Transcript for S4 Episode 3 - "The Trap"

Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Coleman. And this is season four episode three. The trap. Last episode, we witnessed the origins of Western Meddling in Afghanistan. In the 1970s, the United States and the United Kingdom backed criminals and religious fanatics inside of the country. Working with Pakistan, the Shah of Iran, and even the anti-Soviet Chinese communists, this anti-Soviet access-trained and funded the soon-to-be deadly force of Mujahideen. But to the surprise of all, including the Soviet Union, in 1978, the Afghan Communist Party launched a coup, dubbing it the April Revolution.

Afghans in the countryside did not take kindly to the left-wing theoreticians in Kabul. Communist leader Hafizullah Amin was beginning to look more and more, like the Afghans' own Paul Pot.

While the Afghan Revolution ran off the rails, the anti-communist alliance channeled even more money and material to the jihadis. By the very end of the 1970s, the country was nearing a state of civil war.

For a whole year, the Afghan government begged the Soviets to send troops, and the Soviets, wary of a Vietnam-style quagmire, refused. Until it looked like either a mean or the Islamic militants, or both, were about to turn Afghanistan into a true basket case, just south of the Soviet border.

If the Americans and their allies had set an Afghan trap, as the Jihad's mastermind is a big no-brazinski later called it, the Soviets decided however reluctantly to step right into its jaws.

On the night of Christmas Eve, 1979, Andre Greshaw, a Soviet interpreter in Kabul, was frying up potatoes. As Andre quibbled with a comrade on, just how much salt to apply to the spuds, the blaze of Soviet guns lit up the dark streets outside. By now, Afghan President, Havizula Amin, had run a foul of his comrades, both in Kabul and Moscow. He'd retreated with his inner circle from the presidential palace to an alternative hideout, several miles to the southwest. Many rings of troops and tanks defended the place. In preparing their assault, Soviet commanders told their men that Amin had betrayed the April Revolution, says the British diplomat turned historian, Roger Braythway. Thousands of innocent people had been killed on his orders. He was in contact with the CIA. He therefore had to be eliminated.

Hours earlier, Hafizullah, I mean, had not been hiding from incoming Soviet troops, but celebrating their arrival. At a lunch party, he boasted to his colleagues how he had managed to charm the Soviets despite his recent crackdown on their allies. But suddenly, in the middle of lunch, Amine went limp. His aides sent for doctors. In a darkly comic turn, the medical staff were all Soviets. None of whom had any idea that the KGB had just attempted to bump off the president. in saving his life, right, spray-thwaid. The Soviet doctors did not know that they had frustrated a plan to simplify the whole Soviet military operation by putting a mean out of action before it began.

The Kremlin, in fact, had tried to the very last minute, Raids Braithwate, to quietly remove a mean from power. But with that option off the table, Soviet troops sprung into action. The Muslim battalion made up of Soviet Central Asian recruits led the charge. Things got off to a rocky start, Raids Braithwate. Almost as soon as they started, one of the infantry fighting vehicle stopped. The driver had lost his nerve, jumped out of the vehicle and fled. He returned almost immediately. Things were even more frightening outside. The vehicles crashed through the first barrier, the sound of bullets rattling against the armor of their vehicles. One man slipped as he jumped out, and his legs were crushed under his vehicle.

Breaking into Amin's palace, the Soviet soldiers lost each other in the haze of smoke and the rattle of guns. But friendly fire was avoided through yet more black comedy. Quote, the Russians were swearing horribly, using the choices words in the Russian lexicon, and it was this that enabled them to identify one another in the darkness.

Despite their orders to take no prisoners, the Soviets chose to spare the captured loyalists to Amine. The man himself, however, was found dead after the firefight. Amine's body, braveweight rights, was rolled up in a carpet and taken out to be buried in the secret grave.

Having taken out the chief target, the Soviets secured other key sites in Kabul from the Army's General Staff Building to the radio and TV Center. back at the palace in the night's last moment of black comedy. Quote, Soviet soldiers heard rustling in the elevator shaft. They assumed that I mean people were launching a counterattack. They sprang to arms, fired their automatic weapons, and hurled grenades. As it turns out, it was just the palace cat.

The Soviet Union had sent around 80,000 soldiers into Afghanistan, using a vast old road that snakes around the country's mountains and connects all the major cities. Soviet aircraft landed, quote, practically non-stop at Kabul and Bagram. Both officers and soldiers grumbled about the troop levels at the time. They didn't think it was even close to enough to keep border. Russian military experts later calculated that they would have needed between 30 and 35 divisions to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan, right? Spray-thaway. To close the frontiers, secure the cities, road networks, and passes, and to eliminate the possibility of armed resistance.

