CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, Part 3

Ghost Wars
by Steve Coll

(Page 3 of 5)

In this incendiary season arrived a parade of apparent mourners wearing red handbands and shouldering coffins at Mecca's holy Grand Mosque, in the western deserts of Saudi Arabia. The picture they presented to fellow worshipers at dawn on Tuesday, November 20, was not an uncommon one because the mosque was a popular place to bless the dead. There would soon be more to bless. The mourners set their coffins down, opened the lids, and unpacked an arsenal of assault rifles and grenades.

Their conspiracy was born from an Islamic study group at Saudi Arabia's University of Medina during the early 1970s. The group's leader, Juhayman al-Utaybi, had been discharged from the Saudi national guard. He persuaded several hundred followers-many of them Yemenis and Egyptians who had been living in Saudi Arabia for years-that his Saudi brother-in-law, Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani, who had once studied theology, was the Savior returned to Earth to save all Muslims from their depredations. Juhayman attacked the Saudi royal family. Oil-addled royal princes had "seized land" and "squandered the state's money," he proclaimed. Some princes were "drunkards" who "led a dissolute life in luxurious palaces." He had his facts right, but his prescriptions were extreme. The purpose of the Mahdi's return to Earth was "the purification of Islam" and the liberation of Saudi Arabia from the royal family. Signaling a pattern of future Saudi dissent, Juhayman was more puritan than even Saudi Arabia's officially sanctioned puritans. He sought bans on radio, television, and soccer. That November morning, impatient with traditional proselytizing, he chained shut the gates to the Grand Mosque, locking tens of thousands of stunned worshipers inside. The mosque's imam declined to ratify the new savior. Juhayman and his gang began shooting. Dozens of innocent pilgrims fell dead.

Saudi Arabia did little in the early hours of this bizarre uprising to clarify for the Islamic world who was behind the assault. Every devout Muslim worldwide faced Mecca's black, cube-shaped Kaaba five times a day to pray. Now it had been captured by usurping invaders. But who were they, and what did they want? Saudi Arabia's government was disinclined to publicize its crises. Saudi officials were themselves uncertain initially about who had sponsored the attack. Fragmented eyewitness accounts and galloping rumors leaped from country to country, continent to continent. In Washington, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance dispatched an overnight cable to U.S. embassies worldwide on that Tuesday night, urging them to take precautions as the Mecca crisis unfolded. The State Department had painfully learned only weeks earlier about the vulnerability of its compounds and the speed at which American diplomats could face mobs inflamed by grievances real and imagined.

Ambassador Hummel in Islamabad sorted through these cabled cautions the next morning. He did not regard Islamic radicalism as a significant threat to Americans in Pakistan. It never had been before. Still, the Islamabad CIA station had weeks earlier picked up indications from its sources that students at Quaid-I-Azam might be planning demonstrations at the embassy in support of the Iranian hostage takers in Tehran. As a result, Hummel had requested and received a small contingent of about two dozen armed Pakistani police, over and above the embassy's normal security force.

That squad was in place on Wednesday morning when rumors began to circulate in Islamabad, and later on local radio stations, that the United States and Israel stood behind the attack at the Grand Mosque. The rumor held that Washington and Tel Aviv had decided to seize a citadel of Islamic faith in order to neutralize the Muslim world. Absurd on its face, the rumor was nonetheless received as utterly plausible by thousands if not millions of Pakistanis. The Voice of America reported that as the riot in Mecca raged, President Carter had ordered U.S. Navy ships to the Indian Ocean as a show of force against the hostage takers in Tehran. With a little imagination it wasn't hard to link the two news items. As the students at Quaid-I-Azam made their protest plans, The Muslim, an Islamabad daily, published a special edition that referred to the "two hostile actions against the Muslim world...by the Imperialists and their stooges."

