The Hunt for bin Laden Read Online Free PDF

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