A team of CIA operators from the agency’s Counterterrorist Center flew to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in October, 1999. Code-named JAWBREAKER-5, they were led by the chief of the center’s bin Laden unit, known to his colleagues as Rich, a veteran of CIA postings in Algiers and elsewhere in the developing world. At an airfield where Afghanistan’s fledgling Northern Alliance maintained a clandestine logistics base, they boarded an old Soviet-made Mi-17 transport helicopter and swooped toward Afghanistan’s jagged, snow-draped northern peaks.
Their aim was to reenergize secret intelligence and combat operations against bin Laden in partnership with guerrilla commander Massoud. Afghanistan’s most formidable military leader, Massoud was a sinewy man with penetrating dark eyes. He had become a charismatic popular leader, especially in northeastern Afghanistan. There he had fought and negotiated with equal imagination during the 1980s, punishing and frustrating Soviet occupation forces.
He was above all an independent man. He surrounded himself with books. He prayed piously, read Persian poetry, and studied Islamic theology. During the mid-1990s his militia forces had at times engaged in horrendous massacres, however. American and British drug enforcement officials continued to accuse his ragged army of opium and heroin smuggling.
By 1999, some inside the Pentagon and the Clinton cabinet saw Massoud as a spent force. The national security cabinet was sharply divided about whether the United States should deepen its partnership with him, even to challenge bin Laden. But at the CIA, especially inside the Counterterrorist Center, career officers passionately described Massoud as America’s last, best hope to capture or kill bin Laden before al Qaeda claimed more American lives. Massoud might be a flawed ally, they declared, but he was at war across northern Afghanistan against the Taliban, whose puritan mullahs had allied themselves with bin Laden’s terrorist group. Frightened by swelling intelligence reports showing that al Qaeda planned new strikes, Clinton’s national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, and his counterterrorism director, Richard Clarke, approved the JAWBREAKER-5 mission.
In dimly lit Panjshir Valley safe houses that October, Massoud told the JAWBREAKER-5 team that he was willing to deepen his partnership with the CIA, but he was explicit about his limitations. Bin Laden spent most of his time near Kandahar in the eastern Afghan mountains, far from Massoud’s forces. Occasionally bin Laden visited Jalalabad or Kabul, closer to Massoud’s lines. In these areas Massoud’s intelligence service had active agents, and perhaps they could develop more sources.
Massoud also told the CIA delegation that U.S. policy toward bin Laden and Afghanistan was doomed to fail. The Americans put all their effort against bin Laden himself and a handful of his senior aides, but they failed to see the larger context in which al Qaeda thrived. What about the Taliban? What about the Taliban’s supporters in Pakistani intelligence? What about its financiers in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates? “Even if we succeed in what you are asking for,” Massoud told the CIA delegation, as his aide and translator Abdullah recalled it, “that will not solve the bigger problem that is growing.”
The CIA officers told Massoud they agreed with his critique, but they had their orders. The policy of the United States government rejected a military confrontation with the Taliban and focused instead solely on capturing bin Laden and his lieutenants for criminal trial, or killing them in the course of an arrest attempt. If Massoud helped with this narrow mission, the CIA officers argued, perhaps it would lead to broader political support or development aid in the future.
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 late in 1997. Three other teams had gone in by the summer of 1999. The 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.
A few months after the JAWBREAKER-5 team choppered out, the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center picked up intelligence that bin Laden had arrived in Derunta Camp, in a jagged valley near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. It was a typical bin Laden facility: crude, mainly dirt and rocks, with a few modest buildings protected by ridges. Massoud’s sources reported that no Afghans were permitted in Derunta, only Arabs. Testimony from al Qaeda defectors and interrogation of Arab jihadists showed that Derunta was a graduate school for elite recruits. Massoud’s men, with help from CIA officers, set up an overlook above Derunta and tried to watch the place.
Then Massoud ordered a mission. He rounded up “a bunch of mules,” as a U.S. official involved put it, and loaded them with Soviet-designed Katyusha rockets. He dispatched this small commando team toward the hills above Derunta. After the team was on its way Massoud reported his plan to Langley: He was going to batter bin Laden’s camp with rocket fire.
Lawyers at the White House and CIA convulsed in alarm. The Massoud partnership was supposed to be about intelligence collection. Now the CIA had, in effect, provided intelligence for a rocket attack on Derunta. The CIA was legally complicit in Massoud’s operation, the lawyers feared, and the agency had no authority to be involved. The bin Laden unit shot a message to the Panjshir: You’ve got to recall the mission.
Massoud’s aides replied, in effect, as a U.S. official involved recalled it: “What do you think this is, the 82nd Airborne? We’re on mules. They’re gone.” Massoud’s [commando] team had no radios. They were walking to the launch site, they would fire their rockets, turn around, and walk back.
Langley’s officers waited nervously. Some of them muttered sarcastically about the absurd intersections of American law and the secret war they were expected to manage. Massoud’s aides eventually reported back that they had, in fact, shelled Derunta. But the CIA could not confirm the attack. The lawyers relaxed, and the incident passed, unpublicized.
