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

American visitors with a flashy trip to the North-West Frontier Province, the Wild West tribal area of Pakistan where the mujahideen training sites were set up. The camps, designed to handle up to a hundred Afghan fighters for a week or two at a time, were usually struck after a couple of training cycles and moved to another location. There were endless possibilities for training sites in the rugged northwest, and it seemed that the Soviets and their Afghan intelligence service, Khad, were never able to effectively track our movements. Not one of the camps was successfully attacked by air or by infiltration teams during the years I was involved with the program.

A bunch of small arms had been laid out for review: assault rifles, light and medium machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPG-7)—the hands-down favorite of the mujahideen—and 75 and 82 mm recoilless rifles. Crew-served weapons, 12.7 and 14.5 mm machine guns, 82 mm mortars, and 107 and 122 mm free-flight rockets, were also set up for firing, and the Pakistanis and their trainees put on an incomparable show. They fired everything in their arsenals at targets whitewashed onto the surrounding hillsides at two hundred, three hundred, and one thousand yards, and they put on a damn good show.

One blue-eyed young Afghan gunner—he looked no more than fifteen—snapped up an RPG-7 on command and quickly slipped a round in the muzzle, pulling the safety pin and streamer out of the conical warhead as he laid the launcher on his shoulder. He brought the outline of a Soviet tank two hundred yards away into the optical sight and fired, all in about two seconds. As the round struck the target dead center with a great explosion and a shower of rocks, there were a hundred cries of approval. We saw white rock after white rock “destroyed” by the small arms, prompting Gates to wonder if the gunners might not be Pakistani shills. I thought not. The one thing it had never been necessary to fake in Afghanistan was shooting skill.

After the small-arms demonstrations, we walked a few hundred yards to another area where the mortars, rockets, and recoilless rifles would be fired at targets—large chalked circles—one and two thousand yards down the narrow valley. Along the way, hidden, heavily camouflaged mujahideen would pop up out of rabbit holes or from under scrub bushes just at our feet, shouting menacingly while training their Kalashnikovs on Gates and me. All great theater, at least after the first one had popped up.

The crew-served weapons were demonstrated with the same skill—almost all direct hits on the chalked targets. Gates again wondered aloud how much of what he was seeing was real. I told him I wasn’t sure it mattered. The weapons were real, the people were real, and if they ultimately took the guns and their skills to war against the Soviets, that was good enough for our purposes. It would all be just fine as long as the war continued to go our way.

Late on the evening after our visit to the Khyber Agency, I arranged for a close relative of Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud’s to visit Bob Gates discreetly in the privacy of the safe house. Massoud’s man made the usual pitch to the DDCI, telling him that the Pakistanis were giving the lion’s share of the supplies to Massoud’s archfoe, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and that as proof of the claim of Pakistani favoritism it was a Hekmatyar commander who was given the first issue of Stingers. Would Gates intercede with the Pakistanis and see to it that Massoud got his share of Stingers? Gates said he would and promised also to talk to the Pakistanis about establishing a more equitable share of all the ordnance.

Eager to demonstrate his gratitude, Massoud’s man reached inside his shalwar kameez and whipped out a Soviet 9 mm Makarov semiautomatic. Would the DDCI accept this small offering as a token of appreciation from Ahmad Shah Massoud?

As he began to explain that the cold, dead fingers of a Soviet colonel had been pried from the weapon by Commander Massoud himself after a great battle in the Panjshir Valley, the DDCI’s security detail had their hands on their own weapons in a sort of Mexican standoff and were waiting nervously a few feet away to see what would come next. Nothing did, but for the next three years I would have to brief the security details of high-level visitors to expect a Makarov to pop into the scene at some point during discreet meetings with mujahideen commanders.

Bob Gates left Islamabad with a good understanding of the way things were going at a critical moment in the war. During his meeting with President Zia, he had been told that the heat should be turned up in the war, but that care should be taken so the pot did not boil over. President Zia asked pointedly for intelligence on India’s plans for a major military exercise on its border with Pakistan, Operation Brasstacks. The Pakistanis had been concerned for weeks over the training exercise planned by India’s new and hawkish Army chief of staff, General Krishnaswami Sundarji. The DDCI responded with the standard “Friends do not discuss friends with friends,” but he added another important line to that answer. He said that neither do friends let friends get into trouble. That statement, though vague and noncommittal, seemed to satisfy the Pakistanis for the moment, as they believed that whatever was to happen in Brasstacks, the United States would be watching and would intervene before things got out of control.

First Chief Directorate Headquarters, Yasenevo, October 1986

Leonid Shebarshin had been briefed that all of the technical countermeasures against the Stinger had been put in place. Soviet and DRA aircrews were flying above the ceiling of the American missile and taking intensive defensive precautions when approaching and departing from airfields in Afghanistan, particularly those in the east.

The KGB’s point man on Afghanistan had also learned that over the last few days the GRU