Intel Wars Read Online Free PDF

hundred yards away at a separate compound called Camp Vance, conduct what are referred to as “direct action” operations, which is a polite way of referring to commando raids designed to capture or kill Taliban commanders. The main CIA resource for these operations is three thousand Afghan mercenaries known as the Counterterrorist Pursuit Teams (CTPT), who were first publicly identified in Bob Woodward’s 2010 book Obama’s Wars . The CTPT teams, which are deployed at twenty-six firebases in southern and eastern Afghanistan, are rated as some of the most effective combat units in Afghanistan because, unlike their Afghan army and police counterparts, they are well armed, well trained, and combat tested, and their loyalty is not an issue because they are paid four times the monthly salary of an average Afghan soldier or policeman.
    Besides the station in Kabul and the paramilitary base at Bagram, the CIA has three large bases along the Afghan-Pakistani border at Kandahar, Khost, and Jalalabad, which recruit and operate agent networks inside northern Pakistan. Small CIA bases have recently been established inside the new U.S. consulates in Herat in western Afghanistan, which monitor activities in eastern Iran; and at Mazar-e-Sharif in the northern part of the country, from which the CIA monitors Muslim extremist activities in neighboring Uzbekistan. There are also a host of smaller CIA bases along the Afghan-Pakistani border, like the small agency-run listening post called Cardinal , which is located directly adjacent to the Pakistani border above the Ghaki Pass in Kunar Province.
    The CIA maintains very close relations with the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate for Security (NDS), which it completely subsidized until 2008, when the Afghan government assumed responsibility for funding the organization. Despite the NDS’s well-deserved reputation for abusing prisoners, American officials interviewed for this book admitted that they depended heavily on the Afghan intelligence agency.
    For example, the CIA and the NDS jointly ran a number of important surveillance operations targeting the movements and activities of all Pakistani and Iranian intelligence officers based in Kabul and elsewhere inside Afghanistan. In the summer of 2008, surveillance of the movements of Pakistani intelligence officers assigned to their embassy in Kabul revealed that these individuals were closely monitoring the Indian embassy and the activities of Indian diplomats and businessmen in Kabul just weeks before a car bomb destroyed the embassy on July 7, 2008, killing more than forty people.
    While the level of cooperation between the CIA and the NDS is close, the CIA deliberately keeps the details of its most sensitive operations away from its Afghan counterparts. In particular, there is no sharing of information about the CIA station’s top target, Afghan president Hamid Karzai, whom the agency had been carefully watching since he first came to power after the U.S. invasion in 2001.
    Spying on Karzai has proven to be relatively easy, thanks to the array of sources the CIA has recruited inside the Afghan government over the past decade. Published newspaper reports have disclosed that President Karzai’s brother, Mahmoud Karzai, and his half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who was assassinated in July 2011, were at one time or another on the CIA’s payroll. In addition to members of Karzai’s family, the CIA also has dozens of paid informants within the Afghan Ministries of Defense, Interior, and Foreign Affairs, the office of the Afghan national security adviser, and even the NDS.
    The files are stuffed with thousands of intelligence reports about virtually every aspect of Karzai’s personal and professional life. Reading through the Karzai files, several recurring themes emerge. Beset from all sides, Karzai worries constantly about maintaining his independence while at the same time resisting what he