrating clients, however. Andropov and the rest of Brezhnev’s lieutenants found their Afghan communist comrades dense, self-absorbed, and unreliable. The Afghan Marxists had taken their Moscow-supplied revolutionary textbooks much too literally. They were moving too fast. They had split into irreconcilable party factions, and they argued over petty privileges and arid ideology.

“The problem,” noted Ustinov at a March 18 Politburo meeting, “is that the leadership of Afghanistan did not sufficiently appreciate the role of Islamic fundamentalists.”

“It is completely clear to us that Afghanistan is not ready at this time to resolve all of the issues it faces through socialism,” Andropov acknowledged. “The economy is backward, the Islamic religion predominates, and nearly all of the rural population is illiterate. We know Lenin’s teaching about a revolutionary situation.Whatever situation we are talking about in Afghanistan, it is not that type of situation.”
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