By the late summer of 2000 the CIA’s liaison with Massoud was fraying on both sides. Massoud’s aides had hoped their work with the agency would lead to clearer recognition of Afghanistan’s plight in Washington and perhaps covert military aid. They could see no evidence that this was developing. Massoud’s men asked their CIA counterparts, as one intelligence aide recalled it: “Is there any policy in the U.S. government to help Afghanistan if the people of Afghanistan help you get rid of your most wanted man?”
After the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in October, 2000, the CIA’s Panjshir teams tried to revive their plan to supply Massoud with more extensive and more lethal aid. CIA officers drew up a specific list of what Massoud needed–more cash to bribe commanders and to counteract a Taliban treasury swollen with Arab money. He also needed trucks, helicopters, light arms, ammunition, uniforms, food and maybe some mortars and artillery. The list of covert supplies they proposed for Massoud would cost between $50 million and $150 million, depending on how aggressive the White House wanted to be.
The plan envisioned that to overcome the confusion and mutual mistrust that had developed with Massoud about operations designed to capture or kill bin Laden, CIA officers would go directly into action alongside the Northern Alliance if they developed strong intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts. There would be no more embarrassments like the mission against Derunta.
In the late autumn, Richard Clarke sent a memo outlining the CIA’s proposal to Sandy Berger. But they were worse than lame ducks now at the White House. The November presidential election had deadlocked; Clinton’s White House aides were enduring the strangest postelection transition in a century as the CIA’s paper landed. The word went back to the Counterterrorist Center: There would be no new covert action program for Massoud.
Rich and fellow CIA officer Gary Schroen flew to Paris to meet Massoud. They wanted to reassure him that the CIA still intended to keep up its regular installment payments of several hundred thousand dollars as part of their intelligence-sharing arrangements. Massoud told the CIA officers that the U.S. had to do more, or eventually he was going to crumble. “If President Bush doesn’t help us,” Massoud told a press conference in Strasbourg a few days later, “then these terrorists will damage the United States and Europe very soon–and it will be too late.”
Early in September, 2001, Massoud’s intelligence service transmitted a routine classified report to the CIA about two Arab television journalists who had crossed Northern Alliance lines from Kabul. Officers in the bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center took note of the report, but it did not seem of exceptional interest.
The Bush cabinet met at the White House on September 4. Before them was a draft copy of a National Security Presidential Directive, a classified memo outlining a new U.S. policy toward al Qaeda, Afghanistan and Massoud. It had been many months in the drafting. The Bush Administration’s senior national security team had not begun to focus on al Qaeda until April, about three months after taking office. They did not forge a policy approach until July. Then they took yet more weeks to schedule a meeting to ratify their plans.
Among other things, the draft document revived almost in its entirety the CIA plan to aid Massoud that had been forwarded to the lame duck Clinton White House–and rejected–about nine months earlier. The stated goal of the draft was to eliminate bin Laden and his organization. Its provisions included a plan for a large but undetermined amount of covert action funds to support Massoud in his war against the Taliban.
The CIA would supply Massoud with trucks, uniforms, ammunition, mortars, helicopters and other equipment to be determined by the agency and the White –House later. The Cabinet approved this part of the draft document, and the CIA was told that it could at least start the paperwork for a new covert policy–the first in a decade that sought to influence the course of the Afghan war.
In the Panjshir Valley, unaware of these developments, Massoud read Persian poetry in his bungalow in the early hours of September 9. Later that morning he finally decided to grant an interview to the two Arab journalists visiting from Kabul. As one of them set up a television camera, the other read out a list of questions he intended to ask. About half of them concerned Osama bin Laden.
The bomb secretly packed in the television equipment ripped the cameraman’s body apart. It smashed the room’s windows, seared the walls in flame, and tore Massoud’s chest with shrapnel.
Hours later, after Massoud had been evacuated to Tajikistan, his intelligence aide Amrullah Saleh called the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. He spoke to Rich, the bin Laden unit chief. Saleh was sobbing and heaving between sentences as he explained what had happened.
“Where’s Massoud?” Rich asked.
“He’s in the refrigerator,” said Saleh, searching for the English word for morgue.
Massoud was dead, but his inner circle had barely absorbed the news. They were all in shock. They were also trying to strategize in a hurry. They had already put out a false story claiming that Massoud had only been wounded. Meanwhile, Saleh told the Counterterrorist Center, the suddenly leaderless Northern Alliance needed the CIA’s help as it prepared to confront al Qaeda and the Taliban.
On the morning of September 10, the CIA’s daily classified briefings to President Bush, his Cabinet, and other policy makers reported on Massoud’s death and analyzed the consequences for America’s covert war against al Qaeda. Officers in the Counterterrorist Center, still hopeful that they could maintain a foothold in northern Afghanistan to attack bin Laden, scrambled to find a way to aid the rump Northern Alliance before it was eliminated. Massoud’s advisers and lobbyists tried to keep alive speculation that Massoud might still be alive. But privately, as September 10 wore on many of the Afghans closest to the commander came to learn that he was gone.
Hamid Karzai was in Pakistan when his brother reached him with the shocking news. Karzai had spoken to Massoud a few days earlier. He was considering a plan to fly into Massoud’s territory, work his way south, and open an armed rebellion against the Taliban–with or without U.S. support. Karzai reacted to Massoud’s death with a single, brief sentence, as his brother recalled it: “What an unlucky country.”
