The action took place in Pakistan. Under John Reagan the CIA station in Islamabad maintained close contact with the Pakistani government, in particular its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) department, headed by Lt. Gen. Akhtar Abdul Rahman. With the ISI, which had an Afghan branch and detachments along the border in northwestern Pakistan, the CIA did business with the mujahedeen through a base at Peshawar, beneath the Khyber Pass, forty miles from the Afghan border. The CIA base at Peshawar, always small, never resembled the huge bases the agency had grown in Berlin or Frankfurt at the height of the European secret wars, or that in Miami at the time of Mongoose. Peshawar base and Islamabad station together numbered just about forty CIA officers. With task force staff at Langley plus Cogan’s NE people, and even some DI analysts thrown in, there were fewer than a hundred officers pushing the Afghan program.

  John McMahon would be astonished at what presently occurred in the Hindu Kush. The agency’s deputy director for operations, McMahon, knew nothing about the Near East. His baptism of fire had been the Iranian hostage crisis. He had earned good marks there for helping infiltrate the Delta Force agents, but he well knew the military antipathy for the agency. McMahon responded by turning prodigious energy to making sure Afghanistan went smoothly. Admiral Turner’s successor, William J. Casey, later called McMahon the “father” of the Afghan secret war.

  The sleekness of the CIA commitment did not mean this project proceeded without the major support common in paramilitary operations. Rather it would be the Pakistani ISI that provided the muscle. Its Afghan Bureau consisted of officers posted from throughout the Pakistani military. The bureau did much for the resistance. The ISI funneled the military aid, allocating percentages to the various mujahedeen groups; the Pakistanis transshipped the aid from points of entry to the rebels; and the bureau gave the muj intelligence to use inside Afghanistan. The data came partly from the ISI and partly from British intelligence (SIS), but most came from the CIA. Under its most active director, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Youssaf, who served from 1983 to 1987, the Afghan Bureau opened camps to train the mujahedeen. Youssaf also sent ISI commando teams on special missions with the muj and tried to coordinate forces from different rebel groups for joint attacks on Afghan or Russian troops.

  Rebel bands typically formed from calls by clan elders or tribal leaders, who appointed their commanders. When the CIA studied Afghan ethnic groups in the spring of 1980 it found that Pashtuns made up more than half the population and that fierce animosities split the clans, including those between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. The agency calculated that these divisions would impede a unified front or strategy. A September paper from the CIA’s Office of Political Analysis reported literally hundreds of tribes, representing more than a dozen major groups, in numbers ranging from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of people.

  One of the Russian problems was that the very reforms Afghan Communists and Moscow apparatchiks considered essential to bringing Afghanistan into the twentieth century were anathema to the tribes. Within months the Russians estimated that hundreds of rebel bands were active, with fighters totaling between twelve and twenty thousand. Before the end of the year Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev would say during a visit to India that the conditions that had forced his country to intervene had not disappeared. Afghan Communist leader Babrak Karmal charged in November that his country was being subjected to armed aggression from Iran and Pakistan.

  The first CIA weapons entered the pipeline while time remained to prepare for their use. Nothing moves in Afghanistan during the early months of the year, when the snows are so deep and the winds so cold that the struggle is to survive. In 1980 the British sent some Special Air Service soldiers to observe muj operations. With the thaw the muj took the field.

  Not long after taking office the Reagan administration began moving on Afghanistan. New CIA director William J. Casey presented the project as part of a menu of covert actions to stymie the Russians. President Reagan approved the finding in March 1981. At that time Reagan first used the term “freedom fighters” for the Afghan mujahedeen. Later he applied it to all rebels the world over that CIA would support. Reagan’s secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, quickly advocated new arms for the guerrillas. That spring Director Casey made the first of what became annual pilgrimages to the Near East. Casey visited the king of Saudi Arabia and his intelligence chief, Prince Turki-al-Faisal, plus the leader of Pakistan, military strongman Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq. The CIA’s project could not proceed if these men softened in their commitment. The Saudis continued matching U.S. contributions to the rebels, and General Zia fronted for the CIA in equipping the mujahedeen.

