Blowback - S4 Episode 3 - "The Trap"

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

The USSR invades, and the Safari Club kicks things up a notch.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

We're a weekly public affairs program. Our guest today is Texas Congressman Charles Wilson. So why aren't we supplying more things to the freedom fighters? Well, it's a very good question. I think we should, and I think the Congress is going to insist that we do. Has the United States provided any aid to the Afghanistan people? Well, that is a military secret. But President Sadat, before he was assassinated, on television on the world.

Worldwide Television announced that somebody was purchasing arms from Egypt and other countries that had Eastern Block arms. And he wasn't, it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to figure out who that is. Speak about this lush sun! Speak about this lush sign! Welcome to blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is Season 4, Episode 3, The Trap. Last episode, we witnessed the origins of Western meddling in Afghanistan.

In the 1970s, the United States and the United Kingdom back. criminals and religious fanatics inside of the country. Working with Pakistan, the Shah of Iran, and even the anti-Soviet Chinese communists, this anti-Soviet axis trained and funded the soon-to-be deadly force of Mujahideen. But to the surprise of all, including the Soviet Union, in 1978, the Afghan Communist Party launched a coup, dubbing it the April Revolution. Afghans in the countryside did not take kindly to the left-wing theoreticians in Kabul. Communist leader Hafizullah Amin was beginning to look more and more, like the Afghan's own Paul Pot.

While the Afghan Revolution ran off the rails, the anti-communist alliance channeled even more money and material to the jihadis. By the very end of the 1970s, the country was nearing a state of civil war. For a whole year, the Afghan government, begged the Soviets to send troops, and the Soviets, wary of a Vietnam-style quagmire, refused, until it looked like either Amin or the Islamic militants, or both, were about to turn Afghanistan into a true basket case just south of the Soviet border. If the Americans and their allies had set an Afghan trap,

as the jihad's mastermind Zbigno Brzezinski later called it, the Soviets had decided how, reluctantly, to step right into its jaws. of Christmas Eve, 1979. Andre Greshaw, a Soviet interpreter in Kabul, was frying up potatoes. As Andre quibbled with a comrade on just how much salt to apply to the spuds,

the blaze of Soviet guns lit up the dark streets outside. By now Afghan president, Hafizullah Amin, had run afoul of his comrades both in Kabul and Moscow. He'd retreated with his inner circle from the presidential palace to an alternative hideout. several miles to the southwest. Many rings of troops and tanks defended the place. In preparing their assault,

Soviet commanders told their men that Amin had betrayed the April Revolution, says the British diplomat turned historian, Roderick Braithwaite. Thousands of innocent people had been killed on his orders. He was in contact with the CIA. He therefore had to be eliminated. Hours earlier, Hafezila Amin had not been hiding from incoming Soviet troops, but celebrating their arrival. At a lunch party, he boasted to his colleagues how he had managed to charm the Soviets,

despite his recent crackdown on their allies. But suddenly, in the middle of lunch, Amin went limp. His aides sent for doctors. In a darkly comic turn, the medical staff were all Soviets, none of whom had any idea that the KGB had just attempted to bump off the president. In saving his life, writes Braithwaite, the Soviet doctors did not know that they had frustrated a plan to simplify the whole Soviet military operation by putting a mean out of action before it began.

The Kremlin, in fact, had tried to the very last minute, writes Braithwaite, to quietly remove Amin from power. But with that option off the table, Soviet troops sprung into action. The Muslim battalion, made up of Soviet Central Asian recruits, led the charge. Things got off to a rocky start, writes Braithwaite. Almost as soon as they started, one of the infantry fighting vehicle stopped. The driver had lost his nerve, jumped out of the vehicle, and fled. He returned almost immediately.

Things were even more frightening outside. The vehicles crashed through the first barrier, the sound of bullets rattling against the armor of their vehicles. One man slipped as he jumped out, and his legs were crushed under his vehicle. Breaking into Amin's palace, the Soviet soldiers lost each other in the haze of smoke and the rattle of guns. but friendly fire was avoided through yet more black comedy. Quote, the Russians were swearing horribly, using the choicest words in the Russian lexicon,

and it was this that enabled them to identify one another in the darkness. Despite their orders to take no prisoners, the Soviets chose to spare the captured loyalists to Amin. The man himself, however, was found dead after the firefight. Amin's body, Braithwaite writes, was rolled up in a carpet and taken out to be buried in a secret grave. Having taken out the chief target, the Soviets secured other key sites in Kabul, from the Army's general staff building to the radio and TV center. Back at the palace in the night's last moment of black comedy, quote, Soviet soldiers heard rustling in the elevator shaft.

