CIA Led Way With Cash Handouts

The next day, Sept. 27, about noon local time in the Panjshir Valley, Gary sat down with Gen. Mohammed Fahim, commander of the Northern Alliance forces, and Abdullah, the Alliance foreign minister. He put $1 million on the table, explaining that they could use it as they saw fit. Fahim said he had about 10,000 fighters, though many were poorly equipped.

"The president is interested in our mission," Gary said. "He wants you to know the U.S. forces are coming and we want your cooperation and he's taking a personal interest in this." He had secure communications set up with Washington, and, exaggerating, he said, "Everything that I write back home [the president] sees. So this is important." Without exaggerating, he added, "This is the world stage."

"We welcome you guys," Fahim said. "We'll do whatever we can." But he had questions. "When does the war start? When do you guys come? When is the U.S. really going to start to attack?"

"I don't know," Gary said. "But it will be soon. We have to be ready. Forces have to be deployed. We have to get things together. You're going to be impressed. You have never seen anything like what we're going to deliver onto the enemy."

What Works -- and What Doesn't

Gary dispatched several of his men to the Takar region, the front between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban forces. They went north, a good 60 miles to the east of Kunduz. They found the Northern Alliance forces disciplined, their clothing and weapons clean. But the rifles' safeties were on, a signal that this was not a hot combat zone. The troops lined up in formations and conducted drills. There was a command structure. But there were not enough troops or heavy weapons to move against the Taliban, who were dug in on the other side.

Gary knew that CIA headquarters believed that the Taliban would be a tenacious enemy in a fight and that any U.S. strike would bring out its sympathizers in Afghanistan and in the region, especially Pakistan. They would rally around Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader.

Gary saw it differently. He believed that massive, heavy bombing of the Taliban front lines -- "really good stuff," as he called it -- would cause the Taliban to break and change the picture. On Oct. 1, he sent a secret appraisal to headquarters. "In this case," he wrote, "a Taliban collapse could be rapid, with the enemy shrinking to a small number of hard-core Mullah Omar supporters in the early days or weeks of a military campaign." The report was received with vocal skepticism at the Directorate of Operations, as the old hands and experts openly disparaged the appraisal. But CIA Director George J. Tenet took the cable to President Bush.

"I want more of this," said the president.

On Wednesday, Oct. 3, Gary went in search of an airfield to bring supplies into Northern Alliance territory. The team found one airfield in an area called Golbahar that had been used by the British in 1919. He asked Arif, the Alliance's intelligence chief, to grade out an area and turn it into an airstrip, and he handed out another $200,000. He bought three Jeeps for $19,000 and forked over an additional $22,000 for a tanker truck and helicopter fuel. Arif promised they would buy the truck in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and drive it over the mountains to the CIA team, but it never arrived.

That day, the CIA's counterterrorism special operations chief, Hank, whose last name is being withheld, met in Tampa with Gen. Tommy R. Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, who would be in charge of the war. Using maps of Afghanistan, Hank laid out how CIA paramilitary teams working with the various opposition forces could get them moving. The opposition forces, chiefly the Northern Alliance, would do most of the ground fighting. If the United States repeated the mistakes of the Soviets by invading with a large land force, they would be doomed.

Franks's Special Forces teams would be used to pinpoint targets that could be hit hard in U.S. bombing runs. On-the-ground human intelligence designating targets would allow extraordinarily specific and exact information for the precision bombs.

Hank, under instructions from Tenet, made clear that the paramilitary teams would be working for Franks, and in that spirit and somewhat contrary to recent practice, the CIA would give Franks and his Special Forces commanders the identities of all CIA assets in Afghanistan, their capabilities, their locations and the CIA's assessment of them. The military and the CIA were to work as partners.