The soldiers he writes were told that they were going to support the ordinary Afghan people against the counter-revolution, and that they had to get there before the Americans did. But as far as the White House was concerned, the Americans had already gotten there.

The commanders favored by this foreign axis, as we've discussed in episode 1, were the photogenic but thuggish Akmidshama suit, the openly sadistic Golbedeen Hekmet Yar, and mentored to Osama bin Laden, Abdul Siaf. bin Laden too, would by now be working with Siaf to recruit and train Arabs from around the Muslim world.

Among the Islamic charities used to recruit for the Jihad was the Al-Qifa Afghan Refugee Center in Brooklyn, New York, about a 20-minute walk from where we're recording the show. There, recruits could find military training, and not just training for war in Afghanistan, but training to carry out assassinations, bombings, and terror elsewhere around the world.

From the late 70s to around 1982, the Afghan program was relatively modest, at least if you compare the hundreds of thousands of dollars it was getting to the billions that would come down the road. The CIA's mission, despite Brazinski's vision of a new great game, was to more or less bogged down the Russians, keep the war going, lead them dry, rather than turn the tide for the Mujahideen in any major way. Still, as the original head of the program, the blue-blooded Howard Hart would later describe his role, quote, not since Vietnam had an American been responsible for putting so many men into battle. Journalists George Kriow writes that Hart, in charge of a quiet but growing operation in Afghanistan, was the first CIA officer ever to be given the mandate to kill America's true enemy, the troops of the Red Army.

When Afghans woke up the day after the storming of Amine's palace, writes Braithwain. Afghans stand had a new government, and the small boys were back selling cigarettes around the ruined government communications conduit, as if nothing had happened. It was a cold and sunny day, and people were wandering the streets, congratulating one another that Amine had been overthrown. The move against Amine's palace, despite the chaos experienced by the Soviet troops, had produced no civilian casualties. On radio cobble, one could hear the announcement by a means-former political rivals, quote today that torture machine of a mean has been smashed. New President Barbara Carma, the more gradualist, Soviet-friendly alternative to a mean, let a march on a so-called day of mourning to mosques, presenting memorials to the scores of people who had been killed under a mean. The gates of the cobble prisons were thrown open, and thousands of prisoners now poured out into the streets. One Soviet adviser recalls, quote, the greeted our soldiers warmly, gave them flowers and called them friends and liberators.

But just as soon as the Soviet troops had shown up, the Politburo was scheming how to get them out. The aim was not to take over or occupy the country, right, spray-thwate. It was to secure the towns and the roads between them, and to withdraw as soon as the Afghan government and its armed forces were in a state to take over responsibility. Many Afghans agreed with this aim, as one soldier recalled local residents telling him, we are glad to see you, but you will be very well advised to leave again as soon as you can.

Some in the Soviet leadership in bureaucracy were already seeing disaster on the horizon. Soon, quote, one of Moscow's most prestigious think tanks sent a stinging analysis to the Central Committee. However, the paper was too late.

The United States slammed the Soviet invasion within hours, but something was odd.

A few years earlier, Washington had called the Afghan Communist Revolution a Soviet-backed coup. Only nine months before this moment, Washington had pegged Hafizullah Amin as, quote, hopelessly pro-Soviet and quote. Yet once Soviet troops took Amin out, Jimmy Carter, mourned the regime as one, quote, struggling to retain a modicum of independence from their huge neighbor. CIA analyst turned historian Raven Gartof as the question. which was it.

Insofar as the local Afghan aspect was concerned, Garth Off rights. There is no indication that any attention was given to the Soviet motivation or the political situation within Afghanistan. by Garthoff's estimate, both the Soviet line that Amin had invited them in to overthrow him, and Jimmy Carter's, quote unquote, posthumous promotion of Amin as an independent leader, were quote, equal departures from reality.

And so the U.S. put forward a resolution at the United Nations condemning the Soviet invasion, making no mention of the army the CIA was funding inside Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Americans also slapped an embargo on grain exports to the USSR, which required Jimmy Carter to compensate American farmers for their loss of business.

The next U.S. initiative was a boycott of the Moscow Olympics.

quote, only China, Japan, West Germany, and Canada, joined the U.S. in a full boycott.

Meanwhile, National Security Advisor is a big new brizinski, flew to Pakistan for immediate talks with its new dictator, General Zia. The goal was to loosen up congressional restrictions on financial aid. During the first meeting, Presinsky agreed to Zia's rule for the anti-Soviet alliance that all arms supplies and finance and training of the fighters must go through Pakistan. This cash machine that Presinsky turned on would eventually give Pakistan $4.2 billion in cash, high-tech weapons, and unprecedented diplomatic support under the incoming Reagan administration.

near the end of January 1980 Carter stepped up the rhetoric. He claimed the Soviet Union's Afghan adventure was in fact a move to conquer Western oil supplies.

