Langley’s people did not see themselves as holding back the Afghan project. They had a full plate. Beyond the planning and weapons buying, options had to be cleared with General Zia, the Saudis, and other players. Chuck Cogan recalls an adrenaline rush when Bill Casey took over from Stan Turner, but to some degree escalation had to be incremental simply because the foundations needed to be laid. He feels that no one at CIA—at least initially—looked at Afghanistan as a bleeding ground, a Soviet Vietnam. That might have been the idea at the White House but not at Langley. When Howard Hart replaced John Reagan as station chief in Islamabad, Casey’s instructions were simply to go out and kill Russians. Hart had won the Intelligence Star for his part in the Iran hostage rescue mission and had led the NE branch for Pakistan and Afghanistan at the inception of the project. Cogan selected him to lead the station on the basis of their shared experience. At a regional conference among station chiefs in late 1981, Hart convinced the NE baron to back the first of many escalations.

  Hart cabled Langley on January 14, 1982, to put this on the table. Director Casey took the question to the Reagan administration’s Special Group, called the National Security Planning Group (NSPG). They met late in February. According to Robert Gates, despite support from Frank Carlucci and Caspar Weinberger at the Pentagon, and from the State Department, not to mention Cogan’s NE, the beefed-up project initially went nowhere. This seems possible only if Bill Casey did not in fact back it. Only after the Casey-Zia meeting that featured the red map overlay—which took place that April—did the DCI really begin to focus. Casey and Zia met again in late 1982 when the Pakistani leader again lectured the spy chief on his view of Russian objectives. The Gates memoir leaves the impression that Zia had to convince Casey of the need to move ahead. In addition, Gates quotes Casey as saying that Zia’s goal centered on action “to keep the pot boiling, but not boil over,” avoiding Soviet action against Pakistan. To the degree that Bill Casey accepted this, it put him in the camp of those who wished to use Afghanistan as a bleeding ground for Russians.

  Progress did not satisfy the activists. Outside lobbyists reinforced those who sought victory. Several congressmen took up the mantle and pressed for legislation in favor of effective Afghan resistance. Democratic Congressman Charles Wilson of Texas waged what amounted to his own covert campaign against officials he thought insufficiently committed to the cause. Two he fastened on were Chuck Cogan and Howard Hart. By dint of repeated travel to Pakistan, Wilson forged his own links to top Pakistani leaders, including General Zia. He used these to encourage the Pakistanis to demand more than the CIA had programmed—more weapons and better ones too. Hart had good relations with Akhtar of ISI, but by 1983 there were being eclipsed as Wilson worked on Zia.

  Budget levels on the covert program were affected by lobbying. The Reagan administration permitted itself to be moved even farther in directions it wanted to go. Reagan doubled what Carter had spent on Afghanistan. Congress, if anything, stayed ahead of the White House on the Afghan program. The CIA would ask for a couple of million dollars, Congress would appropriate twenty-five. Charlie Wilson became a sparkplug in this effort. The numbers only grew larger. In 1983 $30 million in CIA money ballooned with an extra $40 million in reprogrammed Pentagon funds demanded by Representative Wilson. Senior diplomat Nicolas Veliotis, Chuck Cogan’s opposite number at State, recalled that colleagues handling the program had real worries whether they could handle the surging funds for the project.

  The diplomatic policy that DDCI McMahon craved remained a nullity during this period. McMahon saw the CIA paramilitary effort as the fulcrum to open the door to agreement. A United Nations mediation effort under Diego Cordovez began early but proceeded fitfully. In 1983 it came a near breakthrough, with the UN drafting an agreed text, the Russians suggesting they were amenable to a conditional withdrawal, and the Reagan White House, preoccupied with Lebanon, permitting events to take their course. Instead the Pakistanis and Afghan rebels raised insurmountable objections. Diego Cordovez suspects that Casey may have encouraged that obstructionism. Army chief of staff Gen. Edward C. Meyer told Cordovez later, “Casey would say he wanted them out, but he actually wanted them to send more and more Russians down there and take casualties.” By the time Secretary of State George Shultz made his first visit to Pakistan in July 1983, the diplomatic initiative had ground to a halt.