General Zia had plans that day to promote civic advancement through Islamic values. He had decided to spend most of the afternoon in teeming Rawalpindi, adjacent to Islamabad, riding about on a bicycle. Zia intended to hand out Islamic pamphlets and advertise by example the simple virtues of self-propelled transport. And, of course, where the military dictator went, so went most of Pakistan's military and security establishment. When the first distress calls went out from the U.S. embassy later that day, much of Pakistan's army brass was unavailable. They were pedaling behind the boss on their bicycles.

GARY SCHROEN stood by the window of his office preparing to close the curtains when a Pakistani rioter below raised a shotgun at him and blasted out the plate glass. He and a young Marine beside him had spotted the shooter just early enough to leap like movie stuntmen beyond the line of fire. The shotgun pellets smashed into the CIA station's plaster walls. They had no time now to destroy classified documents. Schroen and Lessard locked their case files and disguise materials in the station suite behind a vault door, grabbed a pair of pump-action Winchester 1200 shotguns from a Marine gun case, and headed to the third-floor code room vault.

By about 2 P.M., 139 embassy personnel and Pakistani employees had herded themselves inside, hoping for shelter from the mob. Within the vault a young political officer had cleared off a desk and was busy writing by hand the FLASH cable that would announce the attack to Washington. As he wrote, embassy communications officers destroyed cryptography packages one by one to prevent them from falling into the hands of rioters. The vault echoed with the sound of a sledgehammer rhythmically descending on CIA code equipment.

The wounded Marine, Stephen Crowley, lay unconscious and bleeding on the floor, tended by an embassy nurse. He was breathing with help from an oxygen tank. Crowley had been shot in the riot's early moments, and by now the protestors had swollen in number and anger, and had begun to rampage through every corner of the compound. They hurled Molotov cocktails into the chancery's lower offices, setting files and furniture on fire. Entire wings of the building leaped in flames, particularly the paper-laden budget and finance section located directly underneath the communications vault, which began to cook like a pot on a bonfire. Onlookers at the British embassy estimated that at the height of the action, fifteen thousand Pakistani rioters swarmed the grounds.

Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant Miller-or the Gunney, as he was called-directed the defense from his post in the lobby. There he watched as rioters rushed through the now mangled front door no more than fifteen feet away. They scurried into the lobby carrying bundles of wood, buckets of gasoline, and matches. Miller repeatedly requested permission for his men to fire on the arsonists, but each time the embassy's administrative counselor, David Fields, denied the request on the grounds that shooting would only further incite the riot. Miller had to content himself with rolling out more tear gas canisters as fire engulfed the building he was sworn to protect.

When the lobby had completely filled with smoke, the Marines retreated upstairs to join the rest of the embassy staff in the third-floor vault. Just before going in, they dropped a few final tear gas canisters down each of the stairwells in the hope that would dissuade the rioters from climbing to the embassy's last remaining refuge.

Outside at the motor pool the rioters poured gasoline into embassy cars and set them burning one after another; in all, more than sixty embassy vehicles would go up in flames. Some rioters attacked the embassy residences, a cluster of modest brick town houses that were home to midlevel American personnel and their families. Quaid-I-Azam University student leaders rounded up a group of hostages from these quarters and announced their intention to drive them to the campus to put them on trial as American spies. An enterprising Pakistani police lieutenant, one of the few guards who had refused to surrender his weapon to the mob in the riot's earliest moments, pretended to go along with the students' plan, loaded the hostages into a truck, and promptly drove them off to safety. He was not the only Pakistani to risk himself for the Americans. At the American School in Islamabad several miles away from the embassy, a retired army colonel armed an impromptu squad of Pakistani guards with cricket bats and broomsticks. They successfully beat off rioters who attacked the school while children lay cowering in locked rooms. Although these and other individuals acted heroically, Pakistan's government did not. Despite dozens of pleas from Arthur Hummel, the ambassador, and John Reagan, the CIA station chief, hour after hour passed and still no Pakistani troops or police arrived to clear the rioters. By midafternoon enormous black clouds of gasoline-scented smoke poured out from the American compound, visible from miles away.

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.