From the novel scoop by evil and war, Many of Corker's anecdotes dealt with the fabulous Wenlock Jakes. Once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn't know any different got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns, answering the rattle of his typewriter. Well, they were pretty surprised at his office getting a story like that from the wrong country, but they trusted Jake's and splashed it in six national newspapers. That day, every special in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution. Everything seemed quiet enough, but they chimed in too. Government stock dropped. Financial panic. State of emergency declared. Army mobilized. Famine, mutiny, and, in less than a week, there was an honest-to-God revolution underway. Just as Jake said. There's the power of the press for you.

The American Reporter Philip Benoski was dumbfounded when he arrived in Kabul in early 1980. The thing I was supposed to see first, I did not see it all. I saw no Soviet soldiers. You had read in the press that you would find Kabul choked with Russian tanks, and you were prepared to find them, but found none, except when pushing through the tangled uncontrolled traffic, you broke into revolutionary square, and there it was, that minimal Russian tank.

Even writers taking a clear line against the USSR, such as one David Klein in the Christian Science Monitor, had to note that, quote, Soviet troops now have largely removed themselves to barracks and other behind the scenes positions. Klein admitted seeing only a single Soviet tank, which sat near his hotel. This underwhelming picture didn't quite live up to Jimmy Carter's declaration of, quote,

Much like the click of reporters in Wawzenauval, the Western journalist's piling into Afghanistan were herded by American agents. The moment their planes set down at the airport, they made a mad dash for the embassy, writes Banoski. And there, quickly debriefed by an officer. They are free to quote, but not to name the source. And by nightfall, the reporters already know all they need to know about the situation. Who the main actors are, what the main elements of the crisis are, and where the nearest bar is.

In February 1980, the New York Times reported from Pakistan, that, quote, Vice President Sultan Ali Kashmat of Afghanistan, died after unsuccessful treatment in Moscow. This piece of news puzzled Banoski and his Afghan friends, who had just seen Kashmat and soon saw him again.

You would think a false obituary of an Afghan leader would be a rarity. But the times and other papers seemed determined to pile up the bodies of the Afghan government. Next on the hit list was Lieutenant Colonel Muhammad Rafi, who was repeatedly and falsely reported as assassinated or killed in some shootout. Then, in July, the New York Times reported Afghan Education Minister, Anahidea Ratibzad, was shot to death Monday in Kabul. The Associated Press stacked an error upon that error, reporting that yet another official was killed with her. But Ratibzad and her colleague were very much alive.

Sometimes, though not always, these fabrications would get corrected. The Washington Post, for example, quote, in the Pakistan Capital of Islamabad in January, a reliable West European diplomat told an inquiring reporter that his country's embassy in Kabul was reporting heavy fighting around the airport, with Soviet megfighters seen striking around the city. The post, acting on two different sources, carried a front-page story of the fighting. The only problem is that it never took place. The license taken by U.S. reporters had become somewhat infamous among journalists on the scene. Later in January, the London Telegraph wrote, quote, The American Embassy in Kabul has been consistently putting out exaggerated reports of rebel victories, which other diplomats consider reflect badly on the United States's credibility and provide an overoptimistic impression of insurgent capability.

Exceptions to this rule, such as CBS reporters Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, had a hard time getting stories picked up. Under contract with CBS News, the images of Afghanistan life that we filmed, they write, show to picture far more complex and nuanced than the dualistic black and white. With the US and Saudi financed insurgency from Pakistan burning schools, toppling power lines and murdering any and all elected officials they could find, communist or otherwise, the Afghan PDPA could do little but maintained previous reforms.

The new Afghan president had looked into Fitzgerald and ghouls as camera lens, and insisted as soon as the US and Saudi and Pakistan war against the government stopped, there would be no need for Soviet troops. The couple was shocked to return to the US and find that their exclusive report, which had been filed for weeks after their return, focused only on the presence of Soviet troops that we did not see, while not even bothering to air the conditions laid out by the Afghan President by which the Soviet troops might be withdrawn.

A few years later, the couple struck out again at ABC News, where they were greeted with, quote, blank stares by the nightline staff upon our return from Afghanistan. Their reporting was rejected out of hand, and they were relegated to a panel after midnight on a Thursday, making the case for negotiation to end the war. On Q, they were rebuked by an anti-Soviet Russian, who said from the studio in New York that he was confident nothing would ever cause the Soviets to withdraw. Nightline then cuts straight to a political officer of Golbedin Heckbitt Yar's party. which Ted Couple described as, quote, an anti-communist resistance group based in Pakistan.