  Chuck Cogan accompanied Bill Casey on every Near East trip during his time in charge of the division. He found General Zia a true believer. Zia feared Soviet encroachment, saw their intervention as such a move, and dearly wanted to strike back. When Casey visited Zia at home, the Pakistani put a map on his coffee table and superimposed on it a red triangle template to represent the Soviet thrust. Zia broke off only to play with his daughter when she wandered into the room. According to Cogan, Casey came away more than impressed, grousing at the American media for “distorting” Zia’s image. Unmentioned went the reason for U.S. concern with Pakistan—Zia’s nuclear weapons program, an issue since Carter’s day. Zia and General Akhtar of ISI, who lived next door, represented a common front.

  Casey left Islamabad if anything more convinced than Jimmy Carter had been of Soviet perfidy. The CIA director ordered up a Special National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet threat to Pakistan. Completed in August 1981, the report foresaw Russian political pressures on Islamabad, but analysts refused to predict anything like a Soviet invasion. They expected that the Russians, the Afghan government, or both might make small raids against insurgent camps or artillery or air strikes across the border, but that “any prolonged occupation of even a small part of Pakistan is unlikely within the coming year.”

  To pursue the Afghan project and a panoply of new CIA secret wars, Bill Casey needed to put his own house in order. He believed John McMahon was not aggressive enough to head the Directorate for Operations. When Richard Allen, Reagan’s first national security adviser, ordered a covert operation to disable a floating drydock the Soviets had put in the Somali port of Berbera, McMahon objected to this act of war, and the DO chief’s star suddenly set. He was shifted to head the agency’s analysis directorate. At Langley, CIA insiders favored John Stein for his replacement, but Casey chose Max Hugel, a business associate with no intelligence experience whatever. Casey briefly made Hugel a top adviser, then appointed him DDO. But before the job could be finalized, it evaporated in a controversy over Hugel’s insider stock transactions.

  The end result for the DO was that John Stein took over after all. But John McMahon, whom Casey wanted to shunt aside, reappeared in a new incarnation, resulting from a different case of personnel turbulence: Casey had appointed a navy vice admiral, Bobby Ray Inman, as his deputy director of central intelligence, second man for the entire community. Admiral Inman was restive, not so willing to cut corners as the CIA director, much more dedicated to traditional missions, closely connected to congressional overseer Senator Barry Goldwater. He watched Casey’s secret wars with mounting anxiety. In mid-1982 Inman resigned to pursue a career in computers. Casey, by then already under attack as a covert action cowboy, suddenly saw John McMahon as a desirable DDCI—his presence suggested the agency would remain within legal bounds. Deputy Director McMahon would have a further impact on the Afghan covert action.

  In its first year the Reagan administration doubled the size of the previous CIA budget for the Afghan project. Once the Saudis matched that, Pakistan’s ISI had real money to play with. In August 1981 five of the largest rebel groups formed an alliance whose center of gravity resided in a council located at Peshawar, beyond reach of the Russian enemy. Fearful a unified command would impede its ability to manipulate the warlords, the ISI undermined the initiative. By that summer there were roughly 45,000 mujahedeen fighters. Through the year the rebel groups averaged almost 500 attacks a month. According to Soviet figures more than 500 vehicles were destroyed that year and 4,550 security troops killed. In one province (Kunduz) the government controlled only 10 percent of the villages.

  The Soviets and Afghan Communists initially enjoyed greater success with their respective intelligence services. The Russian KGB, reprising its tactics in the Baltic uprisings of the 1940s and ’50s, formed false-flag units. The most important of these, code-named Cascade, pretended to be mujahedeen bands. The 150-odd soldiers in each such security unit gained the confidence of rebels who revealed themselves only to be eliminated. The Afghan KHAD agency tried to block trails into the country with some success, using its 5,000 border troops. KGB officers were attached to KHAD in increasing numbers, first a staff at headquarters, then groups of 10 to 15 advisers in each of the 29 provinces. In 1981 the Russians received even greater powers to intervene in Afghan affairs. Najibullah, the KHAD chief (many Afghans use one name), raised no objections. Toward the end of 1981, in an effort to devise new tactics, KGB chief Boris Kryuchkov visited Kabul with Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov. Babrak Karmal also met top Russians at Tashkent that December. No one had a solution. The KHAD grew enormously: from 700 at the time of the Russian invasion to more than 16,000 by 1982, but its heavy hand did little to stem the rebellion.

