See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (19 page)

A dozen Tajik and Russian paratroopers were already sitting on the floor of the AN-2. Judging from their AKS74Us (a short AK-47 with a grenade launcher under the barrel) and the ammunition magazines and grenades strapped all over their bodies, we were going on a combat jump. Into which war was the question. I also wondered about the parachute strapped to my back. Did it have toggles, or would I have to steer by pulling on the risers? Thanks to my big mouth, I would have a chance to find out, on the way down.

The plane took off and headed toward the Afghan border. But before we got there, we started to ascend in circles. As I waited for my inevitable turn in the door, I had to ask myself once again what I was doing. I didn’t like small airplanes, parachute jumping, or even vodka, which I’d swilled most of the night before. I was forty years old, too old to be jumping with Russian special forces. And the reason I was doing it? It was the only way to get close to the Russian military. I was just doing my job, or at least the job I conceived I should be doing.

When we reached two thousand feet or so, Yuri emerged from the cockpit and motioned for me to hook up to the static line. The paratroopers were smirking at me like drunken apes, knowing what was in store as Yuri led me to the open door. The view wasn’t reassuring. The clouds and rain were too thick to see the ground, and a heavy wind buffeted the AN-2, making it creak like an old wooden bed. For all I knew, we’d been blown off course and were actually over Kabul. Red, my jump instructor at the Farm, never would have let us jump into a storm like that.

‘What about the wind dummy?’ I yelled into Yuri’s ear. If we were going to jump, I at least wanted something nonhuman to go out the door first to show us which way the storm was blowing so I could steer my chute into it.

He either didn’t understand or purposely ignored me.

‘You’re first’ he shouted. He then added, as if it sealed the matter, ‘You’re our guest.’

As I plummeted through a cloud, I realized why Yuri didn’t need a wind dummy. I was it.

Two things ensued from my little jump. First, headquarters sent a message to all the offices in the former Soviet Union, stating there would be no more leaping out of Russian military airplanes. Fine, I remember thinking, because there was no way I was ever going to get back in that damn sardine can again. Then, about a week after the jump, there was a knock at my door. I opened to find a Russian in Levi’s and a plaid shirt. ‘My colonel would like to see you,’ he said, sounding like Boris Karloff. Without waiting for my answer, a Russian colonel in combat fatigues came out of the shadows and walked into our office. Pretty gutsy, I thought, an officer showing up at my door right under the nose of the KGB rezident.

The colonel had the self-possession of a cavalry officer. Probably because he was. One of the youngest full colonels in the Russian army, Grigor, as I’ll call him, commanded an elite armor regiment. His father had been a very senior official in the Soviet Union. With nomenklatura credentials like that, it was no wonder he could just waltz through the Russian embassy as if he owned it. He probably could have had the rezident shipped off to the gulag if he’d wanted.

‘Are you the American military attaché?’ Grigor asked.

For a Russian buzzard colonel, I would be anything he wanted me to be. ’Yes, I fill in for that position.’

‘Good,’ he said. With his blond hair, thick neck, and blue eyes, the colonel looked more German than Russian. He had a German directness about him, too. ‘Tomorrow there will be a car to pick you up at nine.’ He did an about-face and walked out, his aide following in his wake.

The next day things started out calmly enough. The driver dropped me off at the main Russian military range, about forty miles from Dushanbe. The colonel, his wife, and a dozen other Russian officers and their wives were already there. I was the first American most of them had ever met. I broke the ice by pitching in to pick mushrooms. While the women cooked them over an open fire, the officers and I drank vodka. We made at least four toasts to the hero of the Gulf War, General Norman Schwarzkopf.

Just when everyone was starting to feel good, two of the Russians brought out their miniature silenced assassination weapons. One looked like a derringer pistol; the other was disguised as a pen.

‘This is how we deal with the Vahabis,’ a captain said, holding his pen up in the air.

Vahabis - or Wahabis as we call them - refers to Saudi fundamentalists. It’s a word derived from the eighteenth-century Saudi Islamic reformer Muhammad Ibn Abd Al-Wahab, the man responsible for Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam. I’d heard the rumor that the Russians were assassinating fundamentalists in Tajikistan. Suddenly, I suspected it was true.