They assumed that Amin's people were launching a counter-eat-exam. attack. They sprang to arms, fired their automatic weapons, and hurled grenades. As it turns out, it was just the palace cat. The Soviet Union had sent around 80,000 soldiers into Afghanistan, using a vast old road that snakes around the country's mountains and connects all the major cities. Soviet aircraft landed, quote, practically nonstop. at Kabul and Baghrum. Both officers and soldiers grumbled about the troop levels at the time. They didn't think it was even close to enough to keep order. Russian military experts later

calculated that they would have needed between 30 and 35 divisions to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan, writes Braithway, to close the frontiers, secure the cities, road networks, and passes, and to eliminate the possibility of armed resistance. The soldiers, he writes, were told that they were going to support the ordinary Afghan people against the counter-revolution and that they had to get there before the Americans did. But as far as the White House was concerned, the Americans had already gotten there. The General Assembly of the United Nations continued debating the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan today. Moscow's ambassador to the UN, Oleg Trojanovsky, delivered a long speech in which he charged American politicians

and leaders in Peking are artificially heating. up the so-called Afghan situation, as he put it, so they can turn the wheel of international affairs backward to times of enmity and military hysteria. The Afghan Mujahideen, made up of local tribal leaders, nationalists, and anti-communists, was by now already receiving cash, training, and guns from the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and China. The commanders favored by this foreign access, as we've discussed in episode one, where the photogenic but thuggish Akhmed Shah Masoud, the openly sadistic Golbadine Hekmetyar, and mentor to Osama bin Laden Abdul Sayyaf. Bin Laden, too, would by now be working with Sayyaf to recruit and train Arabs from around

the Muslim world. Among the Islamic charities used to recruit for the jihad was the Al-Qaeda Afghan Afghan Refugee Center in Brooklyn, New York, about a 20-minute walk from where we're recording this show. There, recruits could find military training, and not just training for war in Afghanistan, but training to carry out assassinations, bombings, and terror elsewhere around the world. From the late 70s to around 1982, the Afghan program was relatively modest, at least if you compare the hundreds of thousands of dollars it was getting to the billions that

would come down the road. The CIA's mission, despite Brzezinski's vision of a new great game, was to more or less bog down the Russians, keep the war going, bleed them dry, rather than turn the tide for the mujahideen in any major way. Still, as the original head of the program, the blue-blooded Howard Hart, would later describe his role, quote, not since Vietnam had an American been responsible for putting so many men into battle. Journalist George Cryo writes that Hart, in charge of a quiet but growing operation in Afghanistan, was the first CIA officer ever to be given the mandate to kill America's true enemy, the troops of the Red Army.

When Afghans woke up the day after the storming of Amin's palace, writes Braithwaite. Afghanistan had a new government, and the small boys were back selling cigarettes around the ruined government communications conduit, as if nothing had happened. It was a cold and sunny day, and people were wandering the streets, congratulating one another that Amin had been overthrown. The move against Amin's palace, despite the chaos experienced by the Soviet troops, had produced no civilian casualties. On Radio Kabul, one could hear the announcement by Amin's former political rivals. Quote, today the torture machine of Amin has been smashed.

New president Babrak Karmal, the more gradualist Soviet-friendly alternative to Amin, led a march on a so-called day of morning to mosques, presenting memorials to the scores of people who had been killed under Amin. The gates of the Kabul prisons were thrown open, and thousands of prisoners now poured out into the streets. One Soviet advisor recalls, quote, They greeted our soldiers warmly, gave them flowers, and called them friends and liberators. But just as soon as the Soviet troops had shown up, the Politburo was scheming how to get them out.

The aim was not to take over or occupy the country, writes Braithwaite. It was to secure the towns and the roads between them and to withdraw as soon as the Afghan government and its armed forces were in a state to take over responsibility. Many Afghans agreed with this aim, as one soldier recalled local residents telling him, We are glad to see you, but you will be very well advised to leave again as soon as you can. Some in the Soviet leadership and bureaucracy were already seeing disaster on the horizon. Soon, quote, one of Moscow's most prestigious, think tanks sent a stinging analysis to the Central Committee. However, the paper was too late.

U.S. intelligence analysts now believe that there is imminent danger of some kind of Soviet military action into northwestern Pakistan. The United States slammed the Soviet invasion within hours. But something was odd. A few years earlier, Washington had called the Afghan Communist Revolution a Soviet-backed coup, Only nine months before this moment, Washington had pegged Hafezilla Amin as, quote, hopelessly pro-Soviet, end quote. Yet once Soviet troops took Amin out, Jimmy Carter mourned the regime as one, quote, struggling to retain a modicum of independence from their huge neighbor.

CIA analyst turned historian Raymond Garthoff asks the question. Which was it? Massive Soviet military forces have invaded the small, unaligned sovereign nation of Afghanistan, which had hitherto not been an occupied satellite of the Soviet Union. Insofar as the local Afghan aspect was concerned, Garthoff writes, there is no indication that any attention was given to the Soviet motivation or the political situation within Afghanistan.

By Garthoff's estimate, both the Soviet line that Amin had invited them in to overthrow him, and Jimmy Carter's, quote-unquote, posthumous promotion of Amin as an independent leader were, quote, equal departures from reality. And so the U.S. put forward a resolution at the United Nations, condemning the Soviet invasion, making no mention of the army the CIA was funding inside Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Americans also slapped an embargo on grain exports to the USSR, which required Jimmy Carter to compensate American farmer. for their loss of business.

