Authors: Steve Coll
Tags: #Afghanistan, #USA, #Political Freedom & Security - Terrorism, #Political, #Asia, #Central Asia, #Terrorism, #Conspiracy & Scandal Investigations, #Political Freedom & Security, #U.S. Foreign Relations, #Afghanistan - History - Soviet occupation; 1979-1989., #Espionage & secret services, #Postwar 20th century history; from c 1945 to c 2000, #History - General History, #International Relations, #Afghanistan - History - 1989-2001., #Central Intelligence Agency, #United States, #Political Science, #International Relations - General, #General & world history, #Soviet occupation; 1979-1989, #History, #International Security, #Intelligence, #1989-2001, #Asia - Central Asia, #General, #Political structure & processes, #United States., #Biography & Autobiography, #Politics, #U.S. Government - Intelligence Agencies
---."Remarks to CIA Employees on Strategic Direction."May 5, 1998, McLean, Virginia.
---."Oscar Iden Lecture at Georgetown University." October 18, 1999,Washington,D.C.
SELECTED U.S. GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS
"Afghan Policy-U.S. Strategy." State Department Cable, September 26, 1991.
"Afghanistan Settlement-Analysis and Policy Recommendations." State Department Cable, June 1997.
"Afghanistan: The Revolution After Four Years." CIA, Directorate of Intelligence, July 1982. Released July 1999 by the National Security Archive.
"Afghanistan: Trends for 1992." State Department Cable, December 16, 1991.
"Afghanistan-U.S. Interests and U.S. Aid." State Department Memorandum, December 18, 1992.
"Biography of Mohammed Omar." CIA fact sheet, December 21, 1998.
"Central Asia, Afghanistan and U.S. Policy." State Department Memorandum, February 2, 1993.
"The Costs of Soviet Involvement in Afghanistan." CIA, Office of Soviet Analysis, February 1987. Released 2000.
"Démarche to Pakistan on Hekmatyar and Sayyaf Gulf Statements." State Department Action Memorandum, January 28, 1991. Released April 6, 2000.
"Executive Order 12947." Federal Register, January 25, 1995.
"Implications of a Continued Stalemate in Afghanistan." State Department Cable, February 5, 1993.
"Memorandum of Conversation Between HRH Prince Turki and Senator Bill Bradley." Memorandum, April 13, 1980.
"Ramzi Ahmed Yousef: A New Generation of Sunni Islamic Terrorists." FBI assessment, 1995.
"Report of the Accountability Review Boards: Bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on August 7, 1998." Released January 8, 1999.
"SE Tomsen Meeting with Shura of Commanders Oct. 6." State Department Cable, October 10, 1990.
"The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: Five Years After." CIA, Directorate of Intelligence, May 1985.
"Special Envoy to the Afghan Resistance." State Department Action Memorandum, April 19 1989. Released March 23, 2000.
"Terrorism, the Future, and U.S. Foreign Policy." Congressional Research Service, September 13, 2001.
"Terrorist Attack on USS
Cole:
Background and Issues for Congress." Congressional Research Service, January 30, 2001.
"To SecState WashDC Priority, Dissent Channel." State Department Cable, June 21, 1989.
"Usama bin Laden: Islamic Extremist Financier." CIA Assessment, 1996.
"U.S. Policy on Counterterrorism." Presidential Directive-39, June 21, 1995.
"USSR: Withdrawal from Afghanistan." Director of Central Intelligence, Special National Intelligence Estimate, March 1988.
DOCUMENT SETS
The Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center. "Toward an International History of the War in Afghanistan, 1979-1989." Comp. Christian F. Ostermann and Mircea Munteanu. Conference in association with The Asia Program and The Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center, The George Washington Cold War Group at The George Washington University, and the National Security Archive. Washington, D.C.: April 29-30, 2002.
---. "Excerpt from a report of 40th Army HQ."
---. Gromov, Boris. "Limited Contingent."
Progress,
Moscow, 1994.
---. Likhovskii, A. A. "The Tragedy and Valor of the Afghani." GPI "Iskon," Moscow, 1995.
---. Lyakhovski, Aleksandr A. "New Russian Evidence on the Crisis and War in Afghanistan." Working paper no. 41.
---. Mitrokhin, Vasiliy. "The KGB in Afghanistan." English ed., working paper no. 40.
---. Politburo records provided by Anatoly Chenyaev and translated by the Gorbachev Foundation.
---. "Special National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan." November 12, 1982.
The National Security Archive. "The September 11th Sourcebooks: National Security Archive Online Readers on Terrorism, Intelligence and the Next War."
---.
Volume I: Terrorism and U.S. Policy.
