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

Leonid Shebarshin considered the Ojhri camp explosion another good example of the abilities of Najibullah’s intelligence and security service, the Khad. He had no doubt that Khad had been behind the operation, but he also had no doubts that they had done it on their own, not in cooperation with the KGB special units in Afghanistan. Shebarshin had a deep respect for the capabilities of the Afghan special services, particularly in the area of “dirty tricks,” which is how he classified the destruction of the American and Pakistani supply dump at Ojhri camp. He was not naive enough to think that his Afghan colleagues would share with him everything they planned and felt no disappointment that the massive explosion at Ojhri could not be credited to the Soviet Committee for State Security.

It was a good operation, Shebarshin concluded, and it couldn’t have come at a better time, just days before the signing of the Geneva Accords.

Ojhri Camp, April 12, 1988

I was met at the airport and taken directly to Ojhri, where I was given a tour by Brigadier Janjua, the new officer in charge of the military assistance to the Afghans. As we walked carefully through the still smoldering rubble, I asked him how it had happened.

“We’re still investigating,” Janjua said, “but it looks like one of the porters dropped a box containing one of the new Egyptian rockets, maybe a white phosphorus one. There was an explosion and a fire in the warehouse, and while the workers were moving the wounded to safety, the fire spread out of control. In minutes the whole thing went up.”

“The Egyptian ordnance again?” I asked, shaking my head.

“The Egyptian stuff again,” Brigadier Janjua answered, anger in his voice.

There had been a history of problems with the Egyptian ordnance. In the early years of the war, the Egyptians seemed to have swept the trash out of their warehouses and packed it up along with their old and unusable ordnance and sent it off to Pakistan for the Afghan resistance. A year or so earlier, there had been a fire in Ojhri involving Egyptian white phosphorous mortar bombs. Only quick action by camp personnel had prevented a similar disaster then. In later years, however, the quality of the Egyptian supplies had improved, and there were fewer complaints. But listening to Brigadier Janjua’s initial take on the disaster, I guessed that this would be the first of many versions of what had happened—maybe even the easiest to understand.

“Was there anything anyone could have done?” I asked.

“Maybe. If they’d tried to handle the fire instead of the injured, it might have been different. But probably not. It was out of control very quickly,” Janjua answered. “After that, about all anyone could do was get out of the way. And some of our boys couldn’t even do that.”

I went from Ojhri to the embassy, where Ambassador Raphel, with the help of my deputy Philippe Jones, had coordinated the American response. There had been no American casualties, but a few near misses had unnerved the community. Some embassy employees were asking to be sent home right away.

Arnie Raphel was coolheaded from the first blast, which he’d heard all the way from Rawalpindi. He had dryly asked Philippe Jones at one point while the rockets were still flying, some of them landing near the embassy itself, whether it was really a good idea to have stored so much ammunition so close to Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Phil had answered truthfully that it sure as hell hadn’t been such a good idea in view of events, but that was the way the Pakistanis had wanted it.

He never brought up the question of who might be to blame again. Instead, he cabled the Department of Defense to dispatch explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) teams to Pakistan to assist in the cleanup. The EOD teams arrived in a matter of days, and for the next several weeks small explosions would be heard each day as the teams detonated the unstable ordnance they had carefully collected.

Though the ambassador was able to keep a cap on American finger-pointing, the blame game in the government of Pakistan was running rampant. Ojhri was still smoking when the first accusations began to fly. Prime Minister Junejo launched an attack against ISI and the Army. The Army counterattacked with criticism against General Akhtar, who had left ISI almost a year earlier, and Akhtar counterattacked by laying the blame at Hamid Gul’s feet for storing too much ordnance at Ojhri. The battle between Junejo’s government and Zia’s Army escalated almost as quickly as the explosions at Ojhri.

Then the whispering began.

The coincidence of the destruction of ten thousand tons of ordnance at Ojhri and the signing of the Geneva Accords four days later spawned rumors that the KGB had sabotaged Ojhri. Others, adding new spin to the same story, preferred to have the Indians, probably acting on behalf of the KGB, behind the sabotage. There was a flurry of alleged eyewitness sightings of Indian Mirage fighters flying at low level in the area just before the first explosion; one of them, the rumors had it, had fired a particle beam straight into the ordnance stored at Ojhri, setting off the conflagration. A sort of one-upmanship entered the game, with each new version of KGB and Indian perfidy becoming more rococo than the last. And before long, the rumor mill decided to settle on the most delicious culprit of all—the Americans. Soon authoritative reports were circulating that the Americans had blown the Ojhri dump as part of a secret deal with the Soviets. The evil conspiracy of the two superpowers had sprung out of the tortured concept of “negative symmetry”—agreed to by the United States and the Soviet Union as an annex to the memorandum of understanding they had in Geneva. Specifically, the United States had made the following statement:

The obligations undertaken by the guarantors are symmetrical. In this regard, the United States has advised the Soviet