September 21, 2003

The Afghan mujahideen could not have defeated the Russians without the help of the CIA and the ISI. Angelo Rasanayagam provides interesting details

UNITED States’ policy in west Asia had been in the doldrums after the fall of the Shah of Iran and the ongoing hostage crisis. President Carter had clearly stated that the US had ‘a moral obligation’ to help the Afghan resistance. There were hawks in his administration — such as the National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and some members of Congress — who advocated a more proactive role. But the initial US reaction to the Soviet invasion was more a concern that Pakistan’s territorial integrity might be jeopardized with Soviet troops on its frontiers.

The invasion coincided with Mrs Indira Gandhi’s sweeping victory in the Indian elections. When Gromyko publicly declared shortly afterwards in New Delhi that ‘if Pakistan continues to serve as a puppet of imperialism in the future, it will jeopardize its existence and its integrity as an independent state’, Pakistan’s worst fears of a Moscow-Kabul-New Delhi axis seemed to be confirmed.

On January 4, 1980 President Carter announced that ‘along with other countries, we will provide military equipment, food and other assistance to help Pakistan defend its independence’. But when in March he offered $400 million in economic and military aid spread over two years, General Zia felt emboldened to reject the offer as ‘peanuts’. What he wanted was massive US military assistance to secure his borders with India and to make the armed forces that were his regime’s only prop happy.

This he obtained when Ronald Reagan was elected US president later that year. In September 1981 the United States agreed to a $3.2 billion economic and military aid package spread over six years, plus an option to sell 40 advanced F-16 fighter jets. Zia was thus in a position to serve as Washington’s link with the Afghan resistance in a covert operation to ‘roll back’ what Reagan called ‘the evil empire’.

Both Washington and Islamabad went to extraordinary lengths to cover up their assistance to the Afghan mujahideen. For this reason it was decided that only Warsaw Pact weaponry would be delivered, as such weapons could not be traced back to the US...

Bill Casey’s CIA procurers scoured the globe in search of Soviet-style weapons. Egypt, which had large stockpiles of automatic weapons, land mines, grenade launchers and anti-aircraft missiles delivered by the Soviets, was the first source. In return Washington offered to replenish its stocks with new US weapons. Other sources were Israel, which had a supply of Soviet-made weapons — captured during the Six Day War and from Syrian troops and Palestinians in Lebanon — and China.

Using Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as a go-between, the CIA contracted with the Chinese government to manufacture rocket launchers, AK-47s and heavy machine guns in return for hard currency and new equipment. China became a major source of supply. As the requirements grew, the CIA arranged for copies of Soviet weapons to be manufactured in factories in Cairo and in the US, where one leading firm was given a classified contract to upgrade SAM-7 anti-aircraft missiles.

Between 1981 and 1985 annual US military aid to the mujahideen channelled through Pakistan’s ISI grew from $30 million to $280 million, making it the biggest single CIA covert operation anywhere in the world. The US Congress, in a rare show of bi-partisanship, and prompted by friends of the Afghan resistance such as Charles Wilson, Gordon Humphrey, Orrin Hatch and Bill Bradley, also took the lead in voting more money for the mujahideen than the Reagan administration requested, sometimes by diverting funds from the defence budget to the CIA.

Its director, Bill Casey, was also able to persuade sympathetic Arab governments to contribute to a reserve fund that could be kept secret from Congress and the State Department. In late 1981 Saudi Arabia, in exchange for permission to buy five AWAC surveillance planes in spite of Congressional opposition, began to match the CIA dollar for dollar in the financing of purchases of weapons for the Afghan resistance.

According to Arney, Saudi Arabia funnelled more than half a billion dollars to CIA accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. This was in addition to its substantial direct contributions of cash and weapons to its own favourites among the mujahideen parties.

As word spread that the CIA had a blank cheque to purchase Soviet-style weaponry and ammunition, a bizarre combination of arms dealers, bankers, smugglers and gun-runners emerged from the woodwork to claim a ‘part of the action’. One of the biggest operators was the Saudi businessman, Adnan Kashoggi, who openly fronted for his government in procuring and distributing weapons and munitions to the mujahideen through the ISI. He was an agent of the head of the Saudi intelligence agency, Prince Turki, and also acted as a watchdog on the expenditure of Saudi funds.

The CIA’s payments, as well as Saudi payments for the arms supplied by the various dealers, were made out of special ‘Afghan War’ accounts managed by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Its head was a Pakistani banker from Karachi, Agha Hasan Abedi. BCCI’s major owners were Saudi and Arab Emirate political and banking figures. Abedi had close ties with President Zia and the ISI’s General Akhtar who handled the whole supply network to the Afghan resistance on the ground.

Casey meanwhile undertook a variety of operations described as ‘off-the-books’, i.e. not accounted for in detail by the CIA’s record-keeping apparatus. As the CIA was a federal government agency answerable to Congress and thus to the US public, Casey considered his ‘off-the-books’ operations as jobs undertaken in his role as adviser to the president, through his membership of the National Security Council, which was accountable only to the president.

Thus the CIA’s accounts with BCCI, where Saudi funds were similarly deposited, also served to secretly finance an altogether different kind of clandestine operation that had no Congressional approval or endorsement. The Boland Amendment had specifically excluded the supply by the US of lethal weapons to the right-wing Contras fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The CIA circumvented this obstacle by simply asking the Saudis to pay for the arms supplied to the Contras which they did through the BCCI accounts.