  Big money, combined with funneling aid through third parties, led to any number of difficulties for the secret warriors, not least with the Pakistanis. In 1984, when the CIA program was again pumped up by $50 million in midstream, the agency sought huge amounts of weapons. Pakistani sources report that CIA logisticians suddenly produced a hundred thousand old Lee-Enfield rifles, apparently from India. Howard Hart had championed the Lee-Enfield weapons. These guns put something in rebel hands quickly and enabled the warlords to expand as fast as they could recruit fighters. The ISI protested—it had not requested the weapons and lacked storage for them. The agency merely answered that the shipment would be an advance on supplies for the following year. Of course that made ammunition an issue, and a Pakistani arms dealer got the CIA to buy thirty million rifle bullets at a premium. It turned out he procured the ammo from Pakistan’s own stocks, put it on a boat, and sailed the ship around to make it appear to have come from elsewhere. Soon enough the ISI discovered Pakistani army stampings on the bullets, which then had to be remanufactured to eliminate the engraving—a cost of millions of dollars. The CIA’s project had nearly ended before the last bullets were ready; the muj had long since switched to automatic weapons instead of these ancient bolt action rifles.

  By 1984 Director Casey needed a new team. Beset by problems from other covert operations, Casey changed his DDO, moving Clair George over to lead the clandestine service. George in turn persuaded Casey to approve a comrade from the Africa Division, Bert Dunn, to head NE. Then came the matter of a task force chief. Alan Fiers, the lead candidate, still had a few months to run on a tour as station chief in Saudi Arabia. A fair-haired boy in Casey’s estimation, Fiers had his detractors among the NE tribe. Meanwhile acting chief Gust Avrakotos had been deputy to MacGaffin from the early days and knew all the players, but he had fallen on the wrong side of colleague, now boss, Clair George. Avrakotos campaigned for the position and, one day when George was out of town, convinced associate DDO Ed Jushniewicz to appoint him, shutting out Fiers. Director Casey sent Fiers to lead his Central America task force. Avrakotos had ties to Charlie Wilson and quietly supported the move to a victory strategy.

  During George Shultz’s 1983 Pakistan visit, Zia had Akhtar of the ISI brief the visiting party on the status of operations. Akhtar reported that the resistance could control at will any portion of rural Afghanistan and that it dominated the Afghan-Soviet border, inflicting heavy losses on the Russians. The reporting cable must have pleased Avrakotos, though Akhtar’s next remark—that in spite of their losses the Soviets appeared prepared to continue their occupation indefinitely—offered a more ominous note.

  By 1984 no part of Afghanistan was safe from the muj. Even Kabul, where KHAD headquarters was subjected to a rocket attack, the defense ministry had been bombed, and DRA officers kidnapped right off the streets, had become iffy. The constant menace of rocket attacks led the Russians and the Democratic Republic army to push a security perimeter out from the city. But in 1984 the CIA got hold of Chinese rockets with greater range and explosive power. The ISI sent along some of its commando teams as rebels staged attacks on the Soviet airbase at Bagram. Twenty-two planes were destroyed on the ground there and elsewhere. In one awesome strike a major ammunition dump containing more than thirty thousand tons of munitions exploded when hit by rockets. Enterprising ISI commanders videotaped the explosions; Casey delighted in showing these films at key moments when Afghan budgets were before Congress.

  In 1984 the ISI presence with the rebels rose to two teams in the Bagram operation, seven around Kabul, and two more with muj groups near Jalalabad. In the latter part of the year rebels began to form units from their shifting bands, joining them to create “regiments,” several of which were united in “fronts.” Another mission was an attempt to block the Salang road tunnel, through which moved three-quarters of the Russians’ supplies. Langley’s experts advised ISI on the weight of explosives needed, which essentially required a truck bomb. The ISI tried several times to carry out this mission but proved unable to bring it together.

  Meanwhile the CIA’s relationship with the Pakistani ISI continued to be uncomfortable. Changing his team, Director Casey approved William Piekney for the station at Islamabad. Piekney pulled off some coups—notably the recovery of an intact Soviet gunship helicopter downed by the rebels—but his support at Langley wavered. Brig. Gen. Mohamad Youssaf of the Afghan Bureau continued as the effective field commander, yet on only a handful of occasions was he ever permitted into CIA safe houses in Peshawar. One irked him greatly—an urgent summons in the middle of the night, when Youssaf could not get his driver, got lost driving himself, then was told the Russians had learned of a rebel convoy hundreds of miles away. There was no way to know which warlord’s band had been discovered, nor to get it a message, both of which Youssaf figured CIA ought to have known. The ISI leader loved the CIA’s satellite photos and its radio intercepts but thought the secret warriors spent too much time spinning their wheels.