It was significant that the first high-ranking woman in Afghanistan's government on a heater at Tabzad was minister of education. Despite the New York Times's false report of her death, many women in Afghanistan benefited from her ministry's programs. Unfortunately, this now meant that those teachers and schools and their pupils were now favorite targets of the Rising Mushai Dean.

In Herod, on April 25th, reported Moscow news, counter-revolutionaries fired on a local high school building with grenade dischargers and sub-machine guns. In the Lockman Province, a school bus was attacked, 11 school children were killed and 16 wounded. Five other children were blown up by a guerilla-planted mine near a school in Masari Sharif. Elsewhere, a time bomb was found quite recently in a couple of university building. Two other such bombs were diffused in the courtyard of another Kabul school.

You could find confirmation of this phenomenon outside of the communist press, especially before the invasion, or even early on.

The head of Amijah Haddin training camp spoke to the New York Times for a peace published in January 1980. The communists, he tells the paper, want to descend everybody to their schools, even the old men and women with 10 children. So we killed the teacher, who was a communist, and fled. Another time is article. Also in January, reported how Guldbidine Hekwitniar's party passed out photos to journalists showing the execution of, quote, communist high school teachers. Banovsky, for his part, reports that almost 1,500 schools had been burnt down since December 1979 by the Mujahideen.

That summer, Brazinski pushed through a succession of presidential directives that were designed to wage a nuclear war. According to Brazinski himself, for the first time, the US deliberately sought for itself the capabilities to manage a protracted nuclear conflict. and directive 59 required the United States to develop the capability to win a nuclear war that would last for months on end.

As things continue to spiral, the Soviets dug in, fearing that a withdrawal would destroy their credibility and leave their retreating troops open to slaughter by the Mojai Dien. The cracks in their military strategy began to show. Unlike many of their American counterparts, Wright's brave weight, the Soviet generals had no recent experience of managing large numbers of troops in battle, and they did not have the equipment, the training, the doctrine, or the experience to fight a counterinsurgency war in the mountains of Afghanistan. Here there were no great set pieces, no battles that turned the tide, just a slow, confusing, and exhausting slog. The Mujahideen took some territory, the Soviets retook it, only to withdraw, and to watch the Mujahideen take it again. Both sides aimed for the same goal, choke off your enemy's supply routes, and quote for their part, breakweight rights, the Russians rated villages suspected of harboring rebels, struck into the mountains to destroy their bases and disperse their men, mounted counter-ambuses, and mined the routes along which the Mujahideen moved. Their operations were supported by transport and battle helicopters. The inevitable result was a heavy loss of life and property among the civilian population. Hundreds of people could die in one day.

A 1985 booklet printed for Red Army soldiers reads, quote, remember that you are a representative of the Army and be worthy of your historical mission. Know and respect the customs of the local people even if they do not correspond to your own. Be very careful to respect Afghan women. Do not interfere with a Muslim at prayer and do not go into a mosque without a very good reason. There were strict injunctions against trading, especially in narcotics. The booklet ends, quote,

But in a guerrilla war with mounting civilian casualties, the manual was just a manual. Quote the Soviet military prosecutors in Afghanistan, had to deal with the whole range of military crimes, right, spray-thwaid. Those found guilty were given harsh sentences of imprisonment, sent to disciplinary battalions back in the Soviet Union, and were occasionally shot. By the end of the war, over 2,500 Soviet soldiers were serving prison sentences, more than 200 for crimes of premeditated murder. and despite the sanctions, braveweight rights, soldiers committed many brutal acts individually or in groups. The excuse often was, they did it to us, so we have a right to do it to them.

Indeed, fear of the Majahadine began to haunt the Soviet troops at night, many claimed that they would rather commit suicide rather than surrender to them, and some followed through with that. They heard tales of fearsome and fearless, holy warriors, and their methods, hacking off of noses and genitals, etc. One minor Majahadine leader boasted that he had made a practice of half-skilling Russian prisoners after a successful ambush, leaving them alive, surrounded by booby traps, to catch the Soviet rescue teams. The USSR's 40th Army writes Tariq Ali, responded in kind. One soldier described how, after lobbying a grenade into a village house, he went in to inspect the results. He had killed an old woman, and a few children. A younger woman and other children were still moving. He shot them dead, hurling another grenade in afterwards, just to make sure.

One rebel prisoner was interviewed about the rural populations' attitude toward Soviet soldiers. Part of the population, of course, supports the present communist regime. But those who do that are already invidels, and they will have to pay for the blood of Muslims that they have shed. Some people cut off heads, others don't. I prefer to sell my enemy for cash, to people who are willing to buy.

