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

scene of the ambush, debriefed the surviving aircrews, and drew their conclusions. The instant assessment was that the American Stinger had finally been deployed, an issue that Soviet intelligence had followed closely while it was debated openly in Washington during the previous year. Within a day, orders were issued to secure “bandit-free areas” in a ten-mile radius from all air bases in Afghanistan. It was an impossible order, and the 40th Army command knew it. But issuing it seemed to demonstrate an ability to deal with the new threat. Additionally, all aircraft landing or taking off were instructed to make spiral descents and climb-outs at the airfields. The new rule of thumb was that twenty thousand feet was the assured safety altitude, about twice the ceiling of the Stinger.

Great efforts were made to assure Soviet and Afghan pilots and aircrews that the Stinger was just another problem that could be dealt with. Soon, they were told, aircraft would be fitted with systems for dispensing high-intensity flares that would draw the infrared-seeking Stingers away from the heat of the aircraft engines by luring them to lock on to the flares falling away from the aircraft.

More quietly, however, 40th Army headquarters began closely documenting the effectiveness of the new American missile, noting how many rebel groups were being equipped with Stingers, how many had been fired, and how many Soviet or DRA aircraft had been struck. Within the first year they calculated the success rate of the Stinger at 20 percent, up from about 3 percent when the rebels used the inferior Soviet SA-7 system.

Langley, Early October 1986

Tensions between the Soviet and Near East analysts on the task force had increased since the first Stinger ambush at Jalalabad. There were reports coming in from all sources—signals, intelligence, human intelligence reporting, and satellite imagery—that put the level of Soviet and DRA aircraft brought down over the last few weeks at about one a day, or one every two to three days if you took the more conservative estimate. The Soviet analysts would not accept the higher number and demanded photographic confirmation of every aircraft shoot-down before it would be counted.

Jack Devine dismissed the debate as senseless and left it to the analysts to argue out. What he did see was the immediate stand-down of air activity following the shoot-down and the change in Soviet air tactics once flights were resumed. The “Stinger effect” wasn’t just a matter of numbers; it was also the increase in morale and effectiveness of the resistance forces. There’d been a shift in the tone of reporting from Islamabad, too, in the week following the Jalalabad ambush. No longer were the mujahideen sitting in their camps in Pakistan awaiting their fates. They were pouring into eastern Afghanistan, now that interdiction by Soviet and DRA aircraft of their infiltration routes seemed reduced. Yes, Devine said to himself, September 25 was a turnaround. Let the purists worry about the numbers. He knew what it meant, and so did his team in Islamabad.

Over the next week, Devine would show the dramatic video footage of the downing of the MI-24Ds to selected members of Congress and the Reagan administration. Bill Casey would run the tape himself for President Reagan. The effect in Washington was just as it had been in Afghanistan: A new sense of commitment could be felt to stay the course. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. When Casey got out to Pakistan for his next visit, there would be something tangible to celebrate with the men he had supported for the last six years.

   5   

Islamabad, October 1986

Casey would never make his promised visit to Islamabad—his world was rapidly narrowing to Washington, where he had fallen prey to the growing rumblings of Iran-contra and to a Congress increasingly after his blood. But his deputy, Robert Gates, traveled to the field in late October. His visit got off to a jumpy start.

In the cable exchanges leading up to the DDCI’s visit, I had asked that the traveling party stay in a duplex house I controlled in a quiet residential quarter of Islamabad. I thought we could move about more discreetly than if the party stayed in the high-visibility Holiday Inn in Islamabad, with its usual contingent of international media. Gates’s administrative staff agreed, until word percolated down to them that the intended quarters were also the location of our temporary storage site for the Soviet weapons systems we had acquired through an elaborate program of battlefield scavenging in Afghanistan. It seems that Gates’s security chief couldn’t bear the thought of the DDCI sleeping with a Soviet AT-4 antitank guided missile ready to cook off under his bunk. Could we clear out the explosive stuff before bedding down our visitors? I was urgently asked. I assured headquarters that we could.

The Khyber Agency, Pakistan

It was a crystalline, dry season day, dry even for that time of year, when I took Gates and his party to the Khyber Agency training site in a mix of helicopters—two slick French-made Pumas and a rattling American UH1 “Huey.” The Pakistani pilots swept low over mud-walled villages tucked into the foothills of the North-West Frontier Province, the scrub pines of the hilltops passing just feet below us as we cleared the ridgelines. Dropping down on the billowing red smoke canister signaling the wind direction at the primitive heliport, Gates mused that much, maybe too much, preparation had gone into his visit. He would later use the term Potemkin village, but I preferred to describe what we were seeing as good public relations. I told him to treat it as the best show the Pakistanis and the Afghans could put on for us and judge it on those terms. Military inspections were pretty much the same everywhere—a lot of show and no surprises.

The Pakistani officers handling Gates’s visit had been through it before with Casey’s visits to the region and the growing traffic from Washington. They knew how to take care of their