The captain unscrewed the top of the pen and extracted a 7. 62 subsonic bullet. It looked just like a standard AK round, but the captain noted that it was made of soft lead, which would explode on impact. ‘It’s the perfect assassination round,’ he said. When he reloaded the pen and fired it into a small pond, the only sound was a splash. It was much quieter than any CIA suppressed weapon I’d ever heard.

More vodka followed. Just as everything was starting to get a bit hazy, it was time to move to the next activity - the range. While the wives stayed behind, we piled into a couple of jeeps and drove half a mile to a pop-up range with about a dozen metal silhouettes. We got to pick our weapons from the back of a truck, anything from AK-47s to belt-fed .30-caliber machine guns to RPGs. There was even a 40mm chain gun.

Fortunately, no one picked the chain gun. The experience was hair-raising enough as it was. Every once in a while someone would accidentally hit one of the silhouettes, knocking it down, but since the control box used to raise it back up wasn’t working, one of the revelers would have to walk downrange to right the silhouettes - and no one, except me, stopped firing.

Grigor decided I’d acquitted myself well enough and invited me the following week to take one of his T-72s out for a test drive.

I’d never driven a tank in my life, let alone a Russian tank. The driver’s compartment was a nice fit for someone about four foot two. Hunched over, I could barely see through the Plexiglas aperture, but I wasn’t going to say no. I started off by driving it right through a mud hole about ten feet deep. Once I got my sea legs, I joined the other tanks as they raced around a valley, stopping occasionally to fire at cardboard targets in the shape of tanks. Yuri was so proud of me, he made me an honorary member of his regiment.

Headquarters took notice of my efforts with another message to all offices in the former Soviet Union: No more driving Russian tanks. I was sorry about that. Unlike the AN-2 biplane, I’d become attached to the T-72. But I was also earning Grigor’s trust, enough so that he decided to show me the dark side of Russia.

He told me only that he wanted to show me something that would interest my country. Shortly after eleven at night, we headed off to the airport, taking backstreets to avoid patrols and checkpoints. Grigor entered the airport through the military side. The Mi-8 and Mi-24 Hind helicopters and transport planes were just shadows in the dark. We stopped about a hundred feet from an IL-76 cargo plane and sat without saying a word.

After about an hour the IL-76’s cockpit lights came on. A soldier standing by the plane flicked on a flashlight and waved it in slow circles. A little while later an Mi-8 helicopter put down next to the IL-76, leaving its rotors turning. Someone started throwing heavy burlap bags out onto the tarmac. A half-dozen soldiers picked them up and threw them through the IL-76’s cargo door. It was all over in ten minutes. The Mi-8 flew back in the direction of Afghanistan. The IL-76 started up its engines, taxied out onto the runway, and took off.

‘Heroin,’ Grigor said. ‘The weekly shipment.’

On the way back he told me the story. The Tajik interior minister, Yaqub Salimov, and a few Russian generals were smuggling tons of raw opium from Afghanistan to Moscow on Russian military airplanes. After secret labs around Moscow processed the opium into heroin, it was smuggled into Sweden by boat and from there all over the world, including the United States.

I told the story to our ambassador. An old-school Foreign Service officer, Escudero believed in the mission more than his career. He agreed to go with me and make a call on Salimov.

Salimov was a thug. He had started out life as a boxing instructor at Dushanbe’s agricultural college. On the side, he temped as an enforcer for a local criminal group. One time he put too much muscle into his work and ended up doing seven years for manslaughter. He never cut his ties to the ex-communists, though, and when they came back to power in Tajikistan in 1992, he was a natural choice to keep the peace.

‘Let me do the talking,’ I whispered to Escudero as we walked up the two flights of stairs to Salimov’s office.

Mustering all the authority I could, I explained to Salimov that the US government could no longer tolerate Tajikistan’s involvement in the heroin trade. I went on for about ten minutes. Salimov maintained a stony silence, all the while twirling a pen between his fingers, which were roughly the size of bananas. Sometimes he would put the pencil down to crack his knuckles. It was as if he were limbering up for a big fight. Escudero never said a word until we were outside, and then only winked at me in appreciation.