Inside the halls of the Central Intelligence Agency, you could probably find everything but a severed Russian head. Again, sterile walls hung a funhouse of trophies, memorabilia, and internal propaganda. There were heads of the shrunken variety, and, quote, menacing masks from Indonesia, and, in one wing, a huge picture of the young Shaav Iran entitled The Hope of Democracy. Inside the Afghan Pakistan branch, past a vault door, hung a doctored photograph, showing a Russian tank with the hammer and sickle insignia looming in front of the houses of Parliament. The inscription? This year Afghanistan, next year, London. By 1982, the Near East Division belonged to Gust Avrakotos, who had just barely avoided getting stuck on Reagan's doomed contrast project. Why not come upstairs, a superior had asked him? We are killing Russians.

Avra Kodos ran a small office, which he referred to as the dirty dozen. It would remain an article of pride with gust that the core group stayed small, even as the program grew to almost a billion dollars a year, right, George Kral. But in fact, quote, the numbers were deceptive, because his 14 agents were able to draw upon hundreds of agency people.

Let's meet the team. There was Dwayne, an intel analyst who struggled with polio, and for gust was a walking encyclopedia.

There was Larry, or the New York Jew. A former Latin American specialist who was now gusts conceglierry. The balding bug-eyed Larry was also a lawyer, and that turned out to be immensely valuable to gust-crile rights, who was convinced that if he listened to the agency's in-house lawyers, nothing would be possible. These aren't terrorist devices or assassination techniques, Larry would find a way to argue, while approving what most would call, well, terrorist devices in assassination techniques.

There was Hilly Billy, in charge of moving all the money through black markets, shady banks. Have you ever tried to open a non-numbered Swiss bank account for the US government? Evercoders asked his biographer. It takes six months because of all the red tape, but this guy, Hilly Billy, he could do it in 12 hours. Billiongicide over his desk that read quote, war is not cheap.

Now, Avocado's runs down a typical spreadsheet for guns and money. It was like the old days when the Italians would produce shoes for $40 and the Chinese would come in at $2 for the same thing. For example, AK-47's on the black market were going for $299. Once I got the Egyptians to start up a production line, the price went down to $139. With the Chinese in it, I was able to get them for less than 100 bucks.

Then there was art, Alper, veteran of the Office of Technical Services, the wing of the CIA responsible for the deadly tools and potions used around the world. Avocado is described art as something of a bureaucratic misfit. He's fat, and people passed him over. But two out of ten of our ideas were great. As a demolitions expert, art was in charge of, quote, ever more lethal ways of killing Russians. I took people no one wanted, says Avra Codos. Half the teammates had been divorced, including him. Everyone worked six and a half days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day. After work, we only went out with agency people. We drank with them, we slept with them, and if you were lucky you'd get laid three times a week, always with an agency person. And once on day a month, I'd head for deal Maryland and eat crabs and smell salt water. From the very start of the war, as we've seen, the U.S. press grouped around to piece together a government-approved narrative. The media would quote kill stories that lent credence to Afghan and Soviet complaints of a secret U.S. war, right, Fitzgerald and Gould, while lionizing Gould-Badine Heckbatt-Yar's heroin dealing Mujahideen. But it wasn't until April of 1980 that a perfect package of propaganda arrived.

CBS reporter Dan Rather delivered a special on 60 minutes and perfect Geraldine Gould set quote a radically new pro military standard for post Vietnam American reporters. Rather had smuggled himself into Afghanistan, dressing up as an Afghan freedom fighter.

This less than subtle get-up inspired TV critic Tom Shales to give rather than nickname Ganga Dan.

Shales criticized his report purely from a production standpoint. He summed it up as, quote, punchy, crunchy, highly dramatic, and essentially uninformative. Rather war peasant talks that made him look like an extract of Dr. Javago. There was one other dominant theme to the report, Shales wrote, and that was that the gallant ill-equipped resistance fighters desperately need American arms.

There wasn't even darker side to rather's report, right Paul and Liz. Quote, standing by as a Mujahideen fighter executed a captured Afghan army soldier for the camera. Rather would later be tried in absentia in Afghanistan and found guilty of complicity in the murder.

J. Peter Zel, of the Center for National Security Studies, later said, quote, by relying almost entirely on the statements of Afghan rebels and a Pakistani information officer, rather managed to consolidate popular misconceptions about the war into one high-impact coast-to-coast broadcast. Rather, even told viewers at home, that, quote, no country is providing arms and ammunition to the Majahadine freedom fighters.

The overall theme, which has lived on to this very day, was, quote, Russia's own Vietnam. Now this framing had already been conceived directly within the US intelligence community, and it was propagated through friendly members of the media, like rather.

