Ghost Wars (37 page)

Massoud figured centrally in the CIA’s plans that winter. Schroen traveled to Peshawar in January to talk to Massoud on a secure radio maintained by his brother, Yahya. Schroen asked Massoud to cut off the Salang Highway as it entered Kabul from the north. If Massoud’s forces closed the highway while other ISI-backed rebel groups smashed into Khost and Kabul from the east, Najibullah might not be able to resist for long, the CIA’s officers believed. Massoud negotiated for a $500,000 cash payment, and Schroen delivered the money to one of Massoud’s brothers on January 31, 1990.

But Massoud’s forces never moved, as far as the CIA could tell. Furious at “that little bastard,” as he called him in frustration, Harry cut Massoud’s monthly stipend from $200,000 to $50,000. The Islamabad station sent a message to the Panjshir emphasizing the CIA’s anger and dismay.

All across Afghanistan the CIA’s offensive stalled. The mujahedin seemed uncoordinated, unmotivated, and distracted by internal warfare. They did not capture any major cities; Najibullah remained in power in Kabul, unmolested.

AS SPRING APPROACHED, the CIA station began to pick up reports from its unilateral Afghan agents that Pakistani intelligence was now secretly moving forward with its own plan to install Hekmatyar in Kabul as Afghanistan’s new ruler. The CIA’s informants reported that a wealthy fundamentalist Saudi sheikh, Osama bin Laden, was providing millions of dollars to support ISI’s new plan for Hekmatyar. The Islamabad station transmitted these reports about bin Laden to Langley.
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On March 7, 1990, in downtown Kabul the conspiracy erupted into plain view. Afghan air force officers loyal to Najibullah’s hard-line communist defense minister, Shahnawaz Tanai, swooped over the presidential palace in government jets, releasing bombs onto the rooftop and into the courtyard, hoping (but failing) to kill President Najibullah at his desk. Defecting armored forces loyal to Tanai drove south from the city, trying to open a cordon for Hekmatyar’s Army of Sacrifice, which hurried toward Kabul from the Pakistani border.

With help from Pakistani intelligence Tanai and Hekmatyar had been holding secret talks about a coup attempt for months. The talks united a radical communist with a radical Islamist anticommunist. The pair shared Ghilzai Pashtun tribal heritage and a record of ruthless bloodletting. Tanai led a faction of Afghanistan’s Communist Party, known as the Khalqis, who were rivals of Najibullah’s faction.
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According to the CIA’s reporting at the time, the money needed to buy off Afghan army units and win the support of rebel commanders came at least in part from bin Laden. These reports, while fragmentary, were consistent with the agency’s portrait of bin Laden at the time as a copious funder of local Islamist causes, a donor rather than an operator, a sheikh with loose ties to Saudi officialdom who was flattered and cultivated in Peshawar by the recipients of his largesse, especially the radicals gathered around Hekmatyar and Sayyaf.
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During the same period that the Tanai coup was being planned—around December 1989—Pakistani intelligence reached out to bin Laden for money to bribe legislators to throw Benazir Bhutto out of office, according to reports that later reached Bhutto. According to Bhutto, ISI officers telephoned bin Laden in Saudi Arabia and asked him to fly to Pakistan to help organize a no-confidence vote in parliament against Bhutto’s government, the first step in a Pakistan army plan to remove her forcibly from office.
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That winter, then, bin Laden worked with Pakistani intelligence against both Najibullah and Bhutto, the perceived twin enemies of Islam they saw holding power in Kabul and Islamabad. If Bhutto fell in Islamabad and Hekmatyar seized power with Tanai’s help in Kabul, the Islamists would have pulled off a double coup.

Did bin Laden work on the Tanai coup attempt on his own or as a semiofficial liaison for Saudi intelligence? The evidence remains thin and inconclusive. Bin Laden was still in good graces with the Saudi government at the time of the Tanai coup attempt; his first explicit break with Prince Turki and the royal family lay months in the future. While the CIA’s Afghan informants named bin Laden as a funder of the Hekmatyar-Tanai coup, other accounts named Saudi intelligence as a source of funds. Were these separate funding tracks or the same? None of the reports then or later were firm or definitive.
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It was the beginning of a pattern for American intelligence analysts: Whenever bin Laden interacted with his own Saudi government, he seemed to do so inside a shroud.