Jeffrey Richelson and Michael L. Evans, eds. September 21, 2001.
---. "The Soviet Experience in Afghanistan: Russian Documents and Memoirs."
Volume II: Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War.
John Prados and Svetlana Savranskaya, eds. October 9, 2001.
---.
Volume IV: The Once and Future King?: From the Secret Files of King Zahir's Reign in Afghanistan, 1970-1973.
William Burr, ed. October 26, 2001.
---.
Volume VII: The Taliban File.
Sajit Gandhi, ed. September 11, 2003.
COURT DOCUMENTS
United States of America v. Ibrahim A. el-Gabrowny et al.,
S(2) 93 Cr. 181 (S.D. New York, 1993).
United States of America v. Ramzi Ahmed Yousef et al.,
S 93 Cr. 180 (S.D. New York, 1993).
United States of America v. Ramzi Ahmed Yousef et al.,
S(10) 93 Cr. 180 (S.D. New York, 1995).
United States of America v. Ramzi Ahmed Yousef et al.,
S(12) 93 Cr. 180 (S.D. New York, February 1996).
United States of America v. Ramzi Ahmed Yousef et al.,
S(12) 93 Cr. 180 (S.D. New York, August 1996).
United States of America v. Ramzi Ahmed Yousef et al.,
S(12) 93 Cr. 180 (S.D. New York, August 1997).
United States of America v. Ramzi Ahmed Yousef et al.,
S(12) 93 Cr. 180 (S.D. New York, October 1997).
United States of America v. Usama bin Laden et al.,
S 98 Cr. 539 (S.D. New York, 1998).
United States of America v. Ali Mohamed,
S(7) 98 Cr. 1023 (S.D. New York, 2000).
United States of America v. Usama bin Laden et al.,
S(7) 98 Cr. 1023 (S.D. New York, February 5, 2001).
United States of America v. Usama bin Laden et al.,
S(7) 98 Cr. 1023 (S.D. New York, February 6, 2001).
NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES, AND BROADCAST NEWS
Newspapers:
Aerospace Daily, Al-Sharq al-Awsat, Arab News, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, The Boston Herald, Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, The Daily Telegraph, Defense Daily, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent
(London),
Los Angeles Times, The Muslim
(Islamabad),
New York Daily News, The New York Times, The News
(Islamabad),
Newsday
(New York),
Platt's Oilgram News, The Seattle Times, The Toronto Star, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Washington Times.
Magazines:
Air Force Magazine, Asiaweek, Aviation Week and Space Technology, Business Week, The Economist, Financial Times, Fortune, Le Monde Diplomatique, Le Nouvel Observateur, National Journal, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Newsweek, Nida'ul Islam, Popular Science, Time.
News Agencies: AAP Newsfeed, Agence France Presse, Associated Press, Bulletin Broadfaxing Network, Federal News Service, Intelligence Newsletter, MBC, Reuters, United Press International.
Broadcast News: ABC News, ABC's
Nightline, al Jazeera,
BBC, CNN,
Fox News, The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, Orbit,
PBS's
Frontline.
FILMS, TELEVISION, AND VIDEOTAPES
Afghan Warrior: The Life and Death of Abdul Haq,
Touch Productions, London, 2003.
Ahmed Badeeb 2002 Interview with Orbit Television,
supplied to the author by Badeeb, translated by The Language Doctors, Inc. See note 1, chapter 4.
Ahmed Shah Massoud with Abdul Haq and Peter Tomsen,
June 24, 2001, Dushanbe, Tajikistan, informal video and transcript of meeting.
Ahmed Shah Massoud with Otilie English,
April 27, 2001, Khoja Bahuddin, Afghanistan, informal video of meeting.
Hunting bin Laden,
produced and directed by Martin Smith, aired as an episode of
Frontline,
Public Broadcasting System, March 21, 2000.
This book belongs first to my sources. During the course of my research, scores of people-Americans, Afghans, Pakistanis, Saudis-agreed to sit for long and sometimes repeated interviews about sensitive subjects, without any guarantees about how I would handle the material. Many of them are listed by name in the notes. I am deeply grateful for their time and trust. I also accept full responsibility for any errors of fact and interpretation in what I have written; those who helped me should not be blamed. Unfortunately, some of the people to whom I owe the most cannot be named here. They know who they are; they have my sincere and lasting thanks.
More than any individual, Len Downie, the executive editor of
The Washington Post,
my partner and friend for the last five years, granted this book its life. His sincere, unflagging support and encouragement of the project, despite the varied burdens it placed on him, made all the difference.