Part of it was run by Alvin A. Snyder, a media executive turned director of the US Information Agency. Snyder later said that, quote, the war in Afghanistan was the American governments made for TV movie. A public relation is dream come true for Washington.

There was radio-free cobble, modeled after other Cold War networks like radio-free Europe and radio-free Asia. NGOs like the newborn international rescue committee and freedom house assembled a co-dury of lawyers, publicists, and social lights from New York in Washington. All were briefed by U.S. officials and policy makers to enforce a more or less singular message in their coverage.

These entities had interlocking boards of directors that featured Zabig New Brasinski and CIA director Bill Casey. One group, the committee for a free Afghanistan, could tout lawmakers, such as John McCain, Barney Frank, and a very special congressman named Charlie Wilson.

Among the millions of Americans who tuned in to Rathers' fraudulent report was Texas Democrat Charlie Wilson. The hard-drinking playboy congressman began to eat up all the news he could find about these washydeen. Wilson writes his biography George Crayle, found himself thinking of the Alamo. He picked up the phone for the Defense Appropriation Subcommittee. How much are we giving the Afghans he asked? Five million answered the staffer. There was a moment's silence.

Congressman Charlie Wilson's pilgrimage from Houston to Kabul ran through the party circuit of one lone star socialite, Joanne Herring. Herring, writes cryo, was quote a glamorous and exotic figure out of the oil-rich world of Texas in the 1970s and 80s. In the pivotal first years of the Jihad, she became both matchmaker and muse to Pakistan's Muslim fundamentalist military dictator, Zia O'Hawk, as well as to the scandal-prone, Charlie Wilson. A combination of Scarlet O'Hara, Jaja Gabor, and Dolly Parton, Herring was also a card-carrying reactionary, an active member of the so-called Minit women, an offshoot of the ultra-right paramilitary Minit men.

In the society pages, you could learn of Joanne Herring's Toga parties, where in performance of the theme, quote, slave girls were auctioned off. Christians were burned to the accompaniment of fireworks. To lend some authenticity, ten-year-old Black Boy Scouts, playing the role of Newby and Slaves, moved about the gathering of Roman-clad socialites, filling their crystal goblets with wine. Guests at these functions included the King of Sweden, Anwar Sadat, King Hussein of Jordan, Princess Grace of the United Kingdom, the shot of Iran, and Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Oh, and the Chief of the French Intelligence Service, the Count Dimash. In other words, the whole Safari Club was there.

Joanne Herring's mission was global. One of her pet projects was raising money for the African Warlord, Jonas Sevinbi, the Christian anti-communist, working with the CIA and apartheid South Africa, to destroy Marxists in Angola. But it was in Pakistan that she, quote, plunged into the villages on fact-finding missions, giving poverty-stricken Muslims inspirational talks on capitalism, and inspiring hope with her idea that each village could get rich, selling beautifully-made dresses and rugs designed by her famous friends. In Islamabad, General Zia quickly won her heart, says cryo. All the more unusual given that Zia was in the process of reimposing fundamentalist restrictions on women. And so as cryo puts it, in the middle of Charlie Wilson's last weekend, a curious romance began between him and herring, with much talk of Christ, anti-communism, and General Zia. The Jihad and Afghanistan was not the only alliance between the US government and Islamic militants during this time. Before the November election of 1980, the Reagan campaign and Israel colluded with Iran to sabotage Jimmy Carter's return of the American hostages in Tehran. BCCI, the shadow bank, processed a deal in which US weapons would be slipped from Israel to Iran.

And so, the worldwide alliance of America and Islamic fundamentalism continued to grow. Michael Springman, former head of the U.S. visa bureau in Jedis, Saudi Arabia, later recalled this period. In Saudi Arabia, I was repeatedly ordered by high level state department officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits rounded up by Osama bin Laden to the United States for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets.

Mohammed Zia O'Hawk, a quiet man with a humble manner, had by the late 70s risen to the top of the food chain in the Pakistani army. He took advantage of the chaos surrounding the incumbent government and launched a coup in 1977, declaring Marshal Law and sending his predecessor Zofikar Ali Buto to the Gallows.

What was Zia Agenda? Military government, death to socialism, implementation of Islamic law, a nuclear bomb for Pakistan, and closer relations with the United States of America. After the military coup, Carter had offered to Pakistan a whole new aid package, according them for the anti-Soviet access, but Zia was insulted by the offer of $400 million, calling it, quote, peanuts. But once in power, the Reagan administration took Zia's allegiance far more seriously. It up to the package by a factor of 10, handing General Zia over $4.2 billion in funds. Take a guess what they were used for.

