See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (21 page)

By the time we had polished off bottle three, it was time to go out on the range. Although Sergei was completely plowed by then, he still had enough presence of mind to tell us to shoot down the valley, not up into the mountains where the enemy was perched out. No point in irritating the rebels if you don’t have to, he said.

Things went just fine, at least at first. It was a beautiful cool day. Nell and Maggie got to fire an AK for the first time. Mercifully, there was no more vodka. I’d retrieved from the Niva a CIA-issue twelve-gauge folding-stock riot gun and showed it to the Uzbek major, who by now had presented me with a box of hand grenades. The riot gun proved to be a mistake. The major insisted on trying it out and fired off a couple rounds - in the direction of the mountains.

In theory. it wasn’t a threatening act: A twelve-gauge shotgun is useful only at close quarters. But the rebels were in no mood for fine distinctions. The first incoming round pinged off a tank only twenty feet from us. Several short bursts of fire followed and then a constant staccato of automatic rifle fire that seemed to be coming from everywhere. It wasn’t long before a mortar round whistled over the camp and exploded about fifty yards beyond the perimeter.

I looked over at Maggie. She was wheezing. She’d bargained only to cover a war, not to start one. ‘Let’s go,’ I said, putting my hand on her arm. It reassured her that someone had a plan. ‘I’ll get the shotgun and you get Nell,’ I said.

Maggie ran toward Sergei and Nell. ‘We’re leaving!’

Sergei, who had taken a liking to Nell as the day wore on and now had his arm around her, shouted back at Maggie in his broken English,’ Good. You go. Woman stay here with me.’

Not one to be messed with, Maggie ran over, grabbed Nell, and pushed Sergei backward. We all ran for the Niva.

As we drove out of the camp, crews were scrambling into their tanks. I noticed they were all Tajiks. Their Russian officers were too drunk to do anything but watch. It was something to hear a dozen T-72s starting up their engines simultaneously. I turned around one last time and saw the camp covered in a heavy pall of diesel smoke.

We stopped about half a mile beyond Tavildara to listen to what sounded like a fierce battle. I threw the land mine and the box of grenades into the river, and we continued back to Dushanbe.

The next spring, when the snow melted off the passes, I dusted off my project for a trip through the Pamirs. This time I persuaded Henry, a visiting State Department officer, to accompany me. Henry spoke near-flawless Russian. What’s more, he’d been in the special forces. He was the perfect traveling companion for the Pamirs.

We packed the Niva with military rations, water, and some twenty jerry cans of gasoline. Our only communications equipment was a handheld radio that linked us up to Washington via a low-altitude navy satellite. I left the shotgun behind, but I did bring along two grenades, which I hid up behind the dashboard. To Henry’s astonishment, I also strapped a pair of skis to the roof of the car. ‘It’s good cover,’ I explained. ‘The bad guys will think we’re just adventurers.’

When we came to Tavildara, we didn’t even slow down. Sergei was likely to still be sore about Nell. In the mountains above Tavildara, the road had disappeared beneath a massive landslide. There wasn’t a single vehicle on the road. We didn’t even see any rebels along the way, but at the top of Kaborabad pass, we came across the remains of a fresh battle. The side of the mountain was pockmarked with black craters - probably from SU-27 fighter-bombers - and burned-out tanks and armored personnel carriers.

We were starting to wonder if the Russians were fighting a war with themselves when two scarecrows cradling AK-47s stepped out from behind a rock and blocked our way. When they put us in the sights of their rifles, stopping seemed only politic. They asked us for a ride to Kalai-khum, the first town on the Afghan border.

It didn’t take long for the chitchat to lapse into an uneasy silence. I watched in the rearview mirror as the two mujahadin cased the Niva to see what was to be had. When they switched into Tajik, which they assumed we didn’t know, the situation took a menacing turn. As best as we could tell, they were debating what to do about us. Taking us home and introducing us to their families wasn’t an option they were considering.

