Building an Alliance
The CIA had the best agent coverage around Kandahar. Even so, its classified tracking reports from multiple sources always seemed a day or two behind bin Laden’s movements. The lack of a source in al-Qaeda’s inner circle made forecasting the Saudi’s hour-to-hour itinerary impossible. Moreover, Kandahar was the Taliban’s military stronghold. The Taliban had provided safe haven to bin Laden in Afghanistan in exchange for money and al-Qaeda’s troops. Even if the CIA pinpointed bin Laden downtown, there was no easy way to organize a capture operation; the attacking force would face strong opposition from Taliban units.
In the summer of 1999, a truck bomb detonated outside the Kandahar house of Taliban leader Mohammad Omar. Afterward, bin Laden used his wealth to build new compounds for the Taliban leader. In Omar’s home province of Uruzgan, bin Laden built a new training complex for foreign al-Qaeda volunteers.
The CIA ordered satellite imagery and agent reports to document this camp. Officers hoped bin Laden might wander in for an inspection. One night, a team of four or five Afghan agents from the original TRODPINT group approached the camp. Al-Qaeda guards opened fire and wounded one of them, they reported.
Kabul was a relatively easy place to spy. The Afghan capital was a sprawling and ethnically diverse city, a place of strangers and travelers. At one point, the CIA believed that bin Laden had two wives in Kabul. He would visit their houses periodically. The Islamabad station recruited an Afghan who worked as a security guard at one of the Kabul houses bin Laden used. But the agent was so far down the al-Qaeda information chain that he never knew when bin Laden was going to turn up. He was summoned to duty just as the Saudi’s vehicles rolled in.
Bin Laden’s travels within Afghanistan followed a somewhat predictable path. He would often ride west on the Ring Road from Kandahar, then loop north and east through Ghowr province. The CIA mapped guesthouses in obscure Ghowr, one of Afghanistan’s most isolated and impoverished regions. From there, the Saudi usually moved east to Kabul and then sometimes on to Jalalabad before turning south again toward Kandahar.
Americans who studied this track called it “the circuit.” At the White House, Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism coordinator, tried to develop logarithmic formulas that attempted to predict where bin Laden was likely to move next at any given point.
The CIA’s bin Laden unit sought to trap bin Laden out of “KKJ,” an insider’s abbreviation for the densely populated cities of Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad. They hoped to catch him in lightly populated rural areas. Yet they struggled to find a convincing plan.
They knew that on the ground in Afghanistan by the summer of 1999, Massoud, the only experienced, proven guerrilla leader waging war and collecting intelligence day in and day out against the Taliban, bin Laden and their radical Islamic allies, was their only real asset.
From 1997 onward, Massoud’s Northern Alliance militia forces waged a brutal, existential war against the Taliban north of Kabul, often battling directly against bin Laden’s Arab, Chechen and Pakistani volunteers. They knew bin Laden not only as a preacher, financier and terrorist planner, but also as a military field commander who wandered near their battle lines.
There were serious doubts inside Clinton’s Cabinet about the history of drug trafficking and human-rights violations among Massoud’s Northern Alliance forces. But at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, analysts and officers in the bin Laden unit knew one thing for certain: Massoud was the enemy of their enemy.
A deeper, more active, more lethal alliance with Massoud, these CIA officers argued, offered by far the best chance to capture or kill bin Laden before he struck again.
Massoud and His Militiamen
In October 1999, a team of CIA operators from the agency’s Counterterrorist Center flew to Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Code-named JAWBREAKER-5, the group was led by the chief of the center’s bin Laden unit, the man known as Rich, a veteran of CIA postings in Algiers and elsewhere in the developing world.
They went to a secluded airfield, boarded an old Soviet-made Mi-17 transport helicopter and swooped toward the jagged, snow-draped peaks of northern Afghanistan.
Their aim was to revive secret intelligence and combat operations against bin Laden in partnership with Massoud and his ragged coalition of Afghan fighters, many of them veterans of the war against the Soviets. Massoud’s hardened militiamen clung to their positions in the stark Panjshir Valley.