Hekmatyar announced that he and Tanai had formed a new Revolutionary Council. But within hours of the first bombing attacks in downtown Kabul it became obvious to wavering Afghan commanders that the coup would fail. Government troops loyal to Najibullah routed Tanai’s defectors in Kabul. Tanai himself fled to Pakistan where he and his cabal were sheltered by Pakistani intelligence. Hekmatyar’s Army of Sacrifice never penetrated the capital’s outskirts.

It remains unclear exactly when the CIA’s Islamabad station learned of the Hekmatyar-Tanai coup attempt and whether its officers offered any comment—supportive or discouraging—to Pakistani intelligence. Many CIA operatives felt that Pakistani intelligence officers “never were honest with us on Hekmatyar,” as Thomas Twetten, then number two in the Directorate of Operations, recalled it.
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At a minimum, ISI’s officers knew when they planned their coup that the CIA was creating a helpful context by organizing attacks on Najibullah’s supply lines. But the CIA also kept secret from Pakistani intelligence the extent and details of its unilateral contacts with Afghan commanders such as Massoud. The agency did not inform ISI, for instance, about the $500,000 payment it made to Massoud on January 31, just five weeks before the coup attempt. The coup’s timing is also swathed in mystery. Tanai may have moved hurriedly, ahead of schedule, because of a military treason trial under way that winter in Kabul that threatened to expose his plotting.

In the aftermath Massoud stood his ground in the north. The CIA might be angry at him for failing to hit the Salang Highway that winter, but what was he supposed to make of Hekmatyar’s plot to take Kabul preemptively, a conspiracy so transparently sponsored by Pakistani intelligence, the CIA’s intimate partner in the war? Massoud had ample cause to wonder whether the CIA, in making its $500,000 payment that winter, had been trying to use his forces in the north to help install Hekmatyar in Kabul.

Massoud told Arab mediators that he still hoped to avoid an all-out war with Hekmatyar. He did not want a direct confrontation with ISI, either. Massoud made plain his ambition to assume a major role in any future government in Kabul. He expected autonomy for his councils in the north. He did not aspire to rule the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan directly, however; he knew that was impractical for any Tajik leader. How much Massoud would be willing to negotiate with Pashtun leaders remained open to question. Peter Tomsen hoped his National Commanders Shura would provide a vehicle for such compromise beyond the control of Pakistani intelligence. One thing was certain: Massoud would not stand idly by while Hekmatyar seized power in the capital.

Massoud husbanded his supplies that spring, built up his alliances across the north, and waited. The long anticommunist jihad’s last act still lay ahead.

HEKMATYAR’S EAGERNESS to conspire with a hard-line communist general and the willingness of Pakistani intelligence to support the plot appalled many Afghans and bolstered support for Peter Tomsen’s new policy approach in Washington. The coup attempt made plain that Afghanistan’s Cold War divides were dissolving rapidly. Extremists from seemingly opposite poles in the post–Soviet-Afghan war had linked up. It was all the more crucial, Tomsen and his allies argued, for the United States to build up moderate centrists in the Afghan rebel movement and to search for stable postwar politics.

It was by now conventional wisdom within the State Department that Saudi intelligence had become the Afghan war’s most important hidden hand and that no new approach could be constructed without Prince Turki al-Faisal’s personal support. Peter Tomsen and his team traveled frequently to Riyadh.
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Prince Turki remained an elusive, ambiguous figure. In the decade since his first meetings with Pakistan’s General Akhtar and his Afghan clients in 1980, the prince had evolved into one of Saudi Arabia’s most important leaders, a high-level interlocutor between American officials and the Saudi royal family, and a frequent and mysterious traveler to Middle Eastern capitals. He maintained palatial residences in Jedda and Riyadh. He summered at luxurious resorts in Europe. Now forty-five and no longer the boyish foreign policy expert he had been at the start of his career, Turki had become an elegant professional, an attentive consumer of satellite television news, and a reader of serious policy journals. He had built personal relationships with senior officers in every intelligence service in Europe and the Arab world. In addition to Pakistan he poured subsidies into the intelligence services of moderate Saudi allies such as Morocco and Jordan, buying access to information and people.
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He seemed most at home on the luxurious circuit of foreign policy and international security conferences held at Davos, Switzerland, or the Aspen Institute in Colorado, where diplomats and generals debated the challenges of the post–Cold War world while smoking Cuban cigars. Within the Saudi royal family, Turki’s influence was constrained by his relative youth. In a political system based on family and seniority, he languished in the second tier, tied by blood and political outlook to the family’s most liberal and modernizing branch but not old or well placed enough to be its leader. Still, as CIA and other American officials identified Turki as perhaps the most reliable individual in the Saudi cabinet and as his reputation for serious work grew, Turki established an authority within the Saudi government far greater than his years would otherwise permit. On Afghanistan he was without question the man to see.