The next U.S. initiative was a boycott of the Moscow Olympics. On January 22nd, 1980 at the International Olympic Committee's headquarters in La Zan, the telex has never stopped chattering or the telephones ringing as the full implications of President Carter's ultimatum of the night before began to sink in. Quote, only China, Japan, West Germany, and Canada joined the U.S. in a full boycott. According to IOC regulations, only a major breach of Olympic rules are a world. World War could stop the Moscow Games from proceeding as planned.

Meanwhile, National Security Advisor Zabignu Brzezinski flew to Pakistan for immediate talks with its new dictator, General Zia. The goal was to loosen up congressional restrictions on financial aid. During the first meeting, Brzezinski agreed to Zia's rule for the anti-Soviet alliance, that all arms, supplies, and finance and training of the fighters must go through Pakistan. This cash machine that Prasinski turned on would eventually give Pakistan $4.2 billion in cash, high-tech weapons, and unprecedented diplomatic support under the incoming Reagan administration. Near the end of January 1980, Carter stepped up the rhetoric.

He claimed the Soviet Union's Afghan adventure was in fact a move to conquer Western oil supplies. Let our position be absolutely clear. An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America. And such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force. From the novel Scoop by Evil and Waugh. Many of Corker's anecdotes dealt with the fabulous Wenlock Jakes. Once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals,

he overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn't know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter. You know. Well, they were pretty surprised at his office, getting a story like that from the wrong country. But they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national newspapers. That day, every special in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution. Everything seemed quiet enough, but they chimed in too. Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny, and,

in less than a week, there was an honest-to-god revolution underway. Just as Jakes had said, there's the power of the press for you. The American reporter Philip Bonoski was dumbfounded when he arrived in Kabul in early 1980. The thing I was supposed to see first, I did not see at all. I saw no Soviet soldiers. You had read in the press that you would find Kabul choked with Russian tanks, and you were prepared to find them, but found none, except when, pushing through the tangled, uncontrolled traffic,

you broke into Revolutionary Square, and there it was, that minimal Russian tank. Even writers taking a clear line against the USSR, such as one David Klein in the Christian Science Monitor, had to note that, quote, Soviet troops now have largely removed themselves to barracks and other behind-the-scenes positions. Klein admitted seeing only a single Soviet tank, which sat near his hotel. This underwhelming picture didn't quite live up to Jimmy Carter's declaration of, quote, The most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War.

Much like the click of reporters in Waugh's novel, The Western journalists piling into Afghanistan were herded by American agents. The moment their plane set down at the airport, they made a mad dash for the embassy, writes Benoski. And there, quickly debriefed by an officer, they were free to quote, but not to name the source. And by nightfall, the reporters already know all they need to know about the situation. Who the main actors are, what the main elements of the crisis are, and where the nearest bar is. Now, a member of a well-place and influential Afghan family has fled to India,

and because of his family's position, was able to give journalists the most detailed account so far. In February 1980, the New York Times reported from Pakistan that, quote, Vice President Sultan Ali Keshmet of Afghanistan died after unsuccessful treatment in Moscow. This piece of news puzzled Bonowski and his Afghan friends, who had just seen Keshmat and soon saw him again? You would think a false obituary of an Afghan leader would be a rarity, but the Times and other papers seemed determined to pile up the bodies of the Afghan government. Next on the hit list was Lieutenant Colonel Mohamed Rafi,

who was repeatedly and falsely reported as assassinated or killed in some shootout. Then, in July, the New York Times reported, Afghan education minister Anahida Ratibzad was shot to death, Monday in Kabul. The Associated Press stacked an error upon that error, reporting that yet another official was killed with her. But Radabzad and her colleague were very much alive. Sometimes, though not always, these fabrications would get corrected. The Washington Post, for example, quote, in the Pakistan capital of Islamabad in January, a reliable West European diplomat told an inquiring reporter that his country's embassy in Kabul was reporting heavy fighting around the

airport, with Soviet-MIG fighters seen striking around the city, the post, acting on two different sources, carried a front-page story of the fighting. The only problem is that it never took place. The license taken by U.S. reporters had become somewhat infamous among journalists on the scene. Later in January, the London Telegraph wrote, quote, The American Embassy in Kabul has been consistently putting out exaggerated reports of rebel victories which other diplomats consider reflect badly on the United States's credibility and provide an over-optimistic impression of insurgent capability. Exceptions to this rule, such as CBS reporters Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould,

had a hard time getting stories picked up. Under contract with CBS News, the images of Afghanistan life that we filmed, they write, showed a picture far more complex and nuanced than the dualistic black and white. With the U.S. and Saudi financed insurgency from Pakistan burning schools, toppling power lines and murdering any and all elected officials they could find, communist or otherwise, the Afghan PDPA could do little but maintain previous reforms. The new Afghan president had looked into Fitzgerald and Gould's camera lens and insisted as soon as the U.S. and Saudi and Pakistan war against the government stopped,

there would be no need for Soviet troops. The couple was shocked to return to the U.S. and found that their exclusive report, which had been filed four weeks after their return, focused only on the presence of Soviet troops that we did not see, while not even bothering to air the conditions laid out by the Afghan president by which the Soviet troops might be withdrawn. A few years later, the couple struck out again at ABC News, where they were greeted with, quote, blank stares by the nightline staff upon our return from Afghanistan. Their reporting was rejected out of hand, and they were relegated to a panel after midnight on a Thursday, making the case for negotiation to end the war. On cue, they were rebuked by an anti-Soviet Russian, who said from a studio in New York that he was confident nothing would ever cause the Soviets to withdraw. Nightline then cut straight to a political officer of Golbodine Hekmet-Yar's party, which Ted Koppel described as, quote, an anti-communist resistance group based in Pakistan. It was significant that the first high-ranking woman in Afghanistan's government,

