The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden

Ghost Wars
by Steve Coll

Looming large in the minds of the American people since the devastation of September 11, 2001 - and perplexing their political analysts, media, and elected leaders - are two unsettling questions: To what extent did America's best intelligence analysts grasp the rising threat of Islamist radicalism? And, Who tried to stop bin Laden and why did they fail? Later this month, and for the first time, Steve Coll, managing editor of The Washington Post, provides answers in a news-breaking account of the CIA's involvement in the covert wars in Afghanistan that fueled Islamic militancy and gave rise to bin Laden's al Qaeda.

For nearly the past quarter century, while most Americans were unaware, Afghanistan has been the playing field for intense covert operations by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies-invisible wars that sowed the seeds of the September 11 attacks and that provide its context. From the Soviet invasion in 1979 through the summer of 2001, the CIA, KGB, Pakistan's IST, and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Department all operated directly and secretly in Afghanistan. They primed Afghan factions with cash and weapons, secretly trained guerrilla forces, funded propaganda, and manipulated politics. In the midst of these struggles bin Laden conceived and then built his global organization.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Coll provides the only comprehensive account to date of the secret history of the CIA's role in Afghanistan, including its covert program against Soviet troops from 1979 to 1989, and examines the rise of the Taliban, the emergence of bin Laden, and the secret efforts by CIA officers and their agents to capture or kill bin Laden in Afghanistan after 1998. Based on extensive firsthand accounts, Ghost Wars is the inside story that goes well beyond anything previously published on U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, chronicling the roles of midlevel CIA officers, their Afghan allies, and such top spy masters as Bill Casey, Saudi Arabia's Prince Turki al Faisal, and George Tenet; heated debates within the American government; and the often poisonous, mistrustful relations between the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies.

Chapter 1

"We're Going to Die Here"

IT WAS A SMALL RIOT in a year of upheavals, a passing thunderclap disgorged by racing skies.

When the mob broke in, William Putscher, a thirty-two-year-old American government auditor, was eating a hot dog. He had decided to lunch in the club by the swimming pool of the serene thirty-two-acre United States embassy compound in Islamabad, Pakistan. The embassy employed about 150 diplomats, spies, aid workers, communications specialists, assorted administrators, and a handful of U.S. Marines. "Carter dog!" the rioters shouted, referring to the American president Jimmy Carter. "Kill the Americans!" Putscher abandoned his meal and hid in a small office until the choking fumes of smoke and gasoline drove him out. A raging protestor threw a brick in his face as he emerged. Another hit him on the back of his head with a pipe. They stole two rings and his wallet, hustled him into a vehicle, and took him three miles away to concrete dormitories at Quaid-I-Azam University. There, student leaders of Pakistan's elite graduate school, fired by visions of a truer Islamic society, announced that Putscher would be tried for crimes "against the Islamic movement." It seemed to Putscher that he "was accused of just being an American."

It was November 21, 1979. As the riot erupted in Pakistan, forty-nine Americans sat imprisoned in the United States embassy in Tehran, trapped by Islamic radical students and Iranian revolutionary militia who announced that day a plan to murder the hostages by suicide explosions if any attempt was made to rescue them. In Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the holiest city in the Islamic world, Saudi national guardsmen encircled the Grand Mosque in pursuit of a failed theology student who had announced that he was the Mahdi, or Savior, dispatched to Earth by Allah as forecast in the Koran. To demonstrate their faith, the aspiring Mahdi's followers had opened fire on worshipers with automatic weapons. Just outside Washington, President Jimmy Carter prepared for Thanksgiving at Camp David. By day's end he would have endured the first death by hostile fire of an American soldier during his presidency.

Inside the CIA station on the clean and carpeted third floor of the Islamabad embassy, the deputy chief of station, Bob Lessard, and a young case officer, Gary Schroen, checked the station's incinerator and prepared to burn classified documents. For situations like this, in addition to shredders, the station was equipped with a small gas-fed incinerator with its own chimney. Lessard sorted through case files and other classified materials, preparing if necessary to begin a burn.

Lessard and Schroen were both Persian-speaking veterans of service in Iran during the 1970s. Schroen, who had grown up in East St. Louis, the son of a union electrician, was the first member of his family to attend college. He had enlisted in the army in 1959 and was discharged honorably as a private. "I have a problem with authority," he told friends by way of explanation of his final rank. He kicked around odd jobs before joining the CIA in 1969, an agency full of people who had problems with authority. As deputy chief of station, Bob Lessard was Schroen's boss, but they dealt with each other as colleagues. Lessard was a tall, athletic, handsome man with thinning hair and long sideburns. He had arrived at the Islamabad station feeling as if his career was in the doghouse. He had been transferred from Kabul, where an operation to recruit a Soviet agent had gone sour. An intermediary in the operation had been turned into a double agent without Lessard's knowledge, and the recruitment had been blown. Lessard had been forced to leave Afghanistan, and while the busted operation hadn't been his fault, he had landed in Islamabad believing he needed to redeem himself.

