Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

succeed.
    • A reasonable prospect for success. Before an operation is launched, policy makers have to possess a clear objective and believe—based on fact, not desire—that accomplishing the operation is possible.
    It is the responsibility of policy makers in the White House to make sure these conditions are met before directing the CIA to initiate a covert action campaign. In Afghanistan in the 1980s, they did just that. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Afghanistan has loomed large in the nation’s global war against Islamist terrorism. But the antecedents to 9/11 lead back to Afghanistan, “graveyard of empires,” to when the Soviets occupied the country and Islamic fighters from across the Middle East flocked to the Afghan border to fight against the Soviets alongside the Afghan mujahideen. One of those was Osama bin Laden.

 
    TWO
    Mules, Pickup Trucks, and Stinger Missiles
    Afghanistan, 1986
     
    After he gave me the model truck that I keep on my windowsill, Charlie Wilson told me I wasn’t going to like the movie Charlie Wilson’s War . He was right. I prefer the real story.
    That story began for me in early 1986, after five tours overseas, three as chief of station. Everybody knew there was an office at CIA headquarters supporting the mujahideen fighters struggling against the Russians in Afghanistan. But exactly what went on behind a locked door on the sixth floor at headquarters remained largely a mystery. The CIA had been funneling hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons to these Afghan “holy warriors” since President Carter first authorized the covert war in late 1979 after the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, concerned about the loyalty of the United States’ client regime in Kabul. President Reagan reauthorized the covert war in 1981, as the first .303-caliber Lee-Enfield rifles purchased with U.S. tax dollars gave way to AK-47s, rockets, and mortars. Secret congressional appropriations grew from $30 million in 1981 to $200 million in 1984, and thanks to an agreement secured by the Agency, the Saudis were matching American appropriations dollar for dollar.
    Support for the mujahideen was stoked on Capitol Hill by U.S. representative Charlie Wilson, a Texas Democrat who had come to passionately support the anticommunist crusade. 1
    By late 1984, the return on investment was enormous. Our initial goal had simply been harassment and costly damage to the Soviet military: we wanted to make the Soviets pay as high a price as possible for their occupying Afghanistan. But when it became clear that the mujahideen could fight and that the Soviets were mortal—the mujahideen, by now well armed, had killed thousands of Soviet soldiers and controlled much of the country—Director William Casey ordered a review and reevaluation of the effort. And with Charlie Wilson adding even more funding to the mix, Casey started to believe that the Soviets might actually be defeated. In league with him were other hard-liners at the National Security Council and Defense Department, and the result was National Security Decision Directive 166, a plan for ramping up the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan. Signed by President Reagan in March 1985, it authorized the CIA to prosecute the war.
    The planning was well under way when Tom Twetten, deputy chief of the Near East Division, called me to his office on the sixth floor and said he wanted me to lead what was now likely to become a full-blown task force on Afghanistan. I had a very good relationship with Twetten and his boss, Near East Division chief Bert Dunn, both of whom knew that I had been an outspoken critic of arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar before the Iran-Contra scandal erupted. I didn’t need much convincing that running the Afghan Task Force was something I wanted to do. This is why I had joined the Agency in the first place. I had had my first big taste of covert action in Chile in 1973, and now I was being given an opportunity to run