Two weeks later, Salimov sent me his response. I was sitting in the office with Stephan Bentura, an Agence France Presse correspondent based in Moscow, when we heard a thunderous boom. In Dushanbe, a bomb in the middle of the night wasn’t something to write home about, and this one had gone off about a mile away. No sweat; we kept talking. A couple minutes later, the embassy administrator burst through the door. ‘They blew up your house.’

I’d just rented the place a month before, in a quiet residential neighborhood. I intended to use it as a place to meet my contacts, out of range of the KGB rezident.

Driving up, you could see the house was pitted from shrapnel. A deep crater had magically appeared in the front lawn. The night watchman, who was sitting in the living room at the time, said he saw two police cars drive up and a person leaning out. The next thing he remembered, a satchel charge was sailing at the front window. Fortunately for the watchman, the bars on the window stopped it, and he suffered only a concussion. I noticed the telephone wires to the house were cut.

When I told Grigor what had happened, he clucked his tongue in disapproval. It was time to raise the stakes: He offered me a T-72 to flatten Salimov’s house.

As if I needed further proof of Mother Russia’s capacity for corruption, Grigor introduced me to the aide of the Russian ground-forces commander during one of his visits to Dushanbe. As soon as we sat down to a dinner party in the officers’ mess, the aide remarked without the least warm up that he’d heard the CIA had a C-130 coming in once a month. I acknowledged it was true. ‘Then why don’t we do some busi-ness,’ he said. ‘I’ll fill it up with cigarettes and sell them to the army here, and we split the profits fifty-fifty.’ Even after all I’d seen in Dushanbe, I was astonished. I’d just met the man, and he was proposing I join him in some Russian mafia deal. I’m sure if I’d asked him, he would have sold me a stolen nuclear warhead.

We soon opened up a new subject, one Washington hated hearing about: Russian nationalism.

Grigor liked to describe himself as an enlightened Russian nationalist, but in fact he was just a Russian nationalist. He’d made up his mind that Russia badly needed a revolution, as profound as the October Revolution, to cleanse it of the corrupt politicians and drug-dealing generals.

One night I came over to his house with a crate of good German beer. Grigor liked his vodka, but the beer was a special treat. Halfway through the crate, Grigor let his guard down and talked about Boris Yeltsin’s 1993 assault on the Moscow White House and how close it came to destroying the Russian army. When the elite Tamanskaya Division received the orders to assault the White House, the enlisted crews, to a man, refused to get in their tanks. Simply put, they mutinied. As a result, every tank that participated in the assault was officer-crewed, but that wasn’t the end of it. Afterward the officers who had participated in the assault were all but drummed out of the army. Ostracized and passed over for promotion, many resigned in humiliation. ‘Yeltsin tore the army apart,’ Grigor told me. ‘He will never be able to count on it again.’

I visited him at home again a week later. Grigor was in a particularly somber mood. Before I could sit down, he said, ‘Let’s go for a drive.’ His UAZ was waiting in front of the apartment building, but he sent his driver away and drove himself.

We drove aimlessly for a while before he said any thing. ‘What would Washington think if some honest Russian officers put an end to the farce in Moscow - get rid of Yeltsin?’

I looked at Grigor. He was serious.

Grigor didn’t say anything for a full minute. ‘Look, Mr. Bob, I and a few officers have been talking. We’re all serving on the borders of the former Soviet Union, places that those bastards in Moscow won’t even visit. They don’t give a shit that if it weren’t for us, Russia would collapse. All they care about is stealing everything they can put their hands on to go live in southern France. You wouldn’t believe it. Ammunition crates arrive empty - every last round stolen. I can’t get radios for my tanks. The bastards are stealing them and selling them to Moscow taxi companies. Our kitchen gardens are the only things that keep us from starving. It’s the worst sort of treason.’

‘Grigor, who do you mean by ‘us’?’ I asked.

‘Oh, there are hundreds of officers who think like me. We’re all on the frontier. Maybe ten percent of the military, but we’re the fighters.’

‘Do you have a leader?’

‘Alexander Lebed is the only one who can pull this off, but we’re no-talking to him yet. It’s too early.’

General Lebed, then the commander of the 14th Army in Moldava was Russia’s most popular general. Soldiers were deserting from all over the former Soviet Union to join Lebed’s force, which was fully staffed. The rest of the army, meanwhile, was running about two thirds below full manpower.