Ghost Wars (16 page)

As the Afghan jihad roused Saudis to action, bin Laden met regularly in the kingdom with senior princes, including Prince Turki and Prince Naif, the Saudi minister of the interior, “who liked and appreciated him,” as Badeeb recalled it. And as he shuttled back and forth to Afghanistan, bin Laden developed “strong relations with the Saudi intelligence and with our embassy in Pakistan.” The Saudi embassy in Islamabad had “a very powerful and active role” in the Afghan jihad. The ambassador often hosted dinner parties for visiting Saudi sheikhs or government officials and would invite bin Laden to attend. He “had a very good rapport with the ambassador and with all the Saudi ambassadors that served there.”
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Prince Turki has acknowledged meeting bin Laden “several times” at these embassy receptions in Islamabad. “He seemed to be a relatively pleasant man,” Turki recalled, “very shy, soft spoken, and as a matter of fact, he didn’t speak much at all.” But Turki has suggested these meetings were passing encounters of little consequence. He has also said they were his only dealings with bin Laden during the early and mid-1980s.
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Badeeb has said that he met with bin Laden only “in my capacity as his former teacher.” Given that Badeeb was working full-time as the chief of staff to the director of Saudi intelligence, this description strains credulity. Badeeb described a relationship that was far more active than just a series of casual chats at diplomatic receptions. The Saudi embassy in Islamabad “would ask [bin Laden] for some things, and he would respond positively,” Badeeb recalled. Also, “The Pakistanis saw in him one who was helping them do what they wanted done there.” As Badeeb organized safehouses through Saudi religious charities, bin Laden’s “role in Afghanistan—and he was about twenty-four, twenty-five years old at the time—was to build roads in the country to make easy the delivery of weapons to the mujahedin.” The Afghans regarded bin Laden as “a nice and generous person who has money and good contacts with Saudi government officials.”

The chief of staff to the director of Saudi intelligence put it simply: “We were happy with him. He was our man. He was doing all what we ask him.”
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For now.

5

“Don’t Make It Our War”

IN JANUARY 1984, CIA director William Casey briefed President Reagan and his national security cabinet about the progress of their covert Afghan war. It had been four years since the first Lee Enfield rifles arrived in Karachi. Mujahedin warriors had killed or wounded about seventeen thousand Soviet soldiers to date, by the CIA’s classified estimate. They controlled 62 percent of the countryside and had become so effective that the Soviets would have to triple or quadruple their deployments in Afghanistan to put the rebellion down. Soviet forces had so far lost about 350 to 400 aircraft in combat, the CIA estimated. The mujahedin had also destroyed about 2,750 Soviet tanks and armored carriers and just under 8,000 trucks, jeeps, and other vehicles. The war had already cost the Soviet government about $12 billion in direct expenses. All this mayhem had been purchased by U.S. taxpayers for $200 million so far, plus another $200 million contributed by Prince Turki’s GID, Casey reported. Islamabad station chief Howard Hart’s argument that covert action in Afghanistan was proving cost effective had never been laid out so starkly for the White House.
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By early 1984, Casey was among the most ardent of the jihad’s true believers. After arriving at CIA headquarters in a whirlwind of controversy and ambition in 1981, it had taken Casey a year or two to focus on the details of the Afghan program. Now he was becoming its champion. Hopping oceans in his unmarked C-141 Starlifter to meet with Turki, Akhtar, and Zia, Casey cut deals that more than doubled CIA and Saudi GID spending on the Afghan mujahedin by year’s end. And he began to endorse or at least tolerate provocative operations that skirted the edges of American law. Outfitted with mortars, boats, and target maps, Afghan rebels carrying CIA-printed Holy Korans in the Uzbek language secretly crossed the Amu Darya River to mount sabotage and propaganda operations inside Soviet Central Asia. The incursions marked the first outside-sponsored violent guerrilla activity on Soviet soil since the early 1950s. They were the kind of operations Casey loved most.
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He faced resistance within the CIA. His initial deputy, Bobby Ray Inman, saw covert action as a naïve quick fix. After Inman left, Casey’s second deputy director, John McMahon, a blunt Irish veteran of the agency’s spy satellite division, worried continually that something in the Afghan covert program was going to go badly wrong and that the agency was going to be hammered on Capitol Hill. He wondered about the purpose of the U.S. covert war in Afghanistan, whether it could be sustained, and whether the Reagan administration was putting enough emphasis on diplomacy to force the Soviets to leave. McMahon wanted to manage the Afghan arms pipeline defensively, sending only basic weapons, preserving secrecy to the greatest possible extent. “There was a concern between what I call the sensible bureaucrats, having been one of them, and the rabid right,” recalled Thomas Twetten, one of McMahon’s senior colleagues in the clandestine service. Also, the CIA’s analysts in the Soviet division of the Directorate of Intelligence told Casey that no amount of aid to the mujahedin was likely to force a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. In one classified assessment they predicted that the Soviet military would pressure the Afghan rebels until “the cost of continued resistance [was] too high for the insurgents to bear.” These career analysts regarded Soviet economic and military power as vast and unshakable. Casey, too, saw the Soviet Union as a mighty giant, but he wanted to confront the communists where they were weakest—and Afghanistan was such a place.
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Reagan’s election had brought to power in Washington a network of conservatives, Casey among them, who were determined to challenge Soviet power worldwide. Their active, risk-taking vision embraced the full range of competition between the superpowers. They endorsed a “Star Wars” missile defense to nullify the threat of Soviet nuclear missiles. They backed the deployment of new medium-range Pershing missiles to Europe to raise the stakes of a Soviet invasion there. Led by Reagan himself, they spoke of the Soviet Union not in the moderating language of détente, but in a religious vocabulary of good and evil. They were prepared to launch covert action wherever it might rattle Soviet power: to support the Solidarity labor movement in Poland, and to arm anticommunist rebels in Central America and Africa. The Afghan theater seemed especially compelling to Casey and his conservative allies because of the stark aggression of the Soviet invasion, the direct use of Soviet soldiers, and their indiscriminate violence against Afghan civilians.