Anahita Retebzad, was Minister of Education. Despite the New York Times' false report of her death, many women in Afghanistan benefited from her ministry's programs. Unfortunately, this now meant that those teachers and schools and their pupils were now, favorite targets of the rising Mujahideen. In Herod on April 25th, reported Moscow news, counter-revolutionaries fired on a local high school building with grenade dischargers and submachine guns. In the Lachman province, a school bus was attacked.

Eleven school children were killed and 16 wounded. Five other children were blown up by a gorilla planted mine near a school in Masari Sharif. Elsewhere, a time bomb was found quite recently in a Kabul University building. Two other such bombs were diffused in the courtyard of another Kabul school. You could find confirmation of this phenomenon outside of the communist press, especially before the invasion or even early on. The head of a Mujahideen training camp spoke to the New York Times for a piece published in January 1980.

The communists, he tells the paper, wanted to send everybody to their schools. even the old men and women with ten children. So we killed the teacher, who was a communist, and fled. Another Times article, also in January, reported how Gubedin Hekbatyar's party passed out photos to journalists showing the execution of, quote, communist high school teachers. Bonovsky, for his part, reports that almost 1,500 schools had been burnt down since December 1979 by the Mujahideen. U.S. national security advisor Brzezinski flew to Pakistan to set about rallying resistance.

He wanted to arm the Mujahideen without revealing America's role. On the Afghan border near the Kaiba Pass, he urged the soldiers of God to redouble their efforts. We know of their deep belief in God, and we are confident that their struggle will succeed. That's summer. Brzezinski pushed through a succession of presidential directives that were designed to wage a nuclear war. According to Brzezinski himself, for the first time, the U.S. deliberately sought for itself the capabilities to manage a protracted nuclear conflict. And Directive 59 required the United States to develop the capability to win a nuclear war that would last for months on end. You know, that land over there is yours, you'll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail

and you'll have your homes and your mosques back again, because your cause is right and God is on your side. As things continued to spiral, the Soviets dug in, fearing that a withdrawal would destroy their credibility and leave their retreating troops, opened to slaughter by the Mujahideen. The cracks in their military strategy began to show. Unlike many of their American counterparts, writes Braithwaite, the Soviet generals had no recent experience of managing large numbers of troops in battle,

and they did not have the equipment, the training, the doctrine, or the experience to fight a counterinsurgency war in the mountains of Afghanistan. Here there were no great set pieces, no battles that turned the tide. just a slow, confusing, and exhausting slog. The Mujahideen took some territory, the Soviets retook it,

only to withdraw and to watch the Mujahideen take it again. Both sides aimed for the same goal, choke off your enemy's supply routes, and quote, for their part, Braithwaite writes, the Russians raided villages suspected of harboring rebels, struck into the mountains to destroy their bases and disperse their men, mounted counter-ambushes, and mine to the roots, along which the Mujahideen moved.

Their operations were supported by transport and battle helicopters. The inevitable result was a heavy loss of life and property among the civilian population. Hundreds of people could die in one day. A 1985 booklet printed for Red Army soldiers reads, quote, Remember that you are a representative of the army and be worthy of your historical mission.

Know and respect the customs of the local people, even if they do not correspond to your own. Be very careful to respect Afghan women. Do not interfere with a Muslim at prayer and do not go into a mosque without a very good reason. There are strict injunctions against trading, especially in narcotics. The booklet ends, quote,

Soldier, remember, you are criminally responsible for military crimes under the criminal code, whether committed negligently, carelessly, or deliberately. But in a guerrilla war with mounting civilian casualties, the manual was just a manual. Quote, the Soviet military prosecutors in Afghanistan had to deal with the whole range of military crimes, writes Braithwaite. Those found guilty were given harsh sentences of imprisonment, sent to disciplinary battalions back in the Soviet Union, and were occasionally shot. By the end of the war, over 2,500 Soviet soldiers were serving prison sentences, more than 200

for crimes of premeditated murder. And despite the sanctions, Breithwaite writes, soldiers committed many brutal acts individually or in groups. The excuse often was, they did it to us, so we have a right to do it to them. Indeed, fear of the Majahedin began to haunt the Soviet troops at night. Many claimed that they would rather commit suicide rather than surrender to them. And some followed through with that. They heard tales of fearsome and fearless holy warriors

and their methods hacking off of noses and genitals, etc. Quote, one minor mujahideen leader boasted that he had made a practice of half-skinned Russian prisoners after a successful ambush, leaving them alive, surrounded by booby traps, to catch the Soviet rescue teams. The USSR's 40th Army, writes Tariq Ali, responded in kind.

