Operation Cyclone

Operation Cyclone was the code name for the

Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken.[2] Funding officially began with $695,000 in mid-1979,^[3] was increased dramatically to $20–$30 million per year in 1980, and rose to $630 million per year in 1987,^[1][4][5] described as the "biggest bequest to any Third World insurgency".^[6] The first CIA-supplied weapons were antique British Lee–Enfield rifles shipped out in December 1979; by September 1986 the program included U.S.-origin state of the art weaponry, such as FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air missiles, some 2,300 of which were ultimately shipped into Afghanistan.^[7] Funding continued (albeit reduced) after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal, as the mujahideen continued to battle the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan during the First Afghan Civil War.^[8]

Background

Under the leadership of Nur Muhammad Taraki, communists seized power in Afghanistan on 27 April 1978.^[9] The newly-formed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA)—which was divided between Taraki's hardline Khalq faction and the more moderate Parcham—signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union in December of that year.^[9][10] Taraki's efforts to improve secular education and redistribute land were accompanied by mass executions (including many conservative religious leaders) and political oppression unprecedented in Afghan history, igniting a revolt by Afghan mujahideen rebels many of whom had been in exile in Pakistan following a failed uprising against the previous Republican regime in 1975.^[9][11][12]

Following a general uprising in April 1979, Taraki was deposed by Khalq rival Hafizullah Amin in September.^[9][10] Amin was considered a "brutal psychopath" by foreign observers; the Soviets were particularly alarmed by the brutality of the late Khalq regime, and suspected Amin, an admirer of Stalin, of being an agent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), although that was not the case.^{[9][10][13][14]}

In the late 1970s, Pakistani intelligence officials began privately lobbying the U.S. and its allies to send material assistance to the Islamist insurgents. Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's ties with the U.S. had been strained during Jimmy Carter's presidency due to Pakistan's nuclear program and the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in April 1979, but Carter told National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance as early as January 1979 that it was vital to "repair our relationships with Pakistan" in light of the unrest in Iran.^[4] According to former CIA official Robert Gates, "the Carter administration turned to CIA ... to counter Soviet and Cuban aggression in the Third World, particularly beginning in mid-1979." In March 1979, "CIA sent several covert action options relating to Afghanistan to the SCC [Special Coordination Committee]" of the United States National Security Council. At a 30 March meeting, U.S. Department of Defense representative Walter B. Slocombe "asked if there was value in keeping the Afghan insurgency going, 'sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire?'"^[15] When asked to clarify this remark, Slocombe explained: "Well, the whole idea was that if the Soviets decided to strike at this tar baby [Afghanistan] we had every interest in making sure that they got stuck."^[16] But a 5 April memo from National Intelligence Officer Arnold Horelick warned: "Covert action would raise the costs to the Soviets and inflame Moslem opinion against them in many countries. The risk was that a substantial U.S. covert aid program could raise the stakes and induce the Soviets to intervene more directly and vigorously than otherwise intended."^[15]

In May 1979, U.S. officials secretly began meeting with rebel leaders through Pakistani government contacts. A former Pakistani military official claimed that he personally introduced a CIA official to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar that month (Freedom of Information Act requests for records describing these meetings have been denied).^[17] Additional meetings were held on 6 April and 3 July, and on the same day as the second meeting, Carter signed two presidential findings permitting the CIA to spend $695,000 on non-military assistance (e.g., "cash, medical equipment, and radio transmitters") and on a propaganda campaign targeting the Soviet-backed leadership of the DRA, which (in the words of Steve Coll) "seemed at the time a small beginning."^{[15][4][5][3]} Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was shocked by Amin's murder of Taraki with the Soviet Union invading the country in December of 1979, killing Amin, and installing Parcham leader Babrak Karmal as president.^{[9][10][18][19]}

The full significance of the U.S. sending aid to the mujahideen prior to the invasion is debated among scholars. Some assert that it directly, and even deliberately, provoked the Soviets to send in troops.^{[20][21][22][23][24]} Bruce Riedel, however, believes that the U.S. aid was intended primarily to improve U.S. relations with Pakistan, while Coll asserts: "Contemporary memos—particularly those written in the first days after the Soviet invasion—make clear that while Brzezinski was determined to confront the Soviets in Afghanistan through covert action, he was also very worried the Soviets would prevail. ... Given this evidence and the enormous political and security costs that the invasion imposed on the Carter administration, any claim that Brzezinski lured the Soviets into Afghanistan warrants deep skepticism."^[4][5] A 2020 review of declassified U.S. documents by Conor Tobin in the journal Diplomatic History found that "a Soviet military intervention was neither sought nor desired by the Carter administration ... The small-scale covert program that developed in response to the increasing Soviet influence was part of a contingency plan if the Soviets did intervene militarily, as Washington would be in a better position to make it difficult for them to consolidate their position, but not designed to induce an intervention."^[3]