“We have a common enemy,” the CIA team leader told Massoud, according to participants, referring to bin Laden. “Let’s work together.”
Massoud remained Afghanistan’s most formidable military commander. A sinewy man with penetrating dark eyes, he had become a charismatic, popular leader, especially in northeastern Afghanistan. There he had fought and negotiated with equal imagination during the 1980s, punishing and frustrating Soviet occupation forces. He was an impressive tactician and an attentive student of Mao and other guerrilla leaders.
He was, above all, an independent man. He surrounded himself with books. He prayed piously, read Persian poetry and studied Islamic theology. But during the mid-1990s, his militia forces had at times engaged in horrendous massacres. American and British drug-enforcement officials continued to accuse his men of smuggling opium and heroin.
By 1999, Massoud was seen by some at the Pentagon and inside the Clinton Cabinet as a spent force commanding bands of thugs. An inner circle of the Cabinet with access to the most closely guarded secrets was sharply divided over whether the United States should deepen its partnership with him. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Henry H. Shelton — reflecting the views of professional analysts in their departments — argued that Massoud’s alliance was tainted and in decline.
But at the CIA, especially inside the Counterterrorist Center, career officers passionately described Massoud by 1999 as the United States’ last, best hope to capture or kill bin Laden in Afghanistan before his al-Qaeda network claimed more American lives. Massoud might be a flawed ally, they declared, but bin Laden was by far the greater danger.
Frightened by swelling intelligence reports warning that al-Qaeda planned new terrorist strikes, Richard Clarke and Clinton’s national security adviser, Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, approved the JAWBREAKER-5 mission. They were uneasy about Massoud but said they were ready to try anything within reason that might lead to bin Laden’s capture or death.
Massoud was at war across northern Afghanistan against the Taliban, whose puritan mullahs had allied themselves with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda fighters in a drive to control all Afghan territory and destroy Massoud’s coalition. Massoud’s men often maneuvered in battle against bin Laden’s brigade of Arab volunteers, as well as al-Qaeda-sponsored Pakistani volunteers and Chechen fighters. Ultimately, Cofer Black, heading the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, hoped Massoud would capture bin Laden during one of these engagements and kill him or hand him over for trial.
In dimly lit Panjshir Valley safe houses in October 1999, Massoud told the JAWBREAKER-5 team that he was willing to deepen his partnership with the CIA, but he was explicit about his limitations. Bin Laden spent most of his time near the southern city of Kandahar, in the eastern Afghan mountains, far from where Massoud’s forces operated. Occasionally, bin Laden visited Jalalabad or Kabul, closer to the Northern Alliance’s lines. In these areas, Massoud’s intelligence service had active agents, and perhaps they could develop more sources.
Massoud also told the CIA delegation that U.S. policy toward bin Laden and Afghanistan was doomed to fail. The Americans directed all of their efforts against bin Laden and a handful of his senior aides, but they failed to see the larger context in which al-Qaeda thrived. What about the Taliban? What about the Taliban’s supporters in Pakistani intelligence? What about its financiers in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates?
“Even if we succeed in what you are asking for,” Massoud told the CIA delegation, his aide and interpreter Abdullah recalled, “that will not solve the bigger problem that is growing.”
The CIA officers told Massoud that they agreed with his critique, but they had their orders. The U.S. government rejected a military confrontation with the Taliban or direct support for any armed factions in the broader Afghan war. Instead, U.S. policy focused on capturing bin Laden and his lieutenants for criminal trial or killing them in the course of an arrest attempt. If Massoud helped with this narrow mission, the CIA officers argued, perhaps it would lead to wider political support or development aid in the future.
“What was irritating was that in this whole tragedy, in this whole chaotic situation,” recalled one of Massoud’s intelligence aides who worked closely with the CIA during this period, “they were talking about this very small piece of it: bin Laden. And if you were on our side, it would have been very difficult for you to accept that this was the problem. For us, it was an element of the problem but not
the
problem.”