Kurt Lohbeck asserts that at least one CIA contract with Kashoggi called for NATO-type weaponry to be sent to Honduras for the Contras, and Warsaw Pact weapons to the ISI for the Afghans — paid out of a single BCCI account. Kashoggi could later argue during the US Senate’s investigation into BCCI that the account was actually divided in two, with the Nicaraguan portion of the contract paid out of Saudi funds in the account and the Afghan portion from the US funds. But the American greenback has only one colour. And why the Saudis, who were traditionally given to supporting only Islamic causes, should take any special interest in the Contras is beyond understanding unless it was part of a deal with the CIA.

Kashoggi’s role, as the CIA’s contractual partner and paymaster through BCCI for the various arms supplies, was central.

On the Pakistan side the chain of command under martial law was more straightforward. The chief martial law administrator was the president, General Ziaul Haq. The armed forces governed the country and Zia, as Chief of Army Staff, controlled the armed forces. Zia’s right-hand man was the powerful director-general of the ISI, General Akhtar Abdur Rehman. Within the ISI, the Afghan Bureau was the command post for the war in Afghanistan and operated in the greatest secrecy, with its military staff wearing civilian clothes.

Its head reported to Akhtar, who also devoted some 50 per cent of his time to the affairs of the Bureau and reported directly to Zia. The respective roles of the CIA and the ISI’s Afghan Bureau are best summed up by the army officer personally selected by Akhtar in October 1983 to head the Bureau, Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf.

To sum up: the CIA’s tasks in Afghanistan were to purchase arms and equipment and their transportation to Pakistan; provide funds for the purchase of vehicles and transportation inside Pakistan and Afghanistan; train Pakistani instructors on new weapons or equipment; provide satellite photographs and maps for our operational planning; provide radio equipment and training, and advise on technical matters when requested. The entire planning of the war, all types of training for the mujahideen, and the allocation and distribution of arms and supplies were the sole responsibility of the ISI, and my office in particular.

The operational base of the ISI’s Afghan Bureau was the Ojhri Camp, located on the northern outskirts of Rawalpindi, and 12 kilometres from the capital, Islamabad. The 70 to 80-acre complex contained warehouses through which 70 per cent of all arms and ammunition for the mujahideen passed garages for some 300 civilian vehicles, training areas, barracks and mess halls. At the height of operations the Bureau included 50 officers, 100 warrant officers and 300 NCOs.

The Bureau had three branches. First, an operations branch under a full colonel was responsible for coordinating intelligence from various sources and controlling day-to-day planning and operations; selecting targets in accordance with the overall strategy; allocating tasks to the mujahideen and organizing training courses for them. From 1984 to 1987, during Brigadier Yousaf’s stewardship, some 80,000 mujahideen were trained at the camps.

The second, a logistics branch with another colonel in charge, was responsible for collecting the weaponry delivered by the CIA from the port of Karachi and airforce bases around the country and for allocating, dispatching and delivering it to the warehouses belonging to the Peshawar parties for distribution to their mujahideen commanders. Inland transportation was carried out in the hundreds of trucks purchased with CIA funds and operated by the National Logistics Cell (NLC). The NLC also carried the food and relief supplies for Afghan refugees in Pakistan procured by international humanitarian aid agencies such as UNHCR and WFP.

The third branch dealt with psychological warfare: the operation of border radio stations, the distribution of pamphlets, the conduct of interviews, and so on.

With many billions of dollars spent by the CIA on the arms pipeline as well as on large cash transfers to Pakistan, it was inevitable that unequalled opportunities were created all down the line for the operation of human greed and avarice. On the supply side, Yousaf cites some interesting examples. When the boxes of weapons arriving from Egypt were opened, rifles were found to be ‘rusted together, barrels were soiled with dirt and corrosion, some boxes were empty, while in others the contents were deficient’.

The ammunition was ‘rarely packed, but came in heaps of loose rounds’. And, 30,000 82mm mortar bombs were found unusable on the battlefield as the cartridges had swollen in the damp and would not fit the barrels. The Egyptians had cobbled together arms that had been lying exposed to the atmosphere for years in order to make a substantial sum of money.

Another example concerned an offer of weapons by Turkey that Brigadier Yousaf was sent to inspect before shipment. He found that they had been manufactured in 1940-42 and had been withdrawn from the Turkish army 30 years before. His refusal to accept them was overruled by his superiors for political reasons. ‘In the end 60,000 rifles, 8,000 light machine guns, 10,000 pistols and over 100 million rounds of ammunition duly arrived. Most were badly corroded or faulty and could not be given to the mujahideen.

In 1984 a shipment of 100,000 .303 rifles arrived in Karachi. When the Afghan Bureau protested that they had not requested this enormous quantity and had no storage space, they were advised by the CIA that the delivery included an advance on the 1985 shipment and that it had been bought at rockbottom prices in India. It did not escape the ISI’s notice that the Indians knew that the weapons would be used against their friends, the Soviets. The ammunition for the Indian rifles was sold to the CIA by a Pakistani dealer through his overseas office without revealing the true source of the 30 million rounds, sold at 50 cents a round.

When the CIA notified the Afghan Bureau of the arrival of the shipment in Karachi and the crates were opened, it was found that every round had POF (Pakistan Ordnance Factory) stamped on it. The ammunition had come from old stocks of the Pakistan army which no longer used the weapon. Obviously the ship had been loaded in Karachi, sailed out and doubled back to the port for discharge. According to Yousaf, it took three years and much money to have the rounds defaced at the factory to conceal their provenance before they could be used in Afghanistan. The main losers in this sorry game were Uncle Sam and his taxpayers and the end-users of the weapons, the mujahideen themselves.

 

Excerpted with permission from

Afghanistan: A Modern History

By Angelo Rasanayagam

I.B.Taurus. Distributed in Pakistan by Vanguard Books, 45 The Mall, Lahore Tel: 042-7243783

Email: vbl@brain.net.pk

ISBN 1-86064-846-0

301pp. Rs1,995

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