Life undercover forced CIA case officers into friendships with one another. These were the only safe relationships-bound by membership in a private society, unencumbered by the constant need for secrecy. When officers spoke the same foreign languages and served in the same area divisions, as Lessard and Schroen did, they were brought into extraordinarily close contact. To stay fit, Lessard and Schroen ran together through the barren chaparral of the hills and canyons around Islamabad. In the embassy they worked in the same office suite. Watching television and reading classified cables, they had monitored with amazement and dismay the takeover of the American embassy in Iran a few weeks earlier. Together they had tracked rumors of a similar impending attack on the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. That Wednesday morning they had driven together into the Pakistani capital to check for gathering crowds, and they had seen nothing to alarm them.

Now, suddenly, young Pakistani rioters began to pour across the embassy's walls.

The Islamabad CIA station chief, John Reagan, had gone home for lunch, as had the American ambassador to Pakistan, Arthur Hummel. They missed the action inside the embassy that afternoon but soon began to rally support from a command post at the British embassy next door.

Looking out windows, Schroen and Lessard could see buses pulling up before the main gate. Hundreds of rioters streamed out and jumped over sections of the embassy's perimeter protected by metal bars. One gang threw ropes over the bars and began to pull down the entire wall.

A group of hardcore student protestors carried Lee Enfield rifles and a few pistols on the lawns fronting the embassy's redbrick facade. One rioter tried to imitate Hollywood films by shooting an embassy gate lock with a pistol. As the American side later reconstructed events, the bullet ricocheted and struck protestors in the crowd. The rioters now believed they were being fired upon by U.S. Marines posted on the roof. They began to shoot. Under their rules of engagement, the six Marine guards at the embassy that day could only fire their weapons to save lives. They were overwhelmed quickly and outnumbered massively.

The Marines had always considered Islamabad a quiet posting. From the embassy's roof they could watch cows grazing in nearby fields. Master Gunnery Sergeant Lloyd Miller, a powerfully built Vietnam veteran who was the only member of his family to leave his small hometown in California, had seen nothing since his arrival in Pakistan a year earlier that even remotely compared to the battlefields around Danang. In July there had been a protest, but it wasn't much of one: "They sang a few songs and chucked a few rocks. Then they went away." To pass the time, Miller and the Marines under his command drilled regularly. They practiced keeping modest-sized crowds out of the embassy compound and even rehearsed what would happen if one or two intruders found their way inside the building. But they had no way of preparing for what they now faced: wave upon wave of armed rioters charging directly toward their post in the lobby. Miller could see bus after bus pulling up near what was left of the front gates, but with only two security cameras on the grounds, he could not assess just how pervasive the riot had become. He sent two of his Marines to the roof to find out.

Inside the embassy hallways only minutes later, shouts went up: "They shot a Marine!" In the CIA station Lessard and Schroen grabbed a medical kit and ran up the back stairway near the embassy's communications section. On the roof a cluster of embassy personnel knelt over the prone six-foot-six-inch figure of blond twenty-year-old Corporal Stephen Crowley of Port Jefferson Station, Long Island, New York, a chess enthusiast and cross-country runner who had enlisted in the Marines two years before. Miller organized a makeshift stretcher from a slab of plywood lying close by. Crouched down low to avoid bullets that whizzed overhead, they lifted Crowley onto the plywood and scampered toward the stairs. The CIA men held Crowley's head. The wound was life-threatening, but he might still be saved if they could get him out of the embassy and into a hospital. The stretcher bearers reached the third floor and headed toward the embassy's secure communications vault where the State Department and the CIA each had adjoining secure code rooms to send cables and messages to Washington and Langley. Emergency procedures dictated that in a case like this embassy personnel should lock themselves behind the communications vault's steel-reinforced doors to wait for Pakistani police or army troops to clear the grounds of attackers. It was now around one o'clock in the afternoon. The riot had been raging for nearly an hour. Surely Pakistani reinforcements would not be long coming.

Copyright © 2004 Steve Coll, published by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

About the Author

Steve Coll, winner of a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism, has been managing editor of the Washington Post since 1998 and covered Afghanistan as the Post's South Asia bureau chief between 1989 and 1992. Coll is the author of four books, including On the Grand Trunk Road and The Taking of Getty Oil.