By 1984 some in Congress wanted the CIA to do more for the Afghan rebels. Compared to the partisan controversies raging over Nicaragua, the Afghan covert action program enjoyed a peaceful consensus on Capitol Hill. The program’s maniacal champion was Representative Charlie Wilson, a tall, boisterous Texas Democrat in polished cowboy boots who was in the midst of what he later called “the longest midlife crisis in history.” An alcoholic, Wilson abused government privileges to travel the world first class with former beauty queens who had earned such titles as Miss Sea and Ski and Miss Humble Oil. Almost accidentally (he preferred to think of it as destiny), Wilson had become enthralled by the mujahedin. Through a strange group of fervently anticommunist Texas socialites, Wilson traveled often to meet Zia and to visit the Khyber Pass overlooking Afghanistan. He had few Afghan contacts and knew very little about Afghan history or culture. He saw the mujahedin through the prism of his own whiskey-soaked romanticism, as noble savages fighting for freedom, as almost biblical figures. Wilson used his trips to the Afghan frontier in part to impress upon a succession of girlfriends how powerful he was.

The former Miss Northern Hemisphere, also known as Snowflake, recalled a trip to Peshawar: It was “just very, very exciting to be in that room with those men with their huge white teeth,” and “it was very clandestine.”
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Beginning in 1984, Wilson began to force more money and more sophisticated weapons systems into the CIA’s classified Afghan budget, even when Langley wasn’t interested. Goaded by small but passionate anticommunist lobbies in Washington, Wilson argued that the CIA’s lukewarm attitude toward the jihad, exemplified by McMahon, amounted to a policy of fighting the Soviets “to the last Afghan.” The agency was sending just enough weaponry to ensure that many brave Afghan rebels died violently in battle, but not enough to help them win. As a resolution pushed through Congress by Wilson put it, “It would be indefensible to provide the freedom fighters with only enough aid to fight and die, but not enough to advance their cause of freedom.” He told congressional committee members on the eve of one crucial funding vote: “The U.S. had nothing whatsoever to do with these people’s decision to fight. They made this decision on Christmas Eve and they’re going to fight to the last, even if they have to fight with stones. But we’ll be damned by history if we let them fight with stones.”
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Those arguments resonated with William Casey. The jowly grandson of an Irish saloon keeper, Casey was a seventy-one-year-old self-made multimillionaire whose passionate creeds of Catholic faith and anticommunist fervor distinguished him from many of the career officers who populated Langley. The professionals in the clandestine service were inspired by Casey’s enthusiasm for high-rolling covert action, but like McMahon, some of them worried that he would gamble the CIA’s credibility and lose. Still, they loved his energy and clout. By the mid-1980s, Casey had established himself as perhaps the most influential man in the Reagan administration after the president; he was able to shape foreign policy and win backing even for high-risk schemes. Reagan had broken precedent and appointed Casey as a full member of his Cabinet. It was already becoming clear that Casey would be the most important CIA director in a generation.