One soldier described how, after lobbing a grenade into a village house, he went in to inspect the results. He had killed an old woman and a few children. A younger woman and other children were still moving. He shot them dead, hurling another grenade in afterwards, just to make sure. One rebel prisoner was interviewed about the rural population's attitude towards Soviet soldiers.

Part of the population, of course, supports the present communist regime. But those who do that are already infidels, and they will have to pay for the blood of Muslims that they have shed. Some people cut off heads, others don't. I prefer to sell my enemy for cash to people who are willing to buy. Inside the halls of the Central Intelligence Agency,

you could probably find everything but a severed Russian head. Against sterile walls hung a funhouse of trophies, memorabilia, and internal propaganda. There were heads of the shrunken variety and, quote, menacing masks from Indonesia, and in one wing, a huge picture of the young Shah of Iran entitled The Hope of Democracy. Inside the Afghan-Pakistan branch, past a vault door, hung a doctored photograph, showing a Russian tank with the hammer and sickle insignia looming in front of the the houses of parliament. The inscription, this year Afghanistan, next year, London. By 1982, the Near East Division belonged to Gust Avrakotos, who had just barely avoided getting stuck

on Reagan's doomed Contras project. Why not come upstairs, a superior had asked him, we are killing Russians. Avrakotos ran a small office, which he referred to as the dirty dozen. It would remain an article of pride with Gus that the core group stayed small, even as the program grew to almost a billion dollars a year, writes George Croyle. But in fact, quote, the numbers were deceptive, because his 14 agents were able to draw upon hundreds of agency people. Let's meet the team. There was Dwayne, an intel analyst who struggled with polio, and for Gus was a walking encyclopedia. There was Larry or the New York Jew,

a former Latin American specialist who was now Gus's consigliary. The balding bug-eyed Larry was also a lawyer, and that turned out to be immensely valuable to Gus, cryal writes, who was convinced that if he listened to the agency's in-house lawyers, nothing would be possible. These aren't terrorist devices or assassination techniques, Larry would find a way to argue, while approving what most would call, well, terrorist devices and assassination techniques.

There was hilly-billy in charge of moving all the money through black markets and shady banks. Have you ever tried to open an unnumbered Swiss bank account for the U.S. government? Avrocodas asked his biographer. It takes six months because of all the red tape. But this guy, hilly-billy, he could do it in 12 hours. Billy hung a sign over his desk that read, quote, war is not cheap. Now Avicotos runs down a typical spreadsheet for guns and money.

It was like the old days when the Italians would produce shoes for $40, and the Chinese would come in at $2 for the same thing. For example, AK-47s on the black market were going for $299. Once I got the Egyptians to start up a production line, the price went down to $139. With the Chinese in it, I was able to get them for less than $100. Then there was Art Alper, veteran of the Office of Technical Services, the wing of the CIA responsible for the deadly tools and potions used around the world.

Avricotos described Art as something of a bureaucratic misfit. He's fat, and people passed him over. But two out of ten of Art's ideas were great. As a demolitions expert, Art was in charge of, quote, ever more lethal ways of killing Russians. I took people no one wanted, says Avricotos. Half the teammates had been divorced, including him. Everyone worked six and a half days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day.

After work, we only went out with agency people. We drank with them, we slept with them, and if you were lucky, you'd get laid three times a week. Always with an agency person. And one Sunday a month, I'd head for deal, Maryland, and eat crabs and smell salt water. From the very start of the war, as we've seen, the U.S. press groped around to piece together a government-approved narrative. The media would, quote, kill stories that lent credence to Afghan and Soviet complaints of a secret U.S. war, right Fitzgerald and Gould,

while lionizing Golbedeen Hekmatyar's heroin dealing Mujahideen. But it wasn't until April of 1980 that a perfect package of propaganda arrived. I'm standing on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, a border that is now closed to most everyone except refugees fleeing the Soviet invasion. These Afghan clothes I'm wearing were part of an operation to sneak me and a CBS News film crew into Afghanistan. CBS reporter Dan Rather delivered a special on 60 minutes, and, per Fitzgerald and Gould, set, quote, a radically new pro-military standard for post-Vietnam American reporters. Rather had smuggled himself into Afghanistan, dressing up as an Afghan freedom fighter. Because an American would stand out like a beacon in those

mountains, the resistance fighters disguised us as one of them. This less than subtle get-up inspired TV critic Tom Shales to give rather the nickname Gunga Dan. Shales criticized his report, purely from a production standpoint. He summed it up as, quote, punchy, crunchy, highly dramatic, and essentially uninformative. Rather wore peasant togs that made him look like an extra out of Dr. Javago. There was one other dominant theme to the report, Shales wrote,

and that was that the gallant, ill-equipped resistance fighters desperately need American arms. There was an even darker side to Rathers' report, right, Paul and Liz. Quote, standing by as a Mujahideen fighter executed a captured Afghan army soldier for the camera. Rather would later be tried