The Reagan administration openly advised General Zia to use Islamic law to clamp down on dissent and order his country. Zia's personal religious belief would of course factor into his role in the Afghan Jihad. In 1971, there had been only 900 madrasas in all of Pakistan, Steve Cole reports. By the summer of 1988, they were about 8,000 official religious schools, and an estimated 25,000 unregistered ones. Many of them clustered along the Pakistan, Afghanistan, Frontier, and funded by wealthy patrons from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Take a guess with these were used for.

In 1982, Joanne Herring hosted a grand party for General Zia at the Houstonian Hotel. According to George Kriel, at this time, quote, the Reagan administration was trying to encourage Zia to hold the line in Pakistan against the Soviets, and this state visit was part of that persuasion process. Joanne had Charlie Wilson scurrying about from table to table, changing the place cards up until the very last moments, and she even banned alcohol that evening.

Before this odd charity ball kicked off, herring, quote, rose to introduce the Pakistani leader. I want you all to know, she said, that President Zia did not kill the former Pakistani leader, Sophie Carlibuto. Even her right wing barren as friends winced as herring proceeded to deliver an impassioned defense of Zia's role in the hanging of his predecessor, cryo rights. after the somewhat uncomfortable toast Zia's non-involvement in the murder, the party got started. And the deals got done. Congressman Charlie Wilson, Quio Wright's had a novel proposition for the Muslim dictator. Would Zia be willing to deal with Zia's railies?

Back in Kabul, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was scrambling to stabilize the countryside. People were willing to cooperate with authorities right straightaway, but on one condition that they were adequately protected against retaliation from the rebels. This condition could not be met even in the vicinity of the major Soviet bases. The authorities might control the territory by day, but the rebels controlled it by night.

The Revolutionary Agenda once a mad dash under Hafizella Amine was scaled back considerably. Now it's not to confront, but win over the less extreme mollus and the business class. But the question was still nagging at the Soviets. Were the Afghan communists a day late and several dollars short?

Charlie Wilson meanwhile had apparently succeeded in getting General Zia to join up with Israel in supporting the Afghan Jihad. Pakistan was now one of several Muslim states working with Israel, but it remained a deadly secret. writes Taurika Lee, quote, in 1985, a young Pakistani journalist accidentally stumbled across a group of Israeli advisors, quote unquote, at the bar of the intercontinental hotel in Peshawar, aware that the news would be explosive for the Zia dictatorship, the journalist informed his editor. A few days later, the Mija Hadine, alerted by Pakistan's ISI, captured the journalist, and killed him.

Having now bonded with General Zia on a trip to Pakistan, Charlie Wilson stepped into his role in the Jihad, not a central role, as his biographer and Hollywood tend to frame it. After all, CIA director former World War II spy and Knight of Malta Bill Casey had been backing the operation with more enthusiasm year after year. But Charlie Wilson played a crucial role nonetheless. As a candy politician and effectively a CIA asset, he would sing the Mujahideen song in the halls of Congress, legitimize them, provide another revenue stream, and a legal one to boot. as Wilson himself put it. By this time, I had everyone in Congress convinced that the Moos were a cause only slightly below Christianity. I told the Conservatives, it was time we fucked the Russians. Told the Liberals, it would prove that they were against communism, even if they didn't support the Contras.

Wilson schmoozed and flirted with a freedom-most CIA agents did not have. This rankled some of the blue bloods inside the agency, not least the original head of the Afghan program, Howard Hart. He found Wilson, quote unquote, repugnant. But by 1982, Hart had been replaced by the cunning, earthy, Pennsylvania, gust of ricottos, who took a shine to Charlie Wilson. Charlie, like gust, wanted the Afghan program to go even bigger. Bigger guns, bigger budgets, and a bigger army of jihadis. The two became partners in crime, with Wilson playing the pitchman, Avrakotos, the enforcer.

In 1983, quote, Congress had appropriated only $15 million for the Afghans that year, and it was concealed in an Air Force appropriation right-storage trial. Though, with matching Saudi funds that $15 million became $30 million. And by the late 1980s, American and Saudi funds would catapult the budget into the billions, making operations cyclone, as it was now called, the most vast and expensive CIA operation, in the institution's history. Meanwhile, in the propaganda war, there was one more campaign at work, one familiar to listeners of the show, allegations of WMD. First alleged by Dan Rather, who had been told by Mujahideen and Pakistani officials. The U.S. government let the rumors simmer a bit before repeating them itself.

In September of 1981, Reagan's Secretary of State, Alexander Hague, told the world that the Soviet Union had been using chemical weapons in Laos, Cambodia, and Afghanistan. The next month, the word was, there was a smoking gun.