  The war sputtered on. Karmal continued the Communist Party infighting, with a PDPA congress in the spring of 1982 marking the final triumph of the Parcham faction over the Khalq. Arab countries played the major role in assistance to the rebels, though ultimately they were eclipsed by the CIA, except for the Saudis, who continued to match the United States dollar for dollar. But Iran gave significant aid to Sunni Muslim groups at least until 1983, especially Gulbudhin Hekmatyar’s Hesbe-e-Islami, and to Shiite Muslims along the Iranian border. Egypt sold arms and donated some also. Others put up money or permitted rebel groups to open offices and recruit for the mujahedeen. The most fundamentalist groups, like Hekmatyar’s, also had some success in making direct approaches to Muslim countries for certain support.

  Pakistan sustained its role, with Peshawar and the nearby city of Quetta as the front-line bases. The ISI’s Afghan Bureau made allocations among the rebel groups at coordinating meetings held quarterly. The ISI director General Akhtar presided, with the chief of the bureau, and that of the parallel bureau Akhtar created to move the supplies, plus their staffs. CIA and Saudi money went into ISI bank accounts. Aid in kind, such as weapons, the donors purchased directly and brought into the country (until 1985 it remained a firm rule that mostly Communist-bloc weapons would be given to the muj). The amounts of both cash and weapons given to each group varied depending on performance, but only two of the seven key groups in the rebel alliance were not fundamentalist, and ISI played favorites. One major rebel leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud in the Panshir Valley, was not in the alliance. The net effect was that roughly two-thirds of aid went to the most radical religious groups.

  The CIA got weapons wherever it could. Most of those from European and Middle Eastern countries transited Saudi Arabia by air or entered the Pakistani port of Karachi. The U.S. Air Force did the airlifting out of Dhahran, where a CIA officer acted as liaison. When the Pakistani air force tried to participate, it had trouble with landing or overflight rights, in spite of Saudi Arabia’s cooperation and CIA’s presence at the airbase. A contingent of three, later five, CIA officers at Rawalpindi monitored storage and shipment inside Pakistan. Certain items, like rockets from China, came to Pakistan directly from their countries of origin.

  At first rebel commanders went to ISI depots with pony trains to pick up equipment stockpiled for them. But the arrangement proved cumbersome. The CIA bought and delivered animals to the rebels, but stocks of local ponies soon dried up. Langley sought the advice of mule experts like Dr. Melvin Bradley of the University of Missouri, and bought mules in his state and shipped them to Pakistan, but the Missouri mules were not used to the climate and wore out quickly. Some Chinese ponies were employed, but a better expedient proved to be mules from Argentina, where the pampas and Andean mountain living favored animals better adapted to the mountains of Afghanistan. The Pakistanis eventually hired traders who provided their own animals for a fee. Of course the fees rose every season, and ISI’s transport department still had to bring the materials to the border depots. A typical mule load was a couple of sacks of corn meal and perhaps four rockets or recoilless rifle rounds.

  Timing was also a problem: ISI officials complained the CIA never seemed to realize that when the snows melted each year in the spring (usually April), the pack trains could hardly move, so supplies needed to be brought in early to compensate.

  The traders crossed a highly permeable border—more than two hundred trails cut through the mountains that lined it. Neither Afghan troops in the 1980s nor Pakistani guards in the war on terror of the twenty-first century have sealed this border. In November 1982 the Defense Intelligence Agency argued that even a major increase in Russian troops (fifty thousand men) would not enable the Soviets to seal off Afghanistan permanently from the outside world. In the 1980s permeability worked in the CIA’s favor, later it would not.

  The tribes on the land were the key to effective supply, and these took a cut of whatever moved through their territory, fees that multiplied as supplies went farther. Mujahedeen deep inside Afghanistan received barely half what they had been consigned. Rebel leaders preferred cash, which they could use for almost anything at local bazaars. About 40 percent of shipments crossed the border in the vicinity of Peshawar and another 20 percent near Quetta, not far from the huge underground base the rebels established in the caves of Zhawar.

