“Okay, you get it.”
“What I don’t get is what I’m looking for.”
“Just read.”
THE CASE FILES from Kabul painted a bleak picture. The station was the ultimate hardship post. Officers left their families on another continent and risked kidnapping and assassination every day. Unlike the Army or Marines, the CIA was a civilian organization that couldn’t order its employees to take dangerous jobs. Most officers stayed a few months, just long enough to put an Afghan posting on their resumes.
Building real relationships with the tribal chiefs who ran Afghanistan took much longer. That work fell to a cadre of hard-core operatives who lived in Kabul for years. By mid-2009, their efforts were paying off. They were a long way from the leaders of the Taliban or al-Qaeda, but they were moving up the ranks.
Then Marburg showed up.
The Marburg reports covered sixteen hundred pages and included scores of photographs, everything from the first surveillance shots of Rashid to the carnage at Camp Holux. A separate file contained the video from the Karachi hotel where Marci Holm had met Ahmad Rashid. The file ended with the eighty-nine-page after-action report from the agency’s internal investigation.
The report’s language was passive, but its meaning was clear. The agency blamed Manny Cota and Marci Holm for the disaster.
SUMMARY/CONCLUSIONS
MARBURG penetrated Holux due to avoidable operational error. It is true that some agents initially reject physical searches. The successful case officer must overcome those doubts and convince the agent that a pat-down protects both CO and agent. Holm never established those ground rules with MARBURG. Holm did not explain in her case reports why she did not insist that MARBURG be searched. Other officers recall that Holm said she found MARBURG personally charming.
Both Holm and Cota believed that MARBURG had extremely high-value intelligence. In their eagerness, the officers missed warning signs, most notably the ease with which MARBURG supposedly penetrated AQ. It is simply not credible that an outsider such as MARBURG would meet Ayman al-Zawahiri so quickly.
Once the officer who picked up MARBURG questioned whether he might be wearing an explosive vest, prudence and protocol dictated a physical search. Either Holm or Cota should have insisted on such a search.
RECOMMENDATIONS
1) Case officers must inform ALL sources/agents that they will be patted down before being allowed onto any secure facility. If an agent protests, his or her officer will explain that the rule must be followed without exception.
2) No more than five agency officers/contractors shall be present at any meeting with an agent. A closed- circuit video link may be provided for additional officers. Authorization at the DD or higher level shall be required to override this rule.
3) Case officers shall encourage agents to take regular polygraph tests. If an agent resists, cash compensation may be offered.
The recommendations continued for several pages. Some made sense, like limiting the size of meetings. Others were irrelevant, like the suggestion that all spies should be polygraphed. That idea might have sounded good at Langley, but it had nothing to do with the way case officers actually worked.
All in all, the report was what Wells expected. The agency had to hold someone responsible for this disaster, if only so that it could tell its political masters what it had learned from its mistakes. Holm and Cota couldn’t defend themselves, so they’d taken the blame. The nastiest line in the report was a throwaway, that Holm “found MARBURG personally charming.” The implication was obvious.
In the video from Karachi, Rashid had impressed Wells as smooth and convincing, right down to his supposed concerns about his family. Wells wasn’t sure that he would have known Rashid was a double. But he would have searched Rashid before letting him inside Holux. Pat-downs were a part of life these days. For whatever reason, Holm had let him through. Two-plus years later, Kabul station was still recovering.
Duto had appointed Jimmy Wultse to replace Cota as station chief just seventy-two hours after the bombing. The choice had seemed solid. Wultse, the chief for Tajikistan, knew Afghan politics intimately. Unfortunately, he also had a drinking problem. He’d managed it in Dushanbe, but the stress of Kabul turned him into a full-blown alcoholic. After four months, Duto ordered him back to the United States for rehab.
Duto’s next choice was Gordie King, an agency veteran who’d spent most of his career in South America. Wells understood the choice. King had a reputation as an old-school butt-kicker. Unfortunately, King didn’t speak Pashtun and disliked Afghanistan intensely. He rarely left his office when he was in Kabul. Making matters worse, he refused to choose a deputy.
Under King, the station slipped into crisis. Case officers cut their tours short and were not replaced. Senior officers in Afghanistan’s intelligence service began skipping their weekly meetings with the agency. Two top sources in eastern Afghanistan were assassinated. Fifteen months after Marburg, the CIA’s intelligence-gathering effort in Afghanistan existed mostly on paper. Its operations consisted of drone strikes and payoffs to supposedly friendly tribal chiefs.
In the medium term, the problems made little difference to the war. The soldiers and Marines in Kandahar and Helmand provinces didn’t need the CIA’s help to kill Taliban guerrillas. But in the long run, the CIA’s role was crucial. Military intelligence officers weren’t supposed to spy on the Afghan government or explore the relationships between the insurgents and Iran and Pakistan. Those jobs belonged to the CIA. But as the agency slipped, the Defense Intelligence Agency began recruiting its own sources in Kabul and all over Afghanistan.
Duto faced an unpleasant choice. Replacing King would mean admitting a big mistake, and Duto hated admitting mistakes. But he hated losing turf even more, especially since Afghanistan had always belonged to the CIA. The agency had helped battle the Soviets in the 1980s. After September 11, while the Pentagon dithered, CIA operatives helped push the Taliban from power.
And so Duto sent King home barely eleven months after naming him as station chief. In his place, Duto appointed Ron Arango, a solid officer who had served in Pakistan and Russia. As deputy, he chose Peter Lautner, who had been in Kabul for seven years. Lautner was known as especially aggressive. He had reason to be. He’d lost his wife and his brother to Marburg.
Under Arango and Lautner, the station seemed to be recovering. Lautner had rebuilt relationships with tribal leaders. Arango had taken five top Afghan intelligence officers to a counterinsurgency conference that was a thinly disguised bribe, an excuse for a vacation in Paris.
But despite the activity, the station was still foundering. Some of its recent intel had proven flat wrong. A month before, one of its best sources had reported that a senior Taliban commander wanted to defect. The “defection” was a hoax, leading to an ambush that killed an Afghan general. The station still didn’t know whether its source had lied or been used to pass along disinformation. Worst of all, the station had just lost another top agent, the deputy interior minister. A bomb hidden in a fuel tank had blown apart the minister’s armored 4Runner.
With all the problems, Wells wasn’t surprised that the station had largely been left out of the hunt for bin Laden. Langley and the Pentagon had directed the operation, with help from the NSA. Kabul had barely been involved.
SHAFER HAD OFFERED to let Wells stay in a spare bedroom while he waded through the reports. But Wells wanted to read the files without having Shafer quiz him like an annoying high school teacher. So Wells was staying a few miles from Langley in a Courtyard by Marriott. He liked Courtyards and Hilton Garden Inns and the other three-star hotels that sat on suburban feeder roads, bland, efficient boxes where every room was identical and no one noticed anyone. Every day he woke at six and worked out in the Marriott’s underwhelming gym for ninety minutes. He reached the agency by nine o’clock and read files for twelve hours, until his eyes burned. Then he headed back to the hotel.
Wells had converted to Islam more than a decade before, but in the last few months he’d hardly prayed at all. He wondered whether he’d ever regain his fervor. Perhaps he’d grown permanently weary of battling jihadis born into the religion he wanted to claim as his own. He kept his Quran on his bedside table, but he didn’t pray.