The State Department declared, quote, over the past five years, and perhaps longer. But not too long, adds Philip Anoski, because that would run you into the American War in Vietnam. Weapons outlawed by mankind have been used against unsophisticated people in campaigns of mounting extermination, in the Louss, Kampuchia, and Afghanistan. And the State Department concluded that the United States had, quote, no evidence for the statement. So much for the smoking gun.

That evidence would never arrive, not in the case of Afghanistan, nor allows nor Cambodia. In fact, whereas the American use of Agent Orange in Vietnam is thoroughly documented and still an active health issue in that country, attempts to prove the same by the Soviets in Afghanistan have been refuted.

Meanwhile, the US stockpile of chemical weapons at that time could be counted in millions of shells, as the nation magazine observed. Over $1 billion was still being allocated to produce them, and, per the Los Angeles Times, Congress eagerly supported Reagan's plans to fund and build new chemical warfare facilities to produce more nerve gas. The reason cited was, what else? reported use of tear gas and incapacitating gases by Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

When interviewed by Congress on the rumors of Russian chemical weapons in Afghanistan, an official from the CIA said, quote, I don't see anything wrong with letting that rumor run.

What was life like inside Afghanistan during these first few years of the war? In the countryside, we're most of the fighting went on. If you were unlucky enough to live where the Maja had been hit out, you and your family may very well end up cut down by a Soviet MI-24 helicopter gunship. Or perhaps you, your wife, husband, son or daughter, would be obliterated by a bicycle bomb courtesy of Gust-Africotus and his team at the CIA. Maybe your children or friends working as teachers would be killed as part of a warlords campaign against secular, unislamic education. Nor were the cities exempt, quote, workers and managers were regularly threatened by the rebels, and workers were sometimes abducted and killed, but they stayed at their posts and went to work, carrying an automatic.

Still, in the cities, especially Kabul, things could feel surreally normal. Braithwate remembers, quote, a part from the influx of foreign soldiers and some incidental damage during the fighting. Life in Kabul continued comparatively unchanged in many ways. Even at that time, one woman wrote, we still went to school. We went for picnics and parties, war genes and short skirts. Women worked as professors and doctors and in government.

Jonathan Steele, a British journalist who was there at the time, later wrote, two campuses thronged with women's students as well as men. Most went around without even a headscarf. Hundreds went off to Soviet universities to study engineering, agronomy, and medicine. The banqueting hall of the Kabul Hotel pulsated most nights to the excitement of wedding parties. The markets thrived. Caravans have painted lorry as rolled up from Pakistan, bringing Japanese TV sets, video recorders, cameras, and entertainment centers.

And Tread was carried on with all countries except with Israel and South Africa. Despite their participation in the war against Afghanistan, Tread was carried on with Pakistan, one of the many paradoxes that one would run into here.

Soviet advisors and specialists rights historian Ardemy Kalinowski, Doug Ditches, operated mines, and extracted natural gas. Their technical advisors did create tangible benefits for many Afghans. Factories provided employment, medical clinics brought modern health services to areas where they were previously unheard of. An extraction of natural resources helped to keep the government solvent throughout most of the 1980s. But, needless to say, these benefits were poor compensation in the eyes of ordinary Afghans, for the carnage, brought by revolution and war. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid sums up the growing costs of the war.

In 1983, U.S. negotiator Roger Fisher flew into Kabul for meetings of the Soviet embassy. Quote his Russian counterpart informed him, the Soviets wanted out. Should the Americans hold back their support for the Mija Hadeen long enough to save face, Soviet troops could withdraw from the front lines, then following a short hiatus, retreat across the Amudari river. We are not stupid, the Soviet official said, calling the invasion a mistake. We want to go home.

In May 1980, six months after the invasion, Leonette Brezhnev had ordered the withdrawal of several units, and told KGB chief, Yuri and Drupov, to discuss the details for further withdrawal with the new Afghan president. The Soviets were trying to keep to their goal of withdrawing within one year. By winter of 1980 into 1981, the Soviet ambassador to Pakistan pushed for setting up peace talks under the United Nations.

Despite the arms, training, funds, and soldiers pouring in from Pakistan, right-skilling off ski, Soviet leaders never took serious punitive measures on Pakistan. The U.S. may have picked up on this, because it gave its ally Pakistan zero encouragement to talk to the Soviets about peace. Undeterred by Autumn of 1981, Yuri Andropov, Head of the KGB, and Defense Minister Ustenov, sponsored a paper by the Foreign Ministry, proposing talks between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

in a few months, and drop off would be General Secretary, and would head to the United Nations calling for peace negotiations. But the sponsors of the Mija Hadine, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Israel. Well, the Safari Club was just getting started.