  Bert Dunn, the incoming division chief, knew the Pakistani sensitivities. Dunn had led the CIA station in Baghdad during the early part of the Iraq-Iran War, and as a Special Forces officer with the army had served in both Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1960s, monitoring U.S. military aid to the Pakistanis, with whom he had excellent contacts. But not even Dunn could calm the waters, undoubtedly because Washington and Islamabad had divergent objectives.

  What the CIA did do was continue supplying intelligence. Some was very good indeed. The United States maintained its embassy in Kabul throughout the war. In April 1984 the DRA expelled the third secretary, Richard S. Vandiver, as persona non grata. Vandiver may or may not have been a spook, but a history of the agency’s Directorate for Science and Technology establishes that the United States used its diplomatic pouch to move sensitive listening devices into the embassy, and official Michael Pillsbury confirms Washington had excellent data on Soviet moves starting from this time. It was at this point that the CIA’s Afghan secret war entered its highest phase.

  Bill Casey was a spy chieftain constantly on the run. His annual visits to the cockpit of the Afghan War typically lasted forty-eight hours or less. Much like the Washington emissaries who went to Saigon in such processions through the Vietnam War, these were the visits of someone who knew what he wanted, not one who wanted to learn the truth of the matter. Brigadier Youssaf first met Casey in the spring of 1984, when he and General Akhtar awaited the DCI’s plane, a midnight-black painted C-141 Starlifter, at Pakistan’s Chakala airbase. The ISI referred to the CIA director as “Mr. Black.” Sometimes Casey brought his wife Sophia, sometimes his daughter. A couple of times he had John McMahon with him, but always NE chief Bert Dunn. The baron recalled that on these long flights, where the only people aboard were Dunn, Casey, one or two others, and the security detail, he really got to know the director.

  There would be a perfunctory inspection or some demonstration of nifty new gadgets—in 1984 the ISI training camps were featured—then a command conference between allies. The Pakistanis frequently saw tension on the CIA side, for Casey, relentlessly enthusiastic, butted heads with more cautious line officers. Dunn seems to have been of two minds about Casey. The ISI were impressed when Casey overruled his people who thought some move unpractical or unwise. They nicknamed him “Cyclone.” Some ISI wits preferred “Wanderer.” Casey would blow through, then disappear into his plane for Saudi Arabia and a strategy session with its spy boss Prince Turki.

  Casey on Afghanistan is difficult to read. Biographer Joseph Persico recounts that when John McMahon briefed Casey on the project for the first time, at the outset of the administration, the DCI shot back, “This is the kind of thing we should be doing—only more. I want to see one place on this globe, one spot where we can checkmate them and roll them back.” Raising the specter of Hitler and Munich, Casey spoke of the dead in the secret war as saving lives in the long run. That should have put the CIA director squarely in the victory camp, but his actions never corresponded to those of a true believer. Rather, the DCI backed measures to draw out the Afghan project. Turning Afghanistan into a bleeding sore for Moscow might ultimately roll back the Russians, but it would take longer, cost more, exact a higher toll, and end ambiguously. Munich meant something different—rapid, decisive action in the short term. The strategic debate shows Casey’s ambivalence sharply.

  The controversy of the moment centered on providing the rebels better protection from Russian aircraft. Major options were Swiss-made Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns, Soviet shoulder-fired surface to air missiles (SAMs), a similar British SAM, or two different American SAMs. Charlie Wilson and congressional supporters of the mujahedeen, drawing from a secret paper John McMahon had sent to the Hill, had earmarked money specifically for the Swiss guns. These turned out to be heavy and awkward, difficult to move, and huge consumers of equally cumbersome ammunition. The guns ended up in static positions at rebel bases.

  That left the missiles. The Russian SAMs, based on 1960s-vintage technology, were easy to counter, as the Soviet enemy well knew. They were not effective. The British SAM, called the Blowpipe, had problems of its own. Because it was an optically tracked weapon, the crew had to keep the enemy aircraft in sight during the missile’s flight. In that interval the crew could be blown up or neutralized. The missile itself had reliability problems, according to the ISI, one of whose teams expended thirteen SAMs to no effect during one battle. The Afghan task force put $44 million of Saudi money into the Blowpipe because it could be spent without reference to congressional overseers, but the investment ended there.