Still, Massoud and his aides agreed that they had nothing to lose by helping the CIA. “First of all, it was an effort against a common enemy,” recalled Abdullah. “Second, we had the hope that it would get the U.S. to know better about the situation in Afghanistan.”
Doubts About Massoud
Massoud had a long, checkered history with the CIA. Among those with the proper security clearances, the accusations and stories of perfidy had become legend.
The CIA first sent Massoud aid in 1984. But their relations were undermined by the CIA’s heavy dependence on Pakistan during the war against the Soviets. The Pakistani intelligence service despised Massoud because he had waged a long and brutal campaign against Pakistan’s main Islamic radical client, the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. As the war against the Soviets ended, Pakistani intelligence sought to exclude Massoud from the victory, and the CIA mainly went along. But under pressure from the State Department and members of Congress, the agency eventually reopened its private channels to Massoud.
In 1990, the CIA’s secret relationship with Massoud soured because of a dispute over a $500,000 payment. Schroen, the CIA officer who was working from Islamabad, had delivered the cash to Massoud’s brother in exchange for assurances that Massoud would attack Afghan communist forces along a key artery, the Salang Highway. But Massoud’s forces never moved, as far as the CIA could tell. Schroen and other officers believed that they had been ripped off for half a million dollars.
Schroen renewed contact with Massoud during a solo visit to Kabul in September 1996. By then, bin Laden had found sanctuary in Afghanistan, and the CIA sought allies to watch and disrupt al-Qaeda. Schroen and Massoud settled their old dispute. (Massoud claimed he had never received the $500,000.) The guerrilla leader agreed to cooperate on a secret CIA program to repurchase Stinger antiaircraft missiles. He sold the agency eight missiles he still had and began to talk sporadically with Langley about intelligence operations against bin Laden.
Schroen met Massoud again in the spring of 1997 at his new headquarters in Taloqan, in Afghanistan’s far north. By then, the Taliban had stormed into Kabul and seized the capital as Massoud withdrew. Looking to win American favor for his prolonged war against the Taliban and its foreign Islamic militant allies, Massoud began to buy up Stingers across the north for the CIA. He also agreed to notify the agency if he got a line on bin Laden’s whereabouts.
A series of clandestine CIA teams carrying electronic intercept equipment and relatively small amounts of cash — up to $250,000 per visit — began to visit Massoud in the Panjshir Valley. The first formal group, code-named NALT-1, flew on one of Massoud’s helicopters from Dushanbe to the Panjshir Valley late in 1997.
Three other teams had gone in by the summer of 1999. The electronic intercept equipment they delivered allowed Massoud to monitor Taliban battlefield radio transmissions. In exchange, the CIA officers asked Massoud to let them know immediately if his men ever heard accounts on the Taliban radios indicating that bin Laden or his top lieutenants were on the move in a particular sector.
Given the doubts about Massoud inside the Clinton administration, the CIA’s push to deepen its partnership with him faced close scrutiny at the White House. The National Security Council’s intelligence policy and legal offices drafted formal, binding guidance.
Massoud was at war with the Taliban. The United States had declared a policy of official neutrality toward that war as a co-sponsor of all-party peace talks, which dragged on inconclusively. Clinton enacted economic sanctions against the Taliban but was unwilling to fund or arm Massoud. The White House sought to ensure that the CIA’s counterterrorism mission in the Panjshir Valley concentrated only on bin Laden. The administration did not want the CIA to use its intelligence-collection and counterterrorism partnership with Massoud for a secret, undeclared war against the Taliban.
Clinton told his top national security aides that he was prepared to work with Massoud on intelligence operations, despite what he saw as a record of brutality, but he was not ready to arm the Northern Alliance, participants recalled. The Pentagon and the intelligence community both provided secret analysis to Clinton arguing that Massoud had all the weapons he needed from other suppliers, the president recounted later to colleagues. In any event, Clinton recalled, Massoud would never be able to defeat the Taliban or govern Afghanistan from Kabul.