  The sole alternative would have been to parachute supplies to the rebels. Brigadier General Youssaf of ISI maintained that airdrops were nonsensical. Drops meant using U.S. aircraft in a Russian war theater and thus posed a danger of direct U.S.-Soviet confrontation, a chance heightened by the large number of flights necessary. The parachute method also opened the possibility of U.S. aircraft losses in a CIA covert operation. Lacking proprietaries the size of Air America, by the 1980s not even Langley could conduct projects on the scale of Afghanistan as aerial endeavors. Langley agreed. Chuck Cogan later characterized those who called for U.S. airdrops as living in a dreamworld.

  On the whole the supply situation remained uneven. In late 1982 the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that major rebel groups possessed ammunition and modern assault rifles but lacked heavy weapons, especially machine guns, mortars, anti-aircraft guns or missiles, anti-tank weapons, and radio equipment. The difficulties were mainly for smaller rebel groups or those in isolated positions, such as Massoud in the Panshir Valley. This is consistent with what Pakistanis say about how they allocated the weapons. But ISI shortchanged groups not in its favor. For instance, there are reports that the rebels were given about 400,000 modern Soviet-type assault rifles; yet, according to Washington lobbyists for the muj, one of the main groups received just 4,000 modern weapons by 1983, along with almost twice that number of old Lee-Enfield rifles. This minor-key firepower compared poorly to what the Russians had or even what other rebel groups were receiving. Over the same period a rebel group that had had 13 machine guns in 1982 possessed 250 by the spring of 1984.

  A major difference between the covert actions of the Reagan era and earlier CIA activities is that in the 1980s varied rebel groups deliberately lobbied Washington, not to build support but to get what they viewed as a fair share of cash and weapons. Law firms or public relations consultants did some of this work, as did activists for the cause. This was true for Afghans, Nicaraguans, Angolans, and so on. The Cubans had formed activist groups outside CIA projects, for which they solicited money and support. Only in the Reagan years were there public efforts to promote CIA programs.

  Divisions rent the administration over the numbers and kinds of weapons to furnish the mujahedeen, perhaps making the solicitation important. This was true even at Langley, where Bill Casey, a true believer, never actually made his mind up on the goals of the operation. John McMahon supported the covert project but doubted the United States could achieve anything unless it had a diplomatic policy to encourage Soviet withdrawal. That ranged him against those who wanted to make Afghanistan Russia’s Vietnam, a group that sometimes included Casey, or those who wanted outright victory, including some in the Pentagon, Congress, and on the CIA’s project task force. According to Robert Gates, there were also those who feared greater effort would trigger a massive Soviet response and a slaughter. Existing findings made the project a harassment effort, and that was what the congressional committees were told. Intelligence reports estimated that Moscow spent forty dollars for every one from the CIA.

  Analysts at the Directorate for Intelligence held that the project could not achieve more than a disruptive effect on the Soviets, but Bob Gates, its chief from 1982 to 1986, did not. Gates repeatedly sent back reports to be reworked with additional argumentation on pitfalls for the Soviets in this war. Thus an April 1983 analysis by DI’s Near East and South Asia office that found the muj incapable of expelling or defeating the Russians incurred Gates’s ire.

  Officials outside CIA, including former DDCI Vernon Walters, now ambassador to the UN, and Fred Iklé, undersecretary of defense for policy, rejected the limited vision of Afghan prospects. Richard Perle, Iklé’s deputy, supported efforts by his assistant Elie D. Krakowski to seize control of the issue, which was far outside their portfolio. Krakowski recalled the Pentagon’s goal as “the withdrawal of Soviet forces and the establishment of a stable Afghan government.” Frank Carlucci, now deputy secretary of defense, and Nestor Sanchez, whom he had taken with him in the international security affairs field, gave helpful advice, though Sanchez would be especially useful on Central America. Pentagon efforts to carve out a policy role were simplified by President Reagan, who consistently refused to rule on the differences among his subordinates.