An eclectic crusader in his life’s twilight, he bullied opponents and habitually evaded rule books. He was fixated on the Soviet Union. He believed that the epochal conflict between the United States and the Soviets would not be settled by a nuclear arms race or by war in Europe. Casey’s reading of Soviet doctrine and history convinced him that Andropov’s aging KGB-dominated Politburo intended to avoid an apocalyptic nuclear exchange with the West. Instead they would pursue the Brezhnev doctrine by waging a slow campaign—across generations if necessary—to surround and undermine America’s capitalist democracy by sponsoring Marxists in wars of “national liberation” waged in the Third World. Casey saw himself as about the only person in Reagan’s Cabinet who fully understood this tenacious Soviet strategy. He was prepared to confront the communists on their chosen ground.

He was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, Maryknoll, on Long Island. He attended Mass daily and urged Christian faith upon anyone who asked his advice. Once settled at the CIA, he began to funnel covert action funds through the Catholic Church to anticommunists in Poland and Central America, sometimes in violation of American law. He believed fervently that by spreading the Catholic church’s reach and power he could contain communism’s advance, or reverse it.
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Casey shared with Reagan a particular emphasis on the role of Christian faith in the moral mission to defeat communism, yet he was a more obvious pragmatist than the president. He had run spies behind enemy lines during World War II and had built a business through crafty deals and cold-eyed lawsuits. He was surrounded at Langley by legions of Henry Kissinger’s
realpolitik
disciples. Casey was an excitable gunrunner
and
a profoundly devoted Catholic. He saw no conflict; he was bending rules for the greater good.

If anything, Casey’s religiosity seemed to bind him closer to his proselytizing Islamic partners in the Afghan jihad. Many Muslims accounted for Christianity in the architecture of their faith and accepted some of its texts as God’s word. There were Catholic schools in Pakistan, and Zia grudgingly tolerated the country’s Christian minority. Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis were less relaxed. Once, while traveling secretly to Saudi Arabia to negotiate with Prince Turki, Casey asked his station chief to find a Catholic Mass for him to attend in Riyadh on Easter Sunday. The chief tried to talk him out of it; formal Christian worship in the kingdom was banned. But Casey insisted, and Prince Turki scrambled to arrange a private service.
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The Saudi
ulama
rejected religious pluralism, but many in the Saudi royal family, including Prince Turki, respected unbending religious faith even when it was Christian. Casey won the GID’s personal loyalty to the extent that Saudi intelligence, with permission from King Fahd, agreed to secretly fund Casey’s riskiest anticommunist adventures in Central America.

More than any other American, it was Casey who welded the alliance among the CIA, Saudi intelligence, and Zia’s army. As his Muslim allies did, Casey saw the Afghan jihad not merely as statecraft, but as an important front in a worldwide struggle between communist atheism and God’s community of believers.

CASEY’S CLASSMATES were the sons of New York City policemen and firemen. Almost 60 percent were Irish Catholic, and many others were Italian. Casey rode the bus to Fordham University in the Bronx from his family’s modest suburban home in Queens. In the early 1930s, the Depression’s shocking deprivations caused many young Americans in the lower middle classes to be drawn to radicals who preached socialist equity or even communist unity. Not William Joseph Casey. His father was a clerk in the city sanitation department, one of tens of thousands of Irishmen who owed their government jobs to the city’s Democratic patronage machine. But Casey would break early with his family’s liberal political inheritance. Fordham’s Jesuit teachers filled his mind with rigorous, rational arguments that Catholicism was truth. The Jesuits “let him know who he was,” his wife said later. He was no renunciant. At Fordham he guzzled bootleg beer and gin with his friends and bellowed Irish Republican Army songs as he staggered home.
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