Before our passengers could come to a decision, we came to Kalai-khum. An Afghan flag fluttered over a mud-and-wattle border-post hut on the other side of a shallow stretch of the Panj River. In front of us, a sandbagged .50-caliber machine-gun position blocked our entry to the town. Our muj hopped out and were in the middle of an animated conversation with two of their colleagues manning the machine gun when one of the hitchhikers came back and stuck his head in the window.’ We need you to come with us to take care of formalities.’ That wasn’t a good sign. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘We’ll go right to the police station.’ Instead I slammed the Niva into first and peeled out. When I looked in the rearview mirror, the four muj were running behind us.

We drove out the other side of the Panj as fast as we could. Afghanistan, across the river, suddenly seemed a lot more civilized than the Tajik side. We were making good time until a tire started to go flat. Fortunately, a Russian border post sat just ahead, protected by high berms, walls, and razor wire. I drove through the front gate without giving the sentry a chance to stop us. Immediately, a knot of Russian soldiers gathered. With their hollow eyes and filthy uniforms about to fall off their backs, they looked like they’d been on strict rationing for a long time. Even their rifles were rusted. I offered them some of our rations, but no one accepted.

While I changed the shredded tire, Henry went to look for the commander. The soldiers just stared at me. No one offered to help.

I was tightening up the last lug nut when Henry came back following a Russian lieutenant who looked to be about sixteen years old. They were arguing loudly in Russian. The lieutenant kept repeating that it was forbidden for foreigners to visit this part of the Soviet Union. He ignored Henry’s reminder that there was no Soviet Union. Finally, the lieutenant walked over to the Niva and stuck his face in mine. ‘You and your friend get the hell out of here. Now.’

Henry made one last try. ‘Can’t we at least sleep outside the gates?’ It was dusk now. Khorog lay at least eight hours away - along a road the Afghan muj used for target practice.

‘No,’ the lieutenant shouted. I could see he was more scared than angry. ‘It will give the bastards something else to shoot at. You’ve got one minute to get out, and I don’t care where the fuck you go. ‘He nodded at the guards, who started fingering their triggers. It was then that I noticed the base’s main defense amounted to a half-dozen antiaircraft guns, all facing across the river toward Afghanistan. The gunners were starting to feed in ammunition belts, preparing for another night on the frontier.

We made it to Khorog by the next morning, stayed a day, and then continued along the Chinese border, hard by some of the most beautiful mountains in the world. At each border post we stopped at, the Russians were totally mystified by our presence. Every time they asked if we had Moscow’s permission to drive through the Pamirs. It was as if they hadn’t heard the Soviet Union no longer existed. We stayed at the border post at Murgab. (The Russians told us it meant ‘dead chicken’ in the local dialect.) For dinner we ate Marco Polo steaks, from the stately and vanishing Marco Polo sheep, about all the food there was to be had at Murgab. The commander said he hadn’t received supplies in a year. Then he added that he was finishing up an eight-year tour. Had Moscow changed much, he asked?

Although Henry and I didn’t make it to Yaghnob, eventually found a guide to take me there. We entered the valley from the western side, then walked for two solid days along a narrow trail perched precariously above a two-thousand-foot cliff before we came to the first settlement. The rumors were right. The Yaghnobis really weren’t of the last two millennia.

At the next village, we ate around a table that used a carpet for its top. Even though it was the middle of summer, it was cold, and a little boy kept placing fresh burning embers under the table to keep us warm. Thanks to sleeves in the carpet, we could stick our arms through the tabletop to warm our hands as we chewed. The village was without running water or electricity, but the setting - a combination of mountains and glacier covered by year-round snow - was spectacular and intricately tied to the ancient culture. Instead of praying to Mecca, as most Muslims do, the Yaghnobi prayed to the highest peak, which they considered the jumping-off point to heaven.

After almost two years of turning on the tap and seeing mud spurt out, taking ice-cold showers, and living off military rations, I’d had enough of Tajikistan. It was time for someone else to come out and share the fun. In January I started to nudge headquarters to find a replacement. After two months of silence in response, I got on the telephone to the division’s personnel office. I was apologetically told the Russian speaker who was supposed to replace me was going to the Army War College instead. An alternate would be found right away. But that guy ended up going to some mid-career management-training course. The third alternate simply dropped out of the assignment. Dushanbe ‘wasn’t a good career move,’ he’d told the division. I was starting to feel like I had died, gone to hell, and would spend eternity in Dushanbe when headquarters proudly informed me it had found a replacement. I was ecstatic, at least until I started reading the guy’s bio. He was a paramilitary officer who spoke neither Russian nor Tajik, had never recruited an agent or even handled one. It was as bad as sending an analyst out to replace me. The one thing he apparently knew how to do was crimp a blasting cap, which would be helpful only if headquarters decided to relocate our Dushanbe office to Tavildara.