in absentia in Afghanistan and found guilty of complicity in the murder. J. Peterzell of the Center for National Security Studies later said, quote, by relying almost entirely on the statements of Afghan rebels and a Pakistani information officer, rather managed to consolidate popular misconceptions about the war into one high-impact, coast-to-coast broadcast. Rather even told viewers at home that, quote, no country is providing arms and ammunition to the Majahadine Freedom Fighters. The overall theme, which has lived on to this very day, was, quote, Russia's own Vietnam. Now, this framing had already been conceived directly within the U.S. intelligence community,

and it was propagated through friendly members of the media, like Rather. Part of it was run by Alvin A. Snyder, a. Snyder, a media executive, turned director of the U.S. Information Agency. Snyder later said that, quote, the war in Afghanistan was the American government's made-for-TV movie. A public relations dream come true for Washington. There was Radio Free Kabul,

modeled after other Cold War networks like Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia. NGOs like the newborn International Rescue Committee and Freedom House assembled a coterie of lawyers, publicists, and socialites from New York and Washington. All were briefed by U.S. officials and policymakers to enforce a more or less singular message in their coverage. These entities had interlocking boards of directors that featured Zabignu Brazinski and CIA director Bill Casey.

One group, the Committee for a Free Afghanistan, could tout lawmakers such as John McCain, Barney Frank, and a very special congressman named Charlie Wilson. Among the millions of Americans who tuned into Rather's fraudulent report was Texas Democrat Charlie Wilson. The hard-drinking playboy congressman began to eat up all the news he could find about these Mujahideen. Wilson, writes his biographer George Crile, found himself thinking of the Alamo. He picked up the phone for the defense appropriation subcommittee. How much are we giving the Afghans, he asked. Five million, answered the staffer.

There was a moment's silence. Double it. What have you learned over there? What's the situation? Well, it's too bad that the American people are not privy to the situation there because it's one area in which the good guys are winning, believe it or not. Congressman Charlie Wilson's pilgrimage from Houston to Kabul ran through the party circuit of one lone star socialite, Joanne Herring.

Herring, writes Cryle, was, quote, a glamorous and exotic figure out of the oil-rich world of Texas in the 1970s and 80s. In the pivotal first years of the jihad, she became both matchmaker and muse to Pakistan's Muslim fundamentalist military dictator Zia al-Hawk, as well as to the scandal-prone Charlie Wilson. A combination of Scarlett O'Hara, Zhajah Gabor, and Dali Parton,

Herring was also a card-carrying reactionary, an active member of the so-called minute women, an offshoot of the ultra-right paramilitary minute men. In the society pages, you could learn of Joanne Herring's toga parties, where, in performance of the theme, quote, slave girls were auctioned off. Christians were burned to the accompaniment of fireworks. To lend some authenticity, ten-year-old black boy scouts,

playing the role of Nubian slaves, moved about the gathering of Roman-clad socialites, filling their crystal goblets with wine. Guests at these functions included the king of Sweden, Anwar Sadat, King Hussein of Jordan, Princess Grace of the United Kingdom, the Shah of Iran,

and Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Oh, and the chief of the French intelligence service, the Count de Marantz. In other words, the whole safari club was there. Joanne Herring's mission was global. One of her pet projects was raising money for the African warlord Jonah Savimbi, the Christian anti-communist working with the CIA and apartheid South Africa to destroy Marxists in Angola. But it was in Pakistan that she, quote, plunged into the villages on fact-finding. missions, giving poverty-stricken Muslims inspirational talks on capitalism, and inspiring

hope with her idea that each village could get rich, selling beautifully made dresses and rugs designed by her famous friends. In Islamabad, General Zia quickly won her heart, says Kryle. All the more unusual, given that Zia was in the process of re-imposing fundamentalist restrictions on women. And so, as Quile puts it, in the middle of Charlie Wilson's Lost Weekend, a curious romance began between him and Herring, with much talk of Christ, anti-communism, and General Zia.

The jihad and Afghanistan was not the only alliance between the U.S. government and Islamic militants during this time. Before the November election of 1980, the Reagan campaign and Israel colluded with Iran to sabotage Jimmy Carter's return of the American hostages in Tehran. BCCI, the Shadow Bank, processed a deal in which U.S. weapons would be slipped from Israel to Iran. And so the worldwide alliance of America and Islamic fundamentalism continued to grow. Michael Springman, former head of the U.S. Visa Bureau in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, later recalled this period. In Saudi Arabia, I was repeatedly ordered by high-level state department officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama bin Laden, to the United States for terrorist training by the CIA.

They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets. Muhammad Zia Lhawk, a quiet man with a humble manner, had by the late 70s risen to the top of the food chain in the Pakistani army. He took advantage of the chaos surrounding the incumbent government and launched a coup in 1977, declaring martial law and sending his predecessor Zofikar Ali Bhutto to the gallows. What was the Zia agenda? Military government, death to socialism, implementation of Islamic law, a nuclear bomb for Pakistan,

and closer relations with the United States of America. After the military coup, Carter had offered Pakistan a whole new aid package, courting them for the anti-Soviet access. But Zia was insulted by the offer of $400 million, calling it, quote, peanuts. But once in power, the Reagan administration took Zia's allegiance far more serious. It upped the package by a factor of 10, handing General Zia over $4.2 billion in funds. Take a guess what they were used for. The Reagan administration openly advised General Zia to use Islamic law to clamp down on dissent and order his country. Zia's personal religious belief would, of course, factor into his role in the Afghan jihad.