Carter expressed surprise at the December 1979 invasion. According to Riedel, the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community during 1978 and 1979—reiterated as late as 29 September 1979—was that "Moscow would not intervene in force even if it appeared likely that the Khalq government was about to collapse." Indeed, Carter's diary entries from November 1979 until the Soviet invasion in late December contain only two short references to Afghanistan, and are instead preoccupied with the ongoing hostage crisis in Iran.

In the aftermath of the invasion, Carter was determined to respond vigorously. In a televised speech, he announced sanctions on the Soviet Union, promised renewed aid to Pakistan, and committed the U.S. to the Persian Gulf's defense.^[15][4] Carter also called for a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, which raised a bitter controversy.^[25] British prime minister Margaret Thatcher enthusiastically backed Carter's tough stance, although British intelligence believed "the CIA was being too alarmist about the Soviet threat to Pakistan."^[4]

Although Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Stansfield Turner and the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO) were contemplating what Gates described as "several enhancement options"—up to and including the direct provision of arms from the U.S. to the mujahideen through the ISI—by October 1979,^[26][27] and an unnamed Brzezinski aide acknowledged in conversation with Selig S. Harrison that the U.S.'s nominally "non-lethal" assistance to the mujahideen included facilitating arms shipments by third-parties,^[28] Coll, Harrison, Riedel, and the head of the DO's Near East–South Asia Division at the time—Charles Cogan—all state that no U.S.-supplied arms intended for the mujahideen reached Pakistan until January 1980, after Carter amended his presidential finding to include lethal provisions in late December 1979.^{[29][30][31][32]} This is also corroborated by Tobin: "With the 'evidence of movement' of Soviet military forces detected near Afghanistan's borders, the SCC resolved on December 17 to 'explore with the Pakistanis and British the possibility of improving the financing, arming and communications of rebel forces to make it as expensive as possible for the Soviets to continue their efforts.' This likely meant increased financing of arms purchases rather than direct arms support, but the initiatives were not undertaken until after the invasion began, and no weapons were directly supplied before January 1980."^[3]

The thrust of U.S. policy for the duration of the war was determined by Carter in early 1980: Carter initiated a program to arm the mujahideen through Pakistan's ISI and secured a pledge from Saudi Arabia to match U.S. funding for this purpose. U.S. support for the mujahideen accelerated under Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, at a final cost to U.S. taxpayers of some $3 billion. The decision to route U.S. aid through Pakistan led to massive fraud, as weapons sent to Karachi were frequently sold on the local market rather than delivered to the Afghan rebels; Karachi soon "became one of the most violent cities in the world." Pakistan also controlled which rebels received assistance: Of the seven mujahideen groups supported by Zia's government, four espoused Islamic fundamentalist beliefs—and these fundamentalists received most of the funding.^[10] Despite this, Carter has expressed no regrets over his decision to support what he still considers the "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan.^[4]

Program

Key proponents of the initial program were Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson; Michael G. Vickers, a young CIA paramilitary officer; and Gust Avrakotos, the CIA's regional head, who developed a close relationship with Wilson. Their strategy was to provide a broad mix of weapons, tactics, and logistics, along with training programs, to enhance the rebels' ability to fight a guerilla war against the Soviets. Initially, to avoid detection of U.S. involvement, the program supplied the rebels only with Soviet-made weaponry. This plan was enabled by the tacit support of Israel, which had captured large stockpiles of Soviet-made weaponry during the Yom Kippur War and agreed to sell them to the CIA clandestinely, as well as Egypt, which had recently modernized its army with weapons purchased from Western nations, funneling the older Soviet-made arms to the mujahideen.^[33][34] After 1985, as the Reagan administration announced that it would support anti-Soviet resistance movements globally (in what is now known as the Reagan Doctrine), there was no longer a need to obfuscate the origin of the weaponry; Pentagon senior official, Michael Pillsbury, successfully advocated providing U.S.-made weaponry, including large numbers of Stinger missiles, to the Afghan resistance.^[35]

