The Management of Savagery. Max Blumenthal
of a coalition government that welcomed the mujahedin into power. So determined was Gorbachev to prevent the Afghan state from collapsing, he proposed free elections supervised by the UN. “If we score any points, we can do it only together. If we try to score points alone, nothing good will happen,” the Soviet premier had told Bush and then-president Reagan weeks earlier at the UN, beseeching them for American cooperation. His entreaties were ultimately met with a cold shoulder from Washington, which had adopted the mujahedin position as its own: full regime change or perpetual insurgency. With the Soviet-backed government of Mohammad Najibullah still in power, the arms continued to flow to the rebels.
The Afghan trap laid more than a decade before by Brzezinski had successfully ensnared the Soviet Union. The Reagan doctrine seemed to have been ratified and America’s nemesis was teetering on the brink of collapse. The war had worked out nicely for the arms industry as well, enabling the battlefield testing of new weapons systems and record sales to oil-rich allies. Reagan’s secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, was a former president of Bechtel, and the construction and pipeline company did billions of dollars in business in Saudi Arabia. As a reward for the kingdom’s support for the anti-Soviet jihad, Weinberger helped arrange a whopping $8.5 billion arms deal that granted the Saudis advanced AWACS surveillance aircraft. It was the beginning of a very special relationship.
Peter Tomsen, an Afghanistan specialist working in the State Department under the first Bush administration, was a voice in the wilderness when he warned of the consequences of Najibullah’s government falling. “An extremist seizure of Kabul would plunge Afghanistan into a fresh round of warfare, which could affect areas adjoining Afghanistan,” Tomsen wrote in a secret 1991 cable to Washington. He added that if Hekmatyar reached the city, “extremists in the Arab world would support them in stoking Islamic radicalism in the region, including the Soviet Central Asian republics, but also in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Arab world.”
Tomsen called for a political settlement, but few in Washington were listening. In the final years before the CIA and Soviet Union agreed to cut off arms to Afghanistan, the CIA pumped unprecedented amounts of cash and weapons to Hekmatyar. Tomsen, for his part, saw to it that an almost equal amount went to Ahmad Shah Massoud, his guerrilla rival, who was seen as more moderate and was favored by the State Department. As soon as Kabul fell, a collection of warlords took control, each with an array of foreign backers, often in competition with one another, and none with any interest in maintaining a semblance of functional government. The country remained a magnet for foreign jihadists while droves of women empowered by communist rule were forced to flee for their lives, their worst fears realized thanks in no small part to the freedom-loving United States.
With one superpower vanquished, an emboldened cadre of zealots introduced to the Afghan battlefield through the Services Bureau set out to wage jihad across the world. The tactics the CIA brought to Afghanistan were on display virtually anywhere jihadist militancy took root. “Time and again,” Cooley noted, “these same techniques reappear among the Islamist insurgents in Upper Egypt and Algeria, since the ‘Afghani’ [sic] Arab veterans began returning there in the late 1980s and early 1990s.”
Abdurajik Abubakar Janjalani, a Filipino jihadist who’d fought alongside bin Laden in Afghanistan, returned home to wage an insurgency for an independent Islamic State under the banner of the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group. According to Cooley, Abu Sayyaf was “the most violent and radical Islamist group in the Far East, using its CIA and ISI training to harass, attack, and murder Christian priests, wealthy non-Muslim plantation owners, and merchants and local government in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.” Filipino senator Aquilino Pimentel was gripped with outrage after reading Cooley’s reporting. Pimentel branded Abu Sayyaf a “CIA monster,” demanding a government inquiry into the agency’s role in establishing the jihadist organization.
In Bosnia, where some 3,000 foreign Islamic fundamentalists flocked to fight the Russian-aligned Serbs, Senator Jesse Helms, far-right former WACL member and powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee member, said it was time to “begin treating the Bosnians as we did the Contras and mujahedin—as freedom fighters engaged in a war of liberation.”
At that point, the Bosnian forces had purchased as much as $200 million in illegal weapons through a shadowy group called Third World Relief Agency, with funding provided by countries like Saudi Arabia and, according to the Washington Post, “the wealthy Saudi Arabian emigre [sic] Osama Binladen.” (The 1995 report represents one of the first mentions of bin Laden in the American media.) A Western diplomat complained at the time, “We were told [by Washington] to watch [the Third World Relief Agency] but not interfere. Bosnia was trying to get weapons from anybody, and we weren’t helping much. The least we could do is back off. So we backed off.”
Another charity that was instrumental in shepherding jihadist fighters from Afghanistan to new flashpoints like Bosnia was Benevolence International. Overseen by Saudi businessman Adel Batterjee, Benevolence International had established a camp to train fighters in Afghanistan in 1991, then followed bin Laden into Sudan, where he set up training grounds the following year. The charity also established an office that year in suburban Chicago, Illinois. Though a 1996 CIA report found that Benevolence International was among a chain of charities that “employ members or otherwise facilitate the activities of terrorist groups operating in Bosnia,” the FBI took no action against it.
As the Chicago Tribune later explained, “the United States did not push the matter because of a long political understanding: America would defend the kingdom [of Saudi Arabia] militarily and not meddle in its internal affairs if the Saudis remained a loyal oil supplier and Middle East ally.” Another undeniable reason for Washington’s passive attitude was that the Islamist guerrillas in Bosnia were becoming valuable proxies in the NATO-orchestrated destruction of Yugoslavia.
Thus Central Europe became the next petri dish for international jihadism, as thousands of foreign fighters flocked there to battle the Serbs, or jaunted over to Chechnya to confront Russia once again.
Former Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigative counsel Jack Blum was among a tiny handful in Washington who raised the alarm about the anti-Soviet jihad’s unintended consequences. When Blum testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in October 1996 about allegations of the CIA trafficking drugs to fund the Nicaraguan Contras during the 1980s, he warned that the agency was facing a new and especially troublesome “disposal problem.”
The problem first arose, according to Blum, when Cuban mercenaries trained by the CIA returned to Miami after the botched amphibious Bay of Pigs landing. “And when you teach people how to change their identity, how to hide from the law, how to build bombs, how to assassinate people,” Blum testified, “they don’t forget how to do it, and you wind up, after the covert action is over, with a disposal problem. We’ve never been very good at handling disposal.”
After 1961, CIA-trained Cuban exiles had wreaked havoc around the world, from the assassination of Chilean socialist diplomat Orlando Letelier to the downing of Cubana Flight 455 by right-wing Cuban CIA asset Orlando Bosch. But the danger presented by the veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad was exponentially greater, Blum warned: “We have all kinds of people who have been trained in bomb-making, and by God, they’ve been with us everywhere from the World Trade Center to Paris and all over the world, wherever there’s somebody who doesn’t suit their ideological tenor.”
Two decades after his testimony, Blum’s frustration has only grown. “By creating a motley assortment of volunteers and bringing them to Afghanistan,” he remarked to me, “we created the monster of all monsters. And nobody seemed to care. It was not only a disposal problem, they were totally abandoned. It went well beyond disposal. They all went home and went to work doing what we trained them to do. And nobody, I mean nobody, has been held accountable for this.”
The Ghosts of Operation Cyclone
Upon his triumphant return home from the Afghan battlefield, Osama bin Laden held court with one of his most generous wartime patrons. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former Saudi ambassador to the United States, had once helped the CIA manage mass transfers of arms to Afghan rebels and Nicaraguan Contras. He had even coordinated with the CIA to arrange