The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

orders. It was clear that he had inherited a problem, one in which he didn’t have a great personal stake. But it was also clear that he had been on the job long enough to have difficulty blaming everything on his predecessor, who, in any case, was very much under the protection of Zia.

“General,” I said, “we’re going to have to work closely together as we bring this war to some sort of a conclusion. And we’ll have to be willing to meet in executive sessions and to be as open with each other as we have been today. If Brigadier Yousaf had been with us, I doubt that we could have been as frank with each other.”

“You’re right, Milton,” Gul said. “We’ll have to keep our eyes on both the war and the politics.”

I left that meeting understanding that the armor officer was still at the low end of his learning curve. But I saw something in his eyes that told me he would take to the political side of the job, maybe even come to like it one day.

A day later, I received the first of a series of discreet telephone calls from Gul’s predecessor, General Akhtar. Would I be free for a quiet dinner at his quarters in Rawalpindi Cantonment that evening, just the two of us? I said I would.

Rawalpindi, Late April 1987

Akhtar had not moved into the quarters reserved for the chairman of the joint staffs in Rawalpindi Cantonment. He preferred instead to stay put in his old quarters because of their proximity to Zia’s residence. He received me in the driveway of his colonial bungalow and accompanied me to his dining room, where we had a working dinner of chicken tikka, creamed spinach qorma, seekh kabob, and dal, along with freshly made chapatis and roghi nan, the flat breads baked in a tandoor. Akhtar, as was his custom, ate sparingly. The meeting wasn’t about the dinner; it was about what was going on in the Afghan program since he had left.

I preempted Akhtar’s agenda with my own by asking a point-blank question. “General, Bill Casey briefed me fully on his discussions with you about operations across the Amu Dar’ya.”

“Casey was always interested in doing something up there,” Akhtar said, a note of suspicion in his voice.

“I know, but there were always other voices urging caution,” I said. “I’m afraid Bill Casey was impatient with those who didn’t appreciate his ideas for the Central Asian republics.”

“It all started with Casey’s idea to send the Uzbek-language Korans across in numbers. But then your people backed out. I think we took the idea and improved on it.”

“I’m sure you did, General. Though your operations might have been more effective than even you might have planned. There has been much discussion of some events north of Termez. . . .”

Akhtar’s defenses were up again. He looked down and fiddled with his food. When he spoke again, there was an edge of irritation in his voice. “I have heard that they may have gone a bit too far. But how can you stop those people? You and I know that they’re all the same people . . . north of the Amu Dar’ya or south of it, they’re all kin. Any problems there are of the Soviets’ own making. They drove their own people down into Afghanistan in the 1920s. Now they’re just getting paid back!”

“Of course, General, but you’ll agree that this might fall under the category of, how would President Zia put it, boiling the pot over?”

Akhtar caught the note in my voice when Zia’s name was mentioned.

“Has the president become involved in this?”

“I haven’t heard. I think it has fallen to the prime minister and to Sahabzada. Maybe that is the appropriate level for problems like this.”

“Yes,” Akhtar said, still waiting, it seemed, for the punch line.

“General, do you think Brigadier Yousaf might be encouraging these cross-border operations because of some mistaken belief that they were what you and the president and Bill Casey wanted . . . that he might be doing this without fully informing Hamid Gul?”

Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf had been involved with the operational side of the Afghan effort for the last four years and was a well-known Akhtar man. He had recently been passed over for promotion to major general and might be on his way out of the program. At least that was the scuttlebutt I’d picked up.

“Yousaf is a good soldier,” Akhtar said. “I’m certain that he’s keeping Gul advised.”

“I’m certainly relieved to hear that, General,” I said, and changed the subject to Akhtar’s latest fitness program. “How’s the treadmill working out?” I asked.

“About three miles a day,” he said. “And you, any time for exercise?”

“Just staying ahead of what’s happening around here is all I can handle,” I answered as I rose to leave.

A few days later, I would learn that Yousaf had retired from the Army, though a connection between his departure and the Uzbek operation was never clear to me. I did subsequently hear from contacts in the Army that Brigadier Yousaf was particularly critical of my stand on incursions across the Amu Dar’ya—just another example of the Americans being weak-kneed, he’d complained. Yousaf, it turned out, had a hand in planning the incursions into the USSR, though the degree of Akhtar’s own involvement remained in doubt. Problems in the Soviet Central Asian republics bordering Afghanistan would continue to plague the Soviets, but there would be no repeats of the tensions of April 1987.

   9   

Aboard the Red Arrow Express, May 1987

Jack Downing, a stocky, handsome Texan in his forties, was considered by many inside the CIA to be Hollywood’s version of a CIA case officer—a Harvard man and a Marine veteran. His father had been a naval officer who died at the Battle of Salvo Bay in World War II, and his mother had been a buyer for the original Neiman-Marcus in Dallas. Downing had been raised with high expectations and a sense of