Whisked to the General Intelligence Department’s boxy Riyadh headquarters in a long stretch limousine, Tomsen and his team, usually including the CIA’s Riyadh station chief, sat for long hours with Turki in the spring of 1990 to talk about the new American approach to the covert war. These were languid sessions on overstuffed Louis XIV furniture in air-conditioned offices laden with tea and sweets. Turki seemed to revel in such conversation. The meetings would begin at 10 or 11 P.M. and drift toward dawn. The prince was unfailingly polite and persistently curious about the details—even the minutia—of the Afghan war. He tracked individual commanders, intellectual figures, and the most complex nuances of tribal politics. He had questions, too, about American policy and domestic politics, and like many other Georgetown University alumni influenced by Jesuit rigor, he seemed to enjoy abstract, conceptual policy issues.

Tomsen and others at the State Department tried to persuade Prince Turki that Saudi interests as well as American interests now lay in moving away from the Islamists backed by his own operatives and by Pakistani intelligence. Tomsen wanted Saudi funding to help build up his alternative
shura
of independent Afghan rebel commanders, outside of ISI control but with a strong role in the new movement for Massoud. In Washington, Tomsen arranged for a meeting between one of Massoud’s representatives and the influential Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, in the hope that Bandar would cable back his support for the commanders’
shura
to Prince Turki and others. Turki handled the appeal that spring the way Saudi intelligence usually dealt with sticky conflicts: He opened his checkbook, and he played both sides. Turki handed over millions of dollars to support Tomsen’s new commanders’ initiative.
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At the same time Turki increased his support to Pakistani intelligence, Tomsen’s nemesis, outstripping the CIA’s contributions for the first time.

For the period from October 1989 through October 1990, Congress cut its secret allocation for the CIA’s covert Afghan program by about 60 percent, to $280 million. Saudi intelligence, meanwhile, provided $435 million from the kingdom’s official treasury and another $100 million from the private resources of various Saudi and Kuwaiti princes. Saudi and Kuwaiti funding continued to increase during the first seven months of 1990, bettering the CIA’s contribution. Saudi intelligence organized what it called the King Fahd Plan for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan, a $250 million civil project of repair and construction. This tsunami of Gulf money ensured that even if the CIA’s operatives cooperated fully with the new U.S. policy designed to isolate extremists such as Hekmatyar, the agency’s efforts would be dwarfed by the unregulated money flowing from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf.
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What was Prince Turki’s motivation in this double game? The Americans who interacted with him, who mainly admired him, could only speculate. They accepted that Turki—like Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, or Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister—belonged to the pro-Western, modernizing wing of the Saudi royal family. Compared to some other senior princes, Turki embraced American and European culture and sought to emulate the West’s models of economic development. Clearly he imagined a Saudi Arabia in the future where the kingdom’s economy interacted closely with the United States and Europe, and where economic prosperity gradually produced a more open, tolerant, international culture in Saudi Arabia, albeit one still dominated by Islamic values. Yet Turki’s funding of radical Islamists in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere empowered leaders and movements violently opposed to the very Western systems Turki professed to admire. Why? Like the CIA, the Saudi government was slow to recognize the scope and violent ambitions of the international Islamist threat. Also, Turki saw Saudi Arabia in continual competition with its powerful Shiite Islamic neighbor, Iran. He needed credible Sunni, pro-Saudi Islamist clients to compete with Iran’s clients, especially in countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, which had sizable Shiite populations. The Saudis inevitably saw Massoud and his northern coalition through the prism of language: Massoud’s followers predominantly spoke Farsi, or Persian, the language of Iran, and while Massoud and his Panjshiri group were Sunnis, there were Shias in their northern territory. Within Saudi Arabia itself, Prince Turki’s modernizing wing of the royal family was attacked continually by the kingdom’s conservative
ulama
who privately and sometimes publicly accused the royals of selling out to the Christian West, betraying Saudi Arabia’s role as steward of the holiest places in the Islamic world. The internal struggle between the austere Ikhwan militia and the royal House of Saud, less than a century old, was far from over. Prince Turki and other liberal princes found it easier to appease their domestic Islamist rivals by allowing them to proselytize and make mischief abroad than to confront and resolve these tensions at home.