In 1971, there had been only 900 madrasas in all of Pakistan, Steve Cole reports. By the summer of 1988, there were about 8,000 official religious schools, and an estimated 25,000 unregistered ones. Many of them clustered along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, and funded by wealthy patrons from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Take a guess what these were used for. In 1982, Joanne Herring hosted a grand party for General Zia at the Houstonian Hotel. According to George Crile, at this time, quote, the Reagan administration was trying to encourage Zia to hold the line in Pakistan against the Soviets. And this state visit was part of that persuasion.

process. Joanne had Charlie Wilson scurrying about from table to table, changing the place cards up until the very last moments, and she even banned alcohol that evening. Before this odd charity ball kicked off, Herring, quote, rose to introduce the Pakistani leader. I want you all to know, she said, that President Zia did not kill the former Pakistani leader, Zofikar Ali Buto. Even her right-wing baronist friends win. as Herring proceeded to deliver an impassioned defense of Zia's role in the hanging of his predecessor, Cryo Wrights. After the somewhat uncomfortable toes to Zia's non-involvement in the murder,

the party got started, and the deals got done. Congressman Charlie Wilson, Quiro writes, had a novel proposition for the Muslim dictator. Would Zia be willing to deal with the Israelis? Back in Kabul, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was scrambling to stabilize the countryside. People were willing to cooperate with authorities, writes Braithwaite, but on one condition, that they were adequately protected against retaliation from the rebels. This condition could not be met even in the vicinity of the major Soviet bases.

The authorities might control the territory by day, but the rebels controlled it by night. The revolutionary agenda, once a mad dash under Hafizullah Amin, was scaled back considerably. Now it sought not to confront, but win over the less extreme mullahs and the business class. But the question was still nagging at the Soviets. Were the Afghan communists a day late and several dollars short? They're rolling hand grenades down to barrels of gun barrels of tanks. The Russians are suffering a lot of cash. and the morale is very bad.

The soldiers are all drunk all the time. They're trading hashish for gasoline, and the Russians don't quite know what to do about it. Charlie Wilson, meanwhile, had apparently succeeded in getting General Zia to join up with Israel in supporting the Afghan jihad. Pakistan was now one of several Muslim states working with Israel, but it remained a deadly secret.

writes Tarik Ali, quote, In 1985, a young Pakistani journalist accidentally stumbled across a group of Israeli advisers, quote-unquote, at the bar of the intercontinental hotel in Peshawar. Aware that the news would be explosive for the Zia dictatorship, the journalist informed his editor. A few days later, the Mujahideen, alerted by Pakistan's ISI, captured the journalist and killed him. Having now bonded with General Zia on a trip to Pakistan,

Charlie Wilson stepped into his role in the jihad, not a central role, as his biographer and Hollywood tend to frame it. After all, CIA director, former World War II spy, and Knight of Malta, Bill Casey, had been backing the operation with more enthusiasm year after year. But Charlie Wilson played a crucial role nonetheless. As a canny politician and effectively a CIA asset, he would sing the Mujahideen's song in the halls of Congress, legitimize them, provide another revenue stream, and a legal one to boot.

As Wilson himself put it, by this time, I had everyone in Congress convinced that the Mouge were a cause only slightly below Christianity. I told the conservatives it was time we fucked the Russians, told the liberals it would prove that they were against communism, even if they didn't support the Contras. Wilson schmoosed and flirted with the freedom most CIA agents did not have. This rankled some of the blue bloods inside the agency, not least the original head of the Afghan program, Howard Hart. He found Wilson, quote unquote, repugnant. But by 1982, Hart had been replaced by the cunning, earthy, Pennsylvania, Gus Avricotos, who took a shine

to Charlie Wilson. Charlie, like Gust, wanted the Afghan program to go even bigger, bigger guns, bigger budgets, and a bigger army of jihadis. The two became partners in crime, with Wilson playing the pitchman, Avrakotos, the enforcer. In 1983, quote, Congress had appropriated only $15 million for the Afghans that year, and it was concealed in an Air Force appropriation, writes George Criol. though, with matching Saudi funds, that $15 million became $30 million.