The distribution of the weaponry relied heavily on the

Casey startled his Pakistani hosts by proposing that they take the Afghan war into enemy territory—into the Soviet Union itself. Casey wanted to ship subversive propaganda through Afghanistan to the Soviet Union's predominantly Muslim southern republics. The Pakistanis agreed, and the CIA soon supplied thousands of Korans, as well as books on Soviet atrocities in Uzbekistan and tracts on historical heroes of Uzbek nationalism, according to Pakistani and Western officials.[40]

Other direct points of contact between the US government and mujahideen include the CIA flying Hekmatyar to the United States,

The U.S.-built Stinger antiaircraft missile, was supplied to the mujahideen in very large numbers beginning in 1986. The weapon struck a decisive blow to the Soviet war effort as it allowed the lightly armed Afghans to effectively defend against Soviet helicopter landings in strategic areas. The Stingers were so renowned and deadly that, in the 1990s, the U.S. conducted a "buy-back" program to keep unused missiles from falling into the hands of anti-American terrorists. This program may have been covertly renewed following the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan in late 2001, out of fear that remaining Stingers could be used against U.S. forces in the country.^[50]

The Stinger missiles supplied by the United States gave Afghan guerrillas, generally known as the Mujahideen, the ability to destroy the dreaded Mi-24D helicopter gunships deployed by the Soviets to enforce their control over Afghanistan. Three of the first four Stingers fired each took down a gunship. The guerrillas were now able to challenge Soviet control of the airspace above the battlefield.^[51]

— CIA – Central Intelligence Agency

Reagan's program assisted in ending the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan,

The U.S. offered two packages of economic assistance and military sales to support Pakistan's role in the war against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. The first six-year assistance package (1981–1987) amounted to US$3.2 billion, equally divided between economic assistance and military sales. The U.S. also sold 40

After the withdrawal of Soviet troops, the U.S. shifted its interest from Afghanistan however did participate in the planning of a takeover of the Afghan city of Jalalabad alongside the ISI however the mujahedeen forces were no match against the Afghan Army in a conventional war. Direct American funding of Hekmatyar and his Hezb-i-Islami party was cut off immediately.^{[67][68][69][70]}

In October 1990, U.S. President George H. W. Bush refused to certify that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear explosive device, triggering the imposition of sanctions against Pakistan under the Pressler Amendment (1985) to the Foreign Assistance Act (1961). This disrupted the second assistance package offered in 1987 and discontinued economic assistance and military sales to Pakistan with the exception of the economic assistance already on its way to Pakistan. Military sales and training programs were abandoned as well and some of the Pakistani military officers under training in the U.S. were asked to return home.^[36]

As late as 1991

The U.S. government has been criticized for allowing Pakistan to channel a disproportionate amount of its funding to the controversial

In the late 1980s, Pakistani prime minister

I'd like to see the looks on their faces now over at Langley. They backed the wrong pony. They helped create Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.[79]

Allegations of CIA assistance to bin Laden

Some have alleged that bin Laden and al Qaeda were beneficiaries of CIA assistance. Steve Coll writes that "Bin Laden moved within Saudi intelligence's compartmented operations, outside of CIA eyesight. CIA archives contain no record of any direct contact between a CIA officer and bin Laden during the 1980s," commenting that "[i]f the CIA did have contact with bin Laden during the 1980s and subsequently covered it up, it has so far done an excellent job."^[80] Coll nonetheless documents that Bin Laden at least informally cooperated with the ISI during the 1980s and had intimate connections to CIA-backed mujahideen commander Jalaluddin Haqqani.^[81] According to Peter Bergen, "there is simply no evidence for the common myth that bin Laden and his Afghan Arabs were supported by the CIA financially. Nor is there any evidence that CIA officials at any level met with bin Laden or anyone in his circle."^[82] Bergen insists that U.S. funding went to the Afghan mujahideen, not the Arab volunteers who arrived to assist them.^[83]

On the other hand, according to

• Ahmad Shah Massoud
• Allegations of CIA assistance to Osama bin Laden
• Afghan Civil War
• Afghan training camp
• Badaber Uprising
• Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History
• Charlie Wilson's War
• CIA activities in Afghanistan
• Gary Schroen
• Howard Hart
• Jalaluddin Haqqani
• Joanne Herring
• Timber Sycamore
• United States involvement in regime change
• United States and state-sponsored terrorism

References