At the White House, some national security aides briefed on the CIA’s missions feared that, as with the Salang Highway operation in 1990, Massoud would just take the CIA’s cash and sit on his hands.
In the end, the National Security Council approved written guidance to authorize intelligence cooperation with Massoud. But the highly classified documents made clear that the CIA could provide no equipment or assistance that would, as several officials recalled its thrust, “fundamentally alter the Afghan battlefield.”
A few months after the JAWBREAKER-5 team choppered out, the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center picked up intelligence that bin Laden had arrived in Derunta Camp, in a jagged valley near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.
It was a typical bin Laden facility: crude, mainly dirt and rocks, with a few modest buildings protected by ridges. Massoud’s sources reported that no Afghans were permitted in Derunta, only Arabs. Testimony from al-Qaeda defectors and interrogation of Arab jihadists showed that Derunta was a graduate school for elite recruits. The Defense Intelligence Agency had relayed reports that bin Laden’s aides might be developing chemical weapons or poisons there. The White House’s Counterterrorism Security Group routed satellites above the camps for surveillance.
The CIA recruited Afghan agents who traveled or lived in the region, an area of heavy smuggling and trade and relatively weak Taliban control. Through their liaison in the Panjshir, CIA officers pushed intelligence-collection equipment to Massoud’s southern lines, near Jalalabad. Besides radio intercepts, the technology included an optical device, derived from technology used by offshore spy planes, that could produce photographic images from more than 10 miles away. Massoud’s men, with help from CIA officers, set up an overlook above Derunta and tried to watch the place.
The Counterterrorist Center’s bin Laden unit relayed a report to Massoud that bin Laden had arrived in Derunta. Massoud ordered a mission. He rounded up “a bunch of mules,” as a U.S. official who was involved later put it, and loaded them up with Soviet-designed Katyusha rockets. He dispatched this small commando team toward the hills above Derunta.
After the team was on its way, Massoud reported his plan to Langley: He was going to batter bin Laden’s camp with rocket fire.
The CIA’s lawyers convulsed in alarm. The White House’s legal rules for liaison with Massoud had not addressed such pure military operations against bin Laden. The Massoud partnership was supposed to be about intelligence collection. Now the CIA had, in effect, provided intelligence for a rocket attack on Derunta. The CIA was legally complicit in Massoud’s operation, the lawyers feared, and the agency had no authority to be involved.
The bin Laden unit shot a message to the Panjshir: You’ve got to recall the mission.
Massoud’s aides replied, in effect, as a U.S. official involved recalled it: “What do you think this is, the 82nd Airborne? We’re on mules. They’re gone.” Massoud’s team had no radios. They were walking to the launch site. They would fire their rockets, turn around and walk back.
Langley’s officers waited nervously. Some of them muttered sarcastically about the absurd intersections of U.S. law and a secret war they were expected to manage. Massoud’s aides eventually reported back that they had, in fact, shelled Derunta. But the CIA could pick up no independent confirmation of the attack or its consequences. The lawyers relaxed and the incident passed, unpublicized.
During 2000, Massoud planned an expanding military campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. His strategy was to recruit allies such as the guerrilla leaders Ismail Khan and Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum and seed them as pockets of rebellion against Taliban rule in northern and western Afghanistan, where the Taliban was weakest. As these rebel pockets emerged and stabilized, Massoud explained, he would drive toward them with his more formal armored militia, trying to link up on roadways, choking off Taliban-ruled cities and towns.
Once he had more solid footing in the north, Massoud planned to pursue the same strategy in the Taliban heartland in the south. He hoped to aid ethnic Pashtun rebels such as Hamid Karzai, a former Afghan deputy foreign minister from a prominent royal tribal family who had been forced into exile in Pakistan. By 1999, Karzai had turned against the Taliban and wanted to lead a rebellion against the militia in its southern homeland around Kandahar. Massoud dispatched aides to meet with Karzai and develop these ideas.