And by the late 1980s, American and Saudi funds would catapult the budget into the billions, making Operation Cyclone, as it was now called, the most vast and expensive CIA operation in the institution's history. Meanwhile, in the propaganda war, there was one more campaign at work, one familiar to listeners of the show. Allegations of WM.D. First alleged by Dan Rather, who had been told by Mujahideen and Pakistani officials, the U.S. government let the rumors simmer a bit before repeating them itself. In September of 1981, Reagan's Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, told the world that the Soviet Union had been using chemical weapons in Laos, Cambodia, and Afghanistan. The next month, the word was, there was a smoking gun. The State Department declared, quote, over the past five years

and perhaps longer, but not too long, adds Filipinoski, because that would run you into the American war in Vietnam, weapons outlawed by mankind have been used against unsophisticated people in campaigns of mounting extermination in Laos, Cambochia, and Afghanistan. And the State Department concluded that the United States had, quote, no evidence for this statement. So much for the smoking gun. That evidence would never arrive, not in the case of Afghanistan, nor Laos, nor Cambodia. In fact, whereas the American use of Agent Orange in Vietnam is thoroughly documented and still an active health issue in that country, attempts to prove the same by the Soviets in

Afghanistan have been refuted. Meanwhile, the U.S. stockpile of chemical weapons at that time could be counted in millions of shells, as the Nation magazine observed. Over $1 billion was still being allocated to produce them. And, per the Los Angeles Times, Congress eagerly supported Reagan's plans to fund and build new chemical warfare facilities to produce more nerve gas. The reason cited was, what else? Reported use of tear gas and incapacitating gases by Soviet troops in Afghanistan. When interviewed by Congress on the rumors of Russian chemical weapons in Afghanistan, an official from the CIA said,

quote, I don't see anything wrong with letting that rumor run. Soviet nerve gas attack. In six seconds he'll be poaching on your back. Get a drop on your skin and then motions will set in. So via nerve gas attack. Soviet nerve gas is strange. In a missile with a thousand mile range. What was life like inside Afghanistan

What was life like inside Afghanistan during these first few years of the war? In the countryside, where most of the fighting went on, if you were unlucky enough to live where the Mujahideen hit out, you and your family may very well end up cut down by a Soviet MI-24 helicopter gunship, or perhaps you, your wife, husband, son, or daughter would be obliterated by a bicycle bomb,

courtesy of Gustafricotus and his team at the CIA. Maybe your children or friends working as teachers would be killed as part of a warlord's campaign against secular, un-Islamic education. Nor were the cities exempt. Quote, workers and managers were regularly threatened by the rebels, and workers were sometimes abducted and killed, but they stayed at their posts and went to work, carrying an automatic. Still, in the cities, especially Kabul, things could feel surreely normal.

Braithwaite remembers, quote, apart from the influx of foreign soldiers and some incidental damage during the fighting, life in Kabul continued comparatively unchanged in many ways. Even at that time, one woman wrote, we still went to school. We went for picnics and parties, war jeans, and short skirts. Women worked as professors and doctors, and in government. Jonathan Steele, a British journalist who was there at the time, later wrote,

two campuses thronged with women's students as well as men. Most went around without even a headscarf. Hundreds went off to Soviet universities to study engineering, agronomy, and medicine. The banqueting hall of the Kabul Hotel pulsated most nights to the excitement of wedding parties. The markets thrived, caravans of painted lorries rolled up from Pakistan, bringing Japanese TV sets, video recorders, cameras, and entertainment centers. And trade was carried on with all countries, except with Israel and South Africa. Despite their participation in the war against Afghanistan, trade was carried on with Pakistan, one of the many paradoxes that one would run into here. Soviet advisors and specialists, writes historian Ardomew.

Kalinovsky. Doug ditches, operated mines, and extracted natural gas. Their technical advisors did create tangible benefits for many Afghans. Factories provided employment. Medical clinics brought modern health services to areas where they were previously unheard of. An extraction of natural resources helped to keep the government solvent throughout most of the 1980s. But, needless to say, These benefits were poor compensation in the eyes of ordinary Afghans for the carnage wrought by revolution and war. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid sums up the growing costs of the war. There was terrible carnage, millions of Afghans fled into neighboring Pakistan and Iran.

and became refugees. This was the first major refugee crisis of the Cold War, in which three to four million refugees fled into neighboring states. And it was a war that, you know, much as today in Ukraine, it was a war that the Americans were determined to win. In 1983, U.S. negotiator Roger Fisher flew into Kabul for meetings at the Soviet embassy. Quote, his Russian counterpart informed him. The Soviets wanted out.

Should the Americans hold back their support for the Majahedin long enough to save face, Soviet troops could withdraw from the front lines, then following a short hiatus, retreat across the Amudarya River. We're not stupid, the Soviet official said, calling the invasion a mistake. We want to go home. In May 1980, six months after the invasion, Leonid Brezhnev had ordered the withdrawal of several units and told KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, to discuss the details for further withdrawal with the new Afghan president. The Soviets were trying to keep to their goal of withdrawing

within one year. By winter of 1980 into 1981, the Soviet ambassador, the Soviet ambassador to Pakistan, pushed for setting up peace talks under the United Nations. Despite the arms, training, funds, and soldiers pouring in from Pakistan, writes Kalinovsky. Soviet leaders never took serious punitive measures on Pakistan. The U.S. may have picked up on this, because it gave its ally Pakistan zero encouragement to talk to the Soviets about peace. Undeterred by autumn of 1981, Uri and Dropon, Uri Andropov, head of the KGB, and defense minister Ustinov, sponsored a paper by the foreign ministry,

proposing talks between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In a few months, Andropov would be general secretary and would head to the United Nations calling for peace negotiations. But the sponsors of the Mujahideen, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Israel, Well, the Safari Club was just getting started.