  So to the American SAMs, called “Stingers.” The CIA’s rule had been no U.S. weapons. Indeed the agency had a preference for Soviet-bloc weapons, for which the rebels could capture or buy ammunition as they fought. Going for American-made SAMs triggered a fight within the U.S. government that lasted more than a year. Officers worried about the security issue, about blowing CIA’s cover by using a U.S. weapon, and about the potential for diversion to other governments or terrorist groups. The U.S. military, just beginning to introduce the Stinger, also showed itself reluctant to slow down deployment by sending missiles to Pakistan. Through much of this debate General Zia himself opposed U.S. weapons for the rebels to avoid provoking Moscow. When Brigadier Youssaf told visiting American-Afghan activists in 1984 that Stingers were needed, General Akhtar quickly summoned the group to hear a retraction.

  The victory camp scored major points in late 1984 when the Senate passed a resolution in favor of greatly improving the equipment of the muj. In March 1985 President Reagan approved a national security directive that made it official policy to move beyond harassment toward victory. A new presidential finding accompanied the directive. Reflecting the exuberance, Undersecretary of Defense Fred Iklé at one meeting advocated cutting out the ISI middlemen by flying arms directly to the muj. Inevitably someone raised the danger of a Soviet-American confrontation starting World War III. Bertie Dunn’s deputy, Thomas Twetten, attended this séance representing the agency, and told author Stephen Coll that Iklé had responded, “Hmmm, World War III—that’s not such a bad idea.” Iklé later claimed to Coll that he must have been kidding, but Twetten insists he heard the remark, and it silenced the room.

  At the Pentagon Michael Pillsbury, an aide to Iklé, took the new finding as an opportunity to press for Stingers. Opposition remained strong. When Utah’s Republican Senator Orrin Hatch visited Pakistan with a Senate delegation that summer, he took Pillsbury, a former staffer whom many regarded as a loose cannon, with him. They were to inspect a Pakistani army house along with General Zia. Before that encounter station chief Piekney, on instructions from Langley, told Hatch that Pillsbury could not attend. Senator Hatch demanded to speak directly to Director Casey and, when he got the CIA chief on the phone, induced him to relent. Casey apparently felt he had erred in agreeing to Pillsbury’s participation, but he blamed the station chief. After that Piekney’s stock at headquarters went into free fall.

  At his meeting with the senators General Zia now said he favored the Stingers. Senator Hatch prevailed upon him to put this in a letter to Washington. Nudged by Zia, within a month Reagan approved an immediate shipment of a hundred Stingers while JCS, Pentagon, and State Department opposition melted. Brigadier Youssaf began to organize training for rebel gunners.

  In October 1985 Bill Casey made another visit to the front, in company with John McMahon and Bert Dunn. General Zia again emphasized giving the rebels Stingers. Finally the logjam was broken. At a breakfast in early December, McMahon told Fred Iklé that the CIA would ship as many of the missiles as the Pentagon provided. When Zia saw Casey again in January 1986 he spoke of turning up the heat in the Afghan War. Director Casey waxed enthusiastic.

  Major policy fights were simultaneously occurring on the Soviet side. In March 1985 the Soviet leadership changed, and Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Gorbachev thought the Afghan intervention a mistake and had already hinted as much to Western diplomats. That July came a key discussion in Moscow. The Russians determined to change their Afghan strategy. The new concept, somewhat akin to what the United States had done in the last phase of the Vietnam War, amounted to “Afghanization.” Gorbachev gave his generals two years maximum, preferably one, for a military solution, failing which Russia would get out. To give the generals what they needed the Politburo increased Soviet airpower and heavy firepower along with elite forces of paratroops and spetznaz. The DRA army assumed a larger share of offensive operations with the Russian elite forces as a spearhead; the bulk of Soviet troops would revert to a defensive role. A new leader for the Limited Group of Soviet Forces was brought in—Gen. Mikhail Zaitsev, previous commander of Russian armies in eastern Germany. Soviet troops in Afghanistan reached their greatest number, 108,000, not long after this policy review. A further Politburo meeting that October confirmed the plan.