Many others at the
Post,
my professional home since 1985, contributed greatly to the book. Bo Jones supported the project and much else. Don Graham provided a helpful manuscript reading, among many other things. Cyndy Zeiss kept me in order and on time. David Hoffman and Phil Bennett took time they did not possess to read early drafts and provided crucial encouragement, support, edits, and suggestions. Brigit Roeber and the entire research department helped in many ways. Walter Pincus and Bob Woodward offered important documents from their personal archives. Barton Gellman, Dana Priest, Tom Ricks, and Glenn Kessler blazed journalistic paths that I followed, and also contributed ideas and practical as- sistance. Michael Keegan and Dick Furno made the book's maps possible. Mike Abramowitz, Joann Armao, Bob Barnes, Milton Coleman, Jackson Diehl, Jill Dutt, Doug Feaver, David Finkel, Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, Deb Heard, Fred Hiatt, Steve Hills, Anne Hull, Bob Kaiser, Kevin Merida, Larry Roberts, Gene Robinson, Chris Schroeder, Maralee Schwartz, Liz Spayd, and Matt Vita offered friendship and humor through a relentlessly paced period of news. They and other reporters and editors too many to list have made the
Post
not only a great newspaper but a creative and exciting place to work. In important ways, this book belongs to the newsroom.
One of my purposes in this project was to provide Afghans with reliable, transparent access to hidden strands of their own history. Especially when I worked as a correspondent in the region between 1989 and 1992, I was aided, befriended, and protected in extraordinary ways by many Afghans. In particular I would like to remember here my late friend, communistera minder, driver, and translator, Najibullah, who was killed in a rocket attack on Kabul in 1992. In Afghanistan this more recent time around, my colleague Pam Constable, her Kabul housemates, and the exceptional translator Dr. Najib offered hospitality and crucial reporting help in the capital and Kandahar. In Pakistan, Karl Vick and Kamran Khan were invaluable. I am grateful as well to Maleeha Lodhi for her friendship and cheerful arguments. Asad Hayuddin helped arrange important meetings in Washington and Islamabad. David Long and Nat Kern made helpful introductions in Saudi Arabia. None of these people should be held responsible for my writings or interpretations in this book.
One of the greatest research challenges I faced was to connect recollections from interviews (inevitably selective) with authenticating, contemporaneous documents. I am grateful to Robert Gates for directing me to his unedited manuscript, held at Harvard University. Peter Tomsen generously shared declassified State Department cables from his vast personal archive on Afghanistan. Otilie English provided a very helpful taped interview with Ahmed Shah Massoud from early 2001. Karl Inderfurth provided important travel calendars and other documents that added precision to my account of U.S. diplomatic history in Afghanistan between 1997 and 2000. Bill Harlow, Mark Mansfield, and Jenny in the CIA's office of public affairs helpfully directed me to open source material. Other sources consulted diaries, calendars, official histories, archives, and other government documents to ensure that my narrative was as accurate and complete as possible. I am grateful to all of them. Excerpts from classified documents published by the congressional Joint Inquiry Committee on the September 11 attacks provided important insight about the 1998-2001 period.
The Age of Sacred Terror,
by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, former White House counterterrorism officials, also offered helpful inside documentation about those years. Finally, Christian Ostermann and his colleagues at the Cold War International History Project collected and, where necessary, translated an enormously valuable archive of Soviet and American documents about Afghanistan from the 1980s, adding to the earlier good work by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The National Security Archive worked its declassification magic again during 2003 and added useful new material about U.S. policy toward the Taliban.
As the source notes indicate, I also sought to connect my original interviews with other previously published journalism and scholarship on Afghanistan, the CIA, and terrorism in South Asia. My colleague Pam Constable wrote early and intrepidly about the Taliban. So did John Burns and Barry Bearak of
The New York Times.
Vernon Loeb of the
Post
wrote extensively about bin Laden prior to September 11; I have drawn from his work. Peter Finn broke extensive ground about al Qaeda more recently. I have relied also on the early, in-depth journalism of Douglas Frantz, James Risen, and Judith Miller of the
Times
about bin Laden, U.S. counterterrorism policy, and aspects of Pakistani and Saudi intelligence.
The Wall Street Journal
produced major breakthroughs from their investigations into the life of Ayman al-Zawahiri. I am also grateful to the team at the
Los Angeles Times
for their matchless biographical work on the members of the Hamburg cell. Among American scholars, Barnett Rubin's writing, especially
The Fragmentation of Afghanistan,
lays a very important foundation for anyone writing about Afghanistan's post-1979 traumas. Ahmed Rashid's book
Taliban
was not only a great feat of journalism, but an act of personal bravery. I have relied also on Olivier Roy's enduring insights into Afghanistan and political Islam. I owe many other professional debts to previously published work; the notes provide a full accounting.