Even after all my years in the CIA, I was stunned. The CIA had no agents in the Russian military and apparently didn’t care, at least not enough to send someone to Tajikistan to recruit one. It also didn’t care that my replacement wouldn’t be able to talk to Grigor, who didn’t speak English. The CIA had apparently written off the Russian military, despite the fact that it still possessed missiles that could deliver a nuclear warhead to anywhere it wanted in the US

I shouldn’t have been surprised. As the civil war in Afghanistan started to boil, I repeatedly asked for a speaker of Dari or Pashtun, the two predominant languages in Afghanistan, to debrief the flood of refugees coming across the border into Tajikistan. They were a gold mine of information. We could have even recruited some and sent them back across the border to report on Afghanistan. I was told there were no Dari or Pashtun speakers anywhere. I was also told the CIA no longer collected on Afghanistan, so those languages weren’t needed. Headquarters instead offered to send out a four-person sexual-harassment briefing team. Another black mark was put up against my name when I declined the offer.

I was beginning to seriously wonder what the CIA did care about these days when a cable landed on my desk, informing me that Clairborne Pell, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was coming out to Tajikistan and wanted to talk to me. Finally, I thought. Pell was a former Foreign Service officer and a veteran of the cold war. Surely he would want to hear what I had to say about the Russian army.

The week before his arrival, I organized my thoughts on a stack of three-by-five cards. I especially wanted to tell Pell what I’d learned about the Russian officers plotting against Yeltsin. How could he not be interested in the possibility of a coup ? I secretly hoped he might go back and pound on headquarters until it sent a real case officer to Dushanbe to replace me, someone who could at least keep meeting Grigor.

It seemed less important than the Russians at the time - as it still might prove, since missiles will always be a better delivery system for mass destruction than jumbo passenger jets - but I also wanted to tell Senator Pell what I was learning about Islamic fundamentalism in Tajikistan and Afghanistan.

I had resumed my Islamic studies when I got to Dushanbe. Almost every day, I read the Koran and the other canons of Islam with a Muslim scholar. Apart from improving my Arabic and Persian, I wanted to see what the Islamic texts said about holy wars and suicide. There was no consensus. You could pretty much read what you wanted into them.

Along the way, I also had recruited a XXXXXXXXXXX who was close to the Tajik Islamic chieftain Abdallah Nuri. Nuri operated out of Afghanistan, where he waged a relentless war against the Russians and their local allies. The connection was important: Russia and Tajikistan were begging the US for help against Nuri. They were convinced the US knew more than it was saying. Nuri received a lot of his funding from our closest ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia. Independently, we tracked large clandestine subsidies and weapons shipments from the World Islamic League of Saudi Arabia, an organization protected by the Saudi royal family, going to Nuri. Since our offices in Islamabad, Pakistan, and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, seemed incapable of providing intelligence, the XXXXXXXXX was almost all we had to go on.

Incidentally, Russia’s and Tajikistan’s concerns proved to be well founded. In July 1996 Nuri brokered an alliance between Osama bin Laden and Iranian intelligence. At least one meeting took place between bin Laden and an Iranian intelligence officer. Although we never found out what happened at the meeting, we knew bin Laden intended to propose to Iran a coordinated terrorism campaign against the US Perhaps if I’d been replaced with a case officer who could talk to the XXXXXX might have found out if bin Laden’s proposal was ever acted on.

Again, and I can’t emphasize this often enough, there is no silver bullet that, all by itself, would have prevented the horror of September 11. But not meeting agents like the XXXXXX I recruited, or using him as an access agent to get to people who knew still more about bin Laden, ensured we wouldn’t. The fact was, bin Laden took advantage of a constellation of factors to forge his network, and any number of groups or sources might have told us what he was up to.