CIA Led Way With Cash Handouts

In one case, $50,000 was offered to a commander to defect. Let me think about it, the commander said. So the Special Forces A-team directed a J-DAM precision bomb right outside the commander's headquarters. The next day, they called the commander back. How about $40,000? He accepted.

The CIA and Special Forces teams were concentrated around Mazar-e Sharif, the city of 200,000 on a dusty plain 35 miles from the Uzbek border. A week earlier, a Special Forces lieutenant colonel had been infiltrated into the area with five other men to coordinate the work of the A-teams. The teams were directing devastating fire from the air at the Taliban's two rings of defensive trenches around the ancient city.

One team had split into four close air support units, spread out over 50 miles of rugged mountain terrain. The absence of fixed targets had freed up the U.S. bombers for directed attacks by the separate units, which were able to use bombs as if they were artillery. The big difference was the precision and the size of the munitions. These were 500-pound bombs. Taliban supply lines and communications had been severed in the carpet bombing. Hundreds of their vehicles and bunkers were destroyed, and thousands of Taliban fighters were killed, captured or had fled.

The massive violence the United States could bring was finally being coordinated.

On Nov. 9, Mazar fell. Three days later, the White House learned that Kabul had been abandoned. And on Dec. 7, the Taliban's southern stronghold of Kandahar fell, effectively leaving the Northern Alliance, its Pashtun allies and the United States in charge of the country.

In all, the U.S. commitment to overthrow the Taliban had been about 110 CIA officers and 316 Special Forces personnel, plus massive air power.

Tenet, the CIA director, was extremely proud of what the agency had accomplished. The money it had been able to distribute without traditional cost controls had mobilized the tribals. In some cases, performance standards had been set: Move from point A to point B, and you get several hundred thousand dollars. A stack of money on the table was still the universal language. His paramilitary and case officers in and around Afghanistan had made it possible -- a giant return on years of investment in human intelligence.

The CIA calculated that they had spent only $70 million in direct cash outlays on the ground in Afghanistan, and some of that had been to pay for field hospitals. In an interview, Bush said, "That's one bargain," and he wondered aloud what the Soviets had spent in their disastrous war in Afghanistan that had contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Mark Malseed contributed to this report.